I spent yesterday afternoon playtesting a new board game design (big shout-out to playtesters Wade, Ryan, Scott, and Mike, and our gracious hosts, The Source). The game was a pre-alpha, hideous-looking prototype, that had the distinct potential of catching fire, blowing up, and kill us all. Luckily, it didn’t do so, and after a few hours of tweaking, really shows some possibility.
Around 6:00, I went to leave the store, but found my car had, while sitting in the parking lot, acquired a bowling ball-sized dent in the left rear bumper.
Huh. Now that’s weird.
No note. No other, obvious damage. Not even a tell-tale scrape the perpetrator’s paint. Just a dent big enough to stick your head in.
Police were called, a report was made, and today I’m calling the insurance company to see how I’m supposed to sort this out.
The police were pretty up-front about it. “No note? No one saw anything? Well, I can do the report, but that’s pretty much all I can do for you.”
That was fine. That’s what I expected. It’s a relatively minor hit and run. I think I’d actually be annoyed if the police spent their resources tracking down the perpetrator rather than seeking serious criminals.
Ever get the urge to strap on some body armor, load up your plasma rifle, and stalk a pack of evil aliens through the darkened corridors of an abandoned spaceship?Yeah, me too.
And now we can! Skirmisher Publishing is proud to present USSMC FM 7-22: Space Boarding Operations - a military-style field manual designed to read like an actual U.S. Space Marine Corps guide to boarding hostile spacecraft in 2089.
No, I didn’t write it. I didn’t even edit it. But I did upload it to YourGamesNow.com, DriveThroughRPG.com, Paizo.com, and Armima.it — and that’s got to count for something.
I’ve been running silent and deep the past few weeks while submerged beneath an ocean of work and strained submarine metaphors. Starting to surface a bit more now, but don’t get too used to regular updates, as GenCon is coming up, and every spare moment has to go towards preparing for that.
Well, not every spare moment.
I’ve found a new time-killer that’s eaten up more than its share of spare moments: Dungeon Runners from NCsoft. It’s a free* MMORPG in the tradition of Diablo, featuring the standard fantasy tropes, killing monsters, taking their stuff, leveling up, etc. But what makes the game fun isn’t what it does, but how it does it.
How is very tongue-in-cheek. It’s extremely self-aware (NPCs complain about waiting in line to access the dungeon, others give you quests in dialog ludicrously thick with thees and thous) and enjoys poking fun at the genre it so lovingly embraces. My personal favorites are the over-the-top item names. Here are just a few items I’ve picked up:
- Steaming cardboard Scrap Crossbow of the Sugar Glider
- Contagious Designer Beads of the Parasitic Rhino
- Feverish Exquisite Chain of the Sasquatch
- Baby Sealskin Glove
- Class Ring of the Goat
But the game is more than a joke. It’s extremely accessible, with personal instanced dungeons, so you don’t have to wait in line to find monsters to kill. And it’s easy enough that you really could play it with just the mouse if you wanted.
*Yes,the game is free. But if you subscribe for $5 a month, you can access things like storage for your items, and you can equip the really sweet “members only” items.
My wife gave me a mischievous smile.
“So…” she said. “After the kids go to bed, you wanna… play RISK?”
My sister-in-law gave me the classic “Library” edition of RISK for my birthday a while back, and we hadn’t had a chance to break it in yet. It looks cool on the shelf, in a wooden box designed to resemble a heavy tome.
We stayed up until midnight, when I called the game on account of time and conceded the victory to my military genius wife. It was a dice-chucking good time, more about the activity than the winning, and further evidence that I have the coolest wife ever.
