Lords of Waterdeep

Lords of Waterdeep

Classified as a "European" style game by my friends, this game has been extraordinarily fun and quite enjoyable, if a bit complicated in learning how to play it.  The various aspects of this game have me wanting more games like it.  The game is very much a hybrid, providing the feel of a good combination of computer based MMO (quest completion and competing for limited resources) and tabletop RPG (making the decision on what, when and how to achieve goals).

The game starts with a combination of intrigue cards and quest cards, gives you a Lord of Waterdeep, a couple of agents and a money supply.  In the group pool of resources are gold, clerics, wizards, thieves and warriors.  On the board are more intrigue cards, quest cards, building cards, potential agent recruits and game control pieces.  Default locations on the board provide starting players with access to the various classes needed to complete quests and gain more gold.  Because only 1 building can be purchased each round, the selection of buildings (3 to choose from at any given time) can significantly affect your ability to complete quests.  As an aside, knowing which quest type your particular Lord wants can make a huge difference at the end of the game, so pay attention.

So far, there have been some obviously better quests/buildings/intrigue cards and some that seem to be after thought crap.  The difficulty in executing the quests varies and depending on how you approach it, can make a slow start erupt into a run-away winner.  

An important note, the execution order of each turn does seem to have a significant impact on play and determination of play by other players, so paying attention to the game is a must.  This is not a beer and pretzels game if you are trying to be competitive.  And while it can be complicated at first, getting to know and understand the little things about this game, make me like it even more.  But, because it has a fair bit of randomness, it does not benefit the regular player so much so that a new player cannot compete in their first game.

I highly enjoy this game, highly recommend this game and will consider purchasing this game upon my return from GenCon.

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Robotech

This excites me in so many different ways.  I have loved Robotech since I first discovered anime in high school (some 20+ years ago).  It just kills me that American audiences cannot get the concept of adult cartoons.








The good news is that it would appear that miniature production has effectively been approved.  At the same time, the Robotech Battles: Macross rules may provide an insight into a new rpg or something related.  With GenCon coming next month, perhaps, and this is just a hope against hope, somebody will be able to say something about this development.





And really, who doesn't love 60-foot tall giant space aliens and the human build mecha to fight them?

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GenCon 2012

The flight is booked, the hotel is secured.  Now just got to go through the pages of events and get the tickets I want and decide on buying the pass early or waiting till I arrive.  I'm torn, last year I did will-call on tickets and stood in line for a good 2+ hours while there was basically nobody in line for just buying the tickets the day of.  Now I'm in a situation where I have to decide on trying to face will-call again or buying them once I get there.  My flight arrives around noon on Thursday the 16th meaning I'll probably have to stand in line either way, I'm just not sure which is going to be the better (shorter) choice.  Oh well, still a good amount of gaming at the best gaming event of the year.

Drop me a line if you are going to be there and let's see if we can't meet up for some dice throwing.

Hentai Cafe or "How we're all doomed"

GenCon 2011 had one event I had never attended before - the Hentai Cafe.  I was young, I was inexperienced, I was curious - BULLSHIT, I wanted to see some anime porn, /sigh, I knew better. 

What I didn't want to see was a bunch of guys leaping on chairs, screaming "pick me, pick me, pick me".  Why were they screaming this, well because instead of the original soundtrack for the selected scene, the MC would *sometimes* pick appropriately gendered individuals from the audience to voice-over the scene: 2 girls & 1 guy, 1 guy & 1 girl, 2 girls.  It was entertaining for about 45 minutes, then it became much more about observing the audience than the hentai.

Dude, you were watching the audience (about a 4-1 male to female ratio)?  Well, yeah, cause 45 minutes of anime porn is all I could really handle.  Ok, so what was interesting about the audience?  I'm glad you asked.  For starters, hentai is freaky stuff, aliens, demons, bondage, slavery, etc. in the form of cartoon characters - yes, I know it's anime, general readers may not be as familiar.  What's really freaky is when members of the audience says, "what the fuck?"  If you have to ask that question at a hentai show, you don't need to be at a hentai show.  Why's that?  Well for one, you should know to expect freaky shit.  The other reason is you've probably never had an adult relationship in which you trusted your partner (and in the process tried some freaky shit on each other), excepting of course uber-religious couples (why were you at the hentai event in the first place?).  Second, the countdown: 5-4-3-2-1-FUCK!!! is just sad and possibly a little misguided depending on the hentai.

On a positive note, the MC was great.  He was personable, funny, self-deprecating and generally seemed to be having a good time, even when he had "to piss like a race-horse."

So why are you saying we're doomed?  Because we even have things like this.  Look at all the *great* societies in history - Rome, Greece, Egypt.  Almost from the moment they started having enough "free-time" to come up with shit like this, their society came crashing down - granted it may take 100 years+ but in the scheme of things, that's not that long.  What are you saying?  I don't know, I'm still working on that.

When it comes to gaming geeks, you are generally dealing with some of the most creative, intelligent, socially-inept people on the planet.  On the Thursday GenCon opened, I would have put the combined intellect and problem solving skills of the people in the Indy Con Center against just about any other single building on the planet: NASA, JPL, the Pentagon, Microsoft HQ, Google HQ, Oracle HQ, you name it, I'll take the GenCon attendees.  Now to just figure out a way to focus all that potential into playing catch-up for the 800 years of progress the Dark Ages cost us.

WarMage Battlegrounds - Review

What do I want to play?  Hmm, I've only got about a 1/2 hour, I know: WarMage from Burst Online Entertainment.  Why would I want to play that?  Why wouldn't you want to play it is a better question?  It's free, it loads in a browser, you can play against people or the AI, you have upgrade options, customizable formations, multiple races, GenCon2011 (hint), you can limit the time to take a turn, player ranking system and you can always just quit if you need to.

So what's bad about it, well, so far I've played it on my home machine, which is old and underpowered, and the game was pretty choppy.  It was playable, but not exactly enjoyable.  My work machine is a different story - yes, I use my work computer for non-work related activities sometime, but it's newer and more powerful and I needed a comparison.  Also, it crashed out of IE 9 on one of my early games where I had burned the Dragon Scroll.  Finally, there is stuff to buy, with real money, but who really wants to do that - oh, just about everybody these days.

Supposedly, the ranking system is dynamic and a high ranked player doesn't get much for beating a low ranked player and a low ranked player might actually increase from playing a much higher ranked opponent.

The graphics are basic, like most browser based games, but good enough to easily distinguish between units, the units are distinct enough to really appreciate a kill on the opposing side or hurt on your side.  There are a ton of maps and I might recommend that they open source that feature for the fans to make some contributions.

I haven't spent enough time in the lobby areas to see what the idle chat is like, so I cannot speak on the other players, but I can say that any time I was in the lobby was time I wasn't playing the game, which I want to do.

Nerd/Geek Rage

GenCon was a relatively mellow event considering the many thousands of folks attending.  However, I did get to see one really good Nerd Rage event that I think exemplifies all that is geeks being social.  Please allow me to set the scene:

A quiet movie room, the movies are running a little behind, about 10 minutes.  It is 12:10 am and the final movie was supposed to start at midnight - a classic D-grade horror flick Mother's Day.  The current show is a series of horror shorts, each 5-10 minutes.  The final one comes on: The Meat Eater, it's, umm over quickly enough and the Gencon employee goes to switch out the movies. 

A voice from the back of the room: "Hey, what are you doing?"  Well, obviously the movies are being changed out, cause the last movie has gone to credits.  Up from the seat comes the view, "I asked what you are doing?"  Nate chimes in: "putting in Mother's Day," he is ignored.  Now the bruiser (not, not really but he is rather large, maybe 6'2" and sporting a dedicated nerd's body, so probably 285+lbs) is demanding to know if the movie belongs to the employee - no dumbass, it doesn't she's just doing her job.  At this point, we are all informed that there are important plot points in the credits - and here I thought the important plot point was that the movie was over.  The berating goes on for a good 5 minutes, but now includes several GenCon employees - of course this is after midnight, so the supervisor has long since gone home.  We've also clearly established that the physical copy of these horror shorts does not belong to any of the employees, who are simply doing their job and that the showings are already behind schedule.

Whatever dude, Mother's Day was much funnier and more interesting that the 7-minute horror short that just finished, no matter how many plot points were revealed in the credits (I've had 10 second dreams that had more plot points).

On the flip side of nerd rage is nerd pity.  A *nice* GenCon staffer begins talking.  This takes the form of being told that my bag, that is sitting at the side of my chair, pinned between a window, my chair and Jason's chair, though not actually touching my chair and with a very small path available to get to it, is too far away and that I need to move it closer because somebody might steal it.  Ok, I'm at a convention with 20-25-30k people, if I leave a bag on a table or even in a chair, I could see somebody grabbing it.  But seriously, the guy sitting at the table next to us, with his shoes off and feet in his chair really needed to put his shoes on - cause you never know what people bring in from the street - /facepalm.  One of the best quotes of the week comes from him, "how long do I have to put my shoes on?"

The next day, I see the same staffer telling a man in a wheelchair to move to the side of the hallway so that he didn't get run over - you know the dangers of stampeding nerds.

GenCon 2011 - Reflections on "the Best 4 Days in Gaming"

Generally speaking, I try to buy stuff in a manner that is most efficient, that often means buying early/planning ahead.  That's what I did this time, it didn't work out well:

Above is a picture of the hallway soon after I got in line.

Now we're 2 hours into the line.

Here's that hallway under normal conditions.


We got there at 8:15ish, and it still took me the better part of 2.5 hours to get through the line.  I cannot imagine what those who were outside on the sidewalk experienced in trying to get their will-call tickets.  Oh well, live and learn.

In the meantime, why are there generic tickets and then specific event tickets - obviously because you can control the number of participants in any activity.  However, just as it does at the local county fair, it functions to create a disconnect between the expenditure of money and the cost of things - who cares that it costs 2-3-4 tickets, but I sure as hell wouldn't pay $8 dollars for something - shit, I just did.  For future reference, plan exactly what you want to participate in, buy those tickets, then get a handful of generic tickets to do stuff like the BattleTech VR Pods or the random pick-up demo game/discussion panel.

So what was fun and interesting you ask?  Well, the BattleTech Pods were fun, and I would have liked to have gotten in again, an hour wait wasn't in the cards.

Giant dice were:

Not into giant dice, how about a *life-size* troll?  I'm 5'10" and came to just above the tip of his nose.

Not into monsters, how about Mechs?

Still not doing it for ya? Then you'll just have to read the next entry with some pics of the various tabletop games.

Challenge of the dice

I've never really paid a lot of attention to non-dice based games. But I got to experience the joy of just such a creation last night. The honor of which goes to The Game of Thrones boardgame - yes, I know I'm way behind the curve on this one, never having read the books or played the game before now. But that said, the sheer number of games at GenCon that are not dice based leads me to think that I will have to explore this concept more closely.

Day 1 - Fini

We arrived at the convention center about 8:15 and found a nearby parking meter that was, in the short-term, better than the $20/day cost of the garage. In we walked. First was the pre-ordered and delivered badges with 2 people in line. Next was the purchase day-of section with about 10 people in line. Then came HELL, officially known as will-call. The obvious line was about 30 people, then the less obvious line separated by the concourse, then the 300 yard line to the opposite side of the building, and the curling end of about 20 yards back towards the main part of the building - What have I done to myself?

1 hour and 40 minutes later I crossed the concourse, the line now mirrored itself, then curled outside for an unknown distance - I didn't care how long it was at that point. Then the first really good thing happened, "if your name is between A and Dj, move to the will call sign and get your badge." I have my badge, time to call and find out where everybody is - crap, they are now in line for tickets - where? WAIT, now I have to get fucking tickets too?

Well, another 30 minutes in line and I have 10 generic tickets - BattleTech VR simulator here we come. "Hey Paul, you don't have your goody bag.". "What goodie bag and where's Nate?". Another 20 minutes in line and I have a free copy of Rift, a Magic booster deck and a ton of coupons for free shit. Battletech time you say? Nope, time to head to the hotel for check-in - Argh!!!!

GenCon Bound

Leaving for GenCon.  Check in often for updates from Indy.