My 2023 UKGE Plans

UKGE

We are fastly approaching that time of year when the UK board gamers migrate to the Birmingham NEC for the UK Games Expo.

Unlike last year where I went for just the day. This year I am going for all three days of the show. It’ll be more like two and a half days as I always leave about midday on the Sunday.

I’m hoping whilst there I’ll get a chance to catch up with one or two friends, and also meet one or two new people that I only know from social media.

Games wise I have nothing I want to buy particularly.

If there are some of the map packs for Cartographers I’ll pick them up. I’m hoping the Star Realms d10 life counters are on a stand. And I might find myself buying the 5e version of the One Ring.

Accommodation was booked a while back, and it looks like the Saturday night there will be a small contingent of Fenland Gamers staying there. So an opportunity to do some gaming there in the evening.

I just need to prebook my NEC parking in the next week (it works out cheaper) and I’m debating whether to buy my UKGE ticket before.

Usually there is no benefit from doing so. The ticket isn’t cheaper, you still have to queue.

If you are going and interested in meeting up or just saying hi. Leave a comment below and we’ll arrange something. Or just stop me on the show floor. I’ll be the one looking like a rather sad Santa.

It’s been a long week for such a short week!

MtG, MtG Deck Building, still alive

It’s been a couple of days since I last posted, and I know how folks hope that the drivel has finally stopped if I haven’t posted for a day or two. And I so like to disappoint.

Even with a bank holiday on Monday, and turning 55 last Sunday. This shorter week has felt so long. Which I think is due to how hectic it is at work at the moment.

But gaming has been happening. Well last night it did with a second session of the Shadowdark rpg. But there will be a post mortem post about that in a day or so.

The cards needed for the Mindcrank and Duskmantle Guildmage combo deck have started to arrive. There were three envelopes waiting for me when I got home yesterday. With more on the way.

This deck is a different build to the one I had a few years back now. That was fun to play. So I’m expecting this to be just as fun.

I like experimenting with different deck archetypes, and I definitely have my favourites. But the experimentation does help in becoming a better MtG player. Even at a casual level. It allows you to assess the opponents deck, make inferences about possible cards, or type of card, and allow you to adjust your tactics based on that information.

For example if I was up against an elf deck or something that has splashed green, I would do my damn best to disrupt that early ramp from those Llanowar elves.

Those two new poison decks from Card Kingdom have given me the urge to revisit my Atraxa Commander deck and look at what new cards I should be considering to add to it. Although playing Atraxa as a Commander does put a pretty big target on the back.

Tuesday I got an email from Chaos Cards saying that they had the A Game of Thrones Mother of Dragons playmat back in stock. Something I had given up hope of ever owning.

Until that email landed in my inbox the price of the playmat was easily over double retail plus a hefty shipping cost on top. Assuming there was one for sale.

So I didn’t even hesitate in clicking the link and ordering one. Nothing like getting something you really wanted for slightly less than rrp and with free postage.

The playmat should be with me next week. With hopefully enough people willing to play the following Saturday.

So that’s my game related stuff this week during a very very hectic week.

Tetriminos keep falling on my head!

gameboy, nintendo, retro gaming, video games

I was hoping to have written this post earlier, particularly on the release day of the movie.

However I made a decision that I wanted to watch the Tetris movie with Nathan. Which was after the release. That plan fell apart when at Nath’s he had no interest in watching the movie.

My first memories of playing Tetris go all the way back to when it was released on the Atari ST in 1987. I remember playing it whilst down in Brighton and it would have been after I finished Dungeon Master on my heavily upgraded Atari 520STFM (I upgraded the internal drive to 1.44MB, the memory was also increased to 1MB).

But the ST wasn’t the only version I played back then. Two or three times my friends and I played it head to head on the arcade version. All I remember is I got my butt kicked every time.

However Tetris really got it’s teeth into me the next time I owned it.

Like millions of others I got a copy of Tetris when they purchased a Nintendo GameBoy. That was the best bit of business Nintendo ever did. For many all the GameBoy was was a portable Tetris player.

Tetris was one of the games I played a lot of on the GameBoy. Before I eventually moved on to the likes of Zelda Links Awakening, Super Mario Land or Donkey Kong, the most lines I completed before dying was over 111 lines.

Probably as iconic as the game itself was its Type A theme music by Hirokazu Tanaka. Even now as I type this post that tune is playing in my head.

How Tetris ended up on the Nintendo systems at the time is what the Tetris movie is all about. At the time I was oblivious to all those happenings.

It wasn’t until I got a cover mounted extract of the classic book on video game history Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World by David Sheff that I became aware of the surrounding events.

So we are looking at over ten years after the events I was finally reading the story of how Nintendo got their hands on the rights to the console version of Tetris.

I think I’ve owned Tetris on every Nintendo handheld I’ve owned.

But we need a board game link here for this blog to.

Funny enough I think it’s had an impact on board games. If only to give designers the Tetrimino. Think Patch Work, Cottage Garden, Blokus.

Blokus has been a game I’ve wanted to try for a long time. But not one of those “I really got to play this” games. More a “it’d be nice to try this sometime” game.

The only thing this game has in common with Tetris though is the use of tetriminos.

I enjoyed the two player version I played. The games were quick, fun, and puzzley. And I wouldn’t mind a copy to play with Nath. Yes that’s how much I like it. Maybe if I see a copy at UKGE at the start of next month I’ll buy it.

The roll and write wing of my collection has a roll and write based on Tetris called Brikks. Sadly it’s a game that still sits in that pile of shame. I need to rectify that. It promises to be the game that most captures the feel of the video game on the tabletop.

The Tetris movie starring Taron Egerton isn’t the first “movie” about the game there have been one or two documentaries. Probably the most famous of which is the Ecstasy of Order about competitive players of the game. Which if I remember correctly (I watched it years ago) was very captivating, and interesting.

Egerton plays Henk Rogers and his performance is very good. As is the rest of the supporting cast of this movie.

This movie is obviously a dramatisation of the events that took place. Much in the vein of The Social Network (which I love) and Micro Men (which I also love). For me this movie also has a lot in common with biopics such as The Buddy Holly Story, The Doors, Walk the Line, and yes Rocketman!

I think it was Mark Kermode who once said it’s all about how these movies manage those magic moments in the subjects story such when The Doors came up with Light My Fire. Tetris the movie has those moments such as when Rogers is first shown the GameBoy and shows Tetris on it to the engineers.

I love the 8-bit retro look for the brief animated cut aways used through out the movie.

This is a great dramatisation. I really like it. It’s entertaining and manages to appeal to none gamers as well. Who knew the story behind Tetris coming to probably the worlds favourite handheld was so full of drama and intrigue?

A must watch.

Tales from the mtg kitchen table

magic, MtG

The two new Battle Decks from CardKingdom arrived.

They both have the infect deal poison mechanic. Which is why I got them.

I just love the whole Battle Deck idea.

They are cheap ($11.99) decks, designed around a theme to be played against each other.

At the price you ain’t getting any expensive cards. These are almost pauper decks!

However I do know one thing. They are damn fun to play.

This morning I thought I’d check out a couple of deck boxes whilst I was waiting for my coffee to brew. And colour me pleasantly surprised when I came across a Battle Deck I’d forgotten all about plus an elf deck.

The battle deck is a blue/black dimir deck that abuses the on enter battlefield mechanic. Memory serves me right it’s a bloody fun deck to play.

I’m not sure of the origin of the elf deck. I don’t think it was a Battle Deck. It might have been a list that I got online and then just ordered the cards for. It’s a fun deck to play either way. Iirc it only had nine basic lands.

I did have a Mindcrank and Duskmantle Guildmage combo deck that I also net decked. But that got stripped for other stuff. It was a cool go infinite mill/damage combo deck. So this morning after finding the other two decks I once more found a deck list for the combo and ordered the cards to build it. Another birthday treat for myself.

I may have to get myself a storage solution for these decks like my gaming pick up and go bag. So I can just grab and go.

Whilst I’m talking MtG we had a bloody cool three player game of Commander last Sunday.

Dave played my Simic Horrors from the Deep Commander deck for both the games we played. Archie (Charlene’s son) played an official pregen Commander deck for both games. Whilst I played my Dinosaur Tribal deck for the first game, and my Elf Tribal deck for the second.

Sadly for Archie he was mana screwed early on for the first game. Which made him an easy target especially when I had Gishath, Sun’s Avatar out. I was building up an impressive battlefield of dinosaurs. Unluckily for me my Horrors from the Deep deck has answers in it. Answers that bounced my dinos back to hand, and allowed Dave to get the win.

Our second game saw my elves doing elf stuff, despite a slow start due to lack of mana or elves that tapped for mana. But once I got off the starting block it quickly became oppressive, tapping for mana and life.

Again my Horrors from the Deep had answers and once again I had a hand full of cards. Twenty seven to be exact. Luckily on my next turn I had an opportunity to get an unlimited hand size so I didn’t need to discard. I was soon back to the very scary looking board state.

Just as I was going to one shot kill Dave and Archie with twelve flying buffed up elves, Dave pulls out another answer to bounce everything back to my hand.

That was the last chance I got before Dave managed to kill me before taking out Archie.

Both fun games. Looking forward to playing Commander again soon.

Why MCDM Will No Longer Get My Money

rant

I know that this rant/post will draw flack from the MCDM/Matt Colville fanboy camp. That’s if they ever read this that is. Let’s face it the likely hood is very low.

However I need to voice my disappointment in MCDM and why I’m adding them to my list of companies I won’t give my hard earned money to.

Let’s jump back to I think it was 2020 when Matt Colville and his MCDM company did a kickstarter for what was basically the follow up to Strongholds and Followers, Kingdoms and Warfare.

Being a fan and interested in possibly adding the this to a campaign if the party ever got to a point where this interested them. I backed it.

Obviously during Kingdoms and Warfare’s development we had the whole pandemic thing going on, shipping costs going through the rough, etc etc.

But despite all that the book got finished and sent off to the printers.

It’s here that things start to go tits up for them.

There was a mistake in the printing of the book. Which initially wasn’t handled very well by the MCDM team. But give them credit where credit is due, they managed to turn things around and have options for a solution that backers could chose from.

I went with the option for the MCDM team to insert the sticker for me and then send the book. I didn’t trust myself to put the sticker in correctly, and I didn’t want to wait for a reprint without the error. I thought I had gone for the best solution for me.

However the delay in the MCDM inserting the sticker and sending the book got longer and longer. So long in fact it was looking like I might as well have waited for the reprint.

While this was all going on MCDM launched a new kickstarter for a new monster book for 5e. This was their priority now.

Then the next issue for MCDM arose. Shipping costs had gone up considerably and they needed time to find a cheaper solution.

Eventually a container was leaving for the EU at the end of January. From there the UK bound books would be shipped by container once more to the UK.

That was the last update from MCDM. There was an email saying that my rewards were going to be shipped soon. That was the end of March. Now at the end of April. Nada.

This kickstarter has been forgotten. Or more that those of us outside of the US seem to have been forgotten. No updates since January. Not acceptable.

So I emailed MCDM and left a comment on the kickstarter page. They have lost a customer here.

I think I’ve been patient and understanding.

But no more.

I did get an email offering a refund this morning, which I am taking.

I don’t want the book anymore.

This experience is leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

I like the stuff Matt Colville and his team do. I’ll still recommend his YouTube channel to others (especially the Delian Tomb). Although even that seems to be lower down on his priorities these days, and second fiddle to this Twitch stream.

So that’s why MCDM have joined my short list of companies that I will never give any more money to. They join Inside The Box and CMoN on my no buy list.

Grp2: When last we left our heroes… #15

D&D, D&D Grp2, post mortem, RPG

SPOILER ALERT TO MY ADVENTURERS! The following part of the post contains spoilers for the up and coming campaign. You may want to avoid this part of the post and join me in a future one. Don’t give in to temptation go read something else. Just say no to metagaming!

Our fifteenth session. How did that happen?

We were on player down this session due to life events.

The “Hamund’s Harvesting Handbook: A Complete Guide to Harvesting and Crafting in D&D 5e” was used a couple of times to harvest from fallen opponents. I thought they worked well from a DM’s point of view. I do need to get some player feedback on them at some point. But they do make a lot of sense both mechanically and thematically. I’ll definitely be purchasing the two remaining pdfs that cover the other two official monster books. I’d love it if they covered the Tome of Beasts series of books also. But sadly they don’t. Hopefully my work-in-progress will help on that front.

Most of the session was a combat encounter between an orc, four thugs, and two gnomes.

I don’t like fudging dice rolls. So it is very very annoying that I roll high on initiative for the monsters, but mainly low on combat rolls.

In the combat I did split the party using a portcullis that provided an extra challenge to the situation. But see the previous paragraph for why this just delayed things instead of making the situation more dangerous.

I did have the monsters walk into the trap that the adventurers set, not to just reward the party for thinking of it, but it also felt like something the monsters would do.

Our session was cut short when one of the group had life call them up and call them back to base. We could have continued however having just finished the combat we were at a natural break point.

Playing D&D 5e for FREE (2023 edition)

D&D, DM/GM Tips, RPG

I thought it was about time to update the links etc for how to play D&D 5e for free.

The only outlay you need to make is for some dice, pen/pencil and paper. Oh and for printing out some character sheets. Otherwise using an electronic device of some kind you can use everything else digitally.

First up you need the rules. Luckily WotC released the core rules to Creative Commons earlier in the year. Sadly it’s not all the classes, spells and monsters. But it’s a good chunk. So you need to get the D&D 5e SRD .

In a couple of weeks time Mike Shea aka Sly Flourish will be putting some of his Lazy DM stuff out under a Creative Commons license. And as Mike said on his live steam/podcast this week once out this could almost be considered the DM Guide for with the SRD.

However while you wait you can get the samples from one or two of the full products for free (which may have some over lap with the stuff that gets released under the Creative Commons).

So you can get a really useful sample of the Lazy DM companion, and Forge of Foes for free.

Using bits of these you can create your own adventures and monsters and never need to buy a thing. Yes really! Mike has videos on his YouTube channel where he shows these two documents in use. Well worth watching.

But if you are creating your own adventures you might need a map. Dyson Logos is the only place you need to go. He has hundreds of maps you can use in your own games for free. Plus if you watched one of those Mike Shea ol’ YouTube videos I mentioned earlier he uses a Dyson Logos map for the adventure he created using the extracts, and you get to see how to populate the dungeon.

But maybe you want some free monsters, etc to drop in your adventures made by a publisher. You know cut down on the work you have to do. Well Kobold Press have your back.

Kobold Press have a lot of their stuff under the OGL, which you can get here. I personally prefer the Kobold Press monsters to the WotC stuff.

A great free first adventure to try is the The Delian Tomb by Matt Colville.

You can get free blank character sheets here. The link also has some pregenerated characters to.

Now Mr Shea also has some free adventures and pregenerated character sheets that are samples of his various books, Fantastic Locations, Fantastic Adventures, Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot, and Fantastic Lairs. You’ll find the download links on pages I link to.

I hope folks find this useful, and get to try D&D 5e for free (if they have the dice already).

Early Present To Myself

Advanced Wars, Advanced Wars 1+2 Re-boot Camp, gameboy, nintendo, switch, video games

This weekend saw the much anticipated release of Advanced Wars 1&2 Re-boot Camp on the Nintendo Switch.

I love Advanced Wars.

I’ve played it since it first came out in 2002 on my GBA.

21 years since I first played it!

Wow.

I love the classic PC RTS Dune 2, and Command and Conquer. So when I heard about Advanced Wars and though not a RTS but turn based I still needed to get it.

2002 saw me commuting between Farnborough and Surbiton on the train. So portable gaming with my GBA (that was later replaced by a GBA SP) was a way to pass the commute. And probably at that point in my life the main opportunity I had to game.

I loved Advanced Wars. I was an instant fan.

The turn based mechanic worked perfectly on the hand held GBA. The graphics were cartoony and worked really well on the small screen. The cut scenes and pop up characters were drawn in a cartoon anime art style. A style that matched the bright tone of the game perfectly.

I can’t remember the music. However that would be due to me playing the game without the sound on. Something I did all the time back then.

There was a story. But I don’t remember any of it. That’s not a reflection of the game at all. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since I played the game.

I don’t remember finishing the game. But I did get a fair way into the game. I think I was pretty close to completing it.

It should come as no surprise that I got the follow up to Advanced Wars, Advanced Wars Black Hole Rising when it was released in 2003. Which was more of the same.

Obviously by the time Advanced Wars Dual Strike came out on the DS in 2006 I too had moved on to the latest Nintendo handheld. Although continuing the story of the previous two instalments that were on the GBA. Dual Strike introduced new features that made use of the dual screens of the DS.

I enjoyed playing the latest instalment of Advanced Wars. But looking back it doesn’t seem to have had as big an impact on me as the original GBA game.

The final Advanced Wars I played was its fourth and final portable outing Advanced Wars Dark Conflict in 2008.

Despite owning the final portable instalment of the series I don’t remember ever playing it. I think considering the events of 2008 and what a major upheaval to my personal circumstances they were. The fact I didn’t get to play Dark Conflict doesn’t surprise me.

I never did play the 2005 RTS spin off Battalion Wars on the GameCube. (I should try and pick a copy up.) Or the 2007 Wii Battalion Wars 2. I remember reading good things about Battalion Wars at the time. As I’ve already established I’m an RTS fan, so I think these versions would tick a lot of boxes for me, and that I’d enjoy them.

So here we are 21 years later with Advanced Wars finally hitting the latest Nintendo console. I feel with it’s release on the Switch the game has returned to its mobile roots!

If the title Advanced Wars 1&2 Re-boot Camp doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the game, especially having played it before. Then I don’t know how more obvious they could have made it.

This release is an update of the original two GBA releases with the usual graphical improvements (I’m assuming) that goes along with it.

I love the tag line in the title of Re-boot Camp. It’s funny. Well I chuckled.

I’m going to take a little break from my Doom series of posts to play Advanced Wars, and give myself a chance to get the boardgame to the table some more.

Which means you’ll get at least one more Advanced Wars post.

Until then…

Out of the Shadowdark #1

one shot, post mortem, RPG, Shadowdark

Last night was my first ever time running a Shadowdark rpg session.

As I have said in the session planning posts we were using the adventure that comes with the free Quick Start Kit, The Scarlet Minotaur. Which meant naturally we were also using the rules that come in that kit. Sadly the full rules are in Backerkit limbo at the moment.

I had hoped I would have access to the pdf version of the full rule set by the time we played. But I knew it would be cutting it close.

Not having the full rule set did not stop us having fun.

Anyway like my D&D post mortems I will be looking at what worked, what didn’t during the session.

First off I have to say I love the mechanic for torches, where they last one hour real time. It does force the players to be a bit more focused in their discussions about what to do.

Related to that I think the always on initiative order also helped and made sure everyone got to do something and had their moment.

I did think I was going to have a tpk with the very first encounter with the party. One of the party made a loud noise in the very first room that when I rolled to see if an encounter occurred, it did. Then I rolled to see what the encounter was and it was a massive centipede. Although I did give the party 2 xp at the end of the combat, as I thought they had earnt it defeating a level 4 monster.

Luckily my rolls as the GM were not good, although I did get a couple of hits in. It was getting close for one of them.

And after that first encounter roll, I never rolled another encounter all evening!

It took a while for the wizard to get used to how spell casting worked. They felt they should be doing more than just casting magic missile. But as we discussed at the end of the session there is that push your luck element to casting magic. Where if you fail the casting check you lose the spell until you have rested. Plus there is the whole issue of the natural 1 and the negative things that can happen.

If you compare the GM area for the session to the one I have for D&D I’ve never played with so little gear. But it also means the rolls, etc were in the open.

It did help having a print out of the annotated level map to refer to, whilst I had an A3 copy of the map on the table for the players.

For me the jury is still out for the movement in combat. The close,near, and far. It kinda worked for me. I think it flowed better.

My cheat sheet was useful. I did find myself referring to it more than once. But thats not a surprise whilst using a new system and still getting to grips with it.

I would like a Shadowdark version of the monster and spell cards that Kelsey did for D&D 5e. I like these as a quick reference that way I’m not forever flicking between pages.

Overall we had fun, and another session to continue further into the dungeon is on the books.

Venturing into the Shadowdark #3

one shot, RPG, session planning, Shadowdark

In less than three hours (as I write this) I will be setting up and playing Shadowdark.

My current workload (marking assignments) has made me regret planning a mid week session. But we live and learn and I’m pretty sure I’ll repeat the mistake again and again.

Waiting for me at home will be a printout of the fourth and final monster sheet that Kelsey did for the Kickstarter. That arrived earlier in the day along with a load of other printing I had done.

I did finish a preliminary GM cheat sheet for Shadowdark last night. Which I’m hoping will be useful this evening. I’ll go more into that during the post mortem.

I’ve also printed out the annotated dungeon map from the Quick Start Kits GM guide for the adventure we are playing tonight. Which will be handy. Just a shame it’s not available as a single A3 image.

As I was grabbing my stuff together for this evening first thing (so I can just get home grab everything and shoot back out) it struck me just how minimalist this session will be.

There will be a photo (shared via Instagram) this evening. But this is going to be shocking. I’ll definitely make sure the photo is in the post mortem.

I did download last night the YouTube videos from the previous post so I can listen to them in the car on the drive to and from work. It’s a shame this stuff isn’t available as a podcast. But this is the next best thing. Just a little inconvenient getting it onto the phone.

I am about as ready as I can be. A tad nervous. But as long as we have fun.