Return from Wesnoth

I finally lost my patience with Battle for Wesnoth, which I’ve been playing lately. While I’ve usually been able to endure playing a scenario per day, the latest scenario in the campaign, the Trial of the Horse Clan (or some such; playing the Finnish translation here) almost made me break my mouse in frustration. I doubt that I’m going to return to the game again.

The Best Product to Rule them All

As I wrote in my last post, there were a multitude of rpg products published at Ropecon. Only one provoked me to play immediately, however. I haven’t more than skimmed most of these products, but I can already tell you which makes the greatest impression to me (aside from my own book, presumably).

Pick-up Party Play

My snazzy topic here comes directly from a reader comment here. Captain Poco wants to know how I’m doing with a constantly shifting player base in my Alder Gate campaign, especially as I haz girz in the group, too. So let’s look into those issues, then – there’s a lot of other things I could write about here (including a Story Games discussion I need to write backgrounds for, related to my experiences here).

Chromatic Diplomacy

We played Chromatic Diplomacy with the teenagers a while back. As I’m always interested in Diplomacy variant design, it was pretty good to get to play this comedy masterpiece my Millington & al. from the early ’90s. The reason for playing the variant now was really that I happened to have a snazzy laminated map on loan from a friend in the south, and that we happened to need a 5-player variant. In hindsight it probably wasn’t smart to play something that has more comedy value than anything else, especially when half of the players hadn’t played Diplomacy before and couldn’t really appreciate the comedy.

New primitive D&D campaign

Right now it seems that my primary source of rpg amusement this winter is a new campaign of primitive D&D with challenge-based adventuring techniques. As many of the youngsters I’ve been playing rpgs lately moved towards university studies I had to think up something new to attract new gamers to my group. We have plenty of boardgamers, computer games and Magic: the Gathering players here in Sonkajärvi, but the teens do not usually play roleplaying games independently of my influence, it seems.

24 hours on the Shadowfell

Busy, busy, with well-paying whitecollar-slaving. Only now time to report on the weekend a week ago, when I was at Jycon. It’s a new boardgame convention in central Finland – very good all-around arrangements, I have the utmost faith that it’ll do well in the future if the organizing association becomes well established.

I only played two games at the convention. One was a Diplomacy Finnish Championships trial wherein I secured my own entrance to the championship finals later in the year; the (shortish) game is being analyzed at the boards right now. The other was around 24 hours of Dungeons & Dragons, split over three days. The adventure was Keep on the Shadowfell, the introductory adventure of the new 4th edition of D&D. As the adventure is still pretty fresh and the actual game hasn’t come out, I thought that somebody might be interested in my impressions.

Marble Madness

I’ve now spent two nights playing Metroid Prime, a couple of hours all told. I remember playing the game around five years ago, but I didn’t finish it then. I can see why easily now: while the game is quite beautiful and has some interesting ideas, it’s also rather repetitive. Most condemning is the player flow control common to the genre of action adventure ever since whenever.

Go on a large board

I played my first game of Go on a full-size board yesterday. Wasn’t my idea, either; Mikko said that he usually plays on a large board, so I obliged. In retrospect I guess I was clearly the stronger player in the game, so we should have had a handicap of some kind. Can’t know without trying, though.

Back with news

Ho hum, a human is a busy creature, and apparently the first thing I cut when I’m busy is blogging. This is a fortunately non-pressurized medium, though, perhaps because of the singular publication model: no need to edit, print or publicize yourself when you want to write. Nice.

Anyway, as a brief explanation for the latest month-long silence, I offer thee this. In other words, I’m going to Gencon this year with the Forge booth if everything goes well. There’s quite a bit of planning involved with all the flight plans, hotels and, foremost, preparing products for the convention. I’m going to perchance discuss my products in greater length later either here or some other medium, for now it’s sufficient to say that I’m being pretty busy writing and producing the games I want to sell at Gencon.

I’m still hoping to write the blog as well during the summer months, though. The first order of business is to write more extensively about different flavours of fantasy gaming, which topic has stood open for a while now after my latest post. A big topic, but I’ll tackle it soon.

Learning Go

I got to play another game of go at our local game club last Friday. It’s pretty surprising how many people had no idea what the game is, despite it being just about the most popular boardgame in the world. Regardless, the opportunities to play are not far and wide, even if I do like the game: most gamers who even know what it is about just look at how abstract go is and give it a pass, preferring anything with some more structure and more players. Still, from the few games I’ve got to play I have to say that I like go: it’s very deep and surprisingly interpretive for all of its abstractness: the stones have strong relationships to each other and there’s tremendous variety in the possibilities. Playing go is very entertaining and not at all heavy and difficult, as one might assume with experience from worse abstract games.