Other Stuff Monthly #9!

So, a few years ago, I was reading my way through the 1980s, as depicted in Uncanny X-Men, and an ad that kept cropping up was one for a board game entitled Web of Gold. It caught my eye, so I went to ebay to see if I could get a copy for myself. Amazingly, depsite the game being decades old, I managed to get a complete copy in immaculate condition for less than five pounds! Even better, it actually turned out to be a pretty good game, which is against the odds for a kids game from the 1980s.

The game concerns a group of explorers venturing into a large cave in search of gold. The cave is unfortunately inhabited by giant spiders. Players each control one explorer and one spider. As explorers, they journey around the board, hoping to find gold nuggets and other items (that aid in finding gold nuggets). As spiders, they try to entrap and kill the other players' explorers in webs. Winning comes through either being the first explorer to fetch six nuggets back to their homebase, or the last explorer still alive. It's a fun game, full of backstabbing, and just enough of a luck element to make snatching victory from the jaws of defeat an exciting event.

Where Web of Gold really shines though, is in its board and components. Everything is meticulously and precisely designed to fit together. The rock pillars on the board have little notches to fit the web tokens between, the explorers have slots on their underside to put them on the webs whn they get caught, and there are little places around the edges of the board to store cards, the die, and so on. Furthermore, each player has a little card to keep track of the fuel in their lantern and the number of spider bites they've suffered. These cards have little sliding counters attached to them and again, they're excellenty designed. Finally, the item cards, depicting things like torches, mushrooms, ropes, and so on, have really great, colourful art printed on them. It's just a great-looking game, with parts that are satisfying to use that add to the overall quality of the game as a whole.

Web of Gold is a great game, and, assuming prices are still as low as they were a few years ago, and also assuming you have at least two other people with whom to play it, I highly recommend tracking down a copy of your own.

Guru Guru (DS)

Also known in Japan as "Guru Guru Nagetto", Guru Guru is a game I found while looking up the developers of a game I covered a few months ago, Simple 2960 Tomodachi Series Vol. 3 - The Itsudemo Puzzle - Massugu Soroete Straws on Game Boy Advance. Not only are the two games by the same developer, but the main character of that game, the trainee witch Straw, is also playable in this one! It's not a sequel, though, as while that was a puzzle game, this is a golf game.

Or rather, golf is the nearest thing to which Guru Guru can be compared. Instead of hitting a tiny hard ball with a stick to try and get it into a distant whole on a massive lawn in the fewest strikes, you are instead throwing bouncy limbless rabbit-like creatures called familars to try and land them at the end of a linear path in the fewest throws. Obviously, there's complications, as the paths are full of hills, walls, ceilings, bottomless pits, and so on, to hinder your progress. You do get to pick between three routes, though, and you can switch between them when you like, as long as you're on a flat surface that's even with the route to which you want to move.

Along with being golf-like in concept, there's also some similarities with more traditional golf games. For example, on each turn, you pick one of three different kinds of throwing technique (determined by which character you picked), then decide how hard you're going to throw the ball with the use of a power meter. Of course, this being a DS game, the power meter utilises the touch screen, having you quickly draw circles to build it up, before flicking across to throw. It works okay, but it's hard to get much precision for those rare occasions when you don't want to throw the familiar as hard as you can.

I was a little sceptical when I first started playing this game, and it did take me a few goes to even figure out how to play it, but it's actually a ton of fun to play once you've got the hang of it. My advice is to ignore the various training modes and just go straight in for the tournament. The training modes make the game seem a lot more difficult than it actually is, and there's a lot of satisfaction not just in beating your tournament opponents, but in seeing their familars bouncing backwards off of walls and falling down pits, leaving them in a worse position at the end of their turn than at the start. One last thing I have yet to mention is the graphics, so before this review ends: they're great. They're cute and colourful (in a kind of pastelly way on my actual DS, though the  screenshots from the capture device look a lot brighter), and have a clean isometric pixelly look that's very appealling. In summary, this game is definitely recommended to anyone still exploring the massive original DS library.