gaming – Page 9 – dangermouse.net

More possible D&D, and an epic level miscommunication

Let’s start low key. This morning I finished off the lesson plan for this week’s older kids’ ethics class, on the topic of Probability. I did half of it yesterday so it wasn’t a lot of work.

For lunch I went on a walk with my wife and Scully, the longest regular walk we do, to the Italian bakery. On the way we went through the local shopping area and walked past the local science toy shop. As we passed, I noticed a poster in the window advertising free Dungeons & Dragons events in the store, for beginner players. I commented to my wife that I should see if they want another Dungeon Master to help run games, and she said I should go in right now and ask them. So I did!

I spoke to a woman and mentioned I’ve been running D&D since the 1980s and would be interested in running some games if they needed more people. She said yes, they definitely could use someone! She took my details and said the guy who organises the D&D events would be in touch to discuss it. They run it every Saturday evening from 6pm, and she said it’s mostly children, but sometimes they have adults join in to play as well. I wouldn’t want to do it every week, but maybe every 3 or 4 weeks would be cool. And given how much experience I have with teaching children, I think I could run a pretty cool game for a group of kids.

This afternoon just before my ethics classes began (three in a row), I decided to check my university email account to make sure everything was fine for tomorrow’s first lecture in this semester’s image processing course. I’ve been all set for the past week to go into the university for the first time tomorrow.

I opened my email and there was a message from the lecturer, asking me if everything was okay, because I missed the first lecture on Tuesday night! Yes, it turns out the course is being run on Tuesdays this year, not Thursdays like I thought! I replied and apologised for the miscommunication, saying I’d thought it was Thursdays. We went back through our email chains and discovered that he had told me it was on Tuesdays, but only in one email from December last year. I can’t remember if it registered at the time, but for months now I’ve been thinking it was on Thursdays.

So next week I need to go in on Tuesday, not Thursday. Another issue is that I have three Outschool ethics classes on Tuesday evening, which clash. So I’ve had to move them to Thursday and inform all the students that this is an unavoidable move. I know some of them probably won’t be able to attend Thursdays and will have to drop the class, so it’s a bit of a pain, but hopefully most of them can adjust to the new day.

So, it’s been a very mixed day. Some good news with the D&D stuff, but quite the mess with the evening classes.

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Winter chill back in the air

Monday morning is full of ethics classes, finishing off the topic of “What If?” about alternate history.

After those and eating some lunch, I took Scully for a walk. I was thinking of a longish walk, but a look at the weather outside and a consultation with the rain radar changed that plan quickly, as there were heavy rain showers incoming. So instead I took her on a shorter walk around past the corner store supermarket, where I stopped in quickly to get a Portuguese tart for a treat (for myself). It was fairly large, so I had half and am saving the other half for tonight. Besides threatening grey clouds, it was chilly today, much colder than the balmy days we’ve been having the past couple of weeks.

I finished up another Darths & Droids comic this afternoon, which puts me a week ahead on the buffer now, so that’s good. And then I took it relatively easy for a few hours, just relaxing. Scully got another walk in the evening before my 6pm Game Design class, the second of 6 lessons. This one’s going well, and the student came up with some really intriguing ideas for potential game themes, including: writing a diary; being a pessimist; managing a hotel; and reading biographies or speeches of famous people and quoting them. I have no idea how that last one would work as a game, but it’s very interesting.

Tonight my wife and I are going to watch the Matildas’ round-of-16 match against Denmark in the FIFA Women’s World Cup. Hopefully it’ll be as exciting and in favour of Australia as last week’s game against Canada!

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Scully’s dental

Friday was online board games night, so I didn’t write up a blog entry. We played a host of the usual suspects, plus a couple of new ones on Board Game Arena: Exit Strategy and Gang of Dice. We also played It’s a Wonderful World, which we’ve only played in person before. I much preferred the last one, and not just because I had a runaway victory.

Exit Strategy was basically just multiplayer kingmaker – it became clear at various stages that certain players couldn’t win, and then the only real choices they had were which other players to drag down. We all agreed after one game that we probably never want to play it again. Gang of Dice is a Yahtzee variant with some push-your-luck twists. It was amusing enough and may get another run but it wasn’t a super compelling game. It’s a Wonderful World is a proper game, with some depth and strategy, and mostly about building up your own position rather than tearing other players down.

Friday was also an important day for Scully, as she had her teeth cleaned by the vet. For dogs, this is a general anaesthetic procedure, so she was there most of the day so she could recover before coming home. She was fine afterwards and got spoiled with some boiled chicken for dinner after not having been able to eat all day. They did some x-rays because apparently some of her adult teeth haven’t erupted yet, which is unusual for her age (5 years), but they said there was nothing to be concerned about.

Today I spent much of the day writing new Darths & Droids comics. I need to try and get ahead because we’re running a bit close to zero buffer at the moment. It rained a bit, but we took Scully on a couple of walks around the showers. And my wife went to the community garden again and brought back some more random vegetables. We used some radishes and green leafy things for a salad tonight with our minestrone.

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Multiple board games over two days

Yesterday was intended to be Dungeons & Dragons night at my place. However due to multiple different circumstances, several of the players couldn’t show up, and we ended up with only three people plus myself. I decided the successful threshold for D&D would be 4+me, so we abandoned that and played board games instead.

We started with Fujiyama, one of the games I bought in Japan. It works differently with more than two players, and I think better, as you have a different opponent sitting on either side of you to make the tile passing interactions more interesting. You also end up with a lot more animals for higher scoring opportunities.

Next we played Evergreen, which I bought a while back and have played with my wife a few times.

And we finished with a nice chaotic game of Camel Up. These games plus a break to eat pizza was enough to fill the night. Most of the rest of Friday was taken up by teaching ethics classes online, and cleaning the house before my friends arrived.

Today I went for a run in the morning. The weather was beautiful and warm. It really doesn’t feel like winter here at the moment, despite us being in the middle of it.

We went out (with Scully) to Newtown for lunch. We went to the Carriageworks Farmers’ Market to look around, and then walked over to The Pie Tin for pies. They had some interesting ones that I hadn’t seen before: chicken pesto; duck with hazelnuts and cherry sauce; and one with pulled pork, lentils, and African spices. I tried the duck and pork pies, which made a substantial lunch. They were both good, although I was a little disappointed that the cherry sauce in the duck pie was extremely muted, to the point where I wouldn’t even have suspected that it contained a fruit of any sort unless I already knew it.

This afternoon I tried the other Japanese board game we got with my wife: Gin Crafters.

You have a hand of gin cards and “brand” cards (goals, worth points). You use actions to buy ingredients (juniper, various botanicals), distil gin according to recipes on the cards, collect cash, or draw more gin or brand cards. Distilling gin scores points according to their difficulty, plus bonus points depending on interactions between cards. It’s a fairly straightforward game design and easy to play, but enough combos and competing strategies to keep it interesting and fun.

In other photos, I thought I’d share a picture of some redevelopment that is taking place near us. This area used to about 25 houses, facing on to two streets (the other at the top of the hill here, along that line of trees). The whole lot has been demolished in the past few weeks to make way for a huge new apartment complex. I dunno, but I suspect there’ll be a hundred or more apartments in the area formerly occupied by about 25 houses.

This isn’t the only redevelopment going on here either. Within the same block there are at least two other apartment redevelopments in various stages – one has started building recently, and another two are in early demolition stages. And that’s not all either. The two adjacent blocks also have dozens of houses fenced off and awaiting demolition. It’s quite crazy the amount of demolition/construction work being done in this area at the moment.

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One week from Japan: Fujiyama board game

It’s been a full week since we got home from Japan. I still feel like I’m in catch-up mode a bit, because I’ve been concentrating the past few days on copying material off my private wiki as a safety precaution before upgrading it. Which hasn’t given me a lot of spare time to catch up on other things. I think I’m going to have to let Irregular Webcomic! go on a brief hiatus until I get this sorted – maybe a week or two.

That’s what I was doing most of today. I also went for another run, but didn’t manage as quick a time as yesterday. I think my muscles were still recovering a bit from yesterday after three weeks with no hard exercise.

My wife and I went on a long walk with Scully over lunch, to the Italian bakery. It’s about the longest walk we do with any regularity, clocking in at just under 6 km return. I had a slice of pizza there, and a special pastry of the day, it was a mandarin and ricotta danish-like thing. On the way back through the closer shopping area I picked up a couple of the limited edition spiced caramel apple scones from another bakery. I’ll try one of those for dessert later tonight.

This afternoon my wife and I tried playing one of the board games I got in Japan. The first one is Fujiyama.

Each player starts with an empty board and the goal of the game is to fill it with hexagonal tiles in such a way as to maximise points by forming complete forests (triangles of the same colour) and groups of animals. The forests come in four seasons: spring (pink: flowers), summer (green: deciduous and evergreen trees), autumn (brown: chestnuts, mushrooms, grapes), and winter (blue: snowflakes). Each completed forest scores points in a different manner depending on its season, while mixed forests score zero. You also score points for groups of animals, more for groups of more different animals. The tiles are acquired by choosing which ones to give to your opponent/s and them choosing which tile to use – if they choose the one you gave them, they give you an animal to place. If they don’t choose the tile you gave them, you don’t get the animal. So there’s quite a strong incentive to give your opponents tiles that they can actually use.

It plays in 20 minutes or so, and there’s plenty of strategy going on. I look forward to playing this with my friends at one of our board game nights.

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OMG this flu

I checked and apparently my symptoms are consistent with a particularly nasty strain of flu going around Sydney at the moment. It is utterly miserable. Today was the worst day yet – it just seems to get worse every passing day. A few days ago I’d been feeling relatively okay in the mornings and deteriorating later in the day. But today I’ve been feeling messed up all day. barely got any sleep again last night, up with constantly blocked and dripping nose and coughing.

I was thinking it would be bad if I cancelled a whole week of Outschool classes and was feeling better by Tuesday or Wednesday – I could be teaching kids later in the week. But now I’m starting to feel like I won’t even be in fit shape to teach a class on Sunday.

I marked another couple of university assessment reports and videos. It turns out the Beatles break-up team did in fact submit two separate reports. I had to ask the professor to send me the other one. The two halves of the team seem to have worked almost completely independently, because even though they started with the same project idea, they went completely different directions with it and used different datasets.

But in good news, I got some new roleplaying games! I was thinking about the store credit I still have at the game shop, and what to spend it on, and decided to look at some recent games that have been well received, and also browse through what else they had available that struck my fancy. I ordered them by email, and my wife was in the city so I messaged her and she dropped in to the game shop to pick them up on her way home.

I decided to get:

The One Ring RPG – the third of the four roleplaying games based on the works of Tolkien.
Blades in the Dark – a heist-based game set in a fantastic Victorian era city, acclaimed because of its innovative mechanics.
Monster of the Week – a game using the other recent acclaimed “Powered by the Apocalypse” mechanics, reproducing an X-Files/Buffy style monster hunt in the modern day.
Mörk Borg – a real outlier; an award-winning dark, gritty, fantasy game inspired by heavy metal.

The last one, Mörk Borg, has made a real name for itself recently, so it was the first one I cracked open. It’s a short book, and… flipping through it is an experience. The graphic design is all over the place – it feels like your brain is being ripped out as you read it. But it works. The text is dark and disgusting and strangely compelling. The PCs in this game are not heroes. They’re doomed to die, as is everyone in this bleak world, and soon! When starting a campaign the GM basically sets up a world-destroying apocalypse that will end the game at some random time in the future. And unlike heroic games, the PCs can’t do anything about it – the world will end. Their only job is to make their short lives more comfortable for themselves at the expense of everyone else. It sounds awful, but you can’t take your eyes off it. I’m not sure if I’ll ever run this game, but it’s definitely one for aficionados of RPGs to absorb and mine for dark ideas.

How dark? Let me just say that I think what I have is the Mörk Borg of flus.

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Ninja Grandma, and a ninja flu

I did a second playtest of the Ninja Grandma board game design with my wife today, after iterating on the first design and changing some of the rules. I went for a modular bard instead of a fixed one, and changed from worker placement to a movement mechanic, which increases interaction and strategic decisions.

The potions are now more powerful, so it’s worth making them, and there are also poisons. And animal costumes so you can disguise your ninjas as other animals. It might be a bit too much, as this iteration required a lot more analysis to decide on a move. But such is the nature of design!

In other news, I had a bad sore throat yesterday. I was able to do my classes on Zoom, but by the end of the fourth one my voice was breaking and I couldn’t have done another one. I had real trouble sleeping overnight and am very tired today, and feeling some other symptoms of what I think is the flu. Hopefully it’s not COVID again, since I had that only a bit over a month ago! I’ve cancelled all my Outschool classes for tomorrow, because I really don’t think I’ll be better, and I need to provide 24 hours’ notice.

Hopefully tonight I’ll be tired enough to fall asleep and sleep through the night.

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A new board game: Applejack

It’s fortnightly in-person games night, but only three people could make it in person tonight, so we decided to convert it to an online event, which has allowed a couple of others to join in. We’re playing a new game in Board Game Arena called Applejack.

It’s pretty quick to learn and get into, but has a lot of choices to make and possible strategies to try to win. Each player has an orchard and is trying to collect hexagonal tiles to make contiguous regions of different varieties of apples. The larger the regions the more points you score. But there are also beehives, and matching those along the edges of the tiles gives you points too, so you need to weigh up and prioritise either the apples or the beehives. The tiles are selected from a common board and there’s chances to take tiles that other players want as well, so that’s another wrinkle. We’ve played a few games and are enjoying it.

The weather is getting wintry. Last night on the news the weather presenter said that the day felt “brutally cold”. Now, remember we’re a subtropical city… the maximum temperature was 17°C.

At lunch I took Scully for a walk past the fish & chip shop, where I grabbed some lunch, and we ate sitting on the bench in the park overlooking the harbour. Although cold, it was clear and sunny – a very nice day actually.

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Ninja revision and advertising ethics

First task today was writing the week’s new ethics lesson, on the topic of advertising. That was fairly easy since I did this topic a couple of years ago when I first started the classes, and none of those kids are still enrolled, so I mostly copied the old lesson, just revising a few of the questions.

Then I spent a fair bit of time revising the Ninja Grandma board game for the kids in the Creative Thinking class. I still have some work to do on that and hope to finish it tonight.

I took Scully for a big walk over to the bakery for lunch. I had her in her doggie backpack for the walk there (she walks all the way back by herself – it’s a fair distance for a little dog). We passed a woman on the street going the other way, and as she drew level and passed me, she must have noticed Scully. She said, “Hi Scully,” and kept walking, without saying a word to me! I didn’t recognise her, but presumably she’s another local dog owner and we may have interacted briefly at some point (or she knows my wife).

I’ll keep it brief because I want to get back to the game design and try to send it to the kids before bedtime.

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Revising the ninja game

This morning I had lesson 5 in the Creative Thinking/Game Design course with the kids. We went over our playtesting notes for the Ninja Grandma game. The kids had some cool ideas, including changing the ninja castle from a fixed board to a variable layout using tiles for each room, and making the layout matter by having the ninjas move from room to room, rather than be placed anywhere. Now I need to revise the game and send it back to them for another round of playtesting before the final lesson next Sunday.

I did a bit more comics work, assembling Irregular Webcomic! strips for the coming week. And tonight was three more ethics classes. And … wow, where did the day go?

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