Sunday, August 31, 2008

 

GenCon UK Day 4

Gencon is a lot shorter on Sunday - finishing at 4pm so everybody has time to go home before returning to the daily grind on Monday - so I wasn't expecting to get too much out of the day. I signed up for the archery and swordsmanship training at the Medieval Tented Encampment - at £5 a session, I'd be a fool not to.

The first three days of the convention I spent indoors while outside was warm sunshine. Come the fourth day when I'm outside, it starts to rain - much to the dismay of the other people joining me for the archery (hi, Rei!). We managed several sets of arrows at the straw garland with a range of ancient and modern bows; when the rain was just way too heavy we had a history lesson on archery (removing arrows from your body would appear to be pretty gruesome stuff).

The sword-handling session (just me attending) was free as the instructor was a little worse for wear (blisters on fingers from previous days) and cut it to around 20 minutes. Showed how much the stunt people must train to get the stage fighting to work - I found it really hard just remembering the single parry I'd just learned, let alone a string of moves. Fun all the same (and no rain).

Afterwards I whiled away the time playing "Ingenious", "Kung Fu Fighting" and "Shadow Hunters" (twice).



Ingenious - yet another of the 100s of Reiner Knizia games - is a colourful, tactile game with an interesting scoring system. You place figure-of-eight-shaped pieces to score points by extending lines of colours; these points move the corresponding wooden cube across your score card; at the end of the game when there are no spaces left on the board, the losers are the players with a cube that has a lower total score than the winner's lowest cube. So - just like in "Bucket Brigade" that I played on Saturday - concentrating on getting one colour with as many points as possible is not going to win you the game. A lot of Knizia's games are like this - they are not "race as fast as possible to the end" games.

Kung Fu Fighting from SlugFest Games was great fun - playing cards to beat the crap out of the opposition in Hong Kong cinema style. Employ a stance; make an attack; make the attack harder/faster/wilder; big up yourself with awfully dubbed accents. I'd buy this but I don't know that many people who would get into the game's background enough.



Shadow Hunters took a little while to get used to what the winning conditions were and why everything was the way it was. The players need to need to work out which type of character (bad guys, good guys, neutrals) each of the the others are playing so that they can kill the right ones. Interesting way of dealing damage - the amount is the difference between the roll of a d4 and a d6 which gives the following range:





The rest of the day was spent on lunch and shopping for stuff I didn't need.

Every week it seems my gaming buddies show off yet MORE dice they have just purchased on some shopping trip. I look at them with concern in my eyes - "surely you have enough dice already?" They giggle madly in reply (or at least I imagine they do). I have a laughably small dice collection by modern standards - less than 50 before today and a third of those have been freebies picked up from conventions in the last few years. A few date back 30 years to a box of Gamma World I owned at some point in the past. These are easy to spot - the faces aren't all exactly the same shape and the edges/vertices are showing impact wear - modern dice last forever.

So there I am with time to kill in the trade hall - this is like going food shopping on a really empty stomach. I've already checked every table several times in the last few days so there isn't going to be much that will catch my eye ... except some Chessex Lotus Speckled Dice at the Squash Goblin stall. The colours of the dice are more vibrant than the images off the web - nice bright orange and green (my favourite colours).



I carefully select just the ones I need - 4d6 for character creation (even though I just use the fixed elite rolls these days anyway) and 2d8 (for damage) - so that I don't spend too much money. I'm not poverty-stricken but I think it is important to focus on buying only what you need (I have enough d4s; nobody uses d12s; my d20s have remained unchanged for decades).

And then I bought the Gargantuan Black Dragon for £10.

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Saturday, August 30, 2008

 

GenCon UK Day 3

Change of pace today - I've already played all the Call of Cthulhu games that were available (excluding the beginner level ones) so only had the afternoon Paranoia session booked. Also, the family were coming along today to partake in the fun.

So a lie-in to try and catch up after the late finish of day 2 (and even later blogging) meant we didn't leave the house until getting on for lunchtime. After getting Sue and Sam issued with tickets at the con HQ in Palmer building, we had a look in the trade hall to see if Ralph Horsley was at the artists' desk.

As I was now attending all 4 days of GenCon, I could now catch up with Ralph who I knew from the 80s when he was a fanzine artist learning the tricks of his trade. Now he's being commissioned to produce work for Wizards of the Coast D&D products and these days they don't just put any old rubbish in their books (we're talking about the artwork here, not the gaming content where opinions are a lot more varied). I mentioned that I was planning to publish my old Green Goblin Magazines in Adobe Reader format and he agreed to have his original line artwork to be included. Hopefully he won't be too embarrassed to see his early attempts resurrected.

Ralph was also selling off some of the books he received as free samples where his work was printed - 3 D&D books for a tenner was not something I could easily pass up on, especially "Serpent Kingdoms" which I had been checking eBay and Amazon to buy for my campaign. The other two books were "Monster Manuals IV & V" which I had not touched before, mainly because of the poor reviews I had seen. Now, though, at £3.33 each it was harder to say no. In a feeding frenzy state, we also picked out two pieces from his art collection - an original pencil sketch and a colour print of one of the Magic:TG pieces he's created. Both are reflections of some parts of our family life and it is up to you to work out what.

The sketch is A4 and nicely detailed, stickered at £90.



The print, "Boggart Birth Rite", is copied from a roughly A4 acrylic original and was priced at £7.50 including the frame.




Ralph was generous enough to sell the books and pictures all for £90 - effectively we paid full price for the sketch and received everything else free.

Ralph also signed the MM5 and recommended I ask Anne Stokes and Eva Widermann, also doing sketchs and signing at the artists' table today, so I did. Here are the pictures (from the Wizards site) that I asked them to sign in the book to show how good their work is:

Ralph
Horsley
Anne
Stokes
Eva
Widermann


Afterwards we bumped into Beth Ashton (Tom's better half) and went for lunch on the Blue Room. My intention afterwards afterwards was to catch the 2pm Paranoia game - which I had been looking forward to for days - only to be cruelly denied.



It happens - now I'll have to wait until Dragonmeet for my fix.

To fill the gap, we all went to the Kniziathon:

"Reiner Knizia is one of the world’s foremost designers of boardgames, with more than 400 games and books published. He is winner of many awards for his designs, including Germany’s prestigious Spiel des Jahres 2008 for the game Keltis (aka The Lost Cities Boardgame, Kosmos).



Playing in a Kniziathon is a great way to enjoy a variety of Reiner Knizia's games in one place at one time. There are lots of games to try – from classics to the most recent releases (and even some which you might never have come across before). There are plenty of willing opponents and friendly organisers to help you with the rules. It's the perfect opportunity to meet games players and enjoy exciting games - and if you are doing well, you might even win a prize!

As an added bonus, Reiner Knizia will also be present for the Kniziathon. Here’s your chance to meet Reiner in person, ask questions about his designs, or even test your skill by playing against him. Reiner will also present the awards to the winners at the end of the Kniziathon. Hint: turn up early and play as many different games against as many different opponents as you can!"


The principle seems simple but the scoring isn't. There are two stages to working out how many points you get for completing a game. Firstly you cross-reference the number of players against your final position - for examples, a two-player game awards 4pts for 1st and 2 pts for 2nd but a six-player game gives 6pts for 1st, 5pts for 2nd and so on down to 1pt for 6th. And then secondly you take into account the weighting of the game which represents the expected time taken to play. Here you would use a multiplier varying from 1x (e.g. "Mmmmm... brains") to 4x (e.g. "Amun-Re"). So winning one hard 6-player game should net you 24 points, equivalent to winning six easy 2-player games.

The Breakwells stuck together and played through "Lost Cities", "Bucket Brigade", "Fish Eat Fish", "Sushizock im Gockelwok", "Flea Circus" and "Too Many Cooks" (all 2x games apart from "Flea Circus"). Not surprisingly (as they are designed by Reiner Knizia), all of these were easy to pick up and play. Some made you realise that there could be some really good strategies waiting to be understood (like "Bucket Brigade") while others were more down to luck. Highlight of the day - coming 3rd and receiving a heavy stone plaque from Knizia. I must have been grinning so much I'm surprised the top of my head didn't tilt back. It's not often I manage to beat my family at card and boardgames which makes getting the plaque doubly sweet.



After the awards it was tea time - Sue stayed on-site to dine while I drove home to drop Samantha off (lightweight) and return after having fridge clearance food to eat. I found Sue in the Looney Labs room because, according to them:

"We absolutely do not have a preview deck for the new game, Monty Python Fluxx. We will not be running demo sessions of it all convention. Ignore the rumours of silly accents and singing. There will be no Kniggets of the Round Table. Tell everyone."

So we didn't play three rounds of Monty Python Fluxx or shout "NI!" or question whether strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is a basis for a system of government or expect the Spanish Inquistion. And neither will you be able to play the final retail product at Dragonmeet on November 29th.

A donation to the Children In Need box granted us Zombie Fluxx Flamethrowers (be the envy of all). I did enter the decorate-your-own-zombie contest but ate my entry before it was judged. As you can see, an obvious winner:



Trailing zombie crumbs, we went to the cinema theatre to watch the charity auction. Normally I don't come away with anything as I'm not willing to compete with those people with money to burn, even if it is for a good cause. They can be good entertainment though. Colin Baker, one of the convention guests, was good at pushing the prices up through sheer force of will. Here he's describing the proof of a Dr Who card collection that was going under the hammer:



I loved his reference to Peter Davidson, the Doctor before him, as the "Wet Vet". I hadn't heard the label before and it did amuse.

Best auction was by this looney (below) who was offering a tattoo-of-the-winner's-choice on his shoulder for charity. The big-screen picture shows the amount of space in the lot - must be about 3 inches across. Went for over £250, I think.



After the auction we played a couple of games of "Blue Moon" (yet another Knizia games) in the Board Games Library. Lovely artwork and actually not as complicated as it first seems.

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Friday, August 29, 2008

 

GenCon UK Day 2

One thing I forgot to include yesterday was a photo of the game that looks amazingly like Subbuteo.



FTChamps is a flickable game, just like the original, except they have added a collectable flavour by selling individual player figures that you click into the bases. Each figure can be bought in packs or singly for around £2 each. If it takes off then the money should roll in.

Day 2 at GenCon started with a 9am game of Call of Cthulhu (Dark Ages):

Unsung Saga, by Oscar Rios
"For long months all of you had prepared for the raiding season. The new Knorr, 'Ravenar' was ready to sail. Her lines were sleek; her deck strong, and her raven figurehead was newly painted black. Axes were sharpened, swords oiled and her crew was ready. Goodbyes had already been given for by dawn you would all be on your way to Ireland.

This game was set in viking-period Scandanavia and followed the classic CoC model - lots of investigation and weirdness leading up to a big battle. I played the skald, minstrel, what-have-you with a nod to the style of Monty Python's "The ballad of brave Sir Robin." In line with the adventurer's title, the saga remained unsung as the singer didn't survive the epic climax.

After lunch the same Keeper ran a 1930s period Cthulhu investigation:

One of Us, by Max Bantleman
The players took on the characters of various freaks in a travelling circus. This was more complicated than the earlier game although this may just have been down to a different mix of players. There are a few ways to play most adventures - you either let events drive you (going with the plot) or you try and drive events (resisting or missing the plot). The latter occurs when players start to really let their imagination go wild on what they think is happening, usually causing the Keeper to have to handle off-the-wall activities which don't necessarily fall in the scope of the plot. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't.
(downloadable from here)

After tea, the third and final CoC game of the day from Flammable Penguins:

Emerson Manor, by Vittorio Leonardi & Annick Drewnicki
"A dark descent into the horrors of the past. Dark Themes present. The memories a home can hold. Time gets trapped in the creak and warp of the wood. Dreams slide and catch in stained shingles interwoven. The Emerson Manor home of the gifted toy maker has sat still for many years. The town and time have marched on but this silent marker remains. Does it hold what you seek or merely a few children's scary stories and little else."

This game went on until 1:30am (5.5 hours)! And we all died. A lot of the time was consumed by one or two players firmly playing their interpretation of what they were seeing and another (in his first CoC game) needing to understand what was going on in quite some detail. All the characters had partially interconnected backgrounds which made progress difficult at times as personal objectives competed. The slow mirror-by-mirror drift into insanity for the characters (admittedly a feature of a number of CoC scenarios) didn't help progress much either. Again, another example where the player mix is key to the success of the game. Should you stick to playing your role or playing the game, or a bit of both? Not always easy to work out where the balance is.

During the day there was a flying display of hunting birds outside. Unfortunately this was when I was playing but all the birds were available to observers.

Bald Eagle


Barn Owl


Harris Hawk


Tawny Eagle


White-backed Griffon Vulture

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Thursday, August 28, 2008

 

GenCon UK Day 1

Having learn from my practice run in 2007, I booked in advance this year - early bird ticket (4 days for £40, instead of £50 on the door) and all the game sessions I wanted to attend. Most of the RPGs have a slot at either 9am, 2pm or 8pm so it is possible to play almost solidly from breakfast to midnight with gaps for meals (as I will be Friday).

Today started well - picked up my pack of game tickets in Palmer Building and went upstairs to a UFS drop-in session. UFS - or Universal Fighting System - is a CCG version of the arcade/console games like Soul Calibre or Dead or Alive. So you basically play cards to help you attack or block, taking the opponent out before they do too much damage to you. The beginner game (where you get a free starter deck) is nice and simple - thump, block, thump, etc. But then we played through a normal game where - just like in the console game - there is a lot more responding to attack moves with special effects, leading to quite convoluted situations. Even though I was a complete beginner, I had an inkling I wouldn't have the mental approach necessary to consistently build a winning attack combo on my own. This is not the game for me, regardless of how large the women's breasts are in the artwork.



Stuffing my free demo deck into my pocket, I went shopping in the trade hall:

Three cheap books (£5-£7 each, instead of £21, as 3rd edition D&D books are being dumped in favour of newly released 4th ed.):

Wizards of the Coast - Stormwrack
Wizards of the Coast - Dragon Magic
Wizards of the Coast - Complete Mage


Two games from the bring and buy stall:

Burley Games Limited - Take it to the Limit! (£8)
Rio Grande Games - Carcassone: The Castle (£5)


"Take it to the Limit" is a bigger version of the very good "Take it easy". For geeky facts fans, both games are named after Eagles songs from the 1970s.

I picked up "The Castle" because I liked the first few Carcassonne games although, after looking in the box, it's not an expansion for them though so I'll have to see if the family are willing to give it some time. It is a (co-designed) Reiner Knizia game and he can do no wrong at the moment and that may help.

Next event was the Loren Wiseman
Q&A". Loren was heavily involved in creating Traveller at Game Designers'
Workshop (GDW), an RPG is used to play in school back at the turn of the 70s/80s.



The game still exists, now in the (hopefully) capable hands of Mongoose
Publishing
.


Here's a lovely setup of a normal boardgame (Shadows Over Camelot) - would be lovely to use this when my friends play the game but too much of a bugger to cart around each time. ("Hi" to Tom, the rocker in the top right corner).




Here's the much more mundane retail version of the board:



Afterwards, I spent lunchtime in Cafe Mondial (which does free coffee refills - marvellous) reading some of my new books until the afternoon Call of Cthulhu session was ready to start. I almost didn't make it on time as I was defeated by a door, one that had a pull handle but required you to push. I game in this building almost every week but little things like this can even catch out hardened veterans like myself. So dead on 2pm I stumble into the room (thankfully not the last player to arrive).

Suite 350, by Chad Bowser
"A young, upstart company has struggled to make a name for itself in the world of business consulting. In the midst of a reinvention, a consultant is brought in to give the office a new look to keep the ideas flowing. His ideas have drastic consequences for the company and employees as they are drawn into a sublime horror, from which only the investigators can deliver them."

I played a member of SWAT team sent in to relieve a potential hostage situation. First thing my character did was twist his ankle jumping out of the helicopter on the roof. It went down-hill from there although we managed to all eventually escape with the situation solved. One thing that amused me was that the adventure was set in a building owned by Microsoft with floors rented out to other companies. "Hey, I work for MSFT and I didn't know we had an office in Columbus, Ohio". Needless to say, a quick check on the Internet proves I know nothing about the company I work for, absolutely NOTHING.



Game complete, I was driven home for tea before returning in time for the 8pm Call of Cthulhu session:

Charlie Don't Surf, by Max Bantleman
"May 10th 1969, the A Shau Valley near Hue, it’s been quiet... too quiet... the air is thick with the expectation of an attack from Charlie in response to operation Apache Snow. You and the remains of your squad from the 101st Airborne are out on deep recon, trying to get back to your base at Hill 937: ‘Hamburger Hill’. You come across two abandoned vill’s. Scouting the area you find something that changes your world. Makes you think that Charlie may be the least of your worries..."

(Downloadable copy of the Shadow Warriors scenario is here)

Again, we got back alive (and with a damned sight more SAN than in the first game). The games master [[Ben Adkins]] was top notch with excellent background knowledge on the Vietnam war to add flavour to a non-mythos game (not all Cthulhu games need to have Deep Ones). The player running 'sarge' was pretty good too.

And so home to bed (and my blog).

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Sunday, September 02, 2007

 

GenConUK 2007 - report #2 - RPGA

Thursday-Sunday this week has been GenCon UK 2007, held at Reading university.
I'll put my thoughts down in type over the next few days.
Here's my comments on the RPGA events that I posted on the GenCon UK website today.
The website forum really annoyed me as the first draft - which took nearly an hour - disappeared into the ether when I accidentally hit the Escape key. No "did you mean to do that" pop-up. Just gone forever...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Undermountain sessions at GenCon this week were the first encounter I'd had with an RPGA event and I'd like to discuss my experiences to see if they are typical or I was just plain unlucky.

I managed to play "The River Sargauth", "The Citadel", "Belkram's Tomb" over Thursday/Friday with different GMs and players and had different amounts of enjoyment each time. I'd written up a Chaos Gnome priest (luck domain) in the same way I would for a campaign at my local club (i.e. focus on trying things out rather then min/maxing).

"The River Sargauth" (written by Chris Lindsay) went well. The environment felt "real" - we could visualise what the place looked like (good GM descriptive skills, caverns and passageways that made sense, monsters that had personalities (again, down to the GM)). We completed the objectives and felt we had put in a good few hours' work. This obviously set me up for a fall.

"The Citadel" (written by Eric L. Boyd, Ed Greenwood, Chris Lindsay, and Sean K. Reynolds) was an appalling example how to write a rail-roaded hack-and-slay scenario. The flow went as follows: arrive, fight random monster, find random magic item on monster, move to next location, fight random monster, rinse, repeat...


"Belkram's Tomb" (also written by Boyd, Greenwood, Lindsay, and Reynolds) was an equally appalling example of a tricks/traps/monsters dungeon crawl. There was no rhyme or reason to it - how it needed four people to write it is beyond me. Maybe one person had the squared paper, another the Monster Manual, a third had the Magic Item Compendium and the last made the coffee. Which of these guys decided that magic items should be randomly scattered on the floor for the characters to find?

Maybe I would have had different experiences with different DMs? The first seemed to be enjoying themselves but the second, though, didn't seem to be (hadn't prepared as much, got irritated by the poor adventure editing...). Or is it me? Am I expecting too much? Are the modules deliberately dumbed down to make them easy to run for GMs and accessible to novice players?

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Thursday, August 30, 2007

 

GenConUK 2007 - report #1 - Extreme Carcassone

Thursday-Sunday this week has been GenCon UK 2007, held at Reading university.
I'll put my thoughts down in type over the next few days.

Highlight of the convention was a game of Extreme Carcassonne - basically the basic game and a pile of expansion sets. I'd played a lot of games already on Xbox Live (and bought the boxed set too for a more tactile experience) so I was happy about the basic rules but this gave me a chance to try out the expansions at little cost (a £3 ticket to play) against a bunch of players from South Wales.

From the picture below, you can see at least seven expansion sets in use:

  1. The wooden tower pieces from "Carcassonne - The Tower"
  2. The Count and 12-tile town from "Carcassonne - The Count of Carcassonne"
  3. A grey wooden pig from "Carcassonne - Traders & Builders"
  4. A red wooden dragon (edge-on) from "Carcassonne - The Princess & the Dragon"
  5. Cloth and wheat counters from "Carcassonne - Traders & Builders" (again)
  6. The King tile from "Carcassonne - King"
  7. Cathedral and Inn tiles from, surprisingly, "Carcassonne - Inns & Cathedrals"
  8. Extra river tiles from the 2nd River expansion

This lead to quite a confusing game to start with as we got to grips with the various rules. The towers allowed you to take followers hostage and the dragon could be steered by the players to scare followers away, both making for a chaotically changing game. One of the key point winners was the King - if you completed (but not necessarily owned) the largest city during the game then you were King and gained an extra point for every complete city at the end of the game - with the number of expansion sets in play, this meant a 40+ point bonus. There was a similar tile for completing the longest road which also brought in a hefty amount.

Not all the pieces and rules felt like they fitted neatly together - the Tower, for example, didn't make too much sense in the context of the rest of the game. The expansions (apart from the extra tiles) seem to be additional game mechanics and pieces that somebody thought were a good idea at the time. But then even the basic set is a pretty abstract game so I shouldn't really be looking for something that makes a lot of real-world sense.

If you're on Xbox Live and fancy a game, just let me know (Gamer Tag Kingfisher280).

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