"Li Summer Fang Ji, leisure and joy for a while." Today is the "lixia" in the twenty-four solar terms of the mainland, also known as the "spring day", heralding the arrival of summer and the peak season of all things.
From ancient times to the present, people have endured the vicissitudes of nature and generated various wonderful imaginations. In modern times, people have learned that the weather is no longer controlled by the "thunder and electricity mother, wind and rain master", and the eyes are also focused on how to adapt, change, and even take advantage of the weather.
Yet in the face of the impermanence of nature, human efforts are most of the time futile. But if it's in a game, isn't it easy to change the weather?
Unfortunately, the board game designers didn't get the players to their wishes very easily.
Weather Machine
In weather machines, the player is responsible for correcting the "beta 1.0 version" of the failed weather machine and solving the adverse effects of its "butterfly effect" on the earth's ecology.
Such a tall theme, in the game the player is a proper "social animal" life - the player in the game only has a scientist Mi Bao, that is, a worker available, each round can only be placed in one place, how to reasonably arrange their own actions, in order not to tire of a wasted work?
The layout and workstations in the game are similar to those in Gallery, with four main areas, starting in the Supplier area, which can perform five actions, such as adjusting the order, obtaining resources, and producing robots. The other three zones have two action options to choose from.
One is mainly to let the player place their robots in the idle positions of various weather types and weather machines, and the other is to perform other related activities, which are the main means for players to turn around resources and obtain climate points (brush points).
The NPC professors in the game will move through the areas under certain conditions. When the player moves their workers to the area where the professor is, they will get an additional proof of payment, and while moving to get additional benefits, it is also common to let the professor help them "card slots" by making careful calculations.
However, after all, it is the theme of making machines to change the global climate, and the player's work point is not to blame. Players will enter the state early, from the first round of the choice in the supplier area will enter the fierce competition state of competition to change the game order, accumulate the resources required for the first move, and the first move after each adjustment of the order will often bring higher benefits to the player.
It's not just about you on the starting line, but also about the secret strategy that players have developed after reviewing the entire territory after the initial setup. Since a lot of the content of "Weather Machine" is directly displayed on the map, most players can take one step and calculate three steps after a long time, and the high-level migrant workers almost think about how to hand over the full score from the beginning and design a new machine to save mankind.
"Great Powers Contend for Dams"
Board games with weather elements often have a brain-opening background, and the recently produced "Great Powers" is one of them.
In the world of parallel time and space, the great war of mankind blew up the Alps into a number of huge craters, and after the war, these craters became natural reservoirs, triggering hydropower experts and engineering teams from all over the world to come to pan for gold. The smoke of the battlefield dissipated, and the open struggle in the business field began.
This is a classic worker placement game where players gradually increase their power generation around building dams, intercepting water storage, draining pipes, artificial rainfall, etc., and increasing their scores while earning higher income.
The various countries played by players in the game have distinct abilities, and the game route is diverse, and with the strange play of the players on the field, there will be a variety of magical chemical reactions.
Players who are accustomed to German games will often obsessively build dams and lay pipelines in "Great Powers Dam" to build dams and lay pipelines, ignoring the importance of artificial rainfall, and do not know that there is no source of living water, where can the flood current be launched?
"Battle for the Dam" from the initial selection of national characters and supporting the initial setting of resources began to compete players, the initial few moves are more crucial, determine the general direction of the game, is a game with a high threshold for entering the pit, but as long as you are familiar with the process of the game and the characteristics of each country, the charm of the game will also be truly displayed.
The scene of multinational competition for the development of hydropower is probably only presented in the Alps where the game is overhead.
《Otake-en Garden》
"Seven Dragon Year Mother's Courtyard, Star Eclipse Four Seasons Royal Bamboo Garden." The famous meme in the early days of this board game circle is the first board game promoted by players in the initial period of domestic board games. "Otakeen" continues to harvest fans steadily in family games with a brisk style and a cute theme.
The game is about a national treasure giant panda given to Japan by the Chinese side, the player plays the role of a gardener who raises pandas, and the actions that can be performed include moving pandas to eat bamboo, moving gardeners, irrigating canals, pumping plates, and extracting tasks, the main goal is to complete various tasks to get high scores.
The weather dice determine the special environment of each turn in the game, increase randomness and fun, and also give the game a certain degree of "watching the sky to eat" attributes.
Although players can't determine the results of the weather dice, the adjustment of strategy according to different weathers is a solid German style, and the game designer's skillful control of action point allocation, plate splicing, complete sets of collection and other mechanisms has also achieved a good result in its BGG ranking of 300+.
Carbon Dioxide
As can be seen from "Weather Machine", the designer Complex Brother is quite concerned about climate issues, and the earlier work "CO (Carbon Dioxide)" is also a strong proof.
What "Carbon Dioxide" discusses is more practical than the overhead Weather Machine - the earth's ecology is deteriorating due to the wanton pollution of human beings, especially the mode of burning energy to generate electricity, so that the atmospheric carbon dioxide content rises year by year, and the greenhouse effect leads to a continuous increase in temperature year after year.
Players in the game will jointly tackle this problem, by building new energy power plants, attending summits, and buying and selling carbon indicators, trying to prevent continents from building high-polluting power plants due to development needs and maintaining the ecology of the earth.
In the original version, because the players were semi-cooperative, they often fell into inexplicable governance dilemmas, especially the backward side was easy to abandon itself and give up the rescue of the earth, like the real-world climate governance problem of ridicule and prevarication.
Although the content of the game is realistic, the process is extremely painful, and the ability to successfully end a game must also be based on the strong tolerance of the lagging players to "take into account the overall situation". So Complex Brother redesigned the second version in 2018, players can freely choose co-op mode, Solo mode, semi-co-op mode to play.
In the cooperative mode and solo mode, the players finally work together to complete various issues and work together to solve the international problem of carbon dioxide emissions. In the semi-cooperative mode, the future of humanity is still grim, and the player's choice of non-cooperation in the middle still exists.
Overall, however, the game's flow is clear — the player performs one main action per turn, and three side actions can be interspersed before and after the main action. The game's learning curve is noticeable, and players will noticeably find themselves improving after multiple games. Of course, saving the planet also requires a little bit of luck when setting up, and the number of players factor is also very related.
If you want to try a high-intensity cooperative game, "Carbon Dioxide" must be the first recommendation.
Nowadays, the climate problem is still severe, go to the alien to find a second home, engage in Mars colonization, lunar project, etc. is not the choice that human beings hope, we can not hope to change the weather only on the desktop, save mankind, want to survive in the blue star for a longer time, pay attention to weather problems, environmental protection from me, is also everyone's compulsory course Oh ~