Ninjas bring rocks, scissors, and paper to a fight in Ninjan to help you recruit the strongest ninjas possible.
In Power Grid: Outpost, the colonization of the new planet advances quickly. There is a huge demand for electricity that your companies gladly fulfill.
Can you purchase the best power plants, biggest shelters, and best technologies? Can you spread your network faster from city to city than your competition? Do you expand your company economically to accommodate workers permanently so that you can avoid employing expensive seasonal workers that you must dismiss to the labor market after each assignment? Only then you can win Power Grid: Outpost!
Outpost was one of the major inspirations for Power Grid as that game was far ahead of its time. More than twenty years after the first release of Power Grid, Friedemann wants to honor Outpost with this game. He took many thematic elements of that game and translated them to the Power Grid world.
 December 2024 Games I played for the first time this month, from worst to best, along with my ratings and comments. |
 Kelp: Shark vs. Octopus – 5/10 Sometime in the early 2000’s, I acquired a free copy of N.Y. Chase, a hidden movement in the vein of Scotland Yard. Despite wanting to play as many new games as I could, after reading the rules, I just couldn’t psych myself up to teach it to anyone. At the time, I found this inexplicable. But a couple decades later, it’s become something of a trend. With rare exceptions (Captain Sonar), these hidden movement games just don’t seem to grab me. The best reason I can articulate has something to do with the frustration that arises when your careful logical deductions are disrupted by randomness. “I’ve perfectly solved it! I know just where you are!” And the game coldly responds, “Well done, now play rock-paper-scissors to see if you win.” In Kelp: Shark vs Octopus, this is no exaggeration. Rock-paper-scissors, performed with three cards per person, is exactly how combat resolution is done when the Shark player finds the Octopus player. Of course the components are lovely. Chunky Mahjong-style tiles compliment color-coordinated dice. A plastic shark figure silently patrols the lavishly-illustrated board. The cards are also illustrated well, portraying spurts of ink and flashes of teeth in an energetic, almost comic-book style. “I’ve got you cornered again!” And the game coldly responds, “Well done, let’s leave this one up to a coin toss.” That’s right. Upon the second encounter, it becomes a 50/50 shot instead. The final encounter, if it gets to that point, will reduce the Octopus’s chances of escape to nil. Does this system feel rewarding, to either player? But the Octopus player has more to do than just hide. By moving a little riskier, the Octopus can devour various tiny sea creatures throughout the board. Devour all four and win, an alternate victory condition to simply running out the clock until the Shark is exhausted. Balancing this risk is key to success. For the Shark player’s part, careful observation of the opponent’s tells will lead to success. A rookie Octopus player will often clumsily give away everything. You’re not as clever as you think, my eight-legged friend. Ignore my rating, you lovers of hidden movement. If you want a lighter, faster-playing Mind MGMT, Kelp is here for you. If you think Specter Ops would be better as a 1 vs. 1 game, spend some time here in the briny deep. But I’m going to sail on by. |
Welcome to the third chapter of the Opinionated Gamer’s Alphabet List! Just to summarize, 30 of us listed our three favorite games that begin with each letter of the alphabet (as well as those that start with a numeral). Each selected game in first, second, and third position earned 5, 3, and 2 points. I’m presenting a summary of each category.
Here’s how the summaries are laid out. Each category shows the total number of games that got mentions and the total number of votes cast in that category. Next comes the 5 games that got the most votes in that category (as long as they each got at least 10 points), as well as any other games that got at least 15 points. Each game’s year of publication is shown and the game that got the most first-place votes gets an asterisk. This is followed by the game’s point total and, in parentheses, the number of people that voted for it. After that top group, I also mention all the additional games that made the lists of at least three of our voters and give the number of lists it appeared on. Finally, I’ll make some comments about the category as a whole and some things that I found interesting.
So far, we’ve summarized our selections through the letter N. So let’s see if our next set of choices can put the O in OMG.
O – 31 games, 82 votes
Games with at least 3 votes: Oh Hell (4), Onitama (4), On the Underground (4), Oracle of Delphi (3), Oh My Goods (3)
Orleans easily finishes on top. There are quite a few versions of this game and I folded all of them in, but even without that, I’m pretty confident that it’s our favorite O game; after all, half of the voters listed it. I was actually pretty surprised to see Ora finish second; it’s a really involved game, and not for the faint of heart, but it did very well in the voting. Odin’s Ravens is an old 2-player design that obviously quite a few of the voters remember fondly. And of the many versions of Werewolf that are out there, ONUW was the only one that made one of the top 5 lists.
Welcome to the second chapter of the Opinionated Gamer’s Alphabet List! Just to summarize, 30 of us listed our three favorite games that begin with each letter of the alphabet (as well as those that start with a numeral). Each selected game in first, second, and third position earned 5, 3, and 2 points. I’m presenting a summary of each category.
Here’s how the summaries are laid out. Each category shows the total number of games that got mentions and the total number of votes cast in that category. Next comes the 5 games that got the most votes in that category (as long as they each got at least 10 points), as well as any other games that got at least 15 points. Each game’s year of publication is shown and the game that got the most first-place votes gets an asterisk. This is followed by the game’s point total and, in parentheses, the number of people that voted for it. After that top group, I also mention all the additional games that made the lists of at least three of our voters and give the number of lists it appeared on. Finally, I’ll make some comments about the category as a whole and some things that I found interesting.
Yesterday, I covered the numeral category, as well as A, B, and C. So let’s start with D.
D – 40 games, 80 votes
Games with at least 3 votes: Dune: Imperium (4), Dominant Species (3), Darwin’s Journey (3), Diamant (3), Dice Realms (3), Durch die Wuste (3), Downforce (3)
This one is no contest—it’s Dominion all the way. After that, the votes are really well spread, with 11 games getting between 10 and 16 points and only one other game being picked by more than 4 voters. It’s fun to see Deep Sea Adventure, the unassuming little filler from Japan, in the third spot, edging out Die Macher, perhaps the first well known complex (and long playing) game to come out of Germany.
It’s also a kick to see some lesser known games get some love from the voters. I was pretty amazed that someone’s three favorites included D’r Af, a barely remembered Splotter racing game from the late nineties where your goal is to drive your car off the edge of the table! Another surprise selection was Discretion, a tiny American game from a tiny American company, themed around making your fortune in the real estate market. It was a favorite of mine back in the eighties, but I was a bit shocked that anyone else even knew about it, much less that they would include it on their ballot. Fun stuff. Continue reading
Happy New Year, everybody! The OG staff wishes you all a very happy, healthy, and prosperous 2025, with more of the things you love about life and less of the things you hate. The former will hopefully include lots of great gaming, of course!
The new year is a time when many people put together lists of resolutions. And while that kind of introspection may not be your thing, the concept shouldn’t be a foreign one, because many gamers love making lists of games. Top 10 lists, Desert Island lists, lists of our favorite games by timeframe, designer, and genre—all sorts of things. Coming up with lists of games seems to be a big part of most gamers’ DNA.
One popular choice for this is an Alphabet list. What’s your favorite game whose title begins with the letter “A”? What about “B”? And so on, for each letter of the alphabet. It can be an enjoyable exercise.
Just before Thanksgiving this year, I saw a post from Caroline Black on the Geek. Caroline regularly posts a blog on BGG called The Dyslexic Gamer that I like to check out from time to time. Her article that day was about a couple of games in her own alphabet list. After reading that, I realized that the OG group had never put together an alphabet list and I thought it might be a fun thing to do. I put my own list together, posted it to a shared spreadsheet, and asked the group if anyone else would like to come up with their own list. The results were pretty impressive: we wound up with contributions from 30 people! With that much data to work from, it was obvious that an article needed to be written to summarize it all. Dale asked me if I wanted to ring in the New Year with a 3 part piece, and I agreed. So thank you, Caroline, for the inspiration!
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