Elephants and Caverns
Feb. 9th, 2020 03:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearI finally got around to watching the film version of Water For Elephants and mostly enjoyed it. I think it suffered a bit for having cut out the present-day nursing home narrative, though I can understand why that was nixed. The framing narrative and voice-over felt a bit clunky at either end, and the necessarily compressed nature of the story meant it lacked the depth of the book. I definitely wasn't as emotionally invested in the story of the film as I was with the book, though the climax was still affecting.
Christoph Waltz was on excellent bad guy form, but Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon didn't work for me as a couple, even though they both gave perfectly fine performances. Rosie the elephant was awesome and the life of the circus was well evoked. But overall, it didn't feel like it had much oomph or enough real development for the story to work. So, I would definitely recommend the book more.
This week, I was browsing the internet for games to recommend to a friend and came across Above and Below, which sounded so appealing I instantly bought a copy for myself. It sounded like a cross between Village, Dungeon Lords and Tales of the Arabian Nights, which are all pretty heavy hitters as far as engagement for me. As described in the overview I read, you have to develop your village by recruiting new villagers with increased skill levels, building houses and outposts, and collecting resources and money. Muck like other worker placement games, you have lots of options and a limited number of workers to assign. You also have to allow your villagers to rest before they can come back into rotation, and the number of workers you can retrieve from rest depends on the number of beds available in your village. That's the 'above' part of the game.
There are also caverns below the village, which you can explore by assigning a party of villagers to that task. There's a chunky book of possible encounters, one of which is allocated randomly to your expedition. This gives you a bit of story and a choice of two actions to take. You then roll dice and the skills of your villagers determine whether or not you have succeeded. Success provides additional resources and also gives you extra settlement spaces to build more outposts.
Overall, the game wasn't as dynamic and compelling as I'd hoped from the description, though it was still fun and I'd like to play it a few more times with different numbers of people before I decide whether or not I want to keep it. The main drawback is that it's too short - it's meant to be played over seven rounds and that's not enough time (based on this first play) to achieve the higher goals. Adding an extra three rounds allowed us to get pretty much where we wanted, and it's easy enough to add extra rounds, so that's not too much of a problem.
So, fun but not fantastic.
Christoph Waltz was on excellent bad guy form, but Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon didn't work for me as a couple, even though they both gave perfectly fine performances. Rosie the elephant was awesome and the life of the circus was well evoked. But overall, it didn't feel like it had much oomph or enough real development for the story to work. So, I would definitely recommend the book more.
This week, I was browsing the internet for games to recommend to a friend and came across Above and Below, which sounded so appealing I instantly bought a copy for myself. It sounded like a cross between Village, Dungeon Lords and Tales of the Arabian Nights, which are all pretty heavy hitters as far as engagement for me. As described in the overview I read, you have to develop your village by recruiting new villagers with increased skill levels, building houses and outposts, and collecting resources and money. Muck like other worker placement games, you have lots of options and a limited number of workers to assign. You also have to allow your villagers to rest before they can come back into rotation, and the number of workers you can retrieve from rest depends on the number of beds available in your village. That's the 'above' part of the game.
There are also caverns below the village, which you can explore by assigning a party of villagers to that task. There's a chunky book of possible encounters, one of which is allocated randomly to your expedition. This gives you a bit of story and a choice of two actions to take. You then roll dice and the skills of your villagers determine whether or not you have succeeded. Success provides additional resources and also gives you extra settlement spaces to build more outposts.
Overall, the game wasn't as dynamic and compelling as I'd hoped from the description, though it was still fun and I'd like to play it a few more times with different numbers of people before I decide whether or not I want to keep it. The main drawback is that it's too short - it's meant to be played over seven rounds and that's not enough time (based on this first play) to achieve the higher goals. Adding an extra three rounds allowed us to get pretty much where we wanted, and it's easy enough to add extra rounds, so that's not too much of a problem.
So, fun but not fantastic.
