Nerd Olympics 2010 Games Preview Part II

This week, sulci takes a look at 5 events taking place at Nerd Olympics this year: Warcraft III: Frozen Throne Tower Defense, Settlers of Catan, Magic the Gathering, Tetris, and Bomberman.

Warcraft III: Frozen Throne Tower Defense
In this year’s Blizzard Strategy category at Nerd Olympics 2010, we will be playing the Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne Element 3.0 tower defense map. Warcraft III is known for Blizzard’s epic story telling and instantly recognizable UI and gameplay. In Tower Defense mode you must place and upgrade towers to survive waves of enemies (called creeps), carefully investing earned resources into new buildings and research.

The top two players out of each 8 player preliminary will move on to the final round. Warcraft III is exclusively for PC, but you can also practice with the immensely popular Element TD flash game.

Settlers of Catan
Settlers of Catan is one of the most popular European-style board games in existence, and the only board game at Nerd Olympics 2010. Players build settlements and collect resources which they then trade for building supplies or random game cards that give special bonuses. The goal of the game is to get to be the first person to collect 10 victory points, which are awarded for various achievements, like building stuff and amassing armies.

The INOC has decided to run two 6 player games, with the top 3 players of each competing in the final round. Preregistration is required – so sign up quickly. You can practice this game in real life, or on Xbox Live Arcade, NDS, the iPhone, and in various PC versions. Find a good rundown of the rules here.

Magic the Gathering
Magic is a collectible card game in which you control various creatures, spells, and other abilities and attempt to defeat your opponents by reducing their life points from 20 to 0 first. Lands are played each turn and are use subsequently to tap for mana and play various other cards which require a certain amount of mana to play. A player’s deck of cards is constructed out of one or a combination of the 5 different colours (white, blue, black, red, and green), all of which have a different theme and play style.

The INOC has decided to host two Magic the Gathering tournaments this year: Legacy and Draft.

In Legacy format, players must own their own deck to play and very few cards are illegal. Decks must have a minimum of 60 cards, with no more than 4 copies of the same card, aside from basic land. Sideboards are not permitted in Nerd Olympics 2010, so plan carefully. The Legacy tournament will have randomly assigned 4 player pools, with the top player of each pool moving on to the final pool. Life totals will be recorded and used as the tiebreaker within each pool should a tie occur.

In Draft format players construct their cards by opening booster packs and taking a card, then passing the booster pack to the person next to them. You then select a card from the pack that was passed to you, until there are no cards left. You can supplement your drafted cards with however many basic land cards as you wish. Your deck must be at least 40 cards in size. There will be a $10 buy-in to play in Draft to cover the cost of the booster packs and you will end up with 45 new cards. The tournament will have randomly assigned 4-6 player pools, with the top player of each pool moving on to the final pool. You should supply your own basic land cards, if possible.

Practice Magic the Gathering with friends, solo, on the Xbox 360, PSP, or PC, including MTG online. You can also practice your Booster Drafting skills with the official Draft Simulator tool. Newbs also has some MTG tips on his Youtube channel and here on shufflingdead.com.

Tetris
Everyone knows how to play Tetris: create as many rows as you can without gaps, clearing up to 4 at a time to create a Tetris. In the multiplayer version, clearing several lines at ones causes horizontal rows to rise from the bottom of your opponents’ screens, causing potentially deadly gaps to ruin their games and ensuring your own victory.

NO 2010 will feature a 4 player single elimination tournament, with the top two players moving on. You can practice on any console, cellphone that can run small java apps, or with any of the bazillion flash based games online. As if you bastards need practice!

Bomberman ’93
Another classic arcade game to be featured at NO 2010 is Bomberman ’93. The goal of the game is simple, blow up the other players by strategically placing bombs and keep yourself alive. In Bomberman ’93, multiplayer mode has levels which contain power-ups as well as skulls, which are detrimental if picked up.

At NO 2010 the Bomberman event is a 4 player single elimination tournament, with the top two players moving on. You can practice Bomberman ’93 on a TurboGrafx-16 console or Wii virtual console. Practice other versions of the game on virtually any console, cell phone, pc game, or even flash games.

Hopefully, this has given you a helpful overview of a few more of the games you can anticipate playing at Nerd Olympics 2010. You must start training now if you want to have any hope of competing in the grueling struggle for victory. I expect most of you will put in at least an hour of game play per day, per game to compete with likes of Nerd Olympics 2009 champions Newbs, Doug, Ben, Flowers, Weskimo, G, and Wylliecoyote, who dominated these games last year. If you know of any additional means of practicing, please comment with your suggestions.