Observations of the Fox

 I pledged to the Altered Carbon RPG Kickstarter when it was going. It was meant to have been shipped in August 2020, but I guess COVID has stuffed up a lot of things this year. I have finally managed to have a look at the second version of the backer review copy of the game.   It looks alright. But as I read through it, I'm seeing lots of fiddly systems and subsystems. The core system looks interesting and fairly sturdy, with a system that's going to be a bit counter-intuitive to most gamers of mainstream systems. It's a roll under system, where characters start with a big die (a d12) as a crude level of skill/potential, and gradually get their die lower as they train and improve. Easy tasks have a high target number, while hard tasks have lower target numbers. Certain effects like having specialised equipment or training, seem to let you roll multiple dice (then pick the best result), while other effects modify the target number.  There's a few variations depending...

My nephew was given three games for Christmas. He got a starter set for Warhammer 40k... that's going to be an expensive hobby for him if it takes hold. He also got the D&D 5th edition starter set... which is also going to be an expensive hobby. I'll probably get roped into runn9ng a few games of each. Since I've bern collecyinb miniatures for 25 years and have been roleplaying for about 30. I can see both of these games really hooking him if he gets the right crowd, but can also see him turning away if he has a couple of bad experiences. We'll see how things go. It's the third game that I found surprising. I despise Monopoly, and I've generally avoided Fortnite, but no one else wanted to play the game against my nephew so I took the hit for the team. I figured he'd get bored and I'd only end up wasting an hour or so. The basic premise of the game follows some of the tropes of Monopoly, moving around the board, collecting properties, go...

All designers have an idea about how they envision their games being played. I know that I run games in a specific way, I know that different designers have their own play styles in mind when they write their games. So it's always interesting to read something written by someone to highlight how they perceive a particular game to be different to others. Symbaroum is one of those games that has been on the periphery of my notice for a while. When I saw that Paul Baldowski had written a blog post  about how he saw the game behaving differently to others in the market, I naturally had to read through it. There's a lot of good points in the article, and it's always fascinating to see how someone perceives a work to be read and utilised. Reading through the post, I'm now more interested in giving Symbaroum a more careful read. I'll have to download the OneBookShelf app that organises all the purchases made from that site, because I might have already purchased it,...

Because I'm running behind on these reviews, here's another batch for today. At an average of 5-10 minutes or so reading through each of these, then composing my thoughts and writing them up, it takes about 2 solid hours to write each batch of 20. When I've got other things to do around the house as well, that can extend to 4-5 hours, so I don't think I'll be able to write up more than one batch of 20 each day.   Entrant Name Premise Rules Definition Agenda Coherence Total 41 The Gulf Between Them – Star King West 1 1 0 3 3 8 42 Revenant – Adriano Bompani 1 1 2 1 1 6 43 My Brother’s Keeper – Chris Krueger 1 2 2 3 2 10 44 Sete – Drink in the Apocalypse – Leandro Lisboa 2 2 2 1 2 9 45 Chance Goodbyes – Michael Blatherwick 3 2 2 ...

When I started writing these reviews, they were organised on the 200 Word RPG site by the time the submissions arrived. They have now shifted to alphabetical order. I started by writing the games in the first column, or at least the first 200 games, so I'll keep working my way through that listing. Once I've worked through those, I'll probably do the rest according to their current alphabetical listing. Entrant Name Premise Rules Definition Agenda Coherence Total 21 Please Silence Your Cell Phones – Jack Rosetree 1 2 0 1 1 7 22 Transmogrified Creatures Save The Day! – Daniel D. 2 3 2 2 2 11 23 Be A Cat – VL Darling 2 2 0 3 2 9 24 Have You Heard This One Before? 1 2 0 ...