Review: Bontago

Every once in awhile, the guys at work and I play a LAN game at the office.  Since most network ports are (understandably) blocked by the office network, we can't play anything that requires an internet connection.  This makes finding new games harder and harder since a lot of multiplayer games have permanent servers or require internet verification.  One game I found while looking for LAN friendly games was Bontago.

This game was a student project from DigiPen in which players try to increase their influence to cover one or more white flags.  They increase their influence by building blocks either at the edges of their current influence (indicated by a colored area) or building a tower inside their influence.  Building up gains far more influence then building out, but is easier to have it topple, which will cost all your influence.  If one player's influence grows around someone else's blocks, those blocks will disappear allowing players to destroy each other's influence.  Random destructive weapons appear around the board that can be picked up by players by surrounding it with their influence and then tossing the weapon at another player.

Unfortunately, the physics is a little finicky in the game, which is crucial to making this game great.  If you drop the blocks from any height other than directly on top of another block or the ground, the dropped block will bounce around like it's made out of jello.  You can rotate blocks, but you can't snap them to any certain rotation, which is the only way rotating the blocks would be useful.  Also, the random weapons tend to destroy your towers way more frequently than other people's (or maybe I just build worse towers...).

So while the concept is sound and could be very fun, the control you have over your blocks isn't as tight as it should be, so the game becomes less about strategy and more about just rapidly dropping blocks and hoping for the best.  This is made even worse by the fact that there is a timer that will automatically drop your block if you're taking too long.  It seems like if you wanted to stall the game to perfectly place your block, you're only hurting yourself, so this timer only serves to ruin the ability to strategize and not add any benefit to the game.