TokenCon 2: Electric Boogaloo

A couple of weeks ago was the second installment of Oklahoma's first and (so far) only board game convention: TokenCon! As should be no surprise to anyone, I had to attend. This year, it has expanded, both in terms of size and in duration; it was three days this time! Sadly, I wasn't able to attend on Friday, as there was a special event at work that day which lasted well into the evening... still, I was there for a good chunk of both Saturday and Sunday.

I am pleased by the overall direction of the convention. It is definitely growing; there were more people there this year. It took up more space. The gaming hall seemed more full than last year. I had a good time, and I don't regret the money I spent. Granted, I bought one of the 'early bird' tickets, so it wasn't quite as expensive for me this time. Still, I don't feel as though the ticket cost was too high this time around, as I did last year.

So let's talk about what I saw and did there.

Geekway to the West

My friend John has been trying to get me to go with him to the Geekway to the West convention in St. Louis, MO, for several years now. I wasn't able to go, because work obligations prevented me from being able to take the time off when the convention was happening.

Until this year.

I went to the 2019 Geekway, and boy did I have a great time!

For those who don't know, Geekway to the West is a board game convention that takes place annually in the St. Louis area. Unlike Gen Con, which is dedicated to tabletop gaming of all sorts, and which has tons of panels on all sorts of gaming-related topics, Geekway is focused exclusively on board games. Pretty much everything there is about playing, buying, selling, or trading board games. They have some tournaments, and a few special events (like the 'fancy gaming' event, and the game design contest, and the craft fair), but other than that, it's all board games all day.

PinkFae Archive #14: Children as Players in Roleplaying Games

We are slowly working our way through the archive of articles I wrote for PinkFae. This week, we come to entry number 14, about playing roleplaying games with children. I hope you enjoy it! This article was originally published on 10 April 2016.

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A friend of mine recently posted a link to an article about playing D&D with your kids. It was short, but had some interesting points. In particular, there was the part in which the author described a gaming session with his group that includes some parents who'd brought their children to the game. In this particular session, the three-year-old daughter of one of his fellow players was having fun with his miniatures. He states,

...as I was explaining what each monster was she began to ignore me and make up her own names and stories for them all. I smiled and played along with her. As we played however, I noticed that this was really kick starting her imagination. Stories of strange beasts and dragons with giant spiders as pets...

I don't have any children. My wife and I have chosen a different life path for ourselves. But I know several gamers who do have children. John Trobare, whom I interviewed recently, has a few, and he plays board games with them all the time. I don't know if he's ever tried to get them into roleplaying. But I have known other parents who have.

PinkFae Archive #12: Interview with Board Game Designer John Trobare

This week's entry is a very special PinkFae archive. It's my first game designer interview, and even better, it's an interview with my good friend John Trobare. This interview was first posted on 19 March 2016, not long after he had successfully published his game Asphodel through Kickstarter. So let's get right into it!

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My good friend John Trobare is an accomplished individual. He created the game Asphodel, which he self-published last year through Kickstarter. In addition, he opened his own pizza delivery business two years ago. All this in addition to being a devoted father and husband, and playing games several times a week, including annual trips to the Geekway to the West convention in St. Louis.

I decided to interview Mr Trobare for this week's entry. So one Sunday evening, we sat down with some family and friends to talk over dinner.

Legacy Games: A Double Edged Sword

I enjoy the video reviews at Shut Up & Sit Down. I often disagree with their assessment of a game, which merely shows that I look for different things from my games than they do, and that's fine. But I still enjoy watching the reviews. In part, this is because they're very informative, and in part because they're generally enjoyable to watch. This will be pertinent to the upcoming board game review, which I will post in two weeks' time: Near and Far.

You guys, I am so impatient to post the review for Near and Far.

But right now, I want to talk about one of SU&SD's favourite things: legacy games. The guys over at SU&SD tend to fall all over themselves when talking about legacy games. In their review of Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, they refer to Risk Legacy and other legacy games using the following statement: 'So, in other words, Pandemic Legacy is just like Risk Legacy, but with one vitally important difference: Pandemic was a great game to begin with!' (This statement can be found at time stamp 2:32). This implies that simply making a game into a Legacy version makes it great.

My Personal History of Roleplaying Games

I spent some time chatting with a friend recently. In the course of the conversation, I ended up describing to her how I got into gaming, and which games I've played, in rough order from earliest to most recent.

It occurs to me that this may be of interest to others, if only in part because my path into gaming was so very different from that of most other gamers. So I think I will describe it to you, my faithful readers.

It's all my father's fault, really. When I was a teenager (15 or 16, as I recall), my father brought home a number of Marvel comic books. He was an executive in the regional offices for Hardee's, the fast food restaurant, before it was purchased by Carl's Jr. At the time, Hardee's was considering doing a merchandising promo with some Marvel characters, and so he brought home a handful of issues of various titles for research. There was an Iron Man, a couple of different Spider-Man titles, an Incredible Hulk, and so forth. But the two that caught my attention were the Uncanny X-Men #258 and Wolverine #23.

Asphodel under way!

I know I didn't post this last weekend, and if things keep on the way they have been, I fear I may not get to post again this coming weekend either.

I'm sorry. Summer has thus far been crazier than it should be. I promise I'll get to some more posting at some point in the future.

For now, though, I want to make sure everyone is aware that the Kickstarter is live for Asphodel. I guarantee, if you get a copy of the game, you'll love it. Do a guy a favour and head over to the Asphodel Kickstarter page and back it. There's just over a week left, and there's still aways to go!

Thanks so much! Until next time,

Game on!

Board Game Review: Asphodel

Remember last week when I promised I would post a review of the game my friend has created and is playtesting? No? Well, I did. So now I will.

Asphodel is a strategic game of ghostly skirmishes. At the mouth of the river of the dead sits the spectral city of Asphodel, made up of the ghostly echoes of locations from the realm of the living. Places that may be many miles apart in the world of the Quick are jumbled together in the necropolis where we lay our scene. It is here that the various factions of the dead battle for the resources they need to move on and leave the afterlands for their eternal reward. You control one of these factions, and must manoeuvre your ghosts to strengthen your own position whilst undermining the efforts of the rival factions.

Welcome to the afterlife.

Although this game is still in prototype format, it works as well as any fully-produced game, so I will review it in the same manner. For starters, the ratings:

Strategy: 4
Randomness: 2
Complexity: 2
Humour: None
Attractiveness: Pretty (keep in mind this is a prototype I'm using; there's a very good chance that once the game is produced, this rating may increase to Ideal)
Expected Length of Gameplay: 45 minutes

Favourite Characters

I was reading a blog today about "Awesome things I've done in a game." This got me to thinking about some awesome things I've done, and I realise that more than awesome things, I'm drawn to awesome characters. I say this because the vast majority of entries in my version of this list would have been "played Character X."

So I decided that for today's entry, I would post a list of my ten favourite characters. These aren't all characters that I've run, but they're characters that I really like and remember with some sort of fondness. We'll start with:

1. Sarah Storm. Game: Changeling: The Dreaming. Player: Me. Overview: Piskie grump.
   This character was inspired by two simultaneous events. First, I read an entry on the White Wolf forum that was talking about how Changeling is a purely fantasy game. As I've mentioned here before, Changeling is as close as you can get to a universal-genre system without actually being a universal-genre system. So I wanted to disprove this statement. Secondly, a friend of mine complained that I am incapable of and/or unwilling to play combat capable characters. I wanted to prove him wrong too (for the record, I don't dislike combat-capable characters; I demand deep, well-rounded, dynamic characters, and so prefer to avoid gun bunnies). Anyway, so I made a cyberpunk piskie; her Chrysalis was triggered by William Gibson's Neuromancer, and her Dream Dance spawned TIM, the sentient chimerical cyberdeck. She has a chimerical cybereye through which she can interface both with TIM and with her treasure: a ray gun. She's smart, sassy, doesn't take any lip from anyone. Plus: Cyberpunk piskie! 

Co-operation

Hello again! Here we go, off on another week of the Game Dork's diatribes essays! Today, I found myself thinking (don't ask me why) about a game I was in once. It was a GURPS Fantasy game, inspired in part by a previous GURPS Space game run by a different friend, where each player created his own alien race. There were some really neat species in that game... but one of the players liked the idea so much that he started a Fantasy game along the same lines. I still use two of the races from that game on occasion: my Staglings and John's Ængoa.

But enough about the irrelevant details. The thing I was remembering was a conflict that arose from a concession that the GM gave to me: I had asked that there be no "common" language. Since, after all, there's no such thing as a "common" language in the real world; why on earth would there be one in any other world? I liked the challenge of finding ways to communicate without being able to assume that we could talk to anyone we met.

So when it came time to create a PC party, we had to address the issue of linguistics. How would the party communicate? Would we all learn a single shared language? Would we carry magic telepathic artefacts? Would one party member learn everyone's languages and act as translator?

Jurgi Deathbringer

Last week, I mentioned Jurgi Deathbringer. I think this week, I'll describe him in more detail.

As I said, Jurgi was a Werewolf character. I wrote him when my gaming group tried to use the pack rules for the first time, but chose a pack totem without waiting for me to get home from work. In a fit of anger, I tried to show them how stupid it is to play combat monsters. So I wrote the most min-maxed character I could.

He was an ahroun (the warrior caste) from the Get of Fenris tribe (the most savage, bloodthirsty, and warlike tribe there is, as well as one of the most arrogant). I maxed out his physical stats, gave him the lowest possible intelligence score, and then put all his social points into his appearance. Then I took the flaw "Hideous," which reduced his appearance to zero, resulting in a socially inept monster.

All his skill points went to combat abilities. All his gifts were combat optimised. And I gave him a hatred of every other were-creature that existed. My hope was the other players would see how ridiculous a character like this actually was, and start playing more realistic characters in the future.

My plan backfired.

The Game Dork Profile Photo

Welcome back! Time for another fun-filled episode of The Game Dork's Gaming Corner!

This week, I thought I'd discuss my profile photo. If you're viewing this page on a mobile browser, like a phone, it may not show up, so I'll post it here as well:

It all started many many years ago. I had a friend, a very imaginative and creative friend, named John Trobare. John has a tendency to launch into some lengthy speeches, which are astoundingly funny and will have everyone in the area laughing uncontrollably for twenty minutes or more. Of particular noteworthiness was the time he described the adventure in which he and his friends Mike and Stephen went to Alaska in an attempt to make $30,000 each in a single summer aboard a fishing boat.

But the instance that started this whole mess was when he described the species laevus ludorum, commonly known as the Game Dork. He described their habitats, behaviour, and mating habits. In particular, he devised the Game Dork Mating Call.