Saga you say?  I been reading about it for a while on some of the forums I stalk.  Didn't think anyone would interested.  Hmm Welsh elves...

Ahh yeahhh...  Kill La Kill.  I did indeed consume that fizzy pop.  Crazy, absurd actiony show.  I give it a 7.  You should see some of the cosplayers.

| Random Stuff!

Been meaning to post about a bunch of random stuff. Here we go:

- Saga: Dark Ages: This is a Viking-era minis game that I tricked elzar into picking up. We've only played once so far (in Santa Clara in the middle of an insane rainstorm), but it was fun! Essentially, you field a bunch of Vikings and shit. At the start of your turn, you roll a bunch of fancy dice with weird symbols (different runes and shit) on them. You use the symbols you rolled to pay for the things you want to do on your turn. A lot of the time you'll be using them to activate units of dudes (for example, you can activate an elite unit by paying a die with any symbol, warrior units activate with slightly harder symbols, and your crappy units who lack motivation can only be activated with a rarer set of symbols). But in addition, you can spend dice to activate special abilities from your faction's special list; for example, the Anglo-Danes (my faction) have numerous defensive abilities that you can pay combinations of dice for, the Vikings (elzar's) have more offensively oriented abilities. Fun mechanic overlaying a pretty simple movement/combat system, definitely seemed like a keeper. Hopefully elzar and I will get in another game at ManCon.

- Primer: I've been getting back into painting/building minis after a long dry spell. One of my issues has always been that I really have no backyard (just a TINY shed, on a 6'x6' patio, on an interior courtyard). I can spray prime by clearing out my shed and setting up a booth (which I will probably do tomorrow in fact), but it's a real hassle. So I've been looking into brush-on primers which I believe is brave new territory for this crew. Citadel makes some stuff that I have determined to basically be garbage -- it worked OK on the plastic Saga mini I applied it to, but three coats into a metal Warmachine mini and it's STILL patchy, with very little "tooth" like you get with a standard primer. Since metal Warmachine minis are like 65% of my minis collection, that doesn't work. I poked around on forums to learn what the big kids use and it seems that Liquitex gesso is one of the popular options, so I bought a big bottle of it off Amazon. It should arrive, and I'll keep you all posted on developments as they occur!

- iOS apps: I picked up Monument Valley, which is a very short adventure/puzzle game. It was really pretty and weird and I strongly recommend it.

- Weird anime: I have always liked the anime art style but I've never liked any of the actual shows I've tried watching. Recently for a variety of reasons I watched this show Kill La Kill on Netflix. (Don't Google it at work, it's kinda NSFW.) Anyway I ended up... well, I don't know if I exactly liked the show, but it was fast-paced, bewildering and bizarre things in a way I generally found pleasantly numbing, and it was pretty inventive and entertaining, so I guess I sort of did, although it was occasionally incredibly creepy? The premise is a familiar one: the student council at a Japanese high school is in the process of a fascist takeover of the rest of Japan, empowered by transforming school uniforms. Into this comes a transfer student armed with half of a giant scissor who is looking for answers about the murder of her scientist father. After getting her ass kicked, she returns to the ruins of her father's mansion where she finds a sentient school uniform which forces her to wear it against her will. When the uniform is fueled by drinking her blood, it turns into possibly the most ludicrously skimpy thing ever animated ever but gives her kick ass combat powers. Oh! This perverted looking uniform was made by her father specifically for her and also kind of looks like him. She uses her powers to start kicking ass and taking names at her high school. This is in the first episode and things start getting a lot weirder after that. Quasi-recommended? (Definitely not recommended to elzar.)

| Another Shitty Start to Another Shitty Year

Last year pretty much ate a dick. Here's hoping this one is better!

| Happy New Year!

| Merry X-man

Have a great holiday, gang!

Finally got around to playing the copy of Mr Jack: Pocket that I got from Elrick at the last man-con. It was fun! It's SUPER light, but the rulebook was always kind of daunting (not a great English translation) and I just never bothered trying to learn it. Anyways, it's actually a pretty fun, super fast, filler. One player is Mr Jack and the other player is Sherlock and his gang, hunting him down. I will bring it back to Mancon to get some plays in! It's actually pretty easy, but you know how sometimes rules be looking crazy when you have no idea what's going on.

| Unrelated: Awesome shows n stuffs

Just got done binge-watching True Detective season one. Wow. That was amazing. 100% recommend.

| ...and on that note

Arena Commander 1.0 alpha just got released. Whooooo boy, lotsa goodies to read up on!

Sweet Linkage

| Epic KS Shame Post

To date, I have only ever done one Kickstarter:

Star Citizen – DELIVERED (partially) : It's the game made for sim/gamers by sim/gamers, with no studio interests to satisfy. The stretch goals are crazy ambitious, but I'll be damned if it doesn't look like they're pulling off the bigger stuff already. The Arena Commander (dogfighting module) has already been released as an alpha and I'll say that I'm pretty impressed. The graphics are solid, the interaction with Voice Attack is amazing. I think the original kickstarter was only asking for 1.5M to make "the game", and had some minor stretch goals for the next couple million above that... and when it went live it blew all existing KS fundraisers away. I think when their KS campaign ended, they had pulled in 10-15M from KS directly and another 10-15 from the website. With ongoing fundraising still happening, they are now 100% crowd funded and I think approaching $60M, which is nuts.

| The Kickstarter Shame Post

Some of us, I won't volunteer who, have gotten a little out of hand re: Kickstarter.  One of these fine gentlemen started an email thread for us to post our shame and I think I'm ready to stand up and accept my shame in public, so here is my list of Kickstarter shit that I have spent and blown money on since the inception of Kickstarter...

PRE-2014

D-Day Dice – DELIVERED I loved this when it was a print and play, and this was my first foray into KS, so it was exciting to watch all the stretch goals build – it was like I was getting so much stuff for ‘free’!!!!  Of course, all that free stuff was just there to offset the cost of these fuckers hosing me on Up Front, but more on that later.  I think I played the KS version of this once or twice, and it really isn’t a bad game, but I don’t see it hitting the table anytime soon.  I still can’t pull the trigger on selling it at Kubla, and I don’t think I’d get much for it anyway, so it sits in my garage.

Gunship: First Strike – DELIVERED Second foray into KS, and I felt really, really bad for the designer.  He was like a part time worker in a sign shop, lost his job, and the only thing he had going for his was this KS.  I’ve never played the game and I’ve heard it was pretty stale.  Sold at Kubla for pennies on the dollar.

Flash Point: 2nd Story, Urban Structures – DELIVERED Success!  This one got me the base game, which I missed the OG KS for, and these expansions (which included the [at the time] sexy minis).  I would call this a keeper, its always fun to play, and we have yet to really sink our teeth into it and explore all the boards and additional rule.  I think that speaks volumes for how fun the base game is, much like the first scenario for Aliens or “Torch the Toilet” from Space Hulk.

Drunk Quest – DELIVERED Funny on paper, a fucking disaster in practice.  Worst drinking game ever.  Played it at Cayucos and I have never enjoyed a Lagunitas Sucks less than when I essentially had to chug it, immediately followed by a Sumpin Sumpin, because Peter played a grip of cards on me.  A fittingly sold this game while drunk at Kubla.  I remember trying to pitch it to a girl in the flea market by saying something like “hey, you like the kind of girl that likes to drink to have fun” or some such shit.  She didn’t buy it.

Unexploded Cow – DELIVERED No explanation for this one at all.  It was cheap?

Airborne in Your Pocket – RIP This is a sad collateral loss due to the fuckers over at Valley/Radiant Games stealing a bunch of money from backers as well as defaulting on a private loan.  Zombie in Your Pocket was neat, so adding WWII to it seemed like more fun.

Dreadball – DELIVERED I liked this game, but the more I think about it, it seems like a lot of work to get back into it.  I have no one to play it with and built a fantasy themed board for it to use with my painted Blood Bowl teams, but the likelihood of me playing it again is slim to none (See Dreadball Xtreme below).  I love sports games but I think I need them a little bit more based in reality than this one was with three different goals you could shoot at and no stoppages of play, the ball just recycles after a point is scored.

Up Front – LIKELY RIP See Airborne in Your Pocket.  SUPER FUCKING PISSED about this on not making it.  I just wanted an updated version of the cards and counters, and then they started throwing all this extra stretch goal stuff at me, how could I say no??!?!  Well, those assholes duped me, they have my money, and they are vacationing in Australia (true story) while their court case of defaulting on a loan and stealing KS money languishes in Texas courts.  I wanted to believe in this one SO MUCH!

Dungeon Roll – DELIVERED Fun little dice game that I can play with Wylie, mostly.  Good for solo play, enough variation with characters and chance that it stays fun.  Neat mimic-style treasure chest-shaped box.

Flash Point: Extreme Danger – DELIVERED More rules and boards for a great game!  Also, this one added role based miniatures, so even sexier!

Deadzone – DELIVERED Wow, do I have a lot of Deadzone stuff.  I like the system but after having to teach and learn the rules at the same time for my first 3 games, I’m not mentally ready to play it again.  I have some fatigue and would love to try it now that we have (hopefully) all grokked the rules enough that it will be smooth.  Good mechanics, great terrain, mostly great sculpts, pretty good value.  Happy with this one.

Call of Cthulhu 7th Ed – IN PROGRESS, EST FEB 2015 I love this game and am happy to support the new version.  They have added some fun rules for tests where you sort of get bennies from succeeding at different levels as well as if you fail you can re-roll but if you fail again you have dire consequences.  The PDF looks great, the stretch goals look great, some additional swag (coffee mugs, tshirts) look great.  Very excited!

Labyrinthos – DELIVERED Fun little maze book.  The polish author is like an architect that can’t find work so he is a day laborer.  Sad, but a fun little project.

Reaper II – WHO CARES I backed this for a dollar thinking I could cherry pick some minis and then saw that the estimated delivery date was over a year in the future because I got in too late, so I never upped by pledge.

PicoBrew – DELIVERED This was a self-contained beer brewing system for small batches with the intent that breweries would use it for recipe test batches.  I thought it was amazing and wanted to start my own pico brewery using it, but thought better of it so I just backed for a t-shirt.

Brew Crafters – IN PROGRESS, EST DEC 2014 Worker placement eurogame about running a brewery.  Hopefully will let me fulfill my undying fantasy of running a brewery someday.  Or it will be a standard Euro with a pasted on theme that I hate playing.  Like La Havre, but in a brewery!  They seemed to have worked in lots of real brewing stuff which will be fun to try like yeast discovery, different grains and hops for different recipes, tap rooms, etc.

Dungeon Roll Winter Promo – DELIVERED Winter (Santa) themed characters for Dungeon Roll.  Was supposed to ship Dec 2013, actually arrived July 2014.  Haven’t played any of the charaters yet.

Coin Age – DELIVERED Fun little area control game that is played with coins and a board the size of a credit card.

2014

D-Day Sergeants – IN PROGRESS, JAN 2015 So this is a slightly larger scale version of their other DDay Sergeants title, which I sold at Kubla.  It’s an interesting premise/system where each box has a collection of uniquely, yet balanced, mixed soldiers.  Let me rephrase that, each soldier is unique but balanced against other soldiers in the same box.  So my 10 guys will be different than your 10 guys and they will have different tendencies and strengths within the game system.  Its interesting, the game was fun when I played it but the expansions were getting expensive because of the prepainted metal minis and this version has all laser cut wood minis and the scale of the game is a bit larger.  So a little less on man to man tactics and more on movement, maneuver, and field positioning.  Looking forward to it.

Dreadball Xtreme – IN PROGRESS, Dec/Jan 2015 Well, they apparently opened the field up some, added obstacles, and changed some other stuff from the OG Dreadball enough that I backed it.  Again.  I have high hopes, but reality is that I will have a shit ton more plastic teams just rotting away in their little baggies.

Pairs – DELIVERED Cheapass Games parlor card game, which means: fun little game great for a drinking game.  Basically there are cards numbered 1 – 10, and a number of cards in the deck equal to the value, so 1 – 1 card, 2 – 2 cards, 10 – 10 cards, etc.  Everyone is dealt one card, and on your turn you can either steal an opponent card, scoring that amount and ending the round, or flipping a card up and hoping you don’t get a pair with your existing card(s).  Whomever scores X points first, loses and then drinks, or buys everyone a round, etc.  I played it with the kids on the street and we had some fun.  I’m pleased with this purchase.

Dungeon Scroll – IN PROGRESS, TBD A card-based Scrabble meets a dungeon crawl!  I guess you have a hand of letter cards and each monster in the dungeon requires a word be played to defeat it.  Each monster has certain restrictions/abilities like ‘word can’t start with a vowel’, etc.  You score points if you play a word, and more points if you play it first.  It sounds like fun to play with Wylie and not fun to play with Jon.  Looking forward to it!

MERCS: Recon – IN PROGRESS, TBD Well, not sure why I backed this.  It looks a little like Tannhauser as far as LOS rules, and then just small teams of minis sweeping office building for objectives with a big shootout at the end of every mission.  These guys made the disastrous Myth game, so not sure why I backed it, but it comes with a LOT of mini’s that I could almost care less about…  Ah well, hopefully it will be a fun game?

XenoShyft Onslaught – IN PROGRESS, TBD I think this is the first CMON, non-minis game.  Watching the demo made this look like a really fun co-op deckbuilder that meets the adventurer party attacks the dungeon from Dungeon Lords, sort of game – almost like a tower defense where your guys are lined up to defend and the aliens attack you each turn.    I think it will be great fun when it hits the table.

Flash Point: Honor and Duty – IN PROGRESS Completest move, no more, no less.  The likelihood of this hitting the table is low given all the other unplayed expansions, but you never know.  I think it comes with a giant box to fit all the previous stuff in, which would be great.

Tiny Epic Defenders – IN PROGRESS I didn’t really care for Tiny Epic Kingdoms, but this a coop version so I thought I’d give it a shot.  TEK had nice components, a nice footprint, and a nice feel, but it wasn’t really my kind of game.  Hoping this will be different.  In hindsight I think I’d have rather not backed it because I’m not that excited, but I only did the $24 pledge so I’m not on the hook for THAT much scrilla if it is teh sux.  Plus, I bet I could get close to retail at auction/flea bag market for it.

Storytellers Thesaurus – IN PROGRESS I grabbed this when I was really into Dungeon World and thought I might actually try and run it.  It’s basically a sourcebook for names, items, places, descriptors, etc. for a fantasy RPG.  I’m very curious to get it, though I’m not really looking forward to it, per say.

Dungeon Saga: The Dwarf King’s Quest – IN PROGRESS Fired up about this one!  Hopeful spiritual successor to Warhammer Quest, with a (potentially shitty) solo and co-op play variant.  I like what Mantic is doing and think this could be lots of fun.  I’m really looking forward to it!

Dungeon Crawl Classics: Peril on the Purple Planet – IN PROGRESS, PDF DELIVERED Unsure why I backed, but I think it had to do with all the stretch goals and the fact that this on is a mix of DCC and sci-fi a la a few old D&D modules.  I don’t think I backed the blacklight and felt poster level, but I might have, which would be rad and really make my wife’s day!  Not.  Excited to see all the goodies in the box when it arrives, though I might not back this one if I had a second chance.

50 sHAdes of VORpal – IN PROGRESS Hilarious, ridiculous middle-school art inspired RPG.  The KS campaign was pretty amusing and for $5 if I never see the PDF I was promised, I think I’d be fine.  This guy earned it!

Kings of War 2nd Ed – IN PROGRESS I watched a lot of KoW demo videos and it looks really fun, fast, loose, and everything I would want in an attempt to revisit the WFB of my youth.  I really liked WFB but it got expensive and out of hand rules-wise before I quit, and I’d like to dabble with it again.  It’s Mantic again so it will be all plastic, reasonably priced, and likely lots of fun.  Same designer as Bolt Action, Alessio Cavatore, so I think it will be pretty good!  Excited!

Masks of Gnarlyhotep Props – IN PROGRESS One of the most heralded campaigns now gets some amazing props about 10 years too late!  This might be retirement home fodder, but I always have it in the back of my mind that I will run a great, epic CoC campaign to completion and this just fuels the fire.  I’m very excited to get this when it arrives.

/barf

FYI: today is ALSO a good day to log in to hearthstone. The new expansion is fully live now and you get three free packs for logging in this week.

This game costs ZERO DOLLARS and is rad. Do it!

| Yeah, so about Divinity : Original Sin

It took me a few hours of play and some reading-up to get here, but I'll say... it's pretty neato.

It's your usual RPG three-quarters view style game, with dialogue choices, equipment, character builds (although not in the purely D&D structure). The combat is really brutal and unforgiving. It reminds me a bit of X-Com in that regard. You gotta REALLY play smart with your peeps, use the right skills at the right moment, or.. well.. die. lol

They use action-points that you can save up (to a max) and then spend, which makes for some interesting game play decisions. Do you try to go for one knock out punch, or pew pew pew a bunch of lesser attacks? What's really new in this relative to other D&D RPGs I've played in the past is your ability to use the environment. Literally, if some bad guys are standing in a puddle/river and you hit it with a lightning bolt, they all get fried. I've teleported barrels of oil to just in front of the enemy's advance and then hit it with a fire arrow to satisfying effect.. likewise there are some fun combinations with poison clouds, etc. And, counters for most of them as well. Bad dude setting things on fire? Use a rain spell, etc etc.

There are a few things that I think they could have done a better job with, like explaining how the skill point system works.. it isn't very clear that you will need more than one skill point to advance a particular skill, so most people probably wouldn't save it up to max out their primary skill and instead spend it on something they probably don't care a lot about (lol, charisma). The first bit of game play / development is also a bit sloooooow. You are more or less useless against anything outside of the city walls until you level up a few times grinding out boring side quests.

Haven't messed around with the multiplayer at all yet, but am excited to see what that looks like.

FYI! This is a good weekend to login to hearthstone. They've added the new expansion cards (gnomes & goblins) to the Arena, and anyone logging in this weekend gets you a free arena run! (And any arena run gets you a booster pack, so it's win/win!)

Nah, bro, not cool.

Except it would be totally awesome! Do you still have your yahoo email address? There's a whole big thread and that address is on there. If we should be using your gmail address instead, well, I guess Aeryk fucked up.

Now we just need Benji to come so we'll have our full brass section for a JP Can't Come Over reunion show.

If I promise not to be a buzz kill and watch rerun episodes of Small Wonder, can I invite myself to Cayucos as well?  What are the dates?  I'll fly in for that shit.  Round trip from Hawaii is pretty cheap right now.

And as the Drums of Cayucos grow louder, I keep getting more excited! I'm gonna make a print-and-play version of Spyfall, an upcoming social deduction game that looks like silly fun.

EDIT: Oh, the print-and-play is only the TEXT of the cards, puke. I'll find awful stock-photos to use in place of the art.