Olympic Games?

Posted on September 22, 2015 by Quirkworthy

Olympic flagDid you know that chess and bridge are being considered for inclusion in the 2020 Olympic Games? This came up again today as lawyers for the English Bridge Union made the next step in their ongoing argument with Sports England as to whether Bridge is a sport or not.

Frankly, it’s all a daft piece of semantics that seems to be inspired wholly by the extra funding that is available to sports and not games. Want some free money? You can see the attraction in the right term applying.

However, greed aside, it made me think. If I could pick one game to be added to the Olympics, what would it be? Naturally here, when I talk of games, I don’t mean sports 😉

To my mind chess and bridge are both rather uninspired options, but that’s just me. To avoid prejudicing your ideas any more I’ll bite my tongue on my thoughts on the matter, and listen to what you think first. So, ignoring practicalities, popularity or other considerations for a moment, what game would you choose to feature in the Olympics if you could choose one? Would it be a wargame, a board game, a computer game?

Which single game represents the best in gaming?

Posted in Random Thoughts | 22 Comments

Deadzone Redux Army Building

Posted on September 21, 2015 by Quirkworthy

I answered a question on this in the comments of an earlier post. However, knowing how often these things get missed, I thought I’d pull it out and make it a post for everyone to see.

We’re not done with this yet, so expect more details over the next few weeks as it gets more refined. Overall, my aim is to include as much character within a simple process as possible. For the moment, it works like this:

You start by choosing a commander. This choice then influences everything else. Each faction will have several commanders to pick from, each with their own way of winning battles. Some commanders are more assault-oriented, and others more shooty. Some like balanced forces and others go all-out for a single type of troops. This is all reflected in the next step.

SargeYour choice of commander determines the troop, weapon and equipment options you can pick from. So, if you pick Sergeant Howlett as your commander you’d have access to lots of assault troops and specialists that back up that way of fighting, but much less of everything else. As you’d expect.

Unit choices are currently along the lines of you can take 0-1 of these or 1-3 of those, with the options and upgrades being allocated on a per-commander basis to maximise the character of each force. So, to stick with Howlett, he must take some assault Enforcers. Anything else would simply not reflect his character.

One of the nice things about this approach is that we can simply add a new characterful force list if we make a new commander. So the Warpath background can expand as it needs to, and Deadzone can grow alongside it.

Another nice facet of this approach is that it can be used to limit the cherry-picking approach that is designed purely to win at all costs and ignores the story and character of the universe. Instead, the forces can be designed to include both advantages and disadvantages which makes for a much more interesting tactical challenge on the tabletop. Howlett is really nasty up close, but he struggles at a distance because that’s simply not how he fights. And overcoming that struggle is part of the fun 🙂

Posted in Deadzone | 34 Comments

Clearing A Drop Zone

Posted on September 20, 2015 by Quirkworthy

Need some more space.

Decades’ worth of games, models, notes and associated gubbins has silted up my study to a silly extent. So, in an effort to create some more space, I’ve been thinking about what I really need to keep and what can go, and then made a start on getting the gone stuff out of the way. I’ve also moved around the furniture and generally created chaos as I shuffled everything around.

junk_1Overall, it’s been good so far, and I have a much better idea of where I’m going in terms of future gaming and have better access to what I want to keep. All fun for me and a bit dull for you. What might be of interest is that all this excess stuff has to go somewhere, and that’s largely eBay. Sure, I’ve given away some stuff and sold other bits to various collectors, but the mountain that’s got to go is rather imposing and I only know so many people. You can see one pile above, and more in the corridor below. And that’s not all of it either.

junk_2Of course, eBay has changed a lot since I last used it to sell stuff, so it’s a relearning process. Some of their new format is genuinely helpful, and some is barely-functional dross. Still, you take the rough with the smooth. I think I managed to get a listing up properly, so we’ll see what that looks like tomorrow. Then I can start moving the mountain…

Posted in Random Thoughts | 11 Comments

Deadzone Redux

Posted on September 19, 2015 by Quirkworthy

Deadzone Redux, or DZR to its friends, is the current name for the updated and improved version of Deadzone.

I’ve been working on DZR for a few months now, and it’s still being tested so there’s not much in the way of detail I can tell you yet – best to wait till things are a bit more nailed down. However, it’s hard to keep the fun entirely under my hat, and I can say that we had a cracking game yesterday, as you can see from Ronnie’s happy face 🙂

ronnieIn case you’re wondering, he’s pointing out a Pathfinder that’s about to do something nasty to my sadly misunderstood rats…

All the old DZ fun is still there, with Ronnie making good use of the odd gaps blown in his newly-painted scenery to snipe at my rats from beyond the range of their weapons. Pesky humans. See if you can spot the nasty Pathfinder lurking in the distance (click for a bigger pic).

Spot the PathfinderDZR is a faster, bloodier and easier to learn version the original, and I’m looking forward to our next stage of internal testing when we add all the armies into the mix (so far only been using parts of a few to test the core mechanics).

As an illustration of the sort of carnage we’re making, yesterday’s game ended with this fight between an injured rat and the last of the pathfinders (their boss). We’d both largely ignored the objective markers and concentrated on slaughtering the opposition, and slaughter we did. At the end of the game there were 2 models left on the table out of 12 that started.

final_battleStay tuned and subscribe, bookmark or whatever suits your reading style as I’ll be back with more as soon as Ronnie says I can spill some beans 🙂

Posted in Deadzone | 71 Comments

Interesting Visit

Posted on September 18, 2015 by Quirkworthy

Back from my meeting with Ronnie at Mantic. We had a fun game of the new Deadzone, and I managed to snaffle an early copy of Dungeon Saga. It wouldn’t fit in my backpack.

Anyone watching Ronnie’s FaceBook page will have see us mugging for the camera while we were playing, and I’ve got some more pics on my iPad for tomorrow. It’s still not entirely nailed down, so it’s best not to talk details yet. It only upsets people when they get changed. However, I can tell you that it’s even faster and more dangerous than before. I think I had 2 models left out of 7, and Ronnie had none by the time we stopped.

Posted in Deadzone, Dungeon Sagas | 9 Comments

Mr Potato Head, Body, Legs…

Posted on September 17, 2015 by Quirkworthy

potato_models_1You find inspiring stuff for gaming and modelling in the strangest corners. For an amazing sculptor in a very non-gaming environment, have a look at the video in this report.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34261568

potato_models_2He makes his models from cooked potato and plaster. Even so, note how he is still using the same process any sculptor of 28mm figures would use, researching his subject, building an armature, and then working over the top. And, though there are fewer details than we might be used to, the pose and character of the figures is great.

Posted in Painting & Modelling | 1 Comment

Designer’s Notes

Posted on September 15, 2015 by Quirkworthy

Here’s a question for everyone, sparked by a comment on a recent post.

If I self-publish a book, I get to pick what I want to include. As I like talking about the why of a game as well as the what, I’d be inclined to include designer’s notes. However, it’s occurred to me that burying these in the rules might not be the best place for them. I could, for example, include them here, so that anyone could read them – not just the people who bought the game.

What do you guys think is the best place for designer’s notes: in the rulebook they apply to, or on the web?

Posted in Game Design Theory, Random Thoughts | 39 Comments

Paintballing

Posted on September 12, 2015 by Quirkworthy

Just come back from a morning’s paintballing in the forest.

PaintIn theory, running around shooting folk (who are shooting back) might generate some interesting thoughts for tabletop skirmish games. Unfortunately, I could see so little through my thoroughly-fogged visor that I might as well have spent most of my morning with my head in a bucket of grey paint. So something of a missed opportunity.

As an illustration of this lack of vision, I walked into the boundary fence more than once, and narrowly stopped myself from running into a tree (where’d that come from?). When my gun jammed, I had so little vision that I couldn’t see whether the motorised ammo feed was on or off. And that’s the gun I was holding up to my face. Spotting someone hiding in a bunker 10 yards away? I can’t even see the bunker.

There is one small point of interest to be salvaged though, to do with the hit location tables that I’ve been playing with for my retro SF game. Judging by the various welts I’m now sporting, I’ve got it about right 🙂

Posted in Random Thoughts | 16 Comments

What I Can Say…

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Quirkworthy

Yesterday’s post was really just to let you know that I’m still doing stuff… just that most of it’s got to remain under my hat for a while.

However, that’s not true of everything.

ValhallanOne thing I’ve been helping out with recently is Age of Tyrants. This is a 6mm SF battle game designed by a friend of mine called Mark Brendan (you may remember him as one of the White Dwarf crew back way when I was editor). It’s set in a universe that’s already seen much conflict as the setting for Urban War and Metropolis – so if you’re familiar with either of these then you’ll immediately recognise the warring factions.

Big guns

Except this time instead of a 28mm skirmish or small battle, you get to command the huge tanks and other war machines of the full armies. And some of the tanks are enormous.

So there’s that coming along. They’ll be running a Kickstarter sometime fairly soon as they’ve taken it about as far as they can on their own and need the community support to finish it off. The chaps behind it have promised me a couple of early test shots of the models so I’ll be able to show you a few of the tanks 🙂

Other things I’ve been doing that I can talk about include a skirmish game I started messing about, and which I may end up publishing myself. I originally did it as an amusement and design exercise for myself. What I’ve found though, is that every time I tell anyone about it they want to play too. Maybe I just hang around with an eccentric crowd.

Don’t answer that.

GrumpyThis skirmish game is probably worth its own post to explain in detail, but the potted explanation is that it’s a retro style 28mm SF skirmish game, designed as if I had written it in the mid 80s with that period’s style of rules, sensibilities, and expectations. I’m thinking Laserburn, Combat 3000 and Traveller, if that helps.

This was inspired by a combination of the Colony 87 miniatures (like the one on the left) that were Kickstarted earlier this year, and the Macrocosm figures (like the Diggers below) which are on Kickstarter now. This last Kickstarter is interesting as Chris (the fellow behind Macrocosm) has gone a slightly unusual route. Instead of starting from nothing and diving straight into a Kickstarter, he’s self-funded the first two races so you can get them now. Anyone who’s been to a game show or two in the UK this year has probably bumped into him at one of those, showing off his Malignancy and Digger Corps factions. That’s where I got a load of models from both of those ranges. The Kickstarter is called Macrocosm: The Next Races, and as its name suggests is about expanding the game with more factions, and so far he’s funded some great new stuff – you should go and have a look for yourself. I’ll do a review of some models later.

DiggersReally, I’ve waffled on long enough for the moment. This is just to say that I’ve not forgotten this blog, it’s merely been sleeping 🙂

Posted in Kickstarter, Random Thoughts | 11 Comments

Don’t Tell Anyone

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Quirkworthy

Seems I’m up to my ears in secret projects at the moment.

For example, I spent yesterday in a very enjoyable meeting (which for me often includes playing games) with the owner of a company you’ll all know, about a game which isn’t yet public. That’s one of several projects I’m working on that dare not speak their names out loud, at least not yet. The contrast between now and the later stage (when everyone on the planet will need to be personally buttonholed and indoctrinated into the life-saving wonderfulness of the product) always makes me smile.

Apparently these particular beans are going to be spilled at Essen Spiel, in about a month, so that’s not too long to wait. Some of the other ones will have to wait till next year… maybe… or perhaps even later. A few will doubtless never make it to the public eye at all, and they’re even odder.

Sometimes this makes me feel really detached from the world of Facebook and forums I watch roll by. I know it’s the same for other writers and designers. By the time something you’ve worked on it in the hands of the people it was made for, you’ve almost forgotten what it was all about.

I wonder if this is the way spies feel, carefully guarding all manner of things that supposedly must be secret, but which really want to be out there in the world.

Posted in Random Thoughts | 20 Comments