We stopped by the MoCCA comic show yesterday, mostly for Eileene’s benefit. I tend to stay at arm’s length from comics, as I do from all art forms, treasuring only a very few favorites and ignoring the merely good. Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile may belong in that elite first category. Shiga caused a stir a couple […]
We host a monthly Game Day: anywhere from four to ten friends get together and play board games. And tomorrow’s the day. We have a few new games to try, but I don’t know whether I have the heart. There’s a certain trade-off between rich strategic and/or tactical play on the one hand, and accessibility […]
Okay, okay, they got me. Sort of. As an April Fool’s Day joke, jayisgames.com, a website devoted to freeware and shareware web games, offered a review of the new turn-based strategy game Tic Tac Toe. Even small children recognize tic tac toe as far too ancient and far too simple to waste time on, except […]
Fishing for new RPG fodder, some designers have gone too far afield. Parsley Games are self-contained scenarios designed to mimic old-school text adventures like Zork. The players attempt to win the scenario with simple verb-object commands like “get lamp†and “go east†and “eat profiterole.†One poor player is stuck with the role of “parser;†[…]
Looking at the world through someone else’s eyes can teach surprising lessons. Even when the someone else is fictional. Even when it’s your own RPG character. Let’s see if I can get through this briefly. Our current campaign is another variation on the “secret magical war†so successfully pioneered by White Wolf. Everybody who’s anybody […]
Did our taxes this weekend, to find a happy surprise: we now qualify for educational credits. As recently as 2009, we didn’t qualify because we—by “we,†I mean “Eileeneâ€â€”made too much money. But the ceiling for claiming a tuition deduction has been raised to something like $80,000 per person from an earlier ceiling much closer […]
We host a monthly Game Day: anywhere from four to ten friends get together and play board games. And tomorrow’s the day. We have a few new games to try, but I don’t know whether I have the heart. There’s a certain trade-off between rich strategic and/or tactical play on the one hand, and accessibility […]
I finished Dragon Age II tonight. All my earlier thoughts still hold, although the pig-in-a-poke Gotcha! missions about which I complained became mercifully less common as the game progressed. (In their place came missions you were free to accept or decline, but still had to perform after declining: transporting a Qunari mage to his execution, […]
I’ve noticed a nice touch in Dragon Age II: weapon and armor shops sell good stuff. Dragon Age: Origins had a few nice things in its shops: magical tomes that would increase your attributes and backpacks to increase your carrying capacity. But weapons and armor? On rare occasion, you might find gear superior to your […]
Studying game systems and searching for campaign inspiration has taken on a sudden urgency. Ella, our current GM, has announced that she’ll be traveling: to the Philippines for a couple months, maybe elsewhere for longer, while she tries to work out where to go next after some major life events. Her intention is to return […]