Firefly - Game Review

 So I’m a few years late to this particular party, sometimes the good stuff takes a while to get there, and this Wednesday I found myself finally getting to sit to the helm and take a burn around the ‘verse.

This is Firefly...

I’ll touch momentarily on the production values before I get to the game proper.  They are, as always for Gale Force Nine, Spectacular, there’s no other way to describe them.  The ship counters are well crafted, the card counters are solid and well coloured, the cards you’re using for the various parts of the game are as good as any professional deck of cards that you’re likely to pick up, and as the images used are all from the TV show, it’s as close as you’re going to get to running around the ‘Verse yourself.

The game strategy is simple, get a job at one place, pickup whatever crew or cargo you need to do the job, deliver the crew or cargo and get paid.  The game works on the premise of everyone having the same goal to work with, so everyone knows what the score is before the game starts and everyone has a clear idea of where all the other players are.  It’s possibly to play the game any way you like, you can take all the illegal jobs that require you to misbehave (such as I did), or you can stay on the right side of the law and take less profitable (but less dangerous) jobs.

My first handful of jobs all required that I misbehave to get them done, and this is where I learned a fundamental of the game.  If you haven’t got a good crew behind you, don’t misbehave...  I spent a good few turns sitting there stuck while Sue and John were Zipping around the Verse because I didn’t have the right calibre of crew. 

Once I got clear of the first one, I started stocking up on what I needed.

As long as you have the funds, you can buy any amount of gear or crew that you need, but you only have a limited number of spaces on the ship for both, so choose wisely.  Once you’ve got over the idea of only one of a particular action in a turn, the game starts to pick up.  If you’ve burned into the middle of nowhere, there’s nothing else you can do, so you start looking at the planets in range when you’re making jumps so you won’t end up sitting in space hoping for nothing to find you. 

On the subject of the two NPC ships in the game, the Reaves and the Alliance cruiser, neither made much of an impact in our game, and I suspect that you have to be running around in open space for some time before they really start to cause a problem.  I liked that cards have to be drawn for every movement past the first when you’re travelling any distance, each one increasing the possibility of something happening, it made the game seem more claustrophobic, the universe less empty that the board would have you think.

Overall, for fans of the TV show (or the film, which we shall not refer to again here), it’s a good reminder of all the good things that there were, you can easily spin a game into something like the Arabian Nights (http://millionwordman.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/arabian-nights-game-review-bridge.html) and have a great time doing it.  For those who aren’t fans of the TV show, it’s not a bad game, but you won’t have half the fun that those who’ve watched the TV show will have.

And the solution for that is to go buy the TV show, you have no idea what you’ve been missing...

Lord of the Dead - Play Review

So, amongst the kickstarter goodness that arrived this week was Lord of the Dead, backed on a whim because it looked very much like the games I grew up with, such as Survival and Barbarian Prince, it also looked colourful and interesting.

And now it’s here, I can cheerfully report that it’s interesting, but the villagers have really got a fight on their hands...

What we liked most about it was that the move and attack orders were reversed for the two different sides, allowing the humans to close and attack each round (and invite the possibility of a return strike), or they could stay out of range and there was nothing that the shambling undead could do to catch them.

With this in mind, you’d think that it would be an easy matter for the humans to stay at range and pepper the undead with shots for the win...

Not So...

I played several games against my constant companion through adventure, John Wilson, and found that while the Lords of the Dead themselves aren’t that much of a threat in straight combat, their spells make them a particularly troublesome foe.

For example

Most of the Lords have a range of one, meaning that they have to be in contact with the base of the model being attacked, and so a lot of their attacks are lessened because of this range issue.  Any human would do well to keep to range and keep firing, but many of the spells have a range on them, and that range does well to counter the problems that the Lord has in general.

When the Lord in question does have a ranged attack, the humans are in real trouble, The pumpkin head is one of the most dangerous because it has a range of two, equivalent to many of the humans and it hits far more often.  Of the games played when I took this villain, all ended in sure defeat for the humans. 

Against the others, tactics and judicious use of propelled weapons won the day.

Strategy?

For the player of the undead, the whole goal is to get to the graveyard and there raise the army, for the humans, it’s to stop them getting in there, so the undead strategy is to head at best speed for the graveyard and let nothing stop them.  Bonus points are awarded for the humans to pick their forces if the undead start closer to the graveyard at the beginning, and the points allocations are about right for the advantage the range decrease gives.

For the humans, it’s all about having the right troops for the job, the Paladin is really expensive, but can cancel spells and hit hard.  The farmer on the other hand is there for little more than cannon fodder, but that plays a part as well...

We played a good five or six games in less than fifteen minutes once we’d got the rules down, it’s a good fast game with simple mechanics, good production values, and excellent replay value, I’ll be looking for the next one by Christopher Ferguson, this one’s a keeper... 

How Kickstarters should work - Part two - Feng Shui 2 and Exploding Kittens (Including sound...)

They say about Kickstarter that sometimes you go so long on waiting for things you backed that you forget that you backed them in the first place...

I don't...

I keep a list of all the things I've backed and a running total of how much I've spent on them over the years, so when something arrives, I knock the total off the outstanding and feel less guilty about the whole thing :)

Sometimes, just sometimes, a motherload lands, so imagine my cheerfulness this week when Lord of the Dead arrived earlier, and this morning...

Only Feng Shui 2 and Exploding Kittens...

Full review to follow, but I'll leave you with this...

Exploding Kittens box Opening...

Lord of the Dead - How Kickstarters should run...

I got something in the post this morning, admittedly one of the last to get it because of circumstances beyond the control of the creator, but I thought to share this around my various groups.  I back kickstarters probably more than I should, I like the idea that I'm helping people to achieve something they want to do and while I'm at it, get something from it myself.

I am aware that I'm not backing a certified reward, I'm backing the promise of their best efforts to get the job done and produce what they wanted to.

Sometimes this doesn't go to plan, and I'll come to that in a future post. Sometimes however, small developer shows the world how it should be done...

This is Lord of the Dead, from Christoper Ferguson...

As you can see from these shots, it's professionally produced

the counters are reasonable stock (at least equivalent to first edition OGRE)

Ziplock bags for the counters when you've punched them out...

And a big bag to hold it all in when you've punched it all out...

But what's impressed me more that getting the thing done within a month of due date, getting all the things out to everyone, and starting another kickstarter while he's at it, is the way he's handled himself throughout the whole thing.  Updates have been every day, not every week or every (Take note Chaosium...) month, when he's had a problem, he's been out front with it, he's told people of his frustrations and he's been open and inviting to questions.

This...

This is how Kickstarters should be run, with open and regular communication, with honesty and the knowledge that those of us who back kickstarters just want to know how things are going, we bought into your dream, we want to know if it's turning into a nightmare.  I haven't been on a single kickstarter where regular and truthful updates have been anything but a boon to the creators of that kickstarter, and as they say, when it all goes quiet....start worrying...

I'm taking this to play at the group tonight, play report later, but watch this man, he's a good example to all game makers out there...

Big B******* Walking Club - East, Ever East...

And so yesterday, in the face of potential soakings and the prospect of arriving home looking like bedraggled cats, we went a little east of the house, out along roads that had no paths (that was fun...), and over hills that had no dales, on a walk that had no discernable route, because we ourselves had not planned it in advance, figuring that there's enough walking ground out there to find our way in.

What we found...

Carlton Marsh is not that popular it seems...

Maybe because this is literally as far as you can go at 6 at night...

Nice Bridge though, shame that you couldn't go past it...

No shit...

Even if the gate had been open, you'd not have got further...

Nice Wall around a pond...

And another bridge leading high into the back of the marshes

That seemed curiously familiar...

High into the hills, or the long dark into Moria...

Not quite the Bridge at Khazad Dum, although we do think there may have been Balrogs down here at some point...

And we always like the woodland arches on these paths...

But high on these hills was the bypass, and so all real opportunities for good photos that didn't involve a stack of tarmac and little else went by the wayside, in all something near 7 miles, two hours around, and a lot of hills, but we arrived back not (quite) dead, so there must be improvements somewhere...

Book Review – Armada

In the wake of reading Ready Player One, and given that I was more than a little late to that particular party, I picked up the next book by Ernest Cline as soon as it came out on the hope that it would be a book of at least similar humour and wit.

Lightning does not often strike twice

I wish it had this time...

Armada starts in the same way as Ready Player One. Zack, a young man who lost his father at a very early age is making his way in the world one day at a time, with the only exceptional thing about him being his skills at video games.  The world is a dark and miserable place, until one day he finds out that all the games he’s ever played were part of a government sponsored plan to teach the whole world how to fight an impending alien invasion and he’s been specifically selected to help the war effort along with the other elite game players.

Yes, someone rewrote the Last Starfighter...

In and of itself, that’s not a problem, I liked the Last Starfighter...

But it’s more than that, the story is tagged together, but obviously so. Here there’s a bit of the Last Starfighter, there’s some Star Wars, here’s some Robotech, there’s some American Pie, and while its all well and good to borrow things from other series, the one thing you don’t do is point out that that’s what you’re doing...

There was my biggest problem, every time a bit I recognised came along, it was less than a half page before Zack considered where the quote came from, it came across as if the author was trying to prove how much pop culture he was familiar with and for me, it disrupted the story badly. 

The book tries to keep the same level of geek savvy and pop culture references that were in the first book, but Armada fails where Ready Player One succeeded, and it’s for one very good reason.  The references in the first book weren’t jaded or rehashed from anything else, they were all relevant to the situation at hand, and most importantly...

They were all right...

The first book was so endearing because of that intimate knowledge, you could empathise with Wade because he was a geek, absolutely one of us.  He obsessed over certain things and he had the knowledge to go with those obsessions, he got the details right and he was proud that he got them right.  In Armada, Zack is also supposedly a geek, and while he’s quoting from the same sources that Wade was, he gets things right, but when he goes off piste (Top Gun for example), the knowledge isn’t there, he draws conclusions from things that weren’t correct, or worse, were misquoted...

(Yes, I do love Top Gun, and I know the difference between Viper and Stinger...)

I liked Ready Player One, took me two days to finish, but I enjoyed almost all of it.  Armada I finished in a morning and when I was done, I had no desire to go back to it, and in the world of reminiscence fiction, not wanting to go back to something isn’t a good thing...

Book Review - Ready Player One

“You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Kodan Armada.”

The perfect score on Pac-Man is 3333360

There’s a way to get infinite lives on Tempest...

Does any of this this mean anything to you?

If not, this book might not be quite as good for you as it was for me...

I imagine it’s a difficult thing to write a book with a teenage protagonist and aim the book at those in the forty to fifty age range, but in Ready Player One, Ernest Cline has done exactly that.  The book centres around the idea that the whole world is jacked in and spends most of its time in a virtual world called The Oasis, rather than actually living in the real world.  One day, James Halliday, the creator of the Oasis dies and with his death, calls into play the greatest competition in the world.

Those who solve his riddle and find the key will inherit the entire Oasis...

It’s the equivalent of Zuckerberg, Gates, Jobs, and Obama all handing over their power to the person who solves the riddle, and Wade Watts, a young man who grew up in the Oasis, wants to solve that Riddle...

The story is set in 2044, and at the beginning of the story, Wade is in his late Teens but he’s spent a long time studying games and the history of games, playing on old games and generally hanging out in the Oasis.  When the competition is announced, Wade manages to piece together the clues before anyone else does to get a headstart, and the story spirals from there.  He gathers together a party of other like minded adventurers, all different races and creeds, all drawn from the ranks of the Oasis users he knows and trusts and they battle against the combined ranks of the Sixers, a corporation who are trying to get the power for themselves and have far more resources than the kids.

There’s a lot of references to things that occurred around the time of my childhood, Xur and the Kodan armada are the bad guys in the film The Last Starfighter, a film I greatly enjoyed when I was a kid, but not one that stood the test of time well.  References to other films like Wargames and original D&D Modules like The Tomb of Horrors were similarly well received and it was easy to draw some sort of kinship with the author as a person who liked similar things to me, which in turn made it easier to like the main character as they came up with the same things. 

The story needs suspension of disbelief on a number of levels. The information needed to win the various challenges isn’t hidden, and if a single person was up against a powerful corporation, it’s a sure bet that that corporation would hire a number of geeks to give up the answers.  But that said, it’s an enjoyable run, Wade, Art3mis, Aech and the others are likeable characters and they often act like kids, rather than being utterly focussed on the win, they take time out to do other things and they’re very human in their outlook.

If you’re a geek and you remember the 80’s well, this book will be a pleasant run down memory lane with a reasonable story to boot.  If you’re neither of the above, you may still like the book, but it won’t have the resonance that it did for me.

Big B******* Walking club - Night time Edition

And so I went a walking again, but this time alone, and at night...

Which of course may be not the brightest (no pun intended) thing to do, so I took a high power torch with me at the same time, and restricted the walk to roads where there was some semblance of light.

What I found was

The camera doesn't focus in the dark

And when it does, all you see are the street lights

And if you go off road

The torch doesn't help that much.

So this'll be the last time that I document the night walks unless something truly spectacular comes up or I get night vision lenses and to be fair, wandering around at night with night vision goggles on sets the wrong precedent for bored barnsley police with no sense of humour, so....

Big B******* Walking club - The next step...

Officially we seem to have run out of places to walk to within the confines of Barnsley, so we’re now starting to get creative with the walks that we’re doing.  Given that there’s two of us, and that we’ve got two cars, one option that we’ve been experimenting with these last two weeks, is the idea that we can drive to a place in one car, walk all the way back to the house, and then use the other car to go get the first car without having to walk all the way back...

Thereby circumventing the need for having a circular route...

There may come a time when we will walk so far that all routes are circular...

So we started at Newmillerdam, with a route that winds 6.5 miles back to my front door, and on the way, we discovered that there are prebuilt tents all over Newmiller, all you need is a sheet...

Nearly sunset is the best time to walk

It’s not so far down if you walk another mile...

Yes, this mile...

Bridges never stop being awesome...

Ever...

Ever...

Ever...

Ever...

Ever...

A Species of flower no one could identify...

We know from bitter experience that this bush hurts if you try and get through it...

See those lights?  That’s where we started...

The best of sunsets...

Some looney (that’d be lee) wanted to do a big hill at the end of the walk...

And I’ve never understood the end of mad max three so much as that point at the top of the hill, when I looked down to see the lights in my study on.

"Cause we knows there come a night, when they sees the distant light, and they'll be comin' home."