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Thanksgiving and Triple Town
Nov. 29th, 2010 10:38 pmSpent Thanksgiving in Chicago: hanging out with the family and my bro. Introduced John to Avatar: TLA, and he introduced me to various word games. Spent Friday in Chinatown and Hyde Park, feasting on Pheonix dimsum, Aji snacks, and Calypso/Dixie Kitchen (Plantain nachos with jerk chicken, fried catfish, johnny cakes, fried green tomatoes). 超懐かしい。 Saturday we went to the MSI, and then to the North Side to hang out with Jono's Chicago gamer friends, who were really nice. Sunday we watched Legend of the Guardians: Owls of Ga'Hoole with Aleksa. It was cute. I liked to anti race supremacy message. The magnetic fleck thing didn't make sense, though.
But really, this post is about Triple Town.
John and Jono mentioned Triple Town as a Kindle game that was inspired by GROW. Since (a) I loved GROW, (b) I was bored and had a Kindle handy, and (c) Jono seemed to really respect the game designer (who blogs about Triple Town here, I got the game.
It is, I suppose, a puzzle game. There are various game pieces that you need to "place" in specific squares relative to other pieces in order to have them combine into a new piece. The combination process gives you points and clears space on the board for more pieces. The game ends when there is no more space on the board. There's no way of knowing what piece you must place next. There are Barbarians and Wizards that roam the board after you place them, and may take up a space where you want to place something. Barbarians can be killed by fencing them in (like Go).
There is a combination sequence of 6 levels: 3 grasses make a flower, 3 flowers make a bush, 3 bushes make a tree, 3 trees make wood, 3 woods make a house, 3 houses make a castle. There is also a separate combination sequence of 4 levels: 3 dead Barbarians/Wizards makes a church, 3 churches make a cathedral, 3 cathedrals make a castle. 3 Castles make a Sky Castle. So it's much more profitable to make castles with dead Barbarians, because when you are trying to create a chain of 6 levels, it's hard to place all of the right pieces at the right place and time. To complicate matters, the Wizards give you 10,000 points (equivalent to a Cathedral) at the end of the game, so you want to keep them around, but they get in the way of placing things.
It's a pretty fun game, although I felt like a lot of it had to do with the luck of whatever shows up next. There are some strategies for dealing with how to place a tree when the grass you just placed past round to make an eventual flower is taking up the optimal spot, but thus far it seems to have mostly come down to whether the wild card pieces show up at the right time, and whether a cluster of barbarians die at the right place.
What it isn't, is GROW. For me, the magic of GROW is that you *don't* know what would happen after you place the item: placing it in a specific order gives you specific whimsical animations and effects, and you want to optimize your payoff by figuring out the right order to get all of the animations to play out and create something amazing. With Triple Town, you *know* what happens after you place an item, and you are counting on that thing happening. Triple Town fails to evoke the same sense of wonder and anticipation. It's just a resource management puzzle game. The designer talks about trying to capture the charm of creating something new and watching your town grow, but if I wanted to design a town, I would just draw it. During the game, I spend all my time agonizing over whether the placement of grass would kill my Barbarians too early, and whether there will be opportunity for said grass to transform into a flower, and where I want the flower transformation to take place. I don't think, "hey, I'm making a town! I've got all my grass in a row!"
That said, I spent a lot of time this Thanksgiving break playing games on my Kindle. I played 8 games of Triple Town, and at about 30 minutes per game, that was at least 4 hours lost. Not to mention playing word games on the Kindle. I've realized that I don't find a lot of joy in playing solitary games -- it's just another empty calorie -- it doesn't make me a better person, and it doesn't help me spend more quality time with friends. All it does is make me feel accomplished when the pixels turn from a castle into a sky castle, and feel frustrated when it doesn't. I should stop playing solo games.
But really, this post is about Triple Town.
John and Jono mentioned Triple Town as a Kindle game that was inspired by GROW. Since (a) I loved GROW, (b) I was bored and had a Kindle handy, and (c) Jono seemed to really respect the game designer (who blogs about Triple Town here, I got the game.
It is, I suppose, a puzzle game. There are various game pieces that you need to "place" in specific squares relative to other pieces in order to have them combine into a new piece. The combination process gives you points and clears space on the board for more pieces. The game ends when there is no more space on the board. There's no way of knowing what piece you must place next. There are Barbarians and Wizards that roam the board after you place them, and may take up a space where you want to place something. Barbarians can be killed by fencing them in (like Go).
There is a combination sequence of 6 levels: 3 grasses make a flower, 3 flowers make a bush, 3 bushes make a tree, 3 trees make wood, 3 woods make a house, 3 houses make a castle. There is also a separate combination sequence of 4 levels: 3 dead Barbarians/Wizards makes a church, 3 churches make a cathedral, 3 cathedrals make a castle. 3 Castles make a Sky Castle. So it's much more profitable to make castles with dead Barbarians, because when you are trying to create a chain of 6 levels, it's hard to place all of the right pieces at the right place and time. To complicate matters, the Wizards give you 10,000 points (equivalent to a Cathedral) at the end of the game, so you want to keep them around, but they get in the way of placing things.
It's a pretty fun game, although I felt like a lot of it had to do with the luck of whatever shows up next. There are some strategies for dealing with how to place a tree when the grass you just placed past round to make an eventual flower is taking up the optimal spot, but thus far it seems to have mostly come down to whether the wild card pieces show up at the right time, and whether a cluster of barbarians die at the right place.
What it isn't, is GROW. For me, the magic of GROW is that you *don't* know what would happen after you place the item: placing it in a specific order gives you specific whimsical animations and effects, and you want to optimize your payoff by figuring out the right order to get all of the animations to play out and create something amazing. With Triple Town, you *know* what happens after you place an item, and you are counting on that thing happening. Triple Town fails to evoke the same sense of wonder and anticipation. It's just a resource management puzzle game. The designer talks about trying to capture the charm of creating something new and watching your town grow, but if I wanted to design a town, I would just draw it. During the game, I spend all my time agonizing over whether the placement of grass would kill my Barbarians too early, and whether there will be opportunity for said grass to transform into a flower, and where I want the flower transformation to take place. I don't think, "hey, I'm making a town! I've got all my grass in a row!"
That said, I spent a lot of time this Thanksgiving break playing games on my Kindle. I played 8 games of Triple Town, and at about 30 minutes per game, that was at least 4 hours lost. Not to mention playing word games on the Kindle. I've realized that I don't find a lot of joy in playing solitary games -- it's just another empty calorie -- it doesn't make me a better person, and it doesn't help me spend more quality time with friends. All it does is make me feel accomplished when the pixels turn from a castle into a sky castle, and feel frustrated when it doesn't. I should stop playing solo games.
