“💇🏻‍♀️” was finally home after being away for summer! I love her so much!♥︎♥︎♥︎♥︎♥︎♥︎

We met up and played Haggis; we played a traditional long game of 350 points, not really utilizing the “bet” rules, and using the new reckoning of one point per captured card instead of some cards 0, some 1, some 2, some 3 and some 5. The game was really fun; I had a huge lead and then she had a clean sweep almost catching up but I ended up winning. I also managed to use both laser bombs and rainbow bombs! This was our first time with the new reckoning so let me review that real quick! That’s right, fam, you get game reviews tangled up in the sesh reps in this 🐝!

Pros

1. The new reckoning plays much better, faster, breezier for pretty much the same results
2. The new reckoning is much easier to remember, teach, and explain
3. The new reckoning is much friendlier for ordinary playing cards compared to using the specially printed cards that had the point values

I’m definitively gonna keep using the new reckoning and it makes Haggis shoot up as one of my fave 2p card games. I was kvetching that I don’t like that it doesn’t use the aces (one reason I have such a sweet spot for Color Gin is that it uses the entire French deck fully; suits matter, ranks matter, sets matter, sequences matter and all 52 cards are in use, whereas Haggis hits the first three of those four [and is way more interactive than Color Gin]. It uses a very unusual deck composition 2–10 in four suits, or five suites for 3p. But “💇🏻‍♀️” was into it! She said it was easier, there’s already enough to juggle, you don’t need to worry about card rankings etc, this was great. She made a great case for Haggis’ deck design!

We used one of my fave decks from when I used to collect Bicycle decks. This deck is well worn by now.

But now on to the cons with the new reckoning!

• It makes the idea of “capturing” completely dumb!! First of all, cards in hand are now worth six each in practice no matter which card they are, but you get them as five and then one!
• And the tensions around using the king etc is gone, and the ranking of the joker bombs aren’t as obvious
• And why do I now “capture the haggis” instead of “you get 8 bonus points”?
• It just doesn’t make sense! With the old reckoning there was a purpose to capturing cards. Now “💇🏻‍♀️” wondered why there even was capturing and I explained “it used to be that cards were worth different amounts of points and that’s why capturing was a big deal. You still do it because they’re one point each”.

She agreed that one point per card is better!

This is a strength of Sean’s game dev chops; he ruthlessly realizes when a rule doesn’t really change the outcome of a game. There’s probably less than one game out of forty where the fiddly card point differences changed who won a game, probably less than one out of five where it changed who even won one round. So the new reckoning is way way better but it curiously shows traces of the games’ evolution since if it had been one point per card from the start the “capturing” wouldn’t’ve evolved in this way or been phrased that way!

Then after I had said au revoir to her and returned home, who did I find waiting outside my door? My beloved D&D dorks! And D&D was really really fun today! We could play outside! It was the opposite of last time (where it was stomp-and-stare until we found a “Trilemma” adventure location); this time the random encounters were fun! I was using the rule that stuff on the NE Strielund table that we’ve already seen a couple of times, instead I roll something off of Dungeonesque’s tables (in the blue book).

So we got some flavorful and weird Strielund stuff followed by first a chimera! It was a scared and frozen chimera that didn’t wanna fight but “M”‘s character Tófa hates the world so he started throwing javs! With disastrous results, everyone in the party spent their guardian acorns and barely escaped.

So that later in the afternoon same day they were more vulnerable and they ran into two nobles (high lords from Sisteborg [“Lastfort”]) and their five retainers. The nobles demanded 90% of the party’s possessions. @Halo’s character Visan (he’s playing a Wildfire druid… that has taken every single chef feat in the book! + herbalism!) offered to cook up a meal, the nobles said “Well, that’s a start! You’re right that we’re quite hungry. We can divide the rest of your stuff after dinner.” (they had been treading in the snow) but Visan slipped them a sick dose of psilocybin ‘shrooms! Which was great because I then got to describe how they turned into wolves! (I did a detailed & gory description inspired by The Dreamers by Stephen King which I read the other day.) All seven of them—the whole “nobles and retainers” was just a disguise; rather than lycantrophized nobles they were really bandit werewolves who had stolen those outfits! They had the poisoned condition which made it easier to hide from them (which the party remembered) and defend from them (which they forgot). So everyone got infected by lycantropy which was moot in Tófa’s case because he died! But that was a good thing because “M” seemed way more stoked for his new char! He’s been not entirely positive to the #trippeludden campaign and even less for the campaigns I’ve been thinking of running (#trippeludden is kind of a stopgap or filler campaign as I’m working on the next. Our #boatmode campaign isn’t destroyed, it’s properly bookmarked & stashed in case I wanna return to it, which I don’t anytime soon even though I can understand why the players would want to!) so we’re all hoping that his new character will turn things around!

What I’ve been doing with the Trippeludden setting is that they were pretty restricted in terms of character options at first but as they run into weird creatures, those creatures have been unlocked as character options. So at first they could only be humans but now they can be gnomes, Martoi remnants (using reskinned “Shadar-Kai” stats for them), orcs (of the Aggal blight variety), half-demon (that is to say half-orc, half-demon, using “Tiefling” stats for them), and Seree automations (using reskinned “Warforged” stats for them). Players don’t decrypt: Gurl jrer nyfb ernyyl ernyyl pybfr gb zrrgvat n bar-bss neznqvyyb perngher, juvpu, vs gurl qb, gurl pna cynl xva bs jvgu Gnfun’f havdhr yvarntr ehyrf. Gurl whfg qvqa’g tb vagb gung ebbz!.

Also we were using initiative cards! A little fiddly and slower compared to our normal home made deterministic initiative system but pretty fun and dynamic and easy on the brains for me as DM. I really had looked forward to using those cards ever since I got the Essentials Kit many years ago (they were still on their performated sheet, I separated them for the first time for last sessions but that session didn’t have any fights). I made a couple of mistakes with the cards but “M” help me sort that out. We could also use the cards to partially help keep track of which werewolves had been hidden from and which had not been.

Now, normally on a weeknight we don’t play boardgames after, the way we might on a weekend (maybe as fillers before the game). But since we had a char death, we had time to play Stella! It’s such a dumb game but I love it!!! It just makes me feel really really happy when I play it! And the best part is, “M” loves it too! Things have been a li’l tense since his pet char died in #boatmode so it’s good that he’s been grooving on Stella. He thinks it’s way better than Dixit; although all three of us are in pretty much lockstep sync agreement about the pros and cons of Dixit and Stella. @Halo asked if we could play good old Dixit too sometimes and we said yes. I think the 3P variant does work well for Dixit.

I finally managed to explain how the original scoring system works and they agreed how dumb and bad and fiddly and time-consuming and book-keeping it was. Our houserules are isomorphic but just work faster. “Normally even the ‘in the dark’ player would get two points for every match and one extra for every super spark, but they would then retroactively lose one of those points if they fall, and everyone’s points would be tracked using these stars, and then between each round those scores would be transfered to a score sheet that comes with the game, I don’t have it anymore, and then after the game the scores are summed”. It’s just so dumb!! Instead we use the bunnies and the score track from Odyssey and people get their scores immediately: one if you’re in the dark (which makes sense since the in-the-dark token only shows one star), two if you’re not, and one extra if you spark, and if the in-the-dark player doesn’t fall, which so far hasn’t happen to us, they’d get bonus points equal to as many they marked (a.k.a. their position on the lantern track). So unlike upstream Stella you never have to “backtrack” and there’s no “score transfer” or “score summing” book-keeping steps.

Now, I believe that one reason they went with that cockamamie Rube Goldberg scoring procedure was to make the game feel more different from Dixit! And one other reason is that they just borked it in the dev process (I mean, the two-star/one-star sides on the lantern tokens are an echo of how scoring perhaps worked differently at an earlier stage in the process).

Now I mentioned the other day that I think I need new glasses already but it works OK when I pick up the cards. Stella is “kind” in that way since it uses fewer cards per game. (Although Stella games are shorter than Dixit, we had time to play it twice in 40 minutes tonight.) And getting to look at these cards is such a delight and such a reason why I love these two games!

I’ve been frank in how much I can’t stand some of Dixit’s expansions (“Journey”, “Mirrors”, there are some other ones I also really don’t like. Journey’s images would be cool for a picture book but they’re frustrating for Dixit because unlike Dixit, they’re often just “one thing”, each card is one story or one pun, whereas Dixit’s original three sets (“Dixit”, “Quest”, and “Odyssey”—Journey was called Dixit 3 at one point even though it’s the fourth set) I can come up with a dozen things for each card. But come to think of it, maybe Journey’s cards would work well with the Stella ruleset actually! The Stella word card system affords us to look at every card in a new light! Although nothing can fix that Asterix-style card in “Mirrors”! The Tintin rocket in Odyssey is bad enough!) but please let me then counterweigh that by saying how much I love the card sets of Odyssey, Stella and Revelations! BGG has all card images for all set I really do feel like I’ve picked my three fave ones (in that order: my old fave Odyssey now surpassed by Stella and by my new fave Revelations)!

After a long streak of expansions I don’t like, the Stella cards actually are great! I know that the new rules and components were one big reason why I wanted to get the Stella box but those components can be replaced by scrap paper; as long as you have Dixit cards you can play with the Stella rules, just draw a five by three grid with six lines on a note paper or something. But I really really love this card set! Warm and soft and rich in imagery. Bringing back a lot of what I loved from Dixit which a lot of the other sets have lost. (“Dixit” and “Quest” I’d place as my fourth and fifth favorite; as I said the other day, @Halo has them so I’m not gonna get them since we can play with them with his set when we get nostalgic for them. Instead, I’d be more likely to mix in divination cards from my Morgan-Greer or Laura’s Liminal Spirits Oracle deck.)

D&D #boatmode today was such a disaster. I forgot to use lair encounters and legendary encounters so when the huge amount of XP poured in, @Halo felt guilty and asked if we could redo the fight.

And in the redo they lost two beloved and long-running PCs. FML.

And “M” (as some of y’all might remember, I’m obscuring his identity since he’s not on Fedi or other socials, which, mad props for that♥︎) is so hyped up for D&D 5.2 and is lashing out against all my proposals to go more OSR with RC or Strange Stars or WWN or something similar. I had prepped Fever Swamp (which I’ve had placed on our world map since #boatmode first started, it’s over by the Ruined Kingdoms jungles) but looking at it, it seemed a li’l tough for level one chars so I suggested they roll up three RC PCs each [and I was gonna say that the module has some custom classes available too] but he just snapped “No let’s just do one each so we can die as quickly as possible because that’s all OSR is good for, dying quickly!”

I really wanted to use RC for Wind Wraith and that that should be our summer campaign but now it’s been delayed and is gonna come out at the same time or maybe even after D&D 5.2.

He was pretty mad and I can understand that since it was his pet character that unnecessarily died in the encounter redo. A really annoying character who always decided randomly where to go or always went opposite of what other people suggested (“you’re saying we should go left? So that means we should go right then?”) or whatever out of some weird Bizarro Superman interpretation of the chaotic alignment, but it was a character he for some reason really loved and one who had been with our game since September 2020, that’s almost four years.

And I’m getting so overwhelmed with 5e how it needs so many books. 5etools was absolutely borking out and glitching up so I was running a Mummy Lord off of screen grabs in the iPad’s “Photos” app and that’s why I missed all the stuff. For the redo I went to a storage location to grab a physical Monster Manual. I was looking forward to running Wind Wrath off of just three books: the RC, the Wind Wraith campaign book, and a paper notebook. (Although I already diluted that by getting the Creature Catalog for RC too, FML.)

And “M” is so stoked for 5.2 and is watching all the videos and he is so disparaging of RC and everything OSR. He correctly points out that we’ve already yanked a heck of a lot of the raisins from the OSR cake since we’re running so extremely OSR-ish already with plenty of rules straight out of B/X and 2e and Veins of the Earth and a bunch of house rules of my own devising.

When I was moving apartments this winter is when I really got the hankering to switch away from 5e. We had six shelf-foot worth of D&D books readily at hand in the old, bigger apartment. I wanted to go more light. I had high hopes for Cthulhu Dark but they don’t like that very much. RC was my second out but we haven’t even gotten to tried that yet. 5e was great in the bigger apartment where we had all the spell cards and all the monster manuals and TCE/​XGE/​MoMu/​PHB/​MM/​DMG + a bunch of 2e boxed sets and 3rd party books and maps on the walls and etc etc etc. The maximalist dream. Since I moved I’ve been relying off of 5eTools (a pirate site. But I have all the books, often in two or three copies, it’s just that they’re in storage) and Flexcil and they’re so glitchy and flaky. I’ve been longing for a game where I don’t have to use the iPad and that runs out of just one or two books. And it’s not even a sure thing that Wind Wraith is gonna be any good.

We had dinner the entire group, playing Turncoats which I accidentally kingmade into Halo’s favor, adding some more salt in the figurative wounds.

Halo stayed back for a couple of hours of boardgames. I clobbered him in Radlands going 3–1 and then he clobbered me in Good and Bad Ghosts, 9–3 with eight being the longest streak (I won the two first and the second-to-last). I should go and edit my BGG ratings because Ghosts is my favorite game and I currently have it listed as third. It’s just that I so seldom get it to the table because other people don’t understand its greatness, they think it’s just lolrandom (and maybe it is and maybe it’s me who’s wrong about it).

There’s more than an hour left until the next episode of Bad Gear. 😔

I’m so blue all the time and that’s just how I feel. 😔

Drowning my sorrows in old books and unhulled sesames.

I’ll try to prep a new D&D campaign. Our Strange Stars didn’t get of the ground (I’m a li’l intimidated), I’ve got some story games lying around, saddest of all Wind Wraith was delayed until fall. Maybe I’ll just make a few more islands for #boatmode. We could leverage all the continuity and world-building (where everyone knows about the salt bond or how to properly conduct oneself on Hakiyah’s Day or how to properly pick fruit from Catastrophe Trees) while still having a li’l bit of freshness and a reason to switch to Rules Cyclopedia, which I wanted to do waaaay ahead of D&D 5.2 but now the months have gone by and we haven’t.

Our Arden Vul game just turned a corner the other night, but it’s a li’l too pixel-hunty for them. How the heck are they supposed to find and open that door. 😔

D&D + boardgames!

First Sail with “M” as we were waiting for @Halo. Our boat collapsed and the kraken ate us as we were one step from the harbor. We were literally in the little square that borders three harbor squares so the people were standing on the shore cheering our arrival but their cheers turned to horror as our boat turned to splinter. On level 3 no mods.

D&D #boatmode was really exhausting to DM because it was a session that required a lot of subjectivity and interpretation. I needed to roleplay 600 mamluks + a couple of Hakiyah imams + some salty Flamesea mages. And try to understand all of Kerbog Khan’s resources + carefully describe four completely different and hitherto unexplored parts of the Halls of Arden Vul since they used an oracle to get clues to the whereabouts of four items.

We had a fun li’l break with DM’s story hour as they were reading the tales of Larel one eye.♥︎

Then boardgames; one game of Turncoats which continues to be amazing for the simple reason that every game is wildly different. I’m more and more impressed by it. And we did manage to get the situation where the lands were tied so the player with the fewest stones total won. So it is possible.

Then a game of Veritas. What a clobbering by “M”. Me and @Halo were infighting so he was making hay. Final scores me 6, Halo I’m not sure but around thirty, “M” had 104 points.

Then two sessions of the old Knizia Lord of the Rings co-op (listening to Bo Hansson records of course). Our first time playing it 3p. First game was a clusterheck, only getting 37 points. I succumbed to Sauron’s influence as Pippin outside of Shelob’s cave leading Sam and Frodo to run out of resources against the witch king as they didn’t enlist Eowyn in time.. A difficult game at 3p.

Then one game of SS3. I was the super saint so I was in no hurry to vote so of course I did the opposite and immediately voted to convict Halo, who hesitated but voted back at me. He wasn’t sure, he wavered a bit between voting to convict me or “M” until we settled in a standoff. I had a mafia read from him. “M” hadn’t acted. I told him that if he promised to vote Halo, I would temporarily move my vote over to him first so “M” wouldn’t need to risk it with the hammering vote. That made him realize I was the super saint so he could trust me and we won, convicting Halo who was mafia. Of course, I’m realizing as I’m writing this that Halo could’ve immediately switched his condemnation over to “M” and won the game in that window when I had my condemnation aimed there. Which would’ve lost him the game if “M” had been the super saint but it was his only out in that moment.

Then finally two round of a parlor game Richard taught me called “What does Sandra believe?” where Halo is supposed to come up with a trivia question that has a numerical answer, I commit to an answer, then “M” guesses what number I believe, and then Halo says “higher” or “lower”, and closes to my guess wins (I can’t win, the game is about guessing what I think, I’m not a contestant). We played twice, changing roles, they won once each, both time I believed way too low. Apparently I think a 60 pound battery weighs less than two pounds 🤦🏻‍♀️

Fun fun fun♥︎

@kensanata

Definitively interesting. That might solve some problems compared to stricter realtime.

We’re very diligent with our fantasy calendar, even now when we’re not currently juggling multiple teams (when we were, it was a godsend). It’s currently eight AM, Masta the fourteenth in the 1395th year of the Loregiver. It’s Selan’s day. Two nights from now (the night between 15 and 16) is gonna be a full moon. Three days left for the big trade day in Gosterwick on al-Dabab Island.

We’ve talked about doing more realtime stuff, between sessions, but haven’t tried it.

When we had multiple teams our rule is and was that if one team gets too far behind it needs to do downtime rolls to catch up, but that has never happened. It was just a few days off here and there, playing leapfrog who was the most ahead.

Our #boatmode campaign has gone for a li’l over 300 sessions since juuuust before pandemic first started, and it’s been 13 and a half months diegetically. So a li’l more than one day per session but then several days go between sessions. Time passes most quickly when travelling, especially on the ship. That’s when we can do like ten, fourteen days in a session. Normally we do around half or two thirds of a day of dungeon crawling in one session.

@kyonshi @madmoses

Followed four hours of #boatmode D&D (they specced Sending so they could start calling up Captain Xendros and check out her catalogue) we played three rounds of Turncoats. We won a game each! So far this game keeps growing for me:

• the tactility / coziness is through the roof
• it captures its theme very well
• every game has been meaningfully different from the last in an interesting way.

Is Spike happy? I don’t know. It’s luck-heavy and it’s pretty vanilla area control. But I’m loving it.

I have a weird thing about theme, and I’ve never ever been able to explain this to anyone in a way that they’ve understood it but here I’ll try again:

When I play a classic game with classic-looking timeless pieces, I get super into that feeling and it feels like every time I’ve seen that game played in a book or a movie. A great chess set with red and white pieces like Breaking Dawn, or a checkers set where a missing piece has been replaced by a button like in Winnie the Pooh, or a wooden Scrabble game like Calvin and Hobbes has, or a set of Bee playing cards like in Kakegurui, or a game from books or comics like Swords & Stronghold or Tak. It takes me right there. I feel like I’m Beth Harmon, Hobbes the tiger, Mary Saotome, not that I am them exactly but all the things that I think are cool about them, I get to feel like we’re having all the same fun. Maybe that’s a li’l childish but this aesthetic is something I hugely appreciate in board games. I love when games have the aesthetic of games. I feel like I’m taking part in something timeless.

With it’s classic-feeling look and pieces, Turncoats does deliver in that regard. It feels like it belongs right there with Nine Men’s Morris or Checkers, that we could be playing this in a salon in the 19th century or in a field in the medieval times.

Minis and art is a completely different aspect of “theme”. Do I really need to pretend that the li’l plastic skeleton is a real skeleton? This sense of theme is appealing too but much less than the first kind of game-qua-game aesthetic. Don’t get me wrong, I can get into it. I can play Betrayal on the House on the Something Something in a dollhouse style pretending that the li’l figures are the real peeps, make-believing like a li’l kid (or the way we used to do it when I was a kid, not sure if kids these days still use their imagination like that). Just today we were playing Radlands and I was cheering when I sent my Scientist into the Octagon for a deathmatch! I was holding up the card making li’l walking and fighting motions as if the card was a puppet 🤦🏻‍♀️

Here, Turncoats can’t measure up to a game with more full fledged art or minis but you know what? It’s enough here too. The three armies of Waves, Flowers and Grass; when they go on the march it does feel like they go on the March, when they fight it does feel like they fight, when they recruit it does feel like they recruit etc. It’s enough to pull it over the edge and into making my imagination feel like these really are three li’l lands at war.

Finally, onto a third dimension of theme that we rarely get to see outside of maybe Napoleon at Morengo. One type of pretend-play I can indulge in with Turncoats is that we’re in the war room planning out our troop movements using these counters on a map. It’s chromeless enough, and detailed enough with the li’l regions and lake, to trick my head into making that fantasy work.

And yes, I’m sprawlbrained enough to make all three fantasies work at the same time making it just a wonderful time. We’ve taken to refering to the negotiation move as “I’m willing to go to the negotiation table”. The game is a li’l difficult to teach but once everyone knows it, it flows great.

After the three sessions of Turncoats we played one game of Ticket to Ride. I lost huge 🤦🏻‍♀️

I made one iffy play but even if I hadn’t done that, I would’ve only had 24 points more (a seven point swing for the ticket + I would’ve gotten shared Globetrotter bonus). Maybe the most fun thing that happened was that at one point the market row had only green train cards. We’re using the Nordic map and I got it into my heads that orange cards are by far the best and most important color.

Then for the first time we playtested my 3P variant of Radlands. Worked great!

Everyone selects two camps out of four, places one in front of themselves and one shared with the player to their right.

Start player gets 1💧, second 2💧 and from then on everyone gets 3💧 as normal. It goes clockwise.

You have sole control of your own column and shared control of the columns to your left and right. Those shared camps also give you starting hand cards.

There’s no player elimination, one player wins when the three camps they don’t control are destroyed (the two opponents sole camps and their shared camp).

You can use the people placed in your shared columns no matter who played them. They become ready at the start of the turn of the player who played them though. But you can sacrifice them to Mulchers and Blood Banks and such right away.

Cards that say “of your opponent’s choice”, like Raiders and Octagon, they work like this: First, the two opponents get a chance to agree, if they do agree on a card then that’s it. (And in our playtests, that always happened.) If they can’t agree they must rock-paper-scissors over it.

You can not shoot your own shared columns with offensive cards like Railgun or Holdout even when you’d tactically want to do that.

We played one game this way, that particular game worked great, was fun, had some shifting tides and ended in about the same amount of time as a normal 2p game.

Then one dork left and we played four more games of Radlands. Fun games! We went 2-2, alternating wins. This time it was definitively more about the camps and less about the characters. Maybe the most fun character thing that happened was how Karli Blaze showed up at the Oasis and could fire right away (and then I had another here, Magnus I think, who could bring out a punk to protect her). Then the next round, the Exterminator could haste in and immediately nuke four enemies thanks to Blaze’s ability. Then Karli Blaze died but at least she got to do the thing! Another very snopen win I managed to get was that I had a Command Post (no punks) and a Railgun and there were only two camps left, both damaged. A High Ground resolved, and I junked the Silo and a second High Ground for a total of five water so I could fire from both camps in the same turn, for the win.

A rare treat today: our #boatmode D&D session was IRL instead of over XMPP video. And it was way less exhausting and for all I’m concerned we coulda played way longer. It’s weird how tiring video chat is compared to actually hanging out.

Also we’re deep in the Arden Vul muck now. Starting to see the dark at the end of the tunnel on this 🐝

I love all the small monster details that have accumulated in the #boatmode campaign. Like how skeletons love to say “ri” over and over again, “ririririririri” you’ll hear. Or how oozes & cubes have a minty fresh smell.

Troupe play is so wild! 🤯

In #boatmode the biggest threat to the player characters in Arden Vul is… their own alternate party! You can definitively tell that they’ve played Microscope and Hillfolk and Fiasco a couple of times.

Session 298 of #boatmode devolved into a hidden movement game with the players writing down their characters’ movement room to room so my NPCs couldn’t know where they went

I just reread this horrible thread I was in four years ago and I became physically nauseated. Bad faith, mean-spirited arguments, and being repeatedly misunderstood.

Although it was cozy to see references to events from session 26 of #boatmode when we just did session 273 yesterday.

https://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=170456

@Sandra I'll read through that in detail - I was actually thinking more of the Against The Wicked City style retrospective of What worked, What didn't, Lessons learned from a GM perspective.

Mostly I ask because I think #boatmode is one of the longest running Spelljammer campaigns I have ever heard of by a *big* margin

https://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2021/03/failing-better-gming-retrospective.html