Quick Review: Harry Harrison's Wheelworld

Too Dangerous to Live. Too Valuable to Kill.From the back cover: Jan Kulozik is in exile: sentenced to service the machines of Halvmork, the farmworld that grows crops to the the holds of Earth's grain-ships.  This Wheelworld, baked by eternal summer, is a world of peasants enslaved by a handful of powerful families.  The disaster.  One year, the ships do not come; starvation threatens Halvmork.  Jan rallies the people for their own survival, and guides them on a perilous trek across half a planet.  Battling heat and savage creatures, earthquakes and volcanoes, fighting the violence and treachery of the Families, Jan leads the people of Wheelworld to their new destiny.

The first time I read Harry Harrison's Wheelworld, I was in highschool, about twenty-five years ago, and it was the fond memories of this one that spurred me on to finally read the entire To the Stars trilogy.  I remember the image of the great trains making a desperate run from the north pole to the south before the four-year summer cycle began.  Having reread it now, I see there's so much more there to appreciate. 

The great run constitutes the largest part of the action, but the tension of the book is built around the protagonist's clash with the stagnet, ultra-conservative rulers of the human settlement.  When the people's normal cycle of harvesting corn, migrating to the other pole, and delivering the food to ships is disrupted, the ruling class clings to its old ways.  Jan, our hero, realizes this is basically suicide.  They must change or die - new situations call for new actions.  So the power struggle begins.  It is interrupted by the many obstacles and hazards they must face on their trek, but it always re-emerges.  It's also interesting in this volume to see Jan, who was at the top looking down in Homeworld, on the bottom side of things looking up.  If book 1 taught him about the injustice of his world, book 2 is all about preparing him for the battle to come.  More than anything, though, this book reveals the dangers of ignorance.  The ruling families rule by keeping knowledge away from the population, and as the book ends, Jan's battle for freedom begins with education.

I very much look forward to the final volume, Starworld.  As for Wheelworld, I have to give it an extra star, not only for nolstalgia's sake but for also having a more complex and exciting plot than its predecssor.  Wheelworld is available as an ebook at Amazon.

Enjoy!

Quick Review: Jack Vance's The Dying Earth

An exotic world hovering on the edge of time!From the back cover: “THE TIME is fabulously far from now; over the dying earth hovers a worn and burned-out sun; in the red day and fearful night strange creatures wander horribly through the frighted forests; magic governs man.  Revelry and sloth absorb the time as Earth spins its last few courses and prepares to plunge to eternal night.”

I can't believe it took me all these years to read this book! I've known about The Dying Earth for decades, threatened to read it just as long, and yet have always put it off. 

The book is actually a collection of Vance's earliest Dying Earth stories.  Each tale focuses on a different character for the most part, but they are not the main focus of the book anyway.  Not to say that the characterization is not there.  It definitely is.  Liane the Wayfarer is fleshed out in just so many pages more so than many characters in a series of novels.  Vance is perceptive when it comes to humanity, even when that humanity is simply waiting around to die.  And that, to me, is the BIG thing about this book. 

The setting is so rich and beautiful and developed that it is much like a character unto itself.  It shapes so much of even what the characters do and how they act.  In case, you aren't familiar with it, the stories are set so far in the future that the sun is swollen and red, and magic and technology are indistinguishable. 

I've noticed in some reviews that readers were put off by Vance's language.  Some of the words are archaic or from British usage, but that didn't bother me one bit.  If anything, it added to the alien feel of the far future setting.  To me, the book read like prose poetry, and I would even catch myself reading it aloud at times.

All of these books are being released as ebooks in authorized versions.  I will definitely be reading the other books in this series.  I only wish I hadn't waited so long.

Enjoy!

Quick Review: Harry Harrison's Homeworld

 Trapped Between Two WorldsFrom the back cover:

"Jan Kulozik is one of Earth's privileged elite.  A brilliant engineer, he enjoys all the blessings of a 23rd-century civilization which survived global collapse and conquered the stars.  Then he meets Sara, the beautiful, desirable agent of a rebel underground dedicated to smashing the iron rule of Earth's masters.  She shows him a sordid world he never dreamed existed!  And suddenly Jan has to choose - between slaves and masters.  His choice plunges him into a web of intrigue, assassanition and betrayal that will lead him to death . . . or to the stars."

I liked this book a lot.  It's the first book of the late, great Harry Harrion's To the Stars trilogy.  I read the second book back when I was in high school and only recently decided to read all three parts.

As far as dystopian fiction goes, I don't think there's anything new here. What makes the book, however, is Harrion's writing and characterization. The story moves briskly and smoothly throughout, and I admit, I did not expect the one big thing to happen at the end that happened. The main character is very capable, but not a superman. He is outsmarted by the baddies even when everything seems perfectly planned.

Even more impressive, Harrison is capable of telling his tale in a couple of hundred pages. The entire trilogy combined are not as long as a single volume in the ten book traps writers push off on readers today.

Fortunately, all three books (Homeworld, Wheelworld, and Starworld) have recently been released in ebook format, from Amazon at least.  If you prefer a hard copy, they're not too difficult to find at affordable prices from used online booksellers.

Definitely worth checking out. 

Enjoy!

Team Fortress 2: Mann vs. Machine Gameplay Video

I've been playing around with the newest Playclaw release for video capture.  Here is a short video of one round of the new TF2 mode Mann vs. Machine, which is basically a co-op horde mode.  I'll try doing one with voiceover soon.

Lords of Waterdeep Review

  Lords of Waterdeep

Wizards of the Coast

Designed by Peter Lee and Rodney Thompson

Is this the best Ameritrash/Eurogame hybrid to date?

 I'm fortunate to have two very distinct gaming groups—one which prefers old-school American-style hobby games (hereafter: Ameritrash) and another that mostly seems interested in the latest Eurogame hotness. For a gamer who likes all types of games, this is a huge luxury, but it also means that when I buy a game, it usually is only going to see play in one group or the other. For that reason, I've had my eye out for so-called hybrid games—games that appeal to both the Ameritrasher and the Eurogamer. The latest game to get pinned with that appellation is Wizard of the Coast's Lords of Waterdeep. After getting multiple plays in with both of my game groups, I'm ready to declare it the best crossover game I've yet come across and a very good game overall.

In Lords of Waterdeep, players take on the role of masterminds attempting to gain control of one of the flagship cities in the Forgotten Realms (one of Dungeons and Dragons two main universes). The players accomplish this by recruiting heroes of four different types (cleric, fighter, wizard, and rogue) and sending them on quests that earn the player influence (victory points) as well as other benefits. The game is played over eight rounds with the player who finishes with the most influence winning.

Mechanically, Waterdeep is a worker-placement game. Players have a certain number of agents that they can place onto locations on the board each turn. Placing agents allows the player to recruit heroes, that will be used to complete quests, or gain other benefits. After each placement, a player can complete a quest if he has the heroes in the correct number and colors. Like Caylus, there is a building mechanic that allows players to build and own locations that they get rewarded for each time an agent is placed there. To me, the game feels like a mix of Agricola and Caylus, but the mechanisms should be familiar to players of any worker-placement game.

The question when a game is so familiar mechanically is “what does it do better than other games in the genre?” Why play this instead of Stone Age, Caylus, Agricola, Ora and Labora, Dungeon Lords, Troyes, Dominant Species, Age of Empires III, Antiquity, Alien Frontiers, and In the Year of the Dragon (the worker-placement games currently in the Boardgamegeek top 100 games)? Well, I haven't played all of those, but three are among my all-time favorite games (Age of Empires, Agricola, Caylus) and Waterdeep offers a few things that recommend it over (or as an alternative to) those great titles. First, it plays very quickly. The limit to eight turns makes for a quick game and the diminishing options available each placement means adding new players doesn't add much time per player. In my experience, four-player games run about an hour, three-player about forty-five minutes. With three players, I can get two games of Waterdeep in the amount of time I could play one game of Caylus (or set up one game of Dungeon Lords, but that is another issue, entirely). The other difference is what makes it a great game for my collection—the Ameritrash mechanisms included as chrome.

The two elements that separate Waterdeep from the euro worker-placement games it will be compared to are the lords and the intrigue cards. Each player is randomly dealt a lord at the start of the game. These lords have special end-game bonuses and are kept secret from the other players. This keeps the victor in doubt right up until the final count. The intrigue cards introduce a level of take-that game play that is missing from the Eurogames. My favorite intrique cards are the mandatory quests, which can be played on an opponent forcing him or her to deal with them before completing quests of their own. Other cards allow players to break certain game rules for a one-time advantage. The cards are a very Ameritrash addition that add an element of surprise but don't add enough randomness to spoil the strategy.

It is those two elements that make the game more appealing to my Ameritrash group (along with the theme, since we are also a long-time D&D group). So far, the cards haven't provided enough of a swing that my Eurogame group were put off by them. The game has been requested multiple times by both groups, making it money well spent already and potentially one of my best bang-for-the-buck purchases in years.