Archives for games - Page 2
Geas or How to tie your character in knots
In my fantasy world Skyss they use geas to control people. Not everyone is under a geas, but those in public office have it as place of their oath of allegiance. Similarly prisoners get a geas of public service compelling them to atone for their offences. Also I had my bad guy put one of my characters under a geas, just because it sort of made sense to the plot. What is a Geas? English:a design from the Book of Kells, fol. 29r. Traced outlines in black and white representing three intertwined dogs. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) A geas (pronounced gesh) is a sort of unbreakable vow. It's a celtic thing that appears in Scots & Irish folklore and legends. It's a bit more than a curse, in the sense that there are positive benefits to accepting a geas. Being under…
Secret Hitler from Kickstarter has arrived
I backed Secret Hitler on Kickstarter a little while back, and it finally arrived! I'm really looking forward to playing it, but it might be a while as it is a five to ten player game. Secret Hitler - what's in the box? Here are a handful of pictures of what is in the box. The box, two of the three double sided tracking boards, the places for the President and Chancellor, voting cards and policy tokens. The back of the Chancellor's placard, with a summary of the relevant game rules on the back. It's sitting on the liberal party's board, these are all identical on all three game boards. On the other side are the fascist policy tracker boards that depend on the number of players. The back of the President's placard. As you can see the President has…
1866 Megagame – Offside Report
The Prussian Team for Game 2 of 1866 and all that assembles. Yesterday I played in an 1866 megagame, well in one of two 1866 megagames. Megagame Makers ran two simultaneous megagames about the 1866 bruderkrieg (between the Prussians and the Italians on one side and the Austrians and their allies on the other). One of the most interesting things about today's 1866 megagame was that there were two entirely identical games going on at the same time. The only difference between the 1866 megagames were the players. Both games had the same briefings, maps, counters and mechanics. The end results were quite different, although in both cases fairly close to historic. Certainly within the bounds of plausibility. My role in the 1866 Megagame Unusually I was playing the megagame. This was because Alexander came to play in his first…
Milmud – Guest Post today about 1689 Highland Battles
Today's blog post is a guest post on Military Muddling, AKA Milmud. Milmud is the blog and club newsletter for Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group (CLWG). CLWG are a group of activist game designers. Most of the Megagame Makers designers belong to CLWG, including Jim Wallman who brought us the Universe roleplaying games and Watch the Skies. I'm a member of CLWG and have been for about 20 years. At the 2015 CLWG conference I ran a session on the Highland Battles of 1689. This is going to form part of a 1689 Megagame planned for late 2017. You can read more about my game design efforts over on Hot Blood and Cold Steel. Link to Milmud Here's the post on milmud Highland Battles 1689 - onside report. I found the session very useful and I learnt a lot from it.…
Notice: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool in /var/www/html/themself/wp-content/themes/mesocolumn/lib/functions/theme-functions.php on line 502
T317 Design and Innovation starts
My second to last open university course officially started on Friday. The course is about Design and Innovation, which I thought would be a very good thing to go into my business studies BA along with the Creative Writing I did two years ago. At the time I booked onto it I was working as a digital architect, designing digital services for the bit of the civil service I was working in. Since then I have been promoted and changed ; I'm still likely to find it useful though, just in a different way. The upshot of this course, 60 credit points at final year undergraduate level, is that I'm likely to stop reading things for pleasure for a while. So there will be fewer blog posts, and what there is may be about design or innovation. I'm expecting my…