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. 

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.

All About Bacon

Backstory: I was reading Suppressed Transmission: The First Broadcast by Kenneth Hite, and the chapter entitled "Six Degrees of Sir Francis Bacon" got me wondering:

• What other variants of the Kevin Bacon Game are there?
• What other references to said game in popular media could I think of?
• Is there anyway I could work it into a bill in Nomiblog?

Kevin Bacon game: Everybody knows this one. One player lists a movie. The next lists an actor from said movie. The third lists another movie that actor was in, and so on around the circle. Several scoring systems and variants exist, depending on whether you're trying to cooperatively get to Kevin Bacon or actively trying to stump the other players. If playing with an even number of players, it's often best to have each person's turn be the listing of both a actor and a film.

I hearby propose a new name for an established Bacon Game variant: We'll call it Fakin' Bacon, after that lovely product that looks and tastes like Bacon but is actually made from soy. In Fakin' Bacon, you can count home movies, stock footage, voice overs, actors playing other actors, sound and lighting technitions, etc. As long as it was filmed, videoed, or digitally recorded and shown to at least one person who wasn't in it, it counts. I played a lot of Fakin' Bacon back when it didn't have a name.

To that, we add some other variants I've played or seen in print:

Sir Francis Bacon game: As Kenneth Hite demonstrated quite ably in the above-mentioned book, Sir Francis Bacon is very easy to connect to anything in the field of conspiracy theory: Masons, UFOs, Kabbala, modern-day assassination plots - they are all the fault of Sir Francis Bacon. I mentioned an example elsewhere today.

Hite also quotes Foucoult's Pendulum, wherein Umberto Eco connects "sausage" to "Plato" in 5 easy steps. That sounds like a variant of Kevin Bacon, but with fewer restrictions on what things you can connect and how you may connect them. Probably only a game in the same sense that Sim Earth is - a pleasant rule-less diversion you can never truly win.

The A. Harrison Game is kind of like Sir Francis Bacon, except played via snail-mail and probably dangerous under the current administration. Also pleasant, ruleless and unwinable.

I once played the Eggs and Bacon game, where instead of listing actors and films we listed menu items and restaurants. It was okay for something to do when you're trying to get kicked out of Denny's, but not really a good overall game. Getting from "Faux Chicken with Mangos" to "Kosher Latkes" is an exercise I'll leave to the reader.

The Erdős–Bacon Number involves people who are published academics and appear in films. It's not really a game, not even in the sense that Sims are, as it's just an equation with no decision tree. It's interesting none-the-less: you add your Erdos number to your Bacon number, and the total is your Erdos-Bacon number. The current minimum is a 3. My wife has a Bacon Number of 4 (see below) and co-authored a paper on plasma physics and using lasers to cause implosion (seriously) while working at the Los Alamos Labs, so she may have a non-infinite Erdös-Bacon number, I'll have to do some research to say for certain.

The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon entry on Wikipedia lists plenty of good references to the Game. But it misses my two favorites:

1. The DVD of Season 2 of Lost has an interactive Six-Degrees game that simply shows the links between the characters in the show.
2. "James Bondage, 006.9 in A View To A Clone, Part 2: In The Mouth Of Cloneness" has an extended sequence wherein Bondage and the Clonemaster play Fakin' Bacon, though they claim it's the genuine Kevin Bacon Game.

My Bacon Number would be 4:
Rolfe Bergstrom is in the upcoming Black with Billy Garberina. (I also have a voice-over zombie moan and shuffle in Billy's Necroville, but that may be uncredited)
Billy Garberina was in Gimme Skelter (2007) with Kenneth J. Hall
Kenneth J. Hall was in Fear of a Black Hat (1994) with Nancy Giles
Nancy Giles was in Loverboy (2005) with Kevin Bacon

Therefore anyone else (Jake & Kris Roth, Audie Harrison, etc) who appeared in In The Mouth of Cloneness has a Bacon Number of 5, assuming you count minor video projects.
The original View To A Clone at least appears on the internet so it's perhaps a more legitimate Number 5 link for Jake, X, Daved, Kat, etc.
J. Starr Welty appeared in a couple Pizza Face Death films with me, in addition to writing and directing Black, so her Fakin' Bacon numbers are 4 or 5 depending on how you trace it.

I note that someone I went to high-school with has a Bacon Number (or at least Fakin' Bacon Number) of 3:
Tasha Hardy produced Star Trek: World Enough And Time which starred George Takei
George Takei was in American Summer (2007) with Tom Arnold (I)
Tom Arnold (I) was in We Married Margo (2000) with Kevin Bacon

The Oracle of Bacon determines Bacon Numbers quickly, though it does so only via Actors, so it ignores Tasha, for example. Jerks. Here's a fun fact:

"According to the Oracle of Kevin Bacon website, approximately 12% of all actors cannot be linked to Bacon using their criteria."

I assume wikipedia and the oracle meant all professional film actors when they said that.

My Dear Baron...

I have been recently named "Baron of All Nomiblog" by my fellow participants over at playnomiblog.blogspot.com, and so I've begun posting in-character. As Baron, I'm being most snooty, "ande I doth speaketh like yon faux Middle-English-er".

But hauling around this title of Baron just reminds me of the Munchausen RPG. There's another one I really enjoyed but haven't played in forever. Not since 4th of July in 2001, I believe. It's more of a story-telling party game than an RPG. It has more in common with Once Upon A Time, Nanofictionary and The Rocky and Bullwinkle Role-Playing Party Game than it does with D&D or Scion.


"My dear Baron, would you please tell us about the time that you, whilst armed with nothing but a 2-day old halibut and a half-empty jar of goat's milk, defeated the entirety of the Spanish Armada and the Mongolian Hordes simultaneously?"

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!"

Werewolf Terrorist

Saturday night we played werewolf over at Tindalos House, the home of Andy and Gwen. Amazing how I couldn't taste or sense the alcohol in the first two Mai Tai's, yet the 4th made me utterly incapable of bluffing. I don't think that last one was particularly strong, either.

Then Sunday, Sarah and I went for dinner at Beth's with Amy and Kevin. While there, we kept talking about Werewolf. It's pretty typical, as the game is so lively it's on your mind for the next day or two. In that conversation, we were talking of hunters and seers and witches and star-crossed lovers and other roles that keep townsfolk and werewolves from getting stale. And Kevin said something to the effect of:

"there should be a role that's like a terrorist or something, and if they die, they blow up the people sitting next to them."

My eyes bulged. I told him to expect something along those lines on my blog in the coming week, along with due credit to him for coming up with the initial idea. As we talked, we roughly sketched out two different versions of the role. I typed them up, and intended to post them here. But in the process of looking for a good rule page to link to, I found they already exist. Look under "Killing Roles" and read about "The Human Torch". Sorry, Kevin, some unknown person beat us both to the punch. But man, there's a lot of roles there. Might just have to print that out and bring it to Tindalos.