|
About OgreCave and its staff
|
 Reviews - Blokus World Tour |
 |
|||
 |
by Lee Valentine
Blokus World Tour (BWT) is published by a Massachusetts-based company called Funkitron, Inc., under license from Blokus' publisher Sekkoïa. Funkitron was founded in 2001 by Dave Walls. They specialize in "downloadable casual games". They have produced a variety of board game-to-PC crossovers such as Scrabble Deluxe, Scrabble Blast, and Boggle Supreme. In BWT Funkitron has made a fun solitaire program for playing Blokus. This review assumes familiarity with Blokus' rules. For those unfamiliar with the rules of Blokus, I'll describe them in the next section, or you can click here for a full review of the Blokus board game.
Hardware requirements
Blokus overview Each player is given 21 distinct polyominos to play with. A domino is an example of a polyomino (dominos are made up of exactly two joined squares). For readers familiar with the video game Tetris, that game uses tetrominos - polyominos made up of four square sub-units. The polyominos in Blokus are all shapes made up of groupings of congruent squares, where each square is connected to at least one other square on the piece by an edge, rather than merely on a corner. Using 21 shapes in Blokus allows for all the possible polyomino shapes that can be made from one to five sub-squares that are legally constructable based on the above specifications. There are four colors of pieces in Blokus: blue, yellow, red, and green. To begin, each player is assigned a starting square and set of 21 distinct polyominos of a specific color. Other than color, each set of pieces is identical. A player's starting square is on a designated corner of a 20 unit by 20 unit grid. The first piece played by each player must cover his designated corner of the board. Each piece played must fit entirely on the grid without overlapping any part of another previously played piece. Each piece played after the first must have at least one square of the new piece diagonally adjacent to a square on one of your previously played pieces. However, no square of any newly played piece can be orthogonally adjacent to any square on any of your previously played pieces. There is no restriction about how your pieces can be played relative to the pieces of other players, provided that your pieces don't overlap theirs. Players take turns in color order (blue, yellow, red, and green) playing one piece at a time. Players continue playing in this fashion, skipping over any player who can no longer legally play. When all players can no longer play, the game is scored. Scoring is based on the number of squares in each piece that you play. BWT uses a slightly different scoring system than the classic method for Blokus scoring. BWT's scoring is discussed later in this review.
Modes of play In the Challenge mode, you engage in Blokus puzzles (think old school newspaper chess puzzles, but in Blokus terms). Each puzzle tests a specific skill, like being given one piece which must be placed so as to minimize the score and limit the placing options of three other computer players. Another puzzle tests your ability to score as low as possible while the computer players are trying to help to maximize your score. Each challenge hones a specific skill useful in Blokus games, or teaches you to identify a specific type of weakness in your opponents' play. In addition to the overt Challenge section, there is a Gold Blok awards page, which gives you a little virtual trophy for overcoming certain specific challenges in the game. These are not puzzles, so much as they are reaching certain milestones in your Blokus career (like coming back from a deficit of 10 points or more in a single game). Unlike the Challenge pages, these sort of highlight your Blokus games as opposed to teaching you a specifically applicable skill. Blokus World Tour supports classic four player Blokus (one color per player on a 20 x 20 board), classic two player Blokus (each player plays two colors on a 20 x 20 board) and Blokus Duo (each player controls one color on a 14 x 14 board). It does not support a three player mode of play, or team play involving computer opponents.
Multi-player The multi-player mode does not support team play. In BWT's multi-player mode everyone plays head-to-head. Multi-player play only applies to the Quick Game mode, and not to the Challenge, or World Tour mode, or so it seems. However, the software can track skill ratings, player-by-player, for up to four different human players on the same computer. Three human players can play at the same time on BWT, but the computer always generates a fourth computer player instead of allowing the human players to alternate playing green, as per the standard Blokus rules for three players. Unfortunately, and this was a true disappointment for me, BWT had no option for online play, either through a Blokus server or even by using a direct peer-to-peer, client/host connection. When you play a game with "World Tour" in the title, the end user is very likely going to expect some kind of multi-player online option, so I found the title of the game somewhat misleading.
World Tour mode World Tour features ten tournaments, with 16 different computer players to beat. Each one is represented by a large, cartoonish avatar. Most of the avatars are well-drawn, and there is some light animation to the avatars, such as a change of expression when a given character wins the game. Oddly enough, while there are a lot of computer player avatars, there are exactly four you can choose from when picking your own avatar in the game.
Differences from classic Blokus Blokus World Tour introduces another scoring mechanism called the Round Score to show how good you are across multiple games in a tournament. The premise of Round Scoring is that it tries to measure you against the field of players you just played against. Consider the following example: Player A has 80 points, player B has 70 points, player C has 60 points, and player D has 50 points. For each player, the Round score starts at 0 and adds one point for every point relatively speaking you are ahead of every other player and subtracts one for every point you are relatively behind another player. So, in this example, player A is +10 ahead of player B, +20 ahead of C, and +30 ahead of D, for a total Round Score of +60. B has a Round Score of +20. C has a Round Score of -20. D has a Round Score of -60. This formula is explained absolutely nowhere in Blokus World Tour, and is something you just have to calculate for yourself. The computer uses the Round Scores to determine seatings and pairings when playing in World Tour Mode. In addition to scoring changes, BWT introduces another rules change from standard Blokus play. BWT allows a player who just cannot figure out where to play to skip his turn, and then play continues around the table with the next player. Skipping once does not prevent you from playing on a subsequent turn. I've never found this particular option necessary given the Hint feature (see below), and given that skipping would be primarily useful to speed up multi-player online play, which does not exist in BWT.
A few bugs & oversights Both the trial and full versions of the software had problems operating smoothly in windowed mode. In that mode a few of the buttons (such as "Menu", "Options", and "Help") did not sense a mouse over normally, making them difficult or impossible to click. None of the in-game controls were affected in windowed mode, but to access the main menu and the Quit function I did have to exit from windowed mode using the Windows maximize button to get to full screen mode before I could hit some of BWT's menu buttons. In addition to the aforementioned bugs, in Blokus Duo mode, there are a variety of naming errors with non-player characters. This is mostly centered on pop-up dialogs saying which player starts. For example, there is a "Name here, you start", error for computer characters in Blokus Duo mode. Similarly, I have seen the non-player character Emma called "Chip" in the same startup dialog box for Blokus Duo. Another apparent error was the ranking of Round Scores. Nominally BWT computes Round Scores (as described earlier) while playing in World Tour mode and apparently sorts them in descending order to handle seatings and pairings. However, the program does not seem to consistently sort negative Round Scores in descending order. This seems to be an error, but the lack of documentation for this feature of the program makes it impossible to say for certain. Another oversight, in my opinion, was a lack of any kind of an owner's manual. Without even a PDF user's manual for the product, even basic questions like, "Can you play the game with multiple, non-computer players at the same time?" and "Can you play this game over the internet with another player?" were not overtly answered anywhere. I had to find the answers through the trial and error process. This lack of an owner's manual hampers the user from finding out about the scope of the software's features. It does not, in any way, make the actual play of Blokus more difficult, and the software does a good job of explaining Blokus basics. Overall, the user interface is quite intuitive insofar as playing the game by yourself goes. Only multi-player play options (and a lack of internet play) really desperately needed to be documented.
User interface - BWT versus Blokus Online The play interface offered by Blokus World Tour is much larger and much friendlier than the Blokus Online software. BWT also allows the end user to choose the difficulty of the computer AIs the player plays against, while in the Training Rooms of Blokus Online, the software's difficulty level is hard coded. Gone in the online version are the cute avatars of BWT. BWT offers a couple of very strong features that Blokus Online effectively lacks. The first of these is a Hint feature. There are three levels of Hints in BWT. The first shows you all the legal spots that you can place a piece on the board (corners that are eligible for a new piece). The next Hint shows you all the places which your piece cannot cover. And the last stage of Hint actually suggests a play. These are fantastically useful for beginning Blokus players, for young Blokus players, and for just about anybody toward the end of the game if you don't want to spend five minutes finding your next legal move. Since the software tells you, even without asking for a Hint, if there is at least one legal move left for you, this, combined with the "show legal moves" hint, speeds play without detracting overly from the skill required to play the game; it helps curb analysis paralysis. Blokus Online has a single tier Hint system and it only shows you one randomly chosen possible play, which is generally not a very useful feature when compared to what BWT offers. The second feature that BWT has over Blokus Online is an Undo feature, which takes back a whole series of moves to let you fix a misplay. Because of the Challenge mode, the Hint feature, the Undo feature, the ability to choose the difficulty of computer AIs, the larger and friendly user interface, and the ability to build your skills up slowly in the World Tour mode, Blokus World Tour is a really great piece of software for a beginning Blokus player. It will hone your skills in stages. A beginner will strain her eyes a lot more with Blokus Online, and will probably take longer learning the same skills. Sekkoïa, have designed a new game called Blokus Trigon, which uses a hexagonal board and pieces that have triangular segments instead of square segments common to the standard Blokus polyominoes. Blokus Trigon is also not supported by the Blokus World Tour software even though it is supported by the free Blokus Online interface.
Conclusions If you plan on playing Blokus offline a lot (while travelling), or if you want a larger, friendlier, better interface than Blokus Online offers, then Blokus World Tour is a nice piece of software and is a good purchase. BWT is an exceptional learning environment for new players - the challenges, the wide variety of computer opponents, and interface features like "Hint" and "Undo" make this an exceptional piece of software for improving your Blokus game if you aren't already the city champ. Some online software vendors sell BWT for as low as $9.99, but the standard going rate is $19.99. When compared to playing Blokus for free online, this is not a decision to be taken lightly, but for the right consumer, BWT is a good fit. If you are an advanced Blokus player who wants to play mostly over the internet, then Blokus World Tour is simply not for you.
Lee's ratings:
Overall Score: B (A for solitaire play, but some bugs and no internet play)
Links
|
|
||
 Back to reviews index |
 |
|||
Blokus World Tour
In addition to any of the
limitations of the software listed above, there is one big reason which
will keep a lot of people from purchasing this game -