Category Archives: dice masters

dice masters

New Arrivals New Arrivals – mid Feb 15

dice masters, lego minifigs, new arrivals, star realms

I'm starting this new arrivals post with Lego minifigs. I'm still awaiting for some parts to arrive from France, but in the meantime I managed to get a Lone Ranger minifig and also the Lego City Polar Accessory Kit. I got this mainly for its accessories. I wanted a tent, and the stove, the mugs and axes are a bonus. But there is also what looks like a lolly which is a little hand trowel. These accessories will help me in my backpacking scene I will be creating.

Next in is some Dicemasters stuff. Top photo shows the three cards from the Days of Future Past OP kit. I had bought the first OP kit as well, however that seems to have been lost by the courier, and I got a refund. So now need to source another copy of that.

The bottom half shows off the final nine cards that I needed to complete the Avengers vs X-Men Dicemasters. So I'm happy about that. My set does not include the alt art cards, that's a silly root for me to take as the Tsarina alt art card is going for silly money.
Next month get the final cards to complete the Uncanny X-Men set.
Finally on the Dicemasters front the Yu-gi-oh! Starter set also arrived. I think I need nineteen cards to finish off this set after getting the starter and a gravity feed. So that isn't bad. The cards are either rare or ultra rare.
Also arriving are the cards from the two tournament kits that Star Realms had last Summer. Star Realms is one of my favourite games at the moment. Obviously there are spares which I'll be giving away. I'm going to need to get another base game. Then I can have a copy of the base game to teach new players with, and a copy of the game with the expansions added to play with experienced players. I still need to find a copy of the Gambit expansion, and I haven't seen anyone advertising the storage box yet.

Finally I have for some reason two copies of the Blackmailer promo card for Cash 'n Guns 2. Could of sworn I only clicked it once! And also with that came the Kickstarter Deluxe Content for Tiny Epic Kingdoms. This adds three new factions and the exploration expansion.

So that's the new arrivals wrapped up. Some cool stuff I think. I'm going to leave this post with something I shared on Instagram/Twitter/Facebook yesterday, I hope you like it.

 

DiceMasters Yu-Gi-Uh Initials Cards I Like

dice masters

As the earlier new arrivals post showed I happened to open a gravity feed for the latest set of Dicemasters Yu-Gi-Uh. I've had a couple of looks through the cards I pulled and thought I'd put up the ones that grabbed my attention so far, ones I like the look of.

This Jinzo card seems to be getting some heat (my friend and Dicemasters online rival Scott dislikes this card).

The main problem now in a mixed game, three sets, only eight cards. And this only gets worse through out the year when the other new sets come out, currently four at the moment.

 

New Arrivals new arrivals (5/2)

dice masters, ghost stories, lego minifigs, new arrivals

Going to start off this post with some lego stuff and then finish with a game related bit.

First up some minifig bits that will make be parts in making my three planned figures. Plus the little contamination container for the scientists. There are still some more bits to come, more legs torsos, and accessories. But they are coming from a different company. I am really happy with the anonymous head to use for the hacktivist.

I had a little issue getting this next item. Ordered at the same time as the other bits from Amazon, but sent separately via Royal Mail. Didn’t arrive next day ( thanks Amazon for the extra month of Prime membership, pays to complain ). The book still hadn’t arrived yesterday so back on to Amazon who resent the book! Which turned up today.
Finally I found a site (Belgian!) that sells promos for the game Ghost Stories, ok truth be told I wasn’t actively looking for promos for this game I stumbled upon it, as you do. So as part of a small promo splurge this month I ordered the promos they had. The Ma-Cho promo is for an expansion I don’t have (yet) but thought I’d get now while I could. The others add more cards/tiles to the base game. I’ll be looking at these in more indepth at a later date.

So there you have it today’s new arrivals. More still to come, but I’m not going to spoil the surprise as to what they are. Knowing what was released last week I think some of you may be able to make an educated guess to one or two of the items.

UPDATE

Well lunchtime saw another delivery. The Yu-Gi-Uh Dice Masters Gravity Feed arrived. Ninety packs, one hundred and eighty cards and dice. Two rare cards ^__^ So as you can guess I’ve had a funtime opening all those packs.

 

 

A Look At The Official Diceamasters Dice Bag

dice masters, review, sketchnote review, tabletop

 

I think it's pretty clear to regular readers how I feel about Dicemasters. For those still wondering I LOVE it. There are some official accessories for the game, such as setup boxes, card storage boxes, playmats and the subject of this post a dice bag. Below you will find an attempt at reviewing the bag using sketchnotes!

I'm still learning to sketchnote, and my “artistic” abilities are a bit basic but with practice I will improve. So bare with me as I find my voice and style.

 

My Webcam SetUp

dice masters, online play, tech, webcam

I play Marvel DiceMasters, I love the game. I love the theme (Marvel superheroes!), the collectable aspect, the rolling of dice, the tactics/team building, basically everything about it. It's as if they specifically targeted the game at me (although FFG seem to have done that also with the X-Wing miniatures game too, am I that easy to hook in?)

Now my local gamestore (The Rift) runs organised play ( competitions with prizes) and has a few players there. However being 26 miles away not always the easiest most convient to get to or stay long enough to play lots of games ( parking also costs in Peterborough – or as I call it a shopping tax to push shoppers to out of town stores).

So what is so marvelous about DiceMasters is that it works so well as an online game using a webcam! So I now play regular games online with folks in the US and England ( I know there are one or two down under who are interested in playing but not played them yet).

Those playing use a variety of setups, using inbuilt webcams, mobiles/tablets, external webcams. Every now and then we get asked about what setups we use, and software. So I thought I'd write this post to answer that question from my side.

As the photo above shows my setup is the following:

Hardware

Software

The desk lamp gives me that nice overhead shot without getting in the way of playing. Basically when I got the lamp I stripped it down to what you see in the photo. Removed the shade and power cable, they aren't needed. I used the hitech solution of elastic bands to hold the webcam in place.

However the image from the camera is up side down and flipped. So that people can see the play area as I see it, ie it looks correct I needed to mirror and rotate the image from the webcam. Sadly the Logitech driver software doesn't allow you to do this. Luckily I found a solution in an app called iglasses. It's an amazing little app, which allows me to flip and mirror the image, zoom, set focus, even add filters. It's not free, but not that expensive and works great.

We use Google Hangouts to play the games. So people need a Google+ account to play. Nice thing is about Google Hangouts there can be multiple people on the hangout. But from time to time we use the on air side which broadcasts the session live, and then saves it on YouTube. So it allows us to put games up for others to watch at their own leisure.

When using Google Hangouts with this setup, instead of accessing the webcam directly you tell it to use the iglasses app as the webcam. Which then means you are getting the correct image being used in the hangout.

I hope people find this post useful in setting up their own webcam and join us soon in an online game of DiceMasters. There is a really friendly community of online gamers got DiceMasters and new comers are always welcome.

Epilogue

My next steps with this setup is to get picture in picture working using the built in webcam, and to make use of lower thirds. The lower thirds is apparently easy to do using hangouts. So will probably be the first to be done.