Playin' with myself

I have a stack of four board games here which I should be getting around to reviewing, and I've got no one to play them with. There was a time, dear internet readers, when I had plenty of loyal and local friends with whom to pursue various harmless activities during my junior high and high school days. However, I was slowly alienated from them as they took up a preoccupation with the effects of various substances, and I took up a preoccupation with the world outside of this valley in which we lived. I saw these people again, this past summer, at the wedding of one of our mutual friends, but it was clear that even six years later, we all maintained our own respective priorities. One had joined a pyramid marketing cult. An ex-girlfriend was drunk by the time she arrived at the afterparty, which means that there's a very good possibility that she was sloshed during the wedding ceremony itself. I had a gin and tonic and slunk quietly away, so that the highly contagious syndrome of 'Chronic Going Freaking Nowhere', of CGFN, didn't infect me. In college, I made a few really good friends whom I'd play Heroclix and Dungeons and Dragons and Soul Calibur with, but those five years are gone, and friends disperse, and I'm not very good at making new friends from this strange point of isolation. There aren't many people around who can tell me the origin of Bizarro, and my level of respect just drops to a point of no return from there.

So, here I am to give you a unique perspective on solo gaming, and the fun that one can have WITHOUT having to deal with living people. I call it, unrepentantly, 'Playin' With Myself'.

First, let's look at Trillon, the game with a purported trillion ways to play. The premise of this game is that between a collection of 100 identical blocks with a different color on each face, a handful of tokens and some dice, you can pretty much do anything. While flinging these sharp-edged little missiles at your nearest and dearest friends' eyes is not out of the question, Gamepeace does not promote such actions, as they stress non-violence in their play. In such a game, though, I'd suppose that the remaining un-blinded player would truly be the winner, and any videotapes of said event sent to ANR headquarters would make me a winner too, and let me tell you, I'm tired of being a loser. Make me proud, folks!

Sure, you say, colored blocks. Big deal, you say. Space travel? Been there. Cure for hydrocephaly? As if.

Trillon is one of those games that returns to the origins of gaming, long before the mystic forces of the pop-o-matic bubble controlled our every movement. Before we had to not pass 'Go' and not collect 500 dollars. Prior to breaking the cookie jar, necessitating a repentant ride down a long slide and subsequent climb back up many ladders of goodwill, and prior to our dreaded encounters with the dreaded Count Licorice (who has since been elevated to 'Lord Licorice', and if you don't believe he, go ask Hasbro, and while you're there, ask why Queen Frostine was demoted to Princess Frostine). Nay, Trillon nostalgically recalls those days when gaming consisted of rolling warthog bones across a stained cave floor. Simplicity, pure and clear, and with these basic and suitably ambiguous components, and an accompanying rulebook (or good, old-fashioned Neanderthal ingenuity), the possibility expand in all kinds of clever directions.

Of course, my initial inclination, when seeing a collection of colored cubes which are highly adjustable within their sturdy plastic frame, is to... well, do this, because my cold, pixellated video game heart told me to :

So, within this grid of over one trillion possible arrangements of six colors (which does not count the nearly infinite arrangements when one decides to leave out cubes or stack them vertically), there are many games to be played. One of the simpler variations involves rolling a numbered die alongside a colored die and locating a matching color x spaces away to move your game piece to, and continuing to do this until one reaches the opposite side of the board, or until one makes a circuit around the board (leaving the center squares empty, making a kind of loop). Expand upon this and you can use the 14 brown and ivory tokens included, playing a game more similar to checkers. Throw in a pit of death at the center of the board, virtual rivers of lava, capturing your opponent's pieces, and the prohibition of certain movements, and this becomes a game of deeper skill, and not just the luck that the dice may give you.

A more detailed instruction book, which is sold separately, includes a plethora of further board configurations and game possibilities in addition to the two games presented with the game set itself, which all ultimately involve matching a piece with a color and traipsing around an infinitely customizable board. Use your own pieces. Use these pieces in other games. Create art. Here's my master plan, though : use one of these cubes as a Cosmic Cube in a game of Heroclix, and I've got a whole scenario laid out here for you.

For this scenario, you'll need one Trillon cube, 2 die, and the 6-color die from the Trillon board game, in addition to the usual game supplies. The scenario can be played with any build point total you'd like. Treat the Cosmic Cube scenario as a battlefield condition.

For those of you who don't know, Cosmic Cubes have been messing up the Marvel Universe for decades now. These Cubes are boxes filled with the latent energy of a parallel universe, much like Jolly Ranchers, summoned to this dimension by thought. This energy grants the wielder of the cube nigh-omnipotence. Interaction with these Cubes and their energies turned lab assistant Owen Reese into the ridiculously powerful Molecule Man, and drove MODOC (Mental Organism Designed Only for Calculating) crazy, turning him into MODOK (Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing), and if I'm not mistaken, one evolved into The Beyonder and caused the Secret Wars, among other murky things which caused Marvel continuity to fold in on itself. These Cosmic Cubes, however, also begin to gain a sentience and free will after a while. This is where we find our Cosmic Cube scenario.

The Cosmic Cube, which has just discovered the bare edges of independent thought, is wandering curiously through a populated area. The streets have been evacuated, but two teams arrive on the scene to survey the chaos. Each team thinking that the other is controlling the cube, they clash and attempt to wrest control of the Cube from each other, for purposes of good or evil, depending on your assembled team. The Cube, however, has other ideas.

The Cosmic Cube, represented by the large Trillon cube, moves randomly around the board, as determined by die rolls, while the two teams duke it out. The last team standing through the effects of the cube and the effects of battle is the victor.

Before beginning play, determine which direction on the map (preferably outdoors) is North. At the beginning of each round, roll a six-sided die to determine direction of movement for the Cube, which receives both a movement and an action at the start of each round. Follow the following chart to determine direction of movement.

Roll of 1	Cube moves North
Roll of 2	Cube moves East
Roll of 3	Cube moves South
Roll of 4	Cube moves West
Roll of 5	Cube does not move.
Roll of 6	Cube does not move and takes no action.

To determine movement, if any, roll 2 six sided die and the colored die. The Cube then moves the total distance of the two dice, multiplied by each other, in the determined direction. The Cube ignores spatial limitations, so if the movement would place the cube off of the playmat, continue the Cube's movement on the opposite side of the playmat.

No figures can land on the Cube, but if the Cube lands on a figure, said figure possesses the Cube for that turn only and no friendly figures (including the figure itself) will be harmed by the effects of the Cube. The possessor of the Cube does not take any damage while possessing the Cube. The possessor of the Cube cannot attack or be attacked during this turn, but gets one free movement action to be taken at the beginning of that player's turn, during which the figure may move up to its speed value, taking the cube with him. At the conclusion of this movement, the pre-determined effect of the Cube takes place, with the possessor having the fore-knowledge of what effect the Cube is about to have, and allowing the possessor to move into an advantageous position with the Cube. At the start of the next round, the Cube cannot be controlled again and moves as normal. If the Cube does not land on any figures, skip to the following chart. Turn the cube to the face matching the colored die. The following colors have the following effects :

RED	Cube does 2 damage to everything within 3 squares of itself, ignoring Stealth and terrain. This damage cannot be reduced.
BLUE	Cube fires 20 squares North, doing 5 clicks of damage to any figures which fall into this range. Ignore Stealth and blocking terrain.
GREEN	Cube fires 20 squares East, doing 5 clicks of damage to any figures which fall into this range. Ignore Stealth and blocking terrain.
YELLOW	Cube fires 20 squares South, doing 5 clicks of damage to any figures which fall into this range. Ignore Stealth and blocking terrain.
BLACK	Cube fires 20 squares West, doing 5 clicks of damage to any figures which fall into this range. Ignore Stealth and terrain.
PURPLE	Cube fires on 4 diagonals with a range of 20. All affected figures have no superpowers for that round only.

The last team standing realizes that the cube was not, in fact, being controlled by the opposing team and can now take appropriate action to quell the sweet baby Cube.

While not an application directly working with the Trillon board, this is the kind of inspiration and creativity that Trillon promotes, and I don't doubt that the game's creators would advocate such a use of their basic ideas of color and form into any other fun application. This is not a game meant for gamers of the war gaming variety, but more of the Backgammon / Go / glass of chardonnay by a warm fire in a velvet robe crowd. Me, I'm more of the root beer from the can, Batman shirt that has mouse holes in it, warm glow of the computer type, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

I anticipate playing this with my niece, who has her colors and numbers down pretty solid, as a kind of math and learning tool, but the applications span far beyond that, and like the above, you're invited to explore them, with Gamepeace granting a great deal of seed ideas.

So, we've played with form and mathematics, but let's switch it over to the other half of the brain. The half filled with words and those Alphabits that you snorted on a dare that time, but was it worth having the word 'JEDI' show up on your CAT scans? Indeed, you'd be a winner two times over.

I've got a thing for anagrams. Always have. I find myself looking at odd phrases and words and rearranging them into better words. I couldn't pass by the fire doors at school, loudly described as 'FIRE DOOR' in big red letters on each, without thinking 'RIFE ODOR!'. My ex girlfriend's instant message name was an unfortunate anagram for 'ANAL INVADE', which I reminded her of as often as politeness would allow. And I have a wild, bemused fondness for what is possibly one of the best conceived anagrams of all time, as derived from Hamlet's soliloquy:

"To be or not to be: that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." = 'In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.'

While I lack the capacity to turn such complex anagrams without the use of 35 slide rules and a bag of pretzels at my disposal, I still enjoy them. We're still not talking grade school 'god / dog' anadrome word reversal stuff here. That junk's for morons. It takes a word of at least six letter to get me off, and it's always amused me, in some horribly geeky way, that my tiny, obscure town of 'Putnam' is an anagram for 'unmap't'.

So, we come to Anagramania! from Karmel Games, like a Trivial Pursuit for people who are something more than dry receptacles for tired factoids. Amagramania comes with a timer, a 30-sided die covered with letters, a board, pencils, tokens to move around the board and a whole bunch of anagram clues with an answer booklet. The rules come with two variations - one version for players of equal wit, and one version to balance out the playing field for those groups which might include a lexical demigod such as myself.

In the 'everyone is ostensibly equal' version, players move around the circular board according to colored paths, solving anagrams in unison as they're exposed from behind a screen. Each player has their own identical set of anagram clues, which must be pulled out from behind the player's screen honestly and precisely, in order to avoid previewing the next clue and getting an unfair advantage. While this mechanic seems a bit shady and ridiculously easy to subvert towards an ill-gotten victory, all you can do is trust the shifty players around you. Also, this won't work with x-ray vision. The first player to the center wins.

These clues, samples of which are available on the company's website, come in the form of sentences. A word or two within the sentence is italicized, and these are the letters which must be rearranged. The rest of the sentence gives some implication towards the meaning of the secret word. Simple, right? Here, I'm gonna make one up. Just for you.

'Even the Man of Steel couldn't stomach the prunes ma gave us.' The answer will follow the article. I admit that I used some digital help with that one, for the sake of writing this article in a relatively timely manner, and I found it HERE. Hours of fun.

In the 'can I have your babies, you maverick genius?' version, we get a game much more akin to Trivial Pursuit, except instead of earning wedges, one earns letters by rolling the d30. You can earn up to six letters, and if at any time between your third and sixth letter you can make a word using every letter earned so far, you can proceed to victory. Otherwise, it's an endless traipse around an infinite loop. A large share of wild card spaces on the die don't make this impossible, but it does provide a necessary impediment to the uberbrains by throwing in that dastardly element of 'luck', and it's a well known fact that geeks don't oft have any interpersonal relations with Lady Luck, or any lady whom isn't a jpeg, really. Something about the spheres of magic and science being completely repelled from each other. I'm sure there's a formula for it, or an incantation which must be chanted to the north wind while naked and burning sage. A few sample sets of rolls with the d30, a geekworthy implement unto itself, have earned me a large share of triple-letter words, a six letter word, and even a triple-wild word, which can be translated into one thing and one thing only : ASS.

One might think that Anagramania has a short shelf life. Once you run out of clues, the game has exhausted its resources. This, my friends, is why Karmel Games is creating and publishing expansion packs of clues in three difficulty levels. We have the intermediate set, and while some of the clues are total stumpers, a good portion of them I've been able to just rearrange without even really thinking about it. I'd like to expand into the advanced pack of clues, but not only are they challenging on an anagram level, the words they rearrange are pretty fancy, so one must have a large vocabulary as well as an inflated IQ. And I'll still kick your butts.

And the answer is 'superman'.

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