The Goblin Hordes Arrive

I haven't done much eBaying in recent months, but about 2 weeks ago I finally broke down and made a purchase. I won 3 separate auctions for some painted Heartbreaker Goblins. These were painted by John the OFM, a well-known poster on TMP and fellow HMGS East convention attendee if memory serves me correctly.

Heartbreaker figures were a competitor to Citadel back in the 80's and are now out-of-print, but you may be able to hunt them down in various backwoods haunts on the internet. Many of these gobbos were sculpted by Kev Adams, known affectionately as "The Goblinmaster" in minis gaming circles for his excellent goblin ranges. Here's a link to a reference site for the Heartbreaker line. You can also order OOP Heartbreaker figures from Ral Partha Europe.

First off, are some Goblin Spearmen. These guys are very cool looking, with classic old-school goblinoid features, and are probably my favorites of the bunch.

Next up are some Goblin Archers. They're also quite neat. I especially love the guys with the pointed helmets, and they're worthy of gracing the front-rank of any Archer unit. I got enough of these little shooty buggers to form 3 or 4 regiments of Heavy Archers for use in my Sword of Severnia wargame.

...looking to shoot down some fat Dwarves and pansy-livered Elves....



And last but not least is a warband of Goblin Swordsmen. These fellas come in 2 varieties. The ones shown here (helmeted) are the best of the two sculpts and fit in really well with the archers and spearmen character-wise. There are also some non-helmeted gobbos (not shown). They're okay and remind me a little of the goblins from the old BattleMasters game from Milton Bradley, but they seem smaller and less fierce than the other gobbos.

So there you have it. A quick look at some of the troops that will be joining the Trolls, Redcaps, and Giants in the goblinoid army of Zidda Zobba.

Mmm.... roasted dwarf chops! Nuthin like 'em!

Hockey Magic

For all you ice hockey fans out there....

 

Check out these two videos of Linus Omark, a European hockey player whose breakaway moves are beyond compare. 

This guy will be in the NHL some day. 

 

http://www.totalprosports.com/blog/index.php/2009/04/linus-omark-embarrasses-goalie-with-crazy-shootout-goal/   

 

--- And remember... Britannia rules the waves....

 

Somebody Clone Me -- Please!

I have a problem. I like too many things.

My interests run the gamut from things like playing fantasy baseball to watching American Idol with my wife to developing software to painting miniatures to reading books & blogs to designing tabletop games and playing them to spending time with my family to playing the drums to chasing my 2 cats to finding a great new restaurant to eat at to whatever else excites me at the moment. I'm exhausted just thinking about it all.

Maybe you're like me. Maybe you've come to the frustrating conclusion that there are just so many things to spend your time on that you're an ideal candidate for cloning. I mean how else are you going to find the time to do all that stuff? There needs to be 5 or 6 of you.

Let's set aside one Sevy for work and business. He can develop great software and bring home the cash. Hell, you know that the rest of us clones don't want to work for the man anyway.

Clone #2 can serve as the Font of All Knowledge. His job is to voraciously read everything and soak up every worthwhile scrap of knowledge that he comes across. The group will go to him when it needs guidance and answers to difficult questions. Better get him a Kindle, because we're not gonna have enough bookshelves to store all those books he'll be reading.

Clone #3 can be the Socialite. He'll happily flit back and forth amongst family and friends, spreading love and joy, lending an ear to the troubled, offering a hand where needed, and making sure the bonds of blood and friendship remain strong.

Clone #4 can be the Uber Geek. He'll organize boardgame nights, run the local rotisserie baseball league, serve as gamemaster and secretary of the ongoing miniatures wargaming campaign, organize outings to game conventions, spend countless hours reading BoardGameGeek and The Miniatures Page, and listen to 20+ podcasts from the geek community at large.

Clone #5 will be the Artist (or artiste for you French buggers). He'll paint. He'll draw. He'll pick out cool patterns for his wife to cross-stitch. He'll select the color of frame and matte used for all the pictures the family decides to hang on the wall. He'll stroke his imaginary beard at the art show and discuss impressionism, cubism, pointillism, art-deco, and whether Frank Frazetta was a greater artist than Boris or Larry Elmore. He'll leave Frank Lloyd Wright and I.M. Pei architectural books on his coffee-table.

And on it goes.... Clones will be generated and sent off to focus on a specific area of expertise. They'll convene once a week in the great Clone Convocation, probably in my living room. Each will be required to bring a covered dish. It gets expensive feeding all those clones every week. After hours of swapping stories, they'll retire to their separate bedrooms on the 2nd Floor, for as we all know too well, my clone sleeps alone.

And maybe, just maybe, I will finally achieve peace and happiness. I will have mastered and learned everything there is to learn; at least the stuff that I give a rat's ass about. I will finally be satisfied. Until I uncover the next cool thing...

Draft Prep -- The Best Thing about Rhino Baseball

For those of you who don't know, I'm the creator of a rotisserie baseball program called Rhino Baseball Deluxe. It's the only available desktop software for fantasy baseball that combines everything from managing rosters and crunching stats multiple fantasy leagues, computing customized player projections, computing customized dollar values, preparing for your annual rotisserie auction, tracking live draft results and assisting you to make the best possible bids/picks, computing in-season player and fantasy team projections, creating trend graphs, and evaluating players and teams during the season in a variety of ways.

Although this software was initially released in 1998 (as Rhino Scout) and has been around ever since, not enough fantasy players really know enough about it. Ultra conservative marketing is somewhat to blame, as is the complexity of the program -- it contains so much stuff that casual users and inexperienced fantasy baseball enthusiasts are quite intimidated by it. There are also a host of other reasons why I've never gotten rich off the darn thing, although it has done well enough that it has been continually enhanced and sold for 12 years now.

I really love this baseball software (I'm a little biased!) and have been using it to run my fantasy league for 13 years (since the 1st beta version) and to prepare for my rotisserie auctions for many years now. I've also used the live draft tracking / management tools since they became available in 2005, and have had great success with them. Since 2000, I've finished in-the-money (top 4) every year in our HARL league and have captured 4 HARL championships. I owe much of that success to the fantastic draft prep and stats analysis of Rhino Baseball.

One major feature of Rhino Baseball that non-users don't know anything about are the Draft Planning tools in Rhino Baseball; in particular the Draft Assistant, Draft Plan Analyzer, and Draft Advisor. They're definitely unique to this software program; I haven't seen anything else like them in any other software package. So just what is a draft plan?

Many inexperienced rotisserie GM's make the mistake of grabbing a set of player projections, crunching player dollar values off of those projected stats, printing out player rankings (sorted by dollar value), and then thinking they're done with their draft prep. Unless you're in a league full of newbies, you haven't gone far enough in your draft preparation. Dollar Values and player rankings are great, but they must live and die within the context of two major things: Your Fantasy Team Budget and the Statistical Goals you need to reach in order to win. The simple facts are: (1) you cannot afford to fill out your roster solely with superstars, and (2) just because a given player has a high projected dollar value doesn't mean he's the perfect fit for your team at a given point during the auction.

Here's where Rhino Baseball comes to the rescue. Rhino Baseball includes a really neat function called the Draft Assistant. It lets you search through the available players for your draft, and build a POSSIBLE ROSTER of players for your fantasy team. Each player's DRAFT PRICE is based on his projected dollar value, although you can tweak it as necessary (e.g. perhaps you think you can get a player for his Optimal Bid price, generally 70% to 85% of his projected value).



Building these draft rosters or DRAFT PLANS is an eye opening experience, not to mention a hell of a lot of fun. You quickly realize that you've got many tough choices to make. You cannot afford all the studs. So do you spend the money on 1B Lance Berkman to get his great OBA and top-notch run production, or do you grab 2B Brandon Phillips who offers a nice power/speed blend at a position which lacks depth after the top 3 or 4 guys are drafted? Can you afford to pay for a stud Closer and 3 excellent Starting Pitchers? How many dirt cheap $1 guys (one bid unit) must you draft to compensate for all that money you're spending on studs? These are the kinds of choices that the Draft Assistant alerts you to. It helps you build a great team that's WITHIN YOUR BUDGET.

The really neat thing about Draft Assistant is that you can create MULTIPLE draft plans (budgets). I often build 6 or 7 of them. Once I've spent the time to do that, I open the Draft Plan Analyzer function to evaluate which of my plans is gives me the best chance to win. Here's how that works.

In the Draft Plan Analyzer, you enter your STAT GOALS into a popup window for all the stat categories your fantasy league uses. For instance, if you play in a 5x5 league that uses Batting Average, Runs Scored, RBI, Home Runs, Stolen Bases, Wins, Saves, ERA, Strikeouts, and WHIP, you enter a target value for each of those stat categories. This is the stat level that you want your team to reach. Generally, it's going to be the stats level you'll need to reach in order to finish 3rd in each category (or perhaps 4th in a large league with 13 or more teams). I usually look at the last few years of our HARL fantasy league stats to derive realistic stat goals for my team.

Once you've entered your goals, you click a button and the Draft Plan Analyzer does the heavy lifting. It computes the projected stats for each of your selected draft plans (you can select all 7 at once if you like), compares those projections against your given Stat Goals, and calculates a Plus/Minus Factor for each plan. The plan with the largest plus-factor gives you the best shot to achieve your goals and garner enough points in your league standings to win. That's the draft plan that becomes my PRIMARY draft plan to follow on Draft Day. The 2nd best draft plan serves as my fallback option or SECONDARY plan.

Armed with these draft plans, I use them during my live rotisserie auction using the program's Draft Advisor tool. Rhino Baseball and its associated SQL database can be loaded right onto your laptop and you can take it with you to your annual draft. There are several "Live Draft" related functions, but I won't delve into them now. Most of them are for tracking which players are still available (ranked by best-to-worst value), adjusting player prices due to draft inflation/deflation, checking Drafted Rosters for all the teams, looking at Projected Fantasy Team Stats at any point of the draft, and so forth. But the coolest and most helpful tool in my opinion is the Draft Advisor function.

The Draft Advisor function lets you look at a selected draft plan (usually your Primary plan, unless you've gone to your fallback plan). You can see which players you've drafted (highlighted in green), which are still available (not highlighted), and which players (highlighted in red) your fellow owners have drafted out from under your nose (bastards!!!). For players who have been poached by someone else, you can click on a player then click the Recommended Replacements button to find suitable available players whose stats-production and player-values are similar to that player who was in your original plan. This is a huge help, and let's you quickly adjust your Draft Plan on the fly. It also keeps you on track Budget-wise, so you know when you've got extra money to spend (time to pounce!) and when you need to cool your jets and sit back.

On the right-side of the Draft Advisor screen, you can also see how the team you've drafted so far are stacking up against your Stat Goals. How short are you on Home Runs or Stolen Bases? Can I stop worring about ERA and Saves? It gives you a good idea of where your strengths and weaknesses are, so you can draft accordingly. If you're solid in power but are severely lacking in speed, you'll need to pay, pay, pay for the best available Stolen Base guys.

Drafting based on pure dollar values is a recipe for disaster. The Draft Advisor takes the core data (projections, dollar values, available players, frozen players, statistical goals), and helps you FOCUS your attention on what you need to do to win. Plans do change in mid-draft -- often a lot. But in order to succeed and win, my strong belief is that you need to "work your plan during the draft". It's hard to be successful if you just wing it and go entirely on gut instinct.

Those draft plan and advisor tools are really what makes Rhino Baseball Deluxe and Draft Magic (the draft-only version) great from a draft prep and management perspective. I wish more people knew about it and learned to use it to their advantage. I know there are a few guys in my HARL league who have used other software packages for their draft prep and tracking. They continually fail to beat me. I wonder why?

Peace out!

Color it Purple

Just a quickie post today...

 

Like to keep on top of the interesting news in the world of tabletop games? Most serious gamers have heard of the major gaming sites such as BoardGameGeek, The Miniatures Page, and BoardGame News.

 

One website you may never have seen is The Purple Pawn, a website founded by Yehuda Berlinger which covers a wide assortment of board games, miniatures, classic games, wargames, RPGs, card games, and electronic games. It's a great blog-like site, and one which I heartily recommend checking out.

 

-Sevy-

 

Gamer Perspective -- March 11

Hopefully.... maybe just maybe.... perhaps.... Those are the types of words & phrases that pop into my head when I want to blog, game, paint miniatures, or start reading a new book that's been sitting on my nightstand for 3 months, but I just don't make the time for it. I've been in Hopefully-Maybe-Perhaps mode for awhile now. And dammit, I need to break out of that mode!

So apologies to all those blog readers who were about to give up on me because I've been practically AWOL the past few months. I'm still kicking.

Anyway... Enough personal crap. What's been going on in my gaming life?

Sword of Severnia

I've briefly mentioned this before, but I'm currently developing a fantasy miniatures wargame called Sword of Severnia. I've been working on this game for just over 3 years; pretty much full-time the past 2 years. Things are coming along quite nicely, especially over the past six-to-eight months, and I'm finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. With persistence and one final big push of work, I'm hopeful that I'll get this darn game published in the later-half of 2009. Join me in crossing your fingers and toes!

Late last-year, my miniatures wargaming group and chief playtesters (known as the Sultans of Severnia) began joining me in a monthly Sultans Game Day held at my house. We've enjoyed several really fun get-togethers and have been playing Sword of Severnia (SoS) exclusively these past few months. Over that time, a menagerie of fantasy races and cultures have been battling it out for tabletop supremacy and we've really gotten to dive down deep into the underlying SoS game system. After numerous rule changes and system tweaks, I'm finally starting to feel satisfied with the wargame design. The game is certainly fun and challenging, encourages the use of smart tactics, includes some neat elements of surprise and tension, and is tremendously customizable and replayable. And I'm finally starting to get the typical playtime pared down to my goal of 3 hours.

The Sultans meet this Sunday for our next set of battles, and I'll keep you posted on how that goes. I'm hoping that we finally hit the point of saying "okay, the rules are looking tight, it's time for Sevy to start hammering away at the WarBuilder software."

WarBuilder is a desktop software application for the PC that works hand-in-hand with the Sword of Severnia tabletop wargame system. It enables wargamers to create customized regiments (units) and characters (leaders, heroes, magicians, specialists), generate army point and victory point values for them, and print stat-cards listing the critical game statistics and special rules for your troops. In essence, there's no need to buy supplemental "army books" for this wargame or build rosters by hand; all your army building and organization is done via the WarBuilder software. It will even create printed cheatsheets that include the specific spells and special abilities that apply to your army, so you won't have to constantly reference the rulebook during play.

I've already designed a good chunk of the WarBuilder database and have programmed one major function, so at least that's a good start. Once the rules stabilize to a safe point, I'll resume design/programming on the core Troop Builder and Character Builder program functions.


Cold Wars

This weekend is the Cold Wars miniature wargaming convention in Lancaster, PA. With the terrible economic situation which has hit many folks in America quite hard (including my family), I almost decided to skip this year's convention. But it looks like I'll be heading down to the con on Friday with one of my buddies for a day of wargaming fun. It's always a blast.

I'm certainly going to curtail my spending this time, to about 1/3 to 1/4 of my usual amount -- sorry vendors! Unfortunately, paying the bills is more important than buying hordes of model soldiers right now. Plus, I haven't painted a single figure since my last model shopping spree in November at Fall In. So my new Eureka frog warriors, Beowulf barbarians, West Wind mummies, WarGods gator-men, and Front Rank foot knights remain the shiny color of tin. Not to mention I've got a whole slew of Gnome Wars arquebusiers and halberdiers to paint, and need to get off my butt and finish the paint-jobs on some trolls I started awhile ago.

My goal was to paint a LOT more this year, and so far, I've failed miserably on that accord. Once April rolls around and the crazy preseason baseball crush is over, my "fun schedule" frees up somewhat and provides me with more time to paint. And now that we've got regular games of Sword of Severnia going on, I'm more eager than ever to get some new troops to the table. So Hopefully-Maybe-Perhaps.....

My buying focus at this Cold Wars will be painted figures. Since my budget is quite limited, I probably won't end up with all that much stuff. I refuse to buy complete crap, and nicely painted minis usually aren't cheap, so I need to be very particular with my purchases. Here's hoping for some great finds in the Flea Market!

I'm kinda torn of just what to buy. A typical Sword of Severnia army is around 60-75 figures (12 units plus characters), so that's small enough to build several armies. I've already got enough figs to field about 4 or 5 different armies (goblins/trolls, arthurian-style knights, undead, elves, and dwarves/gnomes). I'm also trying to round out a decent swamp-army (reptilians, gator-men, dinosaurs, frog-men), a Krone barbarian force (vikings, valkyries, ice trolls, yeti, giants), and a mythic Jartan force (hoplites, centaurs, minotaurs, greek monsters). I'm also keen on building up a Broog army (beastmen, dogmen, deermen, anubis warriors, wulfen). And more than anything, I'd like to beef up my cavalry in just about every force. I guess my problem is that I love everything, and just can't choose 1 or 2 favorite armies. They're all good!

Anyway... maybe Kev and I will snap some good pictures at Cold Wars and be able to share them with the blog readers sometime soon. Stay tuned.


Board Game Roundup

It has been a fairly quiet few months for me in the boardgame world. My good friend Wally and I got to play a game of Wizard Kings in late-December. It was great fun and truth be told, I'm itching to play it again.

For those of you not familiar with the game, Wizard Kings is a strategic level fantasy wargame played on geomorphic maps which can be assembled in a wide variety of ways. Like most of the wargames designed by Columbia Games, your troops are represented by wooden blocks with colored stickers attached to one side which show the type of unit and it's corresponding attack, movement, and strength stats. These blocks are nice & chunky, visually appealing, easy to use, and simulate fog-of-war superbly.

What sets Wizard Kings apart from most of the other block wargames is it's interesting variety of troops and maps, which provide for truly awesome replayability. Many people describe this game as a "kit style" wargame, where you can customize your armies to some degree, build a huge variety of battle-maps to fight on, and design your own wargame scenarios. I absolutely love games like that (I'm a miniature wargamer after all, where creativity is king). As much as I really like a historical wargame like Hammer of the Scots, it's not a game I can see playing 30 times without getting bored with it. Conversely, with 7 different armies, a nice variety of maps with interesting terrain effects, support for multi-player games as well as 2-player, and the ability to design your own battle scenarios, Wizard Kings is a game with lots of staying power.

Other than WK, I haven't been playing any boardgames of late. Hopefully, we'll start up some regular weekend boardgame sessions this Spring. This always seems to be the time when people free up and shake-off the winter doldrums. There are definitely some great games in my collection that I'm eager to revisit, and some new-to-me games that I'm hoping will hit the table soon (such as El Grande, Aladdin's Dragons, Prophecy, Wallenstein, Last Night on Earth, Downfall of Pompeii, Hannibal, and Big City). I've also got my eyes on a few new or upcoming releases that are must-buys: Age of Conan, Small World, and the new edition of Cosmic Encounter by FFG.

So that's the scoop for now. Hopefully-Maybe-Perhaps... I can start blogging more frequently! Perhaps I just need more encouragement? Or maybe a swift kick in the nads? Option #1 sure sounds better!

Peace and pray for Spring to arrive soon!

Courseware for Game Designers

I wanted to post this link from one of our blog readers (Kelly Sonora) because I thought it was interesting...

70+ Open Courseware Links for Game Designers and Developers

http://www.bachelorsdegreeonline.com/blog/2009/70-open-courseware-links-for-game-designers-and-developers.

Caution. It's VERY "mathy". Hope that you'll find it educational. Peace!

-Steve-

 

A Detour into a New World

For awhile there you might have thought that this fun little Blog had died a grisly death. What has it been, about 2 months and I've posted nary a word? The silence has been deafening.

Fortunately, I've held off the saliva-dripping hounds gnawing at my ankles and have escaped with my dignity and my tootsies intact. Well, at least my tootsies. Reclaiming my dignity may take some time. You see, I've made one of those major life-altering decisions to leave my current full-time job as a micro ISV owner (not entirely, as my tiny software development company will live on as a part-time gig), and return to working full-time in Corporate America.

There are several reasons why I'm making this move, but the overriding consideration is a purely financial one. Despite pouring lots of time, money, creativity, software development skill, patience, and hard work into my micro business, it has never become the money-maker that I had originally hoped it would become. Developing a great product and providing top-notch customer support for it isn't nearly enough to succeed. You've got to out-market and out-sell a large portion of your competitors. That's extremely difficult to do when your biggest competition can spend $1,000 for every $1 that you spend to promote your product. Eventually, you have to confront reality and admit that you're not going to win every fight.

There have been successes and accomplishments to be extremely proud of, and many new friends made along the way, but in the end the reality is that except for a few very fortunate software entrepreneurs, working for someone else pays a helluva lot better.

So I'm in the midst of re-assimilating into the world of "working for somebody else". On one hand, it really sucks. I will sorely miss the benefit of choosing my own projects to work on; projects that I'm intensely passionate about. I'll miss picking my own development tools to use, and implementing my own personal procedures and methodologies. I'll miss setting my own work-schedule. But I won't miss being underpaid, working mostly in isolation and anonymity, working lots of nights & weekends, and frequently feeling completely overwhelmed by the sheer variety of tasks that need to be done to keep a micro ISV running to even a mild degree of success. I've "worked for the man" before. Let me say that it is a much easier job and usually less-stressful than running your own business.

What's hardest for me to deal with right now is the loss of dignity that comes with moving from full-time self-employment to hunting for a position working for somebody else. Most of the people who you'll interview with have absolutely no concept of what it takes to run a small software development business or all the things you do to make it happen. They don't realize all the hats you've had to wear and all the things you've had to learn entirely on your own.

The simple truth is that you come from a totally different world than they do and they don't really value it like they should. If they want a VB.Net developer and you've been using PowerBuilder or Java for years, they scoff and kick you to the curb. If it's NOT EXACTLY what they want, they move on. It doesn't matter whether you've designed software for 20 years and can probably run circles around them as an analyst & developer, or can learn the language well enough to be teaching it to new programming recruits by next year. Nope. They want what they want; who cares if you actually ran your own company or not? I'm slowly learning to swallow my pride, like it or not.

Working for someone else will probably always be "just a job" to me. It helps pay the bills, but it's unlikely to become something that I'm completely passionate about. Who knows, maybe I'll catch lightning in a bottle? But I kinda doubt it. Most people just aren't that lucky.

That's why I'm keeping my business around as a part-time hobby gig. That will be one way to satisfy my personal desires, to work on stuff that I truly love. I can dabble in what I enjoy and will no longer need to worry about whether it's a big financial success or not.

I'll see how it all works out. Until then, I'm taking a detour into a New World; one with bosses, co-workers, time-sheets, business attire, rush-hour traffic, meetings, and office politics, but most of all, one with health benefits, regular vacation, and a steady paycheck. Wish me luck!

Fearsome Arena

Last night, I finally got the chance to play some boardgames after a gaming hiatus of about a month or more. The four of us (myself and my friends Kevin, Wally, and Hunter) played two games which were completely new to us: Fearsome Floors (by Friedemann Friese) and Colossal Arena (by Reiner Knizia).

What follows is my overall impression of each game...


FEARSOME FLOORS

The gist of Fearsome Floors is that each player controls a band of hapless travelers who have entered a gothic fortress that's home to a terrifying and very hungry monster named Furunkulus. You are attempting to move your group of travelers through this dungeon and escape out the exit before you're eaten by the monster and before your fellow players get their travelers to safety.

In a 4-player game, the first player to get 3 of his travelers safely out of the fortress wins the game, provided that the preset time-limit (14 turns) doesn't expire. So in essence, this is a race game with lots of suspense.

Movement is very straightforward for the travelers. They can move X number of squares horizontally/vertically when it's their turn to move. Move rates are listed on the traveler's playing pawn which is a 2-sided disc. The disc gets flipped over after moving, so a traveler's move rate increases and decreases from turn-to-turn. Travelers can hide behind stones scattered throughout the dungeon, or push them around to block or open up pathways. There are also blood pools that you can slide through to move faster.

Where the real fun lies is in the monster's movement. The slobbering Furunkulus moves towards the closest visible traveler. If he lands on your location, he eats you (gulp!). He can also squish you by pushing your pawn and the stone you're hiding behind into a wall. The monster also moves much farther than the travelers, can push mutiple objects ahead due to his immense strength, can step on magic portals to rapidly teleport to another location, and can even walk through walls and suddenly emerge into the midst of a throng of startled travelers on the opposite side of the dungeon! In short, he's a mean eating machine!

Strategically, you're not only trying to avoid having your travelers get eaten by the monster and outrace him to the exit door, but you're trying to goad old Funky into chasing down your opponents and turning them into lunchtime snacks. Sometimes this means sacrificing one of your travelers to ensure that a whole bunch of opposing travelers get eaten. Oftentimes, clever positioning will force the monster to alter his course, squishing opponents into walls, stepping on teleportation portals, or walking through walls to thwart travelers who thought they were in a safe spot. Sometimes, you have to screw over the other guy to survive!

I thoroughly enjoyed Fearsome Floors. Although the rules are on the simple side, this is a challenging mid-weight strategy game that plays in about an hour. There's lots of chaos which keeps things interesting (the dungeon floorplan is ever-changing and the hungry monster twists and turns a lot), and the light-horror theme lends itself to lots of laughs. I found myself cheering for Funky to "eat, eat, eat" whenever he rumbled towards my opponents' pieces.


COLOSSAL ARENA

The second game we played was Colossal Arena, a card game by the good Doctor himself, Reiner Knizia. In this game, mythical monsters are duking it out for supremacy in a gladiatorial arena. Eight monsters enter this grand free-for-all, but in the end, only 3 are left standing.

The fight lasts for 5 rounds. During this time, you are placing bets on the monsters who you think will make it out alive once the dust has settled. The earlier you place a bet during the monster slug-a-thon, the more risk you're taking, since there are more beasties still alive. But betting early potentially reaps big rewards. Bets placed later on in the competition are much safer, but pay out much less.

The cool part of Colossal Arena is that you have a direct hand in how the fighting turns out.

You have a hand of 8 combat cards which you may play onto the table to influence how well (or how poorly) a particular monster is faring in the fight. Each combat card identifies a monster and has a combat value of 0 to 10. During a round of combat, players are laying cards on the table, trying to allocate high valued cards to the monsters they want to win (those they've bet on) and low valued cards to those beasts who they want to suffer defeat (those of opposing players who have bet many chips on them).

There's an additional twist to all of this action. If you're the BACKER of a given monster (the person who has placed the highest bet on him), then you can use that monster's Special Power whenever you play a combat card associated with him. The special powers allow you to do all kinds of neat stuff like take cards from other players, play 2 combat cards, discard a combat card that someone has already laid on the table, draw extra combat cards, etc. Taking advantage of the unique abilities of the monsters you're backing adds a whole layer of nuanced strategy to the game that's easily overlooked when you're just learning to play the game. But to me, this variety is what truly moves Colossal Arena from a simple betting game to something great.

I'm not averse to "screw your opponent" type of games, and Colossal Arena is certainly that style of game. In order for your bets to payoff, you need to ensure that your behemoths come out on top, and that means whomping on your enemies in every way possible. This isn't a game to play with your Mother or those with tissue-thin sensitivity. Being a fantasy fan, I also love the monster slug-a-thon theme and it's successfully executed by gorgeous card art.

I highly recommend Colossal Arena. It plays fast (45-60 minutes), is highly interactive and never dull, and packs a lot of replay value for your $20 bucks. Go get it.

Out of Kilter

My life has been out of kilter lately. You can thank my Mother-in-Law for that. You see, she's been staying with us for over a month as she recovers from major surgery to fix her broken hip.

Oh, we've been getting along just fine. So I won't go into Mother-in-Law Bashing mode. It's just that having another adult staying in your home messes with your usual daily routines and really twirls all aspects of your life into unexpected directions. Couple that with the fact that I spent many October evenings watching and rooting for my Phillies in the major league baseball playoffs, and not a whole lot of tabletop gaming, mini-painting, or other extracurricular stuff was being done.

Of course as we all know, the Fightin' Phils won the World Series (WOOHOO!!!), their first in 28 years, so it was entirely worth it. But I'm glad the series is over; my heart couldn't take much more of that nail-biting, gut-wrenching excitement!

Anyway.... I've had no time or desire to blog lately. Hopefully, that will change sometime soon, once my life returns to normal.

At least one major gaming thing is on my horizon.... I'm heading off to FALL IN this weekend! Looks like all of my miniature wargaming buddies are off doing family-related things this week, so I'm going solo. That's a bit of a bummer, but such is the life of 40-something gamers.

This time around, I'm going to focus my wargame shopping on some cool stuff that I've consciously backed away from over the past year or so. Namely, unpainted miniatures. I already have overflowing tubs full of unpainted figures to paint, but it has been awhile since I've added anything new to my cache of tiny tin men. But it's time to unshackle my slobbering inner lead junkie and have at it. SULTAN... NEED... TIN... slobber slobba drip drip....

I recently became a member of the Old Glory Army. This shopping club, which costs $50 per year, entitles you to 40% off most products sold on the Old Glory website and at HMGS East shows. You're also entered into regular prize drawings for free goodies and get a set of 12 free specialty figures with your first order. You need to spend $120 bucks to break even, before you start realizing large savings. But that's not very hard to do, especially since Old Glory has their own massive miniature range to pick from, and you can buy models from Crusader USA (great line of ancients and dark age minis), Blue Moon (cool pulp, horror, swashbuckler, and Robin Hood figures), West Wind (love their Dwarf Wars and Gothic Horror ranges), and Ghost Miniatures (some classic fantasy figs -- great dwarves, ice trolls, orc, and barbarians).

But the thing that really sold me on the Old Glory Army membership was their recent release of Old Glory Painted. These are painted versions of some of OG's metal minis. They're initially releasing Romans and Zulus, but within the next few months we'll see a host of new historical periods offered (including Vikings, Greek Hoplites, Persians, Macedonians) and even Dwarves and Orcs. NICE! The jury is still out on the quality of the figs & their associated paint jobs, but I'm optimistic and hope to see some of the Romans for myself at FALL IN.

Besides whipping out the Old Glory Army card and spending money on the previously mentioned stuff, I'm definitely interested in visiting the Eureka stand. In addition to their awesome warrior Frogs (gotta get some!), I'm smitten with their new range of Beowulf figures which are truly excellent sculpts and full of character. The Empire of the Petal Throne stuff is also enticing. I'm hoping that Age of Glory will still have some Front Rank medievals on hand (they're not going to be carrying them anymore -- damn shame). These are my favorite models for 100 Years War and War of the Roses by far. And finally, I need to check out the WarGods stuff for assorted goodies (Anubi, Sebeki, Spartans, Typhons, Yeti, etc.).

Okay... almost finally.... I forgot about the cool stuff from Bronze Age and Hydra Miniatures. I'm not a huge sci-fi gamer, but some of their stuff is too cool to resist. The Hydra minis have a retro sci-fi feel that really pushes all the right buttons for me.

As for painted stuff, I'll definitely visit Stan Johansen's stand, as his fantasy stuff is beautiful and reasonably priced. Plus, he's a great guy and I love supporting the truly good people in this hobby.

Anyway... Enough rumblings for now. I'll report back here once I return from my journey down to Gettysburg and FALL IN 2008. It will be VERY interesting to see if the piss-poor economy has a negative impact on the convention. I hope not, but I fear it will hurt somewhat.