It’s been several months (an increasingly standard layover) since I last rapped at ya, but this time I’ve been gaming harder than ever before. I’ve become recently single, and as such, have been stuck in that strange little nook of solitude where you’re still used to spending lots of time with one person being a shut-in, but now simply shut yer lonely butt in and find something else to proverbially snuggle with.

For better or worse (and as you might guess, mostly worse) I found a game called Quadradius. Now don’t get me wrong - as someone who’s job it is to talk to you about video games, I can hardly do anything but crow about the varied pleasures the game brings. The set-up is simple - Quadradius is to checkers as NBA Jam T.E. is to basketball. The tiles in between your two armies will sprout a particular number of orbs after a particular number of moves - only where they pop up, and what they do, are random. Some of the powers are minor -say, being able to raise or lower a tile (several powers drastically change the topography of the board), or being able to spy on the powers of every piece in your current column. Some of the powers are more powerful, like destroying everything in your radius, or inhibiting other pieces in your row from getting any further powers. And then there’s Smart Bombs, which literally just shoot their pieces off the board in a volley that leaves the board pockmarked and difficult to traverse. I curse and crave their power in rather frighteningly genuine displays during heated games. And with actual humans as your opponents, its always fairly heated.
The community is what really began to draw me into my descent - Quadradius’s poker-like traits of unknowns and subsequent bluffings in regards to orb powers keeps games from relying solely on the luck of the, er, orb draw. And upon paying for it’s membership (really, a point at which I should have realized what I was signing my soul over to) you can be ranked against all other players on a top 100 list. Here is where my competetive gene sprang up at the party of my mind, eating all of the hummus dip and changing the TV from an ironic movie backdrop on mute to a full-blast barrage of grunting from the World’s Strongest Man Competition. I consider myself a genial man, but when this gene is armed with something like 24/7 accessible completely anonymous competition, you may as well just lock Bruce Banner in a room full of tse tse flies and Happy Hardcore meets Kidz Bop: At Last. There’s no chance for redemption.

To date, I have played 244 245 matches of Quadradius since my membership began on May 14th. This is a little gross, seeing as how I’m averaging out to about 8 matches a day. The games last about as long as a checkers/chess match, so we can safely say this is taking up a large amount of time. Now addiction is addiction, which is to say talked about way too much. For our purposes here, I’m just going to say that I’m awfully entranced by this game - aside from the monomaniacal grip it has taken on my mind, many of the powers and even tabletalk remind me of my days with Magic the Gathering. And what should I find out, but none other than Richard Garfield himself is an avid player and fan, and has hung out for QnA’s in the lobby chatboard on recent occasion. If our dual endorsement doesn’t convince you that this is a game of endless captivation (and I use that phrase in a purposely oblique manner), just try it yourself. (Warning: for the love of god play in moderation)

Love letter from the rehab clinic,
~DM