Gaming at Dice Fest 2025

 Dice Fest 2025 wrapped up yesterday.  Over the weekend, I ran 9 sessions of a custom Shadows of Brimstone mission on a fancy 3D Board. I also played two games of 1,000 Blank White Cards while I was there, and one game of the The Score (a micro-RPG that takes about 20 minutes to play). 

And I also I helped create, organize, host and judge a miniatures event called the "Bitz Box Brawl" where 20 people received a box of random miniature parts and one hour to design and glue together their own chimeric monster. 

I taught all those games above to new players while I was at it.  I really enjoy sharing my favorite games with people I'm just getting to know, and conventions are great for that. It was all immense fun, but I am truly exhausted today.

1000 Blank Werewolves

A recent spate of 5 opening cards created for a game of 1,000 Blank White Cards.

 

Blank White Cards

 I've decided to run a little bit of Blank White Cards at an upcoming convention, and needed a picture to put on the Tabletop.events page for the sign-up sheet... and discovered that basically every picture I have of cards we've made includes either NSFW content, or some card with rules text that's probably going to be intimidating for new players, or cards with inside jokes you had to be there to understand. It's often a spread of 9 or 12 cards in a picture that are mostly usable except just one obscene drawing of goblin boobs in the middle of the spread, and one card with painfully difficult to parse rules text that's been scratched out and rewritten twice for clarity that it still lacks. Sadly, many of the best cards fall into one of these categories of "probably not the best picture for trying to entice a new player into the game". 

Anyway, here's a shot that's decidedly NOT my best foot forward (I have so many better cards than these in my giant bags of old cards), but also not going to get me in trouble for posting goblin boobs in the convention program book. It is what it is.

My goblins are always mildly NSFW.

Played a couple hands of 1,000 Blank White Cards on Friday with Quintin Lee and Mahmood Miah. They'd never played before, but picked up the game very quickly and made some great cards. Here's 27 of my favorites from this weekend.

I think the best card of the night was Mahmood's Goblin Medic, as it required us to write and draw over existing cards in play, and also neatly shut down my Goblin Pike Recursion Engine before it could come online. Well played, sir.

Note there are some goblins in these pictures, and that means that one or two of the cards are very mildly NSFW.  :) Goblins have bad taste, and no sense of decorum. No boobbloons appeared in these games (or at least, they never got inflated because someone else got to finish the text), and I purposefully avoided publication of the rectococks that did show up, for the sake of all the innocent little children in the intertubes.You're welcome.

https://flic.kr/s/aHskpq4qLt

1,000 Blank Pink Sheep

A few weeks ago my wife and I taught 1,000 Blank White Cards to some friends of ours (Mark and Laura). We played two games in rapid succession. Here's a bunch of our cards:

1kBWC - Teabagging Sheep, a set on Flickr.

1KBWC in ABQ

In Albuquerque last weekend we played 1,000 Blank White Cards. Our host, Jeremy, has put up some scans of the cards made for the game. Link to card images.

Here's a sample, there's another 81 cards where these came from:





Additional Blank White Cards link.

Stankenfreen's Monsters: More Than The Sum Of Our Parts

Last Thursday I ran a one-shot that started with something to the effect of: "You awake strapped to a laboratory table, having been shocked into life by the Lightning. In the distance, you hear your creator shouting 'My monsters! Come alive and rescue me!' as the angry mob of villagers drags him out of the room."

I used a home-brewed system for it, which was literally made-up on the walk to the game. I had a pile of index cards. Each player designed a body part for each other player, on cards which were then given out face-down so you didn't know what your monster looked like until you looked down at your body in the first scene.

The body parts were bits from people and animals. "Hands of a concert pianist", "heart of a lover", "eye of the hawk". That sort of thing. Here's the actual PCs, as drawn by their players:

	<- Sarah's PC, "Polly" Parts: Antlers of a Buck Hands of a Speed Typist Arms of a Wood-Chopper Voice of a Parrot Nose of an Ant-Eater
Laura's PC, "Cookie" -> Parts: Shell of a Snail Left Foot of a Great Tapdancer Bill of a Platypus Tongue of a Chef Claws of a Wolf
	<- John's PC, "Joe" Parts: Spit Glands of a Camel Hands of a Surgeon Hands of a Strangler Eyes of a Lecher Throat of an Opera-Singer Added via Surgery skills mid-game: Snout of a Pig (on the elbow) Hide of a Blacksmith
Mark's PC, "Jack" -> Parts: Jack Ass (Butt of a Donkey) Mouth of a Super-Salesman Tongue of a Snake Legs of a Can-Can Dancer Monkey Feet Added by feasting on an NPC: Evil Laugh of an Executioner

The best part was the parts. Everyone else made body parts for your character, and did so blind without anyone knowing what other parts you were going to get. We ended up with some pretty bizarre PCs as a result.

Beyond those parts, they also ended up with a set of "Eyes of a Curious Child", but instead of installing those on a PC, they used them to fix some blind NPC in the Vampire's dungeon (his name was Corwin, not that it matters).

The title of the body part functioned like a skill. Every time you took an action, you'd roll 2d6 and +2 for every body part you felt could help. ("Tongue of a Serpent" might help for sensing heat and scents, but also for tempting people like in Eden.) If your roll plus modifiers totaled 11+, you were successful.

If either die came up a "1", you'd make a tick-mark on one of the body-parts. If a body-part got 5 tick marks, it falls off. Double 1's is a tick on all your body parts, Double 6's means you've developed a soul. A soul changes your dice from 2d6 to 1d12. That means it doubles your odds of accomplishing unskilled rolls (2 in 12 instead of 3 in 36), and cuts your odds of taking tick marks by about a third.

Attack rolls were super-simple. A success killed a townsfolk, or ripped one part off a monster, depending on who was being attacked. The dice mechanics weren't amazing, but they worked well enough for a one-shot. In retrospect, modifiers didn't end up stacking as much as I'd imagined them to, so I probably should have had a lower difficulty. Dead townsfolk, by the way, became one body-part each, which basically made them into treasure.

The plotline involved rescuing the "good" Doctor Stankenfreen from the townsfolk. When that proved too easy, I added a second plot about the Vampires in the next castle over. Once you're a vamp, you're a vamp all the way. It was goofy fun, and not too deep.

GwenCon Ate Blank White Cards

At the start of Day 2 of Gwen Con '08, I hosted Blank White Cards. I organized two different 2-hour blocks of it.

• The first game was a very low-scoring game. I won, with a measly 47 points. Sarah (my wife) was 2nd place with 12 points. Mike Lee was 4th, at -200, and Aaron Cooke was 5th at -350. My favorite score was Logan Bonner's 3rd place total of -192.8541 points.
• The reason for the low scores in that game was a card I made in the pre-game card generation called "Orky Maff" - it overruled all positive scoring cards to cap them at no more than +6 points. It's a GW Ork reference. This dropped everyone's scores by a ton, till it got killed by a card Logan made named "Elfin Math". But then later, another card was used by Sarah to resurrect Orky Maff, 'cause Logan's score was getting far ahead of everyone. The point of the game isn't really to win, but cards that jostle the whole table's scoring tiers are always appreciated.
• The second 2-hour block had more traditional scores. Kevin Smith (not the famous one) won with 900 points (Clown-filled Manicotti FTW). 2nd place was Aaron Curtis at 701 points, Jennifer Clark-Wilkes was 3rd at 220pts. I and my wife filled out the bottom of the rankings at -150 and -444 points respectively.
• Logan Bonner made really fun cards, by the way - he had us drawing mustaches on existing cards, shouting "Hey you guys!" at the top of our lungs, and doing other goofy stuff.
• Aaron Cooke had a great illustrative touch. He cards look really sharp, and it reminded me of playing with my friend Jeremy back in Albuquerque. (Jeremy's cards have traditionally been the most artistic and grokkable, cards that you just love to have in your deck. Comparing Aaron's to Jeremy's is a high compliment for the new player.)
• There's a natural tendency for each consecutive game of Blank White Cards to get stranger and more complicated. Game 1 always has lots of elegant "just points" cards, while subsequent games get more and more text-based cards. That really bit us in the 2nd 2-hour block. Sarah and I were unintentionally making more advanced cards, but 2 of the 3 other players were just learning the game. The error of our ways became obvious when both those players used a rule on a card to intentionally make themselves lose a turn so they'd have time to figure out what all the other cards in play did. By that point, it was hard to undo the damage. If I host it again next year, I'll run only one 2-hour block per day.
  

If there's interest, I'll take some photos of at least a few of the cards and post them here later this week.

My submissions to GwenCon

I just emailed Andy Collins the events I'd like to run for GwenCon:

The first is an RPG:

Lost Waaaagh!
system based on Dark Heresy / Warhammer FRP
6 Players
4 hours
No knowledge required
A small band of Orks miraculously survive when their space "plane" crashes on a mysterious planet. Now they must fend off smoke-tyranids, flashback sequences, and even "Da Uvvers". Familiarity with ABC's Lost and GW's WH40K wouldn't hurt, but is not required.

As you can see, it's not at all related to the various games I'd discussed here before for possible GwenCon games. Many of them had been based on Scion, and I've decided I hate the Scion mechanics. No doubt I'll probably find the Dark Heresy mechanics intolerable as well, but for a one-shot, I should be able to distill them down into a rules-light version.

The second event is a card game I'd "moderate":

Blank White Cards
6 Players
2 hours
No knowledge required
It's kinda like a CCG, except you create the cards during the game. Each card needs a name, a quick (and awful) illustration, and then either a point value or explanation of what it does. Pens, colored pencils, and blank cards will be provided. Bring your own imagination. Winning is NOT the goal.

I plan to run BWC twice, back to back, since it's the sort of game people can leave (or dive into) mid-game without a real problem. That way no one's forced to commit to 4 hours if they only want to do 2, and we might get some fresh meat between rounds.

Fungeon - The Blank White Cards of Hack & Slash Dungeon Romps

I just discovered Fungeon today*. It's a GM-less hack and slash dungeon romp, where the players build the dungeon as they explore.I'd done something similar (but dreadfully more complex) several years back, which we lovingly called Forge Knight Quest (as it used parts from Dwarven Forge dungeon tiles, the Mage Knight miniatures game, and Warhammer Quest). We played that till till someone broke their nose.** Eventually, it sprouted Forge Knight Quest Dark, which allowed "programmable" monster behavior inspired by Simulator Bots in the Nintendo 64 game Perfect Dark. Basically, it just liberally mixed bits of all the above games in an attempt to make a semi-random GM-less dungeon-romp minis game. We'd also played a bit of D&D minis, and a game that blended all the WotC minis systems (D&D, StarWars and even Axis & Allies using the Godzilla-ish conversion rules they'd put up at wizards.com), plus a bit of Heroscape thrown in for good measure. What can I say? I like minis, but I also like cooperative games.

Fungeon is kinda like that, except it's more like an RPG, not minis-based, and is a lot more rules-light. So it's got a bit in common with the Rune RPG, too, only a lot lighter. It's also kinda reminiscent of Blank White Cards, since you're making a joint map and encounters on paper (and on the fly). Strikes me as a lot of fun, and I might give it a shot after we've moved into the new apartment.


*: When a forumite talked (joked?) about converting Scion to Fungeon's mechanics - a very odd concept. He wrote it straight-faced with no apparent irony, but what a strange idea.

**: I mean that literally. In the midst of the game, she realized she'd left something out in the car, so she went downstairs to get it. Walking back to the elevator she fell and broke her nose. She went to the hospital, and for some reason we never played the game again. It'd been a regular weekly game for a couple months before that. Go fig.

Blank White Cards on Flickr

Today I stumbled across this collection of images by What Silence. I'm posting it here because it includes several images of Blank White Cards, more than a few of which I had a hand in. (There are a few mistakes in his accreditations, as in two or three cases he mistook my wife's drawing and handwriting for mine.) Damn, I need to play BWC again, and soon. Hopefully he'll get around to making that Ruby version sometime. (Hint. Hint. Nudge. Nudge.)

Grin. I was there for many of those games, and looking back on this cracks me up. Thanks for putting those shots up, my friend. And thanks the smile on my face.

I may have to "appropriate" the cards named "New Plan! Let's kill Corwin AND Benedict!" and "Object Of Your Desire" for future Amber-related posts. Wonder if he'll notice...

Or-E-Gone!

This weekend we visited friends in Brooklyn, on Milwaukie, but not in Maine. The trip was a lot of fun, and included the first game of Blank White Cards I'd played since leaving Albuquerque.

Since we were hanging with old friends of the neither-frightening-nor-easily-frightened variety, I made a few cards I'd always wanted to do, but had never felt they'd be appropriate. I was pleasantly surprised that not a single R-rated (or more severe) moment occurred in the game, unless you count what happened to that drawing of the yellow submarine. The trick seems to be to include escape clauses in your more potentially embarrassing cards, such as "...that player chooses between swapping clothes or swapping seats and cards." You still get the humor and the tension effects, but without anyone doing anything they'll really regret later. It's a hoot. And before Jeremy asks: "For the last time, we're not swingers!"