Thoughts on writing a million words in a year Required 1000000, Achieved 1008274

A year ago I set out to write a million words in a year, a number that I didn’t really understand when I started out with it.  It doesn’t seem real when you look at it in its entirety, so you have to break it down sizes that you do understand.  A million words works out to 2740 words a day,19180 words a week, and depending on what month you’re in, between 76720 and 84940 words a month, and when you look at it like that, you can get some idea of what it is that you’re setting yourself up for...

The first thing to note is that there are no breaks, you have to write every day, and whatever wordcount you miss on a bad day, you have to make up the next day, no exceptions, no excuses, if you get a bad week, you’re 20k in the hole, two bad weeks and you’re in a hole that you’re not likely to get out of.

Originally I’d had the thought that doing a million words in a year might inspire others to write, and that was the idea behind things when I started, In October 2013 I went to the launch of a group called Writing Yorkshire, with the idea that to get people writing, I would commit to such a task and have my progress monitored as I continued.  The idea was that for every word I wrote, someone somewhere in Yorkshire writes one, and that in turn may get another million words out of Yorkshire on the whole.  As it turned out, Writing Yorkshire are in it very much for themselves and don’t have much interest in actually taking people’s help when it comes to trying to get people to write, instead being more concerned about where they’re going to find the funding to keep paying themselves rather than doing what they were supposed to be...

That said, this is not much different to many things, but I found it quite upsetting that people offering to help get others writing were rebuffed, and so my priorities changed, with the goal becoming just to see if I could do it for myself...

And in that lies the first lesson, don’t do something like this for anyone but yourself, and there’s several reasons for this, the most important of which is that unless you’re under camera surveillance, you’ll never prove to anyone but yourself that the words you did that year all came from that year.  The only person who will ever know with certainty that you did a million words in a year is yourself, and while I know I have, there’ll be thousands of people out there going “Yeah, sure...” and to them I have nothing to say, I know I did it and I know that I can, and that’s where the win has been for me.  A test was set and I passed, only I know that I passed, but I know...

The second lesson I learned was that counting the words every day doesn’t work...

That may seem like a bit of a misnomer, after all, how could you count that number of words every day, but originally I wrote them down in a book every time I finished a piece and kept a word count going from that. 

That lasted about a month...

After a month I was adding up fifty things a day and trying to keep track of things that I was doing all over the place and something else needed to be done.  A spreadsheet seemed to be the best way forwards for this, as it also let me keep track of how many words I needed to have done by a certain time, and how many I was in front (or as the case may have been, behind).

At the beginning of the challenge, the idea was to write a million words of new stories, and while I managed to keep that up for the first two months (had two fully developed stories in my head when I started), when those stories started to reach their end, I learned a few hard lessons in story writing.

First: Never let people read a novel as you’re writing it, the reason for this is simple, if you have a moment when you look at the story and think that you could have set up a perfectly good primer some thirty pages ago, you can’t do it when you’ve already let everyone read that story and they know that what you’re talking about didn’t happen thirty pages ago.  More importantly, if you find that you don’t like where you’re going, you can change something and put it back on track, can’t do that if they’ve already read it.

Second: Writing stories for a whole year and trying to remain on target is not one bit easy...  At the end of the year, I’ve managed 656371 words on stories, and that’s more than a hundred stories in total, with 433605 words taken up in the five largest stories, The Shift (147404), World War Wolf (128550), In Iron Clad (67310), Oceans of Stars (41554 not complete) and Regiment B (48787 not complete) and the other short stories were all random thoughts that developed into something else.

So, figuring that I couldn’t manage a million words of stories, I started doing Reviews of games, Opinion pieces on things that I found interesting, work on games that I was writing for, and then all the words that I’d written by hand, keeping four different books in which I was writing ideas, stories, games and everything else, for which I had to add the words together on each page and keep a running total in each book at the top of the page.  Then (for which I will be immensely grateful) Dave Chapman came up with the idea of talking about games on a number of subjects over the course of August, something that I repeated in December for boardgames.  When I added all those up, the totals worked out like this.

Stories: 656371

Games and reviews: 102514

Handwritten words: 104781

Opinion pieces and articles: 144608

Total words written: 1008274

If you’re planning on writing with the idea of building an online profile and getting people interested, the good thing about most of the blog sites out there is that they keep a track of what people read, and you can get a good feel for the sort of thing that people like to read about.  If you’re looking to build an online profile, there’s a number of very easy ways to do it. 

The key to getting interest is consistency, post all the time and on subjects that inspire you, not on what you think will get page views.  It’s easy to court controversy (some people do it all the time), but it’s better to build a profile based on what you believe to be right.  People will visit the page in the thousands if you throw something controversial out there (the most read post on the blog is a piece I did based around the differences between the Pathfinder and D&D starter sets), but while I hadn’t intended that as something that would cause problems, it turns out it did, mostly because the faithful on both sides started a war over it.  Got a lot of comments on the blog over that, most of them in the “Damn you, you’re wrong, how dare you say this?” category, but it was more interesting to find out how many people never bothered to reply if you countered their initial angry post with reason and facts.  Most people started a war over it in places I didn’t read (and am only now starting to become aware of because I was too busy writing other things), and to this day (six months later) people are still reading that article.

Perhaps I was just hoping for reasoned discussion, either way I figured it was better to stay out of certain topics as they took up too much time replying to all the things said.  I may change that now that I don’t have to keep up a certain wordcount, because I do enjoy discussion with people, I just haven’t had time to catch up with everyone.

The other thing when doing a million words is to have a reasonably free schedule before you commit to it.  I organise a number of games conventions through the year, and they take up a lot more time than I tell people, particularly when some of them aren’t smaller, one day conventions, but really large multi day jobs.

The most important thing about the challenge though, was that you can’t let unexpected things stop you, I got a new car in January and had it written off by a drunk four months later (one week before the biggest convention I organise), and between the sorting of the insurance and the getting a new car, I was nearly 20,000 words behind at one point, but then I had a bout of bad health in September, the first in my life that’s actually put me down, but because I couldn’t do anything but sit/lay down, I managed to make the words back.  I believe, in all honesty, that If I’d not had those two weeks where I couldn’t do anything but write, I wouldn’t have made it (in fact, looking at the wordcount, I know I wouldn’t have made it), but taking on so many conventions and projects, as well as trying to do a million words, was a foolhardy move, and I know that now, so next time (Ha), I’ll know where I’m aiming and pitch accordingly.

Would I do this again?

Tough one, it’s been great in many ways, the need, not just the desire to write has been fantastic, knowing that you have to write, no matter what else you do, some part of your day has to be dedicated to writing, that has been fantastic, and I will miss that.  It’s also destroyed my procrastination instincts, because every day has been a “Get writing or you fail” day

So here I am, finally winding down from the year, and I feel empty now, as if I had a grand purpose and now it’s no longer there, so I need to find another thing to do, perhaps half as many words this year...

Yeah...

In loving memory

My Gran passed away peacefully this morning.

I did not visit perhaps as much as I should, and that's because some part of me wanted to remember her as she was, but I took mum there yesterday to say our goodbyes, and now she's at peace, because she wouldn't have wanted what happened, she would rather have gone years ago than have things prolonged as they were.

Dementia takes things from you, your life, memories and worse, others memories of you, because while I still remember my gran and I remember Sheffield Fish Market on the Friday and Meat and Potato pies and walking the dogs with her, I'll always remember that she deserved more than to end up in a bed with no memories of what she'd done in her life and all the people she'd made a difference to.

So if, years from now, something like that should happen to me, take this to the doctors and tell them there not to keep me going. That I want life for as long as I live every day, but when the day comes that the spark of me is gone and my body lives on, no more, no more say I, I want people to remember the man I am and all those things I did in life when I lived, let my legacy be all those things I did well, with all my many faults and all those things I didn't do so well, but undaunted and every day doing something to make the world a better place.

And so tonight and every day hence, I will remember my gran, not as she died, but as she lived.

Wordcount update - Required 984500, Achieved 1000007

It's over...

I Won...

#27daysofgames - Day 23 – Game I’d most like to see an improved version of – Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader

Now I know what people are thinking, it’s one of the most updated games in the world, there’s always a new product or a new codex or something new and interesting coming out for this game, it’s a product line that works on the basis of having new stuff all the time for people to buy and play against each other.

So it’s as well that Day 23 is about the game I’d like to see an improved version of...

Not updated...

Rogue Trader was one of those games that captured the mood of a generation when it came out, 1980’s Britain wasn’t the place it is today, there wasn’t much to look forwards to, things were grim, and to be honest, you’d have thought that any game that was a bleak reminder of just how dark things were wouldn’t have been welcome.

You’d have been wrong.

What was brilliant about Rogue Trader was the depth of thought that had gone into it whilst leaving an amount of the game open for interpretation.  The system wasn’t brilliant, in fact I’d go so far as to say that we never managed to get a whole game in, even when we had a whole afternoon to go at it, but we never lost in the interest in the game and the world it was set in.

And that’s why I want to see an improved version, not just an updated set of rules and a new set of army lists, each one more powerful than the last so that you have to keep getting more figures just to keep up and make sure that you have some chance of winning.  An improved version would not necessarily be the commercial viable option, and it is this reason why I suspect that I’ll never see what I actually want. 

Don’t get me wrong, there’s been more of the same things that made Rogue Trader good over the years, and each one updated again and again, steadily moving away from the interesting things about the race and going straight to the cool weapons and invulnerable saves (and of course things that made invulnerable saves not invulnerable), and so things escalated, as the words on the back of the first Rogue Trader said, “There is no time for peace, no respite, no forgiveness, there is only war.”, so the latest editions should read, “There is no time for background, no development, no balance, there is only profit...”

Maybe I’m just tired of companies doing three things when one would have sufficed (yes, I saw the hobbit recently), and I know that as long as there are people who will buy the interesting shininess, so games workshop will go on producing it, and there will never be a return to the days when we got something new and had to make something of it ourselves and maybe it’s that that causes me the problem.

I’m just not inspired by it anymore, not in the way I used to be, and it’s not that I’ve lost interest in games, it’s that whatever I want to play in this universe is now there and available for me to buy. There’s nothing I can wonder about, nothing that I’m not sure of, and in giving me everything I could ever want to see, the game has taken away the vastness of its own universe and that darkness out in the warp, those unknown worlds and frontiers, are no longer out there.

And if they are, you can be sure they’ll be harder to kill than everything else out there presently...

Just to be sure people buy them...

#27daysofgames Day 22 – Favourite Game no one else wants to play – Race for the Galaxy

It’s rare that you get games that encompass the struggle to raise a galactic empire, rarer still that those games can be played in less than an hour, and even rarer than that that they’re actually a good game to play...

Imagine my cheerfulness upon finding Race for the Galaxy...

The game mechanics are simple, both players choose a single order for the turn, then draw from the same deck of cards and act according to the orders that have been chosen.  Each player makes use of the orders that have been chosen, but those who played the orders get a bonus on that particular phase that only they (and any others that have played the same order) may use.  The first person to reach twelve planets or developments within their card structure finishes the game and then the total points scored are added up to find out who has actually won the race.  It’s possible to build an empire very quickly with small planets, but if your opponent has managed to put together a few large point worlds, it’s entirely possible for them to win over the mass of smaller planets.

Perhaps it’s in the nature of the points scoring that people don’t want to play it, something like the building of an empire should not be resolved by the person who managed to put most points on the board, but rather they that built the most powerful empire and it conquered everything else.

Either way, while it was popular a short while ago, even going to far as to bring out rules so that you could play the game in a solo format, it hasn’t seen much popularity since that point, an isolated game here or there to be sure, mostly to show someone how to play it, at which point, the comment of “Interesting” gets issued, which typically translates to “Didn’t mind playing it, won’t be playing it again” and that’s where the problem stems from...

I can’t figure out what’s bad about this game...

I understand that there’s only so many expansion you can put into something like this and I understand that there’s no way of customising the deck so that you get to play a particular strategy, but that’s a part of the fun of it for me, you don’t know what you’re going to get, but you’ve got all the cards you need to form a strategy and look for the cards or developments that you need to fit the strategy you’re working with, it’s well balanced and there’s no way that I’ve seen to break that balance, which brings the inevitable question...

Why doesn’t anyone play it? 

Million word update - Required 976250, Achieved 991710

Sub 10k remaining from the task this year, the words have just been falling out these last two weeks, and I'd be hard pressed to tell you where from, but whenever there's been a spare minute, I've been writing.

I suspect that it's because I can see the end now, and there's only ten days left, and if I were to fail now, somehow, a whole year would be laid wasted and I cannot consider that...

More later, and when I'm done, a breakdown of what I've learned writing this many words, what things have worked, what things haven't, and most importantly, what I'm doing next year...

#27daysofgames - Day 21 – Most complicated Game – Barbarian Prince

In the matter of games that need rulebooks to play, most have rules that work in such a way that when you have taken enough time to figure them out, you will be able to remember them and play without referring to the rulebook. Some games are built in such a way that you actually can’t play the game without referring to the rulebook.  The balancing act involved in such games is how to make the game interesting when you have to refer to everything constantly.  There are two games that I have found that work well to this extent, making them enjoyable, but not necessarily a good game due to the amount of time you have to spend looking through the books.

The first is for a single player and is called Barbarian Prince...

One of the first games I was introduced to and a game that I spent a lot of time playing, it involved the titular prince in his quest to flee to the south and there try to raise an army to take back his kingdom from the usurper.  Along the way, you can encounter trials, troubles, and rewards as well as treasure, allies and enemies, but at every step along the way, you have to refer to the rulebook to see if your travel is safe, which then refers to another table to see what happens next, and then to another table to see how that encounter resolves, and possibly a further encounter to be resolved thereafter.  It makes for an interesting game as it’s designed for solo play, but as a concept, it really doesn’t work for anything other than telling a story.

The second is for many players and is the Tales of the Arabian Nights

This is a game that I played earlier in the year and enjoyed greatly, but never got to the end of it as the amount of time needed to play through the game was more than we had in a single night.  Same concept and same mechanics to play, only far larger in scope and vision than the first, requiring not one but three rulebooks to play properly, and an equal number of players at the least to make sure that one of you didn’t spend the entire evening reading for everyone else.

This one I looked at earlier in the year, one of the most enjoyable evenings I've had all year, the details of which are at http://millionwordman.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/arabian-nights-game-review-bridge.html

#27daysofgames Day 20 – Coolest looking game – OGRE designers edition

The problem with some games is that while they’re possibly the shiniest thing in the world, the simple truth of the matter is that you’d never end up playing them, and all the shiny in the world doesn’t account for a game that you’ll never play.  Of course, for those of us with Gamer DNA, there’s still that pull towards a game that you may already have, but you don’t have the really shiny version.

So it is with the Designers edition of OGRE...

I’ve had the option to buy this on a number of occasions, and it’s not that I don’t have the money to get it, it’s that I honestly don’t know if I’d play it enough to justify the purchase of the game in the first place, especially not when I’ve already got two copies of OGRE.  I considered going in on the kickstarter of the game when it came about and it was only that I was already in for a number of other games that I decided against it.

Of those games, one I am still waiting to receive...

But back to the shiny, does it make any difference that it’s shiny?

A friend loaned me a copy and my conclusions are at

http://millionwordman.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/boardgame-review-ogre-designers-edition.html

TL:DR?

Yes, it really does, and in that lies the secret to every boardgame now being brought out, if you make it small and sparse, then it has to be good, if you make it big and shiny, it can be forgiven a multitude of sins because people will just buy it so they’ve got a copy...

Damnit...

#27daysofgames Day 19 – Best Second hand game purchase – Small World

My mum loves bargain shops, goes to them whenever she can, car boot sales, village fairs, all the things where you can find something for less than what it’s actually worth.  Many are the times we’ve been up at the crack of dawn to go hunting for bargains, and I don’t think the impulse to ever get something for full price when you can get a perfectly good version of it second hand for a quarter of the price is never going to leave me.

And so it is why Bring and Buy sections at conventions are always packed out I suspect.

For me, the best purchase I ever got was not at a convention, but at a car boot sale, and as it happens, it was from a person who didn’t know what it was worth and had a whole bunch of other things like it, that I also bought on that day, but the best of the games that I picked up was Smallworld, for the grand sum of £5.

You don’t really get time to check through the whole box to make sure everything is there when you’re buying things at Car Boot sales, people keep on moving past and at the prices you’re getting them, you tend not to complain too much about a piece missing here or there and instead concentrate on all the things you are getting, as long as the central bits like the board and most of the counters are present, nothing else matters.

As it turns out on this occasion, everything was intact and it had barely been played, as had most of the things in the sale.  I can only presume that all the things on that stall were just taking up space and that the person who was selling them had no particular care, otherwise they’d have done the research and put them on ebay or something similar. 

Either way, it remains the best buy I’ve ever had on a secondhand stall.

#27daysofgames - Day 18 – Favourite Licensed Game – X Wing

Day 18 – Favourite Licensed Game – X Wing

And I’ve already spoken about X wing on this collection of days, so rather than go on about it again, I would speak about the nature of licensed games and what usually goes wrong with them.  The problem for me is not that a game has been made of something that usually wasn’t intended as a game, but that typically, it’s created without any regard for the subject matter and doesn’t address what goes on in the film or show that it’s been based upon.

One must only look at the number of versions of Risk that have been brought out on the basis that there was some type of conflict involved in the licence, everything from star wars, to lord of the rings, to the walking dead, and all because the people in charge of the games didn’t want to think any further than using a set of rules that they were personally aware of.

And that’s where the problem is, for the most part, the only companies that can afford the really big licences are the ones who are trying to make things work on a commercial level, and that means putting it out to the general public, rather than those who know about games and would rather have something that played well, even if it took a little longer to work through and figure out, than have a game that was designed by committee and packaged with the easiest set of rules so that everyone can figure it out.

The reasoning is obvious of course, those games that are produced on a mass (and I mean truly mass, not just a thousand copies, but a hundred thousand copies) scale are those made by companies that no longer look at what makes a game interesting, only at how many units of it they can sell and while this works on a commercial level, it really doesn’t work on a games level.

Take the risk versions that are available, Risk as a game is a simple concept take over the board, occupy a number of territories and that’s how you win.  The tactics of the game favour aggressive players over everything else, to win at Risk, you have to be willing to go forwards all the time, push with the armies till there’s nothing else to do, because the person who tries to form a defensive line will eventually be crushed under the weight of the advancing armies.

Unless they’re Russia, but no game has ever accounted for that as yet.

But the problem here is that while you get a new board, new counters, and ostensibly new tactics, all it consists of is a different board and as such learning your way around it.

Then consider the other things that such companies (And I’m aware I’m mostly aiming at Parker Games here) produce, such as the Transformers Chess set, wherein the only difference is that we establish that Optimus Prime and Megatron are very important but don’t move very quickly and command no real power, and that Ironhide and Starscream are Queens...

Starscream I could make the case for , but Ironhide?

Please...

All so that more merchandise can be put out there that might entice some of the older generations to pick up something because “Well, they like Transformers, so I got them this chess set that’s got them in it.”

Am I ranting?

I suspect I am...

So I’ll end this here with my initial thought that the best of the licensed games out there is X wing, and I’ll continue the rant elsewhere... 

#27daysofgames - Day 17 - Favourite Game Mechanic - Dice...

There’s hundreds of games out there, everything from the ones that have no random elements in them to the ones that have nothing but random elements in them.  Every game needs mechanics to make it work, and for myself, there has only ever been one thing to make a game work.

Dice...

This may seem like a bit of a no brainer for many, after all, Dice are the tool used most often to resolve conflict in games, there is no other tool that can have such variation so easily handled...

Or is there?

For myself, the answer has to be no, but the reason I like them so much is many fold, not least amongst which is the tactile element to a game.  I believe that games that have no tactile element lose something in the playing of the game, and if every time you need to resolve a conflict, you enjoy using the tool that you use to resolve that conflict, then the game becomes that much more enjoyable.

I’ve collected a few dice over the years, and of all the dice that I have, I find the six sided dice has my interest more than any of the others.  Not too much variation that the amount of random becomes too much to contemplate, and possessed of a shape pleasant to hold, even to stack or arrange neatly (Yes, there is some element of OCD in this...), and the mathematics of them are easy to calculate, even for beginners, allowing the games played with them to be easily learned and played.

Of six sided dice, I have a few...

The spares, and the basic box that I take to conventions, these I don’t mind losing to people who need them more than I do, when I need a few more than I carry regularly...

The Specialist dice that make a game all by themselves.

The hand crafted dice, these found by my brother abroad and still carrying the thick scent of the land they came from...

And my everyday carry. 

These rest on my desk each day, playing card decks and pieces all around them, but these in the place I can reach to most easily, the light green ones luminous in the event that night playing needs to be done without benefit of convenient light, the casino ones for those times when I have a playing mat (and my lady will not take me to task for leaving dents all over the kitchen table), and the metal ones...

Ah the metal ones...

No better way of bringing an unruly player into line would you not agree...?

So yes, I’ve had an obsession with dice since a very early age, and I do not see that ending any time soon, and that makes me very...well...

You get the idea... 

#27daysofgames Day 16 – Funniest Game every played – Awful Green things from outer space

Some games have an innate humour to them, some are played for laughs, and some are unintentionally funny by virtue of what you find yourself doing while you’re playing them.  Awful Green things from Outer Space is one of the one’s that has both an innate humour and becomes funnier as you play it.

At least when I’m playing it anyway...

I was introduced to this game some years ago, when my brother got a copy of it and we thought it would make a good change to the normal games of 40k that we were playing most of the time.  A game that didn’t need us to spend a few hours building an army and making sure it was accurate was a welcome change.

The premise is simple, Awful green things have turned up on the ship and are causing mayhem, it’s down to the crew members to subdue or kill them all, and to this end, they have a variety of weapons at their disposal.  The thing that makes this game interesting is that no one knows what the various weapons on the ship will do until they’re actually used.  There are a number of different weapons and an equal number of effects that they can do, ranging from killing the green things outright to causing them to split, to causing them to get bigger, and as you use each weapon for the first time, you draw out an effect from a closed bag and apply it to the weapon.

Given that some weapons affect whole areas of the ship and everything in them, this can be a big risk depending on what result you pull out.  A kill result will be a brilliant thing for an area effect weapon, but if you draw a split or grow effect on the weapon, the results could be disastrous.  Either way though, the game was designed with this in mind, and so most weapons get tested on isolated green things where possible (after all, drawing a beneficial effect on a room full of them would be bad), and that’s where the fun comes in, the crew are trying to get to all the green things before they grow to the point where they can’t be stopped, and the green things, well, the green things are just trying to eat all the crew, and depending on the weapons effects that are drawn, that becomes easier the more the game goes on. 

I love Awful Green things, I think it’s one of the best examples of having to think on your toes (for the crew anyway) that’s ever been produced, and I’ve always enjoyed both the imagery used in the game (serious images just wouldn’t have worked with this) and the speed of the gameplay, tactics vary from game to game and it remains fresh even after a number of years playing.

The reason why this is the funniest game I’ve ever played is because of the reactions of the players when you find out what a new weapon will do and the entire game dynamic can change in a heartbeat, changing what was a sure rout into a crushing fail without a moments pause.  My brother and I tend to mock each other somewhat (I’m being kind here) when we play games, particularly when something unexpected comes up and we have to replan the strategy accordingly.  Most games might have one or two times in a game that cause us to replan, this game does it practically every turn, and that is a good thing.

#27daysofgames Day 15 – Game I wish I owned – Tannhauser

Sometimes, you’re just not there when you needed to be when a game came out, and you find that by the time you realise how cool a game might actually be, you’ve already missed the boat and it’s too late to try and catch up.

Such was the case with me and Tannhauser...

I’ve never managed to get a game in of this, and people just don’t have spare copies lying around to have a look through, but I’ve always like alternative world war things, particularly those with a slight angle towards strange creatures and interesting settings.  I also liked the look of the board and the idea that lines of sight were governed by the levels that the characters were on, which was marked out by an innovative colour coding method so you had to study the board carefully when making your moves. 

Then of course, I liked the characters, not quite steampunk, not dieselpunk, but an interesting blend of the styles, with other things in the mix that defied common description.  The game looks like Guillermo Del Toro decided to make a board game and this is what he came up with, if Hellboy had shown up in the expansions, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

But the interest in it wasn’t there, and fantasy flight have never been one to keep pressing something when the interest has gone, so it’s no longer available unless you’re willing to part with large amounts of money for even the basic set, and for a game that I’ve never played, I’m just not willing to take the risk.

However, I’m willing to be convinced that I should...

Million word update - Required 957000, Achieved 964816

It’s been a while since I put up anything about the million word challenge that this blog was originally intended to monitor, and there’s a number of reasons for that, most notably amongst which was that I became so busy with everything else that I no longer had time to write daily updates on things as well as trying to keep up with the wordcount.

In truth, going into Dragonmeet, I was a little down on the wordcount, and the two days that followed didn’t improve things for me one tiny bit, but then something happened straight after the convention that I hadn’t expected.

The word count started to go up in massive bounds, and I found myself wondering what the reason for that could have been.  How could it be after all this time on the challenge that I found myself suddenly doing stupid numbers of words in the space of time that previously I’d been struggling to make basic wordcount on most days.

Basic wordcount is 2750 a day for those who don’t want to do the maths on it...

And then it struck me...

Convention season is over...

Christmas is still to organise, but that’s not a hard thing to do because it’s fourteen of us around a table and all that’s really got to be done is to have all the food hot and ready at the same time, which is significantly easier than putting even a few thousand people in a hall and having everything arranged for them when they get there.

I haven’t completely stopped organising things, Expo next year is still being planned even now and I’ve got a lot of things to be doing there, but most people that I’m waiting on answers from are on Christmas wind down and I’m not really expecting answers till the beginning of the new year from most of them.  But the telling point has been that when I’m not answering a hundred phone calls a day on things and dealing with all the emails and texts that I get on a daily basis when it comes to organising things, I can put my whole attention into writing, which in turn increases my word count exponentially.

There’s a full report to be had on this year after it comes to an end, but for the first time in quite some time, I can see an end to the task I set myself at the beginning of the year, so much so that in the spreadsheet that I made to keep a track of all the different things I’ve been writing (many pages on that spreadsheet to cover everything), I’ve now added something at the bottom of it that tells me how many words I’ve got left to do, rather than how many words I’ve done.

And that too, is helping...

#27daysofgames Day 14 – Favourite Convention Game – X Wing

There’s a number of different schools of thought when it comes to playing games at conventions, on the one hand, it’s an excellent way to test your skills against people you’ve never encountered before, and on the other hand, it’s an excellent way to get your ass handed to you by people you’ve never encountered before...

Maybe that’s why it’s not for everyone...

I have no problem with getting beaten by someone else, but it’s not why I play games, I do understand the Rabid Kill/Win (RKW) mentality of high level tournament players, it’s not something I’ve ever got into and I don’t think that I ever will.

It’s a game, I just don’t take it that seriously...

X wing for me fits that criteria quite nicely, because when you sit down for a game, you can tell in minutes if the person in question is an RKW or a casual player who just likes playing the game and by extension, you can usually tell if you’re pitching at the right level with your own game.  Then there’s the subject matter, dogfights in space between iconic spacecraft, it doesn’t get much better than that, and finally the system itself...

Now I’m not saying that X wing is the most accurate representation of space combat out there at the moment, but it’s the one that accurately captures the feel of how I like to see space combat being played out, fast and sharp with no forgiveness for bad decisions.   There’s a lot of comparisons to be made to games like Wings of War/Wings of Glory, and there are reasonable grounds for comparison, both systems use move and battle orders and both deal with what is essentially the same subject, but for me, X wing has the edge because it’s simpler to play. 

I don’t always agree with Fantasy flight on a number of things that they get up to, but I do believe that they nailed it when it came to this one.  The simplicity of the orders and template systems, and the ease with which a basic game can be played (I know, I know, no one plays the basic game anymore), but for getting new players in, you want something that’s easily picked up and easily played, and while there are other games out there that do the job better in my estimation, a big part of getting people into games is in giving them things that they can relate to that will draw them in want to play the game in the first place.

Admittedly I’m of the generation that went to see the original Star Wars films at the cinema (or East Dene Working Mens club depending on what we were doing at the time), but who wouldn’t want to be zipping around the board in an X wing or if you’re one of those that roots for the empire, a couple of Tie fighters? 

It’s not often I get to play at conventions anymore, but I usually bring along a few of my favourite games so I can get up to something if there’s a spare five minutes in the day.  So any X wing players out there who aren’t in the RKW category, if you see me at a convention with a spare five minutes, bring some asteroids... 

I’m up for it...

#27daysofgames Day 13 – Best Spur of the Moment Convention Purchase - Lords of War

 It was Dragonmeet 2013 when I first encountered Lords of War, which is something of an irony when you consider that it had won the strategic card game award at Expo the same year.  However, as board and card games aren’t my thing, and I’m too busy running the show on the day, I often find out the results afterwards rather than being there to join in the fun.  So when I was walking around Dragonmeet last year, I found this game and sat down for a swift demonstration of Orcs Vs Dwarves.

Five minutes later I bought it...

For me, the problem with most convention purchases is that I only get to play it the once and I hope that the experience I had at the convention was indicative of the actual game rather than the experience of playing a game with someone who was letting me win in order to get me to buy the game.

On this occasion, it turned out that the experience I had at the convention was actually the game itself, and in the time that followed, I’ve played the game a number of times and enjoyed it more every time. It’s a simple game involving card placement on a board, but the tactical element of it is very strong and promotes a more involved style of play than most casual games require.  While the decks are packaged in two’s, any deck can play against any other, and it’s good to test all the different armies against each other. 

It’s not expensive to start (with a twin pack costing about the same as a single magic deck these days), and while there’s a bunch of extra’s that can be bought to vary the game including reinforced play mats and weather/terrain options for far more involved games, the game can be played straight out of the box and it’s now one of my go to options when I’m talking to non gamers about the sort of games that I play.

The third set of armies caused a reasonable division of the fans, with many considering the Templars to be far stronger than the Undead they were placed against, but it’s not that, it’s just that the undead do a lot of small damage in all directions, which is of no use when you’re trying to beat things that have massive armour and hit hard in single directions.  Those who play with all the different decks have the understanding that while those two decks (ironically) aren’t well matched, both of them can be used well against the other four decks that are already out there.

That said, I do prefer the Orcs and Dwarves that I first played with, the other decks are interesting, but they don’t hold my interest the way Green Vs Short does...

Either way, still the best thing I ever bought on the spur of the moment.

#27daysofgames - Day 12 – Most memorable game played - Perudo

The best games are the ones where you have the right people in the right state of mind playing the right game, and those don’t come along too often.  The games I remember most are the simplest ones when most of us weren’t in the most serious of moods, and all we were doing was kicking back and enjoying things. The game that most sticks in my mind was a few years back at Expo when we were still in the Strathallen Hotel in Birmingham rather than being over at the Hilton and in the evening, when things started to calm down, we had chance to get in a game or two.

The game on this occasion was Perudo...

Perudo is a simple enough game, sometimes called Liar dice, sometimes Devil Dice, but always the same game.  Every player has five dice to begin with, everyone rolls the dice and keeps their result secret, and then players take it in turn to bet on the amount of a certain number that’s present, with one of two different actions.  Either call the previous person on the number and amount that they called, or raise the total and pass the buck to the next person.  The number one is wild and can count for any number, so when people call one’s, they can bid half the previous number, but when increasing on one’s, they have to double the amount and add one. 

For example, if someone called three ones, the next person would have to call four ones, or seven of any other number.  If someone had called three sixes, the next person could call four of any number, or two one’s, both of which would be an increase on the previous bid.

What made this game so memorable was the number of people that were playing it at the time.

Fourteen...

Some of us a little merry, some of us a little tired, but because there were seventy dice on the table to begin with, bids the likes of which none of us had seen began stacking up quickly and then came trying to keep track of how many dice were still on the table and considering what would be a good bid to follow up on.  The first game only took us forty minutes to get through, the second took us more than an hour because it devolved into all of us randomly throwing out numbers to confuse the person whose turn it was, rather than playing fair and keeping the numbers correct.  As anyone who’s ever played games with friends when not all of them were on an even keel will attest, the game either falls apart quickly or holds together with everyone laughing with each other, rather than at each other.

So it was with this game.

I can’t tell you who won the games, I know at least three who will claim they did when they were the first ones to hit the deck, but I can’t remember who won (I know it wasn’t me), but on those occasions when you’re so busy playing the game you no longer care who wins or loses, only that you keep playing...

Those are the best times, those are the ones you remember in the years to come...

#27daysofgames Day 11 – Old Game still played – Intruder

When I was younger, there weren’t the variety of games available that there are now, there weren’t the variety of players available, so a lot of the games that were put out there were calibrated so that you could play them by yourself on the assumption that you either didn’t have friends close...

Or you didn’t have friends...

How times have changed...

One of my favourite game publishers at the time was Task Force Games, because all the games they did were balanced and fair in a number of ways, they were designed to work both in single player and multiple player modes, and each of them took an idea that was well known at the time, such as a lone warrior making their way across a map or a barbarian in search of treasure and riches, but the one that made the most interest for me was a game called Intruder...

As you can see from the cover, it may well have been based on a film you’re familiar with...

Intruder was a simple game, something unknown had found its way on to the ship (which in a move of remarkable meta gaming was called the Prometheus) and had started killing its way through the crew, if you didn’t get to it quickly, it mutated, got stronger, faster, meaner, harder to kill and in general, significantly more unpleasant.  There were a number of other complications in the game, such as the science division not letting you kill it at the beginning (no surprise there then...) and the higher powered weapons (Blasters, flamethrowers, and electric prods, naturally) needing to be researched before you could actually use them, so no running to the weapons cabinet when you’re on a science vessel, you’ve got to figure it out and then build it.

Played as a single game, it was often best to separate the crew and see if you could find the beast before it started to change and get larger and stronger, the main reason for which was because in the lower stages of evolution, it might not attack, and anyone carrying a cage might manage to keep it trapped.  The entire criteria for winning the game was that all the Intruders on the board (one of the potential complications was that the Intruder could make copies) are either neutralised or killed depending on the stage of the game.   Once the Intruder started to change to other stages of evolution, it became far harder to subdue but you then got the option to try and bring it down with more direct methods.

What made it more complex was the fact that the Prometheus was a research ship that was picking up random animal specimens, all of which got loose when the Intruder broke out.  Quite a few animal specimens, which when you find them, may look like this...

But when you start playing the game, look like this...

As a two player game, it rapidly became a chase where the Intruder player looked to isolate a crew member without a weapon and then begin its evolution from there.  Far more interesting as a two player game, the mechanics for the game in single player mode still made for interesting playing and covered every aspect of the film that it was based on (Alien for those still guessing), making for an excellent game experience all around.

Somehow, they never got sued for use of imagery, ideas, or concept, I suppose it was back in the days when people didn’t get lawsuit happy when there was no real damage being done to the IP of the main product, and there’s since been a version of the game made that uses the same map (slightly shinier), same game system (slightly updated), and same ideas (Not at all changed), which is available online in both print and play formats and the version that comes in a box with real counters.

And either way, one of the better monster hunt games out there.