Roll20 and what to buy in the Bleed.

My Ashen Stars online game is still ticking along and by all accounts it is pretty well liked by the players.  I use Roll20 for this and it works really well.  I rely on the dice roller and have made a couple virtual decks of cards (one for me and one for the players) for revealing point spends for opposed challenges.  I also have gotten some good use out of the virtual tools to display both  pictures and maps and to run simple combats by drawing on a map.  All in all it serves well.  It would be nice to have an in-game character sheet but there is not one available yet.  There is a Trail of Cthulhu character sheet in roll20 but not one for Ashen Stars yet, although I have put in a request for one.  I did try to take the ToC template and replace all the skills with Ashen Stars skills but I don't have the knowledge or time to finish coding it or submitting it for someone else to take on.  In any case that's a nice to have for later but not essential for now.

The Roll20 play area

I also use google drive to store a character skill spreadsheet that we can track all the player point spends on.  We also use shared session notes to document cases and any needed reference materials and of course the character sheets that we spun up on The Black Book.  I also have a financial spreadsheet in google docs that lists all the character bank accounts, a company bank account and the ship mortgage info.

I know, Ashen Stars is supposed to dispense with the money in favor of story right?  I have to disagree.  You could play that way but it seems to me that the default game without the money pressure just doesn't cut the mustard.  Without external pressure, it's way too easy to get along and there is less pressure on the characters to tempt them into bad decisions, and money is one of the great narrative pressures that everyone can relate to.  Ashen Stars is great in that there is no nickle and dime transactions to bog things down but there are the big ticket transactions to spice things up.  The only problem is that unless you have borderline psycho players ruining the crew's reputation every game it's too easy to get money and there isn't enough stuff in the core rules to spend that loot on so it piles up.  Also the rules as written are pretty crew orientated and that can limit the fun when it comes to having players fighting over how to allocate the group income or what to do with their share of the loot.  I did post a table here some time age for players wanting to have some lifestyle options by spending Big Creds.  I also have found that making the PCs manage their business by having to pay off a 1000bC ship mortgage is pretty swell - but even these things are pretty easy to surmount with given the costs/payouts in the book as a guide.  What I am looking for is a way to tempt the players into spending money, which will in turn tempt them into bad behaviors in game which will tax their PR skills and offer some spice to the day to day of being a spacecop for hire.

The biggest and bets idea I have had is to come up with some random life event tables to hit players with financial encounters.  Not all these would be bad things that simple place a burden on the PC, although there should be some of these.  I think that for the most part you would want to offer opportunities that come with an associated cost, things like breeding rights or perhaps some sort of potlatch thing for an alien culture spring to mind.  I would want these to be things that the player can jump on that serve as both economic grease and as character goals.  Then watch the players fighting over a bigger share of the payout instead of sinking it all into buying a larger upkeep buffer to more mods for the ship.  What I don't want to hear is an agreement that it would be best to just sink all that money back into the ship - where's the fun in that?

Welcome to Pioneer

Report - Zombie Risk

So Zombie Risk works pretty darn good as outlined.  We played a 4 player game using those rules and it was noticeably more fun fighting the zombies and attacking each other via proxy than simply fighting each other directly.  There were suitable amounts of hatred for other players, but it was a little less personal. There were many more moments of cooperation and rooting for other players than you would get in a typical game. It was fun to use familiar game mechanics in a new way to quell the growing zombie hordes.

The infection on a 1 mechanic was really good and a lot of fights took a sudden turn for the worse when a player's units converted to zombie units mid fight.  It was also good that the infection cards only dropped two units into countries as this limited the attack dice at first and made these skirmishes more tolerable, but made it all the more dramatic when it happened that fallen armies were infected.  The game started out a bit slow and at first the zombies seemed to be a bit weak and it was a concern that players wouldn't be able to get their cards each turn for lack of targets.  However as the zombies gained new units after each player turn, and also the 'infection' cards caused outbreaks and conversions of player countries, it soon became apparent that these zombies were getting to be a real problem.  Slowly the zombie faction spread and soon there were heroic fights just to knock the zombies down a country or two to prevent them from getting that one extra reinforcement next turn.  By the time that players are turning in card sets for higher numbers of units, the zombies had very large hordes in place to counter.  There was a real sense of survival horror and fighting against growing hordes that came with these mechanics.

There was a lot of option for strategic manoeuvring and for player diplomacy, and since everyone had vested interest in the zombie faction it was a much more interactive game than I remember regular risk being.  I am sure that a strategic co-operation in the early game would make it pretty easy to wipe out the zombie faction, but the player self interest in controlling territory seems to be a decent counter to that.  It is good that the zombies only receive one attack per turn and then the two infection cards as it prevents them from being used too aggressively against a single opponent or for a signal purpose.

The players suggested that it would only be fair to have some sort of 'cure' mechanic where zombie forces that rolled 1 on a loss would turn into humans again.  I am not sure this is a good idea but it was a popular request all through the game.  I suggested that perhaps if the zombies lost on a 1 against a roll of 6 the zombie could be cured - making it a more rare occurrence.  I would consider this as a house rule of the house rules I guess.

Some clarifications/qualifications to the rules:

1. Setup should be done by dealing out all the country cards (minus the wild cards) and putting units on the countries you receive - at least for the zombie faction if not for all players.  I assumed this since it's always how we played, but it's not in the official rules I had.  Once all territories have a unit, then the remaining units are placed as reinforcements in player order.  Players should take turns to place a number of reinforcements equal to the number of players and then place a zombie unit until they are all deployed.

2. Zombies get reinforcements for the number of countries they control but do not get cards or continent bonuses.

Zombie Risk

Can such a precision machine be tuned?

Its funny how some ideas are so simple but you never think of them until you hear that simple phrase or concatenation of terms that sparks the self evident.  I was pretty much done with Risk years and years ago.  I kept a copy in hand for nostalgia, and then later on, to play with the kids.  I didn't think I'd want to play it again though.  Risk: Legacy looked interesting but it didn't look 70$ worth of interesting.

A couple days ago I saw the term Zombie Risk in a google search on house rules for Zombies!!! and immediately I realized what that there was potential for shenanigans here.  Without even reading any details I could think of ways to revive that Risk board and maybe fix some of the problems with the game, make it fun again.  It is not an accident that this synergy has occurred, Zombies!!! and Risk have much in common being games that are very popular and fun while being pretty flawed.  The universe loves them despite themselves.

I've looked up some different rules going under the label of Zombie Risk and I think my favorite are the ones that have a semi-cooperative feel to them.  These variants use one faction as the zombies and have the other factions not allowed to attack each other directly but use the zombie faction as the beating stick.

I'm going to try a few different ideas and play test this with my family.  My goal is to shorten the game,  make it more fun to mess with the other players without getting too personal about things, and to prevent turtling up and the Australia effect as much as possible.

Basic rules: 

• Set up the game as normal* but with one faction being the zombies.  I'd use good old zombie Black but what ever floats your boat.
• Every turn players play their turn and then take a zombie turn.  Players may only attack zombie controlled countries in their regular turn but are free to go after anyone as the zombies.
• In the Zombie turn you add armies for countries controlled as normal** and then make one attack on someone, and then flip two cards - placing two zombie units in each of those countries and then resolving those combats as well. 
• In combat, players who loose a combat roll with 1s convert their lost unit(s) to zombie units which immediately rise up to continue the fight.
• You win by being last player standing or the player with the most points (countries and continent bonuses) if the zombies are wiped out.

I'm going to try this basic set of rules and see how it works out.  Then adjust to suit.


update:

*Setup should be done by dealing out all the country cards (minus the wild cards) and putting units on the countries you receive - at least for the zombie faction if not for all players.  I assumed this since it's always how we played, but it's not in the official rules I had.  Once all territories have a unit, then the remaining units are placed as reinforcements in player order.  Players should take turns to place a number of reinforcements equal to the number of players and then place a zombie unit until they are all deployed.

** Zombies get reinforcements for the number of countries they control but do not get cards or continent bonuses.

Hey what about Mecha?

I realize that I owe you a PDF for the Mecha campaign I posted way back in the olden time and no, you are not going to get it soon.  I have been thinking about a return to that game however, another one shot or even a short campaign based on the Jeanne d'Arc and those young space pilots (not so much) in love.  I thought about running the campaign in another system like Traveller or Fate or even Atomic Highway's V6 engine.  I've kind of dismissed those ideas as problematic for various reasons, especially after playing Diaspora and not quite getting the hang of it.  I would however like to take some concepts from Fate and bolt them onto Mecha.  I do like the concept of Aspects and I do like the Fate stress tracks and I've thought about how to use those ideas in both a Mecha game (and in some alternate universe version of Beacon for that matter).  Mecha already has Traits, a something that is a lot like Fate aspects already.  Mecha also has stress track type hitpoint system for mechs and pilots.  It would seem like the systems are not too different after all.  The big difference here however is that Mecha Scenes are quite a different way to do action resolution and if you jigger with he scenes you also jigger with stuff like Overdrive and Tactical points which would be a pretty big gutting of the system.

I also had a few issues with the scenes and players with different visions of the setting and partial knowledge of each other's visions trying to keep a cohesive narrative, something that can obviously work (see Fiasco, of other people playing Mecha...) but wasn't working for me and my group for this game.  I don't think the answer to these problems is to revert back to a more traditional action-resolution system.  There is something I like about this scene mechanic and my inclination is to make it work for me rather than looking to a different system.  So it's probably a good time to try to figure out what it is that I like about it before tinkering with it.  I know you are now waiting expectantly for a good old bullet list or perhaps even a Venn diagram, but I think I'm going to do this in a rambling and inefficient way instead.

• Littler Scenes

Ha, that was a fake out, I am using bullets.  But I think more narrow or smaller scenes is part the solution I'm looking for.  Instead of big scenes where a player takes narrative control and drives everyone on their rail, I see breaking player turns into smaller scenes where something happens but it's more within the context of the larger act in the story.  I think that I need to keep the established scene types so that player can get overdrive and Tactical points and all that but I think that they also need to be able to have more 'filler' scenes that don't give those rewards and thus don't make combat into a point cashing out cake walk.   Also to keep things rolling along the proscribed narrative path I think that there needs to be more GM scenes to introduce or reintroduce those narrative themes - perhaps between each player scene or perhaps as the cap for a round of scenes in-lieu of a combat.  I do still think it's pretty important that each player only gets one of the standard 'reward scenes' e.g. a repair or a field ops scene, between each combat or they will be walking pretty tall.

I'm not entirely sure how this would play out without becoming "you see a box", "my scene will be checking for traps on the box" which is just regular old action resolution.  It's pretty obvious to me that a scene requires a die roll, but if there is a chance of failure, what is the penalty or reward for success one of these 'filler' scenes?  Do they need any reward beyond success itself?  Adding RP to scenes traditionally gives you Advancement Points - is this the reward?  How do you stop accelerated advancement then?   I think that maybe disentangling the Role Playing Objective from the standard scenes and attributing it to these 'Role Playing Scenes' might be an answer.  It is sensible that these role play scenes drive the narrative and the other scenes give a mechanical bonus for the upcoming combat, but I'm not comfortable with them automatically paying out AP since that is the mechanic that encourages trait use to make all scenes more complex .  I'm still trying to figure out how this would look in execution.

• Players messing with each other

This is one of my thoughts from my session write up.  I think that what makes Fiasco work is that a player gets to select the scene or the resolution but not both.  I think there needs to be some sort of opposition to player scenes or they will tend to drive the narrative in the direction of immediate reward.  If you know there is a big fight coming up and you need Tactical points you will try to do the easiest field ops scenes you can get away with, you won't describe a risky scene because that lowers your chance of needed resources.  Even drama players will tend to play it safe when the bigger picture is on the line, but in a good narrative  those moments are the ones that would benefit most from a crazy scheme.  My thought on this is to have the other players insert an element into the scene.  This allows them to include their narrative desires as well as give the GM something else to assign difficulty to.  I think this approach might work because it gives the table some input instead of imposing some kind of automatic counter to the problem or having the GM try to deal with it.  I think the table will do the cool thing where the player might be tempted to do the safe thing.

• More gear but not too much gear - or something

It stands to reason that if there are more kinds of scenes there will be more things going on then the base fighting skills cover.  Some of this will get offloaded onto Traits perhaps, making them more like aspects.  I especially like the idea that your mech (or ship in this case) passes on some Traits to your character.  I can see this being somewhat like Fate where the negative side of traits get 'tagged' by the GM or other players in scenes.  However since the stats are orientated to compliment the standard scenes, there needs to be something else to interact with in these new role playing only scenes.  I also have the idea that the more complicated nature of the game might require more than just pistol+flak vest or las rifle as inventory.  I don't want the game to get bogged down in any sort of  inventory though. You get assigned what you need for the mission.  Perhaps allowing a couple extra slots on the sheet for items or ideas that act something like traits that can give bonuses to resolving RP scenes.  It would be interesting if a character found a 'precision hacking kit' or 'teddy bear concealed dagger' or something that they could use for a bonus modifier.

• Penalties for failure

Last point for now, but I was also thinking that there should be more penalty for failing than just not getting the scene reward.  I don't think that it's right to take reward points away from players, but I have been thinking it would be interesting to award points to their opposition if they fail, or fail over a particular margin.  This idea comes from the combat session where the players used a couple tactical points in one shot to move the Tatical Waypoint right to themselves and ace the combat encounter.  As a GM I really would have liked to have a point to spend there too.  I think that might be a thematic as well as interesting consequence to have the badguys benefit from particular failures.

I'm sure I'll be back to the well on this.  Work is long and I'm so far behind on my one pet projects that I have just resigned myself to enjoying the games I have been playing and mulling over these ideas in my head. I can see trying to actually solidify these ideas into a playable mess for a summer one shot however.

Space Empires III

Space Empires III is one of the best games ever.  It's too good for the technology that it was written for (Windows 95 people!) and I don't think I have even managed to find another game yet that did what that game does so well.  Asynchronous turn based multiplayer space 4x.

Your window into awesomeness.

Space Empires 3 looks simple, and sure it has simple graphics and sound. The menus are not fancy or animated or all tool tippy. The AI isn't brilliant.  But what SE3 does have is it is the best damn computer assisted space board-game you can play with your friends over email.  Oh I'm sure someone out there has made more complex games or more realistic games, and even the folks that made SE3 went on to make bigger prettier versions of the same game (SE4 and SE5)- but here's the thing SE3 got it right.  It has enough depth to keep things interesting but not so much that you need to study a couple books or log a million hours to play.  There is also a surprising amount of power in the way it organizes the game information for you.  All your ships, all your planets, all the orders you have issued are all there to be examined.  I tried other games and this is the break point for me - they get too hard to manage, their menu systems are too obtuse to navigate.  Space Empires IV might have been a better game but I could never get past the UI to find out.  Space Empires III is sleek and efficient.

The other thing that makes this game so good is the strategic combat and the combat simulator.  Don't even bother to play this game using the tactical combat system in single player mode because that's not where it shines.  Where SE3 works is building and testing your fleets and then sending them off with operating instructions to fend for themselves.  It's an wonderful feeling to get a notice that your fleet has trounced another fleet in some far sector of space.  It's a dreadful feeling to get news that your fleet has been expunged from existence.  There is more than just the combat. There is a decent research tree to juggle. You get mad benefits from managing your population properly. You can pump resources into espionage, and you can do well by being a good diplomat and skimming points from trade agreements.  You can win on points or by taking out all the other players.  And the best part is that you feel like a real emperor doing it all at arms length and waiting for your next turn to see what has transpired.

I've thought about how I'd make a 4x game quite a lot and I believe that it would fall pretty much in line with what SE3 accomplishes.  I might add some spokes to the tech tree for that rock paper scissors effect. I'd probably want to increase trade and tribute so that you could move units.  I might even add in some mining or resource collection.  But I have to say all this was attempted in SE4 and it didn't make the game work for me.  My one big wish I guess would be to add in simultaneous turn resolution and some method of having ships/fleets resolve combat at slight distances to compensate for this.  I can see it now, programming your ships to engage if anyone flies within strike range, or having them programmed to flee and conserving some of your movement for these eventualities.  However until the day that I see that, I'll be pretty happy with this electronic board game I think.

I meant to write a post about SE3 for a while now, in fact I started writing this one and ended up kicking off a new play by mail game of SE3 instead.

Games, whiskey and internet shows

I had a chance to play Eclipse and Agricola last night.  Both pretty good games.  Of the two, I think Agricola is the better game and I would be much interested in playing both of them again so that's a success I guess.  Agricola I bought like a year and a half ago at Hammercon with money I made selling a couple games I probably wouldn't be playing again.  I'd like to do more of that since I'm not as hung up on collecting as I am about having the right game available these days and I'm already making my list of 'trades' for the next con I go to.  It's been a thorn in my side to look over and see Agricola but not play it, and although I did do the usual learn the game run through, it hadn't clicked for me.  Now that I've had a chance to play it I know I will be bringing it out more.  I can see it as a light version of Le Havre in many ways - the shorter play time is a definite plus and the farming theme makes it more family friendly than the commodity theme (got to pick up some sheeples for this game, that would up the chances of playing it considerably) although I'd still probably want to play Le Havre if I had the time and the right group of players.

I don't think I'd buy Eclipse, at least not at it's current price.  It was a good game and I enjoyed it but I really thought the components were crap and although the mechanics were interesting I don't know if it's something I'd play over say Galactic Emperor.  Certainly not Twilight Imperium.  Ok, now that I've said that I can see how Eclipse has a more interesting research/upgrade mechanic than you see in most of these types of games.  If it had better components I'd probably buy it.  I played a three player game and it worked pretty well with three, the victory point mechanics offsetting the traditional last to fight wins the game problems so many three player war games have, so there is that.

I've also been sampling a number of single malt scotches in the last six months.  I made the mistake of cultivating the habit, and now I'm spending too much on it.  I started by trying a budget McClellands speyside single malt and it was alright but nothing special and I figured I just didn't like whiskey.  I much preferred a cheap bottle of St. Remy VSOP  or a dark rum.  However after buying a 12 year old Bowmore single malt on recommendation from a fellow at work, I realized that I really (really) like the single malts as long as they are good ones.  I like the peaty ones and Bowmore is my favorite as yet but I have been enjoying all of them quite a lot.  I've had a chance to sample about 8 or 9 different bottles now having worked my way through some Aberlour, Jura, Glenfiddich, Glenlivet, Glengoyne, Auchentoshan, and I just got a bottle of Glenrothes which I'm eager to try.  All these are in the low price range and between 8 and 12 years but are still  more than twice as much as I used to spend on a bottle of booze. I do like a good glass of whiskey now, which is something I don't think I would have said last year. I'm both interested and horrified to realize that I am now becoming very tempted to spend even more than that to try something like a 15 year old Laphroaig or a 18 year old Bunnahabhain.

I've been drinking that whiskey and watching a lot of CrashCourse on YouTube.  This is a series of short educational videos that are both interesting and entertaining.  I have waded though the world history and the literature and am onto the biology and chemistry.  I think that these are a wonderful example of the best of the internet, engaging content designed to be accessible and done with a genuine joy.  I have to salute these guys (the Green brothers and all the folks they have contributing to this) for doing something so valuable and then giving it away to the world instead of hiding it behind a pay wall or using it as fodder for a premium cable channel.  The old promise that television would be a revolutionary medium for educating the masses has not seemed to pan out so it's nice to see another medium take a shot and that quality educational content is being developed alongside the dancing cats and extreme cooking videos.  I think there is a conscious philanthropic component to this as well, likely it has something to do with their DFTBA (Don't Forget To Be Awesome) tagline.  Maybe I'm wrong about that and they are truly evil men in pursuit of unspeakable ends (the more terror connotation of the aforementioned "awsome"), but I am going to give them a big bravo regardless, since they are still very probably inspiring people, especially young people.  We can thank John Green for informing us that authorial intent means squat anyway.

Lots of the things

So yeah, a lot of good stuff happening in August.  Big news on the Mars rover landing - that was some wild engineering there and I am so proud to be species related to the humans that did that.  It was especially interesting that it occurred while the Olympics was on because it was so much in the spirit of the Olympics - oh wait it wasn't at all nationalistic commercial or vain.  It was inclusive and uplifting and an amazing human achievement.  Well it was in the spirit of the spirit of the Olympics then.  The thing they say is represents but really it totally doesn't - like Christmas.
Lots of good science is already trickling back from Mars then and it should be an interesting couple years hearing about it.  There's a great little blog called Mars Weather that reports the daily conditions from the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) on Curiosity.  There is always the NASA site and the Planetary Society site and oh so many places to get more in depth info than the crappy sound bites that you get in the mainstream news.

Other things that are pretty nice are the various Kickstarter things I kicked in for, including the Dungeon World kickstart, the Flaming Carrot kickstart.  I'm considering kicking in for the Planetary Annihilation kickstarter because I loved TA and Supreme Commander (not so much SC2 however.)  I picked up a set of GameScience Zocchi dice from Awesome Dice and they arrived quickly even shipped to Canada, so I am ready and eager to paint them up and play some Dungeon Crawl Classics when I'm not running this fall's Beacon campaign.  I'm also getting ready to fire up my mystery SciFi game (I better do a special post on that bit of business).

And I've been playing a bit of Organ Trail on my Android phone.  It's a remux of the Oregon Trail PC game from waaaaay back and has you driving your station wagon across the USA after the zombie apocalypse, taking odd jobs and trading for food and ammo and gas.  It's a pretty fun diversion that makes no attempt to play fair so there will be some satisfaction when I make it to the west coast.

Also here's the Game of Thrones theme sung by a cat:

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).

What the hell, why do you keep buying new games?

I like playing board games.

Ok there is more nuance to it than this.  I get a lot of feedback from my family and friends when I either buy a new game or when I try to get people to play a new game.  Mostly it comes from the fact that they can't figure out why I don't just play something they already know how to play.  Why the hell do you keep buying games when we hardly even get to play the ones you already have.

Two reasons:

1. Often the people around the table don't share the same game history so if I trot out something that one person knows how to play the others still don't know how to play it.  With a lot of games I like there is a learning curve and a play time limit that so the game you might love would be a bit of a problem to teach to 3 new players in the time we have.

2. Good gaming is based on the number of players, the length of a game, and the type of game you want to play at that time.  These might not be compatible and you might find yourself with 5 people and a great short war-game that would be perfect, but only supports 4 players.  Or you might find you have a game that is short, supports 5 players and is perfect for your buddies, but has elimination mechanics or is too backstaby to play with your neighbours.

So I'm always looking for a game to fill a specific niche.  And if I have a game that does this well - i'm looking for one that does it better or refines a popular niche to provide more options.  In fact these days where there are so many great looking boardgames getting made, I am primarily buying new games based on niches I want to cover rather than on the merits of the game itself.  I think that Alien Conquest is a great looking game but I have a lot of good fast 4 player games in the abstract category and so I can't quite justify buying it.  I think I would like to incorporate something like this concept into some game reviews.

For example, I love Twilight Imperium.  I love the space theme, the dice based combat and the resource management - but it's too long to play it very often and too heavy a commitment to set up for less than 5 players.   For two people in the same niche I wouldn't hesitate to pull out War of the Ring but it's really only great with two.  If I needed a comparable 5-6 player game to play a shorter time I'd pull out Galactic Emperor.  I don't have anything that really would fit a long heavy game for 3 people which is a shame.  For a short 3-4 player substitute I probably would pull out Nexus Ops - but it's not the perfect fit because it's pretty light, but I can't think or a comparable heavy 3 player game that fits in this niche (with 4 there are lots of 2 sided team options).  As for tone, I would not pull any of these games out if I was playing with the neighbours, and probably also not at a family Christmas game, because they involve some pretty direct conflict.  I would play them with the kids and the uncles, but not the grandmas or aunties.  A less confrontational resource themed game I would pull out in that case would be something like Small World or Endeavour (3-5 players) or Puerto Rico (4-5 players - I wouldn't play with 3).  What would I pull out for 6+ players in this situation?  7 Wonders probably, maybe Imperial if I had a couple players who I figured could deal with the complexity or had played before.  I think I have a gap in the library around a light indirect combat/resource management game for a pile of people - but at that point it's party game time usually anyway.

Anyway there are a pile of examples like this and I think that it would be interesting to document some of my games along this line.  I would have to figure out what the various axis the games fall across are because to be honest right now it's more a gut thing - like choosing where to go for lunch.

And they shall inhabit a new and glorious land

I go the Minecraft server set up.  I also got the Minecraft client to run on my younger daughter's laptop, which was surprisingly hard considering.  I used to play/program a game called crossfire and it had a java map editor and I managed to get that to run on a laptop with 32mb of ram.  Minecraft however balks at running well on a laptop with 1GB of ram and really the graphics are not a huge sight different*.

Run you poor bugger, run!

When I set up the server I had quickly rushed around to secure myself before nightfall and had build a small hold, which had gotten blown apart by a creeper. After barely surviving that night, I had built a much nicer hold in the side of a nearby mountain.  I also built a couple monuments with torches to mark deep holes to avoid in the dark and to investigate at a later time.  All in testing the server you realize...  Anyway, when my girls first appeared in the game world they spawned close to the ruins and they immediately looted the torches - the little rogues.  Everyone spawns in the same general area when they first start, or when they die, and that was in a field not too far from my mountain home.  I went out and led them back to the mountain hold and then explained a few basics of crafting to them, as well as handed out stone axes and swords.  I logged out and told them to go exploring and gathering food, but they started fighting right away and the older killed the younger one because she was digging holes in the hold wall.  She spawned back at the start and could not remember the way back and it was getting dark.  Much shouting could be heard over this, so I had to log back in and lead her back to the fort while avoiding the zombies.  It was pretty tense actually because it was also supper time so we had a deadline and could not afford to get killed again.  Despite this altercation, the kids liked the multi-player survival mode.  They asked their mother to join in but she politely declined, even with the promise of keeping her own chicken farm.

After supper we logged back in and I took my older daughter on a tour of the natural caves below the hold.  We packed a pile of torches and went exploring the deep, mining coal and a little iron as we found it.  We also fought a bunch of spiders, skeletons, zombies and a few creepers.  The caves were pretty extensive and we found a couple waterfalls and natural amphitheatres before we ran out of torches and had to turn back.  We were just using text to communicate and when I asked how she liked the caves her comment was "Scary".  Good scary I think, the finest kind of gaming brings immersion that gets your nerves tingling like this.  She wasn't playing Webkinz now!  We returned to the hold with our loot and I set her to refining the ore into iron while I ran out to get some food.  I found a herd of wild cattle in a nearby valley and returned to fry up some steaks on the stove.  I had enough iron to made iron helmets and iron swords for us.

Then it was bed time.

This was a lot of fun and I was thinking a lot about it.  Getting the kids involved in this kind of gaming is fun for me and I think it builds some procedural logic skills that will be useful for them.  I was very tempted to set up a home Crossfire server as well and let them run around on it.  I think that that game might have a bit too high a learning curve at the moment (tons of key bindings to keep up with the mostly text command parser), but I am certainly keeping it in my back pocket.  Crossfire was an excellent experience for me because it got me into the guts of team programming (especially exposure to C and Python), and I've taken a lot of those concepts into the workplace, even if I'm not doing much programming.  It will be interesting to see if they get into programming via video games like I did.

Oh yea, and the WASD control scheme will train them to play Left 4 Dead with me too!





*ok it is 3d and there is lighting effects but still it's all regular polygons here and Minecraft must have incredibly inefficient code to require so much RAM.

Minecrack

Behold a new and unspoiled land!

My oldest kid has been playing minecraft in her browser, that's how you play the older version.  She asked me if I could get her the new version with crafting in it and I thought that might be fun so I looked into it and picked up a copy.  I also picked up a copy of the portable version for android.  I also got the minecraft server so we could set up a shared instance to play on.  I also got a big needle full of smack ready to ween myself off this later, because it's super addictive.  I was 'testing it out' for her and I ended up testing most of the day.  I tested how to get killed by spiders and how to kill a chicken and how to run from zombies.  I tested getting wood and digging a safehole.  By the end of the day we were swapping recipes for torches and stoves and talking about the dangers of eating rotten meat and dark caves.  It's pretty fun.  I haven't got the server set up so we aren't doing multi-player and we have 4 different worlds going on at the moment, one on the tablet, one on my phone, and two on our computers.  The portable minecraft doesn't have crafting in it but it works very well - even on my phone.  On the Transformer Prime tablet it runs like snot.*  My daughter prefers creation mode but I'm hard into the survival.  There is a real story in there surviving your first night in a dark hole while the zombies shuffle just outside your makeshift wall of dirt.  Crafting refines that experience, gathering wood, finding coal and making my first torches was an amazing experience.  Penny arcade did the perfect cartoons for this:

I can see me and the kids sitting around with headsets on fortresses and building crap on our home minecraft server.  It must be said that it's a hell of a lot cheaper than Lego.





*that means good in case you didn't grow up in Northern Ontario.

Another take on Batman

Batman is great and all but I've never really bought into the fact that his super power is that he's a normal guy but just awesome.  That's really the opposite of a 'show don't tell kind of argument' because it's it all tell and all too often it's Batman doing something crazy (like dodging a light speed punch or whatever) and then the reader being told by another character how scary*/awesome Bats is, and that's why he can do it.  Ya I know there are good Batman stories but there are a lot of liberties taken with this too.  He's supposedly awesome because his parents were killed and this made him dedicated to training a lot.  Well unfortunately I think that happens a lot but it rarely makes other people awesome, more likely it makes them depressed.  Sure he trained a lot, but apparently he's the best martial artist/super hacker/detective/scientist/race-car driver/pilot ever.  So how does he train all that and still spend every night fighting crimes?  A lot of people in comics have had bad stuff happen to them (way badder than loosing their parents) or train a lot, and sometime it makes them awesome, but never as awesome as Batman.  I like Batman but I don't know how much I like it when this theme gets too grand and Batman becomes the Chuck Norris of the DCU.

I've been playing a lot of Arkham City lately.  It's great fun and I really feel like Batman zooming around the shadows and beating down goons.  But I'm also getting killed and falling in the water a lot and sometime I get thinking, this game makes me the exact opposite of Batman.  I'm playing the game and I need to swoop in and take down 15 guys, some with knives, and I get capped and Mark Hamill gets in some great voice acted Joker taunting.  Then I do it again.  This time I almost get them before I get slammed down by a thrown crate.  Once more.  OK this time I am the Bat and I take them clown faced mofos out!  Swinging across a electrified floor, parkour off a wall and land on the release switch to save the poor doctor lady?  No problem - just takes 4-5 tries to get it right.  If I'm really really (really) stuck I might look up something on the Internet (Hmmm, you can throw a 90 degree zip-line turn in mid air?  Cool I'm on it.) and my wife will make fun of me.  I just tell her "I am the Bat" and she tells me I sound more like Joe Pechi than Christian Bale.  I might not be the Chuck Norris of the DCU, but I still like saying "I am the Bat" when I finally get the moves right.

But maybe there's another way to think about this (and save my ego...).  This is also an idea if you want to play someone like Bats in an RPG.  So here's my take on Batman:

Instead of being super awesome just because everyone says he's super awesome, The Bat is super awesome because he's actually got the Leibniz "Best of all Worlds" super power to get things right.  He gets to redo things from the last save.  He gets the pause button and the Internet.  Ya, Batman is meta.  If he has to fight Darkseid you bet he's gonna be working it 12 times to get it right, maybe even scraping the forums for a walk-through.  It might take him all night but he's gonna get the moves right and knock ol' granite face into one of them Apokolips fire pits to save the day.  And Superman, Flash and Wonder Woman will never know about the other 11 times he got fried by Omega beams.  He'll put in the time and he plays a lot of videogames, you see his parents were killed and left him some cash.  He doesn't go out much, he took it kind of hard the poor guy.

On second thought you probably don't want to do this with Batman.  Interesting character, but not as fun anymore is it?

I like Arkham City a lot and can  recommend it as a great game, but I think I felt more like Batman playing Arkham Asylum.  It was a bit less over the top and I didn't feel like I was playing Simon type memory pattern matching game sometimes.  I might have been, but I didn't feel it as much.  I also think there was a real missed opportunity with the art.  I wish that they had dialed it back a notch so that everyone didn't look like Bane with necks and arms as thick as their legs.  And the ladies... The ladies are built like statues with massive boobs and butts made of marble, but they have no charm at all - zero, which is too bad.  It would have been great with a bit more of the Animated Series style physical expression to match all the great voice acting in the game.  Arleen Sorkin and Bruce Timm Harley Quinn is such a fantastic voice/image package.  I do like the Joker and Riddler game models though.



 *I like in Arkham City the Joker quips to his henchman that Batman hasn't even managed to kill anyone yet.

**If you have a feeling of deja vu, don't worry.  This post was moved from my Beacon blog to this one on account of it fits in here better.

From the journal of Weilheim Krombach

This is an post session account written from the perspective of a character in a Trail of Cthulhu game.  It details events occurring after the game sessions and references other characters from those sessions.  I wrote it after waking in the wee hours of the morning and it was pretty much formed in my mind with the exception of some adhoc historical references I researched to bring verisimilitude to the tale.

From the journal of Weilheim Krombach:

January 6th, 1933

It is a cold morning and the land lady is still refusing to turn the heat up.  I am beginning to regret leaving my previous apartments, however it was unavoidable, and to look back is not productive.  I consider the funds saved are being redirected into much more profitable pursuits than mere creature comfort.  I have confidence that Mr. Monroe is as good as his fees would suggest and he will soon ascertain the location of Miss C.  

However despite mild physical discomforts, I am eager to get started today.  Of the two distillations, the second is most promising.  Subject A is responding as usual to the drug, however yesterday Subject B was able to make quite detailed drawings of the mysterious male figure in their shared hallucination.  His progress, is remarkably swift as he was only recently remanded into my care.  I found his illustration quite flattering in fact, he has some measure of artistic talent.  Of the unusual doglike entities however neither man is yet able to clearly recall their specific dimensions or aspect.  I think a slight increase in the dosage may yield insights without undue risk, although I believe Subject A should soon be started on morphine as a counter to opiate habituation.   I am still unsure how both subjects can have such accord in the details of their respective experience, however the crime scenes did display a corresponding similarity, especially as to the manner of traumas suffered by the unfortunate victims.  

As to that, while being somewhat biased against Mr. Moon, I nevertheless would not wish such a fate on any man. The horrific wounds speak to a killer of tremendous savagery and have made such an impression on both men that they to this day will not sit against any wall but instead will remain firmly in the centre of any closed room, even without chair or light.  Subject B retains such a fear he will not even let his gaze fall upon the corners of a room.  I hypothesize that experiencing the death, no say murder, of his employer without any benefit of companionship is the reason that Subject B exhibits the stronger neurosis and possibly why he is responding much more strongly to the Black Lotus.  Perhaps even the sad company afforded by my unfortunate cadre, incoherent and unconscious as we were at the time, was the shred of leavening that allowed Mr. Cameron to retain his sanity where his poor doppelgänger did not.

Thankfully I have not as late received any call from the police department.  Either it has been a peaceful winter, or inspector Fellows has sought another forensic consultant.  I find myself relieved as I do not think I could again work closely with that man, and so thankfully have not yet had to find an excuse to decline an invitation to do so.  Besides, my current work seems so much more important.  Finding common psychotic imagery I have been re-reading Jung's Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido and finding new respect for his work which I had previously dismissed as puerile.  I have heard he is planning a trip to America next year or the year after and I would greatly like to discuss my research with him on that occasion.

The fellow from the Durant Motor company has still been unable to find a replacement dashboard for my automobile.  He has told me the line has been sold to Dominion Motors and I must now contact his counterpart in Canada, which I am loath to do.  I would prefer to avoid returning to Toronto if at all possible.

612

Introduced in 1930, the 112 inch wheelbase, model 612 featured a 58 horsepower six-cylinder engine, A.C. oil filter and the"Pullman attachment". The "Pullman attachment" converts the interior of the car into a reclining couch.
Fact sheet: 1930, 1931.

The kick off

I wanted to kick things off with something everyone is interested in so that people reading this blog for the first time will get a sense of inclusiveness and feel they belong in my target demographic.  So I'm going to say a few things about my passion for Morris Dancing.

 

Morris Dancing in Oxford

Actually I don't know dick about Morris Dancing.  I mean I don't have anything against it, I think it's great and everything, but I was just putting it in there to show how this blog isn't going to be another blog about Beacon or Old School RPGs or anything.

However, you know who does like Morris Dancing?  Scott Nicholson from Board Games with Scott likes Morris Dancing. Scott does board game reviews online and they are great. I bought Die Macher based on his review/walk through of it as well as Imperial by Rio Grande games.  I'm still looking for a copy of Indonesia which looks sweet.  I like boardgames and there are so many good and bad ones out there it's very helpful to me to have people who review them and especially reviews that outline how the game plays.  A couple other good board game reviewers I try to keep up with are Tom Vassal and Matt Drake.  Tom Vassal loves games and the videos and reviews on his site The Dice Tower show it.  Matt Drake is a is a bit of alright as well, and has a good game review blog (more edgy than Scott or Tom - he often mentions things like 'crack hookers'  - you've been warned) called Drake's Flames.

I like boardgames and I'll be writing about them in the future but I wanted to draw some attention to these fellows who, in addition to the Board Game Geek website, are probably the primary sources I go to when sussing out if I'll add a new game to my library.