Board Games for a life time
Pros:
Nice selection of board games, Facemaker Tool, Characterization of players.
Cons:
Large memory footprint.
The Bottom Line:
In the online board games segment, Hoyle Board Games 2003 is a great buy!!
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
Introduction
In my house everybody just loves board games. So one day when my dad asked me to look up some online board games that he can play, I stumbled onto Hoyle Board games. And boy o boy it turned out to be a major mega hit!!
About Hoyle Board Games
Hoyle Board games is a collection of the popular board games played across the world to be played on a desktop. It has a total of 18 games which includes a heady mix of mind games, word games and dice games. So we rack our brains in games like Battling Ships, Master Match; test our word power in games like Double Cross and WordOx; and then try our luck in games like Bump Them.
The total list of games available are:
1) Backgammon
2) Battling Ships - The good old board game of battleship makes it to the desktop as Battling Ships.
3) Bump ‘Em - A game very similar to Ludo.
4) Checkers
5) Chess
6) Chinese Checkers
7) Dominoes
8) DoubleCross - A nice little word game where in you can double cross your opponents and steal their points as well. A nice variation to simple scrabble.
9) Gravity Tiles
10) Mahjong Tiles
11) Mancala
12) MasterMatch
13) Pachisi
14) Reversi
15) Rummy Squares
16) Wordox - Another variation to word games, where in partial words are allowed provided they are completed in future.
17) Word Yacht - A good game for children to make words from letters.
18) Yacht
Apart from this there is a facemaker tool available to create your own character that depicts and enacts you on the screen.
Modes of Play
There are three modes available to play Hoyle Board Games:
1) Single Player vs. Computer: A single player can play against the computerised characters pre-built with the game or custom built by the user.
2) Player vs. Players: Two players can play against each other.
3) Player vs. Player across the internet mode: Two players sitting across the internet can play this game by playing in the internet mode.
Pros
1) The biggest pro of Hoyle Board Games is its presentation. Every game has the players surrounding the boards and the game going on the board. Each player has his/her own personality and will make sounds, gestures and statements which keeps the humour alive around the board. To add to more fun you can go ahead and punch, throw a pie or shock an opponent if you are getting frustrated.
2) The facemaker tool available with the game is incredibly good. Much better than the avataar maker we have with Yahoo and allows you to get in a feel into your character on the screen.
3) The gameplay of most of the games are kept really simple and anybody can start playing within minutes of installing if rules are already known.
4) The help provided for the games is pretty comprehensive and in combination with the demo mode, where you watch other players playing, it helps you learn the games pretty easily.
5) The variety in the games is real good. I really liked the word games as they were a slight departure from the normal, yet not very difficult to comprehend.
6) Another big advantage is that you can play the games with opponents across the globe through internet.
Cons
1) The biggest con of Hoyle Games is that it is pretty resource heavy and needs a good amount of memory. I faced a lot of problems running it on 128 MB Ram and then had to move to 512 for the real good effects.
2) In some of the games, the computerized players seem to have unfair advantages. For e.g. in Word Yacht, you are given a limited time to create your words, some computer characters seem to make the words too fast to comprehend.
3) One point is that there should be an option whether we want to wait for the time of others to think and make their move or their moves should be recorded quickly. So in that case after making your move, the others moves should be recorded immediately instead of waiting for their time limit of few seconds to pass before each player makes the move.
Summary
Looking at the complete package, Hoyle board games 2003 is a good package of online board games. Children and Adults would like the games alike.
My rating of Hoyle Board Games 2003 would be a high 4 star rating.
