Micro Mutants Evolution Review

A new dexterity based board game that I got to try out was Micro Mutants: Evolution.

In Micro Mutants, each player takes on the role of a different type of microscopic race of bugs that is trying to take over the world (and for now must defeat the other races). Each turn, you roll two dice which determine what types of units you can move. From here, you take the "shooter" (a small rectangular plastic piece) and use it to "shoot" one of your pieces that corresponds to each unit type rolled. This is done by pushing the shooter down on the edge of one of your bugs (which is also made of plastic), which causes the unit to jump across the table. If your unit lands out of play, you place him back in his original position and his movement is forfeit. If, however, you are able to land on top of one of your opponent's units (or bases), then you are able to destroy it (it actually takes two hits to destroy a base). Once a player has destroyed two of his opponent's bases (or all but two of his bugs), he has won the game.

Before getting into pros and cons, I must confess - this is not my normal style of game. I truly enjoy the strategy aspect of board games, and this doesn't really fit into that mold. With that said, I will try to be fair to the game and base the pros, cons and, ultimately, the score on what I feel the game was designed to be, instead of comparing it to something like Puerto Rico and saying "oh, the game wasn't strategic enough."

The first pro that I found in Micro Mutants was that the four races were actually different and well conceived. Depending on which race you played, you will have a different breakdown of pieces at your disposal and they will also have different abilities. This even reaches out to the race's powers - if you are the flyborgs, you will have different abilities that you can unlock than the usarthropods. It is nice to see that the game designers didn't stop themselves at creating simply a mechanic, but also developed the races so that each could stand on it's own.

The next thing that I liked about Micro Mutants is it was enjoyably light-hearted. (And to be fair, if you take the game seriously, you will probably not enjoy it.)  After several hours of playing more strategic games (and it being 2 AM), we decided to try this one out as a final wrap up game before giving up for the night. With this in mind, we thoroughly enjoyed the social aspect that is possible in the game. (By this, I mean we trashed talked each other about something as trivial as which of us would wind up shooting their bugs more effectively. And just to put it on the record - I turned out to be better at it.)

My main con for the game is that I wasn't a big fan of moving the pieces using the shooter and the fine tuned aiming that was required. Again, I am not a huge dexterity game fan in the first place, but I believe that there is a role for them in the gaming community. Personally, I enjoy playing Clout Fantasy, but the way Micro Mutants played, it seemed to force players to be much better at the dexterity portion of the game than Clout. Personally, I prefer to have a little more leniency in how close I am to the pieces that I am trying to destroy, and a little more importance placed on who I try to attack and when.  In Micro Mutants, the winner is almost 100% based on which player is better at shooting their pieces, and not based on which player was more strategic about their movements.  (Yes, yes, I said I wasn't going to whine about the game not having enough strategy, but I did anyway.  Oh well.)  To me, if I am going to play something that is simply a dexterity game, that is what sports, washers, bean bag toss, etc, etc, are for.

Overall, I give Micro Mutants Evolution a 7.0/10. I think it was a fun little lighthearted game, but definitely won't be a game for everyone. If you enjoy the mechanic of jumping pieces with the "shooter", then this game will provide you with tons of (microscopic) fun. If that doesn't sound like something that is perfect for you, you'd probably be better off staying away.

Wings of War (Dawn of War) Review

For today's review, I will be talking about Wings of War. The version I played was Dawn of War, but I believe that the review should be appropriate for the whole system. As a note before getting started I should mention a couple things about the picture 1) Wings of War did not make an exciting picture and 2) I never claimed to be a good photographer... sorry about that. (Of course, I never claimed to be a good writer, either...)

In Wings of War, each player controls several airplanes and attempts to maneuver them in order to be able to shoot down the other player's planes in a dogfight (or potentially trying to bomb things depending on the scenario). In order to move the planes, the players select both a maneuver card to execute and a speed at which to execute it; the interesting thing is that the players must decide on the next move that will be executed before the previous move actually occurs (essentially, you're always thinking two steps ahead). After this, the front movement card is played and the movements occur. From here, each player determines if his planes are in range and have a clear shot at any of the opposing planes - if so, the opposing planes take damage related to the distance between the two planes and the type of plane that is firing. Turns continue like this until one player has successfully shot down all of the opposing aircraft.

The first pro of Wings of War is how the movement system works. Each of your movement cards has a line and one (or two) different colored arrows on it. When moving, you align the movement card with the front of your plane and then you lift your plane and align the arrow on the plane with the correct arrow on the movement card (based on how fast you were going). This is a really neat system and works pretty well in execution. The only down-side that I found to it was that, since the game was new and the cards were slick, the planes would slide and thus wouldn't be in the exact position that they were supposed to be.

The next pro is the historical nature of the games. Each of the games in the series is based on actual fighters from World War I and World War II (depending on which game you have). I'm definitely not an expert in history, but I enjoyed getting to look at the different planes from these eras and I also enjoyed that, depending on which plane was used, the planes had different movement cards (in order to more historically depict the actual movement of those planes).

To go along with the historical nature of the game, the last pro was the number of scenarios that were available. Between bombing runs and different kinds of dogfights, I think that the people who enjoy this game will be able to have a large amount of replayability because of the scenarios that are included.

However, there was one serious con to me about Wings of War. This con was that we wound up circling each others' planes much more than actually shooting at each other. There are several reasons for this; obviously one reason is that we weren't good at the game - I'm sure if we played it more we would get better at maneuvering our aircraft. The next problem is related to the historical realism in the game; airplanes (unfortunately) can't make turn at a right angle. This means that you have two options to turn around: play a sharp turn for about 5 turns in a row, or play an Immelmann turn (where you flip your plane around 180 degrees). Either way, if you miss your shot at your opponent, you will probably spend the next several turns getting yourself back into position. Whereas some people may find this enjoyable, I was not one of them.

The more I think about the cons of this game, the more focused I become on the one above (the only others I can think of are that 1) the cards get bumped as mentioned above and 2) sometimes it is hard to remember which movement cards go with which plane). There were no real significant flaws to the game other than this. If you enjoy strategically positioning yourself and attempting to outwit your opponents maneuvers, and are willing to have large amounts of time where you are flying past each other, than this con should even be ignored. However, whereas I really enjoyed the game when we started, by the end of the fight I was fairly bored since we spent a significantly larger portion of our time trying to reposition ourselves so that our planes were near each other than we did actually get shots fired. (And most of our shots were directly facing each other as neither of us was very successful at getting a shot in from the side or behind the other person's plane.)

Overall, I give Wings of War a 6.5/10. I feel somewhat bad about giving it such a low score when I can really only name one con, but the con was essentially the crux of the game.  As a final note, I would like to re-point out that this is what I thought of the game; with the giant bias that the primary concept of the game (positioning your plane to get a good shot off) didn't hold my interest.