Karl Gallagher

Cognitive Surplus

2008-04-29T19:04:51Z

Clay Shirky discusses how much brain-time has been used up watching television and how some of it is now being turned to creative work.

Hat tip to nancylebov

The Rest of the Meme

2008-04-02T20:14:57Z

thegameiam prompted me with I'm always interested in religious belief.

Not a great topic for helping beat writer's block . . . but here goes.

Simply put, I don't have religious belief. I've tried more than once but wound up going through the motions, trying to will myself into believing and failing. It's not that I'm opposed to belief. I've seen what it's done for people and I think the universe is too complex to be described with equations alone. It's more a case of being someone who can't believe in a divine being. In Kipling's words, "To these from birth is Belief forbidden."

***
rick_gerdes asked What was your family like growing up?

Small. I'm an only child, born when my father was finishing his BS degree. He died while most of the way through his PhD. I was five. So for all the childhood I can remember it was just my Mom and me. We were close but didn't have much time together, she had to work long hours to keep us going.

***
carbonelle asked tell us an amusing, charming or just sweet story about any or all of your kids

Maggie and Jamie are a very sweet pair of kids. Not to say there isn't the normal amount of sibling violence, but when they're not squabbling they're very affectionate. They're only 18 months apart so when Jamie was born we got a twin stroller to carry them in, one of the side-by-side models so they could see each other. Sometimes they'd hold hands together in the stroller. And four years later they're still doing that.

Iron Man Movie

2008-03-01T04:00:19Z

soldiergrrrl posted the link to the Iron Man trailer. I watched it and said, "Okay, I'm in the target demographic for that one." (Note that I've never read an Iron Man comic)

celticdragonfly said "I really didn't follow that."

selenite: "Defense contractor CEO gets kidnapped by bad guys, escapes, and builds himself a supersuit to go fight crime." (Note--going purely by the trailer here)

celticdragonfly: "Yeah, you ARE the target demographic."

Paging thetechnonerd, aedynn, and anyone else who saw Obama in Dallas

2008-02-22T04:53:50Z

nancylebov is trying to check a story that weapon checks were canceled at the Obama rally. If you've got any info, please comment on her post.

Geekier Than Who?

2008-02-18T21:29:07Z

xinef posted the list of 20 Pop Culture Obsessions even geekier than Monty Python. Let's see. Am I obsessed with these?

1. Star Trek - Not since Babylon 5 started, but in high school especially, oh, yeah.
2. Renaissance faires - Yep, to meet girls. Found one, now it's a more casual interest.
3. Fantasy sports leagues - Sports? No.
4. Michael Jackson - Dude did some good music once, not that I bought any.
5. Wikipedia - Useful resource, I'm not a contributor.
6. Battlestar Galactica - Seen six eps. Will probably watch the rest sometime after I'm done with Buffy.
7. The Rocky Horror Picture Show - Went once.
8. Joss Whedon - Firefly, yes. Buffy, getting there. Angel, TBD. Never saw Aliens 3.
9. Media-specific role-playing - Star Trek (FASA) in high school, Firefly now.
10. Magic: The Gathering - I've played using other people's decks.
11. World Of Warcraft - Some of my best friends . . .
12. The Simpsons - Used to watch it, enjoyed it.
13. Doctor Who - Like what I've seen of the revival, the originals are kinda slow for me.
14. Frank Zappa - See #4.
15. Game-show tape trading - I live in a glass house and shall not throw stones.
16. Anime - I like Cowboy Bebop.
17. Cosplay - Ren faire/SCA count?
18. Live-action role-playing - See #17
19. Second Life / MySpace / FaceBook - How'd LJ not make that list?
20. Fanfic - Write fanfic? Moi?

Table-top role playing games are less geeky than Monty Python?

Yeah, That's Me

2008-02-11T05:55:55Z

Your Score: Rabbit

You scored 17 Ego, 15 Anxiety, and 15 Agency!

IT was going to be one of Rabbit's busy days. As soon as he
woke up he felt important, as if everything depended upon him.
It was just the day for Organizing Something, or for Writing a
Notice Signed Rabbit, or for Seeing What Everybody Else Thought
About It. It was a perfect morning for hurrying round to Pooh,
and saying, "Very well, then, I'll tell Piglet," and then going
to Piglet, and saying, "Pooh thinks--but perhaps I'd better see
Owl first." It was a Captainish sort of day, when everybody
said, "Yes, Rabbit " and "No, Rabbit," and waited until he had
told them.

You scored as Rabbit!

ABOUT RABBIT: Rabbit is generally considered Clever by his many friends and relations. He is actually a much better reader and writer than Owl, but he doesn't consider it worth mentioning. Instead, Rabbit's real talent lies in Organizing Plans. He organizes rescue parties, makes schemes to reduce Tigger's bounciness, and goes on missions to find out what Christopher Robin does when he's not at the Hundred Acre Woods. Sometimes, however, his Plans do not always go as Planned.

WHAT THIS SAYS ABOUT YOU: You are smart, practical and you plan ahead. People sometimes think that you don't stress or worry, but this is not the case. You are the kind of person who worries in a practical way. You think a) What are my anxieties about and b)what can be done about them? No useless fretting for you. You don't see the point in sitting around and waiting for things to work out, when you could actually work them out today and save yourself a lot of time and worry. Your friends tend to rely on you, because they know that they can trust you help them work things out.

You sometimes tend to be impatient with people who are less practical in their ways. You don't have much patience for idiots who moan about things but never actually DO anything about them. You have high expectations of everyone, including yourself. When you don't succeed at something, or when something goes wrong despite your best efforts to prevent it, you can get quite hard on yourself. You need to cut yourself some slack and accept that everyone has their faults, even you, and THAT IS OKAY. Let yourself be faulty, every now and then, for the sake of your own sanity.

Link: The Deep and Meaningful Winnie-The-Pooh Character Test written by wolfcaroling on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test
View My Profile(wolfcaroling)

Icon Pair Meme

2008-02-06T16:57:21Z

From telophase:

Choose two of my icons and I will tell you what happens when those two people, or things, or concepts get together. Definition of "get together" may vary. Response may be phrased in the form of a snippet or sentences of random blathering.

Review: My Own Kind of Freedom

2008-02-06T16:37:06Z

You've probably seen mentions that Steven Brust posted his Firefly fanfic novel. It's good. It's in the continuity shortly before the movie. This time the job goes right . . . but Mal manages to find some trouble anyway. He did a superb job of getting the characters right, especially River (which impresses me--she's hard to write). His Guest Star is an interesting person and plays a key role without overshadowing the BDHs. Go read it, y'all.

I haven't been that familiar with Brust before this. I'd enjoyed Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille but not enough to go seek out more of his work. I think I'm going to pick up Freedom and Necessity and give it another shot.

I Should Know Better

2008-02-04T16:31:16Z

I do know better.

At church yesterday, socializing before and after the service, I mentioned that we're doing fine. "We've all been healthy for weeks." No more of the always-one-or-two-in-the-family-sick we've been having since October.

Well . . . then Jamie started crying in Sunday School and spent the next hour in my lap. When we got home he fell asleep and had a fever. By midnight he'd thrown up twice. I'm taking him to the doctor in an hour.

You'd think I'd know better than to taunt Murphy like that.

Questions Meme

2008-01-31T18:38:07Z

From autographedcat:

YOU'RE ON MY FRIENDS LIST, and I want to know 36 35 things about you. I don't care if we never talk, or if we already know everything about each other. Short and sweet is fine ... You're on my list, so I want to know you better!

1) Are you currently in a serious relationship?
Very serious with celticdragonfly. And also some not-so-serious relationships . . .

2) What was your dream growing up?
To become the chief engineer of a lunar base.

3) What talent do you wish you had?
Morden's "What do you want?" power for extracting someone's true desires would be very useful.

4) If I bought you a drink what would it be?
Coke. If I'm in a situation where I can have alcohol, Murphy's Stout or closest available equivalent.

5) Favorite vegetable?
Potato. What? I'm Irish.

6) What was the last book you read?
Graveyard Dust by Barbara Hambly. Strongly recommended, though start with A Free Man of Color.

7) What zodiac sign are you?
Capricorn.

8) Any Tattoos and/or Piercings? Explain where.
Nah.

9) Worst Habit?
Laziness.

10) If you saw me walking down the street would you offer me a ride?
Sure.

11) What is your favorite sport?
None.

12) Do you have a Negative or Optimistic attitude?
I try for optimistic--but my reflex is negative.

13) What would you do if you were stuck in an elevator with me?
Free-form RPGing most likely.

14) Worst thing to ever happen to you?
Death of my father.

15) Tell me one weird fact about you.
Already did that meme.

16) Do you have any pets?
There's two cats in the house. The "my" and "pets" part is debatable.

17) What if I showed up at your house unexpectedly?
You'd have to stand on the patio until I was done with diaper change.

18) What was your first impression of me? (hmmm...careful!)
Big guy.

19) Do you think clowns are cute or scary?
Scary.

20) If you could change one thing about how you look, what would it be?
I've got a weight goal I'm working toward.

21) Would you be my crime partner or my conscience?
Conscience.

22) What color eyes do you have?
Green.

23) Ever been arrested?
Nope. Did get read my rights once.

24) Bottle or can soda?
Either way I want to pour it into a cup with ice.

25) If you won $10,000 today, what would you do with it?
Send it to the nice credit card people.

27) What's your favorite place to hang at?
Used to be coffeeshops, these days home.

28) Do you believe in ghosts?
No.

29) Favorite thing to do in your spare time?
Read. Write. Be with family.

30) Do you swear a lot?
Having a little girl who'll imitate me precisely is making me clean up my language. I'll still scandalize lip readers, though.

31) Biggest pet peeve?
Watching lots of effort go into an inherent disaster. This can also describe my day job.

32) In one word, how would you describe yourself?
Daddy.

33) Do you believe/appreciate romance?
Yes, I do. I also try to practice it.

34) If you could live anywhere in the world where would you chose?
Here's working out pretty well.

35) Do you believe in God?
To these from birth is Belief forbidden.

Who You Know Meme

2008-01-30T18:20:02Z

From mostuff:

The rules:
- Link to the person who tagged you.
- Leave a comment on their blog so that their readers can visit yours.
- Post the rules on your blog.
- Share the seven (7) most famous or infamous people you have met.
- Tag 7 random people at the end of your post.
- Include links to their blogs.
- Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

Burt Rutan. Before Space Ship One, Scaled Composites took a subcontract to design the airframe structure of Pioneer Rocketplane's Pathfinder vehicle. We kicked it off by taking a Cessna up to Mojave (yes, we could fit most of the company in a Cessna), parking at Scaled's hanger, and getting a tour before the meeting. Burt came in to chat with us a bit before leaving us with the technical team for our project.

Merril McPeak. Was Chief of Staff of the USAF when I was a lieutenant. Never met him then. But he became chairman of the board at Pioneer Rocketplane. Not a fun guy to brief. I remember trying to skip a slide on the grounds that was irrelevant after a design change he'd insisted on earlier in the review. He made me put it up then repeated the whole rant he'd made the first time.

Lois Bujold. First met at Wiscon in 1993. Since then I've seen her at other cons and mini-Lois-cons, where a small group of fans would join her for dinner. A wonderful lady.

Larry Niven. First met at I-con (the one on Long Island, not the Iowa one) in 1982 or '83. Saw him at lots of cons in California. celticdragonfly and I danced with him and Fuzzy Pink Niven at Westercon in 2002.

George Hochbrueckner (former congressman, which is famous in mundane circles even if no one on my flist has heard of him). My mom worked for him when he was a state legislator and I handed out leaflets for campaigns.

Gary Hudson. Never worked for him, though I did try for a job at Rotary Rocket at one point. I met him at the Space Access rocket cons.

Steve Jackson. Also first met at I-con. Last saw him at ConDFW. Him I'm actually working for, sort of. I've sold seven freelance articles to his webzines and hope he'll publish some longer work of mine.

Not sure who to tag, so anyone wanting to do this one, feel free.

The Party With a Ship List

2008-01-29T00:01:09Z

From a discussion on the Crimson Dark board, here's my list of all the things a group of PCs with a ship can be. Posted here for reference, and as a brainstorming aid for anyone cooking up a new campaign. The assumption is that the PCs are all or most of the crew of a spaceship.

Moving boxes:

scheduled freight (work regular run for big company)
courier (high speed delivery)
passengers (probably combined with another role)
tramp freight (odd jobs)
smuggler (illegal odd jobs)
pirate (preying on freighters)
privateer (legal version of pirate)

Final frontier:

explorers (going into unknown space)
prospectors (follow explorers, look for valuable stuff)
miners (extract resources)
colonists (build new home)

Tinkers (travelling provider of services):

repairman
doctor
general store
entertainers (theatre troupe, band)
whorehouse
preacher
crooks (Mal Reynolds & company)

Government jobs:

census team (taking surveys)
intelligence agents (spying)
local law enforcement
special investigator
bounty hunter (freelance version of special investigator)

Combat missions (mercenary or gov't):

gunboat (combat ship)
commandos (ship is transport for ground fighters)
fighters (ship is mini-carrier)
Q-ship (one of the above, disguised as a freighter)

Random Notes

2008-01-28T21:15:13Z

Last week we were watching Buffy: the Vampire Slayer. It ended with the dramatic reveal that SPOILER was a god.
Me: "Oh, we know how to deal with that. Nail him to a stick."
celticdragonfly: "Nah, that only works for three days."
Our handbasket is marked "Express".

***
The Veggietales Pirates movie is good, the quality I expect from them. Probably too scary for some of the under-5 crowd. Jamie watched it from my lap and turned away during the scary bits.

***
One of my favorite RPG settings is Transhuman Space, a hard-SF look at what the human race will be a century from now. A poster on RPG.net complained he didn't like it because it lacked "focus", ie, the set assumption that characters in a game will engage in one mission. (D&D: Kill monsters and take their stuff, CoC: investigate mysteries and go mad from the answers). I replied, "GURPS strives for realism, and reality is notably lacking in focus."

***
I ran into the lovely awamiba at Chikfila while giving the kids some play time. She knew who I was because she recognized the kids. Someday I need to get the church nametag saying "Maggie's Daddy." Not a bad way to be known.

***
I picked up this year's batch of Girl Scout cookies from a co-worker. Turns out he won't be doing it again. That's a prohibited activity here at Lockheed. Why we can hardly imagine.

It Needed A Caption

2008-01-22T21:27:41Z

Post-Birthday Gaming

2008-01-16T22:38:12Z

Saturday fordprfct, mostuff, aedynn, and trollsabre came over for another game day. First one out of the box was The Good, the Bad, and the Munchkin. Literally out of the box--it was part of the payment for my space elevator article and had just arrived the day before. It's one of the better Munchkin games IMHO--they didn't have to stretch as far to find Western themed jokes and the game stayed more balanced instead of letting a few players run away with it.

celticdragonfly skipped the game to get lunch for everyone--thank you, love! After that fordprfct and I tried out an old game of mine--Invasion of the Air Eaters. It's an SF microgame, never reviewed on BGG, so I wanted to relearn it so I can write one up. The aliens won despite a slow start, mostly because the humans had ridiculous die rolls.

The rest of the crew played chocolate Scrabble and then went into the living room to try out Guitar Hero. celticdragonfly got to show off her skills to the newbies. Then after we finished with the Air Eaters fordprfct really showed off.

Everyone got together again for Apples to Apples, followed by Family Fluxx while I put the kids to bed. I joined in the last round of Fluxx, then we played Unexploded Cow, which fordprfct won by taking the biggest pot I can remember seeing in the game.

The last game was Zombies!!!, which is appropriate for midnight. It was the first time I've played a full game but I suspect it went on much longer than normal. The board set-up had all the buildings with supplies close to base, with just regular streets on the way to the helipad. So there was no chance to get more ammo on the way and the heroes would get wiped out by the zombies before getting to the finish line. Finally we respawned enough to attrit them down . . . . "Worst monster hunters ever" was the refrain.

Birthday Gaming

2008-01-02T07:37:31Z

We're hosting a gaming day at our place on January 12th, 2pm-11pm. Come on by and bring any new games you'd like to try out with folks.

Surviving the Holidays

2008-01-02T07:22:35Z

Well, this time I have an impressive excuse for not getting done the projects I'd planned for the holiday break. I came down with pneumonia. Not very suddenly--I'd been having a cough through most of December, but I was also dealing with a rib injury, so I tried to suppress the cough so the ribs could heal. I succeeded. So the suppressed lung problem developed into pneumonia from being a basic cold or something. Fortunately I already had an appointment set up with my GP for a couple days after Christmas to ask for a sleep apnea study referral. I got that, plus a couple of prescriptions for some stuff that left me snoozing for the rest of the week. Now I'm cutting back on the dosage so I can function. The lungs are healing nicely, but I'm behaving myself.

I'm looking forward to being healthy in the new year.

I'd Be Ashamed of Anything Less

2007-12-13T16:48:00Z

Your Score: Outstanding!

You scored 100% correct for the Notebooks of Lazarus Long!

You scored close enough to perfect that it doesn't matter. Way to go! Hey, you didn't have the book in front of you, did you? No cheating! Anyway, Got any good RAH-related stuff to talk about? Why not go to alt.fan.heinlein?

Link: The Notebooks of Lazarus Long Test written by oscagne on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

It's Hard to Keep Ahead

2007-12-13T00:49:18Z

Three years ago Pyramid published a gaming article I wrote, The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Panic. It was mostly an excuse to explore the Hysteria Department at Illuminati University, but the plot focused on the invention of a "Fear Projector." I wanted an appropriate mad science gadget to drive innocent bystanders into a panic. Naturally there had to be a bit of technobabble describing how this thing worked:

The students used a combination of strobe lights and ultrasonic
vibration to make a working cannon-sized beamer
One of the problems with writing science fiction--even when you're doing mad science--is that it's hard to stay ahead of the curve. Turns out there is a government contract for just that kind of gadget:

Military funded researchers are preparing to test a nonlethal weapon that combines light and sound. Nicholas C. Nicholas, chief scientist of Penn State's Applied Research Laboratory, told an audience yesterday at a nonlethal weapons conference that in the first half of next year, the lab plans to test DSLAD, the Distributed Sound and Light Array Debilitator. It'll use essentially off the shelf technology to see if combining aversive noises with light produce some special debiliating effects.

I think "Fear Projector" still has a better ring to it than "DSLAD", but they probably couldn't get any good names through their review committee.

A Very Fun Weekend

2007-12-12T22:46:57Z

Had an awfully busy weekend just past. Saw The Golden Compass with mostuff Friday night. Fun eye candy, but I kept falling out of the movie. I think in pulling out the controversion elements of the story the producers also took out the dramatic tension. It's like Hagrid telling Harry Potter "There's this V-Man guy--nasty dude, hurt a bunch of people. We don't like to talk about him." What's the big deal again? Casting famous actors didn't always help. My reaction to a scene would be "It's Christopher Lee and Derek Jacopi! Cool. I wonder who they're playing." Sam Elliot didn't help either, mostly because his history and his outfit screamed COWBOY! in a movie that didn't have cowboys. Kidman, OTOH, was great as the setting's Darth Vader.

Saturday Maggie was invited to a classmate's birthday party. The host site was a bounce house outfit--they had four of the things in a warehouse. The kids loved it, running all over like crazy. A couple of the bouncers were specialty items, a very tall slide and a slide when had an obstacle course to get to it. Maggie wanted me going through them all with her. The slides were fun, but the obstacle course one was sized to require interesting maneuvering from the kindergarteners. For me it required some serious contortions and my rib cage strongly objected to one maneuver. It's still sore. So I only went through that one the once, no matter how many times Maggie cried, "Come on, Daddy!" After a few hours we adjourned to the "party room" for pizza and birthday traditions. Maggie turned her nose up at the pizza since it wasn't her preferred brand. But she ate the cake, and sang the song.

Jamie had been kept out of the party because he'd been sick on Friday, but since he was doing better I took him and Maggie to the Saginaw Fire Department Open House. They were celebrating their new offices. With the growth of the town the police department moved to a new building and their old building was remodeled to be offices and training facilities for the fire fighters. The kids got to look at the fire engines. The new ladder truck was at full extension. Looks like "top of the grain elevator burning" was the reference scenario for the specs. The Texas Firefighter Museum folks had brought some old engines which the kids could climb into, great fun for them. One of the ambulance services was letting kids into their vehicle for a guided tour but that line was longer than Maggie's attention span. The best part for me was getting some disaster preparedness info from our local FEMA-equivalent. We got to chatting while the kids played. Turns out Walter Jon Williams' The Rift is a popular novel in that crowd (and well it should be). She agreed that it was a terrible book to read right before visiting the Gateway Arch.

Sunday Maggie and Jamie got to see their godparents again for the first time in weeks (and also the last time in weeks as they'll be out of town for the holidays). Jamie's been making a lot of progress lately, not just in talking but in behavior. This was the best behaved he'd ever been in the service, at least since he was weaned. Maggie was swept off to learn how to make cookies with her godmother afterwards.

That evening we went over to fordprfct's place to play Rock Band. Amazingly to me I'm being somewhat competent at it. Sure, I'm playing bass on "easy" but I'm someone who normally can't match rhythm or tune at all. The music selections aren't aimed at me. I suspect getting access to music you like is one of the big incentives for progressing in the metagame. I have to wonder about the future of the game--seems like there'd be a lot of interest in letting people access user-generated songs. Thousands of budding composers could get their tunes out to people by letting them play them.

I admit I want this so I can play filk in the Rock Band II game . . .

GIP

2007-12-05T21:48:09Z

This is from get_medieval. Asher has been conditioned to expect the worst to happen whenever things start to look good. So have I, but I'm trying to get over it.

Postponing Gaming

2007-11-30T05:39:52Z

Well, when we planning on having gaming here on 12/1 we hadn't planned on spending a week going to and from a funeral. Or catching some bugs on the trip. So we're not in shape for hosting this Saturday. We will have gaming, probably mixed with other stuff to be announced, on December 15th. Y'all mark your calendars.

Back from Illinois Stats

2007-11-29T16:34:16Z

Time: 6 days, 4 of them driving
Distance: ~1960 miles
Repairs: New water pump, new air line, plus a quart of oil after the Ozarks
Potty stops: too many to think about counting
In-laws met: see above
LJ skip: 720

Board Game Geek Con 2007

2007-11-23T03:17:22Z

Board Game Geek Con 2007

This was the third BGG.Con. I had a great time at the first one. Last year I was changing jobs and sprained my ankle so I couldn't go. This year was much closer to the first one.

I arrived late on Friday--the con had been running since Thursday morning. I found some friends but they were all in games, so I joined a game of Railroad Tycoon, one of my favorites. The owner was teaching it to a couple of newbies. I came out with a good score. Didn't win. He'd broken a hundred. But you'd expect that from someone who'd been in the RRT tournament at Gencon. Afterwards meerkat1 and I went off for a later dinner and a long catch-up chat--it'd been a year since we'd seen each other.

Afterwards we were going to play Empyrean together, but she had to bail out to let Brack into their hotel room. So I played with some of the friends who'd come out from Washington with her.

I ran into Simon Hunt, who I'd met at the first BGG. We'd playtested each other games and he's gotten his published. He gave me a copy of Take Stock as thanks for being a playtester. He also introduced me to his next game, Pick and Pack. Imagine a Laurel and Hardy movie with them working in an apple-packing factory with a defective conveyor belt. The players compete to grab the best apples while sticking each other with the worst . . . but if you leave him with no apples to grab he can apply a special card. I won by grabbing the "premium" card and doubling the value of one very-full crate of apples after spending the whole game getting consistently out maneuvered. Too abstract to be one of my favorites, but I could see getting a copy if we'd play it often enough.

I was invited to playtest another game--Albion: Kings & Kingdoms, a strategy game of the barbarian invasions of Britain after the Romans left. One of the waves of invaders is the Irish, so the theme had my total attention. It's an area control game--you win by outnumbering the opponent in the region. It has a "eurogame" feel in that there's little nasty combat--attacking to remove someone else's units is an option, but rarely a good one, and players can't be eliminated. The mechanics fit the theme well, it's not just pasted on. Given that the theme appeals to the historical and Celtic interests of our household I think there's a good chance we'll get this when it comes out next year.

Another game publisher was luring people into demo games of Wealth of Nations. I'd heard about this from their BGG ads and it sounded right up my alley--I like economic games. It wound up not working for me because of the mix of abstraction levels. The trading part of the game was quite realistic, they even had a nice mechanism to model supply and demand effects on prices (much better than how, say, Supremacy handled the same problem). Trading worked smoothly. Instead of having a map of Europe or some fantasy land we had a blank hex map that we would fill in with our nations. That's a little more abstract than I like but it worked--you placed flags to claim a territory, then spent more resources to build it up with farms, factories, or whatever. The tiles for each each kind of production were marked with dots, so if you put the right combination of corners and edges together you could get extra production. What totally broke the game for me is that you can spend just a little bit to pick up your territory tiles and put them anywhere else on the map. Yep, if there's some unimproved space in the middle of another country you can just lift up the mines you built in those mountains and plunk them right there.

In a game as abstract as Go that wouldn't bother me. But when your economics are so detailed you have a sliding scale of interest rates as a player gets deeper in debt, letting geography be so random broke the game for me. It's like Up Front, a WWII game where you use a table to see how many hits your machine gun gets at a particular range--but find out whether the new area you advanced into has cover by waiting for your opponent to play a terrain card on you. It breaks my suspenders and keeps me from enjoying the game.

At 1pm we had the Math Trade. Over a hundred geeks had submitted games they were willing to trade and what they'd accept in exchange for Rossum to run through his computer and make matches. Now the four hundred swaps would all happen at once. Amazingly the initial chaos only lasted about fifteen minutes. People wandered about waving game boxes until someone stopped them to do an exchange. No central control, good results. At twenty after Rossum was left with just paging the two missing geeks and everyone else was happy. I traded away Age of Renaissance, which tried to be Advanced Civ in a later period but pretended to be pacifist by renaming all the combat actions, which annoyed me too much to ever want to play it. The other was Ivanhoe, which flopped with our group and should get a good home. One of the new ones is Axis & Allies: Europe which may get played if we have a group in a mood for WWII but I really want so I can use the pieces for a future Ogre Minis game.

The other was 2038, one of the games I was looking at in my quest for a science fiction version of Railroad Tycoon (that was really the main theme of the weekend). I immediately went off to go through the game and figure out how it works. Unfortunately I don't think the "Tycoons of the Asteroid Belt" game will ever get on the table at our place. It's just too damn complicated and I don't have the time for that any more. An economic simulation that realistically handles stock market speculative bubbles and CEOs gutting companies to cheat the other investors is something that might get used in the homeschooling curriculum but not as a fun way to pass an evening.

I found meerkat1 playing Lost Adventures, a prototype of an Indiana Jones-style adventure game. It was nicely made and they all looked to be having a good time. After the big giveaway I got to play the game I most wanted to find: Merchants of Venus. This is a space trading game with each player taking a ship and exploring new solar systems to find out what they can sell and what they want to buy. You can also stumble across ancient artifacts and get hung up by navigational hazards. I loved it but didn't score too well. I spent too much time running around exploring, then got hung up in the vortex when I needed to make deliveries. So by the time I did get some good trading runs going the other players were way ahead of me. Buying this one isn't an issue though, it's hideously out of print and hard to find. There's enough scans of it that I might be able to make a copy but its complexity level is noticeably higher than Railroad Tycoon. Players have to balance the distance and demand levels of potential customers and eventually consider building trade stations and factories to make shipping easier and provide more goods. So most likely it wouldn't go over well with our usual gaming crowd. I'd love to play it again though.

After a late dinner I tracked down Seth Jaffee for a playtest of his Serenity game, Blockade Runner. It's more abstract than I'd envisioned but works. Players try to deliver supplies to besieged Independent worlds while staying ahead of a pursuing Alliance cruiser--and taking pot shots at their fellow smugglers. It works. Not complex enough to be one of my favorites, but I'd buy it--I have a hard time resisting Serenity stuff.

Sunday morning I found meerkat1 and this time we were both free to play a game together! The game library was open for a few more hours so we checked out Starfarers of Catan. This is great. It carries over some of the mechanics of Settlers of Catan but has a completely different feel. You have to balance among planting new colonies to gain resources, establishing trade with aliens to get their fancy toys, and upgrading your ships to make it easier to do the other two later. The "random encounters" make it feel like you're out in the unknown (and possibly introduce too much luck into the game, but I'll need to play more to tell). This is one I want to get a copy of. We couldn't finish, had to hand it back to the library, but we were a good way into the game.

Afterwards we got in one more game. With the library closed we just had what I had on me, and the only other multiplayer game was my prototype, Keep Flying. Brack won in a surprisingly close game--he had one card left when the rest of us were all grounded.

It was a very successful con for me. I didn't get to try every game I wanted to. Two I missed were Agricola ('cause Ryan was raving about it) and Race for the Galaxy. Something to try for next year, when they'll have open seats 'cause everyone will be trying to play the next wave of hot games.

Yet More Gaming

2007-11-23T00:20:40Z

Thanksgiving dinner can be a good time for discussing plans. Folks who don't have plans for December 1st are invited to come play card and board games at our place from 2pm to 11pm.