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after installing an anti-spam package on my system, hopefully this will keep out bogus registration.

*fingers crossed*

[DONATE!]

Through the end of the month, DriveThruRPG is offering an amazing deal.  If you donate $5 or $10 to them, they will double your donation and give it to Doctors Without Borders.  If you donate $20, it goes to DWB, but you also get almost $1,500 worth of PDF gaming product!  There's a lot of good stuff in here, including the Serenity RPG and core system, the Spycraft first edition (of which I was a beta tester and mentioned in the credits), a treatise on how to game with children, just all sorts of wonderful stuff.

So many people wanted to donate product to this collection that finally DriveThru had to say 'no more' and cut them off.  On top of that, they had to hire additional server capacity to handle the demand.

And you'll help Haiti: by the time you read this, they may have topped $150,000 for earthquake relief.

rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=78023&filters=0_0_0_0&free=1

One FYI: don't expect an instant download: they'll send you a key in a day or two.  I did my purchase about six hours ago or so and haven't received the download info yet.

DONATE!

No tests run: I screwed up my timing and didn't get to the game store until 8:45, by which time everyone was already tied up in other things.

But I did get my Spook School set updated to Beta 2.  Also got the outline for the rules for the new game written down, I knew what I wanted, just needed to set them down.

Location: Curious Games, Alamogordo, NM

I'll be running a revised Spook School, and also hope to get a new game printed out and ready to run.

And a note to people registering for membership: if your email address looks like bouncing your fingers on the keyboard to generate a random account, the likelihood of your registration being canceled goes up considerably, as does having an IP address originating in Russia or other countries known as spam havens.

I really hate having to lock membership, but that's the way it goes.  You can also expedite membership approval by sending me a message to my private email account, which I am not going to post here.  But if you have one of my business cards, you have my email address, so use it.

Spammers have discovered my board and started posting spam messages.  I've locked registration so that you will now have to be approved before you can post.

I apologize, and I'm hoping that eventually they'll leave me alone and I can open it up again to email confirmation.

We had a very good time last night at Curious Games.  Up first was a demo of Zombie Cafe which was received very well, lots of fun was had and the game was won by Samantha who was later rewarded with a Crown Royal dice bag for her efforts.

This was followed by THE FIRST playtest of Spook School, likely to be renamed before release.  The basic design proved to be fundamentally sound and I got lots of good feedback for the next playtest.  It was really put through the ringer by six people!  I made a couple of adjustments to the rules during play, and it was quickly determined that there was a problem with draw deck exhaustion.  I think two major changes will appear in the next generation: four player limit and six powers to win.  I prefer my games to allow six people, but I think that, considering the card mix and the strong desire to limit this game to a single deck of cards, that a four player limit will have to be.

Regardless, it seemed that a good time was had by all and that the game holds some promise.

After our test of Spook School, we brought out a copy of Bananagram.  I just posted a review of it in our Game Review section.  It was a huge amount of fun and you can get through a game in 5-10 minutes.

Following Bananagram we played a four-player card game called Arcana, where factions vie for resources in a city.  Think of four players sitting in a square formation.  Now overlay a diamond with each point between the players.  The points on your immediate left and right are your primary zones of control.  You control a guild struggling to control resources through political, spiritual, and military means, and failing that, out-right bribery.  Resources that you're trying to take in your zone of control let you play your cards face-down, resources outside of your ZOC you play your cards face-up.  The fifth pile in the middle of the diamond are face-up for everyone.  The guild houses give you special abilities that can greatly affect the game.

On the last round, my wife played a card that swapped a strongly-contested resource, that, combined with my play of a guild house that removed the highest resource from the game, gave her the win.

Arcana is an interesting game, but not entirely to my taste.  Still, I'd be willing to give it another shot some day.


And that wraps up our 11/14 game night!

Bananagrams was also mentioned in Pulp Gamers' Out of Character podcast, http://pulpgamer.com/outofcharacter/134711/pgoc-085-awkward/

This is an excellent award-winning game that is,  more or less, a combination of Scrabble, Boggle, and build your own crossword puzzle.  Players draw X number of letter tiles from the face-down pool of tiles (the "bunch"), 21 for a three-player game, and simultaneously reveal their letters then begin building crossword puzzle solutions.  If you use all of your letters, you call Peel and everyone takes a letter from the bunch.  If you have a letter that you don't want or can't use, call Dump, put it back in the bunch, and draw three more tiles.  After the last Peel, if there are fewer tiles remaining than there are players, the first person to use the last of their letters calls Bananas.  The other players may then look over their board for misspelled or wrong words, if they're found that player is called a Rotten Banana.

The game came out almost four years ago.  I learned of it recently on an old Pulp Gamer Family Night podcast (http://pulpgamer.com/familynight/), my wife was with me and it sounded good to her.  She's a huge Scrabble/Boggle/word game fan.  Last week we were at a Barnes & Noble and it was on the shelf and quickly in our hands.

It will set you back about $15 and is small enough to keep in your glove compartment.  You want to allow each player about 2 square feet of table space to build out, a common first-timer mistake is to start too low and you find yourself having to scoot your entire puzzle up.

The game is entirely self-contained: no need for pencil and paper or dice, and is available as a Facebook app and on Bebo.


If you have a player who is particularly strong, such as my wife who regularly does the New York Times Sunday Crossword, there are ways to handicap.  One suggestion is to have words related to a particular theme, but what we applied to my wife is that she could not do two-letter words.  She found it quite challenging (read: frustrating) and I won one game due to this.

It's a VERY competitive game, especially when one player starts calling Peel after Peel after Peel.  But it's a fun competitive game, not in the least bit cut-throat.


Heartily recommended.  It will be going with us on road trips as a permanent part of our travel game collection.


http://www.bananagrams-intl.com/index-us.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bananagrams

RinCon is a game convention in its second year in Tucson, AZ, organized by SAGA, the Southern Arizona Game Association.  It was held over Columbus Day weekend at the Tucson Convention Center and WAS A BLAST!  Guests of honor included Wil Wheaton, Jess Hartley and Kelley Barnes of White Wolf Games, Steve Jackson Games' Munchkin Czar Andrew Hackard, Shane Hensley who created the Deadlands RPG, John Wick who authored the Legend of the Five Rings and the 7th Sea RPGs, Paul Tevis game designer and creator of the Have Games, Will Travel podcast, Rick Loomis of Flying Buffalo, James Ernest of Cheap Ass Games fame and authors Mike Stackpole, Jeff Mariotte, and Janni Lee Simner.  Unfortunately I did not run any games as I did not get my schedule until after the program book cutoff, but I gave away several copies of Zombie Cafe to various podcasters, game stores, and to Wil Wheaton, hoping for some mention and buzz.  I attended an amazing number of panels on game design and podcasting and had a huge amount of fun.

I will DEFINITELY attend next year and get in early enough to have scheduled demos and playtests.  Who knows, if the tables are cheap enough, maybe I'll even buy a table in the dealer's room.

One thing that was totally coincidental and amazingly cool was the convention hotel was also hosting a VBOB gathering: Veterans of the Battle of the Bulge.  I could not serve in the military for various health reasons though my family has a history of service: my father's only brother died at Guadal Canal, various uncles and cousins served in World War II and Vietnam and their kids have served in the various Persian Gulf conflicts.  I spoke with several of these VBOB gentlemen and thanked them for their service.  World War II history has always been a weakness for me, so I pulled up the Bulge on my computer and did some reading, and was amused to find out that I was born on the official start date of the war: December 16.  A few years later, admittedly, but still it was an interesting little thing.

http://www.rincongames.com/

http://southernarizonagamersassociation.org/