So what are you reading and/or watching and/or otherwise enjoying in analog?
We’re fixing to go to a birthday party for one of the tribe’s nephews today and are pleased to be giving the child an educational toy: Dinosaur Train Dino Poop Kit
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Last night Niki & I watched the movie “In The Loop,” a British satire of based (it seems) on the lead up to the invasion of the Iraq war. It was bloody brilliant, and I can’t believe I had never heard of it prior to last night.
HIGHLY recommended.
Finally get to read some brain candy. Just finished the delightful and strangely-moving “Graveyard Book,” and am reading the last Harry Potter book, which I’ve neglected until now.
I should read the graveyard book. I love gaiman’s stuff, and the premise sounds great.
Personally, I’ve just discovered “Adventure Time with Finn and Jake”.
It’s really very good. Exactly what you’d expect in a Gaiman novel for children.
Seconded. (It’s not Stardust, but what is?)
Wow, skewering all the comments above in one thrust! Well played.
I’m almost done with The Magicians.
When I get back to the U.S. I’m going to catch up on The Walking Dead (watching, not reading).
Played Quarriors with the nephew and the sis.
We approve. Only one complaint is that it’s not complicated enough.
Awesome, I’m pleased you liked it.
Yeah. I can totally see that. (You’ve played Descent, right?)
No, I haven’t. I’ve had it recommended before.
I don’t really have enough of a regular gaming group to get all the games I’d like to get and have them get enough usage to defend the habit 🙂
I just wish there were more modifiers, really. We talked about playing to, say, 40 Glory instead of 15, and when a card in the Wilds ran out of dice, you pull from either the Spell/Critter pile until you had one of each type of monster and one of each type of Spell out there, and only then going with “four empty cards = game over”, just to try out the interactions some more. We only got two games in (the first took an hour, the second about 30 minutes), so I don’t have a good feel for it yet. Seems like it needed an additional basic wild for a Quiddy bank of some sort; rolling all 1s a couple of times in a row early was a killer when somebody got 3 2s early. Something to smooth out those sorts of distributions. Dunno, more playtesting needed.
Culling the dice seemed to be really important. Was that just an impression based upon the two trials.
Still, DICE!
I can totally see about a million expansions to this, like Munchkin or Killer Bunnies.
Did you explore the spells, really?
Did most of your game focus on the monsters?
I saw the, “you can put spells in your Ready area and save them for future use”, allowing you to bank up for a Big Turn, so that appeals to my silly tendency to want to win via a monstrous turn. Plus, we got the Growth spell in the first round, and with the 2 Quiddy possibilities on that, I bought two of those out of the gate. In retrospect, I would have gone with the Portal earlier, but I didn’t grok its usefulness until midway through the first game.
We got the Death spell in the second go around, and I picked up four of those and used them to nuke critters like mad, which made the second game last longer than it otherwise would have; culling out the Assistants early meant that I had one of those (at least) almost every turn after the third.
The issue I found with the critters is that they were all stand-alone (and it’s actually hard to *kill* critters unless the board drops predominantly offensive ones, which it didn’t either go). You need them to win, of course, but probably in the next few games I’ll concentrate on the spells early just to get a better feel for which ones work best, before I start exploring the actual critter mechanics.
It’s still early. Have you seen the expansion?
There’s an expansion?
My goodness, there is. Its release date is, apparently, the 16th of this month.
I looked at it and it seems like, mechanically, they’re doing that thing of “making the game last longer by making it easier to mess with the other player on a different layer of abstraction” (see: Arkham Horror expansions for a similar development philosophy).
I would have gone the other route and mucked with the direct game interactions a bit more, I think. But then, I haven’t had enough trials to say much conclusively about the stuff I already have.
Only 2 games! Need to play more!
Big, big upside: I suspect Jack can play this now (albeit not well), and can certainly get into it within a year and a half.