RPGs, board games… anything I do for fun, with other people, with clothes on.

Last year for Christmas, L got me a “retro” Monopoly set, with the original tokens, wooden houses and hotels, and generally a more compact feel than newer sets. It’s pretty cute, in other words, plus it feels a little more… I don’t know, can a Monopoly set feel mature? In any case, we played a two-person game exactly once and then set it aside. I knew, though, that she harbored a hankerin’ to play again. Skip ahead many moons, and we’re now part of a fairly stable clique of three couples who get together and play games. L floated a game of Monopoly to the crew, and they agreed that it’d be worth a try.

Man! Six-player Monopoly is a whole different kettle of fish. For pete’s sake, somebody had developed a complete set before the first go-’round was completed by anyone! Sly dog, but as he himself predicted he over-extended himself and went down in 4th or 5th place. Deals flew across the table rapidly, egged on by everyone’s relative rustiness at the game and inexperience with it in general. In other words, some awful trades were made.

My own series of early turns lead to some pitiful opportunities, and I never had more than three properties to my name… [click to continue...]

Just one more game, honest...

The brilliant xkcd published this comic awhile back. I knew it to be true instantly (me and a million others, it’s not hard to see the artists’ smarts) but I couldn’t remember a specific game that had caught me recently.

Well, pshaw. I’ve found a game that I cannot get enough of, and like all good disease carriers I must now bite your elbow innocuously so that you may keel over and die.

Yes, I’m too fond of metaphors.

The game in question is Curveball. It’s blessedly simple. In rough 3D, you are playing a Pong-like game against an AI opponent. Just like in Pong, you win a point by getting the ball past the other player. Unlike in pong, you’re playing in a rectangular tube, so the ball can bounce off of four walls as it goes back and forth. Last and most crucial, the physics engine allows for ridiculous amounts of english to be applied to the ball, making for some hair-raising exchanges as you progress.

Give it a try for yourself and see what I mean.

Click to Play!

Early screenshot from Elemental

Hot diggity damn.

Stardock, after teasing us for more than a year, has officially announced that they are producing a spiritual successor to the classic Master of Magic. The new title, Elemental: War of Magic, does not actually build off of the MoM license. However, MoM was a Magic: the Gathering / Civilization double rip-off with just enough differences to avoid the infringement police, so turn-about is fair play. :p More on the game in a moment.

Stardock, you may or may not recall, was the software development company that mostly did applications, with gaming as a kind of sideline hobby. Then, they released Galactic Civilizations II without any DRM. A Russian company that makes DRM then pointed to torrents of Stardock’s game as proof that piracy was a problem in their own forums. Widely seen as a blatant extortion attempt along the lines of “you sure got a lot of nice stuff here, be a shame if somebody started a fire or sumthin’,” the story went huge in the geekosphere (slashdot, digg, etc…) which had the secondary effect of giving far more publicity to GalCiv than Stardock ever would have paid for. Since the game was awesome, this led to massive sales and, almost overnight, Stardock was a major game company. Their latest game, Sins of a Solar Empire, has also been rapturously received (it’s a hybrid 4x/RTS, and I don’t have the twitch reflexes for RTSes, so I’ve sadly passed).

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Apple to Apples: the Apple Crate Edition

I recently met a new couple that I really like, and they live incredibly close to me. It so happens that another couple with whom my partner and I have been friendly also live close by, and we’ve all said to each other at different times that we should hang out more than we do. So, what the hell, I introduced them to each other and suggested that we all get together. In the back of some of the involved minds is a similar thought: “D&D Group!” But that’s not something you just jump into, so we’re getting started with simpler games first. It’s been almost a decade since I’ve had to host a gathering where a bag of dice wasn’t all I needed to entertain; how’d it go?

I knew everyone involved was a game-player to one degree or another, so at least I had some hints. It also was not a dinner party, so food was simple enough. I peeled and cut some carrots, opened up some great Dorito-like chips for Trader Joe’s, got out some pretzels, and chilled some wine and soda. Simple enough. Now to pick games, and here’s where I made my only serious mistake. The game I led off with was Twitch, a Richard Garfield game that’s sort of a mix between Uno and War (or Egyptian Rat Fuck, or any other speed-based card game you can think of). The thing is, while the rules are fundamentally simple, it’s a difficult game to be any good at right off the bat, leading to a lot of frustration for all but the savviest game players. I wasn’t even that good at it, as it’s a game I’ve admired but almost never had a chance to play. We gave it a few minutes, I took stock of the grimaces and frowns, and pulled it off the table.

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The party has a date in the evening with “Doffel,” where Phon’s attackers are supposed to get paid for killing the girl. Several hours before the meeting, they decide to scout the location (a functioning warehouse that will be shuttered in the evening). Sebastian, and his player J, manages to impress his party members with the ease with which he climbs up a neighboring building, jimmies open a locked window, and slips inside to scout around. (While J is as popular as anybody in our little gang, he has somehow become the punching bag for jokes over the years. Earning the group’s admiration is no small thing for him…) He reports back that the warehouse is one big open space, with a quasi-2nd story comprised of a ring of office space that still leaves the center of the building open from floor to ceiling. The facility houses mercantile goods that are neither sexy enough to steal nor flammable enough to be a problem. (That may or may not be deep foreshadowing.)

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With a good bit of digging around (aka Gather Information and a bit of roleplay) our band of intrepid heroes narrows down Irontusk’s location to the a series of wharfs in The Docks district. hey also find out a little bit about him, including a) he calls himself Irontusk more than anyone else calls him that (he’s a silkaarg who has capped one of his tusks with… wait for it!… iron), he’s a minor criminal type with dreams of grandeur, and he runs… well, some kind of business or other as a front-cum-hedge against downturns in the crime markets. They high-tail it to the general area and start asking around as discreetly as they can.

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As I said last time, the party is mostly on speaking terms at this point, and they’ve swung a gig trying to keep some thugs from getting their paws on an innocent young lady named Phon. They handle this chore admirably, only to discover that she’s actually the target of an assassination, not just a girl attracting the wrong sort of attention. Phon has no clue who would try to have her killed, so the party stows her away in Sasara’s flat, “encourage” the assailants to lay low for a few days, and make plans to derail the meet-up with the assailants’ employer that’s to occur in two days time.

WARNING: In addition to spoiling Ptolus Chapter 33, I’ll now be spoiling Mad God’s Key from Dungeon Magazine, although I significantly altered it for my purposes.

The next morning, bright(ish) and way-too-early, Sebastian wakes up to a banging on his door. An old friend, Theldrat, is in a panic. See, Sebastian’s “day job” is as a locksmith, and the ’smiths have an informal association with each other; there aren’t really enough of them for a Guild, but they stick together by their own devices. Theldrat is a senior member of this community, following in his father’s trade. Anyway, Theldrat wakes Sebastian up with a plea for help - he’s been woken up himself to a warning that his shop is being broken into even as he speaks to Sebastian.

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Our intrepid heroes come together again, with 100% attendance to boot. After a bit of discussion they decide that, despite the significant depletion in resources (i.e. spells and potions) they would bravely push on into the Temple. Bless their souls! No, really, they need it.

The darkness would prove difficult to navigate for lesser bands, but half of this party has darkvision and Aten (the NPC priestess of Gaen) bears a permanent light source, so it isn’t so bad. At least, not until they stumble upon magical darkness in the first passageway. They work around that as best they can, scouting out what turns out to be a rough loop. There is a door set into one wall, and they also discover a secret door. Sebastian the “locksmith” decides to handle the secret door first, whereupon he is struck by a poisoned needle that he overlooked. Losing 5 points of CON in just a few minutes (failed the primary and secondary damage saves), the party quickly changes its mind about pressing on and they work out a retreat. Before leaving, however, they check out the room he nearly died for. They discover that it is full of bodies, whose disposition leads them to believe they are culled from the streets of Ptolus.

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If you saw my posts on Thursday and Friday, you know I was going into this session with some trepidation. Sure enough, before I even left for game an email went out from one of the players, saying he had a headache and wouldn’t make it. Now, no offense to J., who I’m sure did really have a headache, but that’s exactly the sort of thing that, if we had some serious momentum going, he most likely would have taken some asprin and tried to make it. No doubt he would have been lower affect than usual, but everybody would have been glad to see him, and I bet being with people would have made him feel better.

And boy, they could have used him this week.

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