A few days ago Kate was asking Nik and I if we could play a game after dinner. When I asked what kind of game, she said, “A miniatures game.” Now Kate’s played her share of boardgames and whatnot, but she hasn’t really played a minis game before. She has seen me play, of course, and there’s barely a room in the house without minis in it, so I suppose her request should be no surprise. I’ve wished for some time that Hero Clix was more kid friendly, because Kate likes the minis and knows many of the characters. I’ve thought about designing a kid’s version of the game for home use, but haven’t gotten around to it (something about working seven days a week crimps my “design for the hell of it” style).

After dinner I went up to the office and started poking around through my game collection. Nearly every actual minis game was out. “Hey Kate, how about some grand tactical Civil War action with Fire & Fury? No? How about Normans vs. Vikings with Warhammer Historical? No, eh? Hmmm.” Just when I was thinking I’d have to sell her on a boardgame, my eyes fell onto a game I got when I was only a couple of years older than Kate: Melee by Metagaming. My friends and I played the shit out of that game, because making new characters was so easy it didn’t matter if you died. I pulled melee out for the first time in probably 20 years. The rules were as easy as I remembered. I figure if I could read and learn the game at age 10, Kate could play with adult help at age 8.

When I was a kid, we played with the counters that came with the game because none of us could afford minis. A quick check of the hex map showed that 28mm miniatures would work just fine though. I dug out my “pirates and gladiators” case and offered up gladiator minis to Nik and Kate. Once we had all picked our minis, I showed them how to make characters. Then I briefed them on the key rules and the coliseum opened for business. The game was quick and bloody, thanks to Nicole double damaging me right off the bat. Kate, however, was the winner. Although the game itself didn’t take longer than 15 minutes, she seemed perfectly satisfied.

Now I’ve got something we can pull out and play with Kate on short notice. I have enough figs that we can do a bewildering array of fantasy or historical scenarios. I think next time I’ll offer a bigger selection of weapons and armor types, so Kate can start to see the tradeoffs that make the system work. Train ’em young, I say.

Took a weekend trip to Vancouver, BC with Nik, Ray, and Christine. You can read general details at nikchick.com, while I confine my entry to one anecdote.

So Sunday the rain limited our options. We ended up at the aquarium, which is a good one that features critters like sea otters, sea lions, and beluga whales. They had a cool frog exhibit, with all kinds of funky frogs from around the world. Man, those African bull toads are huge!

While I’m making my way through the assorted frogs, I come upon a group of four 8-10 year old kids (both boys and girls) crowded around one tank. In it, a frog is hunting an insect for dinner. The kids are staring intently at the hunt, and chanting out, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” in unison. It was pretty creepy. At last the frog struck and the kids cheered and high-fived each other. Then one noted, disappointed, “Aw, he’s just sitting on it, it’s not dead yet.” At this point I moved on, so perhaps I missed the frog, shouting out, “Are you not entertained?”

Maybe I shouldn’t even mention this on the internet. “Amphibian Gladiators” will now be a mid-season replacement reality show on FOX.

Well, today is obviously “we’re big in Germany day” because we got a package from our German licensee, Truant Verlag, with the German translation of Ork! The Roleplaying Game, which was Green Ronin’s very first book. I honestly wasn’t sure this was going to happen, but we’ve got six copies and it looks awesome. Truant got all new art, much of which is hilarous. One of the illos is a parody of the classic Frank Frazetta “Death Dealer” painting, but featuring a mounted Ork instead. Another Ork is done up like a prussian aristo, with a spiked helmet, monacle, and little moustache. Oh, it’s a riot. It’s also hard to beat such headers as “Orks und Krieg”, “Orksprache”, and “Die Namengebungszeremonie”. Ironically, despite being in German, it’s 16 pages shorter than our version. I wish I had more than six.

A German website also reviewed our big mega-adventure Black Sails Over Freeport and gave it a very good rating. The best line from the Google translation: “BSOF is a multicolored wonder-bag of an adventure.” I couldn’t have said it weirder myself!

Back in the 80s, Games Workshop made a wacky boardgame called Chainsaw Warrior. The character was later imported into Talisman, another GW game that kept me up until dawn many a night in college. Today, I wish I were the Chainsaw Warrior. For the past two days, there’s been a work crew cutting down a big tree right outside my office. And it’s not just a matter of cutting it down and shouting, “Timber!” Oh no, it’s a huge tree, so they have started at the top and are cutting off a little bit at a time. I’m trying to drown it out by blaring the Adverts and Bad Religion, but the sound of a chainsaw cuts right through even the most raucous punk rock. I sure would like to get some work done but it’s quite distracting. Urge to kill…rising. Maybe I could borrow the chainsaw just for a couple of minutes…

On the upside, the latest Bad Religion album is really good. They returned to Epitaph and returned to form. Good stuff.

Since finishing KOTOR, I’ve been playing Medal of Honor on the X-Box. As a WWII buff, I’m enjoying the period detail (and the array of weapons you get to wield!). It’s amusing to start with American weapons in the early missions, and then marvel as you get the much better German ones. The American sniper rifle, for instance, only has a 5 round clip, while the German Gewehr 43 has double that. Very nice when you’re in a jam.

The missions do a nice job of taking you on a tour of 1944 Europe at war. You start with D-Day and later fight through Operation Market Garden. As an OSS agent, you also get to infiltrate submarine bases and an armored train. I do have to wonder if the EA guys know what the word infiltrate means though. “Infiltrating” a train station meant killing everyone in sight. Ditto the submarine base.

My only real gripe with the game is that you can only save between missions. This means if you die at any point before finishing, you have to start the mission again. Goddamn, is that annoying. There have been multiple times when I’ve been killed in the very last room or encounter of a mission. I nearly gave up the other day, while trying to get through one of the “Bridge Too Far” missions. At the end you have to blow up a tank that’s protected by an MG42 and a bunch of infantry. It’s insanely difficult to dodge ripping shreds of MG fire while aiming a panzerschreck (and ludicrously, you have to hit the tank like five times at point blank range to take it out; one hit that close should do it). Up to this point in the game, it hadn’t taken me any more than three tries to finish a mission. Took me at least 15 times for that one and I was getting super frustrated! Finally, yesterday morning, I gave it a fresh start and managed to take out the goddamn tank. I really wish Medal of Honor used the much more sensible “checkpoint” system that games like Halo use. I didn’t need to re-fight the four other big combats leading up to the tank battle over and over again.

To sum up: killing Nazis good, no checkpoints bad.

Look out, Rumsfeld knows kung fu. This is even funnier if you’ve been watching Kid Notorious.

Thanks to the wonders of Tivo, I’ve been catching the Justice League animated show on a regular basis. I like the show, and there have been some amusing surprises (like Cthulhu showing up the other day!), but one thing keeps bugging me: Hawkgirl. Oh, not the character. Tough chick with power mace? Sign me up for that. What bugs me is the way they write her on the show. 99% of the fight scenes follow this pattern.

1) Fight starts.

2) Hawkgirl leaps to attack, flying in with her cracklin’ mace o’ doom.

3) She lands one or maybe two blows if she’s lucky, and then she is somehow knocked out of the sky by a power or trap or fluke event.

4) Other Justice League characters carry on the fight until Hawkgirl recovers or is receives aid from one of her teammates.

The writers seem to be “Worfing” her. As you may recall, the way to establish the badassedness of anyone on ST:TNG was to have them beat up Worf. He was such a punching bag that Ferengi took him out the first time they showed up. All these damn writers need to find a new gimmick. I don’t want to see Hawkgirl knocked around every episode, I want to see her Thanagarian fury delivered unto the heads of her enemies. I want to see the smiting of mooks and supervillains alike. I mean really, give young girls a superheroine to look up to. Who else do they have on the Justice League, Wonder Woman? Please.

I’ve never liked beer. Oh, I’ve gotten drunk on it before. Teenagers can’t be choosy after all and when you shotgun beer you don’t taste it anway. I’ve always found that it tasted like boiled socks though. When I was a kid, I would see all these beer commercials and it always seemed like it would be so delicious. I couldn’t wait to get older so I could try forbidden beer. When I was 12 or so, my cousin Stephanie and I snuck some beer from an unattended keg at a summer BBQ and gleefully snuck off to drink it. My response: ewwwww. Where was the frosty refreshment? Where was the taste people lived for?

At first I thought the keg was just skunky. Surely there was better tasting beer somewhere. Well, 20+ years later and I’ve still never found a beer that tastes good, and I’ve tried beers from all over the world. I had high hopes when I was in Germany, but no dice. Boiled socks. The only nearly beer thing I’ve found that I enjoy is that Belgian Lambec stuff, but that’s really something else. When I was in college though, I discovered hard cider. It’s pretty common in the US today, but at the time cider was more a European thing. Now cider was something I could get behind: alcoholic but not vile tasting.

Five or six years ago I was home in Boston over the holidays. The local liquor store had a special holiday flavor of Ciderjack, “Mulled Apple Cider.” We picked up a six pack to try and it was great. Flavorful, spicy, and so very tasty. I said to Nik, “We’ll have to get some when we get home.” As fate would have it, I have never seen it again. Maybe it was a regional test or something, but it was just not to be found in the Pacific Northwest. Next time I was in MA, I looked for it again but I had no luck. Guess they made just the one batch.

Since then, whenever I go to liquor stores or grocery stores with huge selections of beer and cider, I always carefully search the cider section. Surely amongst all those obscure micro brews and European imports I would find satisfaction. Surely some other brewery hit upon the idea of hard mulled cider.

Alas, my quest has been in vain.

The other day, however, Nik and I were out shopping I noticed that Spire had a new flavor called “Spiced Apple”. That sounded liked mulled so we picked up a six pack. And it’s…close. Definitely the closest of any cider yet, but not quite the same and not quite as good. I’ll be drinking it for the time being, but one day I hope my quest for cider comes to an end.

Got back from my business trip late Sunday night and I’ve spent the last two days trying to readjust my schedule, catch up on mounds of e-mail, and solve all the mini-crises that popped up while Iwas away. It’s amazing how much can pile up in only a week.

The trip went well. We’ve got some solid possibilities for the future, which is all for the good. Got to get my head back to the here and now though, as GAMA Trade Show is five weeks away and we’ve got tons to do. For you non-gamers, GTS is the only real trade show of the game industry. It’s our chance to get our wares in front of the best retailers and all the distributors too. As a plus, it has been located in Las Vegas for the past five years or so, and that adds a bit of fun to the trip. Last year Nicole, Hal, and I did a “Green Ronin” dinner at Picasso and it was amongst the three best meals of my life. We must have really talked it up, because already two of our industry friends have contacted us and said, “Let’s go to Picasso!” Twist my arm!

These next few months are going to be nutty. We have a pretty aggressive schedule of products lined up, and I’m just rolling up my sleeves and getting ready to dive into a huge design project. Last year I spent so much time doing development work and running the company that my most significent piece of game design wasn’t even for my own company (it was the V for Victory WW2 RPG I did for Dungeon/Polyhedron). This year is going to be different. I got into this industry to design games and I’ll be damned if I’m going to marginalize myself! Development work is hugely important, but nothing beats some good old fashioned game design.

Some of my college friends and I were discussing the problems inherent in gaming in Tolkien’s Middle Earth of late. I was reminded of something I hadn’t thought of in years, namely, that most of us had participated in a Middle Earth Play By Mail game back in the early 90s. It was the first and last PBM I ever played.

In theory, it sounded fun. You rule a realm and write your own epic story large on the pages of Middle Earth’s history. Four or five us were joining a game together on the good side, so we could fight together against Mordor and Isengard. All of us were big Tolkien fans and very much looking forward to trying this out.

Apparently, the designers of this game thought that Middle Earth was neither a sweeping story of heroism and romance, nor a mythic clash between good and evil. No, apparently they believed that the essence of Middle Earth was highly trained infiltrators and saboteurs, using stealth and dirty tricks to destabilize enemy nations. I was playing Rohan. The following about sums up how much fun I had in Tom Clancy’s Middle Earth, the PBM.

“Arise, men of the Riddermark! I, Theoden King, will smite the foul Uruks that are a blight on my land.”

Theoden tries to fall on his own sword and end the pain. He is captured by enemy agents instead and held for ransom. Sauron’s armies march into Minas Tirith unopposed.

Oh yeah, it was real fun! Amusingly, GSI, the company that still runs that game, sends me an e-mail once a year trying to “get me back.” Um, yeah.

A Week Without Me

I’m leaving at 6 am for a business trip and I don’t know if I’ll have internet access where I’m going. You may not see another update until next week. Please go to stick it to the Man in my absence.