Hastur vs. Cthulhu: The Home Front!

The Wrestlenomicon Kickstarter is in full swing with rules and DIY printable PDFs available in the first update for backers!

The campaign is structured so that most pledges add to either Cthulhu's coterie or Hastur's entourage. You'll find that Cthulhu is accepting allegiance on Twitter at @TentacleNecktie, with Hastur slightly in the lead at the moment at @EatYellowSign!

This Cthulhu vs. Hastur grudgematch has been playing out in my house for a couple years now, because my wife Lisa . . .
a) loves the game
b) was therefore willing to playtest it again and again and again during time when we were having fun hanging out instead of working
c) loves the art on the Hastur cards so much that she has a hard time playing Cthulhu, even though the straightforward Cthulhu mechanics are more her personal style. She plays Red/Black in M:tG, and Hastur is a bit more Blue/Black if we're gonna break it down like that. Lisa's Sense-of-Hastur helped keep the design on track when things got a bit too convoluted.

So Kurt Komoda's amazing Hastur art easily claimed its first victim. Lisa had never heard of the Yellow Sign, but she's an artist and a writer and Hastur had her number from the first stroke of its giant paintbrush.

Me, I can't choose a side. I love all our children equally. If pressed, however, I'll admit that little Nyarly, waiting somewhere in the shadows, that kid has issues.

Cthulhu. Hastur. Who’s the Great Old One, and Who’s the GREATEST Old One?

Time to find out. It’s WRESTLENOMICON, the card game from veterans of Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, Epic Spell Wars, and Delta Green. Back it now! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arcdream/wrestlenomicon

Archmage Engines on Apocalypse Road

My favorite racing games are Thunder Alley and Grand Prix, designed by Jeff & Carla Horger and published by GMT. Both games ask you to control a team of multiple cars using cards that have a variety of movement effects but almost always benefit some of the other players' cars as well as your own. Strategy counts but there's a lot of luck and a fair amount of chaos. (See this review by Francis K. Lalumiere for a more thorough recommendation.)

Strategy, luck, and even more chaos is coming up in the next installment of the series. Apocalypse Road mixes car wars-style combat in with the racing. I always wanted to like SJG's Car Wars, but the truth is that it was too fiddly for its payoff, for me, so I'm looking forward to auto-combat in a system I enjoy.

At some point I decided to sponsor a driver in the game, paying a bit of support money and naming him Ole Tubli. Like my name, it ain't pronounced like you'd expect, which is fine. If you're not pronouncing it American style, this driver's name is Estonian for 'fare forward bravely,' my Dad's usual telephone sign-off, pronounced o-lay tube-lee.

After getting Ole Tubli into the races, I realized this was probably my life's one chance to sponsor a racing team. So Ole Tubli is part of the Archmage Engines team. Yes, the team will use something like the symbol of the Archmage from 13th Age, though I haven't worked out with Jeff which image will work better for his game. Maybe something like this . . .

Or if we play it straight . . .

Jeff has written a series of blog posts introducing the Apocalypse Road racing teams and the post involving the Archmage Engines just went up. If you feel like racing alongside Ole Tubli (plays mean guitar), Gid Zornes (grinder), and Sargon "The Winged Bull" Ashur (master metalworker) by sponsoring/naming a driver on the (extremely eclectic) Archmage Engines team, Jeff's blog has notes on how to join!

As the blog mentions, the game has reached the magic 500 pre-orders threshold, so GMT is going to start production and publish. The game is still available for the lower pre-order price through its GMT Project 500 page.

Ole Tubli!

The Tea Dragon Society

[2018's Cutest Things*]

Before I enter the Wrestlenomicon ring with a full slate of piledriving elder gods next month, it’s time for an appreciation of a game that’s all the way over on the opposite side of the kindness spectrum.

The Tea Dragon Society, designed by Steve Ellis and Tyler Tinsley, is based on a super-sweet graphic novel by Katie O’Neill. Tea dragons are tiny pets that sprout magical tea from their horns. The tea carries memories, so players of the card game compete to acquire the most wonderful memories. Since it’s essentially a deck-building game, the memory cards do a lot less for you in play than the cards that help you keep your tea dragon fed, entertained, and well-groomed.

The most clever thing about The Tea Dragon Society is that it’s a deck-building game with no hand. You’re not constantly discarding and shuffling cards. Instead, when you buy a non-victory card, you put it into play right away. Each card you draw stays in play in front of you until you spend the card, either to buy another Market card or, more rarely, to buy a victory card, in which case you’ll shuffle your discard pile into your deck. As an introduction to the key concept of deckbuilding—when you acquire a card you’ll get to play it again and again during the rest of the game—The Tea Dragon Society works extremely well, even for children way under the game’s recommended age of 10+. As a beautiful and non-aggressive path through several key deckbuilding decisions, the game also works for experienced gamers.

I like the game enough I’ll mention a couple things that improve it.

[[I love the dragons' different Entertaining cards; art by Katie O'Neill]]

Misprints: There were different misprints in a couple editions. The first printing mistakenly said that the Book card gets discarded when you draw Entertaining. Actually, the Book should be discarded when you draw Boring.

The reprint fixed the Book card but left numbers off of three other cards. Wind Chime should have 0 Growth and cost 3. Musical Instrument should have 0 Growth. The Bed with a missing cost costs either 3 or 4, whichever isn’t in the set already. I understand that Renegade's customer service is taking care of replacing cards for people who got misprints. I just wrote on my Book instead of contacting the company, but I know some people prefer official fixes. 

Tweaking the balance: We've had a problem with the card-drawing Items (Bed, Brush, Fruit, and Musical Instrument) that seemed too effective compared to the rest of the Market cards. Turns out that I hadn't read the rules well enough and missed the important rule that card effects only get used once a turn.

These four cards are still probably the best cards in the game. They might still benefit from a 2-point cost increase, or limit each player to buying only one of the two copies of each BBFM card. My wife Lisa likes the idea of avoiding a type of deckbuilding dominance that feels wrong for this game by forbidding players from owning both copies of a specific BBFM card. You bought Fruit once? You don’t get to buy the other copy. 

More memories coming: The words in the wind are that the designers are working on a new stand-alone Tea Dragon Society set that can be combined with the existing cards!

*Since I was taking a photo of the cutest game I played last year, I put the two other Cutest Things of 2018 on top of the box. The Deluxe Metal Meeples are from a Campaign Coins Kickstarter, and are now available from their store. The little one-eyeball monster is a Timid Monster I picked up at GenCon. I like 'em. 

Wrestlenomicon Launches in March!

[Sometimes Bad Things Happen to Bad Entities, by Kurt Komoda]

“Sometimes bad things happen to bad entities” is an apt slogan for Wrestlenomicon! The first two gods into the ring are Hastur (picture above, standing) and Cthulhu (picture above, splatted). We’re starting the Kickstarter on March 5^th with the decks for those two gods as the core game.

After initial design and playtesting, I was too excited about this game to let it lie fallow while the production details were being wrangled into place by Arc Dream Publishing. I went ahead and designed the Nyarlathotep deck and am working on Yog-Sothoth. If the Kickstarter community gets behind the game and stretches it into something powerful, we’ll end up with multiplayer rules and a full royal rumble of elder gods!

A few early links . . .

For a bit more of the game’s art by Kurt, as well as notes from Dennis and Shane, visit Wrestlenomicon.com

For some notes on mechanics that I wrote during an early playtest phase, see this blog.

Here’s Bebo’s GLOWing intro video.

And here’s a look at an early version of the layout for the Sometimes Bad Things . . . card. (Among other things, the symbols will be a bit different in the final.) Layout artist Simeon Cogswell has been wrassling with the Kurt’s art to fit it onto our tarot-sized cards.

13 Years of Color!

It's time to pull on this blog's starter cord. For the fun of it and because a couple people were asking, I'm restarting by rerunning the first blog post I made on LiveJournal, back in 2008. Yes, my thirteenth anniversary of color is tomorrow. I'm grateful every day.

Untitled, by Eric Eschenbach

    Until 2006 I was colorblind. Show me a sunset and I saw shades of green. Hand me a pink shirt and I was sure it was grey. Before my first date with Lisa, my future wife, I gave her my address and described my house as the gray house on the corner. The only gray house on a corner anywhere in the neighborhood belonged to the local drug dealers, which she realized when they opened the door and called inside to see if there was a ‘Rob’ sprawled somewhere in the haze. Lisa said “Uh, sorry, I’ve got the wrong house,” backed up and found me in the blue house on the corner.

    On February 8, 2006, I sat at home typing Dreamblade notes on my laptop computer while Lisa went to hear a National Geographic lecture with her mom. As usual, I had Windows Media Player humming along playing music. I liked having the Alchemy visualizer twirling colors around at the side of the screen while I worked. Suddenly the screen flashed orangecrimsonpinkpurplescarletblueviolet. I’d always thought of the program as a mix of flashing yellows and blues and some greens. Had the visualizer changed? No, it was the same program I always used. But these were actual colors! I sat and watched the full spectrum twisting for almost an hour.

    I knew that I had a conclusive color vision test hanging on the wall across the living room from me. The day before I’d had my nose pressed to a landscape painting by Lisa’s brother, trying to see the pink in the sky that she said was her favorite part. I hadn’t been able to see anything except some dark streaks. I pointed to them and said, “Is this the pink?” but Lisa just shook her head, saying that I might as well not try.

    When I dared to set the computer aside and approach the landscape, I was ecstatic to find that the sky wasn’t just a blue and gray wash. There was the pink. And those dark streaks I’d noticed the day before? They were beautiful orange.

    Lisa came home and found me sitting in a pile of all our art and photo books, spread out on the floor, looking at colors and details I’d never seen. I was bawling. I was overwhelmed by the reality that this was how everyone else saw the world all the time. Lisa had to talk me into going to sleep, I was worried that I was going to wake up and it would all be gone.

    Two [[13!]] years later, I still have color vision. I don’t have a medically verified explanation for how I regained colors, but with a prompt from a neurologist friend of Lee Moyer’s, I have put together a good guess. No one ever accused me of being colorblind until I was in fourth grade. I don’t remember having any trouble recognizing colors when I was younger and I didn’t have any trouble recognizing them when my color vision came back. But when I was in third grade I ran into a metal pole at a full downhill sprint. It was a serious head injury and it left me with symptoms that bothered me into my thirties. Those symptoms have all gradually gotten better or gone away. My guess is that I also lost the world’s colors to that metal pole.

    After decades, something has reconnected. My mind has agreed to show me colors again.

    I’m happy.

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.