50 Games in 50 Weeks: Dungeon Run
How do you make a dungeon crawl into a board game? I can’t think of a better way than Dungeon Run. The players start by choosing a hero, and placing it on the single dungeon entrance tile. The heroes then move to new rooms and fight monsters. Eventually, someone will find the Summoning Stone, turning the […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Giants (board game)
This is a fascinating game, both for its historical perspective and its mechanics. Giants simulates the behaviors of Easter Island’s inhabitants. You control the population, consuming the island’s resources and building giant stone statues. You have to quarry the stone, then move it to the coast for carving and erection. A few interesting mechanics: you need logs to move your statues, and there need to be people on all the game board spaces leading from […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Cthulhu Dice
Cthulhu Dice is an odd little game. On one hand, it’s dramatically simple: each player has three sanity tokens. On your turn, choose another player, roll a die, and do whatever the die tells you (take sanity from the other player, lose sanity, etc.). If you’re targeted by another player, you get a free die roll in response. Continue until only one player has any sanity […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Castellan
Castellan is an unusual building game. Each player lays out plastic towers and walls, connecting them into courtyards, limited by the pieces listed on special cards (new cards are added and old ones removed as the game progresses). As soon as you enclose a courtyard, it’s yours, and you get points based on the courtyard’s size and the number of towers around it. However, both players are connecting their pieces to the same structure, […]
Wreck-It Ralph
First off: see Wreck-it Ralph for its short film, Paperman. It is worth the admission price alone. The first question about Wreck-It Ralph is this: Does it make full use of its video game conceit? Yes and no. The writers clearly understand classic video games, and constructed a sensible shared world. I felt like I could write fanfic there. The voice actors all perfectly fit their roles, […]
Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude
I’ve long held an antipathy for high art, including serious modern literature (the kind that gets major awards). I appreciate the classics, but I thought modern lit was like pretentious modern art, a dot on a canvas that costs a million dollars because it represents the inimitable sensation of modern ennui and man’s fundamental disconnection from himself. Which is why I’m so glad I know Nick. He’s dived deep […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: The Hangout RPG
New online video tools provide new opportunities for tabletop role-playing. Games that used to require face-to-face meetings can be played by people from around the world. However, these games are still being played with systems built for heavily scheduled, face-to-face gaming. What would a system built for this new world look like? That’s what I […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Warrior, Rogue & Mage
I love Warrior, Rogue & Mage because of its statistical approach to fantasy role-playing. The System It’s a beautifully simple system. Instead of various attributes, races, and classes, WR&M uses three attributes: Warrior, Rogue, and Mage. Each player-character has 10 points total to divide among these three attributes. A character with many points in Warrior and […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Action Castle
You may have played early text adventures like Zork or, well, Adventure. They feel strange to those who didn’t play them at the time, like Victorian mechanisms: quaint contraptions for which one can see the intended use, but appear hopelessly outdated and silly. But there is an ineffable power to interacting with words. Action Castle […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Microscope
One fun thing about the role-playing hobby is its kaleidoscope of worlds. I get to leap into so many interesting, thought-provoking worlds. Players often move into world building at some point. And, of course, world building is hard. There are so many variables. Microscope is a structured game of cooperative world-building. It’s a game you play with friends, but instead of exploring worlds or telling specific stories, you’re […]