Recent Gaming (spring 2025)

Lots of gaming lately. Here's some highlights:

My Amber Diceless Roleplay campaign continues to go strong. It's rolling on 5 years now, roughly twice a month, so we've recently crossed our 100th session with the same characters. Dworkin/Oberon's universe was destroyed, and the action now takes place in Corwin's universe and another universe that Fiona created, plus the occasional scene in the tiny islands of primal matter in the Abyss that were left when the old universe imploded. Those are basically the only place where Brand can exist without the "immune system" of the other universes trying to destroy him.

I just wrapped up my Feng Shui 2nd Edition campaign about a week ago. The players foiled a really major push by the Ascended to conquer 2 of the 3 Junctures they didn't already control. This caused a Critical Shift (the second one of the campaign) and after a truly epic battle we ended with the PCs stepping into a portal to a future they don't know.

For the same group (as played Feng Shui), I'm now prepping a Cyberpunk Red campaign. Scroll down to my last post, from earlier this week, to read about that. 

It was a bit of a toss-up among the group whether we wanted to do Cyberpunk or Pendragon, so in the next few months I'll be reading The Great Pendragon Campaign and the Book of Uther and doing bits and pieces of light GM-prep for that, so that when Cyberpunk wraps up, I'll have that in my pocket and ready to go. But, given that the last two campaigns for this group ran multiple years each, I'm not too worried about getting Pendragon ready in a hurry.

I'm also now playing in an RPG as well. A friend of mine is running Night's Black Agents, aka spies vs vampires. In NBA designs their own vampires and determines whether vampirism is supernatural or superscience or literally infernal demon hell-powers. Our campaign is taking place in the 1980s, so in the two sessions we've played thus far, we've had to sneak across the Berlin Wall three times now. Our characters have rescued a journalist, and the goons who were holding her captive had weird mysterious creepy stuff going on, but we haven't really connected that they (or their leader) is a vampire yet. There's one of them that makes us instantly nauseous when we get near them, but we haven't really figured out why. A different one jumped on top of our car and ripped the roof open trying to kill the journalist, but the roof-rider burst into flames when we shot the heck out of her. We're not at all certain what to expect, or what we're up against. Unraveling the mystery is pretty fun, and the uncertainty makes it easy to tap in to the fear and bewilderment our characters are experiencing. 

This weekend I got together with some friends and played the card game Innovation and the board game Thunder Road.

Innovation is really good, but kind of overwhelming the first time you play.I had really good early turns, or so I thought, as I was in the lead in points and achievements.  Unfortunately, in the mid-game I just could not manage to draw cards with any synergy at all. Well, really the problem was that I had a great hand, but I foolishly commented on it, so someone Melded a card that they could then use via Dogma to steal my hand. I didn't even know that was a possibility... but, duh, I should have, it's not like this is the first game to ever let you steal cards from another player. I just never recovered. Good game, but boy does it have a ton going on.  It's sort of a civilization-builder, where every card is an invention or cultural breakthrough. You start in the stone age, and end in the far-future. Every card in the game is unique, and they all have multiple unique ways to play them. So while I liked it a lot, I imagine its' not going to be good match for everyone.

Thunder Road is much simpler. Just good chaotic Mad-Max style shenanigans. Sort of like if Gaslands or Car Wars was a streamlined racing boardgame. We played with the Chop Shop expansion, which adds cool asymmetric super-powers to your cars via a drafting mechanic at the start of the game. I enjoyed it a great deal, and may end up buying the game and that expansion. Based on just one play, it seems like the core game without that expansion is very light beer-and-pretzels without much depth, but that expansion made every turn interesting and unpredictable. 

I continue to play the occasional solitaire-RPG or solo-skirmish miniatures game when I have insomnia. For the solo-RPG I've been mostly running D&D, with one PC (a Satyr Circle of Stars Druid) and a rotating cast of lower-level NPC sidekicks. When I started I had to lean a lot on the Solo Adventurer's Toolbox and its sequel. I'm a little more freeform of late, but that book is great for getting you started and comfortable with solitaire play.  

And every once in a while I boot up Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldur's Gate 3, but I have to be careful with those because man can I ever lose an entire evening just rearranging my darned inventory. When that happens, I feel like I've wasted a resource (my life, my time) that I'll never get back... and yet, I love both those games so much.

6 Games I'm Loving Right Now (and a runner-up that's probably working its way on to the list)

 Been keeping pretty busy lately. Running two RPGs on the regular, each meeting online every-other week. Also playing in two RPGs, also biweekly. And then cramming in board games, computer games, and even solitaire miniatures into my late evenings. Here's the seven games eating up the majority of my time:

1. Night's Black Agents has been ongoing for several years now, since 2017. Two sessions ago the PCs crashed a meeting of Renfields and a motorcycle gang all working for a vampiric cabal. They created a lot of chaos, got the gang fighting itself. They realized in the process that one of the biggest vampires (Count Orlok) is making some sort of move on the territory of one of his biggest vampiric rivals (the intel was a little vague as to whether his move is against Elizabeth Bathory, or Dracula). While all the feuding vampires are busy in Romania, there's an opportunity for the PCs to strike at one Orlok's properties that they'd identified in Munich. This will probably be the most dangerous target they've gone after, so I'll need to roll out the big guns for the next couple of sessions. What I love about NBA is the tools for building intricate investigative plots and complicated enemy organization charts. We're 5 years into a mystery/detective game that has occasionally had to skip sessions for two months at a time due to schedule conflicts, and yet the game still has momentum largely because of the tools the system provides to the GM and players. We were recently discussing the idea of taking the game back to face-to-face analog sessions, and realized that whatever we do, we absolutely want to keep the Roll20 Adversary Map even if we do start meeting back up in-person.

2. I'm also GMing an Amber Diceless Roleplay campaign. It's about 20 sessions in, despite my only getting around to posting the campaign logs here of the first 7 sessions so far. A huge backlog of material, but hard to summarize or talk about without spoiling upcoming plot surprises. Crazy colorful characters, byzantine multi-layered plots and schemes. The universe imperiled, as it often is in such games. Lots of fun. What I love about Amber is the narrative freedom. The story can go literally anywhere, riff on any pop culture icon or break new ground. The rules are so minimal that, as GM, I can spend all my energies on plotline and character, never having to spend even a minute thinking about whether an upcoming fight scene will be sufficiently challenging yet not roll over into a TPK if the dice fail. GMing Amber is pure creative joy.

3. I'm playing in an Unknown Armies game. What I love is 70% my GM's take on it, 20% the weirdness other players have injected, 10% the setting and game itself, and 0% the mechanics. I'm at best a little "meh" on the mechanics. I've written most of a lengthy analysis post about it, and keep not quite finishing it because I'm having trouble getting blogger to properly format my charts. Deep data number crunching has convinced me that the game would be much better if the PCs started with a little more numerical oomph out the gates. More on that if I ever get the charts working. I will say this, I'm digging the weirdness and open-ness of the setting, and what the participants of the game are doing with it. Our party/cabal of characters isn't making much progress on our goals just yet, but we're definitely chewing the scenery and finding it delicious. My character is a Chief Medical Examiner in her community, who keeps doing autopsies of people she thinks are her dopplegangers. That was part of my character introduction, and I told the GM that I was happy with however he wanted to interpret that. At this point, it seems to be that my character is from a parallel universe and is only just starting to figure that out, and that other parallel me's are also ending up in this reality. The GM even enlisted me to surreptitiously play one of my dopplegangers in a single scene, which the other players didn't see coming. They gave not-me a gun registered in one of the other PC's name, and just a ton of intel that we really didn't want the opposition to have. It felt kind of dirty, but the fallout from this bait-and-switch moment is shaping up to be narrative gold. What I love about Unknown Armies is definitely the GM's doing. I've been gaming with him for years, and this is definitely the best, most engaging, game I've seen him run. One of the best I've ever been player in, honestly.

4. Dungeons & Dragons, an oldie but a goodie. I'm running a once-or-twice-a-year D&D game for friends in other cities, but that hasn't had a session in a few months, so nothing new to report there. The other D&D game I'm in is biweekly game where the GM throws the challenge ratings out the window and doesn't pull his punches. It too is great fun, but it is really tense at the same time. It almost has a horror-game vibe in that every week I feel like my character is just about to die... but it's not using any horror tropes at all. It's mostly about politics, at least on paper, as the big-bads who keep sending assassin after us include a couple of Senators of a powerful city-state. The GM is pretty good at applying the thumb-screws.  What I love about this campaign is getting to navigate against the storm, to struggle onward in the face of insurmountable odds. Assuming it doesn't all end in a TPK, it's gonna feel like a hell of an accomplishment when we dethrone those baddies. 

And then I've been doing a bit of solitaire gaming in the background on free nights. 

5. I've played a fair chunk of Stellaris lately, which is a sci-fi-themed "4X" game. Basically you start with one world, and expand out into the galaxy. It's a pretty long run-time for each game, and only worth cracking open when you have an evening to set aside for it because you'll spend the first 45 minutes just refreshing yourself on the state you left your empire in last time. What I love about it is how much it has going on at once. Actual play is kinda slow and chill, but punctuated with "oh crap" moments when you get invaded, and interesting little event chains of events when your archaeologists start uncovering the ruins of ancient extinct civilizations. It's got a ton of different sci-fi tropes stirred in.

6. This weekend I dove back in to 5 Parsecs From Home. It's a solitaire miniatures game with emergent narrative structure. The third edition just came out, and I love the major upgrade to the look and feel of the game. What minis you use are up to you (or you can very easily run it in your favorite virtual table-top), as it has no official minis, so I'm mostly talking about how I love the visual upgrade to the rulebook. I'd played half a dozen sessions of the previous edition a year and a half ago. That edition was fun, but not much to look at. The new edition is a cooperation with Modiphius, and is a pretty slickly produced product. Could maybe use a better index, but the search function on the PDF is your friend. What I really love about the game is the freeform way a narrative emerges as you play the campaign mode. Last night, I found myself making intentionally bad decisions for the long-term success of my ship full of charming space rogues, because I felt it was what the characters would do. If a game that is mostly charts and die-rolls gets inside your head like that and inspires Firefly-esque drama, it's achieved something powerful.

7. And lastly, I'm playing an asynchronous game of Beyond The Sun on Board Game Arena, taking roughly a turn per day. The game is very interesting. I'm not quite going to say "I'm loving it" quite yet, but I'm intrigued, and it's growing on me. It's pretty novel, and was bordering on overwhelming at roughly the 5th turn of the game, but I'm starting to get the hang of it now. What I really like about this game is how the technology tree develops uniquely in each game, it's a pretty compelling little puzzle with a constantly changing solution. I suspect I'll want to play it again soon, and if it's one of those that gets better as you get more comfortable with the decision trees, it may well end up becoming a "I love it" recommendation.

So that's what I've been playing lately. How about you? Any games you'd endorse?

Three Cons, Old Friends, and a Boom

I have been busy as heck lately, and playing a lot of games.

Work sent me out to GenCon, were I ran demos of Shadows of Brimstone, Forbidden Fortress, Last Night On Earth, Fortune & Glory, and A Touch Of Evil. It was super fun and I love sharing and teaching many of my favorite games to total strangers... but it was also very exhausting because GenCon is a huge show with a million faces and a hundred thousand games.

In my off hours at the con, I played a couple of new games I hadn't tried before.

Incan Gold is a fun press-your-luck game that I reliably came in... well, certainly not winning, but not in last place, either, so I feel like I did okay for a newbie. The best part was that I got to play the game with my old friend Brendan Riley, who lives far away and I hadn't seen in several years, and my buddy Bill French. I never would have expected them to meet, given that they live in different states, but GenCon is a place of miracles.

Brendan's company Rattlebox Games is playtesting a game called Udder Chaos, the only competitive cow-milking game I've ever seen. It's fast and goofy and full of rhymes. It was light-hearted fun, and you'd be helping support a old friend of mine, so check it out if you get a chance.

One night at GenCon I played a party game called Buy The Rights, in which you get a random hand of high concepts and genres and have to make your best pitch about why producers should invest money with you. I hammed it up, basically role-playing as a different screenwriter or producer in each round, and it turns out that nonsense is a very successful strategy in this game.

The other fun new experience of this GenCon for me was Hellapagos, a party game that starts out fully cooperative and then suddenly very quickly descends into murder and sometimes cannibalism. It was a social game that really felt like the first season of Lost. Everyone was working together to build a raft and catch fish, except for a couple slackers who just raided the wreckage for personal treasures. Much fun was had by all, including those who died when suddenly everyone started scrambling for the limited space on the raft. I, as one of those horrible slackers who spent a lot of turns searching the wreck, found a decent supply of bullets, which I traded 1 at a time to the only person who had found a gun, in exchange for her using them on people other than myself. In the end, 3 of the 8 players, including myself, made it back to civilization to tell the story of how we were the sole survivors of the wreck. Just don't ask about the barbecue.


Shortly after getting back from GenCon, I packed my suitcase a second time and headed to my favorite little (~1,000 attendees) local gaming convention, Dragonflight. I had originally planned to just go for fun, but at the last minute agreed to volunteer to run the Story Games Lounge when the usual volunteer dropped out. As it turns out, volunteering to run the Story Games room is itself a lot of fun.


First day of Dragonflight Game Convention:

GM'd an awesome double-length Psi*Run for 7 players.

Explored an alien planet in The Quiet Year

Lost a game of Snake Oil to the dreaded Fraud card

Played "2 Rooms and a Boom" till my brains hurt. It's a great social-deduction game, kind of like "Are You A Werewolf?" except everyone gets to play the entire game and know one has to die until the last couple seconds.

Won a game of Jetpack Unicorn. Honestly, I'm not crazy about this game. I think Superfight does the same thing, but better.

Played some more 2 Rooms and a Boom. (Across 6 games I've now been on both teams a couple times, been the bomber and been an Ambassador.)

On Day 2 of Dragonflight:

 GM'd Og the caveman RPG for 5 players. No use big words play Og. The cavemen met The Doctor, and caused a regeneration.

GM'd another successful Psi*Run, for 4 new players. Hallucinatory madness derailed everything in a delightful way.

Hosted a giant marathon Microscope timeline for 6 players. It was epic! One of the best-developed, most fleshed-out microscope games I've ever seen. These new players really picked it up quickly and dove deep into the game.

That night, I got the band back together! Playing in Laura Mortensen's annual midnight Urchin game, as my recurring character, Rory Wanker of the formerly famous Rory Wanker and the Bloody Stickers. We're making a comeback, if only in my mind.

Other games played in the Story Game Lounge included more Quiet Year, some Zombie Cinema, and a few escapades of esteemed Baron Munchausen.

Day 3 of Dragonflight:

Played in a delightful Lego and d20s game run by Tim Beach. Two of the 5 players were kids, and they kept the game light-hearted and unpredictable. Tim did an amazing job of making the game work on the kids level and not lose the adults to boredom. Nearly all of my GMing experience in the last 20 years is with adults, but I can only imagine GMing for kids takes extra creativity, patience, and panache. Well done, sir.

Later that night:
I went to a birthday party at Zulu's game cafe. While there, we played a game of Dark Gothic. We all lost when the Shadows filled up in a sudden hurry. Quite the shame, as I was super close to winning, and probably could have done so in one to two more turns.


The next weekend:

Battlestar Galactica board game with old friends I hadn't seen in forever: Andy Collins, Gwen Kestrel, and Greg Collins (and their friend Ben). I was a frakking toaster the whole time, and I successfully destroyed the pathetic human fleet by breaking their morale. It was a solid game, and the humans came very close to winning. Possibly the closest game I've ever played of BSG. 

After that, we played Between Two Cities, which is a very clever cooperative drafting and tile-placement game where you're building a city together with the player on your right and simultaneously building another city together with the player on your left. I didn't do so good at this, coming in 4th out of 5th place. I love the entire-cooperative nature of the mechanics, and how that's counter-weighted by the scoring. It's a game that exists in a very unique head space. I want the players adjacent to me to do well, and any other players to do poorly, but I don't really have a way cause that second part. There's probably some deeper strategy I'm not seeing yet, but I can at least admire the novelty of this truly unique game.

We followed that up with Royal Turf. It's a Knizia game about horse racing and betting on horse racing. In the abstract the topic doesn't sound interesting to me at all, like if you said "want to play a game about racetrack betting?" I'd reply with "not unless it's Royal Turf". Every time I play it I feel like a) I'm really not very good at it,  and b) the game is surprisingly fun and enjoyable despite all that.

Then the wonderful Bobbie Hyde showed up to pick me up and we talked her into playing a round of Decrypto. It's a team code-guessing game, and we both really enjoyed it. If I didn't already own Codenames Duet, I would immediately rush out and by Decrypto. I feel Decrypto is a much better game than normal Codenames, but that makes it about equal with Codenames Duet (which is closer to codenames, but also generally a vastly improved version of Codenames itself).

So, it's been a summer cavalcade of new games and old friends. Pretty damn cool way to spend the days. And it ain't over yet. This weekend is PAX West! I will once again be running demos of Flying Frog adventure games. Sleep is for the weak.

Games I played this week.

An expanded version of my weekly gamelog on facebook.

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Played Red Seven, Five Tribes, and Shadow Hunters at the Ballard Board Game Meet-Up at Card Kingdom/Cafe Mox. The games were good, the group is very welcoming, and the venue is pretty amazing. Much better than staying home and watching TV.

Red Seven is good filler or warm-up material. Solid, but not particularly exciting. It's an interesting retooling of the old trick-taking mechanic, but the lightness of play and absence of a theme keeps it from truly moving me. A game I'm always willing to play, but not one I'd go out of my way to schedule.

Five Tribes is a really deep game, with lots of moving parts and a fairly daunting learning curve. I spent the whole game feeling like I was doing horribly because I could never identify moves that were actually splashy enough to be worth bidding the victory points to get first player status. I think I only bid 3 times, and took my turn at the back of the pack round after round. All game long, I thought for sure I was going to come in dead last. Then we totaled the final scores, and I was second place and just a couple points behind the leader. I had 143 points, the winner had 146 points, and fourth place was 112 if I remember correctly. So there really were very few turns where it was worth spending, that wasn’t just me being confused or overly cautious. We were all new to the game, though, so there's some hope that more experienced players would have weighed the value of their bids better and left my penny-pinching play-style in the dust.  I'd like to give this one another try, and see how my strategy develops over repeated plays.

Shadow Hunters is short enough to be party-game filler but intriguing enough to be something more. It's a perfect game for a large meet-up, as it can handle a large number of players easily and is short enough to let people join and quit as they please. It starts with a puzzle, and generally ends with a beat-down. It’s got some “aha!” moments, and excitement, but is very random and at times unfair. Luckily the game is usually short and speedy, so if you’re getting the short end of the randomness stick at least you don’t have to suffer very long. Overall, I enjoy it quite a bit. It's got a little in common with both Are You A Werewolf? and Betrayal At House On The Hill, but is faster and shorter than either. I dig it.

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I played an unpublished scenario of Shadows of Brimstone with Jeremy, Chris, and Sarah up at the Flying Frog Productions studios. Brimstone continues to be a great co-op experience, and has grown more challenging with the expansion previews from GenCon. We’ve been playtesting some amazing content that I'm not at liberty to discuss, other than to assure you that the game keeps getting better and better.

I wish I could fit more plays of SOBs into my schedule right now, but it requires a fair chunk of time and table space. In addition to the playtests, I have two other groups that I specifically schedule Brimstone games with. It's hard to get everyone's calendar's aligned with the days when my table is clear, though perhaps that speaks to my housekeeping just as much as it does the the requirements of the game. This was extra complicated by mass of boxes (over a hundred of them) that was occupying my living room for the past couple weeks. I had to cancel two gaming events this week to stay home culling boxes of old stuff I no longer need in my life. If I don't get a box or two done every single day, I'll never get through them all.

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Goofed off with some Rock Band 4 at a Halloween party. We traded instruments and parts in and out every few songs. Rock Band is more an activity than a game, but it's highly enjoyable... especially when there's enough players on-site to feel like an audience. Scott rick-rolled us all (but especially Jim) during one of his turns on the microphone.

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You'll notice no RPGs this week. That's something I have to rectify soon. Workplace exhaustion and the aforementioned boxes kept me from attending a couple of usual gaming nights, plus there were some non-game events on my calendar. Other cool things I did this week included seeing a friend's short film play in a movie theater, and participating in a long training and team-building session for the Dragonflight board of directors. I've kept myself busy. 

Not bad for a single week.

In the first 7 days of June 2015, I played the following games:

• Dark Gothic (semi-cooperative deck-building card game) x4 game sessions
• Shadows of Brimstone (cooperative miniatures board game)
• Pandemic: The Cure (cooperative dice game) x2 game sessions
• War of the Worlds (home-brewed RPG scenario)
• Ultimate Werewolf (8+ player bluffing/deduction party game) x7 game sessions
• Shadowrun Crossfire (cooperative deck-building card game) x6 game sessions
• Forbidden Desert (cooperative board game) x3 game sessions
• Dead of Winter (cooperative survival-horror board game) x2 game sessions
• Lego Avengers 1895 (home-brewed RPG scenario)

That's 27 plays total of 9 different games, with over 20 different people (ranging from as few as 2-3 in some of the games all the way up to 8-12 players per round of Ultimate Werewolf). Both RPGs were run by GMs I hadn't gamed with in four years or longer. Some of the games were pretty fast little things (Pandemic: The Cure can be pretty zippy), but there were several multi-hour games on that list (Brimstone, Dead of Winter, both RPGs). It's been a pretty great week in regards to restocking the fun after a recent gaming deficit. I actually had the opportunity to spend a little more time gaming than I did this week: I ended up cancelling an RPG session I was going to run on Wednesday because a player had a rough day at work and needed to call the night early. On top of all that, I spent 4 hours at an art museum this week, and took multiple long walks that added up to at least 10 miles.

I needed it, though. The past few weeks have been really stressful and exhausting (more about that some other time, perhaps). I really appreciated the chance to kick back and game my brains out for a few days.

Non-Standard Tiles In Myth

I've played enough Myth that the limited selection of Tiles is starting to get a little boring, so I created a solution (see below). True, this problem will be mostly solved when Wave 2 arrives (IIRC, I have another 16 Tiles coming to compliment the 10 that were in the boxed set) but I really wanted a solution that isn't literally waiting on a slow boat from China.

(For the record: I haven't actually played all the 6x12 combinations yet, but just about every other legal set-up has been done to death, and it's beginning to feel like Yardu isn't so much evil as just overly fond of large orange rugs.)

Over at BGG, miflhanc posted a proposal for using D&D (or other) tiles with Myth. He had tile population legends for 2x2, 2x4, 4x4, 4x8, 8x8 and 9x12 tiles. Sadly, many of the most interesting tiles in my D&D collection were 5x8, 5x10, or some other configuration he didn't cover. Adding those (and 5x16, 10x10, and other double-tile permutations) to his framework was going to be a mess, resulting in an overly complicated menu of options that threatened to slow the game to a crawl with analysis paralysis...  (as if I don't have enough trouble with that already.)

So instead, I reinvented the wheel. Just two new Tile categories to cover the entire gamut of possible tilings and sizes, plus a third option for giving any Tile a small boost.

Behold: The Wheel!

Small Custom is sort of like the core game's 6x6, but with smaller overall rewards (7.7 less gold on average). I mandated a Lair, because frankly the game is rarely challenging if there's neither a Lair nor a Trap on the Tile. Didn't want to include a Trap because then there'd be all the trouble of trying to adapt the existing Trap diagrams to oddly-shaped and -sized Tiles. This could be a single tile, or depending on what gaming resources you have at your disposal it could be a combination of smaller tiles arranged together. Play this when the official Tiles have become too over-used, or if you want a Merchant but don't necessarily need the huge cash spike that comes from the official 6x6.

Large Custom is modeled after the 12x24, but scaled down significantly so there's a playable amount of lairs and only a Gold Hoard not a Treasure Hoard. Miniboss is optional. The payout is 1 Treasure more than the 6x12, but you'll have to go elsewhere for a Merchant. This is almost always going to be (at least) a double-tile, as few sets of gaming tiles include any single piece more than a foot in length. Use it if you want to make some sprawling maze of tile components, or if you want a big finale to a sessions that's a little more customizable than the official 12x24.

Add-On is for use when If you're looking to just adjust the shape of a layout or spike the difficulty of a Tile by a tiny bit. Attach one or more smaller (2x2, 2x3, 2x4, etc) tiles to an existing Tile, along with an accompanying Hunting Pack and 2 extra Gold when the combined Tile is Cleared. I decided I liked +2 Gold better than adjusting the Treasure count, as it better represented the very small climb in extra difficulty that a Hunting Pack represented, and seemed less likely to trigger cheesy min-maxing in the pursuit of loot. It's mainly meant for you to add-on to any Myth tile, but if you wanted to invoke it when laying out a Small or Large Custom build that's okay too.

There is one obvious downside to all this customization, which I alluded to before: Once you've opened the can of worms of using non-standard tiles and possibly laying out more than 1 or 2 tiles to make a Tile, it can slow down the game a bit. Hunting through a box of random D&D tiles for the components to make an awesome complicated room can be fun in itself, but can disrupt the flow of the game. My best advice there is to do some minor pre-game prep work, such as gathering small numbers of similarly-themed tiles into gallon ziplocks so you've got a smaller amount to think about when designing any given room configuration.

Also, in case it's not obvious: if your custom non-Myth Tile layout matches the size and shape of any of the official Myth Tiles (4x6, 6x6, 4x12, 6x12, 12x12 or 12x24) you have the option of using the same stats as the Myth Tile of the same size and shape, instead of calling it a Small Custom. For that matter, the line between Small and Large could be made blurrier without breaking anything. If you had 10x10 or 8x12 space and ran it as a Large Custom, it wouldn't break anything.

Myth: Great Game, Horrid Rulebook

Our copy of Myth arrived last week. It was a Kickstarter we backed last year, and should be available on retail soon-ish. Myth a big cooperative dungeoncrawl game with lots of bells and whistles (and cards and minis). It's in the same genre as HeroQuest or MageKnight Dungeons or the more recent Galaxy Defenders, but I feel it's a vastly superior game to any of those. (Though, to be fair, the only thing I have against Galaxy Defenders is its plodding and fiddly set-up before play.)

Here's a quick run-down of the things I really like about Myth:

• Fully Cooperative: There's no GM. Everybody's a player, and we're all working together. There's no need for someone to run the monsters, or set up the dungeon, or be otherwise adversarial to the rest of the group. Everybody has the same amount of plot-knowledge, and the same goal.
• Flexible: Play duration is in your control, and game play starts almost immediately. Set-up of each board is quick, fun, and collaborative. You can decide on the fly just how long a game you want to play. Somebody having to leave early doesn't anticlimactically ruin your entire session, and you should be able to easily bargain with them "how about we just finish this tile we're on and then we call it end of Act?"
• Engaging: The turn structure is unique, and very clever. Things are happening all the time, and everyone is constantly involved in the action. You're never sitting around waiting for someone else to act. No one can dominate the game, because there's built-in mechanisms to keep everyone contributing at roughly the same activity level. Stealing the spotlight in consecutive turns is punished in a dramatic but enjoyable way. It's genius. The only place this "all hands on deck" turn structure breaks down at all is when a PC dies - but odds are good that a PC death will be followed quickly by either resurrection or a TPK, so I'm cautiously optimistic the downtime even in those circumstances will be short. Honestly, I'd love to see this turn-structure converted for use in an RPG in place of traditional Initiative systems.
• Elegant: The dice mechanics are robust and quick. An area-of-effect blast on half a dozen minions, or a mass attack against a hero surrounded by minions, can both be handled in seconds with a single die roll each, but still feature meaningful depth and variety of results. It's a game that can handle 4 or 5 PCs facing off against dozens of badguys at once without ever hitting a speed bump.
• Toys: There's so much in the box. Not only are the fancy physical components numerous (40 miniatures, a stack of beautiful map tiles, a bunch of decks, etc), but there's multiple game modes and a lot of quest-cards that create interesting scenarios to play out. The game feels like it has depth and replayability aplenty, with lots of eye-candy to keep you entertained along the way.

It's an excellent game. I've played it four times now, and I'm really diggin' it. Can't wait to break it out again.

Yo Momma Is A Crawla

All those praises having been said, the rulebook is wretchedly awful. It's beautiful to look at, but really hard to read. It jumps from topic to topic and back again without warning (but at least it has a better-than-average index). There are several topics, however, that never get addressed in the rules. They skulk silently between the pages waiting to ambush you.

For example:

• Poison and Stun: These two status effects are caused by various cards (poison shows up a lot more than stun), but are never actually defined in the rules. Luckily, the rules do have a "Damage Over Time" status and a "Prone" status that can fairly intuitively be used for Poison and Stun respectively.  An easy fix once you're aware of the problem, but an ugly surprise if the first time it crops up is in the middle of a play session.
• Combo and Optional: These two keywords appear on a number of player cards, but really aren't defined anywhere in the rules. The Archer character and the Brigand character both rely on those two keywords, and the consensus on the forums is that they mean completely different things in the two decks. To feel that I understood it at all, I had to read the rulebook cover-to-cover, then read two FAQ threads (one on BGG, the other at the publisher's forums),  then watch a couple gameplay videos, then re-read relevant parts of the rulebook.
• Stretch Goals: There are plenty of cards, and charts in the rulebook, that reference things that aren't included in the base set. It's often not immediately obvious what expansion-product you'd have to buy to fill in these holes and complete the chains. That's no problem if you bought the "Captain level" Kickstarter pledge which includes nearly 1 of everything for a very reasonable price... but folks buying this piecemeal at retail are probably going to experience some frustration and confusion.
• Action, Reaction, and Interrupt: These are pretty simple concepts in most games, and people can usually intuit what they mean. Not in Myth. As it turns out, "reaction" and "interrupt" are horrible names for what these cards do, and using those terms actually makes the game harder to teach. The rules themselves are straightforward, but the nomenclature is misleading.

There's a huge number of other minor complaints, but those are good examples. It's all stuff you'll eventually figure out, and since it's a cooperative game no one's getting an unfair advantage out of the confusion... but damn is it annoying to have critical terms and mechanics go undefined in the rules, and to have such inconsistent templating and phrasing on the cards.

All of this could/should have been caught with a just a single blind playtest before they went to print, or by any editing pass, and it blows my mind that such obvious holes and murkiness slipped through the cracks. It's like all the time that should have been used for editing and playtesting just went into art assets and layout... but at least it looks sweeet.

Beam Me Up Before You Go-Go

Last night I ran "Wham Trek" at my weekly one-shot group. The mechanics were an extremely light trimmed-down version of Warhammer FRP 3rd. After a brief explanation of the rules, and a tiny bit of clarification that this had nothing to do with George Michael, we were ready to go.

For those still scratching their heads, Wham Trek was an RPG scenario blending of a couple of crazy old boardgames designed by the great Tom Wham, with just a hint of Star Trek parody. The PCs were the crew of the Znutar, and they were responding to a distress call from the backwaters world known as "Snitopia". It would appear there was an unexplained geological upheaval on Snitopia, and an entire mountain range was jumping up and down on the peaceful snits.

For those still scratching their heads, George Michael was half of the 80's UK pop duo "WHAM!"

For reasons I can't really explain, this was a game I'd wanted to run for a long time. I'd been unable (until just recently) to figure out mechanics that would work for it. In theory, it needed to be goofy and light, but able to support random interactions of bizarre weapons and alien biochemistry. I used the board from Awful Green Things as the map of the PCs spaceship. That map shows (amongst other things) where 12 different weapon types can be found on the ship, so I assumed I needed a system that would make these 12 weapons functionally different. I felt that Fudge or Risus or the like wouldn't do that - but in retrospect I probably could have saved myself a lot of trouble.

As it turns out, I forgot to make the PCs specify what weapons and equipment they took down to the surface until they were in the middle of a fight and had already sounded the retreat. As a result, my big list of weapons didn't really matter. I also managed to forget to print one very important sheet of paper - the page with all my NPC stats. Several days had passed since I'd statted out those NPCs, and the morning of the game I'd had a very distracting emergency trip to the vet for one of my cats, so I really had no fuzzy clue what the stats were. Which meant more improvisation, as it turns out was alright.

Dice mechanics were pretty simple, using the dice from Warhammer 3rd as a narrative engine without most of the baggage that game brings with it. I skipped the green and red dice, the fatigue rules, the recharge rates, etc. The "comets" on the yellow dice gave PCs narrative control, the "Chaos Star" on the purple dice meant something really bad happened. In theory I had worked out success, boon and bane results for all the weapons and a few locations internal to the "mountain range" (that is to say, the Bolotomi from the Snit's games) but they really didn't end up mattering as we just improved our way through my missing paperwork. (I wouldn't be surprised if none of the players even knew I was missing most of my GM's notes, since I just kept my error to myself and rolled with it. GMing and grifting have more in common than most of us suspect. If you can fool your players into believing everything is running smoothly, it usually will.)

I replaced the intricate critical hit system from Warhammer with a neat little subsystem stolen from the "New Hope" game I played in last week. Each PC had a handful of consequences - disarmed, wounded, distressed, and captured/killed - they could choose from when a foe got a hit on them. A critical success (lots of hammer or eagle symbols on the dice) let the attacker choose which consequence they suffered, otherwise it was defender's choice. In addition to the common consequences, every PC had one custom consequence unique to that character. The captain could be seduced by aliens, the chief engineer could avoid personal injury by having the engines go offline, the doctor could get cranky and drunk, the communications officer might start speaking in tongues, etc.

It worked well enough for a one-shot, but probably would have been better if I'd had my carefully-balanced NPC stats on hand so I would have felt more confident throwing real challenges at the PCs. As it played out, there were very few injuries and no real PC fatalities. I was probably too easy on them to really capture the proper Tom Wham feel. No one seemed to complain, though.

The best developments of the night started when the Pilot (played by Peter) engaged the warp drive while in the atmosphere of Snitopia, and thus slingshotted around to an hour before the scenario started. You know, the classic Star Trek trick of bumbling into time-travel. This gave them the opportunity to actually cause the problem they'd responded to. When things went poorly and the 1st Officer was lost, they just flew out to where their ship had been half an hour earlier, and kidnapped the younger self of the 1st Officer, thereby disrupting the time line. Transchronal ripples spread throughout the universe as they continued to mess with their previous selves and engage in more time travel. In one time line, they contaminated the Snit gene pool with xenomiscegenation and converted them into a Fremen Fedaykin army that spread across the cosmos destroying everything in the name of the 1st Officer (who, along with the ship's mascot, was revered as a God). Then they undid that timeline and prevented themselves from ever visiting the planet in the first place. Good clean stupid fun.

All in all, we had a blast. I sort of regret the amount of work I went to trying to customize the game system. I made Ook and Leadfoot (the mascot and the robot from Awful Green Things) into followers akin to the "Small But Viscious Dog" in Warhammer, and created small deck of random weapon affects, none of which probably needed the level of detail I'd prepped for them. The game was a big success, but probably would have been just as successful with 1/3 the prep work. Hopefully I'll learn that lesson one of these days.

A Touch Of Elders

I was thinking about the board game "A Touch Of Evil" the other day, and trying to figure out the math of the big showdown at the end of the game. In particular, I wanted to know how many dice should really be applied to any given Evil Elder, so I started looking at the math behind it all.

The conclusion I've drawn from this is that what the game presents as a strategic decision is actually more of a sucker's bet. It gives you the option of rolling very large numbers of dice against the Elders, but doing so is very likely to do exactly the opposite of what you expect it to. The whole point of targeting Elders is to reduce the damage you're taking, but if you put more than a die or two against them, you'll run a good chance of doing exactly the opposite.

Those pie charts show the results and percentages of rolling various numbers of dice against a single Evil Elder.

• The green section represents the odds of rolling a single success - exactly the amount you want to roll.
• The red section represents the chance of rolling two or more successes. You'd much rather roll 1 success than 2, since the extra successes are just wasted. That same die, if applied to the main Villain instead of his Evil Elder helpers, would have been 1 more step towards winning the game.
• The black section represents the chance of total failure - not killing the Elder.

So how many dice are the right number to roll? The answer is almost always 2, with only a few exceptions. If you're feeling cautious, dropping it down to 1 die is perfectly fine.

Silver Shot is one of the main exceptions. If you're using Silver Shot, you should only roll against the Villain, and never worry about the Evil Elders at all. Silver Shot doubles the damage of 6s rolled, making even a single die on an elder has nearly a 17% chance of wasting a hit, and you're as likely to waste a hit as make a normal one. Better to pour all your Silver Shot into the Big Bad, then to waste those juicy 6's blasting a single Elder into mincemeat.

Without Silver Shot, you can always afford to put one die against each Elder with no chance of it causing any side-effects or wasted resources. One die per Elder can only help your situation, or break even, it can never hurt you.

The winning strategy is to eliminate Elders quickly, but do so while minimizing the number of wasted extra hits. Every wasted success has the potential to make the fight last one extra round - and in that extra round the Villain will roll at least 5 dice, possibly 8 or more. On average, the Villain will do more damage in one round than any single Elder does in the whole battle. As helpful as it is to pick off Elders and reduce the damage you're taking, you should never lose sight of the fact that killing the Villain is the real goal. There's no better way to reduce the damage you're taking than to just win the game.

Wasting one or two hits total during the whole fight is probably not going to cost you an extra round of fighting, however, because you don't often win by rolling exactly the number of successes needed in the final round. This is especially true in the Cooperative game, where all the players get to roll in each round, and thus as a group average somewhat higher damage per round. If a group of heroes is averaging 4 or more damage per round (and they should be) then they can afford to waste one or two points without it usually dragging the fight out into extra rounds... most of the time.

Wasting three or more hits over the course of the battle, however, runs a big risk of extending the fight by a whole extra round. So, if you were facing just 1 Evil Elder then it might be worth rolling three dice (as a single roll of 3 dice can only ever waste 2 hits). But if there's 2 or more Evil Elders, it's very risky to apply more than two dice against each of them. Resist the temptation to pile dice up on an Elder "to make sure" you take them out. You can never completely eliminate the possibility of failing against an Elder in a given roll. Both 2-die and 3-die rolls have the exact same odds (44.44%) of scoring precisely 1 hit, the only boost that's gained by rolling the 3rd die all comes in the form of wasted successes, which you don't really want. With four dice, you're actually more likely to score 2 or more successes than to score only 1. Personally, I would never roll 4 or more dice against an Elder, as the risk-to-benefit ratio is too high. Those dice are just better if applied to the Villain.

Advanced A Touch Of Evil

I played several more games of A Touch Of Evil over the recent holiday. We broke out the advanced rules and added them in.

With all those Advanced Abilities on the villain, I thought for sure it was going to boost up the difficulty a lot. To my surprise, we're still winning the cooperative game just as often as we had been when using the basic rules instead of advanced. The villain's Advanced Abilities are basically watered down by the additional Secrets cards, that make treachery less likely.

In fact, we've only lost the game twice total, once to the scarecrow on Basic, and once to the Dellion Dryad (a "web extra" downloadable villain) on Advanced. That's out of more than a dozen plays. We've had a few close scrapes, but as long as you get to the showdown, it seems the PCs are almost certain to win out in a cooperative game. The villains just aren't as powerful as you imagine them to be. We've decided, starting with our next play, to start using the Optional Showdown Chart to spice it up and add to the difficulty. I'm really glad they provided that chart, because as you get better at the game, it needs a little boost to the tension.

Now that we've transitioned to the Advanced rules, I'm really glad we're playing the cooperative version. If not, I think my opinion of the game may have suffered when we hit Advanced.

In particular, the new Secrets cards have an annoying amount of "gray area". I'm specifically talking about "Hero of the People" and "On The Hunt". In our most recent game, the Lair was in the Fields. Those two secrets cards had assigned one town elder to the PC who was about to encounter the Lair, and another town elder to the Fields space. Both those cards allow the PC to use the town elder's stats in interesting ways. Problem is, neither the cards, nor the rules, nor the FAQ at the manufacturer's website, explain if those interesting abilities apply during a Showdown or not. They also don't indicate whether the elder being with you or at the site of the Lair includes them in the Showdown / Hunting Party, and whether or not you can still bring along other elders in the Hunting Party.

Since it was a cooperative game, this was no big deal, we made a ruling based on objective play balance and variety of play experience. But if we'd been playing competitively, this would have been ugly. In this specific situation, how you interpret it would mean the difference between the PC having +2 dice or +9 dice on the fight, whether the villain split his dice between 3 targets or 5, and whether or not we had to take our chances on revealing the secrets of 2 more town elders. That compiled list of differences is pretty huge, and I could see where that would result in an otherwise enjoyable game ending in a rules argument. Glad we dodged that bullet.

Similarly, we also had a situation in another recent game where a card had resulted in a town elder having 2 secrets. When they were revealed later, that one elder had both "Hero of the People" and "On the Hunt". There were no clear rules in the game to dictate which card takes precedence, and whether the elder ends up in a space or attached to a player. Hopefully, Flying Frog will issue some errata or clarifications about those two cards.

Arkham Horror meets Brotherhood of the Wolf

Arkham Horror meets Brotherhood of the Wolf, only a lot less fiddly and complicated than that implies. That's how to best describe "A Touch Of Evil", a relatively new boardgame from Flying Frog Productions. The plot is very reminiscent of Brother of the Wolf, complete with muskets, tri-corner hats, an evil monster, and conspiratorial noblemen. The main game comes with four big villains - vampire, werewolf, headless horseman, and evil scarecrow - each with it's own minions and events to shape the play experience of that particular session.

It's got all the flavor of a game like Arkham Horror, without the maze of rules to wade through. The turns play out faster, and there are fewer counter-intuitive rules ripples to have to sort out. It's got the same "build up your character so you can defeat the big bad" dynamic of Runebound or Talisman or Arkham, but without the 3+ hour play time that those games demand. It's got scenario variety, unlike Arkham Horror where every big bad uses the same chaotic pool of events. A Touch of Evil doesn't feature as much as scenario variety as Betrayal At House On The Hill, but then it doesn't suffer from Betrayal's completely random balance issues either.

Overall, A Touch Of Evil is a triumph of storytelling in a boardgame. Despite having lighter rules than the aforementioned games, it's got more flavor, and tells a better story. As much as I love Arkham, it's such a chaotic mess of monsters and gates that there's rarely a coherent story out of it, and Allies are mechanically indistinguishable from Guns or Skills. Not so in A Touch of Evil, where the "NPCs" have secrets, different from session to session, which you must ferret out lest they stab you in the back. Will the Reverend be a stalwart ally, a craven coward, a book-burning demagogue, or a traitorous pawn of evil? That varies from game to game, and has a lot more impact than just being "+2 vs Vampires".

The game has Competitive, Cooperative, and Team options, depending on the play style you and your group prefers. Team up to defeat the monster, or seek to impede the others and get all the glory for yourself.

Have I mentioned that I really like the game? 'Cause I do. The gameplay is sweet.

It is not, however, completely without flaws. So far I've found three, none of which is major. Here's the problem areas, and how we dealt with them in the two games we've played so far:

1. Tide of Darkness: This Mystery Card can be interpreted in one of two ways. Either you place one monster in 1 space, and some investigation points in three spaces; or they might mean you place both a monster and investigation points in each of three spaces. We were playing the cooperative game, and wanted the bigger challenge, so we placed three monsters. It worked well, but that interpretation seems like it would be a very swingy card in competitive play, shutting off half the board to the player(s) who were already behind in the arms race.
   
2. Muskets: There's no rule stopping you from using 2 muskets at once. Setting this up is relatively difficult (much easier in cooperative than competitive play), but seems cheesy. It'd be easy to house-rule this for the sake of reality, but the absence of fiddly corner-case rules about item stacking is part of what makes A Touch Of Evil so much more elegant than Arkham and it's ilk. Since the musket bonus isn't huge, we chose to just hand-wave it and assume the die bonus didn't represent actually shooting, so much as the fact that you were equipped and ready to take a second shot if the opportunity presented itself. The first musket's bonus is the potential damage of a gun shot. The second musket's bonus represents the reduced psychological pressure of knowing you aren't screwed if your first shot misses.
3. Lair Cards: You can only have one Lair Card, which makes sense, since it represents tracking the Villain to their den of evil. But there's this unfortunate sentence in the rule book that heavily implies you can buy another lair card and discard whichever is worse. Late in the game, the Lair Cards are cheap. In our second game, Sarah discarded about 6 Lair Cards in one turn. Nothing in the rules stopped it, but it felt lame. If swapping Lairs is that simple, you'd never use the more harrowing lairs, at least not in Cooperative play, because someone will always have the spare Investigation points to keep discarding till you get an easy Lair. So we house-ruled this for all future sessions: you can't buy a second lair card, but can still get a second one via the particular Event that gives you a free Lair, which shouldn't come up too often.

If you like flavorful, story-driven boardgames like Arkham Horror, Runebound, or Betrayal at House on the Hill, you should check out A Touch Of Evil. I don't know just yet if it has as much replayability as those games ('cause I've only played it twice), but it's faster and more approachable, which is a huge plus. It strikes me as being the best of the bunch thus far.

GwenCon recap

GwenCon was this weekend - it's a small gaming convention in the home of Gwendolyn Kestrel and Andy Collins. It's an amazingly packed weekend, always a lot of fun. Gwen and Andy are great hosts, and go to a lot of trouble to open their homes to several dozen visitors for this yearly event. We only went to 2 of the 3 days, but it was exhausting. Here's a list of all the games I played:

Friday:

• TransAmerica - an elegant and casual boardgame about being sneaky rail-barons
• Apples to Apples - the classic party game
  Apples to Apples again - a second game of it
• Tekeli-Li - a Cthulhu-themed trick-taking cardgame. Read more here.
• Fordyce Hall - a Cthulhu by Gaslight RPG scenario where the PCs were the servants of a nobleman, sent ahead to prepare the old family estate he'd just inherited. Read more here.
  
• (Are You A) Werewolf - the party game / deductive logic exercise / mob-rule simulator
  Werewolf again - there was a whole second village to hang

Saturday:

• Pandemic - which I've written about plenty of times before, nothing new here other than getting to play it with Sparky and Logan for the first time.
  
• LiveAction RoboRally - the game of robots, lasers, and conveyor belts... on a board so big, we got to play our robots from the first-person perspective.
  
• 9/11/1984 - a cross-publisher superhero one-shot where we were saving the Twin Towers from Ra's al Ghul and Prince Namor. 18th-level PCs, and my first time playing 4th Ed. Read more here.
  
• Lego Batman - In the second prop-heavy superhero-themed d20-based RPG of the day, were playing popular villains from DC comics - except, we weren't villains. Instead, the villain was Batman. Read more here.
  

I've got plenty more to say about at least the 13 hours of RPGs I played this weekend, and the cardgame I'd never tried before, so expect a few related posts later this week.

Space Alert

As usual, I made this post way longer than it needed to be, so here's a to-the-point summary:

Space Alert is a fast-paced cooperative boardgame with a sci-fi theme. A single game of it is about 20 minutes, so you can cram in several plays in a night. It has some similarities to roborally, but the short length and real-time pressure means it is more tense and frantic. The short and exciting nature of it has promoted this to the slot of being my favorite cooperative game.

And now for the long winded raving:

My wife and I are semi-quarantined, so we spent the weekend (and last night) playing the new boardgame that I bought just an hour before the doctor said "It might be swine flu, so stay home, sleep as much as possible, and call me if your symptoms worsen".

That new boardgame is Space Alert, and man does it kick interstellar butt!

Space Alert is a cooperative game, where you are the under-trained crew of a "Sitting Duck"-class spaceship. You are exploring a new sector of the galaxy. You'll be attacked by enemy spacecraft and giant space amoeba, discover you're on a collision course with a comet, fight off boarding parties, contract exotic infections, try to manage your power core to keep fuel running to the shields and weapons, etc. It's good zany sci-fi fun.

And it's hectic and tense. The game comes with two CDs of 7 to 10 minute soundtracks. These soundtracks have the ships computer narrating events that happen in real time. You play cards, programming your actions like in Roborally, but instead of being in turns it's as you see fit in response to the events of the soundtrack. When the soundtrack is done, there's a 5-10 minute process of resolving the cards you'd played.

Like Roborally, if you played the wrong card, or a card in the wrong order, it messes up your later actions. That creates all sorts of craziness, where the whole crews plan hinges on the one character that goofed up. Picture the most dire Star Trek scenario, surrounded by an enemy fleet and barely enough power for shields and phasers if Scotty's working his miracles. Now make Scotty drunk and incompetent - that's Space Alert when you played the wrong card.

I've always loved Roborally, but I like Space Alert better. Roborally had problems with the "runaway leader" syndrome, where one player would get way ahead of everyone else. Clever track layouts could mitigate that, but not completely rule it out. If you made your track too hard, one person could be the clear leader for 30 to 45 long anti-climactic minutes. In Space Alert, the game is over in 15 to 20 minutes, the first 10 of which seem to pass in the blink of an eye. And you're so excited at the end of it, that you want to play again. Roborally is hard to teach to new players, as well, because it's a little overwhelming and they're guaranteed to lose the first two or three games. With Space Alert, you're working together, so the experienced players are motivated to coach the newbies, and can pick up the slack if someone's confused or making mistakes.

Speaking of "easier to teach new players", I feel Space Alert also compares very favorably to the Battlestar Galactica boardgame. It's got just as much going on (It feels like more is happening in Space Alert, but that may be an illusion because of the time pressure), but each individual component is a less complicated. You feel like your choices and actions have more impact, and there's less randomness. Space Alert is like the most tense critical moments of BSG, wrapped up into 15 lightning-fast minutes. It lacks BSGs long pregnant hours of sizing up the other players, trying to decide which challenge is worth spending which resource on, and regretting every action. So, if you were buying BSG because you wanted a game about space ships, Space Alert is probably the better choice. If you were buying BSG for the specific Galactica branding/flavor/characters, however, then stick with BSG. If you wanted a long, slow, cerebral puzzle, BSG is your ship. (If you were buying BSG because of the "Who's the Traitor?" element, I'd say get Shadows Over Camelot instead, as it's got that same feel with a lot less arbitrarily fiddly mechanics than BSG.) If you want decisive action and an adrenalin rush, Space Alert is definitely the better game.

And speaking of other cooperative and team games, Space Alert has replaced Pandemic as my favorite (which replaced Shadows Over Camelot, which replaced Lord Of The Rings). In that chain of replacements, there's a noticable theme. Space Alert is shorter than Pandemic which is shorter than Shadows which is shorter than LOTR. So, again, it never gets long or anticlimactic, and you can squeeze in an extra play or two into the evening. As far as complexity, though, Space Alert occupies a place somewhere between Shadows and Lord of the Rings, being much more complicated than Pandemic. If there wasn't the real-time element, you might overthink all the fun out of Space Alert, as every scenario is mathematically solvable - but you just don't have the time to do so, and it maintains its fun as a result.

As my last game comparison, it reminds me of one of my favorite computer games - Weird Worlds: Return To Infinite Space. It has that same goofy feel, and same quality of lasting just 20 minutes to a play. If you liked WW:RTIS, I think you'll get a kick out of Space Alert. Play WW:RTIS when you're alone, and Space Alert with a group.

The one worry I had about Space Alert prior to buying it was the soundtracks. I feared that they might limit the replayability of the game, because I thought they were entire scenarios unto themselves, and that you'd only want to play each one a finite number of times. Instead, the soundtracks don't tell you what's attacking, just what category of threat it is, when it shows up on sensors, and what trajectory it's approaching on. Something like "Alert! Time is T+3. Serious Threat detected in Red Sector." Then you flip over the top card of the Serious Threat deck, and discover it's an enemy stealth fighter, which you can't get a weapons lock on until it reaches the midpoint of it's approach vector. Or it's a giant "Space Octopus", that has to be destroyed from far away or else it will become enraged and rip your ship apart. Or it's a malfunctioning warhead in your missile bay, which has to be jettisoned before it explodes. As you can imagine, those three problems take very different solutions. Thus far we've mostly played soundtracks on the first disk, which typically give you about three such threats to deal with. Judging from our one play on the advanced disk, it gets much more frantic. In this one weekend of being ill, we've more than gotten our $60 value out of Space Alert, and we still haven't played three quarters of the soundtracks or seen half the cards.

One warning, however. My copy came with two production errors.

• A misprinted card, which they detected at the factory, and tucked a corrected card (and an explanatory note) into the box. Kudos to Rio Grande for catching and solving that problem.
• The other error was the swapping of labels on the two CDs. This they didn't catch. The Tutorial disc was labeled Mission, and vice-versa. So we played our very first game with the hardest difficulty soundtrack, which referenced all kinds of events that weren't covered in the introductory rules. Man, was that ever confusing. Your very first game should be one of the 7 minute tracks. If it runs 10 minutes or mentions an "Unconfirmed Report" or "Internal Threat", you're on the wrong disk.

6 of one, half a dozen epidemics

My wife and I picked up the boardgame Pandemic in early February. It's a cooperative game where you play the CDC, attempting to save the world from several simultaneous outbreaks. We enjoy it quite a bit, though I've wondered (even before we bought it) if perhaps it didn't have enough complexity. Game play is a little repetitive, but it turns out it's fun even on the 27th play.

The game has three levels of difficulty: Introductory, Normal and Heroic. The only real difference is the number of Epidemic cards in the deck. It'll be 4, 5, or 6 depending on the difficulty. Looking at that, you'd expect the jump from Introductory to Normal (a 25% increase in the number of Epidemics) would be bigger than the jump from Normal to Heroic (only a 20% increase in the number of Epidemics).

The game is pretty fast, so we typically get in about 3 plays on the nights we break it out.

The first two nights, we played on Introductory level, and we won. That wasn't nearly challenging enough, and the second night felt like there was no real danger of losing. So we switched to Normal difficulty with a record of 6 for 6.
At Normal, the game was a bit trickier, but we still won 12 games without losing. A few of them were close, but we were 18 for 18, and felt like it was time to step it up again.
Since switching to Heroic, we haven't won a single game. 0 for 9 on Heroic, 18 for 27 overall.

I can't figure out what we're doing wrong, why we can't even get close to beating the Heroic difficulty. We've tried a variety of tactics, and refined our methods with serious analysis between games. The 26th and 27th games, we even cheated a little. We picked the two character roles that we felt were the most powerful (and which combo very nicely as well), instead of assigning them randomly. We even looked at our opening hands and the initial infection placement before choosing which of us would go first.

In the 27th game, we'd not only cured, but actually wiped-out all trace 2 of the 4 pathogens, and had nearly cured the 3rd. It was the closest to a win we'd managed on Heroic. We weren't going to cure the 4th anytime soon, but it was manageable with no more than 2 cubes in any city (and 0 or 1 in most), and the medic was in that area. Half the cards in the deck were now safe, and it looked for sure like we were going to win. Then the 5th Epidemic card was drawn. A new city was drawn, and wouldn't you know it was that 4th color? The discards got shuffled and put atop the deck, and the new city came up again. It "outbroke" into 5 other cities, some of which already had 1 or 2 cubes in them. Drawing the rest of the cards for the turn lead to a total of 4 outbreaks - just exactly enough to make us lose the game via the outbreak meter.

From the verge of victory (with no sense of danger!) to utter loss in less than half a turn. It was awesome to see, just once, but painful to reflect upon.

Lost Cities (the Board Game)

When I first played Lost Cities (the card game by Rio Grande) I enjoyed it, but I was never a huge fan. It's got a nice core mechanic, but for me it grew kinda stale after half a dozen plays. (Some folks I know have enjoyed it for years, however.) I also didn't like that the theme felt "tacked on" to the mechanics - it could have just as easily been a game about lemonade stands, inventors, or vampire hunters.

Yesterday I played Lost Cities: The Board Game, and I must say I like it a lot more than the original. I think it's got longer legs - the random placement of the little scroll-shaped bits makes certain colors/suits a better investment at certain stages of the game. That's probably enough to keep it fresh for a long time.

If you like the original Lost Cities, you'll probably really dig the boardgame version. If the original wasn't your cup of tea, the boardgame is still probably worth a peek. It plays a little better, stays fresh longer, and emulates the theme far more accurately than the card game did. There's slightly greater options to consider on your turn, and it feels more like you're sending expeditions to locations. It works well with 3 or 4, whereas the original is purely a two-player game.

An aside: the red suit of the original Lost Cities featured artwork I referred to as "Viking Stonehenge in Hell". It was neat to look at and try to figure out, but it was strange. The board game version replaces that with the temple-in-a-canyon from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I guess it's because it looks more like a city.

One criticism I will level, however, is that (both versions of the game) could use more "up" beats. Both games have a strong random element, and a relatively blind decision tree (since there's a lot of data you can't predict, such as whether or not the other player is hording the card you're waiting for). It's very easy to make a mistake that costs you the game or round, but it's rare you get the sense that a decision you made really boosted you ahead. Same with the random card draws - for every time you say "just the card I needed!" you probably say "I wish I'd drawn that two turns ago" twice and "just what I needed - another dead and useless card" four or five times. I think both games would be better if that excitement happened more often. It's very rare that you actually get excited about something you draw, and big risks rarely pay off. Instead, you just aim to play a solid conservative game and hope your opponents screw up more often then you do.

Another aside: A good future micro-expansion to address the excitement issue for the boardgame could be handled with just 7 cards. They'd come up rarely enough (IIRC, the main deck is 110 cards) that you wouldn't greatly alter your strategy to accommodate them, but they'd almost always be exciting when you drew them.
The first five cards could be a wild card in of each of the 5 colors/suits. These 5 wilds would just indicate a color, and have no numerical value. When you play one, it goes on the bottom of your stack, so it doesn't change the value of your high number, it just advances you along the track. Having one would make that color much easier, and provide more incentive to dip into your 4th or 5th color in a round.
The 6th and 7th cards would be a Wild 4 and a Wild 8. They would be all five colors (I'd say no color at all, but one of the 5 colors is white, so that doesn't work) and could be played on any one of your piles as the 4 or 8 (as appropriate) of that suit.4 and 8 aren't just random numbers, they were chosen so they'd impact suits that were still being developed as opposed to ones that were nearly closed off, or ones you'd just barely started.
I've thought up some other, more complicated, cards, but decided it's far better leaving the game uncluttered. The remainder of the hypothetical expansion (since you can't sell 7 cards profitably) would probably be new scroll-shaped tiles with different rewards to put on spaces.

An area that needs to be desperately avoided in any potential expansion for the game is cards that allow movement but don't go to your piles, cards that recirculate other cards from your piles, and various other graveyard animation tricks. We found that players were constantly moving the wrong pieces, and having piles of cards to simply recount allowed us to fix every error with 100% certainty no matter when we caught it.

In summation: the new Lost Cities is better than the old. It's fairly light, but has just enough variation to keep it fresh for many plays. It's not a game that's going to make you jump up in triumph, but it's a fun "thinker"-style game that won't melt your brain.

Is Pandemic Not Complicated Enough?

In addition to BSG and Dominion, we also played Pandemic last weekend. Since I kinda panned the other two, it just seems fitting that I smash Pandemic as well.

But I can't.

I guess I can criticize it for being a little too simple. It's rules light, and pretty elegant. It was easy to learn. Once we'd removed the accidentally duplicate cards from the deck, it felt like we had a shot at winning. We lost, but not by much, and I could see things we could have done better. Those are all good things. Due to that simplicity, however, it might possibly grow stale after repeated plays. Possibly, down the road.

That's it, though. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Nothin' else bad I could say about it.

Well, I suppose some might feel it's kinda morbid. Personally, I found a game about the CDC fighting multiple outbreaks (that are threatening global catastrophe) a fun change pace. I could however, easily imagine any number of real-life scenarios where that stops being fun. Then again, aliens could invade tomorrow and make all my sci-fi games take on a not-so-fresh feeling.

But that's it, that's all the gripes I can field, and one of them half-heartedly.

Okay, the random element feels kinda high...
...but as I type that I realize it isn't really. Not any more so than most games. Any game with a die or a deck of cards is at least (and probably more) random then Pandemic. It may feel randomization-heavy and luck-dependent, but it really isn't. Once you get the rhythm of the game under your belt, you'll be able to intuit the rough odds of really bad stuff happening, and plan accordingly. That's pretty cool.

The random element most likely to swing a game is determining which character you play. I'm not sure they're all balanced terribly well. But, it being genuinely cooperative, that probably doesn't matter. Unlike Shadows Over Camelot and Battlestar Complexica (and certain Lord of the Rings Variants), you aren't secretly competing with anyone. Therefore, as long as all the characters have something fun to do, they don't need to be terribly-well balanced.

Between the relative simplicity and the cooperative nature, Pandemic makes it a good intro game. You could easily teach it to anti-competitive, non-gamer types. I may end up picking up a copy. It wasn't as much pure enjoyment as BSG, but it was quick and easy, short and sweet.

Honestly, it's just a solid game. One that could use an expansion, somewhere down the line - but not till after I've played it a couple more times. :) It didn't "wow!" me as much as BSG and Dominion while I was playing it, but I also didn't feel like it had any major flaws when I reflected back on it the next day - and I tried.

Battlestar Complexica

This past weekend, between games of Dominion and Pandemic, we played the Battlestar Galactica boardgame from Fantasy Flight. I'm still trying to figure out if I truly liked it or not. It was a lot of fun, but it was also needlessly complicated.

The game plays a little bit like Shadows Over Camelot, in that it's mostly cooperative, but has traitors (in this case, they're Cylons).

Yet, they don't feel alike. In a typical game of Shadows, you're keeping an eye out for the traitor, but mostly everyone's trying to solve the challenge of the game. There's one Traitor card amidst all the Loyalty cards, so in a 5-player game of Shadows, it's not unheard of for no one to be a traitor. Happens fairly often, actually.

In Battlestar Galactica, the math is a little different. In a 5 player game, you use a loyalty deck of 11 cards, 2 of which say "Cylon". At the half way point, you add a "Cylon Sympathizer" card to the deck, and deal out the remaining cards - everyone gets a second card, and if it's a Cylon card it overrides your previous human card. So, a 5-player game could actually have more Cylons than Humans after the half-way point, and it's actually impossible to go the entire game without a "Traitor". That certainly captures the feel of the show, but I haven't played enough to figure out how well it works mechanically. There's a traitor for certain, so you should be even less tolerant of shady behavior and poor decisions. However, I could also see it be a lot less tense, since there's no false hope that we might be traitorless this time.

As I said, the loyalty system certainly scores well in the "recreating the feel of the show" category. So does the space combat system. Galactica gets ambushed, spools up her jump drives, waits till the last civilian ship jumps (or is destroyed), manages viper squadrons, etc. That part of the game is incredible. I wish the whole experience were as good.

Where it fails for me is the cards. There's tons of cards in this game, which should be a plus. Most are based on events from the first season of the TV show, and have photos and quotes that reinforce the flavor of what's happening. Problem is, you never read them. The rules require reading the quotes out-loud, and certainly the game will be more fun if you're in-character, but it's hard to see it as anything but a diversion. The problem is, the cards are too complex. They're bordering on overwhelming, and the flavor text is only distracting.

I'll describe a typical Crisis card. At the top of the card is the name of the event, below that is a picture, below that is a quote. On the left hand side of the picture is a number - this tells you the target number of the skill challenge. Below the number are 2 to 5 colored blocks, corresponding to various decks of resource cards. Below the quote is a section that tells us the results of passing the skill challenge, and of failing the skill challenge. Below that is an icon indicating which Cylon ships act, and what they do. To the right of that is an icon telling you whether or not the jump drive spools up this turn.

Let's deal with just the skill challenges for a moment. In order to pass the skill challenge, the group needs to play resources of the right colors and combined number value. Every player has access to different resource decks (and thus different colors), so sometimes you just won't be able to help the group complete a challenge. The cards vary in power from 1 to 5, as well, so knowing that 4 cards have been played face-down on the challenge so far means you're at a total of anywhere from 4 to 20, which isn't much to go on when the skill challenge has a target number of 13.

However, cards of the wrong color count negative, and, you'll recall, there's at least one cylon hidden amongst the crew. So, really, 4 cards having been played means a total of anywhere from -20 to +20. It all depends on who the Cylon is, how many there are, how subtle they're being, and who's got what color of cards. And then two random cards from a destiny deck get added as well, bouncing the number by another +10 to -10. In other words, you really don't have a fuzzy clue whether or not you'll accomplish any given skill challenge.

I haven't yet mentioned the resource cards don't just have a color/suit and a value, they also have a special power. So, when deciding what to contribute to a skill challenge, you have to weigh it's value in the challenge against it's potential value as an action on your turn. Guess wrong and you'll squander a resource that will prove vital later.

A lot of times, the Skill Challenges will have decisions that can be made by one particular player. Sometimes it's the President, sometimes it's the Admiral, sometimes it's the active player. Often, these decisions let you skip the skill challenge entirely, and sometimes they let you pick between two different outcomes if you succeed.

Like I said, it's a little overwhelming. Trying to judge the severity of a given Crisis card is really tough. You have to factor in all those details of the Skill Challenge, it's consequences and the potential gains to Cylon traitors who chose to sabotage. It doesn't stop there, as the commands at the bottom of the card concerning Cylon attack fleets and the Galactica's jump drive can make an otherwise non-critical card absolutely devastating at the wrong moment.

Everyone plays a character. All the characters have special powers. One of them is "once per turn, look at the top card of the Crisis deck and either put it back or put it on the bottom of the deck." There's so much data for them to consider, it easily doubles the length of their turn, and they'll probably miss some important factor that makes the card more or less dire than it appears. I don't ever want to have that power! It'd be terminal information paralysis, I suspect.

This complexity permeates the game. Even the loyalty cards are over-complicated. Each different "traitor" card includes a different power you get to use if and when you're revealed - but if you stop to read yours, everyone will know you're a Cylon. Knowing what your power can do, however, would let you know when the right time to make your move is.

The game didn't need to be that complex. It could have been just as flavorful and more enjoyable without so much data being shoved down the player's throats. If so, it would have been a better gateway game for converting BSG fans into gamers. It also would have played much faster, and been a lot easier to master. The learning curve is so steep. If we didn't have so much data to parse, we'd be more impressed by the quotes and eye-candy - so it'd actually be more flavorful. It just feels like it had so much more potential - if only the skill challenges and crisis cards (and everything else) were just a little less byzantine and subjective, you might feel like you had a hope of actually making a better than average play once in a while. Honestly, the characters in the rather bleak show have more hope of making a difference than players of the game do.

Yet it still manages to be fun. (It would have been more fun if it weren't so darned complicated and fiddly, but I think I've already made that point.) I'd gladly play a second game of it, I'm just not sure I'd buy it. Luckily, a friend owns it, so I'll likely get another play or two without having to fork up cash myself.

Next Up: Wham Trek

I think sometime in November I will run Wham Trek. In a nutshell, I plan on using Savage Worlds to make a one-shot that's part Star Trek, part the board games of Tom Wham (most especially Awful Green Things From Outer Space and the Snits games). I can use the boards from those games as maps for the PCs to reference.

Who Can Beat Nixon?

A buddy of mine mentioned, in an old blog post (so old I can't add comments to it) about finding an old Avalon Hill game on his dad's shelf called "Who Can Beat Nixon?" Remarking on the crazy concept for a game, he suggested some other game ideas, one of which was:

Pedagogy Tycoon: navigate a semester of academic life; build an army of loyal undergrads; balance teaching, service, and research! For Mac and Windows. Also look for the Pedagogy Tycoon Expansion Pack: Search Committee.

I'm guessing he's never heard of "Survival Of The Witless: Tenure Is Everything!" a board game from Avalanche Press.

I've played Survival Of The Witless, and it really wasn't terribly good. Perhaps if I were a college professor it would have held more appeal, but the fairly weak humor grafted onto a lackluster mechanic and "supported" as it were by very low-budget components just didn't do anything for me.

I think I've played "Who Can Beat Nixon?" as well. It was years ago, and I can't be sure. I remember the blue monopoly-esque board, but I was thinking it had more artwork on the board itself. Might not have been the same game, though I'm pretty sure the thing we played was an Avalon Hill game - I recall being stupified at the audacity of the game*.

"Who Can Beat Nixon?" (or whatever the old Avalon Hill game I played was called if it turns out it wasn't that one) wasn't a good game, either, though perhaps that's 'cause the experience was marred by the group I played it with. There were 6 of us, I think, including 3 or 4 who'd never played it before and were willing to give it a shot just 'cause the concept was so bizarre. The other 2 had played it, a lot even. They taught us how to play, but made no mention of what they'd determined long ago was the best tactic in the game. And they played "for keeps" using that strategy to crush everyone else (for hours) once they'd established control of it. I remember being so upset with the two of them, that the game itself kinda blurred. The 3 or 4 new players all conceeded and the two "old pros" wanted to keep playing it out. (For the record, the buddy who's blog I referenced was NOT one of the guys I played this with. Wrong State, wrong year.)

Board Game Brainstorm! Come up with ideas for boardgames, pitch them to one another, choose the best idea and make it. Box includes three decks of blank cards; a foldable, laminated board; one Dry erase marker; one Board Game Brainstorm Idea NotePad 2000; One box of Sculpey.

I've played that too - or kinda played it. Tried to, anyway. Or something like it, but without the sculpey, and (obviously) unpublished - but I'll have to save that story for another day, as I have things to do right now.

These other two he mentioned I'm pretty certain don't exist:

Philately, the boardgame!

Assassinate McKinley: one player is Leon Czolgosz, the others are the security detail. Choose your moment at the Pan-American exposition. Get McKinley when he’s in a good mood, and maybe he’ll give you the famous “Go easy on him boys.”

If anyone ever makes it though, I'd be up for a round of that McKinley game. That's geeknuttery enough for me.

*: Later that was topped by Election USA, the game where winning the Republican Nomination means you win the general election (and thus the game) as well. From the back of the box, I wasn't certain if it was a pro-Republican game, or a game satirizing the rigging of elections, so I never bought or played Election USA.

Unwritten Rules on the USS Catastrophe

I used to work for a gamestore. Prior to that I worked at that gamestore. And before that I worked at the same gamestore, under different ownership. Before that, I worked at the Game Distributor (that had begun as the original store to which that store was a sister location, and eventually the sole inheritor thereof). For several years, I would attend the GAMA Trade Show (aka GTS aka Game Manufacturer Association Tradeshow) in Vegas every spring, scoping out the new hot games and getting the inside scoop on where the industry was headed.

At one of those GTS's in years past, I played this boardgame called Vapour's Gambit. It was a cyberpunk-ish racing game. Hoverboard racing, on a modular course, with ramps and pits and other hazards that would spring up through-out the game. It was fast, and fun, with simple concise rules and just enough luck to keep the finishing order in doubt till the last turn. But they'd signed an exclusive deal with another distributor, our competitor at the time.

A few years went by, and eventually the exclusive deal fell by the wayside. The game became available via other channels, and the game store I was managing at this point happily picked it up based on my recommendation. And it stunk. The game utterly lacked timing rules. There had been timing rules when I'd played at GTS years before. Somehow, they'd vanished, or, more likely, had never been written down in the first place. At those two intro plays of the game years before, there was clearly communicated understanding of when certain tiles could be played, and the game had a nice rhythm and balance because of that. Without said rules, the game lost much of it's strategic depth. Further, the game tended to devolve into arguments about who shouted "wait" first, and what space you were on when they did so. As a result, I've only ended up playing my copy a handful of times, despite my fond memories and anticipation. It's as though the game came with a rough draft of the rules, and that the demo had used something very different, an accumulated set of elegant house-rules that made the game much more enjoyable.

Side note: Not only did it feel like only 1/2 the rules came in my box, but only 1/2 the components as well. This was the same game (I remembered the artwork) but the board sections had no narrows, no intersections, just 4 corners and two straights making a grand total of 2 possible board layouts, without any of the cool stuff. Turns out the other boards (which we'd played with at GTS long ago) were from some little expansion they'd done, which was now out of print. What a pale shadow of the game I'd remembered.

On a similar note, I remember one of my coworkers at Distro telling me to never pass up an opportunity to play the L5R RPG with the crew from Alderac. He'd done so at two different cons, with different GMs (both were members of the design team, IIRC), and was struck at what a completely different game it played with them then how it read. Both used a similar set of house-rules on even basic fundamental principles of the game - house rules that digressed from the printed word significantly.

It's very easy to fall into this trap.

You're designing a game. You write up one set of rules, and then playtest it heavily. In playtesting, you start implementing house-rules to fix little things that weren't perfect in your initial ruleset. But unless you take very good notes, you'll end up missing one or more of these little tweaks when you get around to implementing the changes. The more complicated the game, the more likely that is to happen.

I wrote a really cool little game "The USS Catastrophe" a few years back. We playtested it a lot, and found the initial rules sucked, but quickly found things that fixed it. After a while, I had a fun little game that everybody really enjoyed. I never got around to rewriting the rulesheet to match the changes we'd implemented, since everybody just new how it worked. If I were to decide to seek out a publisher now, I'd have to play the heck out of it all over again first, and reinvent the wheel to restore all those little changes we'd made. I didn't have a business plan then, and I didn't take it too seriously. Honestly, I wasn't in the right head space to try getting something published back then - I was under the yoke of manipulative bosses I no longer have to bow to. So I daydream about spontaneously remembering what we'd done to make it work, polishing it up with some snappy graphics, and showing this thing off a bit.

I can't possibly speak highly enough of the value of blind playtests.

It's very easy to neglect something vital to the game when writing your rules, something you'd never forget when presenting the game in person. This often comes from the more casual way we describe things face-to-face than via the written word. If I say "it plays kinda like chess" (just an example) then that conveys all sorts of info: you expect it to be 2-player, on a checkered board, alternating turns, you move one piece per turn, the goal is abstractly derived from military conquest so capturing or destroying enemy pieces is important, position is everything, there's multiple types of pieces with differing movement and capture capabilities, etc. Rather than defining all that, I'll be defining what's different about this game. In face-to-face playtests, you can sum things up abstractly via comparison or verbal shorthand, and gather from reaction whether the other players understand the concept. But it's really damn easy to miss that in a rulebook. You're not going to say "this plays like Settlers" (unless perhaps your publisher is also the publisher of Settlers of Catan) in your rulebook, yet it's actually pretty easy to accidentally assume your audience is already familiar with the concepts behind your game and thus leave out something important.

Please forgive all the rambling above. The gist of what I'm saying is this: I look back at my old rules for The USS Catastrophe, and I see that they are but a thin shadow of what we'd played with. Like my experiences with Vapour's Gambit, or my co-workers tale about the L5R RPG, the designer (me) never thought to chronicle key details which were self-evident in face-to-face play, but which would hamstring those who tried to play without knowing those facts. We all knew how it worked back then, but clearly I don't even know how it's supposed to work now. So I now see how easy it is to flub up something like this.

If I'd used blind playtesting, I'd have had to write everything down in the clearest possible language and context, and I'd have a functional game to shop around today.