Motorsport Manager Review

We like cars and motorsports around our home. Occasionally watch F1, look at the new car models just about every year and play driving video games. One favorite has been Grand Prix Story by Kairosoft. I was excited to try out Motorsport Manager by Christian West.

Motorsport Manager is a racing simulation game where you take control of your own racing team. You make all the calls - where to invest, who to hire, who to fire, what strategy to use during the race, what pitting and tire strategy, etc. It's all in the game. Motorsport Manager is available for iOS and Android.

Motorsport Manager starts you off with modest amount of money and a low tech car and facilities. You choose between two low racing leagues to compete in with your two cars. You take on sponsors to help your team earn money from each race in order to reinvest in either facilities and staff or your young driver program. At the end of each race season you will earn prize money based on your position in the Constructor's Championship.

The game is split into 3 main areas, the management of your team, qualifying and each race. Prior to the race, you can make all of the team decisions - do you invest in manufacturing, aerodynamics or design. Each one will help improve your team's performance by either improving reliability or speed or acceleration or handling. Everything is a balance though as you have limited money and each time you improve an area it can increase the monthly cost of running your team.

During qualifying, you have to make choices between how you will setup your car - do you focus on cornering or straights, do you focus on top speed or acceleration or go neutral in your settings? Each may be better depending on the track that you happen to be racing on. Then what weather conditions will you experience, is it better to put your drivers out with soft, hard or wet tires? All these choices are yours and, along with the driver's skills and your car's capabilities, will determine if you get pole position for the race or languish back mid-pack.

Once the race starts, you are locked into the strategy you chose right before the green light drops. From there, your tactical choices include when to pit, the tires you put on the car and whether or not to push for faster lap times (at the expense of more tire wear). The difference between a podium place for one of your drivers and a mid-pack finish may be determined by your tire/pitting strategy. Soft tires are great on dry, cool days but wear much faster while hard tires are slower (except on hot, hot days) but will last  up to 8 laps or more. It's all up to you.

On my iPad mini with Safari and iBooks open in the background, the game does slow down and stutter during the races at times. You will also find yourself fast-forwarding the speed during the race and qualifying - which will make a race last less than 5 minutes. Take your time when you first start out, upgrade as much as you can and stay in the lower leagues until you have bought everything you can afford. Even when you are dominating the lowest racing leagues, you will be a middle of the road team in the next level. However, the next level will bring significantly better staff and drivers along with the toiling to try to improve (there is a lot more sponsor money at higher leagues, too, but the expectations are much higher). Don't worry that you can only improve your car through investment in your facilities as you will periodically be given a dilemma that may allow investment into immediate improvements to one aspect of your car or another (at a cost). If you aren't patient, the game also offers in-app purchases for more in-game dollars to invest, but it isn't necessary at all.

Motorsport Manager is a worthy racing simulation that feels like you are managing a racing team with the right level of granularity that it doesn't feel like you have to micro-manage. The races are bite-sized enough that you can play one in 2 - 5 minutes…which fits the mobile space well. Overall, it fits in the same sporting simulation space as Football Manager and Out of the Park Baseball. Motorsport Manager gets 4.5 Mick Happies. Well worth your time.

Star Realms Digital Card Game Review

A recent Humble Bundle was focused solely on card games. I picked it up and one of the games I was interested in giving a go to was Star Realms. I had it installed on my iPad mini for a while but hadn't started playing. Since the bundle gave me a full unlock to the base game, I was happy to spend some time playing around.

Star Realms is a deck building game from some of the same designers that made Ascension, several of whom were also professional Magic: the Gathering players back in the day. In a deck building game, both players start with a similar set of basic cards and there is a shared deck of advanced cards that they can select from on each turn. Cards are purchased from a "trade row" with resources gained by playing cards from your hand. See the pictures below - they show the cards in hand and the play space. As a player runs out of cards, they reshuffle their discard pile and start drawing cards again. In that way, cards from the trade row end up in their deck and are available to be played.

Basic game layout - my hand on bottom, my bases to the left

Star Realms gets increasingly complex from there. In the game each player has authority (hit points) and generate trade or combat points that are used to attack your opponent or to buy cards from the trade row of cards. The object of each game is to reduce your opponent to 0 authority. Simple enough, right? The game packs a lot of complexity from there. Individual cards may offer trade, combat or authority or any combination of them. Further, some cards are associated with factions like the Federation or Machine Cult or Blob and may, if multiple cards from a faction are played on the same turn it can result in additional effects. At times these effects might be more trade or combat or force an opponent to discard a card or you to draw a card. The cards in the trade row are either ships or bases; the difference being that bases stay in play once played until they are destroyed. Ships are played and then discarded at the end of each turn.

Mid-turn play

One of the great things about deck building games is that they add the additional strategy of choosing the right cards that come up to build an effective deck throughout the game rather than honing a deck prior to the game. This makes it easy to jump into a new game and makes each game different. The digital app for the physical card game, which is available on PC or iOS and Android devices allows you to play the basic game against the AI or a human opponent. It also includes a campaign of crafted scenarios where your starting deck or modifiers are added to make the game more challenging. Some of them can be quite difficult and are available in normal and hard version. There are also expansions available adding more cards and variety to the base game deck. The only drawback I have found is that the visuals are little small on the iPad mini, but that is more an effect of the device not the game. You can zoom in on any of the cards you want easily.

 Campaign chapters

Scenario description

If you are a fan of card games and want to have it available on the go, Star Realms is a great option. If you want an easily accessible but deep game, give it a try. Star Realms gets 4.5 Mick Happies.

Gotcha!

Nation by Terry Pratchett

Mau and Daphne

I think my first experience with Sir Terry Pratchett's work was reading Good Omens (co-written with Neil Gaiman) aloud on a car ride with my dad. After that it was some of the humorous fantasy novels in the Discworld series that included Granny Weatherwax and her crew of witches and a few books about Mort. Over the years I have picked up an odd novel here and there set in the Discworld and the whole family enjoyed the Tiffany Aching trilogy. Have even had the opportunity to get my copy of The Last Hero signed by the man himself. Therefore, it was pretty much a no-brainer when I saw that his award winning young adult novel, Nation, was on sale as an e-book for a ridiculously low price.

Nation is set mainly in an 1800s version of the South Pacific Islands in a world very similar to ours. It focuses on a young islander, Mau, who is just completing the right of passage to become a man when disaster strikes and destroys his world. Joining Mau on his journey is a young, ship-wrecked girl named Daphne and together they deal with grief, love, theology and what it means to be a people, a nation.

This book is fantastic in the thought-provoking way in which the characters question why life is the way it is. Why do bad things happen? If there are gods, why wouldn't they intervene for good people? Is it wrong to question the way things have always been? What causes one society to rise to greater heights of achievement and science than another? It also is dripping with the subtle humor that pervades  Terry Pratchett's work.

There are some difficult scenes in the book. I wouldn't recommend having it read by children under 11 or so without parental involvement since there is death and implied danger and medical procedures and the occasional "Show us yer drawers!" from a foul-mouthed parrot who is also quite a character in his own right.

I heartedly recommend that you grab a copy of Nation and give it a go or read it with your children. It is an empowering tale about dealing with loss and moving forward to achieve great things. About strength in not giving up. There are strong boy and girl characters to identify with and clever dialogue and thoughtful evaluation of religion and its place in our lives. Grab a copy and enjoy your time on the island with Nation, 5 Mick Happies.