TEAZLE

Teazle is the first real board game for the computer. A 3D board game experience with several categories of games including action, classic, logic, puzzle and methematical. Several gaming options exist, play with computerized opponents, online or with your friends. Choose the style of game board from Great Britain and US to psychedelia and Viking. Up to 8 players can play against each other in teams or at home over the internet. The object of the game is to win a row of games creating a Teazle.

If the square has already been won you may attempt to take over the square. To win the square you must beat the given point level. When you have exceeded the point level your color will take over the square. The objective of Teazle is to complete a row much like bingo and tic-tac-toe. Once you have a row you have a Teazle and you win!

• Arcade
• Action
• Classics
• Logic
• Puzzle
• Mathematical

~ from the back of the box

If you want a good party game, there are a slew of titles to choose from. For my money, the best ones involve mini-games (and are usually made by Nintendo). In 1997, Swedish developer AniWare set their sights on creating their own "board game for the computer" stuffed with 50 bite-sized variations of existing gameplay styles. Created by a team of only 5 people, the project became known as Teazle.

When you launch the game, you're presented with a rather barebones menu to select the number of players and a choice of theme. With options like Great Britain, USA and Canada, you might be thinking it's your country of origin you'll be selecting, but when the list hides Roswell or Valley of Death in there you'll soon realise that's not the case. They each have different background art and music, but as far as I can tell the list of games is randomised from the same pool as the others.

There's a lot of duplicated games to fill up the 50-game quota. The only differences between 

MetalSnake (left) and CheeseSnake (Right) is the colours and whether it has a rigid grid.

The aim is to get control a line of blocks in a 5x5 grid. Each block hosts its own mini-game and should you earn the highest score or shortest time, you control it. You could do really badly at one of them, but still own it because none of the other players have had a go. While you're playing, the AI-controlled opponents are busy doing the same in real time. This means you'll have to balance the time it takes to complete a task with the number of them you can actually get done. It'll all well and good getting a stupidly long snake in one of the Snake clones, but if other players run rampant on the rest of the board it's not worth it.

If online multiplayer was still a thing, this real-time approach would be pretty much the same. The only exception would be the fact you'll be dealing with actual intelligence instead of an artificial one with wildly varying IQ scores. Local multiplayer is different. Different players take turns playing those game and if one of you really sucks at one of the many maths puzzles, you could be waiting for your turn for quit a while. Regardless of how your opponents are controlled, it never feels like you're playing with someone. Only adjacent to them. None of these mini-games features competitive play, only a single-player battle to top a leader board.

Some of the mazes or racing games use a Mode-7 style 3D view, but they all look a little ugly (left).

One of my favourites is a take on the real-world sport of mini-golf (right).

With 50 mini-games stuffed into the CD-ROM, and only five people working on them, the mini-games are going to vary wildly in quality. Traditional Mensa puzzles and arcade games are recreated - often several times - with a barebones art style and minimal presentation. Mathematical brain-teasers and code breakers are functional and dry without much thought put into how they look. The most pleasing ones feature pseudo 3D with some first-person racing or third-person dog walking but each one still lacks any kind of personality found in a Mario Party, Wario Ware or even Jackbox. My favourites involved mini-golf, a variation on Sokoban and a Lunar Lander clone with the black-and-white style of an early Macintosh computer. It's all relative, though.

A game like this would live or die on the quality of its mini-games, and Teazle just about scrapes by. The concept is still a fun one, even if I feel it flows better as a single-player experience. Many of the mini-games are very playable with each one being short enough to not tire of the whole thing, but it does have its fair share of clunkers. It is considered to be a rather obscure game with very little information about it online. The English-language version at least is quite hard to find and the 2000 sequel is even worse, with it only appearing to have seen a Swedish release as far as I can tell. If obscure titles like this float your boat, it's worth a go or two but it won't replace Wario Ware as my go-to choice for a mini-game party.

To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses PCem running Windows '98. Press Ctrl-Alt-PgDown to toggle fullscreen. Press Ctrl-End or middle mouse button to release the mouse. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 10.

IMPORTANT - Remember to shut down the emulated version of Windows before exiting PCem. This could potentially result in errors, lost saves and corrupt data. Close the program only when it is safe to do so.

File Size: 373 Mb.  Install Size: 694 Mb.  Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

Download


Teazle is © Global Star Software
Review, Cover Design and Installer created by me

Like this? Try These...