What I’ve Been Playing: Tabletop A Through F

Here are notes on games I’ve played in the past couple months, with game design comments where appropriate. Covering four games at a time means there’ll be a follow-up or two.

I didn't intend to begin with two of my own games but such are the gifts of alphabetical order.

13th Age

We’re getting close to the end of epic tier in the Teachers from the Court campaign that’s mentioned several times in 13th Age 2e. We started the campaign to test the living dungeon Jonathan wrote as the intro adventure at the back of the Gamemaster’s Guide. We liked our characters and wanted to keep playing so Paul Hughes transformed the dungeon run into a full campaign. Early in adventure tier, we posed as instructors from the Court of Stars sent to educate the half-elf children of our primary contact. We needed a cover-story because we’d entered a contested zone where the forces of the evil Diabolist/Archmage visited the town for supplies. ‘The Teachers from the Court’ became our nom de guerre, even after we’d qualified for several other higher ranking titles in the Elf Queen’s service.

When we don’t have a full crew, I’ve been running my deviant Arduin game, 13th Arduin, aka Arduin, Blessed Arduin.

And I’ve run a couple one-shots lately for diverse groups, one of them using the two-hour freeform adventure you can find here.

Armello: The Board Game

This gloriously beautiful board game from King of the Castle games shipped to all its kickstarter backers a couple months ago. It’s based on a digital game I like to call ‘the national game of Australia.’ With the help of an excellent development/playtest team, I reshaped the original digital game’s mix of quest movement and funny-but-serious-animal combat into a deckbuilding quest and combat game. Each of the four heroes has its own starting deck and powerful experience cards. Your hero gets more powerful by buying action and combat cards from the marketplace and winning treasures by finishing quests that send you criss-crossing the board. Unlike some deckbuilding games, that pretty much let people play their own solitaire games side-by-side, Armello: the Board Game rewards players who mix it up with their opponents.

One of my biggest reasons for designing the analog version of the game as a deckbuilder is that I dislike the way Armello’s beautiful cards are used in the video game. Some cards get played for their full effect, but a whole lot of cards in the video game are discarded to use the symbol that’s on the card in combat. In other words, you read the card, you decide it’s not something you need to play, and you discard it to get a hit or a shield or a save. When a game has beautiful and evocative cards, I like to try to make those cards matter. In this case, deckbuilding mechanics that bring cards through your hand multiple times did the trick, and opened a huge amount of design space. You’ll see my attitude towards cards that should matter surfacing again, below, in comments on Finspan.

I’m answering rules questions on BoardgameGeek, helped by savvy players. I’m not sure when there will copies going through distribution, but for now you can aquire the game by going through the Backerkit page as a 'pre-order.'

Dead Man’s Hand

My Desperadoes faced off against Chris Pramas’ Lawmen a few weeks ago. It was an appropriately desperate tie and a very fun skirmish miniatures game. I love minis games but neither paint minis nor invest in terrain, so it was good that Chris came prepared. We also used a couple buildings from a paper Belgian village that I used as terrain all through my childhood. Chris has now invested in a proper Dead Man’s Hand box, and we’ll definitely play again, probably with different factions.

Finspan

I quite love Wingspan. So does my wife Lisa. So do our ornithologist friends!

Lisa also loves Finspan so I’m going to need to relax my critical spirit and just-enjoy the good parts.

My disagreement with this iteration of the system is that you pay for most fish by discarding other fish from your hand. Yes, it’s that problem again, the same type of objection I have with the digital Armello cards. I’m looking through all my beautiful cards and constantly grading them, only a couple deserve to be played, the others will be discarded . . . and possibly returned to my hand if I get that type of engine working.

Discard-to-buy annoys me. Maybe it doesn’t annoy other people. I'll give it another try and whine less.

Greg Stafford & the First Copy of D&D

(Young Greg painted for King of Dragon Pass by Stefano Gaudiano)

Before you read my story, read the story in Greg's words from the Chaosium blog, February of last year.

It's a great story and I was extremely amused to read it. But my amusement may not have been the same as your amusement, because I was comparing it to the story as Greg had told it to me, back when I worked at Chaosium!

Greg was a storyteller supreme. The best. I can see why he might have been more circumspect in the codex than he was with me. I'm not certain which version shades more towards truth. That doesn't really matter to the story . . .

When Greg told the tale, we weren't talking about Dungeons & Dragons. We were talking about White Bear & Red Moon, specifically about how Greg had tried to work out a publishing deal with various companies, shopping it around. I think it was after the first printing had sold out, he wondered if there was a way to publish the boardgame with a bigger company.

And he went to see Gary Gygax at TSR. As Greg told the story, Gygax was doing well at that time, he received Greg in a nice office. But it did not go well for Greg and WB&RM. Early in the conversation, Greg told Gygax that he thought he had owned one of the earliest copies of D&D . . . and here we diverge!

The way Greg told it, most of the copies of D&D had been stuck at the printer because the bill hadn't been paid yet. They weren't releasing the games to Gygax. And Greg's brother-in-law worked at the printer, or had business there, and saw the game, and thought it looked like something that Greg would like. One way or another he got a copy and sent it to Greg at a time when Gygax was being prevented from getting copies out to anyone else.

Maybe Gygax was amused later, but according to this telling, he wasn't happy with Greg at that moment. The attempt to publish WB&RM through the resurgent TSR went nowhere, and in this telling, Greg turned the story into a sort of fable about waiting until after the deal is done to tell funny stories that will only be funny to you.

(Greg the storyteller, again painted by Stefano Gaudiano for King of Dragon Pass)

Johnny Reb, Dana Lombardy & Glorantha

As a younger dude who hadn’t entirely grown into game designer boots, in mid 1996 I got a job at Chaosium as Greg Stafford’s right-hand man for publishing Glorantha. Positioned on the right-hand, I learned that neither the left hand, nor the checking account, nor the pockets, nor any other chunk of Chaosium, had money to pay freelancers for work they produced within, oh, maybe three years if all went amazingly well. So, my Glorantha work was mostly about shutting projects down.

But Greg’s dream was that Giovanni Ingellis and his company, Stratelibri, from Italy, were going to produce a Glorantha miniatures game. Stratelibri hoped to challenge Warhammer, go big or stay home. But it wasn't something we could start working on at Chaosium. Giovanni wanted to design our Glorantha game, that was his dream, and in return he would fund it.

So I dove into the world of miniatures gaming. I’d already been turned on to a clever ancients/medieval game called Armati by Jon Kovalic, of all people, who for a brief time helped put out an Armati fanzine. But I’d missed the brilliantly abstracted DBA (De Bellis Antiquitas, which I still love) and its wooly ancestor (WRG 7^th Edition, which Charlie Krank & friends introduced me to in Charlie’s game garage). About the same time, Scott Schneider of Chicago introduced me to Great Battles of History, the GMT ancients wargame that plays a lot like a minis game with counters.

Closer to home in the Bay Area, Chaosium’s friend Dana Lombardy wanted to teach me to play Johnny Reb. I put him off for a little while. I believe I was thinking that a regimental American Civil War minis game wasn’t all that relevant to a supposed rival to Warhammer.

the rules at the time; these days some gamers prefer John Hill's newer rules, Across a Deadly Field

After work one day, Dana set up a giant battle (well, giant to me!) and we played for several hours. I'd played write-orders-then-execute-them wargames before, but Johnny Reb improved greatly on that model with face-down order counters executed in a timing sequence that created a dynamic battlefield. Dana was enthusiastic and helpful and wanted to help the Glorantha minis project take off. I remember the Johnny Reb game fondly. Which is ironic, because at the time I was nowhere near appreciative enough.

Dana, closer to now

I was caught up in the strange dance steps of preparing to produce a game that I wasn’t allowed to think about designing. Greg was focused on turning out orders of battle for the various combatants in the Hero Wars, particularly the Lunar Empire. (Some of this work has recently resurfaced in Martin Helsdon’s The Armies & Enemiesof Dragon Pass.) Giovanni of Stratelibri wouldn’t talk about the Glorantha minis game until I visited him in Italy. I thought that was unhelpful, but hey: free trip to Italy!

Giovanni, someone I'm glad to have met

The trip was delightful, Stratelibri were gracious hosts and just meeting and hanging out with Giovanni was splendid in a life/historical sense. But the minis business rolled a fumble. It turned out that Giovanni didn’t actually have time to design anything new, he planned to re-purpose a quirky little cyberpunk skirmish system he’d created years earlier. It hadn’t really worked as a cyberpunk game and I didn't think it was going to work as a Glorantha game. I hadn't really expected to challenge Warhammer but I'd at least hoped to take advantage of Greg’s work on the military histories of Dragon Pass. 

By the time I had returned to California, Giovanni had regretfully pulled the monetary plug because of a) problems with Magic: The Gathering; b) store expansion plans; c) knowing the Glorantha project wouldn’t work; d) choose your own adventure. That was when nearly everyone at Chaosium got laid off thanks to the Mythos over-printing disaster.

But back to Dana. He was on hand, helpful, and would have been one of the best people in the world to talk with about miniatures and wargame design. I stumbled along without recognizing that Dana’s presence in the project was a lucky penny that I should have flipped many times. On the bright side, my mistake wasted less of his time than if I'd understood what I was doing. 

You can find links to Dana’s doings here. If you grab a copy of Green Ronin’s wonderful 100 Best HobbyGames, edited by James Lowder (now of Chaosium!), Dana wrote up Johnny Reb on page 157.

This week's games: 13th Age, Rising Sun, Up Front, and Manoeuvre

For a change, this was a week without serious playtesting on unannounced projects. Instead I ended up playing one session of 13^th Age and a couple sessions of boardgames.

In our Wednesday night 13^th Age campaign that will at-some-point-in-the-future drop us into the Stone Thief, we were in Horizon tracking down an expert on living dungeons. He had managed to overdose himself on his own magic cloak and become a monster known as a bonded, so paying him a visit led let to a fight where I had the sense that this monster we were fighting should really be tearing us up a lot more, remembering something of the Bestiary 2 writeup. (Page 15, a monster by ASH LAW.) Afterwards the GM indicated that he’d never rolled the magic even-numbers, and I’m glad I hadn’t seen the stats during the game because I’m pretty sure I would have realized they were even worse than we experienced, and would I have been able to keep my mouth shut? No. We got off lucky.

I’m having a great time roleplaying and freewheeling with icon relationship narrations in this campaign, but so far in combat my monk’s slogan, borrowed from Mark Jessup in our old 3.5 campaign, is: “I’m 39 hit points you don’t have to lose.” (It would be 40 points but I'm spending one point to maintain the illusion that I'm human. When mom is a rakshasa and dad is an ogre mage, sacrifices must be made.) 

The next night we tried a four-player game of Eric Lang’s Rising Sun. It was fun, despite the fact that I screwed up the game’s logic by introducing the autumn cards ahead of the summer cards. Yes, we played in a twisted fantasy world where spring-autumn-summer-winter led to my Bonsai Clan’s natural rhythms being horribly disrupted. Stunted trees were chopped up and fed to the Koi Clan without gaining the attention of the Imperial poets. The Turtle Clan conquered all.

The Dragonfly Clan also acquitted itself well but had one of its bushi eaten under the table by the newish monster in our home, our eleven-month old puppy, Sammi. Sammi managed to ninja miniatures off the table with no one noticing until she was done chewing. No more under-table game nights for Sammi.

(To give Sammi her due, here's a much more typical photo. This was the evening that Lee Moyer introduced Sammi to her first picture book.) 

I’m looking forward to playing Rising Sun again. It’s gonna make more strategic sense with the seasons aligned properly.

Over the weekend our 12-year old godson Lucas and I played a couple sorta-wargames that are also cardgames. First I taught him how to play Up Front, the amazing old Avalon Hill WW2 game that bills itself as the Advanced Squad Leader card game. It’s a fantastic system that handles actions, terrain, and combat resolution with a single deck of cards. I’ve played so many games of Up Front that even though it had been Many Years since I’d last played—so many years that the rubber bands holding the decks together all snapped immediately—I remembered the game well enough to teach it with fewer missteps than I’d added to Rising Sun. I made sure to play the Italians against Lucas’ British, but the Brits suffered mishap after mishap (a malfunctioning STEN gun!) and it was a proud day for Italy.

Then we played a couple games of Jeff Horger’s Manoeuvre from GMT. We both liked it a lot, the game hits a sweet spot for evoking Napoleonic battle without a complex rules set. I played with the Ottoman Turks and the Chinese 8-Banner Army against Lucas’ Brits. The photo shows Lucas’ finger pointing to where he intended the battle to be fought, instead of over to the right where a couple doughty British regiments had fallen to my Bannermen.

The Chinese are from the expansion, Distant Lands. It’s on sale for $25.00 on the GMT website. If you’re looking for a fast-playing light game that blends Napoleonic maneuvers with a touch of fantasy, this is a steal. It’s worth mentioning that Distant Lands has everything you need to play except the polyhedral dice, terrain that's more vanilla, and a box. The game is better with the core box added, which I'm sure you can still find in game stores, but the expansion alone creates fun battles.

this week in gaming

 

This week I absorbed the rules for four new games: Gloomhaven (cunning boardgame dungeon-crawler and Kickstarter darling) Magic Maze (unique co-op game getting in and out of a delightfully illustrated fantasy shopping mall), Wild Blue Yonder (the new version of Dan Verssen’s Down in Flames WWII air combat card game from GMT), and Centerville (Chad Jensen’s new Euro-style urban planning status and prestige game). So far the only one of the four we’ve played was Magic Maze, which was hilarious fun but demonstrated again that I’m a turn-based gamer and a real-time bumbler.

In the world of playtesting, we played a great session of one of my new card game designs that the publisher has not announced yet. The game has gone well enough for long enough that I’m going to finish up its rulebook and call it done as soon as I can carve out two focused days.

Also in the world of playtesting, Lisa and I played a friend’s new card game a number of times on a couple of nights, but that’s not announced either so I can’t write details.

And the Wednesday night RPG group enjoyed another session of the Over the Edge 25 campaign that Jonathan has been running for a while now. The campaign doesn’t have a name yet. Our other OTE campaigns seem to acquire a name when things go horribly wrong, names like “Ann Thunder Escapes,” when Ann Thunder was our nemesis. So far, so nameless.

Meanwhile in the world of actual work I’ve been acting as editor/layout overseer for the Book of Demons for Pelgrane. And getting art orders ready for three other Pelgrane books. And cobbling together the credits and appendices for 13^th Age Glorantha, which Chris Huth is busy laying out the final chapter of. I’ve also been dealing with art direction on two other game-projects we’re not talking about yet, which raises the point that I’m often working as the art director for games I design or develop. That was something I leaned towards at the end of my WotC shift, when I was writing art orders for books I hadn’t worked on. But WotC had excellent art directors, trained for the job. In the world beyond WotC my untrained aptitude has frequently put me in the director’s chair.

When I get through the art direction, I’ll be back to developing Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan’s Book of Ages, a fun 13^th Age project with three different takes on portraying a world dominated by icons-over-time. Which means that this week, my only effort that qualifies as actual game design was a lunch time conversation with Logan Bonner about two in-progress card games. Extremely worthwhile, but I haven’t even have time to follow up on his thoughts. We’ll see if I can get back to design next week. 

Design notes from Operation Dauntless

I love design notes in games. When I’m working full-time on my own games, I admit there are times that I end up reading the designer’s notes in new games in more detail than their rules, particularly with wargames that I’m not likely to play in the next few months.

The design notes I’ve enjoyed most recently appeared as a 48-page booklet in the GMT game Operation Dauntless, designed by Mark Mokszycki. It’s a grand-tactical simulation of battles in June 1944, during the British offensives in Normandy. Not the same cup of tea (or even the same meal!) as the roleplaying games and card games I’m usually involved with as a designer, but this is work I appreciate as both stellar design and as a thoughtfully-described process.

The game’s mechanics are deceptively simple. Let’s call them elegant! They’re adapted from an earlier game by Mokszycki about the Finnish/Soviet war, Red Winter. In fact, Mokszycki’s design notes mention that he originally expected Operation Dauntless to be a simple conversion of mechanics from the earlier game. Eight years of design and development work later, that was patently not true, but it was too late to turn back the tanks, he was committed to this labor of love.

I’m sure that’s part of why I enjoy these notes so much. Hearing about multiple detailed and heavily playtested approaches to a close assault system, over a period of years, certainly reminds me of game mechanics conundrums we faced during 13^th Age in Glorantha, when a system we thought would easily flow into a different world had to be revised to do the new world justice. 

But the appeal of these notes goes beyond my own process-identification and my fondness for WW2 grognardia. If you’re any type of wargamer, or a game designer, there’s a lot to learn from Mokszycki’s detailed discussions of iterative attempts to simulate specific elements of historical battles. What makes these process notes pay off in the end are elegant and approximately-correct abstractions that both solve his historical-simulation problems and help create a gameable experience.

I may end up playing Red Winter before I play Operation Dauntless, especially since a member of my gaming group has married into the Finnish way of life! If there’s more to say about how the game mechanics match the design goals, I’ll speak up after rolling the dice.