My plant closes down for the holidays every year, and although there are many more productive things I might be doing during my time off, I usually end up spending much of the time hunched over my laptop either working on my websites or figuring out how to get obscure games running on the various flavors of operating systems I use. I’ve managed to squeeze a goodly amount of both pastimes in over this year’s break. I’ll let the site updates speak for themselves (check ‘em out!) and spend more time talking about the games I played.

Seth and I were able to grab a little time to play some online games just before Christmas, and though I lost both - I had a good time. Since Seth wasn’t able to get over to play in person and only very recently got his new PC up and going, we needed something that would be easy to set up. I’ve had both of these games up my sleeve for some time, and it was good to actually play against somebody I know for once.

Tactics Arena Online - a “battle chess” type game (remember Archon?). Turn based, you go then they go. This game requires flash and is played in a browser. I goofed and didn’t take a screen shot of our games, but I found this image on a review of the game (along with a couple other screenshots here in case you’re interested in a more thorough and objective discussion of the gameplay. My opinion is that the game is great, but suffers from the fact that the game has a for-profit model which means if you pay a monthly fee, you have access to more powerful playing pieces. I’ve never liked games like that (including many collectible card games like magic the gathering). Other than that, games are just about the right length (for my short attention span) and interesting to watch (I’m a sucker for miniatures). My only real beef is there doesn’t seem to be a way to just view games in progress (which is a good way to learn), maybe I missed it?
To play, just log on to:
http://www.tacticsarena.com/play/
Pick a nickname and a password and you’re in. Good times.

jSettlers - We also played a game of this Settlers of Catan clone mostly because we didn’t need to install anything to play (assuming Java is already installed). It’s another browser game, so all you really need is a java-enabled web browser (and an internet connection :), but offers AI (robots) to play against if you don’t have any human buddies interested and don’t want to play against someone you don’t know. You can get into live games with other folks through the chat room, though I haven’t done that. There’s an image of how our game ended attached to this post.

Yes, I am aware of the Xbox 360 version of Settlers! I don’t own an Xbox 360 though

jSettlers is based on Settlers of Catan, a turn based board game very popular in Europe where you have to build roads and settlements and get resources based on where your buildings are. To build you need various amounts of the different resources some of which you won’t have so you are forced to trade with the people you are playing against to get anything done.
To try out jSettlers, just click:
http://jsettlers.org/
Enter a nickname, pick a game (or type something into “New Game:”, and click ‘Join Game’. This should open a new window where you can pick a place to “sit”.

Pioneers - Although I like jSettlers, I’ve been playing Pioneers more lately, and I spent some time getting the latest version (11.3) to work on the Mac and the Ubunutu box the kids use so we could play against each other easily. Pioneers is a lot like jSettlers, but offers a choice of board themes, different board layouts, and a non-java interface (Although I like the fact that it runs everywhere easily, I find most Java apps clunky and slow, but just my opinion - please don’t flame me). Once I gave up on compiling Pioneers for the Mac (the GTK+ dependencies completely stumped me) and went with the fink install, I was able to play, but now I have 1.2G of GTK crap in my /sw directory that I don’t need! It’s worth it to play pioneers though

WizWar - last, but certainly not least! I’ve written about Wizwar here before. I was able to mess around with Wizwar some, but only got one complete game in. I started out my holiday looking for an online substitute for this, one of my favorite board games of all time. Here’s a shot of me and the kids starting out a game. I love board games (check out boardgamegeek.com if you do too), but I find that I don’t have time to set up my favorite games *and* play them anymore! That’s the main reason I’ve been seeking out computer versions of them I think.

Here’s the story: There’s an unofficial home for Wizwar at http://wizwar.com/. The author of the game, Tom Jolly, swings in once in a while to comment, but it’s not his site. The guys that run it do it out of love for the game (I still cherish my 5th edition version I got sometime around 1990). Searching the forums of that site brought me to some posts of long ago by someone nicknamed Synneth who started writing a computer version of Wizwar a few years ago (as a teenager). He had gotten it very far so that it was playable, but on Windows only, and due to some (seemingly endlessly upcoming) plans the author had/has to release a computer version, he couldn’t post it on Wizwar.com. He was nice enough to post it on his own site so I could grab a copy - here’s the forum thread, but since it’s only a Windows program, I haven’t messed with it too much. I have been meaning to get back to it and actually play a full game, but haven’t had access to a Windows machine for long enough (yet).

By the programmer’s own admission he made a bit of a mess of the code (which was originally going to be open sourced, but then got into a deal with Tom Jolly, and then abandoned it) and was only really learning to program when he originally wrote this game, but it mostly works and shows how much fun a computer version of Wizwar could be. I have had a couple lock-ups necessitating a CTL-ALT-DELETE, and I’d really like to see a more detailed log history since the computer players wiz by (pun intended) and by the time you go again you’ve missed important stuff. Also, something messed up once on a destroy wall spell and it didn’t work. But here’s a couple screenshots anyway to whet your appetite for *more wizwar*!