A blog by Adam W. Christman

Category: Game Review

  • Game Review: That Dragon, Cancer

    It has been a very long time since I reviewed a game on here, and I can’t think of a better way than to do it with this one.

    On December 12th of 2014, video game developer, husband, and father Ryan Green – along with his wife and co-developers – raised over $100,000 to pay for the development of their game That Dragon, Cancer.* Nine months earlier, the Greens lost their 5-year-old son, Joel, to brain cancer. The game was initially intended as an experience of their struggles and triumph over the cancer. It ended up “a journey of hope in the shadow of death.”

    The word “game” does not adequately communicate to you exactly what That Dragon, Cancer is. This is a game that illustrates the power and potential of video games as a medium for (inter)active experiences that cannot come through any other art form. Joel’s cries in the middle of the night as you try to comfort him, the prayers of the Greens and their friends, and the moments of joy interrupted by piercing grief are only three means by which That Dragon, Cancer takes you by the hand and leads you through the Greens’ experiences. No book, movie, song, or painting can involve you like this “video game” does.

    The abstract art style matches the dream-like quality of the environments and some of the gameplay. In the gameplay, the characters are all faceless. True, some have glasses, and Ryan Green has a beard, but that’s it. The style is minimal, and I think it was a perfect choice for what they made. You can see your own child, or your own loved one struggling with cancer, in Joel’s face. You can see your own face in the avatars of Joel’s parents as they wrestle with what they think about God, faith, hope, and love in their conversations, voicemails, and diary entries.

    Ryan and Amy Green are Christians, and so they faced Joel’s battle with cancer with a worldview that accounts for the potential of God’s intervention in time and space. They took care of Joel as best they could, but also prayed for his healing. In the midst of all this struggle over Joel’s life, we are also let in on their personal struggles with faith, hope, and love. Thanks to the Kickstarter they ran, you can find messages and artwork from many Kickstarter backers in the game, as well. These are messages of hope and loss, grief and joy from many others who have loved ones who are either currently battling cancer or who have lost those loved ones. All these stories you encounter are raw. Including so many of them gives this game scope that it would have lacked without them. You get to see Joel’s battle with cancer as a part of the larger fight against cancer in the lives of many, many people. Too many. So your own story of cancer is also placed in its context among all these others.

    When you experience cancer – either in yourself or in a loved one – how do you tell people about that? How do you tell the community you’ve arranged around yourself, “Hey, this is what’s going on right next to you. This is what’s happening to me”? How do you tell them, “My 1-year-old son Joel was diagnosed with cancer and died at age 5?” How do you tell them, “My father, a teetotaler, died at 31 years old of liver cancer when I was 3 weeks old?” You share the facts. The dates. You try to communicate what the impact is like. And how do you memorialize that person? We pay for a nice gravestone. We write a short obituary. We weep again, alone, so nobody has to see it yet another time.

    I don’t know how to recommend this to you. It is excellent in achieving the goal the Greens set out to accomplish. But is it a game to fill hours with blasting newbs or hopping around goofy worlds with the Super Mario Bros.? No. It’s a game where that dragon, cancer, roars down your throat, full of menace. And for a brief moment, through the experience of the Greens, you roar back.

    *That Dragon, Cancer is available on Steam, OUYA, and through their website thatdragoncancer.com.

  • Forbidden Island and Cooperative Gaming

    Last time I wrote a game review, I told you about Carcassonne, a competitive game that keeps everyone in the game until the very end (unlike Monopoly).

    This week, I’m going to describe a very different game. “Forbidden Island” is a cooperative game for 2-4 players and takes about 30 minutes to play. If you enjoy board games and Indiana Jones movies (though we must not speak of any Crystal Skulls…), you will like this game. In a nutshell, Forbidden Island is a game where a group of adventurers have come to the island to recover four elemental artifacts (they BELONG in a MUSEUM!), but the long-gone inhabitants booby-trapped the island: the whole island begins sinking!

    The only way to win the game is if everyone works together to recover all four artifacts and escape before the sea claims them. But there are PLENTY of ways to lose. In Forbidden Island, you don’t play against each other, you play against the game, which makes for a great experience and makes both victory and defeat so sweet! I think I’ve won the game as many times as I’ve lost. If you get better at it than my group, you can increase the difficulty of the game by increasing the rate of the island’s flood.

    You’ll enjoy the quality artwork on all the cards and island tokens, as well as the production value of the whole package (it comes in a tin box, and all the pieces are high quality). I plan to introduce my kids to Forbidden Island around age 7 or 8. It encourages group problem solving, cooperation, and critical thinking.

    Forbidden Island
    Forbidden Island

    Interested in a game designed by the same person, but harder and with higher stakes? Take a look at Pandemic. This game takes about 45 minutes, rather than 30, but it is another cooperative game. This time, you are a team from the Centers for Disease Control trying to save the world from a global pandemic consisting of four diseases (or more, if you get the expansion!). This game is MUCH more difficult, and I think I’ve won about 2 times out of every time I’ve tried it. But the game is just that much fun. I’m not mad that I’ve lost. I’m resolved to try again! I highly recommend it.

    Pandemic
    Pandemic

  • Game Review – Carcassonne

    This week I’m going to talk to you about gaming.

    One game in particular, actually.

    This game is my wife’s favorite board game, and it is one of mine, too. This game? It’s Carcassonne.

    Originally published in the year 2000, it is still a regular sight on the shelf in your Friendly Local Game Store. It plays with 2 to 5 people and games usually run about 45 minutes.

    The basic idea for the game is that you and the other players are building up towns, roads, monasteries, and farmlands in the medieval French countryside. Each of you is vying for power by building the biggest towns, the longest roads, complete monasteries, and the most bountiful farmlands. It may sound complicated, but the game is actually quite simple.

    Here is the thing about Carcassonne – it is a board game where you build the board as you play. Each turn, you pull a random tile and have to place it strategically to get yourself the most points. Do you start a new city or build on one you’ve already started? Do you leave your neighbor’s city alone, or do you try to sneak in and share the points? Or, worse, do you try to take over the city? Or – most vexing for my wife – do you make the surrounding area so unusable that the player can’t even finish her city?

    You only have so many ‘followers’ to use at any one time, so you can’t claim a new road, city, farm, or monastery every turn. Do you wait on that farmland? What if somebody snatches it up before you come back to it?

    Maybe my favorite element of the game is the scoring. As you go through the game, it may look like there is a clear winner. The end of the game, however, triggers the final scoring that adds up everything that is unfinished (cities, roads, monasteries), and it finally scores the farmlands. It is at this moment in the game where I watched somebody in last place jump to first place and win the game. It isn’t like Monopoly where you go bankrupt and go watch TV while your friends finish the game.

    Everyone is in the game until the very end.

    If you’re curious, there are dozens of versions and expansions that give different kinds of gameplay. The base game is at rank 13 on BoardGameGeek.com’s Family Game Rank, if that tells you how fun this is. If you live in Marin County, you can easily get it through my favorite game store I’ve ever visited, Gamescape North, located on 4th St. (between B St. and C St.) in San Rafael. (No, I was not paid to include that in this post. I really do like that store that much.)

    Have any of you played Carcassonne or something similar? What are your favorite board games?