Games!

My pal Carsmile Steve is giving away his old role playing games (and Warhammer stuff) to make way for more grown up items. If you fancy some RPGs, click here

I'm hoping to pick up some of these myself, so if you are one of my Dublin pals or someone who will be in Dublin in the near future (i.e. Myles) then it might make sense if we got them all together and pooled postage.

Look Good. Feel Great.

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Gary Gygax

Apparently Gary Gygax has died. Gygax was the inventor of Dungeons and Dragons and, by extension, of the entire RPG hobby. I've spent a lot of my life scoving at Gygax and the world of character classes, byzantine tables, and clunky game mechanics he brought us, but the games I actually like playing would not have existed without him.

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World's Saddest Book Found

You know the way gamers have a reputation for being sad men who find it difficult to relate to women? This will no longer be the case now that THE BOOK OF EROTIC FANTASY has been released. This seems to be a supplement to popular game Dungeons & Dragons dealing with sex and suchlike. A cursory investigation suggests that it might appeal to people whose erotic fantasy is pictures of womens' breasts.

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Diplomacy

I am adjudicating a game of Diplomacy. This is the boardgame based on the timeless wisdom of political realism (this might be a more informative link). Here is a map showing the situation, with the next turn being spring 1904:
Two of the countries are being played by siblings. Can you guess which two?

The Great Game

Ammonite has invented a great game - every time you leave a comment on a Blogger blog, you must give a definition for the image verification thing that people turn on to screen out "HI DERE NIEC BLOG" comments.

God help me, I am taking part in a blogging meme.

Gamers Unite!

Even if you think the invasion of Iraq was a ghastly mistake for which we will all be paying for many years to come, you can retain a certain sympathy for the soldiers of occupying power, particularly when they are fellow role playing gamers. Apparently gamers within the US military in Iraq are organising a June convention in the shadows of Ur that they have evocatively called Ziggurat Con.

They are apparently looking for people to donate gamebooks and, particular, dice, with those little polyhedrons being in astonishingly short supply. Helping fellow gamers would normally trump politics, but I notice that they are not playing any Call of Cthulhu or Over The Edge, so they can shag off. I am nevertheless entertained by the convention having a session of Starship Troopers. Would you like to know more?

(story from an ILX thread on roleplaying games)

Do you want to play the Book Game?

There is this game called The Book Game, in which people make up first lines for books and then try to guess the real first line from among all the made up ones. If you fancy playing it with mentalists from the Internet, go here: The Book Game. You will need a LiveJournal account to play, but such things can be arranged.

Continue to let the dice roll!

I have just discovered that there are millions of those I WAS A GOBLIN! articles on Freaky Trigger, with the others being set to link backwards and forwards to each other in a satisfying manner. Check out episode one here: Introduction

Those of you who know me through Spy School will understand how all this is greatly helping me advance towards completion of current espionage assignments.

Let the dice roll!

Attention nerds! Internet superstar Tom Ewing is discussing fantasy role playing games on the games part of Freaky Trigger. It is the kind of thing you would find interesting if you like that kind of thing. Latest installment: I WAS A GOBLIN: There is another world, there is a better world

I played a role playing game with Tom once. It was not a FRP thing but a diceless narrative game set with a mid-19th century Victorian setting. Great days, Gay, great days.

Draws Include All Survivors

I have started playing Diplomacy postally again. It's been a while, and I never played it that much in the first place. In case you have never heard of it, Diplomacy is the boardgame based around playing one of the European great powers at the turn of the 20th century. You engage in a lot of diplomatic discussions, try to form alliances, wheedle pathetically at people when they attack you, etc.. It is all based on a rather Realist view of the world; I am not surprised to hear that Kissinger loved playing it.

The amusing twist with this one is that I am playing it with a load of indie kid tweefuckers. Rather than being the pushovers you might expect, some of them are turning out to be devious little bastards. So fun is being had by all.

Want to play yourself? You could do worse than check out The Diplomatic Pouch or subscribe to a zine like The Abyssinian Prince.

I should point out that the game of Diplomacy is copyrighted by Avalon-Hill or Hasbro or your mum or someone like that.

Hey cats, draws include all survivors

Mojo reports Jimi Hendrix was a great man for the Risk. He used to play it any chance he got. The wild man of rock used also to play the board hard, and was regarded as a dangerous opponent in London boardgamer circles of the late 1960s.

One has to wonder what might have been accomplished had Hendrix lived. Would he have made the transition to more mature games like Diplomacy?

Me am computer smart

There's book smarts, and then there is real life smarts.

I work with computers, doing stuff that bears some relationship to system administration. So I know all about computers. I have been playing this e-mail based boardgame for the last while, and one thing that has been really grinding my nads about said game is the way all the rules are in several different documents, making it very hard to find the particular rule you are looking for. Worse, the font in the rules was very small, making them very hard to read onscreen. But because me am smart, after six months I realised I could copy and paste all the rules into one document, and increase the font size!

Also, ever since I got this laptop a year ago, I have been tortured by how dark the screen display is. This is particularly irritating when watching DVDs. Yesterday, after watching Miller's Crossing, I thought "Maybe I should look and see if there is some kind of setting which will make the screen brighter". And there is!

Ho ho, I must apply to join that MESNA.

It's Been A Bad Year

I've been reading about Honduras. It's all very like popular boardgame Junta.
I feel it is important that I get a game of "Junta" in sooner rather than later. The extensive knowledge I have gained about Latin America from Spy School will surely be to my advantage. I also think it is important that all players ought to dress as shady Latin American military types.

Talking of clothes, I've been wondering what look to go for at ATP this year. Which is reminding me of the great ATP dilemma - what in the name of Christ do you eat while you are there? The food in the restaurants in Camber Sands is vile. I know some people like to cook in their chalets, but that's the path of madness - time spent cooking and washing up is time spent not watching bands. I reckon I will have to swallow my pride and swallow the muckburgers they have on sale. Mmm mmm.