Jörg Zuther's Game Page

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My favourite...

	Board Games
	Trading Card Games
	Computer Games
	Game Links

My Favourite Board Games

• Jörg Zuther's Go Page (html)
  Do you try to handle with the mystic deepness and complexity of Go? You may find some interesting information on my Go pages.

• The Primordial Information Soup (html/ by Jörg Zuther)
  The game "Ursuppe" by Doris & Frank became one of my favourites within hours!

• Puerto Rico (published by Ravensburger Spieleverlag - Alea/ author Andreas Seyfarth)
  If you ever sought after a game with deep strategy, almost no luck and a cool mechanism to let players be active without long interrupts by seemingly endless turns of thinkers, this is your game. It's no surprise that this game was nominated for the "Spiel des Jahres 2002", got the "Deutscher Spielepreis 2002" and is still (February 2003) voted #1 by most players all over the world.

• Die Siedler von Catan (published by KOSMOS/ author Klaus Teuber)
  one of the most successful games ever by one of the most famous game designers

• Carcassonne (published by Hans im Glück/ author Klaus-Jürgen Wrede)
  This game was "Spiel des Jahres 2001" and not without reason! Players in turn draw little tiles and lay them down at a growing scenery of cities, roads, meadows and monasteries. All of these elements can earn points to the players - a player has to manage to have the majority of inhabitants in a given element (city, road, meadow) when it becomes finished. A relaxing game with little strategy and much tactics which is suitable for both families and hardcore players.

• Boggle (published by Hasbro)
  Now, this game outright has been invented just for me. No one wants to play this with me since I'm too fast at it. You have to find words in a 4 times 4 square muddle of letters. You can't use a letter cube twice in one word, but you are allowed to continue from one cube to all its neighbours - be it vertical, horizontal or diagonal. Write down the found words fast - an hour-glass limits the time to 3 minutes or so. When the game ends, players get points for the words they've found - the longer the word, the more points you get.

My Favourite Trading Card Games (TCG)

• The Main Page of Pain Mage (html)
  One of my favourite games is Magic:The Gathering (M:TG), the trading card game.

• Jörg Zuther's Data Wall 2.0 (html/ only in English)
  Unfortunately, the popularity of M:TG deprives other TCGs of the success they earn. A much more intelligent TCG than M:TG is Netrunner, which is an asymmetric game for two players with a high poker factor.

My Favourite Computer Games

• Heroes of Might and Magic III (by 3DO/ New World Computing)
  This was my first computer game after a 10 year pause of computer gaming. It is still one of my favourites despite its lack of strategic depth. Sound and graphics are beautiful! A wonderful world to discover. The game is turn-based, giving you enough time to plan every turn in detail before hitting the next-turn-button.
  I have developed a map for the expansion Armageddon's Blade. The map is called Odyssee (~150K). It's an extra large story map that gives you logistical nightmares and needs about 9 to 18 months (300 to 600 turns!). Take my advice: Follow the advice that is given to you during gameplay or you may be lost! Save often and read the texts. If you click them away frequently you will miss a) the story and b) useful hints.
  The sequel Heroes of Might and Magic IV is now out (April 2002). I'm going to test it soon.
  July 2002: I didn't test the game very much since I didn't find it to be a hit.
  • The sound is ok, but imho it was better in Heroes III.
  • The graphics are nice, the resolution improved, but imho it is far too many-coloured. Overall, I can't see much improvement over Heroes III.
  • The cities changed a bit. You can build far less city improvements than in Heroes III (e.g., there are no upgrades of the creature dwellings in Heroes IV, and you can build only one money upgrade). In Heroes III, I always wanted the cities to be far more extensible. You often built all possible city improvements after some weeks, with further weeks or months in the game to come (especially on large or extra large maps). I would have liked the addition of numerous and extremely expensive (e.g. 100000 gold, 100 wood, 100 stone) buildings with powerful functions. Or something like a metropol hall (earning you 8000 gold per day, at a building cost of 20000 gold) and, after that, a unique Capital palace (earning you 20000 gold per day at a cost of 50000 gold, 50 wood, 50 stone, 50 gems). And 2nd or 3rd upgrades of the creature dwellings. The point is that if all this can be improved to such a great extent then it isn't canonical to build all resource efficiency improvements first and other improvements later (as it was on most medium, large, and extra large maps in Heroes III) simply because this would cost you far too much time. It would make choices less trivial what to build next, thus adding strategic depth to the game.
    There are only 6 city types in Heroes IV. I liked the dense and convincing style and atmosphere of the cities in Heroes III (aah, those necromancer cities were wonderful). Now, in Heroes IV the cities have almost no atmosphere and style. Many creatures are thrown together in an almost arbitrary fashion. The animal/elf city feels like a ridiculous circus. Now, this is a real betrayal of the spirit of Heroes III. At this point, Heroes IV really sucks! Shame on you, 3DO/New World Computing!
    On the plus side, I must point out a good idea you find in Heroes IV: the caravans. You can build a caravan network between your cities that allows you to send troops all over your growing kingdom at great speed. Further, and this is even better, you can recruit the troops of external creature dwellings from within every city that has the caravan improvement. This means you don't need a whole army of heroes running all over the map to collect all those troops and extra resources. Hey, to make this perfect the caravan manager should be made programmable, e.g. with an option "Buy every day/two days/ ... /week" per external creature dwelling (and when there's not enough money, popping up a message asking for help). As far as the creature growth is concerned, the weekly rhythm has been abandoned. In Heroes IV, creatures grow daily.
  • A major change has been done on heroes. In Heroes IV, heroes and creature stacks have become pretty much the same. Heroes aren't "containers" for creature stacks as they were in Heroes III (and what allowed you to transport a huge army of creatures all over the map with a chain of heroes) any longer. Instead, creatures and heroes can wander the map independently, each with its own movement restrictions. If you want extremely fast troop movements, you must now use your caravan network. In an army, heroes and creatures are now both stacks, and you can put multiple heroes into one army. The differences between creatures and heroes are that a hero stack can only be of size one and that heroes can develop abilities to a much, much greater extent than any creature.
    While this wasn't a change I waited for, it improves the simulation aspect of the game a lot. Being able to put multiple heroes into one army creates a huge number of new possibilities. This definitely adds strategic depth to the game. This is the main point that motivates me to play Heroes IV.
  • There are a lot of other changes (e.g. concerning heroes abilities, the magic system, artifacts, locations on the main map, wandering monsters), but all those changes seem to me either minor or I haven't found the time yet to make up an opinion. Overall, I'm disappointed. There are some points where Heroes IV has severely lost compared to Heroes III. And this is something that should not happen in a computer game series like this.

• Civilization III (by Infogrames/ Firaxis)
  Sid Meier's Civilization series offers a huge gaming experience. You have nothing less to do than developing, leading and enhancing a whole civilization, starting with only one or two settlers. Usually, one game can endure several 100 turns, covering over 6000 years of history! This series has inspired a whole bunch of games, inluding:
  
  • Civilization II (by Microprose/ page by Civilization Fanatics Center)
    The precursor of Civilization III. I played it almost one year...
    For people who know the game - I had to laugh when I read the following text in "Die geheimnisvolle Insel" of Jules Verne: "Die ganze Mannschaft des Ingenieurs mauerte tagelang. Smith selbst nahm auch die Maurerkelle in die Hand. Sogar der Zeitungsschreiber ließ sich willig dabei anstellen. Pencroff konnte sich vor Begeisterung darüber kaum mehr halten, mit welcher Systematik in Planung und Leitung der Ingenieur zu Werke ging. Er schlug ihm deshalb vor, auch die Flüsse schiffbar zu machen, Bergwerke zu graben und die ganze Insel Lincoln mit einem Eisenbahnnetz zu überziehen." As it seems, Verne must have had a vision of the civ game series! ;-)
  • Alpha Centauri (by Firaxis)
    This is an earlier sequel to Civilization II. It extends the story: Civilization II ends with a space ship race to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri begins with a ship reaching the Alpha Centauri system.
  • Call to Power (by Activision)
    I haven't tried this clone - yet. This game has been migrated to Linux by Loki. Unfortunately, Loki had to shut down its business.
  • Freeciv (Open Source)
    This project has an ambitious goal - a civilization clone, that can be customized to resemble all of the other civ clones - and even far beyond. Up to now, Freeciv can emulate Civilization I and II very good. It's playable, especially in multiplayer mode. The AI has some serious weaknesses up to now, though. For instance, it does not understand diplomatic matters. However, this project is in hot progression - look out for changes! The customization possibilities go far beyond those of the commercial civ variants and will be further expanded. And the best is - it's open source and free! And you can play it under Linux.

• Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares (by Microprose/ link goes to a review of the game by www.gamesdomain.com)
  In Master of Orion II, you can create your own races. (Covers also my favourite race, called the "Demovores" or the "Lithocracy", which are superfast scientists that can wipe out all their weaknesses very fast just by researching the appropriate technologies - in only a few turns!) Master of Orion II is a game even more huge than Civilization: you have to conquer a whole galaxy! It is many years old, the graphic is completely out of date, but it still granted me one of the best gaming experiences I've ever made (to mention another detail: you can design your own ships, choosing from all components you have discovered so far).
  Everyone who loved Master of Orion II is waiting impatiently for the sequel (look at Master of Orion III - The Official Web Site - it is developed by Quicksilver). It is planned (February 2003) to ship the game February 25th, 2003. If you read all the designers notes you know that this game is going to be huge in every of its aspects!

My Favourite Game Links

• The Game Cabinet
  "a (sometimes!) monthly games magazine". A lot of game reviews and other stuff...

• Spotlight On Games (by Rick Heli)
  much interesting stuff about conflict games (variants, analysis, errata, scenarios, playbacks, charts, summaries, lists, tables, reviews, backgrounds...), list of books on games, games listed by subject (such as "Camels in the Desert Games", "Dinosaur & Evolution Games",...)

• spielbox-online mit KMWs Spielpl@tz (German/ by Matthias Hardel)
  "Das Portal für Brett- und Kartenspieler"

• Card Games (by John McLeod)
  a huge index of all kinds of card games (except trading card games)

• Thinks.com
  "The brain games, puzzles and pastimes website"

• The CyberMUD (by Eri Izawa)
  an online text-adventure-like web-game (old, but nice!)