games

Sunday Night Gaming Captures An Alien

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I’ve long enjoyed James Nicoll’s Wednesday Night Gaming posts, so I thought I’d rip off pay homage to the idea by writing up our semi-weekly FATE game, which we’ve just started.

The setting: In the very near future, Earth is invaded by an alien race, called the Xenari, bent on genocide. We would never have driven them away without the help of a friendly alien race called the Shai’lun, who lent us advanced weapons, ships, and apostrophes.

It’s been a few years since the Xenari have been driven away, but a great deal of infrastructure is still unfinished. Also, local political figures are now beholden to corporate interests–corporations are pretty much in control now. The United States exists mostly as an idea of something people used to have; as a nation, it’s all but over. The Xenari are mostly gone, but the Shai’lun have stayed, mostly in orbit, as friendly but standoffish assistants.

The characters: Continue reading

Randomness for 7/9

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1) Dungeons & Dragons and the Influence of Tabletop RPGs | Off Book | PBS Digital Arts Video

2) Camera allows you to see parkour from the POV of the traceur. Video.

3) Cartoon rejection rates at the New Yorker. Includes a TEDTalk of course because New Yorker.

4) A Visual Guide To The Mastery Of Kirk-Fu.

5) Extremely unfortunate spelling mistakes on Twitter.

6) How to live with introverts, a comic.

7) I need NEED to become an incredibly wealthy person solely so I can purchase one of these. My wife and kid can have one, too.

Randomness for 7/1

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1) Mars Rover takes a billion-pixel photo so you can click and zoom around in it to explore the red planet.

2) How To Use Math To Crush Your Friends At Monopoly Like You’ve Never Done Before.

3) A series of photographs showing various types of rounds cut in the cross-section. Way more interesting than it sounds.

4) Beautiful kinetic sculptures. Video.

5) An offer of free lodging always has some kind of catch to it, right? (People are weird)

6) The Ten Best Superhero RPGs ever. I’m not obsessed with them like the author of this article and I certainly haven’t played all the games on this list, but I agree with his top two.

7) If movies were reviewed like video games.

Randomness for 6/3

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1) Thinking of getting a tattoo? An infographic.

2) BMX Parkour. Video. So totally cool.

3) Cat Whack A Mole. Only ten bucks.

4) “The Moon Moth” a short story by recently departed author Jack Vance. According to Neil Gaiman, it’s “a perfect short story.”

5) Dungeon Bastard lays down the final word on D&D edition wars. Video. via @lilyorit

6) Heroes and Villains (Common Grounds) A terrific comic.

7) The Douche to English Dictionary, with a special emphasis on dating profiles.

Get Thee Behind Me, LEGO Marvel Video Game!

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While I’m on my internet fast, I give you this:

Yeah, I’ll be getting that. I’m still playing the hell out of LOTR, trying to be a completist, so I guess I have until next Giftmas to wrap it up.

Finally got to play Race to Adventure last night

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Now that season one of Veronica Mars is over, the family finally had a chance to play RACE TO ADVENTURE, which I backed as a Kickstarter.

Here’s the layout near the start of the game. Of course I played Prof. Khan.

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You can see I’ve collected the passports for the USA and Switzerland, while to the right my son has collected USA and GB. However! I am about to collect Nepal in that very turn, while my son was hoarding clues at the Library of Congress.

Yeah, that’s my kid giving the thumbs up.

My wife… I’m not sure what she was doing. Let’s just say she had a busy day and wasn’t concentrating too well.

Here we are at the end of the game, when I had returned to the Century Club, said (house rule: no shouting) “I have returned!” and won the game.

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The others also collected all of their passports (and rescued the prisoner from Atlantis) but, having saved Egypt for last, they were still cursed. They were also way behind. Mwah-ah-ah-ah!

As for the game, it was terrific. I think I’d like to play it once or twice more on the tan side of the tiles before flipping them to the more advanced “shadow” game. We stumbled a little bit with the rules at first, like we do with every game, but by the end the turns were flying by. This might be the first game ever that says it takes 30 minutes to play and really means it.

The nice thing is that there’s no luck involved (no blowing your plans because of a lousy roll of the die) and the strategy elements were light but still effective. It’ll be a good fast game when we just want to play something fun without a ton of calculation.

On a day when the news was filled with blood, horror, and people coming together to help each other in dire need, it was good to sit with my family and play a game.

I have something you don’t, board game edition

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According to the UPS tracking website, sometime today a person in a brown uniform will pitch a box at my front door and run off without seeing where it lands, and inside that box will be a copy of Race to Adventure.

That’s my Kickstarter reward arriving, but the good news is that you can order one for yourself if you like. If you don’t know what that is, it’s the board game based on the rpg that also spawned my next novel, KING KHAN which means that the protagonist of my book should be a playable character.

FYI.

Randomness for 4/8

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1) Homemade “Romance Pants”. Has to be seen to be believed.

2) Ten of the Most Beautiful Libraries Ever Built (in Minecraft).

3) The 12 Most Controversial Facts In Mathematics. I dunno how I feel about the title but the article is cool.

4) “Are you a ‘Single Interested in Michael Crichton?’ Meet the love raptors stalking OkCupid.”

5) 15 Mid-Century Modern Dream Homes that will Kill Your Children. Via James Nicoll

6) An anti-drone hoodie designed to hide your thermal signature from above.

7) Plewds, Hites, and Indotherms: Terms for the graphic language of cartooning. I’d heard of grawlixes before, but the others were names for things I didn’t even know had names. Very cool.

Randomness for 3/10

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1) “World’s Greatest Armchair” refills your beer automatically.

2) Six Board Games That Ruined It For Everyone. We own three of the six games they recommend as replacement games, and they’re awesome.

3) Inventors can stop inventing now. The pinnacle of all technology has been achieved.

4) Women vs Tropes in Video Games: Damsel in Distress. Video.

5) You may only kill a Yeti in self-defence.

6) Garage full of art turns out to be worth $30 million.

7) A Mississippi newspaper addresses reader reaction to a story they ran on a same-sex marriage.

EMP followup

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Remember last week when I mentioned that I had taken my family to an EMP event to see a specific panel and the room was so packed we missed it? No? Well, you better click on that link then.

I never did get an email back, but I did get a phone call. The dude was quite apologetic and very nice. Unfortunately, there was no recording of the event; apparently the companies many of the presenters work for had a bug up their butt about what could be recorded and what art they were going to show. Understandable, really, except that the panel we wanted was two local educators, so I suspect they would have been cool with a camcorder or two, but never mind. It’s done.

On the plus side, EMP intends to refund the cost of the tickets.

That’s very nice of them. While they might have made an error in planning their event, their customer service was pretty great.