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About OgreCave and its staff
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 12 Downloadable Gifts in 2010 |
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An Aetheric Holiday Dozen By Demian Katz, Ken Newquist, Matthew Pook, Allan Sugarbaker, Mike Sugarbaker, and Andy Vetromile The big day has come and gone, and perhaps you had forgotten about a certain gaming buddy, figuring you wouldn't run into each other this year. But now, your buddy wants to drop by with a gift. Don't worry, it's okay – the Cave dwellers have you covered yet again with the fourth stage of holiday gift readiness, tweleve PDF or otherwise downloadable gifts for gamers. As we suggest to you every year, you can easily grab these gifts online in moments, and pretend you've been prepared all along. Here's the downloadable gifts we'd recommend from 2010:
Skulduggery, the Roleplaying Game Of Verbal Fireworks & Sudden Reversals
Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers
Inevitable
A Taste For Murder
Minecraft
Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator
Blood in Ferelden
Looking for a rich fantasy world, but can't find a GM? Maybe you should have a look at OgreCave's full review of Dragon Age: Origins, and see what BioWare's been up to.
Cosmographer 3
Spectromancer: League of Heroes
Weird Fantasy Roleplaying
Small World for iPad
If you still haven't visited the original yet, be sure to read OgreCave's full review of Small World.
Boardgame Remix Kit
All of the RPG products we've listed here would make excellent giftage
for the right gamer. However, if you're still searching for gift inspiration, you
should have a look at our other 2010 gift
lists, or even browse OgreCave's review index. You're welcome.
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Here at Ogrecave we like a bit of
"swords & chicanery," getting one up on our fellow players as we pursue
some nefarious scheme or other. For this reason, we always liked The
Dying Earth RPG and welcome the news that Pelgrane Press has
released Robin D. Laws' updated set of rules for the game. These rules can also be used to create sessions in which inter-party
conflict is rife. The pre-prepared quips
of The Dying Earth RPG are in play, and when delivered at just the right
moment, do grievious injury! The result is Skulduggery, a game that
plays fast and light with guidance for the GM to keep the players
turning on each other in true Machiavellian fashion. The book itself
comes with four ready-to-play scenarios and the rules support the
creation of your own games of "rivalries & witticisms."
Duels of the Planeswalkers has been available for some time for XBox,
but this year it was released on the PC and PS3 as well. You can play MTG
against a solid series of computerized opponents or against other
players online, all within a sharp, top notch interface. You can
play normal duels or a Magic: The Puzzling-style problem solving mode.
There are some limitations (e.g., the computer taps lands for you,
sometimes fouling up complex multi-color plays) and perhaps an
occasional bug, but you get a lot of replay value for the price. Three
inexpensive expansions are available, increasing the number of decks,
computer opponents, and puzzles. You don't have access to all the cards
that you would in Magic Online, but you get a lot of Magic for a lot
less dough.
The world has ended, only to be rebuilt by mad computer HappyCOM-9. The
totalitarian overlord remembers just enough of its original programming
to allow free elections, and players must compete ruthlessly to wrest
control of their crazed new world. Demoralize your opponents with dead
raccoons! Earn campaign funds through game shows like "Are You Stronger
than a Third Grader?" A darkly comic board game that feels a bit like
Monopoly possessed by the spirit of Paranoia,
Inevitable is available as a full boxed edition... but
last-minute shoppers will be more interested in the print-and-play
version, which comes in both a free demo form and an inexpensive,
expanded deluxe edition. A print-and-play game of this scope can be a
bit intimidating, but Inevitable does everything it can to make
life easy: most components are full color, but everything looks decent
if printed in black and white, and clear instructions are provided for
putting all the parts together. All you'll need to provide is a
printer, a cutting implement and some 8.5" x 11" cardstock and paper
(preferably in a few different colors).
Take a country house in the 1930s, fill
with family and staff and their relationships, rivalries, and
resentments, and what you have is a receipe ripe for murder. It is a
classic set up right off the page of an Agatha Christie novel, and all
you need now is a death, multiple motives, and a detective to deduce
them all. Graham Walmsley's
A Taste For Murder is a well mannered little game whose theme is likely to
appeal to a much wider audience than us mere gamers. After all, who
doesn't like a cosy little murder? Played out in three acts, in which
motives are established and exacerbated; one player's character is
murdered, but the player gets to play the detective and question all of
the suspects; and relationships are exposed and the murderer revealed.
The rules are simple, the examples extensive, and the advice
abundant. There is also background that explains the world of the
English country house in the 1930s, including period receipes. So
Walmsley gives us not just A Taste For Murder, he makes a whole meal of
it!
We always feel conflicted giving
downloadable PC games away, because if they're any good, you risk
destroying the recipient's productivity, dateability, and/or soul merely
by introducing the product to his or her life. We probably don't need to
even tell you that Minecraft is in this category.
Minecraft drops you into a vast – and we mean vast
– cubey wilderness to find your own way, and you'd better find it
fast before the sun sets and the zombies come out. While we have come to
wish the game had a permanent-daylight mode (it can already be set to
Peaceful for a monster-free experience), it is still a massive indie hit
for a reason. The game is still being expanded, and has yet to reach
completion, so it speaks volumes that the beta version has hooked such a
huge fan base. Share it with someone you love/loathe.
You supply at least three "crew
members" with Windows machines, one of the machines to run the server
and "main screen," the others to be "bridge stations." One crew member
becomes "captain" (and hey, if you're doling out the gifts, shouldn't it
be you?) and gives orders to the others to operate the ship and put
things on screen. Bridge stations include comms, engineering, helm, and
weapons. That's it: end of instructions. Objective: save the galaxy.
Either that made you go "OMG I MUST OWN THIS" or it didn't, there's
nothing else we can do (besides maybe link you to 
Blood in Ferelden presents a
trio of adventures for Dragon Age: Dark Fantasy Roleplaying, one
of the best RPGs of last year and aguably one of the best RPGs to be
adapted from a computer RPG, in this case BioWare's highly regarded
Dragon Age: Origins. This anthology plays up to the game's "dark
fantasy" tag with three lengthy and detailed adventures that present the
heroes with not just plenty of action, but also dark decisions whose
outcomes are often shades of grey rather than straight
black and white. Fortunately Dragon Age's mechanics play fast and light,
so they never get in the way of the players having to make these
decisions. Designed for use with characters of Ranks 1 through 6, Blood
in Ferelden also includes guidelines for using its scenarios and those
in Dragon Age, Set 1 and the GM's Kit to create a simple campaign.
If you're going to explore strange new worlds, you're going to want to
map them. Cosmographer 3, ProFantasy's science fiction themed add-on for
Campaign Cartographer 3, lets you do that. It provides tools and
artwork to build planetary, star system and galaxy maps, as well as
starship deckplans. Old school fans will appreciate support for
Traveller-style maps and the ability to import Traveller sector data.
The maps look beautiful, but they're not for the faint-hearted: while
CC3 made great strides in usability, it's still a CAD-based program with
a sizable learning curve. For CC3 diehards and SF mapping enthusiasts,
Cosmographer 3 is worth the time it takes to learn.
Spectromancer is a computerized
fantasy-themed customizable card game by Magic: The Gathering
designer Richard Garfield together with Alexey Stankevich and Skaff
Elias. It has a simple-but-clean rules set and a solid interface.
Using a resource mechanic, Spectromancer players cast magical spells and play creatures to
slay opposing wizards. Each spellcaster can manipulate five types of
magic; four are common to all casters and the fifth is determined by
your spellcasting specialty. Each round you gain one magic point in
each category, which is banked and can be spent later on any
turn to work magic. There is no deck building – the computer
assigns you a total of twenty spells and creatures each game to duel
with. You can play one per turn if you can afford it. If you like the
idea of Magic, but hate the mechanic or want a game of more
pure skill, give Spectromancer a try. The League of Heroes expansion adds new
types of mages, improved online play, and a new campaign mode.
Last year we loved the scenarios from James Raggi IV's Lamentations of
the Flame Princess so much that we suggested you give two of them!
With a reputation for creating dangerous adventures full of traps,
puzzles, atmosphere, and detail (rather than of monsters to slaughter),
Raggi's take on "Edition 0" Dungeons & Dragons was highly
anticipated. The result is Weird Fantasy Roleplaying, a
retroclone that, inspired by authors such as H.P. Lovecraft and Robert
E. Howard, infuses Dungeons & Dragons with a sense of the unknowable,
the inexplicable, of dread, thus drawing back from the high fantasy
elements that have dominated the gaming genre for the last forty years.
Its highpoints include stripped back rules that focus on character roles
(the Fighter really comes into his own, as he is the only one that can
really fight and the Specialist is an elegant re-design of the Thief); a
Tutorial that Êreally does take you step-by-step through the process of
learning to play; and the good advice that can be found throughout its
pages. Although this is Raggi's very personal look at the Dungeons &
Dragons style game, it is a very fresh look, giving us a new approach
rather than mere replication.
One of our favorite board games of the
past few years is Small World, so we were happy to see its waves
of fantasy races spreading across an electronic countryside. As in the
original game, players each take control of a race of creatures sweeping
out across a fantasy landscape to control sections of the realm and gain
victory points. The trick of the game is to know when to place your race
into decline, thereby taking a turn to "deactivate" your race, leaving
vacancies on the board for a new race you've selected. The iPad version
takes full advantage of the medium, providing an AI for single player
sessions as well as allowing pass-and-play gaming for two. Better still,
the calculation of victory points, bid costs for each race the players
select, and more is taken care of by the iPad program, and expansions have already been translated to the digital world as well. This gorgeous
adaptation is well worth a try, making a great gift for that friend who has everything, including an iPad. 
Whether you're an amateur game designer
or a professional house rule tweaker, everyone knows traditional board
games can get stale without a little variety. Enter the Boardgame
Remix Kit – a collection of new games to play with the games
you already own. Sure, you've played Monopoly with a "Free
Parking" bonus (an unofficial rule, by the way), or allowed extra words
in Scrabble, but what if you had a whole book of such
alterations? Hide & Seek provides exactly that, with sections on
Monopoly, Scrabble, Clue, and Trivial Pursuit that list
rule tweaks, "mash-ups" that mix them with other games, and entirely new
games to play with these classics. The iPhone/iPad app even has a dice roller and timer built in, so you truly have no excuse & teach
those old games some new tricks!