My favorite online game at the moment is a website called Conquer Club. It’s free to play, and you can upgrade to a paid membership for more benefits and privileges (mainly, more simultaneous games allowed and prettier medals). Basically, the game is just like Risk, but because it’s online and computerized, it has many different rule options and many different maps. For those of you unfamiliar with Risk, it’s a game of world domination, where players place military units on geographical locations and roll dice to take and defend territory. The winner is the player who ends up owning all territory, making it the perfect game for nearly every budding James Bond villain in training.
In Conquer Club, thousands of online players play games against each other in all sorts of combinations. The game is meant to be casual – the basic game consists of turns in which players have 24 hours to make their move. When one player makes their move, turn passes to the next player and the clock resets to 24 hours once more. Each player, once they start their turn, has one hour to complete it. If you’re only playing a couple of games at a time, this system means you might spend a few minutes a day making your moves, so it’s easy for just about anyone to get into without becoming a huge time sink.
But if you’re like me, you’ll find yourself wanting to play a bit more than that. Fortunately, while free play only allows you to play 4 games at a time, paying for a subscription (only $25 for one year) lets you play as many games as you want. Furthermore, there are more options than simple turn-based games, including freestyle, speed (5 minutes to take your turn) and real-time play. Up to 8 players can play on a single map together, and game types include team-based options as well as one-for-all. There are options for spoils (same as cards in Risk), reinforcements and fog of war, so there is no shortage of game diversity when it comes to rule options.
But the huge thing about Conquer Club is the maps. The map diversity alone is more than enough to make it worth playing – there are dozens of clever and interesting ideas that have been turned into great maps that are a lot of fun to play. The original Risk game consisted of a world map (this map can also be found on Conquer Club, albeit in altered form as CC wants to avoid any copyright disputes with Hasbro, Risk’s copyright holder). Imagine being able to play Risk with only the United States as a map. Or, maybe the World War II western front. Or the USSR. How does Ancient Greece strike your fancy? One of my favorite maps is a map close to home – the Puget Sound. Because users are encouraged to develop new maps for the game, we end up seeing a wide range of creative ideas implemented, from microcosms of real world maps to complete fantasy maps that don’t exist anywhere. Best of all, with some proficiency in xml and graphic design, you can make and submit your own map, where it will be play tested and critiqued by the community, and eventually put online when it passes muster.
To top everything off, the website includes forums, live chat, and a scoring system that maintains a community-wide scoreboard and awards medals based on points and games completed. The game interface takes a few turns to get used to, but once you have the hang of it, it’s no problem at all. For Risk lovers, this game is a no brainer, and I find myself logging in every day on a regular basis to spend a few minutes whacking my opponents. Look me up if you’d like – I’m “mkohary” and have nearly a 50% win percentage. I take on all comers. :-)
I’m a service operations center engineer, and I work odd hours – Sunday through Tuesday and every other Wednesday, 12-hour shifts. Normally, Sundays are very slow and frequently boring, but today the fire alarm went off and my co-worker and I went packing outside. We knew right away it was no drill, as we hadn’t been alerted to one (they always notify us if they’re testing), and we could smell awful acrid smoke in the elevator lobby. Taking the stairs down and out of the building, we found black, sooty smoke pouring out from the parking garage down the block, which extends under our building, hence the source of the smell.
