Heh. Someone rummaged up a copy of the 1869 Harvard entrance exam (sometimes mislabeled 1899, the date of archiving), which is making the rounds under headings like “will probably make you feel dumb.†Nothing could be farther from the truth. (Though readers who know me might object that I went to the he-man technical school […]
Decisions, decisions. I still intend to explore FATE as a system for a short campaign wedged into an hiatus from our current one. Like many people, my first exposure to FATE was through Spirit of the Century; I didn’t like all of it, but there was a lot of good, red meat for players interested […]
Decisions, decisions. I still intend to explore FATE as a system for a short campaign wedged into an hiatus from our current one. Like many people, my first exposure to FATE was through Spirit of the Century; I didn’t like all of it, but there was a lot of good, red meat for players interested […]
We stopped by the MoCCA comic show yesterday, mostly for Eileene’s benefit. I tend to stay at arm’s length from comics, as I do from all art forms, treasuring only a very few favorites and ignoring the merely good. Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile may belong in that elite first category. Shiga caused a stir a couple […]
We host a monthly Game Day: anywhere from four to ten friends get together and play board games. And tomorrow’s the day. We have a few new games to try, but I don’t know whether I have the heart. There’s a certain trade-off between rich strategic and/or tactical play on the one hand, and accessibility […]
Okay, okay, they got me. Sort of. As an April Fool’s Day joke, jayisgames.com, a website devoted to freeware and shareware web games, offered a review of the new turn-based strategy game Tic Tac Toe. Even small children recognize tic tac toe as far too ancient and far too simple to waste time on, except […]
Fishing for new RPG fodder, some designers have gone too far afield. Parsley Games are self-contained scenarios designed to mimic old-school text adventures like Zork. The players attempt to win the scenario with simple verb-object commands like “get lamp†and “go east†and “eat profiterole.†One poor player is stuck with the role of “parser;†[…]
Looking at the world through someone else’s eyes can teach surprising lessons. Even when the someone else is fictional. Even when it’s your own RPG character. Let’s see if I can get through this briefly. Our current campaign is another variation on the “secret magical war†so successfully pioneered by White Wolf. Everybody who’s anybody […]
Did our taxes this weekend, to find a happy surprise: we now qualify for educational credits. As recently as 2009, we didn’t qualify because we—by “we,†I mean “Eileeneâ€â€”made too much money. But the ceiling for claiming a tuition deduction has been raised to something like $80,000 per person from an earlier ceiling much closer […]
We host a monthly Game Day: anywhere from four to ten friends get together and play board games. And tomorrow’s the day. We have a few new games to try, but I don’t know whether I have the heart. There’s a certain trade-off between rich strategic and/or tactical play on the one hand, and accessibility […]