Horus is a crappy game designer
My firend Pat came over for a bit today. We stuffed ourselves with perogies, flipped through some comic books (among other books in hand he had Hellboy Weird Tales #8, which includes a nifty Evan Dworkin story), shot the breeze in general and about gaming in particular, and actually played some games. The first game we played was Safari Jack by the nice people at Cheapass Games. In this nifty little card game the players are big game hunters looking to blast exotic animals while vacationing in Africa. We had a lot of fun. The cards themselves are so flimsy I doubt they'll last too many hands, but I'm not too concerned since they're so cheaply replaced. Safari Jack is the third Cheapass game I own that involves Victorian gentlemen on dubious adventures, the first two being Chief Hermann's Holiday Fun Pack and Captain Park's Imaginary Polar Expedition. I enjoy all three, though I think the Imaginary Polar Expedition is clearly the best of the lot.

After two hands of Safari Jack we decided to play something different, so I pulled out my copy of Ancient Board Games by Irving Finkel (Welcome Rain press, 1997). This is a board book that contains rules, pieces, and boards for the earliest known boardgames. Last time Pat and I had this out we played the Royal Game of Ur, the first game in the book. This time we tried Mehen, also known as "the Snake Game" because the board takes the form of a coiled snake. The snake is subdivided into spaces, resulting in a standard track game. Mehen proved to be too slow moving a game for Pat and I. Too many turns we would throw the sticks (plastic replicas of the precursors to dice) and come up with a turn in which absolutely nothing happened. We gave up after a quarter of the way through the game. Mehen is a poorly designed game, even by the loose standards of Mr. Bradley and the brothers Parker. The title of this blog entry harshes on Horus because of the prominent Horus-hawk on the reproduction board we played on. That's the closest thing to a credits page that I have to work with, so ol' Horus gets the blame.

I recently acquired a copy of Gamma World adventure module GW1 Legion of Gold, by E. Gary Gygax with Luke Gygax and Paul Reiche III. This little gem was the first adventure released for Gamma World and one of only 3 for the first edition of the game. The Gygaxian spirit really shines through in this little beauty. I would even go so far as to call GW1 a lost treasure of an earlier age of gaming. The design parallels but in many ways improves upon the basic structure established in the class D&D Basic adventure B2 The Keep on the Borderlands. Uncle Gary and crew basically outline a mini-setting (not quite as small as the overland areas in B2) with a partially fleshed-out home base and four nifty mini-adventures. Like many modules of the era it could stand some expansion and alteration, but EGG clearly notes in the first edition Dungeon Masters Guide that all modules need to be tailored to your own specific game. Still, I can see 4 good solid sessions of adventuring fun coming out of this module.

For an added bonus about half of the interior illustrations are by Erol Otus!

Yesterday I got out my handmade copy of Lou Coatney's free introductory wargame 1st Alamein. It's a nifty little Allies vs. Rommel number that's operational/strategic but small enough to be manageable. In the grand grognard style I set up the game tonight and did part of a turn solo before putting it away. I'm not sure I'm doing a good job digesting and understanding the rules. Mr. Coatney was at Winter War this year, running demos of his games including 1st Alamein. Now I regret not availing myself of the opportunity to learn the game firsthand from the author. Maybe I'll go back to trying to play a game of Tactics II. The rulebook for that is so easy to understand it almost insults my intelligence.

While I was looking for my copy of 1st Al I found my partially assembled copy of King of the TableTop. Written by Tom Wham and Rob Kuntz with counter art by Tramp, KotTT appeared in Dragon magazine issue #77, September 1983. It's worth tracking down a copy if you get a chance. My sister and I played the crap out of my now lost first set of this game. Neither my sister nor my wife are gamers. If one of them likes a game I know it's a good game. (If both of them like a game it's gaming gold. Come to think of it, I really ought to put together a list of games they enjoy and post it either here or on my main website or maybe over at BoardGameGeek.com.) A redone/upgraded/whatever version of TableTop was published as a box set under the title Kings & Things, by of all companies West End Games. I can't speak to the value of any of the improvements made to the game in K&T, never having seen a copy up close. I do know that it's tough to find nowadays. There's a German language edition to K&T that seems to be easier to locate, even on this side of the pond. The original version is much easier to find, as eBay sees lotsa back issue of Dragon change hands every day.

With my cow-orker Laurie on vacation this week I got real busy at the office and failed to plan for a game this weekend. Unless Pat's available (maybe for the aforementioned Tactics II or other wargamery) this will probably be a game-free weekend. As such, I'll probably do some work on game-related web projects. I really need to get my stuff together if I want to enter the ChessVariants.com 44-squares contest. The deadline to enter is Wednesday of next week. I think my rules for SpaceWarp44 are good to go, I just need to code the page. I wouldn't mind getting a Call of Cthulhu page up. I've got three tiny little gameaids that could all fit on a single webpage. And I haven't updated the Otus Shrine in a month. I ought to be able to get at least one of those three project done over the next two days.

Now we're talking Old School.
The weird green color is a side-effect of converting a bitmap into a gif. I printed a block & white copy and the green came out as a very useable grey.



Chainmail is trademarked/copywrighted/patented by those swell folks at Wizards of the Coast.

Sometimes I need to run something just once to get it out of my system. Nobilis was like that. My QAGS: Superfriends game too. I had a itch that needed to be scratched, now that it is scratched I don't think about it much any more.

I'm sure my desire to run an apocalyptic zombie game is one of these one-shot urges. That's the main reason I have refrained from shelling out the money to buy All Flesh Must Be Eaten*. At one point I considered using Sean Wipfli's rules-light indie zombie game Dead Meat, but ironically the rules were not meaty enough for me. Now the folks behind Savage Worlds have put out "Zombie Run", a new number in their "Savage Tales" series that just might fit the bill. And it's a only a seven buck download at rpg.now. Even better, I feel like I could scare up some players from the bunch over at the pancake joint.

*AFMBE probably has the most evocative name for an RPG I've seen in years. You just about need to go back to Traveller or Dungeons & Dragons to find a more spot-on RPG title.

Post-Apocalypse Now!
Reading my newly acquired 1st edition Gamma World not long after going through Palladium's After the Bomb and Mutants Down Under has kinda put me in a mood to combine these settings into a single gonzo incoherent post-apocalyptic milieu. One of the nice things about post-apoc style games is that you can whip up location-based adventures with mutational nonsense and techno-artifacts, allowing one to rely on the formulary of D&D but hiding it under different window dressing. That and you can have exotic mutant chicks instead of exotic elf chicks.

I whipped up a rough draft for my Origins of World War I board today. I'm going to take it home and see if I guessed the cell size close enough that a poker chip fits in the right places.

I'm hoping to get some Call of Cthulhu stuff posted to my website in the next couple of days. Nothing fancy, just a couple of quick play aids and the stats and history of an old monster of mine.

You know what I hate...
about some of the old TSR rpgs? Programmed adventures. These were the adventures that were built like the solitaire "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. I liked the Choose Your Own Adventure books. I still have at least one of them, the original Star Trek one in which you played a cadet on Captain Kirk's Enterprise. But TSR didn't seem to do a good job implementing the format. Maybe the fact that I never liked the solo adventures that called for dice-rolling has something to do with it. By all accounts I should have loved the Marvel Super Heroes module Thunder Over Jotunheim. It had Thor fighting trolls and giants, for Frigga's sake. But the "crystal viewer" was a drag and the writing for the adventure was subpar. The intro adventure for the Gangbusters boxed set is one of these "if you eat the cheese, go to paragraph 2A" jobbies. The Boot Hill module Mad Mesa is supposedly more of the same. I want to use this material in a regular GM & party style game, but wandering paragraphs do not make it easy to follow.

Got my copy of the first edition Gamma World rulebook in the mail today. Not only is the game intact, but the seller threw in the poster-sized campaign map! This earliest version of Gamma World is certainly crude, but I love the wide-open approach. Repeatedly the details of the game are explicitly remanded into the authority and imagination of the referee. A lot of games say things like that, but somedays I don't always believe them, especially when the publishers are trying to sell me a bunch of metaplotty supplements. Gamma World, like many early games, hands you a few sparse rules and pushes you into the water. You sink or swim on your own merits.

I started to scour the web for images I can use on my Origins of World War I board. Basically all I should need are flags and/or border silhouettes for each country and silhouettes for Asia and Africa. Finding graphics of World War I era flags for the minor countries is not looking easy. I may have to *gasp* go to a library and find some pictures to scan in. I need to get to the library anyway. If I'm going to do some Serious Wargaming then I have to do my homework.

Reading the rules for James Dunnigan's Origins of World War I led me to go reread my copy of his Complete Wargames Handbook. This book is one of three or four that I own that are fairly comprehensive guides to the wargaming hobby. They're all good books and collectively seem to do a good job presenting a snapshot of board wargaming circa 1980. I find myself wondering if any such reference volumes have been published since. A history of the fall of Avalon Hill, SPI, and GDW would prove instructional, as would an overview of recent developments in the hobby.

The nice thing about old reference material like this is that I might get clued in to old games that are still worth playing. I have little doubt that some fun could still be eked out of Panzerblitz, Napoleon at Waterloo, Jutland or Blitzkrieg (especially with the Blitzkrieg Module System floating around online). Some of these games have to be going for a song on eBay, its just a matter of figuring out which wargames are still considered collectible and which are merely out of print.

But the most interesting data from my re-perusal of Mr. Dunnigan's tome was the discovery of some competition for my 'TSR fever' games. In particular, two Avalon Hill games published in the early eighties seem to cover the exact some material as Dawn Patrol and Boot Hill. I'm talking about Richthofen's War and Gunslinger respectively. I can already sense myself poised at the precipice, ready to plunge into the same old trap sprung upon nearly every wargamer before me. I want these AH games, if for no other reason than to compare and contrast them to the TSR counterparts. For that matter, I want a copy of Phil Hall's Blue Max. Because we all know that a casual wargamer like myself needs three frickin' biplane games.

This is the same sort of thinking that leads men to own 42 different Bulge games. Sure, I'd love to own a copy of Steve Jackson's One Page Bulge, if only as a historical curiosity. But I'm afraid that if I get it I will end up selling my platelettes to buy more little chit games. And that reminds me of the most ridiculouys dimension of these wargaming urges: I don't like little chits and little hexes! The main medium for 99% of wargames I have seen is anathema to me. I'm too hamfisted to carefully maeuver half-inch counters across half-inch hexes. Maybe I just need to buy some foreceps and maginfying lenses like the ASL people.