Trivial Matters

Sunday I joined Facebook. Between the new job on campus and the fact that everyone else I seem to run into is on there, I figured it was time to give in.

And I must admit, this is *way* better than MySpace (not that I’m a social network aficionado by any means). The interface is cleaner, better organized, and has much more information avaialble at any given moment.

It isn’t perfect, however. I still find myself stumbling around for a few things, even after three days. The search feature could use some improvement in narrowing down my results, and a quick tutorial wouldn’t have hurt either.

But the crowning achievement has got to be the applications. I’ve heard about people being bombarded with application invites from their friends, but I’ve yet to experience that. So, for me, the application feature is just fine. I started playing Mafia Wars yesterday, and (as some could see from my status messages) I’ve had to pry myself away from it to do homework, sleep, and everything else in life.

Even as I write this, my character, Louie the Cyclops, is rebuilding his energy levels so that I can finish a few more jobs and get to level 8. I like the fact that the money rolls in regardless of whether I’m there or not, but it’d be nice to build energy and stamina just as quickly.

I’d also like to see the fights explained a bit more, especially the Hitlist jobs. I took on several with no idea about what the guy was packing, and lost them all. That being said, for a free game that I can play when I run out of Conceptis puzzles (which is happening faster and faster each week), Mafia Wars is the bomb.

Capice?

After a long day of writing math, and then reading about math, and then writing some more math, I like to unwind with a good number logic puzzle. There’s a UK company, Conceptis (http://www.conceptispuzzles.com), that puts them online for free each week. I started going to their site years ago when I was doing them on paper in Games Magazine.

In that time they’ve more than doubled the number of different puzzles available, and I’m just now exploring the new ones. Specifically, Battleship and Hashi. Battleship is like the board game, except you use number clues to determine how many ship segments are in each row/collumn.

Hashi is a bit more difficult to describe. It is a sheet of arranged numbers, each number being an “island.” The number represents how many other “islands” it connects to by a “bridge.” As you build bridges, you start cutting the islands off from one another because you can’t cross two bridges. However, you can two bridges connect the same islands (though no more than two).

I’ve done all of the Battleships for this week. It took me a few days to work out the strategies for the harder puzzles, but now that I have them down the rest will be easy. Hashi strategy is another matter. It’s going to take me a bit longer to work those hard puzzles (though it still makes my Calculus homework look easy).

So if you’re bored, or just need a distraction. Head over to Conceptis and try some of them out. They also have sudoku and kakuro which you can play online or print out. In fact, most of the games can be played online, and all of them can be printed out for the train, bus, etc.

Here’s another game I recently discovered, Cineplexity. A friend brought it to a BBQ and we spent hours playing as more and more people kept getting added to the game.

The rules are fairly simple. Each person takes a turn as the “Director” and picks two cards from the pile. Each card has a element of a movie (e.g. basic plot, actors, time period, setting, etc.) and everyone else has to think of a movie that fits both cards. The Director either picks the first one shouted out or (in our case) the best answer offered. The person who names the movie gets to keep one of the cards as a point, and the other is added back into the deck.

In about 3-4 hours of playing, we only came upon one combination that seemed impossible. The cards were for a time period of the 1800s and a prop of either an escalator or elevator. (If anyone can name a movie that fits that, I’d love to hear it.) As the game progressed, we started weeding out the more obscure cards into each others’ points pile, which allowed the game to continue far longer than I think was planned.

I should also add that no movie can be used more than once. We made a side game of listing movies and trying to find a combination that they would fit.

I’d recommend this for anyone who (like me) visits IMDB on a regular basis.

I picked this up a few weeks ago. They changed it up a bit and added an “easy, medium, hard” feature where each card has a single category and questions of varying degrees of difficulty. The question you get is based on the dice roll, and answering correctly moves a second game piece around the edge of the board. Certain spots on this outer ring give you added bonuses like being able to move other players’ tokens, getting only easy questions, and being able to steal away pie pieces by answering first.

My friends and I tried it out one night, and while it did make the game more interesting, there is too great of a possibility of stealing away the game. I managed to get mostly easy questions and had all of my pieces before one player had answered a single question correctly (she was getting all hard questions) and then she kept getting her pie pieces stolen because the other two had made it into that part of the outer ring.

Overall, it’s a fun game to play with people you know, but I wouldn’t bring it to a games night with strangers. I think the next time we play, we’ll ask only hard questions or play one of the other varients listed in the game book.