Showing posts with label classroom activities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label classroom activities. Show all posts

Thursday 27 May 2021

What is your favourite board game to play?


Homeworlds game set for two players.

A review writing assignment (Y10-11)

Those of you who have heard me speak about 'Homeworlds' board game know that it is my beloved — an epic abstract strategy game with a proper cool mechanism. Many say that it is really good in every way, if not great and one of the best strategic and aesthetically satisfying masterpieces which adds more fun to the universe. Yet, at the same time (sigh) it is of one the most often ignored games by many. As you can see in the picture above, there is no board in Homeworlds, no rolling dice, no drawing cards, instead it is an ever-changing endless field with one and only one geometrical shape played on a tabletop.

The flow of the game itself centres around the colours and sizes of the pyramids paired with four possible actions. With its minimalistic art stripped down to its most basic geometry, the dynamic map of Homeworlds really takes the system somewhat to its limit, introducing a fairly complex and layered challenge of counter-intuitive strategic and tactical depth. Because pieces are never removed from the tabletop, the game remains hectic right until the end. It is a gamer’s game that really does rival all-time classics like Chess restricted to a limited area of 64-square grid. Whereas Chess was a game played by renaissance kings, Homeworlds is a game for starship captains, or for galactic overlords if you like, or even for... the Martian Princess. Furthermore, I have come to discover that the pyramids used in the game are akin to a computer running multiple applications at once through multi-tasking, but not to Chess pieces... Winning the game is quite similar in many ways to writing software, and in particular, the task of optimising a sub-routine with dizzying number of options has a lot in common with simplifying a set of early and mid (end)-game goals. By the way, the game of Homeworlds has a Kolmogorov complexity of 3.83! only (i.e. the ratio between the size in bytes of the shortest possible game which just fills the board and the full game). Loosely speaking, it means that just placing pyramids on the board is not as easy as it might seem.
The rules of Homeworlds are elegant and sophisticated, and somewhat Gemütlich. But even after you’ve learned them, it can take a long time to really and truly understand dynamic interactions between various game elements leading to a dramatic conclusion for one player and a clear victory for the other. The goal is to eliminate all of the ships defending your enemy's homeworld. You will have to focus on resource limits, explosions of gas giant stars, building and trading, passive aggression and outright aggression, offence and defence, overpopulation and catastrophes, gambits and sacrifice, hyperspace bypass and being frozen out, cunning moves, connections, colours, star-towing, wormholes and of course diplomacy and bluffing skill in the games of more than two players when they might want to team up. Also, I am enjoying the extra fun you get in naming the star systems. Whenever you discover a new system, you give it a name. Sometimes people use real star names, other times they just use names they find amusing. I, for one, use Elvish names thus adding a fun little dimension to things! Clicking on this download link will open a file with 600 incredibly beautiful Elvish names which I collected many moons ago...
The theme rocks the game box contains four weirdly beautiful trio pyramid sets in three sizes in a plethora of colours (spoiler: if you good enough to go into maths, it equals to a set of 36!). The ability to stack loony semi-transparent tangible objects mimicking binary stars is unbeatable cool to the degree that it looks like nonsense or Harry Potter's "Quidditch" to the uninitiated. Deprived of any skeuomorphic design, the brightly coloured, square-bases plastic pieces can be the essential playing tokens for literally dozens of other games. Just create combos of 2 colours for opposing sides on the board. I recommend the following mnemonics: shell (red, yellow) & ocean (blue, green), stoplight (red, green) & traffic signs (yellow, blue), chevron (blue, red) & BP (yellow, green).  Don't get me wrong, it seems somewhat sacrilegious to use pieces for The GlorIous Homeworlds for anything else, or alternatively improvise Homeworlds equipment on the cheap replacing it with cards or dice, but sometimes alternatives for the Non-Converted might have a place. That is why there are 525 known games sorted by their publication or release year! These games have appeared as professional game products of some kind. Many of these games have become classics.

https://homeworlds-live2.glitch.me/ is the link to play with me. My username is OlegAney and I lose sometimes. There is also an active fanbase for players providing access to the rules for the game, tutorials, forums and archive, sandbox for beginners (don't be embarrassed about playing with yourself at your own pace; train yourself to play a game first as one player, then as the other). Try out numerous different permutations, dig in and experiment. I for one, used to start with a Large Green ship and a Blue/Red star system but now I prefer Yellow/Blue. But there is more than learning the rules and trying to win. There is the mystique: the way to play, the set of attitudes and ideas involved.

Okay, this is where I need to stop! I've obviously been spending way too much time on this, but I'm having a great time with it and if you're into Homeworlds,  click here at https://www.dropbox to see the game rules.

And what is your favourite board game of all time? Please post your answer in comments below and big thumb up too!

My boardgamegeek review...


P.S. See also 'A translation assignment' for Y10 and Y11...

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