Greetings from Toronto, Ontario, Canada! I flew up here today to take a brief vacation and enjoy my 35th birthday while doing two things I have never done before, but wanted to do: go to the Hockey hall of Fame, and a Toronto Blue Jays baseball game. Tomorrow is the ball game, and then on Sunday I'm going to the Hall.
The flights up here were generally on time, and I saved ~$35 by taking a bus downtown, rather than taking a cab straight to the hotel. I was able to talk the bus driver into taking me about half a block away, though, so it was very little extra distance I had to cover on foot. I am staying at the Renaissance Hotel inside the Rogers Centre, the Blue Jays baseball stadium. My room is pretty nice, with a king-size bed, a nice bathroom, a full couch, and a sitting chair. My view out the windows isn't very good, but considering that I'm not paying any actual money for the room, I'm not going to complain!
I hit the hotel bar/restaurant for dinner, which has a full wall of windows that looks out into the Rogers Centre field, so you can watch the ball game while eating. Sweet! Granted, I spent my time glued to the TV watching the first few picks in the NHL entry draft currently underway in Montreal. Let me tell you, the NHL draft coverage in Canada is light years away from what you can usually get in the States. Gee, I wonder why I'm here?
Friday, June 26, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
I Don't Believe What I Just Saw!!!
Whoah! The U.S. Men's team just beat Spain! #1 in the world Spain! European champions Spain! Cesc Fabregas (who played great) is from Spain! Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhh!!!(Sane posting will resume at some time in the distant future after I find a way to get over the ridiculous awesomeness of this moment.)
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Runebound
For the next entry in my walk through my game collection, we come to Runebound, a fantasy adventure board game. I picked this up about two years ago because I had heard that you could play it solitaire against the board quite easily, and that is true, especially if you use the solitaire-specific rules from boardgamegeek.com. There are many different expansions available for the game, but I have only ever played the base game. I have played it solitaire, as well as against opponents, and it is a fun, though not great, board game.
The basic premise is that each player has a character, and you wander the board having adventures to earn experience points, which you can spend to improve your character abilities. Once you feel you are strong enough, you can go after the big bad guys and try to win the game by defeating them. There are 12 different characters in the base game, all with different abilities and attribute scores. The way the game handles character attributes is a bit like console RPGs do, where you start with a fairly low number and can increase them as much as you want, with no limits other than your opposition.
As you move your character around the map, you can have adventures when you land on a space with a colored dot. The colors indicate roughly how tough the encounter will be. Green spaces are the easiest encounters, yellow are harder, blue are harder still, and red encounters are reserved for the main bad guys. Each colored space has a deck of cards that goes with it. When you land on a space of a specific color you draw a card and resolve the encounter, usually by rolling dice along with an attribute to determine if you win the encounter or not. Combats run until one side is defeated, though you can have non-combat encounters, as well. Successfully completing an encounter gives you experience points, which as noted before, you can spend to get better. The number of points needed to improve an attribute varies depending on the number of players, which works out well in actual play. For example, with one or two players, you need five points to improve an attribute. With five players, you only need three. This helps the game because the more players, the more time each individual spends watching other people play the game.
This leads me to the big fault with the game, the lack of interaction between players. Generally, when it is not your turn, you have nothing to do. There are a few times when you can play a card to hinder another player from doing what they want to do, and players can have their characters fight each other if in the same space on the board, but generally you just take actions when it is your turn and watch other people take actions when it is their turn. Because of this, I would not recommend playing the game with more than four players, max. Anything more has you spending too much time not doing anything.
But back to the game. The aforementioned mechanics are OK, but not very interesting. However, the board also includes a number of towns. Towns are great because if your character is in one you can heal wounds, buy new equipment, and maybe hire allies to aid you in your quest. Allies are really, really important, in my experience, as having an ally that has complimentary strengths and weaknesses to your main character means that there shouldn't be any encounters that you don't have a good chance to beat. Granted, it can take work to find a complimentary ally, and the luck of card draws has something to do with it, but getting good allies (and keeping them alive!) is part of the strategy of the game. Some of the items are pretty amazing, too, and having that special armor when the dragon is beating on you can literally be a life saver.
So, Runebound is a fun fantasy adventure game, but I wish it had more inter-action between players. As it is, it makes for a nice "RPG lite" diversion every once in a while, but it isn't something I'm always trying to get on the table.
The basic premise is that each player has a character, and you wander the board having adventures to earn experience points, which you can spend to improve your character abilities. Once you feel you are strong enough, you can go after the big bad guys and try to win the game by defeating them. There are 12 different characters in the base game, all with different abilities and attribute scores. The way the game handles character attributes is a bit like console RPGs do, where you start with a fairly low number and can increase them as much as you want, with no limits other than your opposition.
As you move your character around the map, you can have adventures when you land on a space with a colored dot. The colors indicate roughly how tough the encounter will be. Green spaces are the easiest encounters, yellow are harder, blue are harder still, and red encounters are reserved for the main bad guys. Each colored space has a deck of cards that goes with it. When you land on a space of a specific color you draw a card and resolve the encounter, usually by rolling dice along with an attribute to determine if you win the encounter or not. Combats run until one side is defeated, though you can have non-combat encounters, as well. Successfully completing an encounter gives you experience points, which as noted before, you can spend to get better. The number of points needed to improve an attribute varies depending on the number of players, which works out well in actual play. For example, with one or two players, you need five points to improve an attribute. With five players, you only need three. This helps the game because the more players, the more time each individual spends watching other people play the game.
This leads me to the big fault with the game, the lack of interaction between players. Generally, when it is not your turn, you have nothing to do. There are a few times when you can play a card to hinder another player from doing what they want to do, and players can have their characters fight each other if in the same space on the board, but generally you just take actions when it is your turn and watch other people take actions when it is their turn. Because of this, I would not recommend playing the game with more than four players, max. Anything more has you spending too much time not doing anything.
But back to the game. The aforementioned mechanics are OK, but not very interesting. However, the board also includes a number of towns. Towns are great because if your character is in one you can heal wounds, buy new equipment, and maybe hire allies to aid you in your quest. Allies are really, really important, in my experience, as having an ally that has complimentary strengths and weaknesses to your main character means that there shouldn't be any encounters that you don't have a good chance to beat. Granted, it can take work to find a complimentary ally, and the luck of card draws has something to do with it, but getting good allies (and keeping them alive!) is part of the strategy of the game. Some of the items are pretty amazing, too, and having that special armor when the dragon is beating on you can literally be a life saver.
So, Runebound is a fun fantasy adventure game, but I wish it had more inter-action between players. As it is, it makes for a nice "RPG lite" diversion every once in a while, but it isn't something I'm always trying to get on the table.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Knightmare Chess
To be honest with you, I have never been much of a Chess player. As much as I like playing board games, the subtleties of Chess have always eluded me. It is a popular game, though, so I used to feel like I needed to learn it better, making myself suffer through many humiliating defeats before I was able to find peace with my weakness and peacefully go my own way.
During the time that I was trying to "get" Chess, I picked up a deck of cards called Knightmare Chess, published by Steve Jackson Games a dozen years ago. The basic gist of this add-on is that you have a deck of cards, each of which breaks the rules of Chess in one way or another. The changes are highly varied, from letting you swap pieces on the board, or move a piece differently than they normally move, or my favorite, the Fireball, which blows up one of your pawns and every piece in an adjacent space. That card is awesome. The basic result of playing Knightmare Chess is that while you know how pieces can normally move, you never know what cards your opponent has in his hands, and how that will break the game. Thus, you can end up being more cautious than normal, while trying to put your own pieces in position to do something crazy.
The way that Knightmare Chess is supposed to work is that each player has their own set of cards, and then you create your own play deck. Each card has a points value, from 1 to 10, and you have 150 points with which to build your own deck. Some cards are unique, and you can only have one of them in your deck, while you can have multiple copies of non-unique cards. I have never actually played the game that way, though. I have always used the optional rule where you just use the entire card deck that comes in the box, and both players draw from the same deck. The normal rules add a deck-building aspect to the game that apes collectible card games, but the optional way that I play has easier set-up, and you only need one deck between both players.
I find Knightmare Chess to be a fun diversion, but it is not my favorite game, so I hardly ever break it out. In fact, I think the last time I had played it prior to getting it out just to write this blog post was in 2002, which was the last time I had used my Chess set. If you like Chess, though, and want to add some chaos to your games, then Knightmare Chess is a good way to do that.
During the time that I was trying to "get" Chess, I picked up a deck of cards called Knightmare Chess, published by Steve Jackson Games a dozen years ago. The basic gist of this add-on is that you have a deck of cards, each of which breaks the rules of Chess in one way or another. The changes are highly varied, from letting you swap pieces on the board, or move a piece differently than they normally move, or my favorite, the Fireball, which blows up one of your pawns and every piece in an adjacent space. That card is awesome. The basic result of playing Knightmare Chess is that while you know how pieces can normally move, you never know what cards your opponent has in his hands, and how that will break the game. Thus, you can end up being more cautious than normal, while trying to put your own pieces in position to do something crazy.
The way that Knightmare Chess is supposed to work is that each player has their own set of cards, and then you create your own play deck. Each card has a points value, from 1 to 10, and you have 150 points with which to build your own deck. Some cards are unique, and you can only have one of them in your deck, while you can have multiple copies of non-unique cards. I have never actually played the game that way, though. I have always used the optional rule where you just use the entire card deck that comes in the box, and both players draw from the same deck. The normal rules add a deck-building aspect to the game that apes collectible card games, but the optional way that I play has easier set-up, and you only need one deck between both players.
I find Knightmare Chess to be a fun diversion, but it is not my favorite game, so I hardly ever break it out. In fact, I think the last time I had played it prior to getting it out just to write this blog post was in 2002, which was the last time I had used my Chess set. If you like Chess, though, and want to add some chaos to your games, then Knightmare Chess is a good way to do that.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
The Last Flight of the Eagles
So this weekend the F-15 fighters from the Air National Guard that have operated out of St. Louis for I don't even remember how many years will be gone. I have a number of memories of sitting in Lambert airport waiting to take a flight out of town, and having one of "Lindbergh's Own" buzz a little closer to the terminal than was technically considered appropriate while on a training flight. One time one of the pilots got a little crazy and pulled one of those stunts where they fly really slow over the runway, and then tilt the nose 85 degrees up and hit the afterburners, blasting straight up and threatening to blow the windows out. Good times, but they are now gone. Because, let's be honest, what is the current risk of an enemy nation putting planes in the air near eastern Missouri?
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