What we do in the lockdown

So, it's long been a personal annoyance that various games distribute figurines that aren't particularly visually distinct. The lockdown has finally driven me to the point of trying to do something about it

Pandemic: Reign of Cthulu

The Pandemic figurines

The pandemic figurines are reasonably distinguishable, but a bit dull, and it requires some effort to associate the figurine with the right character sheet at the start

Painted cultists

The cultists don't strictly need to be painted, but it seemed a chance to add more colour and variety to the game.

Shoggoths on the march

Shoggoths should look ugly and menancing, and the pale blue just wasn't working for me

Painted heroes

Far from the best paint job ever, but it achieves the goal of making the figures resemble the card artwork and makes them more distinguishable on the map

Gears of War

Gears of War is arguably one of the worst offenders, with it's basically indistinguishable CoG figures.

However, the colour scheme of the cogs in the artwork doesn't help distinguish the figures, so I opted for the simple approach of solid colours to make them distinct

Not terribly artistic, but much more usable.

Fortune and Glory

That the FanG manual includes this handy reference sheet shows the issues with their figurines. The heroes are somewhat distinguishable, but not particularly so at long distance, and the Nazi and Mob mooks are too similar with the default colouring

The different value tokens are somewhat too similar in size for that to be a good measure, and the different symbols are too hard to see at a distant. Painting the 1-value tokens makes things a lot clearer

Mob villians

Mob mooks

Nazi soldiers

Nazi villians

The different groups are now much more visually distinct, and it's much easier to recognise which figures are on  the board

Painting the zepplin is not required, but seemed a fun idea

Visually distinct heroes are nice

Again, painting the pyramids isn't required, but I wanted the option to talk about different ones easily, so I added the option to refer to them by colour rather than just position on the board. The paintwork is a bit light, since I like the effect of the underlying colour bleeding through - it feels a better look for ancient ruins.

ICON 2010, Sunday

The coffee shop was open again on Sunday, so that was a good start.

I opted to play in another module, rather than watch the VTES final, so I saw very little of the final.

The module got going rather late, and ran a bit long, despite our GM valiantly cutting various bits from the module. It was not a bad module, but suffered a bit from a table of slightly drunk and crazy. The table didn't quite gel, and I often felt I was having to force myself into the game, rather than having space to work with. Also, as my first experience of the infamous ICON tent, I now understand years of complaints about that venue from friends.

The module itself wasn't bad, although, as a Call of Cthulhu module in a medieval setting, it did feel a bit D & D'ish. It was a vast improvement on Friday's modules, though. It felt as if it didn't need all the characters, although that might have just been because of how our table worked.

After the module, I managed to get in another social game, trying out my Alan Sovereign investment idea, which didn't work well - I was left with the feeling that the idea could work, but I'm not sure how to balance things to make it happen yet. With the module running long, this took us well into the afternoon, so the rest of the afternoon was spent in a few conversations before leaving to drop me off at the airport.

Edit: Mish-mash of photos now up here.

ICON 2010, Saturday

Saturday got off to a poor start, as the coffee shop was closed, so we ended up decamping to a nearby Wimpy (having been led astray by my GPS, which promised more options at the location).

I signed up for the VTES tournament, and, while waiting for the tournament to start, got in my second partial VTES social. I was playing the !Brujah deck. which seemed to be doing OK, although we called the game before the table really shook itself into shape.

As I thought the deck was quite solid, I opted to play my HoS deck. This turned out to be a pure choice, and I probably would have done better with a more combat focused deck, as there wasn't that much combat defense around.

The first round was one of the odder games I've ever been involved in. I was bleeding Victor (Assamite BH toolbox), bleeding Jan (!Ventrue farm), bleeding Alex (HoS wall), with Victor starting, IIRC. My predator, Alex, brought out Agaitas, and was thus able to draw and use cards from my deck most successfully. Since Alex's deck was much more wallish than mine, he used this a lot to cycle into block fails and bleed to run me down. He also played a Anarch Troublemaker from my deck, which he should have been able to use to oust me, but forgot about it when he should have lunged. I almost had an awesome play, as I played a second Anatch Troublemaker to contest, but Victor Suddened it. It didn't matter, as Alex fell to a bounced bleed, and I fell to Jan shortly thereafter. Jan was able to whittle down Viktor gradually to take the sweep.

In the second game, I was bleeding Neville (!Ventrue anti-vote wall), bleeding Simon (Malk CEL/DEM combat), bleeding Jan, bleeding Josh (!Malk fast sneak bleed with Malkavian Games) (can't remember who started). I didn't draw enough bounce or intercept to deal with the very forward focused deck (I don't think it had a single reaction card), so was duly ousted first. I hadn't had a chance to bleed Neville before being ousted, so he was somewhat setup, and with a combination of Villeins, a well-timed Giant's Blood, some votes, Neville farmed up considerably, but eventually fell before the !Malks. Jan, who had minions Coma'ed by both Josh and Simon, eventually fell to Simon, but Simon couldn't quite hold on to stop Josh, although it was very close, as Josh almost decked himself on the last bleed.

The third game saw me bleeding Josh, bleeding Willem (Ventrue vote) bleeding Marnik (Tremere slave Gargoyles) bleeding Victor (I started, I think). Willem fell to the sneak bleed quite quickly, but I was able to put in a couple of solid hits on Josh's pool, and almost had him in range before he ousted Willem. At this point, with Josh on 6 pool, he lost a Malkavian Game, and, as he misannounced the effect, he thought he'd lost 6 instead of 4 pool. This, annoyingly, probably cost me a VP, as, had the effect been properly applied, I would have almost certainly had Josh the next turn, and would have hit the Gargoyle deck after an extra turn of being bled by the Malks, rather than with 12 pool, and would have probably been able to win that battle. Victor, who had been largely left alone to tool up, as everyone focused on the !Malks, was able to mop up the table.

Between the tournament and the start of the second LARP, I got in one more social game. I played my Nocturn deck, bleeding Neville (HoS), bleeding Gareth (Nergal power bleed), bleeding Vleis (Gangrel aggro-poke), bleeding Simon (!Salubri). The game had several amusing events - Neville played a Tension in the ranks early, so I wasn't in a position to recruit Nocturns, as the cost for them burning would have itched mightly. Gareth bled forward heavily, and Vleis had something of a bad game as a result. Simon was able to bring out a couple of smallish minions, and burnt one of the Gangrel early. At about this point, Gareth discarded a Majesty, announcing that he had too many in his hand. Simon, seeing that Gareth was about to oust the Gangrel, rushed cross table. It turned out that Garther considered two Majesty's in hand too many, and, having played the one combat card in the first rush, promptly had Nergal burnt by the !Salubri (which, given the old WoD mythos, seemed very appropriate). I got good use out of the DOM/OBT plan B gear of the Nocturn deck, and. with combat flying around cross table, was able to keep my head down and stealth bleed past Neville's defenses. Gareth, although he managed to oust the Gangrel, was running short on minions, and soon fell. Fortunately, I had enough S:CE in hand to survive a turn of rushes from the !Salubri, and, with bleed in hand, had little trouble finishing off Simon's deck.

The LARP kept the vampire theme going, as it was a Dracula LARP. I was cast as Renfield, who was fun to play. His goals were never particularly achievable, but I feel I managed a creditable level of creepy, and generally had a good time. I also managed to get killed twice - both times by Simon's character - which gave me a better than 100% record for dying in the weekend's LARPs.

Icon 2010, Friday

So, in the company of Simon, Adrianna, Mike & Beth, I went up to ICON. I flew up with Simon and Adrianna on Thursday evening, and, with some "not quite following the GPS" navigation (which included a loop around the block in a series of confusing one-way streets, where we may have ended up going the wrong way down one), we made it to the F1 hotel and met up with Mike and Beth.

Friday got off to a bright and early start. Early successes were finding a decent coffee shop for breakfast near ICON, and a source of wasabi coated peas.

I duly signed up for two role-playing modules. We were informed that two modules, one of which I had been considering playing in, had been canceled due to "severe technical weaknesses".

Before role playing started, I got in most of a quick social game with two Pretoria players and Simon. I was playing my Unnamed bleed deck. The game was interesting, as, with the unnamed bleeding, I ended up with a surprisingly large amount of pool without actually doing that much damage. I also had my Enkil Cog DI'd and my Metro Underground Suddened, which left me feeling a bit picked on.

The first role-playing module was more than a bit dire. The group I was in took some time to find the actual character descriptions, which were cunningly hidden as a couple of lines amongst walls of stats and system descriptions. The module itself wasn't much better, as it was equally sparse and lacked essential elements such as a basic plot. Our GM, Naas, took us seriously off script to add some structure - it ended up playing more as a Call of Cthulu module, but ended up being reasonably enjoyable.

The afternoon module was probably less dire, although it was a close call. The character sheets were more fleshed out, but the module was again lacking in basic plot and the characters lacked any motivation for acting in the way the module writer clearly intended. This weak setup also made it almost impossible to do any sort of real horror, and my group played it a bit for laughs, so it was quite entertaining, but not, I suspect, the module the author had intended.

Given the poor quality of the modules on show on Friday (the second afternoon module was apparently also a bit dire), the quality of the scotched modules was a source of some speculation.

Between the modules and the evening LARP, we went to the Edenvale Spur. They were having a very busy night, so this resulted in a quick dinner dash becoming a leisurely, frustrating dinner dash, and us getting back a bit late for the LARP.

The LARP was quite fun. The plot involved nearly every applicable daytime soap cliche, and several that weren't strictly applicable, but were thrown in anyway. My character came quite close to achieving his objectives, largely by presenting a completely false face of reasonable sensibleness, before dying from an unfortunate series of events - it started with poisoning and went a little odd from there, to end in a case of spontaneous human combustion.

Today's social (16 Mar 2009)

Today's social featured arguablely the longest 4 player game I've ever been involved in. Phillip (playing old-school Ventrue Vote & Bleed, and starting) was bleeding Val (Guhuri Restricted Vitae & some vote) bleeding me (new school Ventrue vote and vote) bleeding Kevin (!Toreador sneak bleed).

The game started fairly slowly, since we were all bringing out fairly large minions. With all the Zillah's Valleys and one of the Information Highways in the bottom 10 cards, and not drawing many masters, I was slower to get going than I hoped. I was always going to be in trouble as I only drew 2 masters in the first 3rd of my deck, so later one I was jamming rather horribly on masters. I also erred in the balance of vote cards, and didn't have enough aggrssive votes to really pressurise Kevin when I needed to, and, with the number of big vampires around, calling Honour the Elders ended up helping the table fairly equally. Kevin, relying on the power bleed from the Palle Grande was able to oust Phillip, although Phillip did come close to ousting Val a couple of times, but Val's farming was just good enough to hold him off. I did eventually oust Kevin, after much to-ing and fro-ing, but eventually minion superiority meant Val was able to end oust me (Val had 8 vampires to my 6). Considering that my cheapest two minions were 6 and 7 caps, and Val vampires ranging from 4 up to 11 (Eze) says a lot of how the farming went through the course of the game.

The game had several unusual events - I had to yield two titles due to contests, and had to burn my protected resources to eventually bleed Kevin out, which was extremely annoying. Both Kevin and I decked ourselves, and, when Val ousted me, he was down to only a couple of cards left in his library.

The Ventrue deck does show promise (with the Ventrue headquarters and Gustav, I could towards the end generate 17 votes without modifers, despite the yielded titles), but I do need to add a few more aggressive votes, and work on the master balance a bit. Fitting in a couple of vessels will a) provide an additional pool gain option, and the trifle will also be useful to help cycle through the masters a bit faster.

After the marathon, Kevin left, and we played a three player with the intention of playing fast. I (Serpentis bleed deck, mildly tweaked) was bleeding Phillip (Brujah concept deck) bleeding Val (Lasombra combat & bleed), with Phillip starting. I got off to a fast start, with an early hunting ground and a path not to long thereafter, and, since the bleed deck is fast, was able to sweep the table in less than 30 minutes. The combination of the path & the eternal mask is truly scary. This deck will suffer against bounce, and can be run out of S:CE, it's probably the best of my attempts at a stealth bleed deck.

An interesting, and rather educational evening.

Notes from the VTES tournament

So, Sunday was the most recent VTES tournament, being held at the Tokai Library. Although I arrived somewhat late (due to a misjudgement with the traffic caused by the Argus), I was still in time to play, which was good from a "note wasting the trip" perspective. Regrettably (presumably because of the Argus clash), we didn't attract a larger representation from the Fishhoek crowd, but we still had 10 players, and Phillip judging.

In the tournament, I played the Anarch Vote deck. It successfully got to the final table, which is a much better showing than the previous tournament I played it, though it remains fragile due to it's many moving parts.

The tournament was for me somewhat frustrating, as the deck didn't flow as nicely as it had at Monday's social. The crypt probably needs tweaking. The original idea of bringing out a huge swarm of minions out and RC'ing for double digits is proving to hard to pull off - 4 minions out looks much more reasonable, and I frequently suffered from not having both PRE and OBF available.

So in the first round, we managed to screw up and get the seating wrong from the announced order, and ended up with Marc (Ventrue antribu dominate bleed) bleeding Brendan (Ahrimane precense bleed & wall) bleeding Nick (Lasombra dominate bleed and vote) bleeding me (anarch Revolutionary Council) bleeding Kevin (Toreador antitribu stealth presence bleed). I didn't really get going, but was able to whittle away at Kevin's pool with a few bleeds, and did get one Revolutionary Council off. I made a tactical error in using a Detect Authority in a failed attempt to intercept a vote, rather than holding it for the bleed reduction, which may have saved me long enough to oust Kevin. Scariest event on the table was Marc bleeding Brendan for 13 in one turn, but he ultimately wasn't able to push through fast enough.

In the second round, Simon (Malkavain combat) was bleeding Kevin, bleeding me, bleeding James (Ventrue dominate bleed) bleeding Nick. For most of the game, I had too few votes available to go forward. Between Nick, James and Kevin, there where 7 votes from titles on the table, and James had the Ventrue headquarters, and I only got two Fee Stakes into play, one of which got burnt by a vote.

However, after a turn when James called a Parity Shift, and had thus tapped his Ventrue Headquarters, I was able to combine a inferior bewitching and a rant to force a revolutionary council through and oust him. Being forced to use Seren Sukardi's pre did mean I could never Voter Cap, so my farming strategy, such as it is, failed completely, and I was quickly ousted by Kevin.

Simon's deck was never able to really get around Kevin's combat defense, although, with 3 hunting grounds in play, and a Pulse, Santaleous's standing 6 bleed did generate a lot of blocks. There was an amusing turn, after both James and I were ousted, when Sanelous's bleed was bounced back and forth between Kevin and Nick. Eventually, Kevin was able to go through both Nick and Simon.

The final saw Nick bleeding me bleeding Richard (Akunase wall'ish deck) bleeding Andrew (Ishtarri bleed) bleeding Kevin. This round went rather badly for me. Where I'd previously suffered from not drawing Fee Stakes, in this round, I almost only drew Fee Stakes and wasn't even close to drawing a single vote modifier. Given that Nick got a regent down on the table, as well as another title, I was never in a position to even attempt a vote. Richard also went backwards early in the game, which significantly slowed me down as well. Nick was able to oust me fairly quickly, and Andrew ousted Kevin fairly soon thereafter. When I left, Andrew had also ousted Nick, and with minion superiority, was looking likely to oust Richard, which eventually happened.

In between the first two tournament rounds, I was also able to get 2 social games in.

The first, when I tried the Anarch deck, didn't go well, and Phillip's experimental trophy deck was able to red-list and then burn my single baron, which didn't help me. James's Assamite bleed-farm deck worked efficiently and swept fairly quickly.

In the next game, I played my Serpentis bleed deck, bleeding Phillip's trophy deck, bleeding James's Assamites, bleeding Marc's Liabon presence bleed deck. I was able to work through Phillip quite quickly, although I did end up burning through most of my strike combat ends card after he made one of my minions redlist. James was able to get fairly setup, and bled Marc for 8 in one turn after I'd ousted Phillip. I got lucky, and drew a Path of the Typhon just in time for it to allow me to afford two "Truth of a Thousand Lies"s, allowing me to oust James. Thereafter, I was able to push through Marc, although it was tight as I had very little blood left on my minions, and Marc was bleeding me fairly quickly as well.

After being ousted in the final, I played one more social, trying the latest version of the Mass Reality deck. I bled Simon's Malk combat, bleeding Phillips Aabbt deck, bleeding James's Ventrue deck. The deck performed incredibly poorly. Poor card draws contributed. I didn't draw a Mass Reality at all, and given that there are only a handful of guns in the deck, having 3 .44 Magnums in my hand after two turns was rather annoying. It's hard to say what parts of the deck actually work as a result, and I'll have to try it again to see what happens.

Still, the day was good fun, and I got quite a lot of vampire in, and the Anarch deck got to a final, despite the difficulties it had on the day, so I'm fairly happy with the day. The library is a very pleasant venue (and has a complimentary cat), and, when the event doesn't clash with the Argus, not that hard to get to, so I'm certainly in favour of holding more events there. I'm less of a fan of playing on the Sunday, though.

Today's social

With the benefit of sharing the table with James in all the games, despite the cut-off being moved to 11, I managed to get in 4 and bit games in between arriving at just past 7 and the deadline, which is pretty good going. In addition, I managed to sweep all 4 games that completed, although, in a least a couple of the games, a more aggressive predator would have probably ousted me.

I played two and a bit games with the modified anarch vote deck. It still feels like it has too many moving parts, but the dropping the Veiled Sight's for Forgotten Labyrinth's and some Lost in Crowds makes a big difference to the deck. The Groundfighting are also a useful option, since it an additional option in combat, and remembering that one can Crimethinc in the middle of a vote is very useful for the Revolutionary Council. A serious vote deck will still lock this deck down, and a fast stealth bleed deck will almost surely toast it, and a bad library draw will screw me over, but that's true of many decks. Still, it is quite fun when I manage to pull off the RC.

I also played two games with the Settite Serpentis bleed deck. The addition of the Path's certainly helps that deck. Being able to bleed for 4 at +1 stealth for 1 blood with inferior Serpentis is pretty scary, and the small minions means the deck can move forward fairly quickly. The lack of PRE is a bit of a problem for the S:CE, but the deck is fairly effecient. A good POT combat deck will toast it (I was lucky in one game that Mark didn't draw any of his Immortal Grapples), and bleed bounce will also hurt the deck, but it's been surprisingly effective so far.

Yet more Vampire

(a further post in the "blog as a dump of deck notes" series)

So, at the social today, A had yet another stab at the Revolutionary Council Anarchs deck I'm trying to get to work. It's morphed a fair bit since the last attempts - I totally reworked the crypt, relying on Anarch Converts rather than trying to make Jack Drake work, which makes the crypt cheaper, although I still think the balance is a bit off. The existance of Herbert Westin, another 5-cap with OBF & PRE helps, but I'm still not completely happy with the crypt. I dropped the No Confidences, as just being to corner case, and replaced Anarch Manifesto's with Crypt Son's, since equiping them doesn't actually require an anarch, so can't be used to play Crimethinc. I'm relying on a smattering of tha in the crypt, and a bunch of discipline masters to boost my vampires.

In the first game, I was bleeding Andrew (playing old-school Toreador with some guns), bleeding Simon (Tremere) bleeding Richard (Guruhi PRE bleed) bleeding Marc (!Ventrue Wall/Bleed), with me starting. While I had a reasonable crypt draw (both Rennet and Herbert in the opening crypt), I had a sufficiently strange library draw that's it hard to say anything about the deck from it. I didn't draw a single Revolutionary Council, Effective Maangement or stealth card, and only drew 1 Crimethinc, immediately before I was ousted. Since I went through about 1/3 of my deck, that's fairly improbable (odds of around 1 in 1000, according to Sutekh (since I wrote that bit of the code, I'm reasonbly certain the maths is correct here)). Needless to say, the experience ended up being pretty annoying, and being hit by the occasionaly dominate bleed meant I was osuted without being able to put much pressure on Andrew. At this point, I went in search of some food, so I'm a bit hazy on the details of the rest of game, but, as I recall, Andrew having gradually built up, and, with Masika out to act as a repeat blocker, was able to defend himself well while bring out lots of small minions to whittle down Simon, with the occasional big presence bleed. Richard got several large bleeds through on Marc, but was unable to really get his pool farm going, due to having two Vessels Sudden'ed, which also stopped him burning Marc's blood dolls. Consequently, he was unable to survive a lunge by Simon, who soon fell to Andrew. Marc held on for a bit, but ultimately Andrew's minion superiority simply overwhelmed him.

In the second game, Andrew, playing a Ravnos deck (and starting) was bleeding Richard (Guhuri) bleeding me (Anarch Revolutionary Council) bleeding Marc (Nosferatu Rush combat) bleeding Simon (!Salburi). I had a much better library draw, and actually got some use out of the Poachers Hunting ground (until Andrew burnt Richard's hunting ground). I also managed to get three Revolutionary Councils off, although I had to direct 1 backwards to avoid being blocked. I was able to pressurise Marc quite successfully, but ultimately struggled to generate enough stealth. There were a couple of occasions where I was possibly 1 stealth card away from having the oust, but never quite drew the cards I needed. Having to juggle minions in and out of torpor because of Dragonbound being on the table also complicated things for me. I ultimately was ousted by Richard. Simon was able to oust Andrew via Fame, while Richard managed to strange day a bleed past Marc's 3-Raven spy Cock robin to oust him. Simon though, was eventually able to knock Richards minions down, diablerising Iniko and, had we not called the game at the point, would have probably been able to bleed through (although arguably the game was long past the timeout stage).

The major problem was the lack of stealth - I amybe need to rework the crypt a bit more so there is more OBF available, and run more different stealth cards - having the option of dropping the occasional Lost would make getting the votes to the table more likely. The problem is finding the space, though, as I need to have a number of slots for the Fee Stakes, I can;t reduce the vote push, since the anarch titlesjust aren't enough, and the defence package is already probably too weak. It needs more work, but it's much closer to a working deck idea than in the past, I feel.

What I've done on my Xmas Holiday

As has been mentioned several times, I tend to spend a lot of time hacking on Sutekh, the VtES card manager.

I am, however, also somewhat addicted to the (now defunct) Dune CCG, so some time ago, I vaguely started working on a fork of Sutekh to deal with Dune's cards.

And, with minimal cheating [1], I now present the first evidence of Thufir's evolution to non-vapourware status [2]:




[1] It doesn't parse unmodified html files yet - I'm leaning towards just distributing the tweaked files as a better choice fixing the parser to handle the rather horrible html.

[2] git repo

Dragonfire 2008 summary

I wasn't involved in either of the LARPs, although I did help play-test one of then the week before, which was quite fun, if a little rough around the edges at the first running.

The Saturday was taken up by the Vampire tournament. I tried my Malkavian deck again, but in neitehr game was I able to secure a VP. The first game tone got set by the early appearance of Smiling Jack for my predator, which meant I wasted time going backwards, which the deck is not good at, and was unable to put pressure on my Imbued prey, and that allowed him to build up, and successfully sweep the table.

The second game, I had an Ahrimane wall deck as my prey - I almost successfully ousted him, but a cross-table direct intervention against one of my stealth cards meant that my lunge was blocked, which pretty much left me dead in the water.

In between, we did mange most of a social game, where I played my !Nossie deck, which did a lot better, successfully ousting my prey with a well timed Fame, and beating up my predator a great deal (who twice bled we for 5, so I had to, although it did leave him dead in the water for the weenie gun deck beyond to bleed through).

Sunday I played the two modules.

The first, a Call of Cthulu module, was quite fun, but, with the way the DM's dice where working, we had little chance of surviving the module (only 1 of the 3 groups plaing the module had players alive at the end, so we didn't feel too bad about that).

The second was a DnD 4th ed module. Our group ended up being the slowest by quite some distance - the unfamilarity with the rules did play a role in that, but largely it was they way the group approached the game and the roles. Still, good fun was had by all, and we did eventually beat the big bad glowly vampire boss at the end (although, our DM (Simon), to speed things along, did have the big bad come meet us halfway).

Overall, the con was most enjoyable. Unfortunately, I came done with some sort of bug towards the end, so had to skip the after party.

This yar did suffer a bit from late announcements - the module descriptions weren't up until quite close to the start of the con and the unexpected venue change (although not something in the control of the organisers) wasn't ideal. On the other hand, the mugs were available during the con, so that was good.

Zombies!!!

So, on Friday I was up way too late (4 am in the morning), because of a game Zombies!!!, which I nearly, but not quite, won (I rolled a 4, when I needed a 5). Although, given the way my rolling had gone, it was required some late good fortune to get me that close to winning.

Some observations to come out of the session.

• Rolling three successive rolls below 4 when on the the Town Square, and a "no bullets may be used effect" is in play really sucks.
• The extra cards from the guts counters added by the university expansion really changes the balance for events. It's much more likely you'll have a useful event in hand, and thus more events are changed
  
• The mall expansion, being much more compact, and with the ease of moving between shops provided by the airducts, is significantly unbalanced when compared to the the town and university. We should never have allowed Kevin to camp in the mall as we did.
• When trailing badly on Zombies, the fact that the trailing player can place the Helipad makes wandering away from everyone else a viable approach, as you can place the Helipad near yourself. As other players aren't around though, you do have to deal with all the Zombies nearby alone, which can suck badly.
• Having different expansions running, with different possible Helipad locations, makes this less viable, though.
• Zombies!!! remains a seriously cool concept, and, if shipping weren't so bloody expensive, I'd be buying it
• I should have brought Jonathon Coulton's Re: Your Brains to be played at some point during the game
  

In other zombie related news, Fluxx now has a Zombie version (want (really, really want)).

Dragonfire 2007 summary

Overall, I throughly enjoyed this Dragonfire. unfortunately, no mugs (although this may be corrected in due course).

Thursday was the Vampire tournament, which was quite fun. I played my Osebo close combat deck. As expected, it didn't do that well, although it did gain me one victory point. The weaknesses in terms of bleed speed and such are obvious, and I suffered some strange draws, but enough bits worked tat I had fun, and successfully ousting someone is always a good thing.

Friday, I had the reasonably unexpected LARP, which I've already blogged about. Having now played in a LARP, I'd approach the next one from a slightly less theatrical perspective, and pay a bit more attention to the gaming aspects.


Saturday was spent recovering from the LARP, so I skipped everything, but on Sunday I participated in both modules. The first ran very long for the group I was involved in, but was rather fun. The second was tighter, and also fun. Overall, good to get some role-playing in (I really need to find some sort of convenient RP group nearby).

So, generally good fun, although the unfilled mug issue does remain.

LARP'ed

So, I played in Simon and Adrianna's LARP, the Grove of Fallen Leaves. It was all very last minute - I agreed to play a little more than 24 hours beforehand, due to a player pulling out.

The first obstacle was actually making it to the LARP. This shouldn't have been an obstacle, except that I had to take my bike in to get the choke cable repaired, and they did not let me know that my bike would not be ready until quite late. However, by use of the less than optimal Cape Town train system, I was able to make it across (relying on Simon and Adrianna's hospitality to work around the lack of trains back until the next day).

The LARP was fun. My theatrical background was probably a it of a disadvantage, since I was more likely to play the character, rather than the game situation, although, given the way the game went down, I'm not sure i there was much I could have done differently to change things.

The LARP suffered from hitting a critical level of mistrust, and, despite trying to play a conciliatory role, the rest of the players were more interested in mistrusting each other than actually resolving anything, which was somewhat frustrating.

Still, overall, I had good fun, which is about the best one can expect out of this sort of thing.

Weekend 29 June 2007

Having finally got my car back, the special seminar series was able to resume on Saturday. Kevin, alas, could not make it, and thus fell even further behind in Cowboy Bepop (which remains very cool).

After reaching our Anime quota, Simon and I finally merged the database rework branch into Sutekh. This went surprisingly painlessly, although I spent part of Sunday morning stamping out various little awkward bugs in a less than ideally tested part of the code.

The reason why I was working on Sutekh was that we'd agreed to play vampire on Sunday. I left for this slightly late (due to the bug fixing), but fortunately the N2 was comparatively sane - until the bit where they'd closed it off due to some or other race, anyway - so getting across wasn't too much of an issue.

The modifed close-range Osebo deck was able to successfully burn a vampire in combat each game. It arguably needs some combat rush, and definately needs some more ways of gaining blood. Soem more tastes (if I had any) and some blood dolls would probably do. More immortal grapples wouldn't hurt, so I an get around S:CE. The deck, like all potence decks, suffers from not having a way around Fortitude damage prevention, which, since both simon and Adrianna were playing decks using fortitude, made my life rather difficult.

Anyway, in the first game, Kevin's mixed crypt Presence S:CE and bleed deck, swept all before it. In the second, Simon's Tremere deck did quite well, although Adrianna's Salubri deck farmed extremely successfully and showed good defensive capabilities, although not really able to generate enough bleed to pressurize Simon.

Afterwards, I returned to fix some more bugs in Sutekh. By the end of Sunday, it was getting to be back in reasonable shape.

Weekend Summary

This weekend was mainly notable for a CT BookCrossing's meetup. It took place at the Coffee Bean, unfortunately at the same time as the rugby. It sad how the Coffee Bean has been reduced to yet another place to watch TV, although the management probably disagrees.

I offloaded 3 books into the pile, and picked up a mildly interestig looking murder mystery which I hope to read soon. Simon and Adrianna attendned, and it was somewhat amusing to watch them try to stay polite while a couple of the other members tried to explain the BookCrossing's concept in very small words.

Afterwards, we had the usual games evening. I won at Captain Park, and ended up in an awkward siuation in Jacob Marley, which ended up helping Adrianna win. the game ended off with several rounds of Stoner Fluxx, which was quite entertaining ("What were we doing" is just a great Fluxx card)

Another news'ish post

So, recent developments in my life that are blog worthy?

The major news this week is the sudden and dramatic arrival of the winter cold. Given that my car is still unusable, this has been a source of considerable annoyance, as the commute in to work as become decidedly cool on the bike. I've also discovered various points where the windows in my flat now allow the cold winds to whistle in, so I'll have to spend some time getting those sealed up.

Otherwise, nothing of major importance. I skipped the weekend's VtES tournament - it was a cold and windy day, and driving across to Cape Town for it was just not appealing in the conditions. It did clear up in the evening, which made the drive across for the usual games evening doable, but then was wet and windy for the drive back, which was less than ideal. The actual games evening was quite fun - we had a close'ish game of Enemy Chocolatier for a change, although Simon still won. We tried Get Out with three dice, which suffers a bit by overly rewarding the half jobs. I had some horrible luck in the game, so was never in the running. We finished up with Give Me the Brain, where my luck was a lot better.

In addition, I went to see Spiderman 3. I've ranted about this elsewhere, so I won't repeat that, but, despite being warned about the movie, and having low expectation anyway, it still managed to disappoint.

On the technical side, I spent some time crawling around the freevo code, trying to work out why tron would no longer play my DVDs, to eventually discover that this was due to kaa-metadata not being compiled with libdvdread support. A quite recompile with the appropriate dev package installed, and all was well.

CTPUG 3

So, the third CTPUG meeting went off without undue hitches. The bandwidth barn worked quite well as a venue, and we had a larger attendance than the previous meeting, wich is good.

Getting to CTPUG was made complicated for me by the never ending mess that is the N2 at the moment, and the less said about that part of the trip, the better.

After the meeting, a group went out to dinner at a nice enough place called Greens, near Kloof street and from there Simon, Aridanna and I joined Kevin for the usual weekend games evening. This got somewhat delayed by Simon and I playing with trying to get my laptop to talk to his wireless network, which was eventually achieved.

After a game of CTB, and some rounds of Fluxx, we called it a night. The ride back was made more interesting by a very heavy misty patch on the N2, but was otherwise uneventful.

News, News, get your news here (or what happened since I last posted)

Not a lot, or I might have posted it.

Saturday was Free comic day - I went to Outer Limits, and collected the Wolfman comic on offer, as looking quite decent. I also read the Spiderman one while in the store. In addition to the free stuff, I purchased another Volume of Fables, and the first Hellboy Trade, as well as the 1st book of Peter Morwood's Russia series.

Thereafter, I joined up with Simon,. Adrianna and Phillip to play some vampire. Things where quite fun. My modified Osebo deck lost (not drawing enough strike cards, so I wasn't really able to pressurise anyone), but showed some defensive promise with the modified crypt. The Arhimane deck I threw together won, although it really shouldn't have. It benefited heavily from the extreme combat nature of the table, and some luck. I have to play it again to see how the concept actually works. The last game saw me playing my Malkavian deck, which as usual, did fairly well. I was ousted by Simon's Baali deck, partly due to my not managing the end game carefully enough. I was probably one turn away from ousting Adrianna at the time, which would have probably allowed me to sweep the table.

On the ride home from that, I encountered a car going the wrong way on the N2, which is a first (and hopefully last) for me. I have no idea how the driver managed to be going the wrong way, and, in truth, don't particualrly want to know, but it was a surprising experience.

Otherwise, Tuesday saw me pop across to see the clug talk, which was quite interesting. I now have a much better idea of what the OLPC project's laptop can do. Also got a chance to catch up with Kevin, as he was busy over the weekend and didn't join the games evening. Nothing exciting happened on the trip home this time, thankfully.

The end of dial-up (almost)

I'm almost off dial-up as may main connection from home. Yesterday, my line was changed over to ADSL, and today, I collected my free modem (using telkom's self install special offer). I've conencted everything up, and all appears working, I just need to contact telkom and get them to change my dial up account over to a ADSL one, so hopefully, tomorrow morning, I should be able to connect via ADSL, and join the legion of users who curse telkom's ridiculous cap. Ive also setup a webafrica account, so I should be able to use their ADSL options to supplement telkom's. All going well, this should be the last evening I'm using dial up exclusively. The we'll see just how fast I can burn through the allowed cap - it's likely to be quite spectacular.

The modem, telkom's wireless combo, is, to my delight, running a Linux kernel on a mips chip. It's possible, although I'll have to look carefully at this, that I could shove Freifunk or the like on this.

What I did with my extra long weekend

Other than the usual weekend games session (which was quite fun, although I did horribly in the Big Cheese, and got left in awful position in US Patent No 1), and watching the world cup final, I mainly upgraded tron to debian etch.

Why did this take so long?

Well, the downloading everything over dialup part played a role. Convincing the lirc modules to compile was also a bit of a pain (a combination of out of date docs, and not wanting to dial up during the day on Monday meaning I solved the problem in a rather convoluted way). Migrating the settings from freevo-1.5 to freevo-1.7 was fairly painless, but what took the most time was my very clever idea to replace the awkward custom scripts fro running freevo with gdm & autologin. This worked fine, but I spent several iterations getting the session configured so that freevo would start by default. All is now solved, and tron is up and running better than ever. My local tweaks, based off patches in the freevo bug tracking system, are now unnessecary. Of course, I completed everything just in time to notice that freevo-1.7.1 had been released, so I'll have to update to that soon as well, but that should be a fairly minor issue, especially as I've setup freevo in a dedicated directory under /opt

One advantage of the newer combination of kernel and lirc modules, is that all my remote buttons are now recognised correctly, which has simplified my .lircrc configuration for freevo, so I feel the effort has not been wasted.