Provincial Online Student Championships - 6 April 2019

All are encouraged to participate in MSSA's Provincial Online Student Championships to be held on 6 April 2019.

Mind Sports South Africa (MSSA) shall be holding its Provincial Online Student Championships on 6 April 2019.

This year, any student of any South African tertiary institution (University and colleges) may participate, regardless of whether the player is MSSA affiliated or not.

However, it should be noted that only official teams entered by University Clubs affiliated to MSSA or the Sports Councils may use the tertiary institution's name.

The championship allows students from all over the country to test their mettle against each other in an official championship that has the following benefits:

• Enable students to earn Student Provincial Colours, and
• Qualify for selection for the National Squad, and
• Earn medals.

The event that lasts from 10H00 until 18H00.

The titles to be played at such event are:

High School
#	Title	Platform	Players
1	Counter-Strike: GO™	PC	5 v 5
2	Call of Duty Black Ops 4™	PC	5 v 5
3	FIFA'19™	Console - PS4	1 v 1
4	Paladins™	Mobile	1 v 1
5	DotA 2™	PC	5 v 5
6	League of Legends™	PC	5 v 5
7	HearthStone™	Tablet/cell	3 v 3
8	TEKKEN 7™	Console - PS4	1 v 1

Details are as follows:

Eligibility: Any player/team affiliated to a South African tertiary institution may enter.

Entry fee: Entry is R34.00 per Registered Player.

Entry date: Entries need to be submitted by no later than Monday, 2 April 2019.

Registration:To register, players must complete the entry form.

Age restrictions: Age restrictions per game title shall be enforcred.

When and Where:

• 6 April 2019
• The first round will start at 10H00. Players shall be given 60 minutes to complete each round. 
• Players must all be on-line at 9H00

Teams that finish in the top three places shall receive medals for the following sections:

1. Mixed
2. Female

Student Provincial Colours shall be awarded based on the residence of the recipient. Thus a Registered Player that lives in Cape Town shall be awarded Student Provincial Colours for the Western Cape.

For additional information, please contact: mindsportscorrespondence@gmail.com 

Also read:

• Why schools and universities should invest in esports.
• New National Team Selection Criteria
• 2019 Calendar of Events

LMH Mixtape #25: Nobuo Uematsu

Brent has occasionally referred to Nobuo Uematsu as "the John Williams of video game music" for good reason.  Uematsu's incredible work with the Final Fantasy series has earned him fans all over the...

The Legacy Music Hour was created by Brent Weinbach and Rob F. specifically for the purpose of talking about video game music from the golden age of gaming (16-bit and earlier).

Download Onimusha Warlords Free For PC

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McGuire House Rules For Carcassonne South Seas

Carcassonne: South Seas

Carcassonne: South Seas by ZMan games is a tile-placement game for 2-5 players. I find that it takes 20-60 minutes depending on the number of players when using our house rules below for faster play and setup/cleanup, and works well for ages five and up.


South Seas is based on the core mechanic of the Carcassonne series but is a standalone game incompatible with previous games and expansions. It is a little more accessible than the previous games. This is due to tile designs that force collaboration, eliminating end-of-game scoring, and fewer meeples (pawns) to work with.


I don't find these changes to be a net improvement. The advantages over Carcassonne are slight, and a lot is lost in exchange for them. South Seas has a shorter playing time when using our house rules, offers some variation in theme, reduces some mental arithmetic, and adds fun resource tokens. It lacks depth and increases variance. The tile designs force players to help each other more often, but because many possible tiles don't exist there are often frustrating gaps in the board (i.e., uncompletable features) and features are often small. A group of regular adult board game players will probably not enjoy South Seas as much as Carcassonne, but casual players and children may prefer it.

The game rules are confusing as printed, so I'll give a complete, streamlined description below. There were also some poor design choices in the pieces. So, I recommend that you permanently modify your set before your first game:

1. Mark the front face of the starting tile to make it easier to find. When you put away the other tiles at the end of the game, store the starting tile separately, with the resource tokens for faster setup next time. It already has a different back face, however that isn't helpful during cleanup when you only see the front faces.
2. Store the tiles in a bag instead of in face-down piles. This saves the setup time of making the piles and allows you to sweep them off the table into the bag for faster cleanup.
3. Mark the larger (3x) resource tokens with a dot, since the size difference alone is too subtle for quick counting and the size is ambiguous when you're only holding a single token.
4. Make extra 5x resource tokens, such as coins or other counters. For three players there are barely enough resources and you must constantly trade with the bank to keep the resource supply liquid. With five players, you'll quickly exhaust the supply. Changing the value of the provided resource tiles doesn't help--you need both enough to stockpile and to make "change" on purchases.

Components and Concepts

Tiles: cardboard squares with pictures of fish, boats, wooden walkways (with shells), islands (with bananas), and open sea. These are played each term like dominoes to build the world.

Features: market islands (small islands drawn on a single tile), seas (blue areas that may cover multiple tiles, unbroken by other graphics), banana islands (which may cover multiple tiles), and walkways (wood "roads" that terminate at rocks and islands and are decorated with shells). Market islands are complete when they are surrounded by eight other tiles, forming a 3x3 grid. All other features are complete when there is no way to expand them with another tile (whether or not such a tile actually exists or is available).

Ships: cardboard cutouts showing a mixture of resources, a point value, and a background picture of a ship. These are worth points and collecting them is the goal of the game. The icons drawn on the ship's sail indicate the cost of purchasing the ship. "A" and "B" icons are for two, three, etc. of a kind. For example, "A A A B" means three of one kind of resource and one of another kind. The pie-chart icon is a wildcard meaning any resource.

Resource tokens: painted wooden icons of fish, shells (scallops), and bananas. These are the currency of the game, used to purchase ships (points). At the end of the game, every three are also worth one point. The larger tokens marked with the dots count as three resources.

Meeples: colored human figures that are placed on the board to indicate ownership of areas.

Fishing boats: tiny cardboard rectangles, each with a picture of a single boat. These are placed on fish on the tiles during play to mark them as consumed.

The game requires a medium-sized flat play space, about 1m² in area. Each player requires a small area in front of themselves*  to store points, meeples, resources, and their current tile. The contents of these individual storage areas are public information and should thus be in full view of the other players at all times.

* I use "them" as gender-neutral singular in my game writing, an increasingly popular practice in academia and journalism.

Setup

1. Each player takes four meeples of the same color
2. Weaker players take a mixture of 1-8 starting resources
3. Place the starting tile in the center of the play space
4. Place four blindly-chosen ships face up beside the play space
5. Remove some number of tiles and set them aside. For three players, I recommend removing about half of the supply. For five players, you may wish to remove only four. Ideally the number of tiles remaining will be an integer multiple of the number of players, but it is tedious to arrange that and a single extra turn is seldom significant in this game. The removed tiles are not in play, and players should not see which tiles have been removed. Removing tiles shortens the game and prevents tile counting by players who know the exact distribution in the full set.
6. Each player blindly draws one tile from the tile bag

Handicaps, removing tiles, the bag, and players holding a tile at all times are house rules.

Play

The game ends when the last tile has been placed and the player who placed it ends their turn. The goal of the game is to have the most points. Ships are worth their face value. Every three resources are worth one point (there are no fractional points). Tiles on the board are worth no points. The basic strategy is thus to place tiles so as to gain resources and then use those resources to purchase ships.

Play proceeds around the table in turns, where the current player is the one holding the bag of tiles. On your turn:

1. Place the tile that you are currently holding. Placed tiles must touch at least one edge of one existing tile. The edges of the new tile must match all previous tiles that they touch.
2. Optionally do one of the following:
1. Remove one of your own meeples from the board, returning it to your "hand"
2. Pace one of your own meeples on the tile that you just placed, following the placement rules below.
3. If the newly-placed tile contains a fishing boat, award fish resource tokens: These rules for resolving fishing are house rules. The printed rules are ambiguous on several points here.
1. Identify the sea feature that contains the fishing boat. It will typically cover several tiles. Walkways and islands separate seas.
2. If any meeples are in that sea feature, the players with the most meeples in the sea feature own it and each receive a number of fish resources equal to the fish in the sea feature. Place a fishing boat over the largest number of fish in the feature after awarding resources.
3. If the sea feature is complete, remove all meeples from it.
4. Award resources for all newly-completed features and then remove all meeples from them:
1. The owners of a feature are the players with the most meeples on it. Ownership can be shared when there is a tie. When there are multiple owners, each owner is awarded the full value of the feature.
2. Walkways award the number of shells shown on them
3. Banana islands award the number of bananas shown on them
4. Seas award the number of fish shown in them
5. When a market is completed (surrounded), it awards the current highest-point value ship. Immediately replace that ship with a new one chosen blindly from the supply
5. Optionally purchase at most one ship and immediately replace it with one chosen blindly from the supply.
6. Draw a new tile from the bag and pass the bag to the next player. This is a house rule. Drawing up at the end of the turn allows players to think ahead and then immediately place at the start of their turns, which speeds the game. It also allows other players to see the upcoming pieces, which slightly increases strategic play, especially at the end of the game.

Placement rules

Meeples may only be placed on the tile just played. You can only place a meeple from your hand. Placement within the tile matters--you are placing on a feature within the tile, not just on the tile.

Meeples can only be placed on features that are currently unowned (recall that the features may span multiple tiles). This includes the rule that you cannot place on a feature that you already own. However, it is common to place a meeple on an unowned feature that is near, but not yet connected to, another feature, and then join them together on a future turn. Doing is often an effective strategy.

When placing on a sea feature (fishing), lay the meeple down flat. While I have no wish to imply that fishing is a lazy activity, this helps distinguish fishers visually and if the board is accidentally bumped.

---

Morgan McGuire (@morgan3d) is a professor at Williams College, a researcher at NVIDIA, and a professional game developer. His most recent games are Project Rocket Golfing for iOS and Skylanders: Superchargers for consoles. He is the author of the Graphics Codex, an essential reference for computer graphics now available in iOS and Web Editions.

Getting A Bit Of Everything In Guild Ball: The Union

Tuesday night is our game night out at Top Deck Games (aka Card Titan online if you're into Magic the Gathering) and last night was the first time I've been able to make one in a while. 

It was also the first night in a long time where I was able to get two whole games in, and it ended up being two Guild Ball games for me as the other Warmachine players had already paired off when I was done my first match. 

I decided I wanted to play more of my newly fleshed out Union as I'm probably most excited about playing them.  I figured I'd post about why I'm personally excited about them given my history and what I feel makes them strong. Please keep in mind, I'm no expert at the game so this is more of a layman's perspective. 

Why I'm Excited About Union

I can't talk about what makes me excited to play Union without talking about my previous teams in Guild Ball.  I started the game playing Brewers, and then picked up Engineers because well, I like beer, and I'm an Engineer.  

Brewers, especially when I picked them up, were more of a fighting team, and Engineers once they got reworked were more of a goal scoring team, so they'd make excellent compliments to each other, or so I thought.  Both teams also generally rely on a single captain more than the other. Brewers generally want to be playing Tapper and Engineers generally want to play Ballista. 

What I've found from playing both teams is that it's like playing the two extremes of the game. It's not quite as opposite as playing Butchers and Fishermen, but it's close enough to feel limiting.

Union by contrast can more easily play what the developers call a balanced game, looking to get 2 goals and 2 take-outs to get the 12 points to win the game.   This is probably why I'm more excited to play Blackheart as my Union captain compared to playing what most people consider to be the stronger Veteran Rage as my captain, though I do enjoy playing both. 

My First Dream Team

I wanted to make a team that had as much 2" Melee as possible while also being balanced.  Back in June of last year, it appeared that Union had a good 6 player lineup for this:

Blackheart, Strongbox, Harry, Mist, Benediction, Gutter

Then in July the nerfs came for Harry which toned the team's damage output way down, but I still feel as though these 6 players can make for a hell of a team. 

Blackheart can still score from very far away, using all kinds of dodge shenanigans to get in range for his 6" kick to nail a goal, quite likely at Tap-In range.  He also has Butchery which can give you +1 to damage results against the model hit, and with all non-mascots having 2" melee, it's not hard to stack crowd out's on the player you've hit with Butchery.  Strongbox add's +1 TAC in a 4" aura, which again can allow someone like Gutter to get in and do a massive amount of damage, but nearly anyone on the team can be made to hit hard enough to be a problem with that kind of setup. 

And then there's Mist. He's got to be one of my favorite models coming from playing Brewers and Engineers. Now that Slothecian models have been released, he gets a free 2" dodge if he's within 6" of Grace or Benediction. He has Acrobatics, so he's got a guaranteed 2" dodge.  He has 2" Melee which is fantastic on a striker, and he's got dodges for days.  A turn 1 goal with him when you're receiving is extremely easy to bang in, and with him kicking off it's not impossible to get in that scenario either if your opponent isn't very careful about it. 

The Extended Roster

Blackheart wasn't my first Union captain, that went to Veteran Rage, since I could buy him and Strongbox cheaply in a blister and I already had all the other models necessary to make a team with him at the time (a friend had given me an extra Mist model he had as payment for splitting a pizza on game night – damn Guild Ball is a cheap game to get into).  This gave me a 6 man of:

V. Rage, Strongbox, Avarice & Greed, Gutter, Mist, Harry

This team was far better before Harry and Avarice & Greed were nerfed, but now that I've fleshed out the guild there's a lot of flexibility on how you can build a solid Vet Rage team.

My 10 player lineup is now:

Blackheart, Vet Rage, Strongbox, Avarice & Greed, Gutter, Mist, Harry, Grace, Benediction, Decimate

As of last night, I tried out the following team for Rage and it worked well into Engineers:

Vet Rage, Strongbox, Mist, Gutter, Decimate, Grace

With this, I have three models with 3 dice kicks, and two models with an 8" kick.  While it seems like a lower Influence team at only generating 11 influence, it gets 2 influence for free to fuel Grace every turn.  This allows her to give a "free" Quick Foot to extend Rage's personal threat or to make Mist go even further to score a goal. 

Since it's a Vet Rage team, few people want to fight into it and so go for goals, allowing me to easily get snap back goals with Mist or if I'm receiving, get a very easy turn 1 goal with Mist.  Getting an early goal is a big deal for the team since the extra goal Influence goes a long way to helping Rage do what he wants to do.

It's hard to understate how deadly the team can be with Rage's Heroic or Legendary play and Strongbox's 4" Aura.  Last night I had a setup where Colossus (DEF 2, ARM 2, Tough Hide) was crowded out by Mist, Grace, and Strongbox. Rage popped his Legendary play and then charged in for free with Furious. On the wrap I got a Knockdown and did 4 damage.  I then spent 4 Influence on Red Fury, not making Rage attack, but making Strongbox, the friggin Turtle attack.  

The amount of damage it does in this situation is outrageous: 2 Base Attack, +1 from Shelling Out Aura, 3 Crowd Outs, +1 from Legendary Play, +1 dice from a DEF 2 model being knocked down is 8 total Dice for TAC and +1 to all damage results.  Since Strongbox only has a 2 deep playbook, he is able to wrap many times. Even with Tough Hide taking damage off of each result, I was still regularly pulling 5-6 damage per attack after Tough Hide. With 4 Red Fury attacks I easily took down one of the biggest models in the game with a little turtle.  He's like an honorary Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, I should try and paint a mask around his face.

Strengths and Weaknesses

One final thing that Union has over my other teams is that with my lineup I really can pick either Blackheart or Vet Rage and play two very different games, which is something relatively rare in Guild Ball. 

This isn't to say that the team is nothing but a power house, I actually lack a significant amount of resiliency that I normally have with a lot of Tough Hide models.  As it is a lot of my models are either 4/1 or 3/2, which is possibly better than average, but once they get knocked down or debuffed they will take a lot of damage very quickly.  So far my games with them have been good, but I intend to play a lot more with the team.

The only thing is…I really want to play more with my Engineers and even my Brewers since it feels like so much has changed in the game since I last played.  I'm definitely riding high on Guild Ball in general right now and it feels pretty good.