Brief car woes update

life, the universe, and everything

The car woes are going to drag on for another week because the garage can’t fit me in on a Saturday until the 20th.

Which means I will have to go board game cold turkey until the car is fixed.

It really is a pain not having that flexibility that a motor vehicle gives you.

I’m even having to use online shopping for the food shop.

In the meantime the cards for that Mindcrank and Duskmantle Guildmage combo deck are slowly arriving in dribs and drabs. Although the main stars of the deck haven’t arrived yet!

The A Game of Thrones Mother of Dragons playmat turned up. But as you can guess the planned gaming session to give it an outing for this Saturday has had to be cancelled until the woes have come to an end.

That’s it for now. Hopefully better news in the next post.

Coronation Gaming

Game day

Friday it had looked like I wouldn’t be able to make the planned days gaming round Diego’s on Monday.

I had shared my car woes on the Messenger group set up to plan the days gaming, and that I was not able to make it.

From that posting Charlene and Jeff both very kindly offered to give me a lift.

Both very generous offers that considering neither lived near me and would have to go out of their way to pick me up, I felt I had to turn down.

If a friend needed my help I’d go out of my way to help them. But ask for help? I can’t. It’s very hard for me to ask for help or to even accept it. Call it a personality flaw. But that’s me.

In the end Jeff direct messaged me saying he’d pick me up at 10am, and I could show him where Diego lived.

I was less of a detour for Jeff than Charlene. So there was a little less guilt accepting the generous offer.

The morning of the bank holiday celebrating our newly crowned sovereign King Charles III Jeff was a little early. Luckily I was ready.

Our days gaming started with a game of Terra Mystica.

I’d never played this before, and like one of my students hadn’t done the homework assigned to us by Diego of watching a how to play video.

Terra Mystica – who was which faction

I enjoyed the game and would like to play it again to explore the options more.

It struck me as very much a game where you have to play to the strength of your faction.

With the dragon lords I was playing I think I could have been a bit more aggressive in my expansionism. I was very aware of my limited power tokens (if that is what they are called). But my issues were during the early stages of being too expanding and running out of power tokens, and also generating enough workers. In the last couple of rounds I had the problem of having lots of power tokens and not nearly enough workers to use the tokens with.

I did spend most of the game trailing far behind on the scoring track, but a late surge of points during the final scoring from the priest tracks got me enough to draw last place with Diego.

Jeff and Ben shared the victory. Apparently there is no tie breaker in this game!

Our next game was Cat in the Box. Which Diego just romped away with the victory. Apart from the last round he was scoring over five points a round. It should be noted that Ben scored zero points the whole game.

Our third and final game of the day was Red Rising.

Ben won this game also. However as a five player game it played a lot quicker than I thought it would.

I had four cards I was holding onto from my initial hand as they allowed me to use them as either any named character or colour during the end scoring. I thought these will be really useful. Did I get any other cards that they could be used with? No. didn’t see any come out either.

I also spent a few rounds trying to get a third red card, which never showed up. And I couldn’t get to the one in one of the columns. That stopped me getting a cool combo that would have netted me over five helium in two turns.

Ben took the victory in this game while I was denied the first loser position by a couple of points. Diego took that honour.

I had a great day gaming with amazingly kind and generous friends.

There was only one way to finish off such a great day. Buying Mum a Chinese take away to celebrate her birthday (which just so happened to be the same day as this one off bank holiday). Yes I left Mum at home looking after the mutts on her birthday.

Car woes, and latest Marvel movie

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The second long weekend of May, aka The Kings Coronation started off so well yesterday with my car not starting. “It’s dead Jim” to paraphrase a famous fictional starship doctor.

Luckily a very kind neighbour was able to give me a lift to work. So I wasn’t late and losing pay (being paid by the hourly that could have hit me hard). Then thanks to a colleague at work upon hearing my car woes I investigated whether there was a college bus I could catch.

It turns out there was and it was free.

My walk home from the centre of town from the Horsefair allowed me to stop in at The Luxe and get a ticket for Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (GOG3) on the Saturday.

Sadly the car troubles meant I was not able to attend the Fenland Gamers club night.

Today after getting a couple of magazines to read and a birthday card for Mum I sat down with a vanilla latte and a bag of Galaxy Minstrels to watch the third and final part of the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy.

I was a bit apprehensive about the movie as I knew it was a bit darker than the other two entries in the trilogy. Especially with the subject matter it touched upon.

GOG3 can be viewed in a couple of ways. The first as a separate stand alone movie, and the second as part of the three movie story arc. Although in reality it’s three movies, a Christmas special, the Infinity Gauntlet and End Game, plus the dire Thor 4 Love and Thunder.

As a stand alone movie it works, but just. You really do need to have seen the previous entries to the story to get the most from GOG3.

As the final entry I think this is a really great end to the story.

Yes tonally GOG3 is darker than the previous parts. It does have moments of humour, but these are used more sparingly and to greater effect. In a way I’m reminded of when the first Guardians came out. It felt fresh especially with its humour. And now Gunn has done it again. Pulling back on the humour, touching on more adult themes. A stark contrast to the way Marvel movies have been going in recent years.

As always the soundtrack is awesome, great use of source music, and there are one or two scenes that are similar to the previous movies.

I really enjoyed the movie. A couple of moments near the end my eyes nearly leaked. Which I say bravo to Gunn for manipulating me emotionally to that point.

I’d like to say Marvel are back on track. But at the moment GOG3 seems the outlier from the past few years.

Whilst I was enjoying GOG3 the latest three promo packs for Rolling Realms arrived.

If you get all the promo packs currently available for Rolling Realms you have doubled the number of realms that came with the game.

I like to think that Jamey Stegmaier has invented a new roll and write sub genre called the living roll and write. It’s the roll and write version of an lcg. How else do you describe the promo packs for the game? They work just like the packs that lcgs get adding more content.

Right time to read those magazines I bought. Laters.

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).