A month ago I announced the impending release of my first print-on-demand (POD) game, Cribbage Dice. Unfortunately, once my sample copy arrived I discovered that The Game Crafter’s (TGC) d12s are nearly sequential, which means they can’t be used as randomizers.
More fortunately, TGC’s Hook Box Challenge has inspired me to create three new games. Two of them proved to be untenable for the contest, which requires the entire game to fit into 18 cards and the box that holds them, but will be great as larger games. The third, Spellslingers, is nearing completion, and will be available for POD purchase shortly thereafter. The contest deadline is in six weeks, so expect frequent announcements on Twitter.
While I have been silent here for the past month, it’s not because of depression this time. If you follow me on Twitter or facebook then you may know that I have been busy getting read for the release of my first print-on-demand game, Cribbage Dance (that link doesn’t work yet). My sample copy should arrive in the next day or so. If all is well with it then the game will go on sale on November 13th at the link above.
I have also started work on several new games, including some for The Game Crafter’s “Hook Box Challenge”, which requires entries to fit entirely within an 18-card hook box. It seemed like such an interesting challenge that my wife is also entering. It will be her first attempt at designing a game from scratch, so she hasn’t even told me what it’s about so that I won’t be tempted to influence her design. Needless to say, I’m excited to see what she comes up with.
I’m also nearing completion of a free game for Looney Pyramids – I just need to get a few more people to playtest the rulebook itself. Once Lura and I have finished our entries for the contest we’ll get back to finishing up the Looney Pyramids game we’re designing together.
The first thing Lura and I did after getting home from our honeymoon 15 years ago next week was adopt an adorable stray mutt we named Meekay. Wednesday afternoon he breathed his last breath. I have of course started a tribute poem, but in the meantime here are some hilarious dog haiku to serve as a memorial.
Note: The authorship of these is matter of some debate. If you know who actually wrote them please let know so I can give due credit.
Love my master;
Thus I perfume myself with
This long-rotten mouse.
I lie belly-up
In the sunshine, happier than
You ever will be
Today I sniffed
Many dog behinds—I celebrate
By kissing your face.
I sound the alarm!
Paper boy—come to kill us all—
Look! Look! Look! Look! Look!
I lift my leg and
Whiz on each bush.
Hello, Spot—Sniff this and weep
I sound the alarm!
Garbage man—come to kill us all—
Look! Look! Look! Look! Look!
How do I love thee?
The ways are numberless as
My hairs on the rug.
I sound the alarm!
Mail carrier—come to kill us all—
Look! Look! Look! Look! Look!
My human is home!
I am so ecstatic I have
Made a puddle
I sound the alarm!
Gardener—come to kill us all—
Look! Look! Look! Look! Look!
I Hate my choke chain—
Look, world, they strangle me!
Ack Ack Ack Ack Ack Ack!
Sleeping here, my chin
On your foot—no greater bliss—well,
Maybe catching mice
Look in my eyes and
Deny it. No human could
Love you as much I do
The cat is not all
Bad—she dots the neighborhood
With Tootsie Rolls
Dig under fence—why?
Because it’s there. Because it’s
There. Because it’s there.
I am your best friend,
Now, always, and especially
When you are eating.
My owners’ mood is
Romantic—I lie near their
Feet. I fart a big one.
During Pokémon League on Free RPG Day several years ago I ran an OVA one-shot in which all of the players were different Eeveelutions. Now I’m planning on running that game again in order to playtest my trpg. I adapted the original seven characters into it, and also made Sylveon. But I’d like to also offer players a couple of options that don’t yet exist. Here are the stats for the canonical Eeveelutions:
Eeveelution
HP/At/Df/SA/SD/Sp
Role
Espeon
65/65/60/130/95/110
Special Sweeper
Flareon
65/130/60/95/110/65
Physical Sweeper, Special Tank
Glaceon
65/60/110/130/95/65
Special Sweeper, Mixed Tank
Jolteon
65/65/60/110/95/130
Special Sweeper
Leafeon
65/110/130/60/65/95
Physical Sweeper/Tank
Sylveon
95/65/65/110/130/60
Special Sweeper/Tank
Umbreon
95/65/110/60/130/65
Mixed Tank
Vaporeon
130/65/60/110/95/65
Special Sweeper/Tank
The average stats among all Pokémon are between 80 and 88; average Attack is 95. Pokémon are generally only considered competitive if all of the stats they need to do their particular job are at least 100 (so Espeon’s 130 Special Attack and 110 Speed are ideal for a Special Sweeper). Eeveelutions always have two stats that are above average (110, 130), one that is average (95), and three that are garbage (65, 65, 60).
After spending a couple of hours spreadsheeting, I came to another realization about Eeveelutions: their top three stats are nearly always at least two of the top three stats of all Pokémon of their type, but not in the same order. For example, the highest average stats of all Electric Pokémon are, in order: SA 102, Sp 90, and SD 84. Jolteon’s are Sp 130, SA 110, and SD 95.
With all of that in mind, I used the average stats of their types to create some others so I can make them as pre-gens. I also made sure not to duplicate any existing Eeveelution, which limited my options.
Eeveelution
HP/At/Df/SA/SD/Sp
Role
Steel
65/130/110/65/95/60
Physical Sweeper, Mixed Tank
Dragon
110/130/65/95/60/65
Mixed Sweeper
Flying
65/95/60/130/65/110
Mixed Sweeper
Ground
130/95/110/65/65/60
Physical Sweeper/Tank
Ghost
60/130/95/65/110/65
Physical Sweeper, Mixed Tank
I might make the rest of the types eventually, but that’s it for now. It will interesting to see how close I got if Game Freak ever adds any of those types as Eeveelutions.
I’ve been fighting a cold for the past several weeks (finally getting over it is the first thing going in the jar this week) so I haven’t been posting, but I haven’t been completely idle, either. I have invented two new games this week. One of them is for Looney Pyramids, and I’ll be starting a second round of playtesting for the latest version at the FLGS tomorrow.
The other game is more complicated (imagine if you could design your own tournament-legal figures for a game like HeroClix), and it was while using our Pyramid Arcade to test out ideas for it that I came up with the other game. I’ll go into more detail when I release the Pyramid version as a free game – next week if I can get enough playtesters tomorrow.
Several years ago we sold the vast majority of our Yu-Gi-Oh! collection to our favorite FLGS, reserving only our favorite two or three decks each. But on Saturday we realized that we haven’t even used those few decks since then, so Wednesday afternoon we used the FLGS’ nice big tables to sift through the remainder to find any cards that had art we particularly liked or might be useful as tokens for Magic. We sorted the rest by rarity, ready to sell tomorrow, and were pleasantly surprised by how much some of them are worth.
While at the FLGS I even got to do some playtesting with the store’s resident master of board games, who gave me a great idea for the game. Before I got inspired to make the game I had been working on adapting Final Fantasy Tactics‘ Samurai job to GURPS. I had hoped to have it ready for Thursday is GURPS Day yesterday, but mysteriously hurt my hand either Tuesday night or while we were running errands on Wednesday.
So a pretty great week overall despite the injury.
The debate of whether or not to use serifs in fonts has raged almost since Gutenberg invented the printing press back in 1440. What are serifs, you may ask? Serifs are the little decorative marks on letters, like the bars on the top and bottom of the capital “I”. Sans-serif literally means “without serifs”.
Since I write both fiction and rulebooks, I looked through an assortment of our roleplaying books and novels, and also some boardgame rules.
In our roleplaying books serifs are very dominant. I checked a sampling of our GURPS 3/4e, D&D 4e, OVA, and HackMaster 4/5e books, and they were exclusively serif fonts other than tables and sidebars in HM; sidebars, examples, and sample characters in OVA; and monster blocks in D&D. In other words, they use serifs unless the text is small enough that the serifs might make it harder to read.
Possibly the oldest novel in our collection is my much-loved and rather battered 1978 edition of Heinlein’s Space Cadet. It uses sans-serif for chapter headings and page headers, but serifs otherwise. My wife’s 2013 library book is the same – and some people say that’s the problem, but I’ll go into that shortly.
Boardgame rules are less cohesive simply because they come in a number of formats: sheet or two of paper, pamphlet, booklet, the box or similar material (Ultimate Stratego’s rules are written on the card used to divide the board while players set up). From what I have seen, those that print on card- or pasteboard tend to use serifs, while those on simple paper don’t. Munchkin uses fonts that fit the game’s mood, resulting in a mixture of serif and sans fonts in booklets. Pyramid Arcade includes a 75-page rulebook, entirely in sans serif.
The serif debate is as nuanced as any, but most people seem to fall into one of two groups:
* In long lines of uninterrupted text serif fonts are easier to read because the serifs help guide the eye.
* Sans-serif fonts are “cleaner”, and therefore easier to read. Serif fonts only seem easier to read because they are what we are used to.
I fall into that first group, but also agree that sans-serif fonts look “cleaner”, but in mixed case sans serifs can be confusing. Think of how the word Illinois looks without its serifs. In all caps or or all lowercase it doesn’t matter, but in mixed case capital “I” and lowercase “l” look exactly the same.
As a compromise I have developed the habit of using sans-serif (Arial for screen or Verdana for print) for headings, especially if they are all caps, and serif (Times New Roman) for text. Purely out of curiosity, I mocked up a fake page from my roleplaying game’s rulebook with one written completely in Times New Roman (right), and the other with Verdana headings (left).
There are two Western-themed gaming Kickstarters going on right now by two of our favorite small game companies: Aces & Eights: Reloaded by Kenzer and Company, makers of HackMaster and Knights of the Dinner Table, and Six Shooters – Western Themed Dice by Black Oak Workshop, who we have backed twice before, for Bullseye d6, then Bullseye d4/8.
If you are a big fan of Wild West roleplaying games, then you may already be aware of award-winning Aces & Eights. What you may not know is that it was derived from Hackmaster 4e, which was itself evolved from AD&D 2E. HackMaster 5e, in turn, was adapted from A&8. To celebrate its 10th anniversary, KenzerCo is releasing a second edition, and it looks like the book will be a gorgeous, full-color, leather-bound tome like HackMaster 5e.
Even if you have no interest in the Wild West, its Shot Clock is an easy to way to resolve gunfire in a realistic manner without having to deal with cover and hit locations. Even better, the Kickstarter says it “can also be played as a skirmish-level miniatures battle.” I don’t have any particular interest in Wild West roleplaying, but we may well go for the $15 Showdown miniatures skirmish game rules.
Black Oak Workshop specializes in custom dice Kickstarters. We love our Bullseye dice, and are exceedingly happy with both the quality and how quickly they arrived. Like their previous project, this time the dice are 19mm rather than the 16mm of their previous offerings, which should make them much easier to read.
Take note that Aces & Eights is d20-based, while the Six Shooter dice are naturally d6s, but that didn’t stop Black Oak from backing Aces & Eights: Reloaded. Believe it or not, I actually heard about the A&8 Kickstarter from Black Oak Workshop before I did from Kenzer even though I’m on both mailing lists.
Steve Jackson just released a newly-updated ”Munchkin Thingies”. As a result I was finally able to fill in some gaps in my Munchkin Compatibility Chart, and add in the recently Kickstarted Munchkin Shakespeare (we’re excited about getting our copy).
I’m also finally getting around to moving my files over to the desktop computer I built last summer, and it’s going pretty smoothly, in large part thanks to Box and Mega because they automated the transfer of nearly all of my documents. Going from 4 to 16 gigs of memory for Windows 10 is a dream – even more so since Windows itself is on a solid state drive (SSD), which I bought thanks to the advice of one of my best friends since high school.
Free Win7/10 tip I just learned: You can move your My Documents folder quite effortlessly by simply right-clicking on it in the folder tree in Explorer, clicking Properties, then the Location tab. That’s great because SSDs have limited read/write cycles, while mechanical drives can generally be re-used until something actually breaks. Thus if you can keep your software on an SSD and data files on a mechanical drive, your programs will run much faster, but without frequent saves wearing the drive out prematurely (my motto is “save early, save often” to avoid losing my work).
And we had several TCG-related happinesses over the past week: We got this Saturday’s Pokémon League Cup scheduled (with a Magic prerelease next week and Pokémon one the next), and I got to play in a sealed/demo for the Final Fantasy TCG. I can best describe FFTCG as Duel Masters or Kaijudo if they had been designed for adults rather than children. It moves the complexity scale a bit towards the Magic end, and even borrows some of its keywords (Haste, First Strike) and renames some others to make them better fit (Vigilance is “Brave”, Tap is “Dull”, Untap is “Activate”, etc.).
I can only make two relatively minor complaints about the game so far: the colors are too similar (Water and Ice are both blue, and Lightning is a very blue purple), making it hard to tell them apart, especially when foils get involved; and all of the power ratings end with “000” for no apparent mechanical reason – what I call the “Yu-Gi-Oh effect” or “Pokémon Effect”. In Pokémon every damaging move and every Pokémon HP is a multiple of 10, so you could erase that 0 from every card in the game and it would have no effect whatsoever. D&D 4e’s half-level bonus and 5e’s quarter-level bonus likewise serve only to make the numbers seem bigger even though they don’t actually make any difference mechanically since DCs and ACs go up right along with them.
But this is a Happiness jar, and that goes against the spirit of the idea, so I’ll get off my tangent now, and simply say that if you liked Duel Masters/Kaijudo but thought it was a bit too simplistic, or simply love Final Fantasy, give the game a look (they’ve got some great how-to-play videos. Even if you don’t play it, the cards are the highest quality CCG cards I have ever seen – and I owned an FLGS for three years! They are the same size as Magic cards, but significantly stiffer. If you were to look at the back of one without touching it, you would swear it was plastic, not paper. The art, of course, is amazing. So if you are an FF fan but don’t play card games, it still might be worth a look.
We are proud to announce Asheville’s Pokémon League Cup on Tax Day (April 15th for you those of you not dealing with taxes yet). One week later is the Magic prerelease for Amonkhet, and a week after that is the Pokémon prerelease for Guardians Rising. Naturally, that means there will be no League Challenge this month, but they will begin again in May.
As usual, I have updated my deck registration sheet, including Guardians Rising, which won’t be tournament legal until May 21. But I just made an interesting discovery: PokéGym has a fillable decklist you can fill out in your browser and print. If you do, please make sure it’s only one page, even if you have to double-side it. It’s not only good for the Earth, it reduces the volume of paper we have to store because we are required to keep the sheets for a while.
Had several good things in the last week. One was the big 50th wedding anniversary party for my parents on Sunday – a goal far too many people these days will never reach.
I also finally got back to work on the lite game I made and then abandoned five years ago. First thing was copyediting the original post. How it got past my usual meticulous proofreading is beyond me – the number of errors was appalling. But it’s fixed now, and version .2 is nearly done.
Frankly Speaking 