Terra Mystica

Hello peoples. Today I'm writing about Terra Mystica. Here it goes.

Yesterday two of my dads friends came over and we played Terra Mystica. Terra Mystica is a terraforming game played on a board similar to Catan's hexes. There are seven different terrain types and eight different races. There are also rivers that separate the land. The main goal in Terra Mystica is to terraform more land and expand your kingdom. For instance I was the chaos magicians who can only build on wasteland tiles. So the best place for me to build is the wasteland and then I only have to terraform mountains or desert once to make it a wasteland which is the easiest. Other types like the marshlands I would have to terraform it three times to make it a wasteland. So there are different bonuses for making different buildings such as dwellings, trading houses, temples, sanctuary, and stronghold. You get favor tokens from temples and a sanctuary which help you collect workers, gold, or power at the beginning of a round or move you up in the elemental cult tracks. You can use shipping to build across rivers but your buildings don't connect unless you have a bridge over the river. You can make towns and cities out of multiple terrain hexes to gain bonuses. You can use power to buy bonus deals at the bottom of the game board which often offer more for what you have then what your character board offers. Each players character bard has their own special ability to it and hexes they can build on. Tiles at the side of the board offer rewards at the end of a round for doing certain things. You can use priests to move your token up in the cult tracks of fire, water, earth, and air and get victory points at the end of the game for being first, second, or third in the tracks. A lot of these things you do in the game gives you victory points which moves your token around the boards edge and whoever has the most at the end of the game wins. It was my first time playing Terra Mystica so I lost pretty badly and my dad won.









It's a pretty complicated game but I think I would do better next time and I like the game. Bye.


-Bye Ashton

The Belgariad

Some pictures I took on my way to the bus stop each morning.












Hello peoples. Today I'm writing about a fantasy series. Here it goes.

When I was around 9 my mom sat a box of books down on the table. There was a series of five books there called The Belgariad by David Eddings and the prequel, Belgarath The Sorcerer. I remember reading them non-stop and being so absorbed into it I didn't even realize how much I was loving this series till around the third book. It's a pretty generic fantasy series but it was the very first fantasy books I had ever read. Recently I have been reading them again and laughing at how I had interpreted some parts of the book then and how I interpret them now.

You know you can read a best selling book an you always have the perfect image of what a character looks like even though that image may only lossy fit the books description of him or her and then you see the movie and you're like "No, no, no THEY GOT HIM ALL WRONG." Well for me I imagined these characters as a kid so often I got the description of how they look all wrong and didn't understand it so it's interesting to read it now and imagine what they might look like more closely even though those characters are deeply rooted enough so that they will always look like how imagined them as a kid.

I also enjoy reading them so much because I've always remembered most of the premise but it's nice read it with the nostalgia and go "Oh yeah there's Mandorallen and that's Anheg!" Also probably because of the nolstagia most of the jokes in the book I seem to find very funny and often I'm grinning ear to ear when reading it. I've also found out about the sequel series The Mallorean, the other prequel Polgara The Sorceress and the Rivan Codex which I have yet to read but very excited about.

Bye peoples.

By Ashton

Battle of Wesnoth

Hello people's. Today I am reviewing another iOS game. Here it goes.

When I was around six I had a Gameboy and a game for it called Fire Emblem: the sacred stones. Fire emblem is a turn based RPG with good units and bad units placed on a grid. You had archers and mages and knights and it was an awesome game. It was probably the first game I had ever successfully completed. A few years later I played Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn for the Wii and I loved it as well. I've looked for Fire Emblem on iOS or games like it but I haven't found one until now.

The game is called Battle for Wesnoth. It's graphics are drawn in the same style as FE: sacred stones and I like how it looks a lot. It's played on a hexagon grid instead of squares like FE. So there are 16 different campaigns, or story lines, that you can play in any order and around 25 scenarios, or levels per storyline. In FE you are given more and more units as the game progresses that are all unique with how they look even if they are the same class and have their own names and role in the story.

In Wesnoth you are given a few characters that are unique and a leader. The leader can stand on a specific hexagon in a fort or castle and it can recruit individual units like horsemen, infantry, ect. These units have different names and different stats, level up separately and rank up classes separately. Otherwise the units look exactly the same. Most of the time you unlock new units to recruit as the campaign progresses and you can also recall units from previous scenarios and that is towards your advantage because they keep all their levels and experience and it costs less gold to recall then it does to recruit.

On the map are houses which are called villages. If any of your units move onto it they often get a defense bonus and heal 8 each turn while they are on it. The village becomes "captured" and gives you more gold each turn to recruit or recall. Your enemies can also capture villages for gold. Most of the time the goal in each scenario is to defeat a boss or capture a hexagon before you run out of turns.

They are also different melee classes and magic classes that have advantages and disadvantages over each other just like fire emblem. Different terrain hexes offer defense bonuses to different units, for instance an elf has better defense in a forest and a robber has a better defense in the mountains. There is also a day and night cycle alternating between day, sunset, night, and sunrise. "Lawful" units have better stats at day and chaotic units have better stats at night. Units like elves are neutral therefore not affected.

Wesnoth also offers multiplayer where you can play with someone else on the same device or a network where you can play with each other on unique maps and scenarios across different maps.

Battle of Wesnoth is a great game especially if you like Fire Emblem. Bye.


-By Ashton

Duet and Out There

Hello peoples. Today I'm writing about 2 iOS games. Here it goes.

The first game is called Duet. Duet is a fast paced puzzle game. You control two orbs, one blue and one red, and they are both at the bottom of the screen on opposite ends of a ring. Tapping one side of the screen moved the circle one way and the other side moves the circle the other way. The ring heads continuously forward up the level with white shapes as obstacles. These shapes can move, spin, and more. Your goal is to spin the ring to prevent the orbs from touching the obstacles if you do hit one with any one orb then you die and restart at the beginning of the level. Duet contains 51 unique levels and an endless mode. Duet is a gray puzzle game, it sucks you into each and every level, and is impossible to give up until you've beaten it. It is one of my all time favorite games for iOS

The second game is called Out There. Out There is a adventure game about space exploration. The games premise is the future where a man is in cryonics (suspended animation) on his way to a colony on Jupiter and wakes up in an alien space station some where out there in space. An alien being he cannot see gives him the technology to jump from planet to planet and the technology to "fold space" letting him transverse quickly from star to star. The alien points out a star far from your current location like he wants you to go there. In your adventures in Out There you have to gather resources to repair your ships hull, refuel, and fuel your oxygen supply. You can also meet and talk to aliens, learn new languages, discover new technologies to upgrade your ship, and even take over and pilot other abandoned ships. Out there is a great game for all sci-fi fans and one of my favorite games as well.

Bye peoples.


-Ashton

Terraria

Hello people's. Today I'm talking about another game. Here it goes!

The game I'm reviewing is called Terraria. Terraria is a sandbox game for PC, Plastation network, Xbox, and mobile devices. I have played it on Playstaion and my iPhone. Currently the version of the game with the most content is for PC and that's the version I recommend. The game is similar to a pixelated 2D version of Minecraft and some people accuse it of stealing from it but it is an amazing game and while it has some aspects of MC it doesn't copy it.

You start the game creating your character with the option to be male or female, hair style, hair color, eye color, skin color, and clothing color. Once a world is started the player spawns in a forest biome with a copper pickaxe, axe, and sword. Your first priority should be to cut down some trees with your axe and clear a small area on the ground to build your house. You can go ahead and make the walls and ceiling with the wood. (A ceiling is important because there are flying enemies at night.) Inside the shelter you should go into your inventory and craft a workbench. Whenever you are near a crafting station like a workbench you can craft a much wider variety of items in your crafting inventory. You should go ahead and craft a door or two for your house allowing for easy access. The space for the door has to be three blocks high, the same height as your character.

One of the most essential things in Terraria is a mine. You can start mining in a cave if there is a sizable one close by, but eventually you're gonna need to start mining straight downwards. Simply use your pickaxe to mine straight down 2 blocks wide. Collect any ore that you see on the screen by tunneling sideways and fully explore any caves that you stumble on to. During this process you can explore the biomes above ground, build houses for the other helpful NPCs, (non playable characters), you find on your travels, crawl through dungeons, and summon and fight other bosses. Continue digging downwards, mining and upgrading your tools and armor with the ores you've collected to get to the lowest underground layer, the underworld. This area is necessary to fight the hardest boss yet and if you beat him you get to move to the second half of the game HARDMODE. DUH DUH DUHHHHH.

HARDMODE is generally just a world filled with a few more, harder, bosses, new ores to mine, and harder enemies. There is also a more disturbing aspect to HARDMODE... If you've thoroughly explored you would've found the corruption biome and you know how nasty it is. If you haven't it's filled with really nasty flying beasties and a sickly purple environment. Well now this biome is going to start taking over and consuming the other biomes. HARDMODE also makes a new biome called the hallow. It's filled with rainbows and Unicorns... Literally but it is still hostile and will also take over other biomes. As far as I know the only way to stop this is to surround the two new biomes with a block that can't be corrupted or hallowed, like wood which is long and time consuming. Hallow can't hallow the corrupt biome and corrupt can't corrupt the hallow biome. If you don't want to work to stop the spread of the biomes then the easier choice is to live in the hallow since it is less dangerous than the corrupt. You can also corrupt the hallow or hallow the corrupt using corrupt or hallowed seeds.

So that's Terraria. It's an amazing game and you should get it for yourself. Bye.


By Ashton