Aliens in the Desert

I have some nice little games for you to try out this week. These come courtesy of the Japanese site Gamedesign which proudly offers “All free fun stuffs!!”

Dice Wars
Dice Wars is a neat strategy game that my company’s CTO introduced me to. It is one of those games with fairly straightforward mechanics, but in which the strategy is a bit deeper than your first glance would give it credit for. There aren’t any instructions for play, so I’ll get you started.

1. To begin with, it helps to know that your color is always purple.
2. You can select a map to start with at the beginning of the game. They appear to be generated randomly and there are some maps which greatly increase your winning potential. Picking one where your dice are arranged in slightly larger stacks at an edge of the board, especially if they appear at natural “corners” of the map will help you get off to a good start.
3. Now how this works is you have a stack of dice in a territory. In order to take over an adjacent territory, you have to roll a higher combined number on the dice from your attacking territory than the enemy can roll on their dice in their defending territory. Obviously, if you are attacking with more dice than your opponent is defending with, it gives you an advantage. Oh yes, and ties go to the defender.
4. Now the numbers by the different color dice at the bottom of the screen represents how many territories you have conquered, minus the number you have had taken from you. This is how many dice your forces get to replenish each turn.
5. You move first, and then replenish armies.
6. If the attacker wins, all the defenders dice are gone and the attacker places all of their attacking dice in the new territory EXCEPT that you always have to leave one die behind in the territory you are coming from.
7. If the defender wins, they keep their spot and all their dice and the attacker loses all their attacking dice except for one.
8. You can attack as many times as you like a turn, but only the dice that are adjacent enemy territories can move (you can’t move dice from your own territory to another one of your territories).
9. When you attack, you always attack with all the dice in the territory you are attacking from, but then if you are successful, you leave one die behind
10. You can have a maximum of eight dice in a territory. If you replenish and all your armies have eight dice, than any extra dice go into a pool to be used for later.

Yes, the computer does cheat sometimes (the enemy armies occasionally won’t attack each other even when they really should) but its a neat game nonetheless. The only thing the CTO and I can’t figure out is how the new dice are distributed amongst territories when your armies are being replenished. If anyone can figure that out, let me know please.
Maze
In this game, you are trying to navigate your little blocky guy out of (gasp!) a maze! The time is ticking down as you try to get the little dude all the way through the twisty passages and out the red door on the other side. This becomes tricky as you realize that wherever the counter winds up when you complete one maze, it starts when the next level beings. So if you end a maze with 10 seconds to spare, that only starts you with 10 seconds the next time around. I got to level 10. Beat that!

Stained Glass
In this lovely puzzle game, the goal is to fit the stained glass paines into the window next to it. The trick is that the color of the side of the paine must match the color of the side of the other paine that it is touching. So if you have one that has blue to the right side, you must put one next to it that has blue to the left side. There’s no timer, so you can take your time with it. I found puzzling over which paine to put where to be a very enjoyable experience.

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