Board
Mostly Geek has a new home
Due to issues with hosting I’ve decided to go cheap and just use the freely hosted version of WordPress over at wordpress.com.
Therefore this blog now lives at: http://mostlygeeknz.wordpress.com/
Please update your links.
Old school adventure games
Do you miss the old days of PC gaming? When Sierra released games like Police Quest, King’s Quest and Space Quest (they obviously knew a good name when they saw it)? Games where you just died, no second chances? Where if you couldn’t work out which desk was yours the game ended?
Well now you can play them again! I just stumbled across Sarien.net where you can play these old games through your browser.
Or if you’re more into reliving the expirence with friends check out the Parsely Games from Momento Mori. A great way to waste half an hour or so.
And remember folks, don’t forget to save!!
Dominion – I finally played this too!
Thanks to the friendly folk at Budget Board Games Singapore, I managed to finally get copy of Dominion a few weeks back. If you’re not a board game person, you’ve probably never heard of it, but it’s been one of the hottest games on the scene for the last few years. Again, wikipedia has all the history but it won the Spiel des Jahres this year (the ‘Oscars’ of board games) which basically makes it this year’s best board game. › Continue reading
Thursday Link Day
I’m going to try to do the links on Thursdays from now on. I’ve got some niiiice ones today!
- Holy crap – Planescape: Torment is getting a re-release! Best CRPG EVER. This will work properly on Vista and Windows 7 apparently so it will work nicely for the new PC… (thanks to the Wertzone – no idea how I missed this on my RPS feed)
- Boing Boing has a piece on using Google Wave as a chat channel for RPGs. I guess, but it won’t replace the table top for me.
- Boardgame News has a great article running down card games and boardgames that have been released using the whole Cthulhu/Lovecraft mythos – great, good, average and bad. I really want to play some Arkham Horror.
- And finally, here’s a report about the Essen Game Fair by a guy from local shop Paradigm Infinitum.
Making Germans Light Up – a Power Grid actual play
With one of my recent gaming group having left for six months, my friend Duncan arriving back in Australia after 4 years and a delayed departure of me and mine for Singapore, we decided to get down and dirty with some games last night. Duncan’s a board game person and so we busted out one of Duncan’s German contraptions: Power Grid. › Continue reading
Boardgames and RPGs
I don’t go to cons or spend much time with gamers I’m not already friends with so I can’t say I’ve noticed this but according to two seperate industry figures boardgames are making major roads into RPG circles.
One’s a throw away comment by designer Ken Hite in a con review:
boardgaming boomed this weekend as it seems to be doing all over.
And the other is a longer, more considered piece by Steve Darlington, known for his work on the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay line, amongst other things:
In short, for what people want out of an RPG – to move through something like a plot, to have a character of their own design, to make meaningful choices about goals and combat, to roll dice and produce random events, to make choices IN character even if they work against what might be best for winning the game…all of these are being met, more and more, in board games.
(as a side note, Steve’s a fan of this blog)
I’m not sure about this myself, but my experience of boardgames is that they are too directed in their story – one of my signle favourite RPG-things is that the GM can’t predict what the hell the players will do. I don’t miss the box set games of the past – big maps annoy me and I don’t need more crap in my life, just good ideas.
Do any of you feel that there’s an increasing convergence between RPGs and board games?