Zombies!!!

Three other families from my home area vacationed in the same spot we did earlier this month. One couple came with us to the game store, and they and another couple settled down with us the night before their departure for a little gaming fun.

The group settled on the recent acquisition Zombies!!!

Overall, I liked the game pretty well. I enjoy almost any board game that supports a shifting setting (in this case thanks to tiles, the playing of which is part of each player’s turn). I also admire the mechanics that support the creeping dread of slow-moving zombies while the more agile and stronger player characters can nonetheless only hope to survive by outrunning the endless stream of undead.

I say “endless,” but we quickly ran out of zombie figures and had to fake them with other counters. For a six-player gam, the basic box just doesn’t have enough pieces.

Unfortunately, I found some aspects of the game actively interfered with the fun:

• With six players at least, you had to wait a long time before you could do anything. This in itself isn’t a big deal, but if you were in a disadvantageous position—far from the helipad, perhaps, or simply far from the action—this could turn into a fifteen- or twenty-minute wait while you struggled to get back into position to do anything.
• Because of the long delay and lack of progress when you couldn’t move, it rarely seemed worthwhile to go pick up items (they show up on cards you draw, but you have to move to certain locations to actually “get” them) unless you happened to be right by the target location already.
• Having a skateboard (which increases your speed) is extraordinarily desireable.
• It’s possible to do such mean things to other players that you can absolutely destroy any hope they have of winning. I understand that, as endgame approaches, desperate measures are called for, but certain cards (such as the one that lets you move a player back to the starting point) effectively kill that player, forcing them into the cycle of sitting and waiting for a chance to do anything at all.
• Dying goes from being a very minor inconvenience near the beginning to a difficult challenge in the middle and a cause to completely give up in the end.
• The rules are ambiguous enough on a couple of key points that another edit after a playtest was in order.

Ultimately, I’m enthusiastic about the game, but I do strongly feel it needs some tweaks to make it truly fun. I’ll be poking around the web for rules variants before we tackle it again.
A note about how the game played for the less gamey participants: The owner of the game (let’s call him Tom) isn’t the best rules reader and assumed the game would be quick to play. Instead, it turned into three or four hours of undead creeping. The less geeky couple (Mark and Karen) seemed to have a good time. Mark’s a pretty hardcore WoW player, but he seemed a bit put off by the realization of fantastic themes on a game board.

Karen avoids WoW (and I’ve heard grumbles from her that sound decidedly like she’s starting to resent Mark’s playing), but she likes genre fiction well enough. And she’s so socially adept that she didn’t give off any obvious hint that she was bored. I got a vibe, though, that made me think she’d have been happier with another game or activity.

In other words, Zombies!!! is a reasonably fun game, with the potential for even greater fun. But it’s not one to try to bring new fans to our hobby!

Add comment August 30th, 2007

Heroes Kingdom, St. Albans, Vermont

No, I don’t know why Heroes Kingdom spells its name that way. That didn’t stop us from enjoying the store as a fun spot to visit on our vacation in Vermont. We stayed about half an hour away from St. Albans, and friends staying in a nearby cabin decided to visit the town one evening. They spotted the store, but because it was closed couldn’t investigate.

So we all went together a couple of days later.

Truth to tell, I haven’t spent much time in game stores, despite my passion for the hobby. Online prices always beat brick-and-mortar prices, and online information is good enough that it hasn’t seemed worth the time to me. But now, even though I won’t be back to St. Albans for a year, thanks to this store I have resolved to make time. We would up spending a total of about two hours there.

The RPG section leaves a lot to be desired. It sits on two smallish shelves and features about 95% D20 books. The board game section is small, too, but it had some good offerings. Descent tempted me, but I resisted for now. My friend grabbed Zombies!!!

I picked up both the board game–inspired Settlers of Catan Card Game and Deluxe Illuminati (which has nothing to do with board games).

The store focuses on collectible games. Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures and DC HeroClix figures (and many other collectible figure games) lined the shelves. Magic The Gathering and other collectible card games were also well represented. My other friend managed to snag some booster packs of WizKid’s Pirates at Ocean’s Edge, her passion and something she’s had trouble finding lately.

Other shelves were laden with action figures (which mean nothing to me) and Warhammer materials.

Best of all, though, my two-year-old had a grand time. The back room, normally used for gaming, had a stash of pieces of various board games, including some oriented toward kids. She played with an odd collection of a bus, a dragon, and some other bits and pieces while we grownups looked around.

My daughter has already developed something of a dice fetish, so she and I spent some time looking at the broad display of colorful polyhedrons. After we left, I kept wishing I’d gone ahead and bought some of the unusual barrel dice they had for sale. As luck would have it, we justified a return trip a couple of days later, and I did snag a set. Since I mostly play GURPS, I don’t have a great justification for the purchase, but they’re fun, interesting, and different.

And they’re tempting me to go out and buy Serenity Role Playing Game (Serenity), partly because I love the setting, partly because I’d like to try the game, and partly because it will give me an excuse to bring out these funky fellows.

Add comment August 29th, 2007

Potion Miscibility: Cask-strength Laphroaig

My brother-in-law introduced me to scotch, and to this most strongly flavored variety, all at once. Pronounced something like “la-froyg,” this single-malt Scotch whisky is decidedly an acquired taste. I happened to acquire it on my first sip, but most people have an adversarial relationship with it for a while.

If you come around and learn to like it, though, you’ll probably put it near the top of your Scotch list.

My brother-in-law says drinking Laphroaig is “like drinking a campfire . . . in a good way.” It does taste like you’re pouring ash, cinders, flame, and smoke onto your tongue. But it also tastes as if you mixed all that with honey.

Several varieties of Laphroaig are available for sale in the United States, but I’ve only ever gotten bottles of my preferred kind, cask-strength, from my brother-in-law. He picks it up in duty-free airport shops or asks his coworkers to grab a few bottles when they travel.

The booklet that comes with the cask-strength bottles recommends adding water. In my experiments, I’ve added as little as one drop or as much water as the booklet recommends, diluting one part whisky with three parts water.

It’s always good, but I’m getting more and more partial to the more dilute mixes. At the 1:3 ratio, Laphroaig seems to become a Scotchy wine. Because your taste buds don’t get deadened by the strong alcohol and flavors, you can appreciate every nuance. The color rarefies to a paler amber. I can imagine Tolkein’s elves sipping a wine something like this. And perhaps some more exotic race that favors some fanciful acorn wine would find this pleasing.

I can’t see putting ice in this, ever. And using Laphroaig for a scotch-and-soda would be an abomination.

I do not drink alcohol to get drunk or even for its mild depressant effects when I’m stressed out. I grew up in a family that taught me mental exercises to deal with negative emotions, and those exercises almost never fail me. I do find the process of making a perfect martini very meditative (in fact, I enjoy the process of making one almost more than of drinking it), and I won’t pretend that I don’t sometimes enjoy the effects of strong drink.

But such effects aren’t the reason I drink, and if I ever find myself depending on a chemical such as ethyl alcohol to deal with life troubles, I’ll know I have a problem.

But when I played the “Robbing the Cradle” level of Thief III: Deadly Shadows in a darkened room with a top-notch set of headphones, I had to take a break for a couple of fingers of Laphroaig cask-strength. I credit that one computer game experience with showing me just how immersive a good game can be and, for the first time ever, teaching me to love the horror genre.

I was terrified. I actually trembled as I explored the abandoned insane asylum. And almost all the fear came from the sound itself. The terror of not knowing what was going on, wondering who or what made that noise, wondering why the place was so vast, so empty. And finally uncovering the source of all the madness, even as I became so trapped in it that I just couldn’t escape.

Thief III may have been the worst of the three magnificent Thief games (probably because they bowed to the Xbox restrictions), but it was still a damn good game. And “Robbing the Cradle” is a big part of the reason why.

Even now, sitting here in a brightly lit office, remembering the experience makes me wish I could uncork a bottle of Laphroaig in a warm room with a merry fire and good friends. We’d laugh. We’d sing. And then, as the fire died down, maybe one of us would tell the tale of the Cradle again . . .

Add comment August 24th, 2007

Defining RPGs: T Bone’s take

I wanted to put up a link to send readers to T Bone’s nifty definition of roleplaying games. As he observes, many people offer definitions. T Bone’s is new and different: the third way to enjoy a story.

I like the definition because it’s story oriented—which mirrors my own gaming orientation and strikes at what I think is the differentiator for roleplaying games. Also, it’s pithy and cleverly worded.

Of course, it’s not a perfect definition. You can’t have a perfect definition of something that keeps redefining itself, morphing and changing, and blurring its own boundaries. But T Bone’s definition makes an excellent and usable contribution to the conversation.

T Bone is talking specifically about tabletop RPGs, not CRPGs. No CRPG has come close to caputring what T Bone defines, making the definition even more useful. Innovators wishing to bring new dimensions to computer games should consider how they can bring the shared storytelling experience to their games. The stabs that have been taken so far don’t come close to capturing those vivid, memorable moments that have emerged around kitchen tables.

(And no, I don’t think D&D 4th edition’s computer gametable will get the job done, although it and its many competitors are a step.)

2 comments August 21st, 2007

Back from vacation

I didn’t manage to get a single post up while I was on vacation, in part because I wound up having to put in about six full days of day-job work while I was there. But while away, I did play a lot of great games, not one of them a computer or video game. I’ll be blogging about them and other game-related vacation things over the next few days, while I dig through my hundreds of e-mails and RSS feeds to see what I’ve been missing.

Add comment August 20th, 2007

Vacation!

I’ll be away till mid-August. During that time, I’m sure I’ll put up a few posts (and I certainly won’t miss my Friday potion miscibility articles), but not as often as I do most of the time.

I expect my vacation to be filled with gaming, though, so I’ll have lots to write about when I return.

1 comment August 4th, 2007

Search for Bourne—Wrap-up

Well, the Ultimate Search for Bourne does seem to be well an truly over despite the ambiguous ending. The countdown clock and “415″ don’t seem to have meant anything significant. The web page now just redirects to the official site for the movie.

Here’s my final take on the game: I thought it was pretty lame. I know it’s meant to be a promotion, so it has to have a low enough bar for entry that anyone can play and have fun. So although I personally didn’t like how easy it was, I understand that decision.

But I thought that, especially as the days progressed, it felt less and less like I spy game. I had originally speculated that an alternate reality game (ARG) like this could be the best medium for a spy game.  My first day or two of play, the challenges felt fun. I felt a tiny bit like I was engaging in Internet-based espionage.

That feeling faded by the third day. Perhaps the buggy interface is partly to blame. I’m certain the fact that the challenges felt exactly the same from one to another contributed.

By the end, even with a final challenge that was slightly more interesting, the cloak-and-dagger delight was gone.

I still think an MMORPG with a strong Internet-based ARG element could be phenomenally fun. But that ARG element would have to be a lot better than the Ultimate Search for Bourne.

The game may not have been fun, but it was a “success.” It kept many people busy thinking about the movie, even as they complained about the game’s problems. And despite my disappoiintment with the game, I’ll be seeing the movie. The bonus video at the end was a lame “reward,” but definitely a fun clip.

So, anyone have any other thoughts? Or pointers to any other, better ARGs worth investigating?

Thanks to all the readers and commenters, by the way. You made the game more fun than it ever would have been on your own.

7 comments August 4th, 2007

The new WoW expansion: Wrath of the Lich King

I very seriously doubt I’ll still be playing WoW when the Warth of the Lich King expansion (newly announced by Blizzard) is released, but here’s a quick list of the interesting features:

• The first new WoW class since release: the Death Knight (a hero class; you can create a character with this class, starting at level sixty-something or higher, only after completing a quest with some other high-level character)
• An increase of the level cap to 80 and the profession cap to 450
• The content of Northrend, open to characters 68 and above
• Siege weapons in an outdoor PVP zone

Those, at least, are the features that are interesting to me. I don’t mind the increase in level and profession caps, as getting those up is supremely easy and presumably means there are new and interesting abilities to play with past 70 (and 375).

I like to content, so this ten-zone continent of Northrend may be fun. I didn’t wind up liking the Outlands all that much, apart from Nagrand. They felt too alien and strange to me, too different from what already existed in the game.

As for the Death Knight class, well, new classes are fun. I enjoy learning the mechanics of each class. But Blizzard has always been committed to making the classes truly unique. To do that with the Death Knight, they’ve had to invent what sounds like a fairly bizarre mechanic, with a new sword bar that has runes etched on it that get spent but can be re-etched after a certain time expires. Different, yes, but weird!

Also, I’ve never liked the mechanic of creating a completely new character simply because you’ve achieved something with a different character. It spoils my already very tenuous willing suspension of disbelief, underscoring the gamey side of things instead of the simulation, immersion, and roleplaying that I really like.

But more interesting options for PVP? That I can get behind 100%.

For more details, one great write up is at 1up. Check out their detailed write up here. Or just watch WoWinsider, where there will no doubt be hundreds of posts on the topic of the new expansion over the next few months.

Add comment August 3rd, 2007

Potion Miscibility: The Mai Tai, Part 2—The Exotic Ingredient

This post continues my discussion of the great cocktail the Mai Tai, which began here.

The Mai Tai exemplifies something that can invigorate tabletop roleplaying campaigns with a sense of verisimilitude: namely, the fact that a single splash of an exotic ingredient can transform something ordinary into an extraordinary delight. Rum punch is nice, but no amount of paper umbrellas and miniature pineapples makes them miraculous. A simple splash of orgeat, though, and you can imagine you’re sitting on a beach in Tahiti.

In any campaign, throw in an ingredient that’s unexpected and rare (or at least apparently rare). Pages have been written on interesting hybrid settings, but this is something simpler. Instead of trying to install cyberpunk hardware in a high fantasy setting (which could be damn fun!), just add a little flavor of technology. Many settings now do this, like including mechanical “life forms”—that is, robots—to a setting loaded with magic. Likewise, the world in the marvelous The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman takes a pretty standard Victorian setting and throws in “daemons”—externalized animae that everyone has—and creates a vivid and fascinating new world.

When inventing your own campaign, you can do the same. Instead of melding two genres, pick a familiar one and add a foreign element. One of the best ways to do this is set the campaign in your own home town, but add something strange. This not only assists in campaign creation (you already have pre-made maps, NPCs, and a good estimate of how to get around), it also adds a certain eeriness as players encounter mysterious things on familiar streets.

You could make your own town the locus for a vast conspiracy, with neighbors disappearing and sightings of men in black at the street corners. Horror works well, too. If classic black witchcraft is real and attracts the attention of dark powers, then when a neighbor starts dabbling, the PCs may have their hands full fighting off monsters from beyond—in the players own back yards!

And now, at last, the recipe.

Mai Tai

Ingredients

• 1 oz. light rum
• 1 oz. dark rum
• ½ oz. triple sec
• ½ oz. orgeat syrup
• ¼ oz. fresh lime juice

Instructions

Shake all ingredients in a shaker half full of ice. Pour over shaved or crushed ice in a cocktail glass. (I like to use a brandy snifter.)

Garnish with your choice of maraschino cherries, baby pineapples or pineapple slices, and orange slices. If you have one handy, make sure you use a paper umbrella to perfect the drink.

Add comment August 3rd, 2007

Potion Miscibility: The Mai Tai, Part 1—Comments on History and Culture

The great Mai Tai, perhaps the froofiest of froofy drinks. I have so much to say on this that I’ll be breaking the post in two. The first contains a discussion of the Mai Tai itself. Later today, I’ll post my thoughts on how it relates to gaming, along with my own favorite recipe, of course.

There are many competing recipes, and this seems to have been true since the drink was first mixed! In the 1930s and 1940s, the Tiki-culture fad spread like wildfire across America, but the spark was lit in California. Two innovative restaurateurs—Trader Vic and Don the Beachcomber—catering to American’s hunger for a taste of the exotic, opened “Polynesian style” restaurants to dish out tropical drinks and flavorful recipes.

Perhaps the proud edifices of steel and concrete scraping the skies in America’s largest cities, a testament to the country’s emerging preeminence as an emerging superpower, nonetheless created a longing in its citizens for a simpler life. Lounging on tropical beaches with almost nothing to do, and perhaps with almost no clothes, must have seemed wonderful to the hard-working, driven office workers chasing the American dream.

They wouldn’t give up their jobs, of course, but they might pour some of their hard-earned cash into an evening at a restaurant bedecked with palm leaves, reed mats, and strong-and-fruity cocktails. The Tiki-culture restaurants, which actually served mostly Cantonese food and didn’t have all that much to do with actual Polynesian culture, eventually faded, replaced by Chinese restaurants, some of which actually serve food that people might eat in China.

When I was a child, though, most “Chinese” restaurants still had menus chock full of items such as the “pupu platter” and bars ready to shake up cocktails bedecked with pineapple slices and little paper umbrellas. The foodie community is a bit more sophisticated, today, and more concerned with authenticity. But this sophistication has given birth to a new delight in the campy, borderline absurd styling of such restaurants, and now both the Trader Vic’s and Don the Beachcomber chains are experiencing a strong resurgence.

The founders of both these chains claim to have invented the Mai Tai, and of course their recipes differ. Since the Mai Tai was first served, almost as many recipes for it as there are bars that serve it have come to light. Although they all include rum and fruit juice (and almost all include the cute paper umbrella), some are what I consider merely pleasant rum punch recipes.

A true Mai Tai is very sweet, almost heavy, but nonetheless ethereally delicious. The key to this is the ingredient that distinguishes true Mai Tais from all other rum drinks: the sweet, almond-flavored orgeat syrup. Nowadays, this isn’t hard to come by. Even the ubiquitous Torani sells a version. Don’t make the mistake of buying simple almond-flavored syrup. Delicious though that may be, true orgeat syrup is different and distinct, and essential to a good Mai Tai.

Check back later for my thoughts on how the Mai Tai ties into gaming, as well as my favorite recipe for the cocktail. When the article is up, you’ll be able to find it here.

Add comment August 3rd, 2007