[clicky clicky clicky]
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Love the Apollo rocket!
Never heard of Antike II, but it looks very much like something I would like to play. I am such a sucker for good old maps…
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It’s by Mac Gerdts (Imperial, Imperial 2030) so it has his characteristic roundel mechanism. And the board is double-sided: Mediterranean on one side, Anatolia and Asia on the other.
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I’m not sure if we’re going to separate out solo games from multiplayer games, but for the time being, I’ll talk about: Black Sonata
I did a print-and-play production for Black Sonata and it turned out… okay? I’m very happy with some aspects and very disappointed with other aspects. I may do another production of the game if/when I get some better tools (such as a guillotine/tracked roller paper cutter… or even better: the laser cutter my dad is talking about buying and sharing with me). Since printing the game, I’ve played 3 times now and won all but the 1st game. I actually got frustrated by a lack of sophisticated note-taking-instrumentation, so I designed and printed a visual guide to all of the possible combinations of clues, and then also a notebook to track the movement of the Dark Lady; then I laminated both (I’m really enjoying having a laminator!). The end result of my improved tooling: I broke the game- it’s trivial to track the dark lady and I will need to add in some of the expansion content in order to make the game challenging again.
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I’m back, with an underscore.
Got beat at Silver and Gold by my 7 year old. the 3 year old did a fab job as chief card flipper.
Proceeded to get my own back later in Monster Baby Rescue
Does running an rpg count?
On Saturday I ran a session of my several years old GURPS campaign. This is “historical fantasy,” though “anthropological fantasy” might be more accurate; it’s in a world where technology ranges from Paleolithic to Bronze age, the magical traditions are spirit-based and often shamanistic, and there are seven races, all hominid, from the 3’ dwarves to the 8’ trolls. The player characters are a ghoul, two nixies, a selkie, and a troll who’ve teamed up to sail to distant lands and open up trade.
This latest session was fun because I twice blew the players’ minds. The selkie character, the ship captain, who is female but disguises herself as male to avoid being hunted down in vengeance for her previous career as a pirate, visited a selkie town with a different culture, hoping to recruit an apprentice or two who could carry on trade, and discovered that the male selkies were making a point of introducing her to their daughters—including at least one daughter who was anatomically male. The troll character, the ship’s doctor, who is female and presents as such, got into a discussion with some dwarves she was trading with, suggesting that a dwarf might travel with her ship and learn one or more of its languages; the dwarves brought out a smaller dwarf and then conveyed by gesture that the smaller dwarf wanted to know who on the ship it would be expected to marry; this led to the troll using spirit magic to actually talk with the dwarves and explain that this would be a loan rather than a trade and no marital aspect would be involved.
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Scrabble. I beat my sister 301 to 242, drawing ahead 3 to 2 in our April series.
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Sorry, gents - you posted these as I was moving the rest to the other thread, so I missed them.
Yes. (In theory we could have a separate thread for RPGs, and if there are lots of them I’ll do that, but no need yet.)
I wonder whether this is the Campbellian maxim applied to culture - show me an alien that behaves as complexly as a generic-WEIRD-human, but differently.
Among the “classic” board games, this is probably my favourite, though I’m not very good at it.
I think it may be a further step. I learned a long time ago that if I want to portray alien behavior, I can base it on things I’ve read about actual human cultures, which often include behavior exotic enough to baffle players who don’t read as much history or anthropology as I do. What I’m doing in Tapestry is having multiple different cultures for each race, so that members of a race can be baffled by other members of the same race. None of the Tolkienian “oh, you’re a dwarf, and all dwarves do so and so” effect.
Not that Tolkien was trying for the distancing effect that I want in this campaign. Or not as much; he had a little of it in The Hobbit.
The part with the selkies is very much “encounter members of your own race who have a different culture.” The part with the dwarves comes back to “encounter members of a different race”; the players haven’t figured out that dwarf sociality is partly modeled on that of naked mole rats. (Though there are elements of crustacean fortress eusociality in the way they defend their mines.)
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Yes, fair point - having monocultural non-humans is a lazy approach, ending up with elves as a proxy for 19th-century Prussians or whatever.
Yes, and I’m a big fan of “I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more” as a literary effect.
I don’t know if I have a favorite classic game. The board game I love more than any other is Settlers of Catan, but it may be too recent to be “classic.” It wasn’t around in my childhood, or my college days. . . .
One of my Scrabble sets was my parents’. It is older than I am.
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Quality Mac Gerdts game! I need to play that more, along with Imperial. Concordia will have to take the bench.
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Had a one on one game of Arboretum with my older daughter last night. She was willing to have all trees in, so I conceded (with a smirk)
Soon we realised how tricky it is if you skip the odd number, you soon run out of places to plant trees (to your advantage, that is) with so many cards. The massacre was abysmal. I won’t say the score, but I did drop at the end a: “That’s why there re rules…”
I call that parenting.
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221B Baker Street
and Trainmaker
Finished up the second mission in the Return to Hoth campaign for Imperial Assault using the app. Man, this was a long mission. Sure, we did an encounter first, but that only too 5 mins or so. We started a little before 9 and only wrapped up just after 11:30. And we weren’t dallying, as if we did, we got perils which damaged us, so we were going as fast as we could. It just kept going and going.
We succeeded, though my character got wounded just before we finished the objective. My brother-in-law rolled for a wampa attack and just hammered me when I was already almost out of health. My wife had partially checked out about halfway through, but did do well when it came to doing her turns.
Hopefully the other missions aren’t quite as long, as it is near impossible for us to start any earlier than 8:30 because of our kids.
EDIT: Forgot to mention that my wife and I played a game of Azul Tuesday evening. We were both rather distracted, me with the forum(s) and her with Animal Crossing.
I was the less distracted, however, as I won, 61 - 29.
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I played a game of 1889 (a freely available printable-andable-playable 18xx game that will be getting a retail production run soon). I think through most of the game, my opponents thought I was in the lead but in the end, it was (SUSD forum member) EnterTheWyvern that pulled the, rightfully won, win.
It was the first 18xx game I’ve played and it was a fantastic introduction to the subgenre. 1889 is a 1830-clone and, as such, has a very tight tileset and a good amount of stock-market-manipulation-for-personal-gain. My best efforts to use the stock market to manipulate turn order nearly worked out but ultimately wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the game if it had.
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Yesterday, in the name of making progress on my 10 x 10 challenge, I convinced 4 friends to play Tzolk’in with me on boiteajeux.net. Turns out that 5-player Tzolk’in takes a looong time, but it was fun anyway. We played with the Tribes and Prophecies expansion - none of us were too convinced by the prophecies, which add incentives for completing certain actions during different phases of the game, but the extra asymmetry added by the tribes was interesting.
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As my copy of Street Masters finally arrived, I decided that I would sort the core box, and give solo a try (using the recommended setup from the rule book).
First attempt was a failure! 2 turns in and I hung up the towel. Nothing against the game, I’m just not really a solo gamer, but thought this might be the one.
We’ll, a few hours passed and I thought I would try again…this time to a fair amount of success. I was able to bring down the boss for the win, without too much trouble (though I played a bit reckless and could have gone down too).
I know many people find that if they win a coop on their first go, they loose interest. While I understand that sentiment with most games, given the modular nature of the game, and this being the most basic setup, I’m not too worried. I also think the cards were coming up in my favour (I also may have gotten a rule or two wrong, I’m not sure! Lol).
Overall, I’m excited to dig in more, and extremely hyped for when I finally get to play it with my boy!!!
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