Several things inspired me to update the look of Pawns ‘n Dice. First there was a post on SmashingMagazine.com listing a bunch of WordPress themes, secondly I’ve always liked a dark background, and finally I rendered the little pawn and die in the corner there in Blender and wanted to do something with it!

Anyway, hope you like the new look. But wait, there’s more! The RPG community is growing at All Things Fun! and I’m spearheading an effort to get groups together once a month or so to demo sessions.  Our first session is Monday January 28th, with Jim Wakemen running an exciting Indiana Jones type GURPS adventure. We’ll mainly be using the forums over at the All Things Fun! website, but I’ll update here with session reports and upcoming games.

2008 promises to be an exciting year all around for me, and I have a feeling that this site is going to be a good part of it.

Monday morning I tore myself from my Xbox and Mass Effect and ventured out into the cold to All Things Fun. There I met with two of my gaming buddies and finally played through an entire session of StarCraft. It was the first time I’d been able to play a full game and I think it went pretty well. All in all it took us about a half hour to get set up while going over the basic rules, and about another two hours to play through the game. Of course, this is after I had already spent three hours popping out all the little cardboard bits and inventorying and examining all of the figures for damage. Placing each factions’ bits in their own bag really helped to speed up the setup time. If someone got this game and just dumped all the pieces in the box then I would not want to play with them. I’m sure it would take over an hour just to divvy out all the bits.

Since there were three of us we only needed six planets, which made the universe look a little small compared to the grandiose six player, 12 planet demo I played earlier. I think next time I may throw in an extra planet or two, just to make it a little more expansive. It was still very interesting though, and for our first real game it seemed well balanced and went very smoothly.

If you’ve never played or looked at the rules before, StarCraft:TBG is played by laying out four orders per turn, one at a time going around the table. The orders are placed face down on the planet where they will be executed and can’t be looked at once they are placed. The orders are stacked and then played one at a time from the top, so the last order placed on a planet will be the first one played. If I want to move units from one planet to another then I would place a mobilize order on the planet I’m moving to. Someone else can place an order on top of the one I just put down, keeping me from playing mine until they decide to play theirs.

I screwed myself over a few times with the reverse order placement, placing a mobilize order before my build order, making it impossible to build anything because there were no units mobilized to the planet, but for the most part we all did well in keeping everything straight. I think we all agreed that predicting what someone is going for and blocking their orders is an important strategy, especially when end game is near.  I basically lost an entire turn because of one opponent’s order sitting on top of mine until it was too late and my perfectly laid plan was ruined.

The game is really fun, and I think it’ll only get better the more I play it. There are so many ways that you can position yourself for success and several ways you can keep the opposition down. You have to balance defending your resources and expanding to gain victory points with taking out the other players and ruining their plans. On top of all that you need to be concerned with how fast the game clock is going. There is an event card deck that is split into three stages. Players draw cards from the event deck for various reasons throughout the game, and it is important because each faction has a special victory condition that if it is met when you hit the stage three cards, they win. So if you happen to reach your special victory goal then you may decide to start taking event cards instead of enacting your orders, burning the deck faster to gain victory. When that happens the other players need to drop what they’re doing and try to stop it.

In our game, one of the players gained a major lead in victory points, so I swooped in to uproot a group of his units occupying an important section of a planet. I almost succeeded, but immediately after he drew the last stage two event card, moving us into stage three. He had also met his special victory and won. If I had changed one aspect of my plan during the turn setup then I would have easily taken over that sector and dismantled his victory condition. If we had had a few more games under our belts, I probably would have noticed that the event deck was getting thin and paid more attention to the other player’s special victory conditions. I also would have realized that it would be impossible for the group I sent to destroy his three units in one shot and placed another mobilize on his planet for a second attack to finish the job.

As any good strategy game should be, StarCraft is all about, well, strategy. Very little chance comes into it, with the exception of your combat cards, which you draw randomly. But even they can be controlled somewhat. Your combat deck is not very large and you can draw from it by playing a research order. When a battle ensues you pick which cards from your hand you wish to play. Other than that, it’s all pretty much in front of you to see, so if you lose then it’s probably because the other player beat you, not because you were unlucky. I think the hardest part for the players is that there are a lot of pieces and several decks of cards each player needs to keep at the ready, so your personal play area gets crowded really quickly. You need a big table to make it work.

StarCraft is a keeper, and next time you better believe I’ll be paying closer attention to the end game approaching and everyone’s special victory conditions.

Hurray for the holidays!

Now added to my list of ready to play at the drop of a hat are:

Carcassonne - A fairly easy and very enjoyable tile laying game, Carcassonne is a staple every board game enthusiast should own. It’s one of the easiest games to introduce newcomers to the euro game genre with and is the source of the now universally recognized term ‘meeple’ for the little bits that represent your people. Oh, and don’t forget to make farmers, everyone underestimates the points gained from farmers until it’s too late.

Arkham Horror - Fantastic game of teamwork and survival in a bleak and foreboding Lovecraftian world (and outer worlds). It’s a great game of battling monsters, managing your resources and stats, trying not to go insane, and eventually if you’re lucky you get a chance to fight which ever Great Elder One that is behind all the havoc. Of the six or so games I’ve played I think the players ended up winning about three. It’s definitely an underdog story if you make it, which makes the endgame battle either pretty exciting or very depressing when you finally get to it and realize that you either have a shot at winning or that there is no possible way you can defeat the big baddie.

StarCraft: The Board Game - Ooooh boy, I’ve yearned for this one since I first played a demo at All Things Fun. Unfortunately, it would have been impossible to justify to my wife why I needed a board game that costs $80 and whose most optimistic projections for playing would be once every few months. Luckily Santa understands. With three different races represented by 180 plastic figures and a seemingly endless number of little cardboard bits, this is my kind of game. The game requires quite a bit of strategy and is a ton of fun. In line with its RTS roots, you must build bases and upgrade your technologies in order to build stronger and more effective units. Once you’ve amassed an army it’s time to go and take over other planets, wiping your opponents from the universe. It’s a diceless combat system, which makes the game more about strategy and less about lucky rolling. Because you have to lay out your next four actions all at once, there’s a lot of strategy involved in trying to guess what other people will be doing and where everything will fall out by the end of the round. All in all, a fantastic and well thought out strategy game that with the right group of people looks like it could be a very exciting time.

I hope you all had as much luck as I did!

So I’ve been listening to these design focused podcasts lately and it’s gotten me really thinking about game design. I’ve always been interested in designing games, but up until now my focus has been on computers. In fact, developing little computer games for my friends and I is how I taught myself programming, now my full time profession. The more I play card and board games the more I think there’s something there worth exploring. I’m a creative person and even if I don’t end up making a thing in the end it’s hard for me to be this involved in something without at least taking a peek behind the curtain.

So the juices are flowing and I have a couple of ideas I’m mulling over. My initial thought, and what got me started on this whole path, is a dungeon building and exploration card game that I’ll post up here in a bit. I showed the concept to a few people I game with and several similar games have since been brought to my attention. This is going to be an unavoidable problem. If you can think it up, you can be pretty sure that someone has already created the definitive version of your idea. Now I have to think about it a bit and decide if I can twist my idea and make it different enough to not look like a complete rip-off, or if I should just go with another idea all together.

I have a couple other concepts lingering in the back of my mind, so I think I’m going to start poking around in the tank to see what comes out. Hmm, that probably would have made more sense I I have started with my analogy.. Big ideas are very much like little fish in a tank. You can see them clear as day from the outside. They look like they’d be so easy to catch. But as soon as you reach in to grab one they scatter and it’s next to impossible to snatch one up and hang onto it. Hopefully making my ideas at least somewhat concrete by posting them here will create a net large enough to snag one.

I’m going to focus on card games for now, mostly because I know what it would take to produce one better than a board game and if I happen to come up with something worth taking all the way through to production, I want to think that I could. I also really love the idea of a big game in a little card box and think there may be more fresh ideas in that space to explore.

And with that, off we go on another wild adventure!

I’ve got about an hour commute to work these days, and I do what I can to fill the void. In between sing-a-longs with Bob Dylan and the Wu-Tang Clan I like to listen to lots of podcasts. This past week I just came across a couple more that I think are worth mentioning here.

First off we have Have Games, Will Travel. Paul Tevis is a freelance writer and game reviewer. His podcast has been around since 2005 and with over 100 shows, there’s lots of material there to catch up on. It’s a very professional sounding show, with high quality recording, and his manner of speaking and show pacing testify to his experience.

The other podcast I’ve come across is Ryan Macklin’s Master Plan. If you have any interest in game design or writing then his show is a great resource. Ryan has a lot of insightful stuff to talk about and about every other episode he conducts an interview with a published game designer talking about their processes and personal views on gaming. Even if you have no interest in authoring a game, learning about the process will increase you appreciation of the hobby and make you a better gamer. His show is a little newer, with only 19 episodes so far, but every one has been interesting and chock full of great info.

If you haven’t discovered the wealth of (free, mind you) information and entertainment housed in the auditory nugget that is a podcast, then it’s time to get an iPod and join the rest of the world, buddy! Enjoy, and happy gaming!

Did you know that H.G. Wells published a tabletop war game in 1913? Yeah, me neither. It’s called Little Wars and is available for free on the Project Gutenberg website (which if you’re unfamiliar with you should check out as well.)

Play This Thing has a huge writeup on the game, but I warn you.. it is not for the faint of heart. Just figuring out the rules will be a task, as they are very long and written in a somewhat confusing style. Try this little nugget on for size:

(VI) When men are knocked over by a shot they are dead, and as many men
are dead as a shot knocks over or causes to fall or to lean so that they
would fall if unsupported. But if a shot strikes a man but does not
knock him over, he is dead, provided the shot has not already killed a
man. But a shot cannot kill more than one man without knocking him over,
and if it touches several without oversetting them, only the first
touched is dead and the others are not incapacitated. A shot that
rebounds from or glances off any object and touches a man, kills him; it
kills him even if it simply rolls to his feet, subject to what has been
said in the previous sentence.

If you’re up for a challenge and want to try one of the first ever published war games, then nows your chance. I think I’ll just have another go at StarCraft the Board Game.

Link: Little Wars on Play This Thing
Link: Little Wars on Project Gutenberg

I got chance to play Flying Frog’s new “The Last Night on Earth” the other day, and it was pretty fun. We were learning the rules as we went, so it was a little slow at first, but the action picked up rather quickly and the game looks promising.

The game is designed to make you feel like you’re in a zombie movie. It’s layed out with a big field in the middle of the board and four interchangeable corners (it comes with 6 options) that each contain different buildings, so each game will be a little different. One player plays the zombies and the others each play a character ripped from a stereotypical zombie flick.. the sherrif’s son, the high school athlete, etc. Each character has different hindrances and abilities.

The Last Night on Earth is played via scenarios. We tried out the beginner scenario entitled ‘Die Zombie, Die!’ It was a simple kill x number of zombies in y number of rounds. I really like the idea of having a person play the zombies. There are rules for how the zombies move, but mostly the player playing them has full control over what they do. He picks up zombie cards that contain different events and actions that he can use during his turn or during a battle. The players can also get event and item cards by going into a building and spending a turn searching. Combat is settled with dice and items. The zombie rolls one die and the player rolls two. If either of the player’s dice are higher than the zombie then they fend it off. If the player rolls the same number on both dice then he kills the zombie. Weapon and Item cards make killing zombies much easier.

All in all, I think the game could have a lot of depth to it, depending on the scenarios. The scenario we played seemed a little skewed in the players favor and was a fairly simple. We didn’t have a lot of time to play, so I didn’t get a chance to see the other scenarios, but the potential is there for a very fun and rewarding experience.

I’m looking forward to playing it again, and maybe next time we can put on the included soundtrack to really get things moving

I’ve got a three month old (who is doing great, btw), a new high stress job, and a wife who actually likes to spend time with me. Those three things have taken almost all of my time over the last few months, and while I am grateful for all three, how the heck am I supposed to find time to game?

Luckily I’ve been able to participate in my bi-weekly Earthdawn group fairly regularly since my wife is very understanding, but my board gaming has suffered immensely over the last few months. I haven’t been to a single board game night at All Things Fun! in two months now and I don’t see one in my future for some time to come.

Oh well, I guess that’s how it goes. I’m sure sometime in the future things will shift again and I’ll be living it up in the word of fantasy, but until then I’ve been enjoying a forums based version of Warewolf. We just finished our first game and it went pretty well. It turned out to be a nice distraction and I’m looking forward to round two.

Playing the game really got me thinking about play by mail games in general. I know there are a lot of them out there and I’m thinking more and more that they might be the answer to my current gaming lull. If anyone out there has any suggestions, then I’m all ears.

Fantastic, an origami Cthulhu. Sorry the blog’s been kind of Cthulhu oriented lately, I haven’t had much time to game lately due to work obligations. Things should get back to normal in the next few weeks, and I’ll start blogging about games again!

Boing Boing: Origami Cthulhu

<disclaimer>My apologies to anyone whom this may offend.</disclaimer>
I saw a few Cthulhu fish designs on the CafePress site I posted earlier and was inspired to give it a go myself. Here’s the result:

I was half thinking about taking this design to my scroll saw and making a real Cthulhu fish for my car but I could just see it getting my beautiful Mini smashed in by some wacko. I mean, those Darwin fish are tolerated, but someone unfamiliar with H.P. Lovecraft (as I imagine most car smashing wackos would be) might mistake it for some demonic symbol that will warp their children into eating feces and having inappropriate relations with their pets, sending them into a holier-than-thou Mini wrecking rage. People are weird like that.

Oh well, for now I’ll just enjoy it as a desktop.