Category: Games

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Food Games Me

What you should do in 2016

Follow these people on Twitter: @saladinahmed, @andrewducker, @tcarmody, @joannechocolat, @beatonna, @paullicino

Buy better quality meat and less of it. It’s better for you, the environment, the animals, and it’ll taste better.

Grow something.

Hand write a letter to someone. (Bonus: you can talk about “keeping up with your correspondence”.)

Make your bed every morning.

Play more games. Good, modern board games. If you’re not sure where to start try Tabletop or Rahdo, or check out SU&SD. (Or just pick up Ticket to Ride or King of Tokyo and take it from there.)

Moan less and laugh more.

Look up nearby tourist attractions. There’s almost certainly an obscure museum, park, or gallery on your doorstep you’ve always ignored or never knew about. Visit it.

Give things away

Drive a little slower. The time saved by speeding on your commute to work is negligible but it’s costing you money and stressing you out.

Buy a book from an independent bookstore.

Pay for something you get for free. You almost certainly use Wikipedia, pay the $3 when they ask, if you read a webcomic or follow a YouTube channel back the creater on Patreon.

And, most important of all: be kind. If we’re not kind to each other then we’re all fucked.

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Books Comics Computer Games Film Games Me

The Year in Review

Films. My favourite film I’ve watched this year might be Nausicaa. My favourites of this year’s releases… probably Fury Road and The Force Awakens (I also loved how like Nausicaa Rey’s intro scene was).

TV. Jessica Jones and Daredevil probably the picks of the year. I continue to enjoy Arrow and The Flash. Non-superhero… Umm… I still have Jonathan Strange and Wolf Hall recorded but unwatched. Ooh! Rick and Morty. Loved Rick and Morty and seriously lamenting:

– Lack of region 2 DVD
– The wait for a third series

GoT was disappointing this year, still good TV but little progression and certainly weaker than previous series with the exception of the best zombie sequence we’ve had in years.

Games. I bought too many and played too few. Of my whole collection I’ve now racked up plays for ~20-25 games now but that’s less than half.

My favourite game of the year might be Above and Below, just the right mix of eurogaming and storytelling, and easy enough for my family to pick it up on the first play. I wish I’d played Pandemic Legacy but I lack a regular enough gaming group to play the series. And I wish I’d enjoyed Codenames more, again, I think with the right group this would be a blast but on our family holiday it just didn’t really take.

(Talking of games I’ve only really played one computer game this year but I think most games would struggle to beat Fallout 4 this year)

Decisions. Joining Spa Striders is shaping up to be one of the better ones, I’m getting fitter and while I’m yet to really make friends (repeated introductions by the same people are getting a little embarrassing) I’m hoping that’ll get easier when the evenings get lighter and more pub runs are on the cards.

Worst decision? Not sure. Could’ve saved a bunch of money by not buying a host of games I haven’t played! Equally I could’ve saved even more money by not going on any dates but while nothing’s really panned out on that front yet it’s all been useful. Not sure yet. Anyway, this is supposed to be about favourite things!

Books. Really enjoying The Mistborn series thus far, Old Man’s War was really rather good, The Night Circus was nice but doesn’t quite make the top of the list. Certainly happier with how much I’ve read this year and just bagged a rake of bargains in Amazon’s 12 days of Kindle so hopefully that’ll continue on. Not sure I have a standout comic this year though I’m still catching up on a lot of what I’ve picked up.

That’ll do for now I think. More thoughts may follow between now and New Years.

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Computer Games Film Games TV Work

All work and no play

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Games

Mordheim

Related to the last, this would be cool:

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Games

Age of Sigmar

Well this is confusing.

I’ve toyed with taking up Warhammer on and off for years, but now it all seems to be… gone? Or just different? Or both?

The big event over the last year or so in the Warhammer Universe has been ‘The End Times’ and apparently it really did all end. The hefty rulebook, the square bases, ranks and formations, non-trademarked names, the world itself: all gone.

In there place we have a four page rulebook, round bases and skirmish rules, Ogors, Orruks, Aelfs, and Steamhead Duardin inhabiting nine new realms and belonging to some new Order.

The starter set comes with a bunch of Sigmar’s pals, intent on taking the fight to the ninth realm of Chaos, who wouldn’t look out of place in a chapter of 40k marines.

stormcast

From a business point of view this makes sense, something like 60% of GW’s income comes from Space Marines. If no-one’s buying WF let’s get a little Space Marine in there and see how they like it, but any notion of a game system seems to have gone out the window. Or they’ve stripped it down to all you need. It’s hard to tell: no points limits, no selection constraints, special rules based on player moustache size and talking to your miniatures…

rules

As mad as it seems I’m still keen to try it, I imagine you’ll very quickly identify who’s in it to have fun and who’s in it to break/cheat the (lack of a) system. It feels odd that this coincides with Total War: Warhammer which is very much rooted in the Old World but, again, it makes sense to base the game on the established world.

Will I actually play this? I don’t know. I spend enough on board games that I don’t get to play, not sure I can afford to buy and paint a bunch of minis I won’t use either but I’ll keep an eye. Some of the new sculpts are quite cool so I’ll perhaps see how some of the other races turn out (though I doubt I will ever call them anything other than Orcs, Elves, Dwarves…)

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Games Me

Ergodic reading

These are books, like digital literature, computer-generated poetry and MUDs, where a “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text”. And they are more common than you might think, especially in geek culture. Game books that allow you to “choose your own adventure” are ergodic, as are fantasy novels with extensive maps and world-building notes. But the RPG handbook pushes ergodic reading to its limit.

From ‘The joy of reading role-playing games’.

I have a fair-sized collection of RPG books: the Advanced Fighting Fantasy books (Dungeoneer, Blacksand!, Allansia, Out of the Pit, and Titan), Savage Worlds, D&D 4E Players Handbook, Mythic, the full set of D&D 5E Manuals (plus some others I’ve forgotten about, no doubt), but I’m yet to really play one.

I once convinced a friend to start an AFF quest, we must have been about 11 or 12, but our story didn’t get much further than one night. More commonly I’d spend hours meticulously constructing characters (on the slim chance I could ever get someone to play) and reading and re-reading the quests and background lore to imprint the worlds and stories in my mind.

Since I bought 5E I’m pretty much back there 20 years on, rolling characters and questing in my imagination.