So everybody’s excited about Diablo 3. My excitement is, however, tempered by the fact that I fell off the PC upgrade race about 5 years ago (it’s still good enough for DotA). Thus, since my head is on a little straighter than other fans of the game, I can clearly see that announcing Diablo 3 is a clever way for Blizzard to delay production of Starcraft 2 until 2014.
2014 is going to be a great year for gaming: Duke Nukem Forever, SC2 and Diablo 3!
Tickets please. All aboard. Get it on. Ok now thats out of the way, lets start with todays board game. Ticket to Ride Europe. One of the many in the Ticket to Ride series published by Days of Wonder. So the game is about trains. Actually its about connecting cities with your railways before your opponents cut you off. But it uses little plastic trains to do it. Ok they are actually train carriages but you get the picture. And they make clinky noises if you mash them all together.
Back to the board game. Each player gets 4 “tickets”cards. Each ticket describes which cities they need to link together and how many points the player would receive if successful. The “tickets” are kept secret until end of the game so one does not really know which players have reached their goals (though if you can read people it is a bit obvious. Poker faces people!). The catch with the tickets is that if one fails to complete them, the points on the ticket are deducted from the players score.
A small aside: the title “Zug um Zug” comes from the german verion of Ticket to Ride. I am told it means something like “train around train” or “move by train” though I can’t be sure, since my german is non-existant. But it sounds fun, doesn’t it? Zug um zug um zug um….
But, I hear you ask (coz I hear voices), how does one put down the clinky train carriages? Coloured cards is the answer. Collect enough cards of the same colour and use those to place the plastics. Players take two cards for their turn. There are five revealed cards to choose from or one could just blindly draw from the deck. Some connections require a specific colour and the amount required is simply the number of rectangles that make up the connection. And there are points involved. The longer the connection, the more points one gets. To make things easier, there are joker cards (called locomotives) that are any and all colours. If a revealed locomotive is taken, the player’s turn ends. (The player gains one instead of the usual two cards.)
(tablecloth, lighter and ashtray not included)
Ticket to ride Europe also includes Tunnels and Stations. Tunnels could cost a player more than the indicated number of rectangles. (Three cards are revealed off the top of the coloured card deck and for each colour (and locomotives) that matches the colour one used to claim the tunnel, one extra of that colour must be paid. Its easier to do than explain.)
Stations: Each player starts with three. The stations can be used to claim a city (i.e. one station per city). A player can now use one of his opponents connections with an end at that city as if it were his own. But only for claiming tickets. As a bonus though, for each unused station a player gets some points at the end of the game.
All in all a fun little board game. I mean big. The board is big. And the scoring around the outside of the board seems like a good idea but is impractical with drooping sleeves and awkward elbows. Otherwise a solid game which can be played by the whole family.
Until next time: Be a better railroad tycoon.
Alhambra, palace and fortress of Moorish monarchs. Alhambra, the board game in which one can compete with friends to build the best palace and fortress. Alhambra… (If you are wondering where you can buy a moorish palace, try elsewhere.) Lets get to it then.
The game at is core is simple: grab money then grab palace pieces and put them in your palace grounds. Here’s the rub: Everyone else is also grabbing money and palace pieces (tiles). And once one has a palace piece, placing it is a problem since the walls (those horrible big black borders) almost always get in the way. But let’s start from the beginning.
Players start with a fist full of money of which there are four currencies. These four currencies correspond to four positions on the market board. Each palace piece has a cost and the cost must be payed in the correct currency. This can be confusing as there are both blue and green palace pieces and blue and green currencies. It is not fun finding you have collected green money for a green piece that is on the orange currency space in the market. (How hard is it to use different colours? Light blue and light green is still blue and green.)
The market people are very nice. If you give them exact monies, they give you an extra turn. So one can buy up to 4 palace pieces and grab some money before another player has a chance to go. The money and market is refreshed only at the end of each players turn.
Once you have those palace pieces they got to go into your palace. but beware the walls. Each piece has a specific orientation (they know which way is up and they are all straight). This is very important for wall placement but basically the walls belong on the outside of the palace or against other walls.
So how does one win? The one with the most points. How does one get points? Players only get points three times in the entire game. There are two special score cards shuffled in with the money and one final scoring when the palace pieces run out. The one with the most of each palace piece colour gets points (while runner ups get decreasing number of points) and each player also gets points for their longest wall on the outside of their palace.
There it is. A strangely simple yet surprisingly fun game. I had my doubts the first time I heard of this game since it does fall under the “older” game category. Each player building their own palace? That sounds silly. But this is a game of buying the right pieces for both placement and colour. Waiting until one has exact monies for more extra turns is not always an option as some pieces one simply must have (for example, to get the monopoly on one colour). And opponents grabbing your pieces is always a problem.
Until next time: Build a beautiful palace in the sky…
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See here for the last of a series of ’see here’ posts about redesigning the DnD 3.5 Monk class into something more awesome. Based on the last post, you can see that I was having a bit of trouble trying to make the class feel 3.5 and not like either a ‘3.75′ Tome of Battle or 4th Edition class. I want the class to be customizable and generic enough so that you can build the martial artist you want, but still feel monkish.
This is what I’m thinking of the moment:
Just as there are two types of rangers in 3.5, why can’t there be two or more types of monks? This is already sort of catered for in 3.5 (monk bonus feat selection), but I think the idea needs more fleshing out. Example: At level two a monk picks between grappling, unarmed strikes and weapon specialist. A grappling monk gets x, an unarmed strikes monk gets y and a weapon specialist monk gets z. Then at level 6, a grappling monk gets a, an unarmed strikes monk gets b and weapon specialist monk gets c. It doesn’t necessarily have to follow the ranger progression and it doesn’t necessarily need to be feat based.
Also, just as a rogue (arguably) has unique uses for the skill disable device and the ranger for the skill survival (thanks to the bonus track feat), I was thinking that monk should perhaps have unique uses for some of the other skills, giving her more in-combat and out-of-combat options. Example: A monk with x ranks in heal can make a heal check (DC y) as part of an attack roll. If the heal check succeeds, the attack also does z in addition/instead of normal damage. At monk level b, a monk can always take 10 on a heal check. Sense motive and other wisdom based skills may be used like this.
I think that this may lead to a more 3.5-feeling class, yet still offer the flexibility to reward creative players with interesting build ideas.
And yes, I did watch Kung Fu Panda over the weekend and it was indeed awesome.
i’m finding myself curious as to why all the attempts at recreation or remaking of the classes of dnd focus on either combat or avoiding traps and monsters….in a game that is all about the role-playing shouldn’t some attempt be made at adding or enhance aspects of the various classes for more role-playing, that isn’t combat focused? i’m not saying skip the fighting, i enjoy a good hack and slash as much as the next person, but also remember that the characters we build are people not just fighting machines……therefore it stands to reason that the skills and abilities they pick up, that appear to be good just for a fight, manifest themselves in other situations as well……the way i look at it, one wouldn’t need to really add anything, but just increase the scope of use.
in a recent comment i’ve highlighted the question of chat-based DnD (or other RPGing); which almost naturally led to a discussion between me and J regarding a dice-less RPG system. i have something in mind, and will describe it in more detail once i have all the rules down pat.
for now suffice it to say that it is, in essence, a D20-OSG a la DnD, but without the D20 (or d4, d6, .., d12, d100).
the basic premise is that players get Action Points (APs) for each day, and Combat Points (CPs) per round of combat. any action does not necessarily require spending of AP/CPs, but doing so helps increase the odds, efficacy, safety, etc of the action.
for example, searching a door for traps costs APs. depending on the Threshold (TH) of the trap more points need to be spent to find it (and players do not know in advance how many a given trap needs, or even if there is a trap). however, to facilitate the process – a “thief” class character would likely have the “Find Trap” feat and automatically gets “+2″ for free for any such action. thus the thief would be able to search for mundane and common traps without spending any additional APs. however, the thief may chose to spend additional APs on a trap search check if she feels that the trap TH exceeds her mundane check.
in combat, for example, armor might automatically lend “+2″ CPs for free for the purpose of defense.
combat as a whole is a secret bidding war: an attacker secretly bids how many CPs are invested into an attack, while the target secretly allocates CPs from its pool to defend. then afterwards the totals are revealed and the combat turn resolved as appropriate. since CPs are a limited resource, it is important that each player/monster carefully plan its CP allocations. it is possible to “move” in combat without spending CPs, but doing so is more risky than paying CPs (due to Attacks of Opportunity).
to summarise: APs (CPs) are your personal prayer to destiny.
i’ll have a more detailed explanation (or rather actual set of rules) up at some point
- trashy
Interestingly enough, Cthulhu brings the most search engine traffic to this blog. Obviously, Cthulhu is everybody’s favourite Great Old One. Crunching tenletter’s numbers reminded me of a d20 Call of Cthulhu session I had run several years previously…
The setting was simple: The players were traveling, some by bus and others by private transport, to their new lives in the quaint little town of Arkham. However, it had been a particularly vile winter and their route was blocked by heavy snowfalls. The travelers were thus forced to spend the night at a small roadside motel and gas station. There they got to interact with the live-in staff of the motel and the other guests. It wasn’t long until most of the people at the motel went to bed. Sometime close to midnight, the players were awoken by a loud scream – a murder had taken place at the motel!
The session was a lot of fun, with the players piecing together the clues in an attempt to uncover the murderer… and, as in all Call of Cthulhu games, the players went a little dotty and the session ended with them blowing the fuel tanks of the gas station and escaping into the night.
I believe that the villain in this session was the key in making the session fun and memorable (for me at least). I designed the villain using my old psychopathology textbook from 2nd year psychology classes. The villain was a ‘reformed’ serial rapist-murderer and was spending out the rest of his days half-comatose and bound to a wheelchair in one of the staff rooms of the motel. Not much of a villain, right? Wait, here comes the interesting part: the villain had a rather special case of multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder. His primary personality didn’t really commit any of the crimes he was convicted for, but rather one of his other personalities. The treatment he received for his disorder at Arkham Asylum led him to his current pitiful state, but also gave him something else…
His different personalities were able to manifest themselves in the real world. In fact, most of the NPCs in the session were just manifestations. The only NPCs that weren’t part of the villain were the ones that were murdered in their beds. Some personalities would help the players and others were indifferent and a few were particularly antagonistic. At first, the players thought that the NPCs were just ordinary people, but as they began to realise things, that’s when I got to call for the sanity checks. One of the personalities was a young girl of about 5. She was shy, but friendly. Another personality was the older brother (mid-teens) of the girl. The older brother personality would physically, sexually and emotionally abuse the younger sister personality. When the players discovered the abuse, they were outraged. When the players found out that they weren’t real people, but different reflections of the same person, they were wtf?
Pleasant dreams.
-j
