Amongst things I got for my birthday was a copy of the Avatar board
game, and I’ll freely confess that prior to the point of getting it, I had no
idea that a game had been made of it.
How can this be? This film was
one of the best selling films ever, more people have gone to see it than go to
church every week, and whatever you say about the story behind it, a licence
like this should have owned everything...
So what went wrong?
Well, in the first instance, it’s not a game...
Pretty to be sure, nice board, big and colourful, a constructed tree in
the middle to sit pieces on, but then we get to the point where we actually
have to play the game, and here’s where it all falls apart.
The players take the part of the Na’vi warriors defending the tree of
souls against the RDA forces aligned against them, all they have to do to
succeed is keep the RDA levels down, and they do this with special multi coloured
dice that give you a one in six chance of placing more RDA troops down, and
between a two in six and five in six chance of blowing up the RDA troops in
your space if you have all the equipment you can have.
I appreciate that the game is designed for eight year olds and upwards,
but I need to ask the question here, at what point do eight year olds not know
how to play games? The victory conditions for the game are such things as "Be on a purple square and beat two RDA counters" or "Give up three counters that you get for free..." It's not a challenge, it's pick up sticks with dice...
We did a test run with the random placing of the RDA forces using the
dice, it’s possible to place all the RDA forces without causing the overload
that damages the tree, and the mechanics required for the good guys to trounce
the bad guys make this game all but Ludo with Smurfs...
It is things like this that make me furious, here’s a chance to get
people into games, to give them something that combines their love of the film
with a simple game to get them going, now squandered with something that looks
pretty but isn’t actually something that you can play with tactics...
Dear Mega Games, when you get a licence like this and want to produce a
game for eight year olds and up, it doesn’t require that you have the game designed by eight year olds...
Just saying...
