Small Joyful Things

Claire has always enjoyed thrift store shopping. She loves spending hours going through the racks of assorted clothes and bags for treasures. And she often comes out on top, finding incredible items among the mountains of cheap tops and pants.

But this summer she pivotted away from clothing to start searching the glassware. She loves watching thrift store videos on YouTube and through them she has internalized a lot of details on what to watch for and how to fairly accurately identify genuine high value antique items from cheaper reproductions. 

Because of this, she has amassed a modest collection of very nice vintage glass and ceramic wear, and started selling some of her nicer finds that she doesn’t want to keep herself on eBay and Etsy.

However, before that, she’s been recording videos of her discoveries! They detail the history of the item as best she can tell, what to watch for in relation to that particular style of object and other interesting facts! Her channel is still quite new, but she’s been very consistent with her uploads, and as a result, her trips to the thrift stores around us. If you’d like to watch her videos, her channel is Small Joyful Things. If you’d like to buy anything she has on offer, you can order through her Etsy store, or check out her eBay page. Please buy stuff. Our home can’t support the amount of glass it currently contains, and it only grows almost daily. 

The Game Canopy

I don't drink, smoke or do drugs, nor have I in recent years been spending money on addictions I used to have, like comics, action figures or video games. These days, and for some time now, board games have been my one vice, the one thing I impulsively spend money on, either in my friendly local gaming stores or online, especially at Kickstarter.

I'm proud of my collection, and enjoy sharing it with others, both long time friends and new. But carrying games safely has been an issue for gamers like me for years. We use Ikea bags, backpacks or, in a pinch, light plastic shopping bags, risking rain and crush damage, or the corners getting rubbed away on rough surfaces, all of which have happened to games I own at least once. In fact, just last month I brought Captain Sonar to a friends place, safely tucked into my backpack, only to arrive at gaming and have to wipe off the rain that got though the fabric.

I do live in Vancouver after all. It's a temperate rainforest. It rains.

A lot.

Which is why, despite the perceived high cost, more-so after including shipping and taxes, I was willing to back the Game Canopy from Level 3B when it appeared on Kickstarter back on April 24th, 2016, almost a year ago now. I was there when the campaign went live and one of the first backers, number 191 out of a final total of 1,753. This isn't even my first time talking about the Game Canopy on my blog.

After what felt like much longer than a year of waiting, I have my new game transport system in my hand. A year of waiting, anticipating, reading updates, following progress, getting increasingly more excited about how good it could be. That's Kickstarter's biggest flaw. No matter how good the final product is, it's almost impossible to live up to the imaginary possibilities that lengthy waiting conjures up.

Except, the Game Canopy is that good.

Padded on all sides, including base and top, the Game Canopy is custom built to protect your games in best possible way. Level 3B thought of everything. There is even padding inside to cover the zip so that it can't rub against its precious cargo. The top carry handles are stitched all the way around the bag to prevent the load from pulling on one seam, with D-rings on all corners front and back giving you plenty of options for how you'd like to attach the shoulder strap, which itself is the nicest shoulder strap I own, thick padded with a grippy material underneath.

The Game Canopy can comfortably fit five "standard" sized board game boxes laying flat, one on top the other. You know, the Ticket to Ride, Mysterium, Cosmic Encounter square box. Of course how many you can fit and how many you can carry can be vastly different numbers. My Cosmic Encounter box includes all the expansions to date and is a hefty load by itself. Change the orientation a bit and the Game Canopy is tall enough to handle Inis, Tales of the Arabian Nights, Pandemic Legacy Season 1 and Legendary Encounters. Side by side. Together. Not that I'd advise carrying those four games together. I have no doubt the Canopy could handle it. I just doubt you or I could. That's a lot of compressed dead tree matter.

And it looks great doing all this. I chose the charcoal base with mandarin trim (read: grey with orange edges), and it's exactly as the promotional photographs indicated. My own photography doesn't do it justice in the visual appeal. I love how clean, crisp and professional it looks, while also being fun and bright. Board gaming isn't just a hobby for recluse stereotypical nerds, and the Game Canopy is easily a carry bag I'm going to be proud to carry around the city to events and display. It's just so gorgeous!

All in all, the Game Canopy is everything I could have hoped for. I'm really excited to take it out to my next game night at the end of the month. I can tell this is the start of a beautiful relationship. Just me and my Game Canopy and Captain Sonar and Mysterium and Takenoko and Santorini and Battlestar Galactica and...

Addendum: While writing this and testing out some game combinations for the photographs I learned my two year old can open and close the zip, and really enjoys playing with my Canopy. A great start for my future gamer.

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Board Game Carry Solution

I love board games, that much is obvious. I also love sharing my board games, and teaching folks my favourite games. I love broadening my hobby by introducing people to this amazing social activity. But transporting my games to local conventions has always been an issue.

In the past, I've employed IKEA reusable bags and other tote bags, as well as my backpack, like so many other gamers through the years. However, it rains a lot in Vancouver during certain times of the year, and this has caused issues. I've damaged more than one game box from having it out in the rain, even while it was in my backpack. I can sometimes plan ahead and wrap them in a plastic bag first, but all that is just awkward and messy.

Which was why I got so excited when I saw the Game Canopy from Level 3B on Watch It Played. It looked ideal for my needs. Sealed, safe, and water resistant, and it holds the boxes flat! No more opening up a game to teach and spending the first ten minutes sorting out a pile of cards and tokens that got knocked loose in the box.

I followed Level 3B on Twitter and via mailing list, and anxiously awaited the start of the Kickstarter. I was there the second it went live, and grabbed the Adventurer Level, which includes the Game Canopy, the shoulder strap and the all important rain cover. It's more expensive than a duffle bag, but far safer for my games. It also looks amazing! Like any hobby that isn't a sport, board gaming regularly gets dismissed as a childish, or geeky pastime, so I love having accessories like the Game Canopy that just elevates our hobby to a new level, showing it off in a professional, smart light.

The Kickstarter has only just begun and is already a huge success. It's got over 1,000 Backers, and is about to break $150k in funding at time of writing. There are some odd features of the campaign that I hope get fixed soon. The reward levels are fixed, trying to cover ass many bases as possible with different levels, but still don't suit everyone's needs. The Level 3B team seem hesitant to allow add-ons of the Canopy bag or the smaller Vanguard to pledges, and I noticed that this has resulted in some pledge levels seeing vastly more popular than others. The worst is Game Knight Lite, with no Backers at all. Allowing add-ons would have avoided this, having less Reward Levels, but ultimately more options for Backers. I'm happy with the my level, but would definitely consider adding a Vanguard as well if it was an option. There is one with everything I have, plus a Vanguard and a second shoulder strap, but I really don't want the second strap.

The only other issue I have is that the delivery date is in the far distant future of April 2017. I'd love to have it for Terminal City Tabletop Convention 2017 in March.

It's going to be a long wait.

 

XCOM The Board Game

I got into the XCOM franchise of games from Firaxsis with the modern relaunch in 2012. It's one of the few games I played a lot of when I got my new PC in 2013, even recording a YouTube series that included a squad of my friends defending the world from X-ray threat. Claire and I also enjoy watching another YouTube play by XCOM expert player BeagleRush, who plays at a level so far above me it's like someone who previously had never heard music listening to a full live symphony every week, and just like that hypothetical fellow, I thoroughly enjoy it every week, but have no idea how it's all done.

When Fantasy Flight Games announced an upcoming board game, I was mildly interested, but assumed it was going to be a miniatures strategy game mimicking the mission gameplay from the video games, and I am terrible at those. So, when previews started arriving, I grew more intrigued, as the designer Eric M. Lang decided to present a game focusing on the base management and global phase of the game instead, and I love that stuff.

XCOM The Board Game is a one to four player co-operative game where the players take on the four key roles of the XCOM Project command.

The Commander looks after global concerns, deploying Interceptors, while also keeping close track of the shared budget, and demanding that other roles "stop buying so much stuff!" Sending too few Interceptors results in UFO's staying on the board, harrassing everyone. Spending too much money has disasterous results on global trust in the Project, because clearly if you can't balance the books, you shouldn't be battling the mooks.

Speaking of mooks, the Squad Leader is in charge of the troops, assigning soldiers to missions and defending the base from attacks. Their role is most obviously critical to success, as successfully completed missions accelerate the chance of the final mission being triggered. But unlike some other roles, when things go bad for the Squad Leader, they go really bad, as soliders die and are taken away from possible combat rotation until the Commander can afford to buy them back.

The Chief Scientist spends their time researching new technology to upgrade the various roles in the game, providing new armour to the Squad Leader, the alien element Elerium to the Commander, or Alien Alloys for their own department, among others. While it is the most relaxed of the roles, it is also, aguably, actually the most vital to overall success, as it is the Scientist who keeps everyone else going when the chips are down.

Finally, there is the most interesting role in terms of mechanics, and also the most controvertial in terms of what it brings to the table, the Central Officer. Their role is to deploy satellites to orbit, but mostly to relay information to the other players. They do this using the free to download app, available on most popular devices and operating systems.

The app has caused some waves among core tabletop gamers, as some seem to feel that a board game should be without electronic attachments, especially one that isn't included in the box. To that, it's worth noting that:

• Games have often come with nontraditional elements, from Atmosfear's videos to Scattergories' clockwork timer.
• Everyone has a phone or tablet these days. Access to the app is unlikely to be an issue with even just minor effort.
• The tasks of the app could be replicated with cards or dice, but only with extreme complexity in set-up and execution, and lots of limited-use components.

The XCOM game app lays out initial set-up, acts as a tutorial and rulebook, controls the game difficulty, what aliens you'll face and where your home base will be located. Relayed during play through the Central Officer, it tells players when to perform actions, from drawing cards to deploying units, and puts every such action under a tight time limit. The game has been built with the app in mind from the ground up, not tagged on halfway through developement, and it shows. It makes complex elements remarkably clean, while adding a tension and excitement that a deck of cards or roll of some dice could not.

Despite having those very seperate roles, communcation and player interaction is vital toward the success of the XCOM Project. Table talk is encouraged, especially during the Resolution Phase. The game is broken into two distinct phases, Timed and Resolution. The Timed Phase is, as you could guess, timed. The app tells you how much time you have to complete the task assigned, from a comfortable 30 seconds, to a few frantic moments. During the Timed Phase, players will commit their units to tasks, or chose cards to put into play, but nothing gets resolved. No dice get roled.

All the dice action happens during the Resolution Phase. This is not timed, allowing players to talk about how things went last round, and plan for the next, as well as activate cards for a wide variety of effects. It's a nice bit of downtime for everyone involved, allowing players to relax, grab a snack or use the washroom. It reminds me of something I heard about in relation to action movies. It's can't be go, go, go action for a full 90 minutes because you'll exhaust the audience. That's why so many great action movies have laugh-out-loud moments, or quiet, somber character pieces. This makes XCOM a much more relaxing game to play than other timed board games, such as Escape The Curse of the Temple or Space Alert.

I've had the joy of playing XCOM: The Board Game a lot recently, and with a wide variety of people, both friends and gamers I had only just met, thanks to a recent convention. I've taught the game to about a dozen or so people, and I can confidently say that it's remarkably easy to teach once you've had a game or two of practice. Pro Tip: Start with the dice rolling, in a broad generalisation. It gives a good basis for understanding why everything else happens. After a quick overview of how the game works, the first round covers most quetions that come up, and the game flows smoothly after that, even for new players.

XCOM is a fast, fun and intense. It's a fantastic co-op game that eliminates any possibility of "Expert Instruction", the possibility of a co-op game becoming a single player experience with viewers. Each player has their very specific roles, and while there is sometimes room for short discussion, the decision falls to the active player, often leading to tough choices that at least feel like you have ownership of that choice, even if it's the lesser of two evils. Actually, it's always the lesser of two evils.

It's a pity that all the rules are in the app. The box includes a single sheet for setup, but no paper rule book. While everything is in the app, it's not convenient for quick referencing rules. Relatedly, there are a few rules that the initial tutorial doesn't touch on, requiring players to search through the ap for answers to questions about exact mechanics or timing. This hurts especially when the tutorial seems to teach everything, while not actually doing to. Also, while most steps during the Resolution Phase will remind players to complete all elements of each step, one or two are missing, such as when a continent drops into full panic (the orange zone), you should move any UFOs in that continent to orbit. This is mentioned in the rules, but not the screen that asks about each continents status.

I love playing XCOM The Board Game, but it's not for everyone. I have a hard time getting it onto the table, and it's highly dependant on who shows up for games night. Anyone that has played it enjoys it, but not everyone is hungry for a second run. If you enjoy some tension in your games, a fun co-op experience and the truth that you will fail far more often than you will succeed, even on Easy, then XCOM might be for you.

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Sheriff of Nottingham

Now listen. I'm an honest guy. I've never tried to sneak anything past an offical representative of the State in my life. So when I tell you this, you should believe me. I know what you just saw, I saw it too, so I'd never try to do anything funny. Honestly. I really do have four apples in this sack. NO! Don't shake it! You'll shoot someone's eye out... Well... Crap.

In Sheriff of Nottingham, you take turns playing the titular Sheriff, inspecting the other players bags of totally legal goods and judging their honesty as they pass through you gate. The merchant players are trying to move goods through to their stands, staying safe with legal, but low value, goods, or taking risks by trying to get contraband, illegal but higher value items, into town. At the end of the game, the player with the highest value of goods and coin in from of them wins! Easy.

Sheriff of Nottingham is a hilarious bluffing game about bribery and smuggling. The core gameplay comes in the Inspection Phase, after everyone has chosen their goods, loaded their bags, and passed them to the Sheriff. At this point, players can bribe, bluff and cajole the Sheriff to leave their bag alone or open someone else's. If the Sheriff opens a bag with undeclared goods in it, the player who owns that bag must pay a penalty. However, should the Sheriff open a bag containing exactly the declared goods, then the Sheriff pays the owner for the inconvenience. Risk/reward for all involved!

It's great when you have a bag full of apples and you bluff the Sheriff into open your bag by trying a bit too hard to shift attention to someone else. Equally, it's frustrating when you realise that the Sheriff is very likely to hand back your bag, loaded with an honest-to-goodness four bread, a missed opportunity to move those two silk you've been holding for two turns.

The rules in Sheriff of Nottingham are surprisingly light, making it a wonderful starter game for getting new people into the hobby. Set-up is fast, hindered only by the massive number of cards in the deck making it tough to shuffle. Turn sequence is printed on each of the player cards, so once each phase is explained, the turn is easy to follow.

The key to Sheriff is in player interaction. Players can try to convince the Sheriff to open another merchants bag, or bride the Sheriff to leave their bag alone. There are few hard rules to this phase. You use your poker face and wits to bluff and read other players, talking as fast as you can to convince the Sheriff to open a suspect bag, or questioning a shady merchant about the contents of their suspiciously quiet bag of three chickens.

A cunning player can try to get other players to gang up on a merchant, pooling small amounts of coin from each of their purses to pay the Sheriff to open another players bag, knowing that the coin those players spend weakens them more than the coin you sacrifice. A cunning Sheriff could take a bribe from everyone, knowing that the large sum of coins they got individually vastly outweighs any potential income from the meagre contraband any individual merchant got through the gate. Oh the fun you will have!

And that's what this game is, fun! If you're looking for a fast, light game that will have everyone laughing, then Sheriff of Nottingham is the game for you. If you have a group of players that are willing to role-play a bit during the Inspection Phase, then all the better! It's hilarious to watch someone get caught with two crossbows in their bag, and desperately try to explain it away in character! Or listening to characters grow over a few turns, from honest apple-pickers to nefarious mead runners. A highly recommended game that has been hitting my table an awful lot since I purchased it. It's just so easy to get in to and you can happily play two whole games of Sheriff before moving on to other games and not feel worn out.

A few things before I wrap up here. There is a free App available for Android and Apple devices, and it is well worth grabbing and using. It includes a timer for the Inspection Phase, which is helpful, but it is great for totalling the final score. As well as adding up the values of all the goods on each palyers stands, the player with the most and second most of a good gets bonus points, with ties getting divided up among those on matching scores. The App takes care of all that math, including working out the bonus from Royal Goods and any promo cards you might have. You can update players scores each round, or wait until the end and score everything at once, as I like to do. This keeps the game moving during the bulk of play, rather than interrupting each round to add in scores.

Finally, there is one rule that is worth highlighting. During the End of Round Phase, players should draw back up to six cards in hand. Although not explicitly mentioned in the rule book, players should only draw new cards from the face-down pile, not either of the two face-up discard piles. This keeps new cards cycling into play continuously, as well as stopping players from simply drawing a bunch of goods that were confiscated that round. This rule isn't even mentioned in the official FAQ, but is stated as a rule in the excellent Watch It Played How To Play video (Link is to the moment the rule is mentioned). It's arguable then that this isn't an official rule, but having played with and without it, I will always enforce this, as it enhances the gameplay significantly.

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Love's Lost Legacy

While attending PAX Prime 2013 with friends, one of the highlights of the weekend was being introduced to the micro card game Love Letter. My good friend JP picked it up and showed it to us, having played it himself while visiting San Fransisco.

Love Letter, by designer Seiji Kanai, consists of a slim 16 card deck. The basic mechanic every turn is Draw One, Play One. You always have a card in hand, and draw a second, chose one of the two you now hold, and play it. Card actions are clearly described on each card, and none are particularly complex.

The round ends either when one player remains in play, or, if all cards are played, the remaining players compare their cards and the highest value card, displayed in the top left-hand corner, becomes the victor. The game is played traditionally on a first-to-four-points basis, though it works fine as a one round per game quick filler.

AEG's Love Letter is a wonderfully tight game, with beautiful art on every card, and presented in a beautiful red velvet pull-string bag. It's fast, fun and intense, resulting in lots of laughs and gasps of astonishment as people get knocked out in the most unbelievable way. Deducting what cards are left in play from those that are sitting exposed on the table is a fun, taxing time, with a light-hearted tension resting over the players.

As well as the red velvet bag edition of Love Letter, I also picked up the green velvet bag edition themed around the world of Legend of the Five Rings. This is the exact same game with roles and art reskinned to match the L5R universe.

Then I discovered Lost Legacy: The Lost Starship, from the same designer. Another micro game with a 16 card deck, and the same Draw One, Play One mechanic, this game has a fantasy tinged with Sci-Fi theme. It plays very similar to Love Letter, but the card actions are universally different.

The goal of Lost Legacy is to discover the location of The Lost Starship, a unique card in the deck. It also adds a Ruins location on the table, containing one or more cards. Card actions allow you to look at, swap or shuffle cards in the Ruins during the game. The endgame mechanic is unique as well, introducing an Investigation phase on top of the Elimination victory. If the game makes it to the Investigation phase, the players that are still active have a chance to discover the location of The Lost Legacy, either within the Ruins, or in other players hands. Whoever successfully discovers The Lost Legacy wins the game.

Like Love Letter, Lost Legacy is a tight, fast game. Some two players games have been over in a single action! The art is, again, beautiful, with very cool and interesting depictions of a fantasy world infected with Sci-Fi technology. Adding to my collection of beautiful packaging, Lost Legacy comes in a blue velvet pull-string bag.Unlike Love Letter, Lost Legacy is played in single rounds. The winner of a single round is the winner of a game. In the future, there will be sequel sets, Flying Garden and Whitegold Spire, allowing you to mix two sets for a bigger deck, or playing each set back-to-back as a campaign, which I'm ready to buy into.

While they seem very similar, both Love Letter and Lost Legacy share playtime at my gaming table, sometimes one directly after the other. They are equally fun and I love introducing both to new players and watching them understand how much depth can be had in just 16 cards. Highly recommended, if you're not already enjoying either of them.

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The Year So Far

I've been really terrible at posting this entire year! This is actually my fourth post in 2014, easily heading for my worst year yet on this blog.

But mostly, that's because it's been one of my best, busiest, fun-filled years in recent history! Claire and I have done so much this year, from getting our Permanent Residency at long last, to taking a holiday all to ourselves for the first time since we got married!

Both of us have taken this year to get healthy and fit. I've been swimming again for well over a year now, and I recently started jogging everywhere I can, for as much as I can. That usually means I jog for two or three blocks, walk for a block or two, and rinse and repeat until I get to where I want to go. The hope is that I'll build stamina and extend those periods of jogging to three, four, five blocks while minimizing the breaks in between. I still swim most mornings before work, which gets me going for the day ahead.

Claire, meanwhile, gave up swimming in exchange for swordfighting! She joined Academie Duello in Downtown, near where she works. Several of our friends have been doing it for years, and in the six or seven months that she's been involved, she's rarely gone less than three evenings a week, putting in about eight hours of intense training a week! She's recently started noticing that her t-shirts are getting tight around her biceps, and her pants are getting looser around the waists, but much tighter around the calves! She's far more flexible, happier and loves swinging big metal weapons around. I'm delighted for her, and only a little afraid for my own safety.

Summer has been amazing. We've enjoyed trips to the pool, lots of outdoor activites, and generally loving the warm weather, even if it did get a little too hot to comfortably sleep for a while there. I spent the summer working with the school age summer group, which involved loadsd of field trips and spending a lot of time outdoors, developing a vicious farmers tan in the process!

Last summer, boardgames fell to the wayside in favour of outdoor activities, but this year we've balanced our time better, and we get together with friends almost weekly to game, chat and hang out. New, old and even as-yet-unpublished games have been played and enjoyed, and our circle of friends have grown significantly in 2014, thanks to this wonderful hobby.

Speaking of hobbies, I'm still reading at a phenomenal pace, powering through sci-fi, adventure and murder msytery books throughout the year. I've read a few comics as well, but not as many as I used to, usually one or two in between two novels, sort of as a short downtime. Though I did read the entire Superior Spider-Man run, which I highly recommend. Fantastic stuff! I really loved that new, meaner Spidey for a while.

On the other hand, video games have been very seasonal, with lots getting played in the opening months, but quickly falling off once the weather started to improve. I even did a bunch of Let's Play videos for my YouTube Channel, including a long XCOM series staring all my friends! Some died. The video thing is something I do hope to get back to as the winter evening creep back in. They were a push to learn all new skills in audio and video editting, as well as trying out commentary work, which is something I've always wanted to do. I definitely improved between the first and last videos, but I have a long way to go yet.

At the start of August Claire and I went to Whistler, a holiday village about two hours north of Vancouver. It's best known for its ski season, with stunning slopes, beautiful log cabins and lots of places to warm up around a cosy fireplace. But the summer season is awesome fun! We went on a two hour ATV trail up the mountain, during which time we saw no bears, unfortunately. We went to the top of the mountain on the gondola, and then across between the two mountains on the longest and highest unsupported gondola lift in the world! We have a buffet barbeque at the mountain peak, played crazy golf at the base, got lost in the woods around Lost Lake and relaxed and recovered in a Scandinavian Spa for a few blissful hours. And all that was just the first three out of five days!

Now we're into September. We have so much happening over the coming months, which you'll be hearing about as it happens. I have craft projects I can't wait to show off (Hint: They're boardgame related), new artwork I'm super proud of and more. Claire is hard at work on her writing and web development, constantly inventing new ways to create awesome things.

So while 2014 has been quiet on One Terrific Day, it hasn't been in our lives. New things are happening every day, and we can't wait to share them with you all as they come up.

Stay reading, stay gaming and stay tuned!

 

Hanabi

The hardest part of this game is that you hold the cards the wrong way around.

No. Really. That's going to be the bit that trips you up more than any other.

In Hanabi, you play technicians tasked with putting on a spectacular fireworks show, but you've made one slight error. The sequence for firing each rocket has been mixed up, and now you and your fellow technicians must correctly launch your coloured gunpowder tubes, without admitting your own fault.

Each player has a hand of cards, but holds them facing out to the rest of the table. Thus, you know what everyone else has, but no idea what you hold yourself. On your turn, you can play a card, discard a card, or give a piece of information. Information is limited, represented by eight clock tokens that get removed as information is shared, and recycled if a card is discarded.

It is up to the players to make five suits of fireworks, one in each colour, each containing five cards, numbered one to five, in ascending order. If a card is played incorrectly, either because a copy of it is already in play, or the card one lower than it is not yet in play, then the fuse shortens and the tension rises.

The game ends if all five fireworks are completed, if the draw deck empties or if three fuse tokens are discarded to the box, revealing the explosion token. At that point, the highest value card in each colour is added together to get the groups final score.

Hanabi is a fun, tense game of strategic planning, memory, deduction and a little luck. It plays fast, and supports up to five players.

We love this game at my house, and it gets a lot of playtime, most popular with four or five players, but fun with two as well. Because information is scarce, and there are restrictions on how information is given, what you chose to tell someone, and what you chose not to tell them becomes the key to victory or defeat. Also, once a piece of information has been given, it's up to that player to remember it. Other players shouldn't remind their fellow technicians what was revealed in previous rounds.

It's hilarious being able to see everyone else's hand, but not your own. Looking around at opening hands is always fun, realizing that the other players all hold all the fives, or that one player has three red ones in her hand. Co-ordinating the distribution of information with other players is easy at first, but becomes more difficult, as you can't explicitly tell the active player what to do. Trying to work out the value of being told "These two cards are RED" can be tricky, and I've often found myself discarding a valuable card or playing an inappropriate card because I misjudged something.

It can also be incredibly frustrating seeing a valuable card in another players hand, but not being able to get them that vital piece of information. But that's all part of the game.

I recently brought Hanabi into work with me and tried it out with some of the kids I teach. I was planning on just teaching the older group, but we had one seven year old in the group, and he was the first to totally get how the game works. While I was explaining the rules, he would stop and ask me a clarifying question, by way of a play example, and he was right in his assumption every time! When we played, it was clear that the group had no issues with understanding the rules, and enjoyed the tension of watching another player agonise over whether to discard or play a card inhand.

Hanabi is a wonderful game, and comes highly recommended. It's also the first of three games by designer Antoine Bauza that I'll be reviewing in upcoming posts!

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Let's Play

Whelp! It's been a while! What?!? I've been busy... Mostly.

Claire got me a powerful PC for Christmas, and I started recording my games and uploading them to YouTube, which was a lot of fun while I was playing games, and then not so much when I started back into board games in a big way. I was only ever doing the YouTube thing as a hobby, so once I started spending my time on another, more social hobby, that fell to the sidelines.

Still, I had a blast making YouTube videos. I did a bunch of short plays, mostly showcasing opening areas, while I collectively called "Couch Projections". These were a lot of fun, and usually involved minimal editing, as they were straight plays of what I experienced. Some, like the fantastic OctoDad: Dadliest Catch ended up being too long, with too much of me feeling lost and not knowing what to do, so I editted those down to tight, short plays, highlighting the best parts. Others, like FLT: Faster Than Light seemed to be paced perfectly for what I intended the Couch Projections series to be. Either way, they were a lot of fun!

The only extended series I did was a full run on XCOM: Enemy Within, including all the DLC. The whole squad was named after friends and family, and they bravely fought aliens and died to protect humanity. I had an absolute blast recording this, and it was my first time ever finishing a full playthrough of XCOM, which I had originally owned on the Xbox 360 since launch.

As of this post, the final mission is not yet online. That's because, once I got to it and played it, it was kind of boring. It's a straight run through a linear base, with an alien voice explaining away any questions you had about the creatures you've been battling with for months. I struggled to edit and narrrate an engaging version of the mission, adding in fluff story details like I had been doing, but nothing was coming together. I'll really make an effort to go back to it and finish it just for the saake of completion, but it's not going to be a great ending.

I actually have plans for another XCOM series I'd love to do. There is a fan-made mod for the PC game called The Long War that dramatically changes many of the game elements, including skills tree, which are now much more in-depth, the terror tracks on nations, research, weapons and upgrades, and basically the whole feel of the game. I've been really excited about trying it out, so this is something I'm interested in doing. So keep an eye on my YouTube for that!

And if you want to volunteer to protect humanity, leave a comment on this post and you might see yourself drafted! Remember, service guarantees citizenship!

You Gotta Share The Love

I've been a role-player since starting college in UCC in 1998. Before then, I had vaguely heard of the concept, but wasn't all that familiar with how it worked. I got asked to join a once-off adventure with pregenerated player characters, run by one of the taller members of the Wargaming and Role Playing Society, or WARPS. If I recall correctly, it was a Lovecraftian horror, in which I played the wife of a crackpot inventor who ended up being revealed as a clockwork automaton, much to everyones surprise, including myself! At that point I killed my husband and everyone else and escaped into the wastelands with my son who had been locked away in the attic.

Basically, I was hooked.

It was like reading a book with friends and choosing the outcome. Brilliant! I found out much later that those kinds of books existed as well! Amazing!

I spent the next several years playing and running various games, learning various systems and introducing more people to the world of tabletop RPGs, as well as making new friends through it.

Then that tall man with the twisted and uncanny sense of storytelling, who had gone on to write RPG's professionally, told me about a new game on the market, one focused more on storytelling and description than rolling bigger numbers. Gar laid out all the reasons why I should get excited about Spirit of the Century, then hit me with the homerun. It was a pulp setting, based in the 1920's and 30's, styled after the adventures of the Shadow, Indiana Jones, Doc Savage and, of course, the Rocketeer!

Once he got hold of his own copy of the book, he ran a few games, and I jumped at the chance to be in it. Before we were even finished the character creation section, which was most of a session in itself, I knew that this was going to be my system. The system I used for every game I ran. The system I stole elements from even if I was playing with a different rules set. The system I would love and support from this moment on.

I got the beautiful and low print run hard cover edition, read it cover to cover and ran my first successful campaign, including twelve sessions, guest appearances by other players and many, many happy memories.

So when Evil Hat annouced in late 2012 that they were Kickstarting their new edition of Fate, the rules system used in Spirit of the Century, I was stuck to it like gum on a Cirrus X-3! I watched as the Fate Core stretch goals were destroyed as the amount pledged shot through the roof. My own pledge amount rose as more and more was made availalbe as print add-ons. I became involved in the swiftly growing community around it in ways I have never done for anything before. I loved seeing the love Fate Core was getting, and sharing that love with others online.

Jump to PAX Prime 2013.

I'm wandering the main exhibition floor early on Saturday morning. I've decided to cross to the other side of the hall to check out a particular booth when I stumble across a guy chilling out on one of the complimentary seats one of the big booths has lying about its area. His head is stuck in a copy of the recently released print version of Fate Core. I stop briefly to comment on the book.

It turns out he's not a role-player! He saw the book and thought it looked like an interesting read, and already he's about a third of the way through. We chat briefly about the hobby and the book, and I suggest a few places to start, as well as answering a few quick questions he has. Before I leave, I suggest that he takes a look at Fate Accelerated Edition, a companion pick-up-and-play version of the Fate Core book, then I wish him well in his new adventure and keep on wandering.

Saturday goes by and Sunday rolls about. It's late afternoon, and I'm in the convention hall again, but this time I'm looking for my wife. I check my email and discover that she's on the sixth floor, in the Console Freeplay Area. That means having to go up the back stairs, a route I don't usually cover at PAX, as that side of the sixth floor is mostly for various panels.

I reach the fifth floor and sitting on one of the comfy chairs by himself is the guy from yesterday, still reading Fate Core. He's noticably further along in it. I stop and say hi. He recognises me immediately and we both get a good laugh out of running into each other again in a convention of over 70,000 attendees, especially here, as he picked this place to stop and read expressly because it was so quiet and out of the way. I ask him how he's enjoying the book, and he tells me, with much excitement, that he's thinking of running his first game tonight!! I wish him the best of luck in tonights game and many more beyond before leaving to find my wife.

I sit down with Claire and realize my brain wants to tell me something, so I relax and listen. It tells me this:

You have never been monetarily wealthy. You went to college away from home and had to pay for rent and food. Even with a job, you had to borrow money from your parents at times. You finished college with a degree and got a job doing something you love, but for only four hours a day, and you still had to pay for food and rent, as well as now paying back borrowed money to the bank and your family. Any time you thought you had money, an unexpected expense came up to take it all away. And then, you decided to move to Vancouver, so you had less money than ever to spend freely.

In all that time, from your first day in college to today, tomorrow and beyond, you have had amazing friends. They have shared with you all kinds of things, from cards to make your L5R deck better, to board games and books, from video games to comics, to food and clothing. You have long thought about how you haven't often been able to return that kindness to them.

But karma is a universal thing. Others do good things to you, you do good things to others, others do good things to even others. It does not have to be a closed loop. They do not have to be the same people. And

Every.

Little.

Thing.

Counts.

It's not the value, it's the friendship behind it.

You know what to do.

And suddenly I do. I get up and tell Claire I'll be back soon.

I race down three flights of stairs to where I know it will be and I buy it.

Then, I go back up two flights of stairs and find that guy again, still in the same place, still reading the same book. I interrupt his reading one last time and hand him a fresh copy of Fate Accelerated Edition, because I can do that now for someone. It's nothing, I say. It only cost me five dollars. This is incredible, he replies. I've never had a stranger gift me something before. I really appreciate it.

Enjoy the game, I tell him as I head back to my wife. It's the best hobby in the world.