From what I've read on my gaming forums, it's a pretty long game. People seem to really enjoy it, but it looks overwhelming to me. Watching the video reviews is giving me a pretty good overview of the game. (Video Review/Overview) If it looks good to you, I'd be down to try it with you broham.

Looking at Twilight struggle at BGG. #1 war game, anyone have a copy? Is it fun? Doesn't look like much of a "war" game

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/12333/twilight-struggle

Don't think I can go to one of the groups tomorrow because ill be hanging with my girlfriend before work, but ill hit you up for maybe Sunday if you're free (and I'm not too tired from work). Gonna go to a game store today and scope out the scene.

Edit: went to Game Empire in pasadena today and it was awesome! They had like every game ever plus a ton I've never heard about. Only bummer was things all seemed retail price. Hard to compete with online shopping. But they had tons of gaming tables and of course, dudes playing friggen warmachine. Gonna go out there some sat for their boardgame day.

Some peoples job is to live from the Arena, and some, TO DIE! His new job? T'is the latter, cuz there can only 1 victor! ----> Jonnicus Maximus! (crowd cheers, ovation)

Actually I was reading the roman gladiator stuff on history channel. Apparently there were gladiators that fought over 100 fights and often it was not to the death as often as one would think. It also mentioned gladiators were often spared their lives by the crowd. I think it probably eventually evolved from a punishment for criminals (death), to become a sport where gladiators were trained to put on a good show/fight for entertainment like boxing but with swords. It was said eventually half the gladiators were free men who wanted to fight in the arena for fame/fortune. I could also see the motivation for Roman Lanistas, business men and even politians would be to maximize their profits or fame. It doesn't pay to train a gladiator only to have them die all the time or after 2-3 matches. Even boxing today, you want undefeated boxers with awesome records to draw the big pay matches.

Whew.... it was a lot of reading too! That was just the cliff notes.

Anyway, Rude, are you going to a game group this Saturday? I'm thinking about going this weekend. Let me know, give me a call if you want to go and maybe we can meet up. It's lots of Ham mans and Ham womans!

What's your new job!? I remember you were going to be going for something but I don't remember any details. Is it better at least? Are you happier? You better not be working for a rival gladiator card game making company!

I know what you mean about it possibly getting bogged down. I just can't figure out what the core mechanic of the game is yet. Maybe when me and Jael get our game on soon we can start messing around with stuff in person.

Now I really wanna play the new Battleship game, Battleship: Galactica or whatever it's called. It's like a solid $60 bucks everywhere. Hope it shows up at one of my game groups. Battleship GALAXIES

| Gladivs Maximouse

I totally want to work on the game but between biting a hell of a lot off at the new jorb and still plugging away at school, along with the commute and mi familia, I just haven't had the time. I like all the ideas professed so far and I can see the game being played in my head, I just don't see the EXACT gameplay- just a lot of laughing and groaning!

I like the icons as I think it speeds up gameplay, but I fear too many things to do in a turn and too many numbers to track might take away from the OG intent of fast-play. Maybe it shouldn't be fast play anymore?

And Rude, I envision the combos to sound something like this during gameplay:

E: "Since I'm in ATTACK stance, I can play this STRONG ATTACK card without needing to burn any other cards to make up the number icons needed."

R: "Since I'm also in ATTACK stance, that STRONG ATTACK will hit me for too much damage, so I'll play a BLOCK card from my hand to mitigate some of the damage"

E: "HA! You fool! Since you have a SHIELD card in defense, I play REVERSE and spin off the shield which lets me draw another card and attack again!"

R: "Prick"

E: *draws card* "Hoody-hoo! Since you just played a BLOCK card, I will play OFF-BALANCE on you which gives me a bonus 2 MOVE ICONS for the turn, then using those free ICONS, I will burn this STRIKE card for the ICONS, which gives me 5 total MOVE ICONS- just enough for LEAPING STRIKE! Burn the rest of my hand for 6 ATTACK ICONS which doubles the damage, and you need to draw 4 DAMAGE CARDS (which are printed right on the regular cards, but you keep them infront of you and they tell you any lasting effects, etc.).

R: "/slitwrists"

Or something like that.

I love roleplaying! /slitswrist

The "encounters" sessions are weekly in-store games that happen every Wed across the world, I guess. Yeah, they're basically designed to be played in about 2 hours and every week they'll send the DM the next week's game. Players can basically go to any session and be able to bring their character from a previous game and jump right in (they also have pre-gens which I used). They're pretty hardcore railroad rides, almost like Castle Ravenloft or something, but they're meant to draw new people in. Think you always start the season at level 1 and maybe get to level 3 by the end. Format seems to be, little bit of roleplaying/setup, the party gets MAYBE 2 choices of where to go, then a big fight. They've been doing it for awhile now I guess, but it's usually tied to a new product setting and each story runs about 12 weeks I think. They did one for Dark Sun, this one I think has to do with some "shadowfell" book they put out. The one that starts in August is tied to the new Neverwinter campaign setting. Aug 6th there's going to be a "game day" with a prequel to the next Encounters sessions, so I'm def going to hit that up. If you have a game store near you, go for it. The 2-3 hour time limit is really kinda nice.

As far as 4E goes, I'm digging it I think. I have a good bootleg of the character builder that people are really good about updating, and it makes creating a guy a 5-10 minute affair. It's pretty great. The official D&D Insider sub for $10 bucks a month is kinda brutal unless you've got an actual group going and you share it between friends. I like how the system has been streamlined and the powers and themes are pretty cool (we got a taste of it in the Ravenloft game). Just sorta works which is cool.

One thing I'm not crazy about, but which is completely optional, is the new Fortune Cards that you can buy booster packs of. So a player can have a deck of these fortune cards and every turn in a fight he can either use whatever card is up or discard and draw another. They're free actions n spells n shit that I dunno, just feel out of place. WIZARD$$$!!

BOOK: Haven't started A Dance with Dragoons yet! Well, I read the prologue and thought it was cool, but I've seriously forgotten so much, I think I'm going to try and power thru at least books 2 and 3.

Nice! How do the encounter games work, are they kind of like a living campaign or something where different groups play the same adventure?

4e has a lot going for it. It is a lot cleaner in design than the previous editions were. I'm not sure character creation is simpler than 3e (although it might be), but it is harder to create a character that sucks balls due to inadvertantly poor choices. Complexity is much more manageable as you advance in level since after a certain point you start swapping out powers for existing ones, rather than just gaining more all the time. It's also really fun and easy to plan adventures, there's a really great point system for building encounters that makes it a snap.

Whoa, hope this wasn't depressing!

[edit]By the way, how cool is it that DANCE WITH FREAKIN' DRAGONS is out??? I'm about five chapters in so far. It was a little slow to start, but it feels like it's starting to get rolling. Very nice to see Dany, Tyrion, and all those other fux again after so many years.

Played D&D at the Borders in Torrance and it was awesome! Super cool group and it was only about 2.5hrs which is a nice time. The "encounters" games are pretty hardcore railroaded because you need to be at the same place for the next weeks session, but it scratched the rpg itch pretty well. Can't wait to do some more! 4e was nice. A lot of stuff is streamlined (saving throws are super simple now, 10+ you pass) and it jammed along at a great pace. Making characters is pretty hardcore but I got the offline character builder which makes it all super easy. There's a ton of different builds you can use. Fun!

Sweet, I'm gonna have to check out the con with you this year! Any excuse to get some good gaming in. Maybe by then I'll have my crazy GMT game and we can punch chits for 12 hours.

Over in Steam news, 16-bit style rpg silly games Breath of Death VII (which I have on xbox and which owns) and Cthulu Saves the World are both out on Steam. Double pack of both games for $2.69! I bought it because the Cthulu game is supposed to be good and I already liked BoD7. They're really cool games. Part parody of the old style rpgs but they're also actual fun games that are worth playing. The humor is great too. (Make sure you buy the double pack because they're also listed individually for the same price.)

P500.... years! It's common practice i hear. Game companies will wait until they have an X number of presold copies before print. My cousin signed up for a wargame 5 years ago and has yet to gain access to it, if the game never achieves that reorder number. The reason they do that is so they can also measure the demand for it.

here's a list that gets an added 5 dollars
http://www.strategicon.net/index.php?goto=registration

west arroyos not on there... yeah, that's my normal sat group, BUT i'm also part of ventura game group, i just never go being too far from me.

Mike, good to hear from ya!

Glad you guys are doing well! Be safe and watch out for mafioso! 99% of our posts are ramblings, so ramble away about cool stuff from the other side of the world.

gAMES: Last game thing, go to the JAB website then click "rulebook" to check out the rules. Looks pretty fun! I don't wanna rip that dude off because he has a pretty unique system, but I found it inspiring to come up with something fun and different. It's a real-time without being "spam cards as fast as you can." Can't wait to actually try it out. You Gen Con duders gotta try out tons of games for us by proxy!

| Ciao da Italia

Greetings Action Team! Sorry for the unrelated post, but I wanted to say hello from Italy to you all. Sounds like things are going well from reading over your recent posts. Here, we did get permission to dig after all, so we're working hard on finishing up the trench from two years ago. It is all going very well. Right now, I'm sitting in our campsite (with Internet that works for a change) waiting for one of the group's washing to finish. Its so hot that I'm sweating just from typing this. So... much... work... Today is one of our days off (which is good because it's going to be 95 up on site today), so I believe that the plan is to go to the beach. I'm sure that there are other interesting things I could tell you about the summer, but I always feel as though I'm just rambling. I will simply observe that coffee and mozzarella are better here than anywhere else - why should that be so? and that ants suck ass - mosquitoes too.

Pretty cool idea J! I had been thinking just like a numerical value inside of the circles, like when you're in an aggressive pose your Attack is +5, Defense is +2, and Move is +0, while when you're in say the Move mode maybe your Defense is -2, etc. Using emblems/symbols instead of numbers could totally work too. I'm still trying to get my head around how we're going to make combat work. I wanna hear more about what people mean when they talk about "explosive" attacks and stacking a bunch of cards, etc. Once we have a better idea of what the actual game mechanic is, we can make a quick Google Doc for a card list and say what the cards do and how many there are, etc. Fun times.

What gaming group gets a discount Johnny? The West Arroyo one? Or do you have a different Saturday group? I'm still waiting on my GMT game. I guess they're supposed to start printing later this month, so I'll hopefully have it in a few weeks. I've never bought something from them, but their P500 program is pretty interesting. They wait until they have 500 orders for a game before printing it up.

explanations:

So just an idea, i was thinking, the images on rudys character card will be the symbols. So in Attack stance might be 2 swords and 1 run. To play action cards you have to have the required # of symbols. So basically, that gives another reason to switch stances is to be able to properly gain the symbols you need to play the cards you have in hand. To gain permanent symbols, you would have to have items like swords, shields, spears, nets etc. To gain temporary symbols, you can play instants, like that shown on the card in Green. (Orange is primary action, Green is instant action played out of turn). The damage of the attack is shown on the top right and botoom left of the card. I threw in some dice because romans loved the dice game and this could add up or pair up for some randomized event/luck.

Rude, anytime man! I thought you were going to get that game of yours and then meet up? Maybe we can meet up at one of these saturdays at my gaming group.

| mock up actiony teamy card 1

Dude, when are we gonna play some games dude!? Let me bring over some jams one of these days, we'll party rock the place (and do some DnD Incan Gold)!

Good link. Rummaged through the thrones site and it's pretty much what I expected from this company. The graphics looks eerily similar to Blood bowl, 2000's sierra games with apple font. Seriously, if that's the best graphics they can come up with these days, they need to fire their graphics designer. Good graphic doesn't mean it's a great game, but bad graphics to start doesn't make what's to follow promising. If they haven't done it by now, they should also have fired the philippino/indian outsourced programming team that did BB.

I'm looking forward for Strategicon already for September! Apparently they also give an additional $5 discount for my gaming group. The reason for the excitement is that I recently found out that they came out with Axis and Allies 3rd ed (anniversary) with updated rules. Apparently this came out back in 2008 so it's old news, yet it looks promising to join the AA tourney! Hooya!

| From the people who brought us the Blood Bowl PC game...

comes A Game of Thrones: Genesis. Probably going to be horrible.

| flight$

Yeah, I tried all the sites. The real shady ones like CHEAPOAIR and Flights24 had stuff in the mid $400s range but reviews of those sites and people's horror stories really freaked me out. Stuff like price changes after you've already been charged and other weird stuff. I'll take a better look when I'm at home. Would love to go dammit!

I sent out some Google+ invites this morning, so don't be surprised. Looks kinda neat. I've already seen people on some of my rpg forums talk about playing games through the new G+ "hangout" feature (which is basically a chat room from what I can tell?) - check it out. I think eventually everyone with a gmail account will get rolled into it.

Go go gadget social netblursting

Hey enron, ask Dave next time you talk to him if he's ever played any of the D&D Encounters sessions that they do at Third Planet. I know they run the weekly Wizards sponsored games, but I wonder if the DMs at 3rd-P are any good (or are DAVE!)

Think I'm going to a Gamma World game tomorrow... don't really want to, but the group is eventually planning on doing a 4e Dark Sun game, so figured I'd go check them out and see if I like the vibe. I have a feeling it will be me +7 ham-mans, but you never know.

Hamman-e-faces

Hmm. Try Expedia and Orbitz etc. -- flights there are looking to come up in the $500-600 range, which is probably as cheap as it'll get.

It'd be awesome if you made it! Fingers crossed!

| holy shit!

I was looking at flight prices to maybe go to gen con because the days off actually work for me and WOW, I was looking at the price for 1-way. Round trip would cost me almost $800 bucks!? Not gonna happen. Gonna keep looking but WOW, that was a major buzz kill.

Make card games, go!

EDIT: Well, I guess it was more bait-n-switch type situation where the sites would say $400 and then $800 with the explanation that prices fluctuate. I'm still looking around! Will try to find something reasonable!

| Character Card Mock Up

Whipped this up real quick, using the idea Dennis had about stances. Whatever arrow pointing forward reflects the stance your dude is in. The little circles would have what the adjusted stat would be for each stance. What do the stats represent? Dunno. Maybe number of cards you can use or something? Also, obviously don't wanna use photos from Spartacus, but worked in a quick pinch. DO IT!

In the flavor txt section could be an emblem representing that fighters faction if we use that idea. Also we could if we wanted have that fighters preferred weapons, if they add bonuses. Those stats are just quick and generic, we can use whatever. Also maybe we can have "reach" or leave that up to whatever your lead weapon. (Example, Rudicus attacks Ericus with Short Sword at 7 power, meaning 7 cards from my hand underneath the weapon card.)