I’m an excitable fellow. It’s both a fault and an self-diagnosed admirable quality: my personality is a friendly magnet at parties, but in a more somber setting, it’s a reminder that loud isn’t allowed. I just can’t help it, nor do I want to. It’s not like I actively raise my blood pressure, take a sharp breath in and resist the urge to blink when I watch a trailer for Jurassic World. I don’t do it to annoy others, but if I manage to rile them up (and I often do), I can’t be held accountable for my actions. READ MORE
It’s E3 time, and we’re reviving the Speculator for a special prediction competition! The Snackbar staff weighs in on the Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo events at this year’s E3. Who will win? As a handy guide, we’ve marked our highest and lowest responses. Optimistic? Check out the bolded response. (Pessimists can direct their eyes to the italics.) READ MORE
For a guy who devotes as much energy as I do toward the pursuit of leisure, I am terrible at discovering new sources of entertainment. I can still remember the first time one of my junior school buddies showed me professional wrestling. Sure, I’d heard about it, but even when I watched The Rock run in on a Stone Cold match and listened to my friend freak out, I still didn’t get it. It obviously wasn’t real. It was a bunch of half-naked dudes punching each other. What was so great about that? As it turns out, everything. I don’t know when, if ever, wrestling and I would have crossed paths had it not been for my quick initiation in my parents’ basement on a barely-color TV. READ MORE
With a few years under their belt, the latest generation of hardware is starting to show what it’s truly capable of accommodating in terms of same-room multiplayer. So here’s the best of that! We’re starting with the PlayStation 4 and covering the Xbox One soon, and it deserves top billing due to its efforts in the local multiplayer space.
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There are a lot of worker-placement games on the shelves these days. Each one brings its own special spin on the core mechanic, but for the most part, every action taken by one player results in one fewer choice for those who follow. Competition for desired actions and a limited number of workers each round forces players to prioritize, and a backup plan or three never hurts.
Coal Baron, a 2013 design by Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kelsing, takes a different approach. Instead of only a handful of workers, each player has over a dozen, with the specific amount depending on the actual number of players (up to four). If a player wants to use an action previously taken by another player — or even themselves — all they have to do is assign one additional worker to that action. This adds a new level of strategy, as you must balance the actions you want to take against how many workers you are willing to spend to take them. READ MORE
