News You Can Bruise for 2004 August 9

Greetings, already havers of the following games. Today we look at computer versions of games usually played on boards. "Board Games", they are called. Man, it's hard to fill up a whole introductory paragraph. Did you ever notice how arbitrary the "board game" term is when games are categorized in a Linux installation? The category includes solitaire Mahjongg, which is not a board game and uses pieces from a board game that has no proper board. It includes Yahtzee, which is put out by a board game company but is played entirely with dice. Yet it does not, and this is the real travesty, it does not include my groundbreaking multiplayer mudfest "Bran's Brother Has Flipped!: The Home Game". Where's the justice? Not in this life, my friends.

That's why I'm imposing a strict rule on this episode of Games You Already Have Roundup. No matter what the menu classification says, if the game does not feature competition, ie. you versus some human or AI opponent, it is not a board game. It will not be featured in this episode, but rather in the next episode, Games You Already Have Roundup III: The Search For Puzzle Games. Hopefully the people who write Debian post-install scripts for these games will take this as the stinging rebuke it undoubtedly is, and will get their act together in time to avert game-categorization catastrophe on a grand scale.

Don't thank me; I'm only doing this so I can put off playing those awful marble games. And now, with further ado, the games.

• KWin4: Give me a break! I thought I could go the rest of my life without having to play Connect Four, but then I got this crazy idea to review all these bundled games. Hm, I never realized how quickly this game degenerates into a holding pattern where you fill up all the useless rows to the top.

  Actual title of this clone: either "Four wins" or "Kwin4", depending on what part of the application you believe. You can play over the network. I hope that was fun for the author to implement. Nice animation, on the opening screen and in the game. It's really well-put-together, but it's Connect Four. What's next? Operation? The goofy game for dopey doctors?

• Four-in-a-row: Argh! OK, this one's actually not a good game. It looks like every other Gnome game with marbles on a grid, but it's got the logic of Connect Four. Again the inconsistent naming: help claims it is called "Gnect". I also can't help noticing that I never win. Is it a solved problem or am I just no good at this game? This version has AI settings, which implies the latter. Winner of of KDE/Gnome Connect Four clone smackdown: damn you, Connect Four! The only way to win is not to play. I hate to admit that there are degrees of "better" and "worse" here, but the KDE one is a lot better.
• Iagno: Scraping the bottom of the Gnome pun barrello is this Othello clone. I started wanting to eat the pieces; they look like delicious mints. I tried various buttons to see if one was the "eat" button. I searched the settings for an option that would let me eat the pieces. Then I gave up and switched to a slick sun-and-moon graphic set which I think would give the implementation a lot more character if it were used as the default. Two local players or AI.
• KReversi: Graphics not nearly as good as Iagno's can be, and what's more the animation is annoying. In Iagno all the pieces you capture turn over simultaneously. In KReversi they turn over piece by maddening piece (I later found out you can speed up the animation so fast it goes away). However I perservered and by pressing the one Othello hint I've learned since I was 9 and playing a BASIC Othello game ("go for the corners"), I was able to rack up what I think is my first Othello win ever. One player against AI only. Winner of KDE/Gnome Othello clone smackdown: Gnome!
• GNOME Tali: It's Yahtzee, despite the name which tries to connect it to the ancient Roman game of knucklebones. For once, I believe the game conglomorate official history. It's fun. I don't need to defend Yahtzee to you. I like the interface by which the dice you want to re-roll turn into pumpkins when you select them. AI and/or human players. Keep it.
• Ataxx: Uses the same graphics as Iagno. And it's a little like Othello: you're trying to convert your opponent's pieces to your color. But you have a choice: you can clone a piece by 'moving' it to an adjacent square, or you can jump a piece and convert all neighboring enemy pieces. There's a point at which the strategy abruptly switches from always cloning to always jumping, and at that point the game can go on for quite a while. There's nothing wrong with this game, but I think Othello has a better-defined win condition.
• KBackgammon: To review this I thought I would have to relearn how to play backgammon, but it turns out this is not the case. This game is a mostly GUI wrapper around GNU backgammon, which in and of itself is fine. There are also GUI wrappers around eg. GNU chess. But the GUI wrappers to GNU chess don't have a text adventure-esque interface surrounding the chessboard where you interact with the GNU chess engine. You don't have to enter a special command to castle; the chessboard and the pieces and the drag and the drop constitute the whole user interface. Yet tragically this seems not to be the case with KBackgammon--sometimes nothing in the GUI will advance the game and you have to type a command. So even if you know how to play backgammon, I think you will find that KBackgammon is not nearly as usable as it should be. However as I flailed around trying to understand this state of affairs I was treated to comical output like "Only 3 beavers are permitted (see `help set beavers')." Who will deny me additional beavers?!?!

  PS: Why does chess not come with every system? It's the single most popular chess in the world! Could it be because "gchess" and "kchess" are already taken as names?

• Atlantik: I remember the halcyon days of 1998 when Linux was a doomed fad and this program was called "kmonop". Yes, I remember well those halcyon days of 2001, when Linux was just a flash in the pan and this program was renamed to Atlantik under legal pressure. I stood by on the sidelines for years and watched via the project go from its original goal--to be a Monopoly clone for Linux--to being an all-singing, all-dancing all-client-server Monopoly®-like board game framework, allowing you to play any arbitrary game so long as it was homomorphic to Monopoly. Well, I get quite enough of that philosophy in the world of physical games. I managed to avoid Atlantik, to keep it in the realm of free software nostalgia and out of the realm of free software installed on my computer, until this installation with its new version of KDE. Even now I have managed to avoid actually playing it due to the server not working (admittedly, I am not trying very hard to make it work). So you can say this is not a fair review if you want. Maybe if I actually started playing I would find some features to tickle my fancy.

  Looking at the board designer, which does work, I see that your games can differ from Monopoly mainly in the number and names of squares, the cards, the rents charged, and the locations of the special squares. Frankly I expected more from a project that seems to have fallen victim to hacker mania for abstraction; it looks like it just lets you design your own local version of Monopoly. Whereas if I were to design a Monopoly-like game it would have fluctuating rents, mobile properties, and monstrous beasts that roamed the streets destroying houses and hotels on your command. On the other hand, Atlantik is bundled with KDE, and none of my stuff is. So they must be doing something right. PS: Linux is too hard to install! There's no application support! Where's the GUI?

• Kenolaba: Where chess is a battle this is kind of a mob scene, or a really big wrestling match where all the down-home "good" wrestlers take on all the effete, pretty-boy, villanous, or downright foreign "evil" wrestlers at once instead of going at it one-on-one or tag-team. Or maybe a real battle instead of the abstract battle that was planned beforehand. You have to push your opponent's pieces off the board using your own pieces. Really nice click-and-drag interface. I was wondering "What kind of game played on a big hex board could justify its inclusion in kdegames?" But this is a... wait, I just figured it out. This is that game "Abalone". I never checked out that game and now it's been KDEized. Anyway, a good game worth your attention.
• kbattleship: You sunk my kbattleship! OK, I got nothing. This is your basic Battleship game. Has several nice improvements over the overpriced Milton-Bradley version. Apparently you're not allowed to put your ships touching each other (I never knew this), so when you destroy a ship it blocks out all the surrounding squares so you don't waste time on known bad squares. This is pretty good, but I don't think the AI is too smart.