Crysis Management

I somehow managed to get Crysis: Warhead running on my PC (after years of it sitting on my to-play list) and was quite impressed with the fluid, albeit railroaded, gameplay. To be honest though, I found it on the easy side, despite playing on the hardest mode. I guess all that practice with the L4D2 zombies improved me as I don't recall the original game being so easy. That said the final boss still took me a few tries to beat! The rest of my games have been taking a backburn though as they are venturing into the realms of "my compy can't handle them" anymore. It's ok, hopefully sometime this week I'll it will be getting an upgrade.

Lords of Waterdeep
 
Hasn't stopped me from playing my other games though - board games! Primarily been playing "Lords of Waterdeep", a really clever and competitive game in a D&D with a focus of management and manipulation. So far I've fared better (won) in bigger groups but when it's one on one I'm usually on the losing end. The premise of trying to gain the most influence on the city through completing quests is pretty simple and very elegantly done. The lack of dice rolling and an 8 turn limit also makes it go pretty quick (in comparison to Arkham Horror at least) but it's the strategy that may take time (as that's where all the fun is). Lastly it's very fast to get into and quite quick to setup which are two more positives, I just wish there was a cooperative mode where you had to fight the board but that would be kinda hard to do I think.

The other one I got to play recently was "Settlers of Catan" which I totally got thrashed in. Still fun, but I feel that you are often at the mercy of the dice. Comparatively speaking I like Waterdeep more because there's less luck involved and you never have turns where you do nothing (which was a common occurence in Catan if the dice gods didn't favour your villages). Note that you still need -some- luck in Waterdeep to be able to get the quests you need but other than that it's all on you.