Games N Stuff

Last Monday night's boardgaming consisted of another round of Tigris & Euphrates, followed by Puerto Rico. T&E seemed like a whole new game this time because there was some very agressive play, as opposed to the "everybody does there own thing" vibe from the previous week. Puerto Rico was a lot of fun, too. I'd put that game right up there with Settlers of Catan and El Grande on the list of German games I would buy if I had the spare money to putter in them as well as rpgs. I did better with Puerto Rico than I had in the past, though still not necessarily well.

Wednesday night the Pancake Hut group got together as usual. Dennis ran his Everknight game, leaving the rest of us (Dave, Joe, Ray, Pat, and I) to putter around with other stuff. We played a few hands of Fluxx and then a round of Carcassonne. It was very interesting playing Carcassonne with 5 players instead of the two or three I'm used to. We finished up the night by pretending we were playing poker. I say "pretending" because no money was involved. Still, the five card draw and seven card stud was a lot of fun. I think next time I will bring my Icehouse set and my Chrononauts deck. Maybe I'll re-read the rules so that I can finally play a proper game of Icehouse. So far I've only played a couple of games you play with the Icehouse toys.

Thursday morning I had to be at the Vermilion county courthouse bright and early. I suppose I should point out that this was work related. Like all court function I attend this involved a fair amount of hurry up and wait, so I brought some light reading in the form of the 3.5 Unearthed Arcana. Everytime I read this book it sells me on playing the modern D&D. There may be better modular gaming toolkits out there (GURPS and FUDGE spring to mind) but none of them are specifically designed to modularly enhance my orc-hacking. And the new UA is almost all Open Gaming Content to boot. Everytime I flip through Unearthed Arcana I get jazzed to run D&D again. This time, however, it was more than just a vague sense of "this would be cool". I got some specific ideas, like combining the "PCs roll all the dice" with OGL Fantasy Lite to produce a high-action campaign suitable for the youth. Between my two nephews Ian and Alex, Don McKinney's son Michael, and Dave Hoover's son Mark I know enough young players that I could do it.

But then, Dave's been on me to not run anything while I got this writing assignment hanging over my head. He made that abundantly clear Sunday when the Shared Lobotomy yahoos got together at my place. He's right as rain of course. Between writing supervillains and prepping for Winter War, I've got my plate full. But the Pancake Hut group needs two GMs, but we only have one signed on for the next round of role-playing chicanery. I'd sure as hell wouldn't mind playing in a Feng Shui game ran by Dave, even though it'd hurt just a bit to drop the bread to buy another copy of the corebook. But then who's running for the other five or six players while he and I are GMing? Right now the answer is "no one". And then there's the issue that right now none of us are actively playing an incarnation of the d20 system, yet we have the audacity to conisder writing for it. Not good. So I made a deal with myself, if not exactly with Dave, that if I could finish 15 villains by 12/29, then I would start a new campaign. Assuming no one steps up to the plate in the meantime. If someone else wants to run something cool, more power to them. Maybe Joe will get things together sufficiently to run Mekton. That doesn't solve the d20 shortage, but it would kick a lot of ass to be able to choose between Hong Kong Action Movies and Giant Robot Anime.

Later last night after shooing the Shared Lobotomy goonsquad out the door, my brother-in-law Jim and his sons came over. We played two rounds of Carcassonne. I finally got my big meeples marked with a silver sharpie. That helped me tell where the big guys were on the field. The second game we played was a total trainwreck, scoring lower than most any game I've played since getting several expansions. We had several one-tile holes in the array and a couple large multi-tile flubs as well.

If you like stupid webtoons you ought to check out Weebl & Bob. I just discovered this site today and it's cracking me up. Maybe not as fall down funny as Homestar Runner at its best, but still pretty dang cool.