Tag Archives: board games

Atari A to Z Flashback: Video Chess

After my woeful performance at Video Checkers, I must confess I was kind of dreading Video Chess a bit. But things ended up going rather better than I imagined.

Turns out the special “Beginner” level available in the game is perfectly attuned to a strategically challenged moron like me — and I think I might have actually learned a thing or two about how to play more effectively along the way, too.

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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Atari A to Z Flashback: Video Checkers

I am bad at checkers, or draughts as we call it over here, but I’m not going to turn down a chance to play an early game by Carol “River Raid” Shaw.

In fact, legend has it that Carol Shaw’s Atari 2600 version of Checkers put Activision’s similar effort to shame by such a significant degree that she was offered a job with the company. And the rest, as they say, is history. Now in commemoration of such a heartwarming story, enjoy my terrible attempts to beat the lowest difficulty level on a 41-year old video game adaptation of a very simple board game.

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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short;Play: 51 Worldwide Games

Also known as Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics, this title is an essential part of any Switch library.

It marks Switch-era Nintendo making a keen effort to attract the same “family-friendly” audience that they courted with the Touch Generations games on Wii and Nintendo DS. It’s also a great way to learn or brush up your skills on some classic games, whether you’re playing solo or with friends.

Check out the tabletop action in the video below, read some more words about this great game here on MoeGamer, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

51 Worldwide Games: The Good Old Days

The concept of “gaming” wasn’t always about immersing yourself in RPGs that last for several hundred hours, or about hurling abuse at random strangers online.

No; in the dim and distant past, before electronics dominated nearly every aspect of our lives, it was about gathering around a table with friends and doing various things with bits of wood, glass beads and playing cards that could, in most cases, be summarised as “tidying up”. And once the digital age first dawned for consumers in the late ’70s, it was about gathering around your family television to play digital recreations of those tabletop pursuits on your woodgrain Atari Video Computer System.

51 Worldwide Games, also known as Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics, marks a delightful return to both of these bygone eras. And in the process, it becomes a true essential for anyone’s Nintendo Switch library.

Continue reading 51 Worldwide Games: The Good Old Days

Atari A to Z Flashback: Backgammon

A big part of the early Atari 2600 library consisted of digital adaptations of tabletop games — including several that could be played solo against a computer opponent.

One such example was Backgammon, a fairly comprehensive package that allowed one or two players to play Backgammon or Acey Deucey, with or without a “doubling cube” to facilitate gambling.

I’m not good at Backgammon, but aside from this adaptation’s bizarre paddle-based control system, this seems like as good a way as any to learn!

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

Atari A to Z: Yahtman

Yahtman is a game that hails from simpler times; a time when a video game about rolling a few dice a few times was enough to keep people occupied for… ooh, a good few minutes, at least.

It was also a time where there were plenty of people making software based around popular board and tabletop games — some licensed adaptations, others… less so.

Yahtman skirts the usual copyright-infringing tendencies of the era by providing us a game of “dice poker” or “yacht”, and absolutely, positively not Yahtzee, you hear me?

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

Atari ST A to Z: HeroQuest

I absolutely loved MB and Games Workshop’s HeroQuest as a kid, but I rarely got the opportunity to play it on the tabletop with real people.

Imagine my delight, then, when Gremlin announced that they were developing a computerised adaptation of the board game I’d come to love so much. And imagine my even greater delight when it turned out to be a very good game indeed — although arguably perhaps a little too true to the original board game for a computer version!

This is a game that still holds up pretty well today in both its tabletop and electronic formats. Gather a party of friends — or go it alone — and see how far you can get in the substantial campaign!

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

Puzzler Essentials: Take It Easy

I don’t play a lot of games on my phone these days, because a lot of them are touchscreen-controlled garbage, bad knockoffs of games that I didn’t really want to play in the first place or microtransaction-infested pits of misery and despair.

However, once in a while a game comes along with none of those issues. A game where you can pay once and just play it; a game where you’ll never see an ad, never be asked to pay again and not be bugged every ten minutes to “rate 5 stars on the App Store”.

And sometimes that game is even good! Here’s Take It Easy, by Ravensburger.

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Atari ST A to Z: Shanghai

Any time you undertake a project like this, you have to accept that some elements of it are just going to be less of a “spectator sport” than others.

Such is the case with today’s Atari ST game, the not-much-to-look-at-but-fun-to-play Shanghai by Activision, an adaptation of Mahjong Solitaire that makes use of the ST’s built-in graphical user interface GEM as the foundation of its aesthetic. This was not at all an unusual approach back in the day, and is akin to more modern PC games running on Windows 95 and beyond making use of a windowed interface and standardised Windows controls. Not the most beautiful look, no, but perfectly functional — and a lot more intuitive to those who perhaps don’t play a lot of games.

Compared to more recent adaptations of Mahjong Solitaire, Shanghai is fairly limited, but it nonetheless remains a pleasingly relaxing, Zen sort of experience. Once you figure out how to read the screen properly, that is…

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Delving into Dragon Quest: Hand of the Heavenly Bride – #6

Okay, I got it wrong. I have not yet finished Hand of the Heavenly Bride, nor was I near to doing so.

Well, actually, that might not quite be true. But I have been getting a little distracted on my way to what I can only assume is the final boss: first with grinding to get Bianca up to a similar level as my protagonist and their children, and subsequently with the subject of today’s article.

Many RPGs today concentrate primarily on their core mechanics, with their optional content involving those same mechanics: challenging combat, deep dungeons or hard-to-find items. But the Dragon Quest series, like Final Fantasy, is one that has always incorporated minigames into the mix, with their own completely separate ways of playing. And it’s that I’d like to talk about today.

Continue reading Delving into Dragon Quest: Hand of the Heavenly Bride – #6