Christmas

I know its July but I've recently run across this neat webcomic by a Canadian lady, and this particular comic struck me as very important.  I think its one of the best Christmas stories I've read.  

I showed it to my girls so they could understand that Christmas is about doing something for others, about sacrifice and about love. I don't think they got it, but I'll link it here and maybe we'll run across it again when they are older.

I love so many of the comics that Kate Beaton has done and this one in particular shows something very well without trying to say it.  That's something to value in media.  It's not the picture that's worth the thousand words, it's interpreting something into a relevant context that increases the density of the information.

*update*
Posting this made me think more about the comic and what it said to me.  It just now made me realize that maybe the reason that Santa is such a HUGE Christmas icon isn't because of the presents or the Coca Cola commercialism.  Its really because Santa dies.  Santa is the sacrificial lamb we offer up to our childhood, and he's reborn every year when we wind up our kids with visions of sugar plums.  We don't do it because its perverse but because it's important for human development that this wonderful thing get sacrificed.  And I'm going to stop trying to say this thing now.

Go Elon

Elon Musk > Batman because he's real and doesn't totally waste all his money randomly beating up petty criminals. I don't know much about the guy's personal habits actually but really, even if Elon eats a baby every day it's still probably a huge net gain for humanity.


http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/05/spacex-docking/


Also, I know a pile of dedicated folks are involved in Space X, Tesla and Solar City projects, but really the guy is Batman for getting it all moving.

Fiasco is great

With only four of us available for game night this week, I thought it would be a neat thing to try Fiasco.  I figured four was a bit light for a GM driven game but should be great for cooperative play.  I picked up the book at the local shoppe earlier on this spring and it had been sitting on the shelf all this time, so I read it over the week and tried to get a feel for it prior to game night.  I got the idea, but was still hazy on some of the execution and figured I'd do a dry run through following the play example at the end of the book.  Well unfortunately my wife got her foot stepped on by a horse and we spent the evening at the hospital getting it x-rayed the night before the game. I didn't get the chance to do the walkthrough and I wasn't feeling sure I should be introducing the game.  I felt it was likely going to be a ...debacle.

Well everyone seemed open to try it anyway and it was a Fiasco.

Fiasco is a cooperative story generator.  You set up some randomized Relationships, Needs, Locations, and Objects from a thematic playset and then you use these to create characters and perform scenes in a two act play.  As you do scenes you decide to either create the scene or resolve it which is an interesting mechanic.

Great game.  We tried out a superhero playset and got off to a bit of a rocky start.  From my reading of the setup I thought that each player needed two Relationships and we ran out of dice before finishing.  I found the written rules about how you would end up with two index cards a bit confusing and it was a bit of conjecture that there should be only one Relationship each and finally seeing the picture a few pages later solved that.  Its also true that the first scene is hard.  We had a bit of trouble figuring out narrative control and scene resolution.  I also think we probably fleshed things out too much but it started working better the more we played and we had a good time.  The game was fun to play and the story that came out of it was surprisingly fun and complete.  I'll totally play Fiasco again.

Moar Kickstarter

This is a Hyabusa pic, not the kickstarter thing.

So some folks out there are kickstarting a satellite.

The project is actually a time-share sensor kind of thing but man it's a satellite and that's one big step for kickstarting.  Or one small step for crowd sourcing maybe.  I essentially participated in the same kind of idea when I contributed (directly and indirectly through membership) to the Planetary Society's Solar Sail projects and although the first two of those didn't make it, I don't resent the money spent and hope they keep trying.  Space exploration is expensive and risky.  It's also totally worth every cent in my opinion because the eventual pay-offs are huge and unexpected.  I don't know how these guys are getting around all the red tape of putting something in orbit - I would imagine that that costs more than the actual hardware.  I know the Planetary Society had a lot of fun dealing with U.S. national security red tape. Anyway I only hope that these guys have success with their project.  Maybe the Planetary Society should kickstart their next project - expand their crowd sourcing base as it were.

I remember the excited chatter on the Internet when Google did their Virgle April Fool's Day* spread.  I wonder what would happen if someone tried to Kickstart something really big - like an asteroid exploration drone or a Europa ballistic test.


*or was it?!

iTitan

Ah you monster slug-a-thon you

Titan on the iPad!?!  Well that's a kick in the ass then.  Crap I was excited when Valley Games acquired the rights to reprint Titan and I then was a little disappointed with the reprint (it was the same problem as with the Fantasy Flight second edition of Game of Thrones, the game board colour scheme was too busy and it impeded game-play.)  Now I am excited again because they did a tablet app which is awesome, but I'm again disappointed because it's only available on the iPad and I sold mine.  It's really the only regret I have about selling the damn thing.


Still if you have an iPad check out Titan on it because it's a great game and it benefits from computer assistance.  It says 2-6 players local or AI which probably means no internet play yet - hopefully they get that in there because that would probably be the best format.  The colossus online play java version of Titan is great and really speeds up play so I imagine a tablet app would also.  I can see a day when we have giant tablets for boardgames and it makes me mist up.  Bring back my Starfleet Battles but on 50' multitouch+ camera enhanced surfaces!!!  Any way Titan is a lot of fun. And in this case with (computer assistance) the fancy colour scheme might actually work.

I still think it's a bit busy - classic Titan had such clean lines and colour coding...

Highway to the danger zone

As much as I want to run some Beacon again, I have had a bug in my ear to run something else. I'm not going to go into details on the game system yet because I am not going to tell the players what the system is until we get underway. However I will say that it's short and sweet and hopefully full of win.  I am going to post some setting material here though because it helps me cope. I have a game date set for July 6th and once it happens and I've spilled all the beans, I'll probably be posting some session notes and get into reviewing some of the game mechanics.

Anyway here's the pitch:

You are all novice pilots aboard the CSF space carrier Jeanne D’Arc, a B class fusion drive fighter carrier designed for autonomous operations in the outer solar system. 

The Jeanne D’Arc carries a complement 63 crewmen servicing four full fighter squadrons and three multi purpose tugs. Each fighter squadron consists of five short range high thrust single pilot space craft equipped with solid fuel missiles and a short range pulse laser.  Squadrons are kept in a regular rotation of four active pilots with one reserve, however full squadrons of five are maintained during crises or in times of war. 

The CSF, or Coalition Space Fleet, is the space based military arm of the United National Coalition, an alliance of national entities consisting of the European Union, Russia, Japan, South Africa, various corporations (most notably West American and New York), and their L5, Martian, and Saturn colonies. At this time the CSF is a distinct and autonomous entity from the mostly planet-based CAF (Coalition Armed Forces) although the two share operations throughout the solar system. 

The UNC has the smallest space fleet of the big three powers, relying on high tech equipment and drone systems to compensate for lower manpower.  The UNC space fleet consists of 8 carrier ships, two dozen fast reconnaissance cruisers and some 50 auxilliary, transport and manned gun ships. 

Nexus Ops

I finally got to play Nexus Ops.  This game has a story for me because of how I got it.

Quite a few years ago (like 2006 or something) I was visiting my Mother in North Bay and I popped into the local game store to check out what boardgames they had.  Catan was really hitting it's stride, Fantasy Flight was ramping things up, Hasbro was mining the Avalon Hill catalogue and trying to push a small number of gamer games and Mayfair was rolling out train games and some other stuff, but this was before you saw too too much on the shelves except old stock, Warhammer, and Magic cards.  It was also before I had much in the way of disposable income so I was pretty picky about what I would buy.  I did however go in with the intention of buying something.  I didn't buy Nexus Ops, I picked up Kids of Catan because my kids were tiny and this looked like something we could play.  Wow that was a mistake - Kids of Catan sucked donkey balls.  As for Nexus Ops, I picked up the box and looked it over and thought about buying it, but I didn't.  I found out later that it was actually quite well reviewed and I kicked myself for not grabbing it.  I really wanted a quick light fighting game to pull out and it seemed like a perfect fit.  Problem was that it was out of print now and I couldn't find it anywhere.

Cut away to last year - and I found myself back in that store and looking at that same copy of Nexus Ops.  I think the guy game me 10% off because it was so dusty.  I snatched that puppy up and skipped out of the store.  I read the rules and it sounded cool and I put it on one of the lower shelves and waited for a chance to pull it out.  It's funny because a couple times I have found a copy of a game that was out of print only to find that it was being reprinted - I spent many years looking for SPI DragonQuest, and the minute I found a copy TSR bought it and reprinted it.  Conversely I was ecstatic when Avalon Hill reprinted Machiavelli and the week after I got the reprint, I found a copy of the original at Value Village (it was in excellent shape and $3!).

Well last weekend I finally got to play Nexus Ops and I I have to say I enjoyed it.

You start with 4 corporations (represented as player boards and pieces in different colours) and a modular hex based game board which you build randomly each game.  You also place hidden resource marker on each tile. Each player gets a starting area with some mines on it and some cash (rubium) to buy units.  The mines you control give you more rubium at the end of your turn, but only if you have units working them.  The grunts are cheap (2-3 rubuim) and come in three types, humans, fungoids and crystaloids (or something).  They aren't great at fighting, however they get bonuses in their home terrains, and are the only units that can work mines.  There are also bigger more expensive units like rock striders that can move further over rocks, lava leapers who can jump out of lava pools, and 12 point rubium dragons that have a ranged breath attack and hit on a 2+.  You move out and explore and get more mines.  Combat is interesting because you each type of creature on both sides attack in order (strongest to weakest) and they only attacks once - so your dragons attack and you remove casualties, then the lizards and so on, until you get to the humans.  Humans only hit on a 6 (six sided dice) and it's tempting to take them off as casualties in the early rounds and save your big guys, but then you'd get less rolls later on in the combat round.  There are also energize(?) cards you can play to give combat bonuses or extra combat rounds or otherwise mess with things.  Certainly it's based on random dice rolls but there is some strategy to be had here in addition to the luck.  Also because you only run through the combat sequence once, combats are more persistent and if you didn't wipe out the enemy forces this turn,  players can retreat or reinforce their positions on their turns.

You play to get 12 victory points and you get a point for every combat victory.  You also get victory points for completing secret missions, and so you might enter combat just to kill a couple humans or to win a combat in a lava pit.  This works great and the game doesn't drag on and there are secret motivations in play  aside from simple 'resource holding' to make things interesting.  You might have all the mines to power a vast war machine but if someone tricks you into loosing a rubium dragon so that they can get a 3 victory point secret objective - they can take the game.  Turtling up around your mines is not a wining strategy.

There's also a bug monolith in the centre of the board and whoever holds it gets two energize cards on their turn - which is a nice perk so it's one big king of the hill going on there.

So Nexus Ops is a great game, light but fun, and it has a good story for me too.  I'm glad to see it's being reprinted by Fantasy Flight (although I don't know if they are keeping the dayglo black light-ready colour scheme) and also curious to see if they produce a two player expansion for it.  I think it might remain a good game with more a couple players (although it might drag a bit it seems to be light enough to overcome that problem).