malvasia bianca

Like I said yesterday, we’re in a surprising heyday for match 3 variants. Of the variants I’ve played recently, I like Triple Town quite a bit more than 10000000: I get the feeling that there’s a lot of depth to the gameplay, in the way that it invites me to plot out strategies that take advantage of rare items drops while not being screwed up by them when they don’t fit into my plan.

Despite that, though, I gave it up fairly quickly—I’m not sure I’ve played through ten rounds of the game. The problem is that there’s almost too much depth, or perhaps that it takes too long to unfold: I haven’t timed it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a round takes 30 minutes or more. (And that’s with me just not being that good at the game yet—my individual turns will speed up as I get better, but I expect the fact that I’ll be making more of them to balance that out.) And, while there’s no hidden state, there’s enough advance planning going on that I find it difficult to put down the game in the middle of a round and then pick it up again the next day.

The result is a game that doesn’t fit very well into the rhythms of my play sessions: it’s structured more like a pick-up-and-play game that I’d like to be able to fit into small pieces of down time in evenings/weekends (with, of course, occasional longer bouts), the way I have with Ascension, but instead I feel I have to schedule time for it the way I would a narrative game. (Or the way I used to schedule time for go; but while Triple Town is a very good game, I’m pretty sure it’s no go.) And my brain resists doing that.

So I stopped playing it. I wish things had worked out differently, but they didn’t.