Tag: gaming

1980s games night and Saturday

Last night I ran the 1980s kids adventure roleplaying game that I’ve been working on. I had four players, playing 11-year-old kids in 1982. I don’t want to reveal any details of the adventure yet, because I have a second subgroup of friends who will be playing the same adventure next Friday during virtual games night. We all want to see if they handle the adventure differently, and compare notes afterwards. So suffice to say that the evening and the game went really well!

Today I went on a long walk with my wife and Scully to the distant Italian bakery. It rained a bit while we were out, and Scully got pretty wet, but fortunately it wasn’t too cold. They had the banoffee croissant special again, which is just so amazingly good that I can’t pass it up any time I see it there.

I spent most of my at-home time today working on new Darths & Droids comic scripts. I had a bit of writer’s block, alas, and broke it up with that long walk, and a 2.5k run. The run was a bit slow, since I was full of banoffee croissant! Tonight for dinner I made okonomiyaki.

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A late storm

The weather forecast for today was ominous: heavy rain beginning from around 8 am, totalling 10-25 mm. But it didn’t turn out that way. There was not a cloud in the sky when I took Scully out for a morning walk. And it remained bright and sunny all morning.

I took her out again for a walk and to get some lunch at midday, and it was still very sunny, and warm. Although it’s still winter, we got up to 22°C. But as we walked home, I could see dark clouds building up on the horizon. The cold front came through after 1 pm, and the temperature dropped rapidly to 12°C. But the rain was localised, and it didn’t start where I am until a couple of hours later, while other parts of the city were getting hammered. Now it’s raining steadily, and the temperature has dropped further to just 7°C, which is really cold for Sydney.

Besides watching the weather, today I worked on material for Friday’s roleplaying game. I used DALL-E to make an invitation image to advertise the game to my friends.

Agate Beach banner

I shared this with them. I also made a map of Agate Beach, the tiny west coast US town where the adventure is set. It’s a real town in Oregon, and I’m basing the game map on the real map, but with some modifications. I’ve also got some new ideas for how the adventure will flow.

And this evening I began the first three classes on this week’s new ethics topic: Friendship. One question I ask: Is it important that friends be of a similar age to each other? It’s interesting hearing kids discuss this. They’re 10-12 years old, and they can’t even imagine having a friend as old as 14 or 15!

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What did I do today?

Let’s see. I picked up the groceries this morning. I went for a run. I drove out to pick up my wife and Scully when they got caught in the rain on the way home from the dog groomer.

Oh, I prepared character sheets for the players in the roleplaying game that I’m going to run next week. I made a sheet template and then filled it in with stats, skills, advantages, flows, equipment, and character sketches that the players had chosen. They got to adjust some skill scores, which just took a few minutes. So they’re all ready to play.

And tonight we’re in the middle of online games. (I’m typing as we play 7 Wonders.) We played some Jump Drive to start, and I won a couple of games. I came second in a game of Bärenpark. And I’ve just lost badly in 7 Wonders.

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A day of assembling comics

Today I spent time making comics out of the photos I took yesterday. I only made five, and wrote annotations for them, as I had some other things to do. So there’s still a whole lot more to assemble, but that five will last for the coming week.

Last night at board games night, we played three games of Werewords, then a new game called Fantastic Factories.

This is a tableau building game where you roll dice, collect resources (energy and ingots), and use them to build various factories and industrial things that allow you to cascade into producing more resources and other stuff, and also collect points. In the building phase, everyone rolls their handful of dice simultaneously, and decides how to spend them – each die can be used to draw an extra card, or rolls form 1-3 can be used to gain energy, while rolls from 4-6 can be used to gain ingots. The thing is that you gain energy equal to the die roll (so 1-3 for each die), but for ingots you gain just 1, no matter what number is showing on the die.

Two of us got this wrong (since it was our first game). One friend of mine was taking 4-6 ingots for each die, and so gaining a huge advantage. My mistake was the exact opposite: taking only 1 energy for each die showing 1-3, rather than 1-3 energy. So I was handicapping myself. (It was possible to do this because everyone plays their dice rolls at the same time, so nobody is really watching what anyone else is doing to check on them.) Another player made a different rules error. In the end we joked that the winner would be the only person who didn’t realise they’d been playing illegally the whole time. But you kind of expect this thing on a first learning game. It was fun, and will be worth another play, now that we all know the rules!

After that we played an old favourite: Ra. We played this a lot back in the day, when we all used to work at the same company. Unfortunately, I had an utterly shambolic game. It’s an auction game played over 3 rounds, scoring points for collecting sets of various tiles that you win in the auctions. You start with 10 points (since it’s possible, though unlikely, to score negative points in a round), and then normally you’d expect to score around 5-15 additional points per round. In the first round I scored 2. In the second round I scored -2. That’s right: minus two. In the last round I scored 9 points, but I finished squarely in last place with a total of 19, behind people with total scores ranging from the 30s to 50s. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a bad game of that! Lucky I play for the social interaction!

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A day of writing comics

My break from producing new Irregular Webcomic! strips is almost over… so I got stuck into writing a new batch of comics today. I just finished, in the middle of the evening – phew! That’s actually faster than a lot of other times, when it can take two or three days to write a batch of scripts. Tomorrow I’ll try to photograph them all and then have the weekend to assemble them.

Apart from that I didn’t do much else. I took Scully for a walk at lunch time and got some fish & chips to eat. We went down to the ferry wharf to enjoy the waterfront a bit while I ate.

Oh, I’m finally organising a date to play the 1980s “kids with bikes” roleplaying game adventure that I’ve written. I’ve recruited several of my friends, and we’ve decided to do it twice, in two separate sessions with different players. One group will play face-to-face at a games night which I’ll be hosting at my place, and then a week later the other group will play online using Zoom. After both groups have played the adventure, they can compare notes and see how they fared compared to each other. I’ve been sitting on this adventure for a long time, so I’m very keen to finally run it.

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Games night and walky day

Friday night was online games night, so I didn’t have time for a blog entry. We played a bunch of the usual suspects. I tried a very different strategy in Splendor this time, after losing badly last time. Last time I concentrated on buying as many cheap cards as possible to build up my power to purchase things without having to collect lots of gems – but by the time I was ready to get rolling and buy lots of point-scoring cards, the game had ended. Someone told me that that wasn’t a great strategy – you have to start buying more expensive cards earlier. So this time I started buying some of the second-tier cards as soon as I could, saving up lots of games to do so. Only at one point I ran into the rule (that I’d never noticed before) that you have to discard down to 10 gems at the end of your turn. So I wasted a whole turn grabbing extra gems that I then just had to throw away! Anyway, the result was just as bad as last time I played. I was just getting into a groove and planned to purchase some valuable point-scoring cards in my next two turns… and the game ended! I never got those turns, and came last, again.

The other main thing I did on Friday was attend the Standards Australia meeting on photography, which is a follow-up to the ISO meeting I attended in Cologne back in June. I had to present a report on that meeting, which is really the main part of the local meeting, bringing all the Australian experts up to date. It was the first face-to-face meeting we’ve had since COVID began, so it was good to catch up with people again. And we have a new project manager at Standards Australia (who ran our last meeting via Zoom), so it was nice to meet her for the first time.

I slept in a bit this morning. I needed some catching up on sleep, as a neighbour has a baby which has been crying a lot at night recently. I worked mostly on comics today, but took a break early in the afternoon to go on a long walk with my wife and Scully, over to the good bakery. We just had some small pastries for afternoon tea – I had a cheese danish.

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Editing comics

I’m currently reading a book on editing comics that I got from Kickstarter: Filth & Grammar by Shelly Bond. The book is all about what a comics editor does.

One main part is about what a comics editor should look for when giving feedback/requests to the author/artists. One thing it really emphasises is that every page of a comic should have around 3 or 4 bolded words to indicate speech stresses. If a page comes in with no words bolded, send it back and tell them to bold some.

I’ve long noticed that comics seem to do this – have multiple bolded words on each page. But I always thought the propensity of bolded emphasis words in comics was way too overdone. I find it distracting and annoying. I wonder who in the comics industry decided that comics had to have bold-emphasised words on every single page.

In other news, I got an invitation for DALL-E today, and I’ve been playing with it a bit, generating some artwork. Not too much because it’s easy to burn through your 50 free credits and have to start paying money to keep using it.

It also came with some free credit to try using GPT-3 text generation. I gave it this prompt:

Write the rules for a Euro-style board game based on medieval monks brewing beer.

And here’s what GPT-3 produced:

1. The game is played with two to four players.

2. Each player has a monastery, and starts the game with two brewmasters and two workers.

3. The game is played over six rounds. In each round, the players take turns performing one of the following actions:

a. Collecting ingredients: The player rolls two dice. They may choose to collect either the number of hops or barley indicated by the dice. If they choose to collect hops, they take that number of hops from the supply. If they choose to collect barley, they take that number of barley from the supply.

b. Brewing beer: The player spends one hop and one barley to brew one barrel of beer. The player may choose to brew either ale or lager.

c. Selling beer: The player may sell up to three barrels of beer. They may sell either ale or lager, but not both at the same time. They receive three gold pieces for each barrel of ale sold, and four gold pieces for each barrel of lager sold.

4. At the end of each round, the players check to see if they have enough beer to satisfy their workers. If they do not, they must pay one gold piece for each worker that is not satisfied.

5. The game ends after six rounds. The player with the most gold pieces wins the game.

Wow. That’s almost a sensible game. There are some obvious issues, but you could certainly start from this and tweak it into a playable game.

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A Zoom and a tunnel

Friday night was virtual board games night with my friends, so I didn’t have time to write up a blog entry. I picked up groceries, taught some online classes, and started working on a new online class for Outschool. I’m planning to run some Dungeons & Dragons or other roleplaying games for kids. D&D classes are very popular on there. I think a lot of kids these days are getting exposure to D&D online when they don’t have local groups to play with—or maybe some are getting an extra fix—and Outschool is a perfect platform for them to find adult DMs with experience running games for kids.

During games night, we played Sushi Go Party!, which I won, amazingly. And 6 Nimmt, Splendor, and Jump Drive, all of which I lost badly, unsurprisingly. We also tried a new game: VektoRace, which is an analogue car racing board game in which you use distance templates to move car tokens around a race track. It seemed an odd thing to port to an online version, but seemed to work okay. I took an early lead and the other players struggled to catch me, and we decided to quit after a bit more than 1 lap of the 3 in the race as it wasn’t particularly interesting. It’d probably be more fun with actual miniatures and a table.

Today I went to visit my mother, who lives up north, an hour’s drive away. While on my recent trip to Europe, my wife and I visited my aunt, my mother’s sister, in her nursing home in Germany. In the past year or so, we’ve had Zoom calls with her and several members of our family (organised by one of my cousins), but my mother has never been in on the call, because she’s not computer savvy and panicked when I suggested she set up Zoom on her computer. So when we saw my aunt in person, I asked if she’d like me to set up a call with her sister (my mother), and she sounded very enthusiastic about that. So when we got home from Europe, I phoned my mother to see if we could visit and take a laptop and do all of the Zoom setup for her, so she could talk to her sister. She thought that sounded great, so I emailed the nursing home in Germany and set up a call.

Today was the day, so my wife and I drove up to have an afternoon tea with my mother and then set up the Zoom call. It was scheduled for 5pm here, which was 9am in Germany. I took a laptop, and connected it to her WiFi (after struggling to find the password, before finding it written on the bottom of the modem), and ran the Zoom from there. It worked well and my mother and aunt had a rather emotional chat for a while, not having spoken to one another for many years, since the last time my aunt had visited Australia. My aunt tires quickly, so we didn’t stay on too long.

I knew we’d be leaving my mother’s around 6pm, so we decided to have dinner somewhere on the way home. Before we left, I found a nice restaurant in northern Sydney, just off the freeway exit and before the long slog through the suburbs back home. As we approached the freeway exit, we were nicely 10 minutes before our reservation – perfect timing.

But I hadn’t counted on NorthConnex. This is a new tunnel extending from the freeway, under multiple suburbs, bypassing a notoriously slow surface road. This was the first time I’ve driven back into Sydney from the north since the tunnel opened. We were approaching our exit, so naturally I moved to the extreme left lane (remember, we drive on the left in Australia). But then suddenly I was in unfamiliar territory, and wondering what the “NCX” written on the roadway meant… and before I knew it we were in the tunnel.

This is a 9-kilometre tunnel, with no exits. There was no way back. So we missed our dinner reservation, because by the time we exited and drove back it would have been half an hour or more later. And we paid a toll for the privilege. And we ended up far from home and had to take another tolled motorway to get home. So that was a bit of a debacle. We ended up stopping near home and grabbing something at an Indian restaurant for dinner. A place we hadn’t tried before which… was a bit substandard, and not somewhere we’d go again.

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Magic: Goldfish Draft results

I missed posting an entry last night because I was busy last night and bedtime crept up on me. Since I still haven’t quite fallen into a regular sleeping pattern after getting back from Europe, I decided to go to bed rather than stay up later writing a blog post.

I mentioned just over a week ago that I was playing a new game of Magic: the Gathering Goldfish Draft with my friends. Well, now a week later I can tell you the results of the game. Yes, it took me that long to calculate my score, using a spreadsheet – that’s what I was finishing up last night that caused me to have a late night. My result? I scored 10246.8 points.

Now you might think this is an awful lot of points to score in any sort of game. Surely I must have beaten everybody else’s scores! But you’d be very far from the truth. In fact, I came last out of six players. All the players’ scores were, in increasing order:

  • 10246.8 (me)
  • 1074682
  • 10628960
  • 103×1014
  • 10↑↑4.1
  • 10↑↑↑↑2.7

The last two use Knuth’s up-arrow notation for writing extremely large numbers that are beyond the capability of standard exponential notation – using a monotonic extension we worked out for interpolating non-integral operands. Also, these scores are all approximate – there’s no point, or even possibility, of tracking all the digits of the numbers we’re calculating here.

Also yesterday: did some housecleaning, dog walking, cooking, the usual day-to-day stuff.

Today: I slept in a bit after a solid sleep, which was good. I think I’m now pretty much back into a sensible sleeping pattern, which was not something I would have said yesterday. My arm is still a tiny bit sore from the 4th COVID shot on Friday, but otherwise that seemed to be fairly unremarkable.

I went for a big walk with my wife and Scully, out to our favourite bakery for a kind of brunch-ish snack. We just had a pastry each. Then on the way home we took a longer detour to see some different scenery and stretch our legs more. The day is actually nice today! Sunny and a forecast maximum of 20°C, which is considerably warmer than it has been for the past few weeks. So it was good to get out and enjoy it.

This afternoon I cleaned out the garage a bit and put some things out for the fortnightly household items collection that the council runs. Every two weeks you can put large items out on the kerb and council trucks come by and pick them up for disposal. I got rid of an old chest of drawers that we’d been storing in the garage for years, but it was pretty filthy and we were never going to use it again. I also took out my old set of golf clubs – the ancient ones I got second hand for about $50 and used until our neighbour passed away and his wife gifted me his very nice set of clubs. I’d seen second hand clubs at the golf course and asked if they wanted a donation, but they said they get lots of old clubs and don’t know what to do with them any more. So I didn’t expect to be able to get rid of them any other way, and placed them out for collection, and then a neighbour drove into our apartment driveway and saw me putting them there and asked if he could have them, for a friend of his who was just beginning to play. I said sure, and helped him take them. I’m really happy that they will get one more life with a new player!

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Friday games, Saturday game

Friday was online board games night with my friends, so I didn’t have time to write up an entry. We played games of Fruit Picking, 7 Wonders: Architects, Codenames, Nidavellir, 7 Wonders, and then Sketchful.

Fruit Picking is a new game we tried for the first time. It’s based on mancala; you move “seeds” round several “farms” mancala-style, and then use sets of seeds to buy fruit cards form the market to build winning sets of fruit. The tactics were interesting and we may try it again. The Codenames game was hilarious, as both sides had difficult combinations of words to clue, and also one side had SAND while the other had DESERT, so the team spymasters (me and a friend) also had to come up with clues that indicated one of those words but not the other. Our team-mates ending up hitting numerous bystanders and failing to make sense of either spymaster’s loose associations. Eventually the team opposing my team won, alas.

The other big event on Friday was Scully had her annual vaccinations at the vet. She’s been healthy the past year, with no visits to the vet since her last vaccinations. After the vet visit we gave her a bath and extra cuddles all evening.

The other thing I was doing on Friday, which extended into Saturday, was drafting a new round of our Goldfish Draft Magic: the Gathering game format that we invented. I may have mentioned this before – it’s a game based on Magic: the Gathering, in which players attempt to score the most points, and scores can often be so large that they require exponential notation to write down, or even more than that, things like Knuth’s up-arrow notation.

Today we finished drafting our cards, and now my mind turns to calculating my score. This is non-trivial, and can take several days to work out, often involving a spreadsheet. Yes, we’re complete nerds – we’re playing a game that requires a spreadsheet to calculate our scores, and often we actually deal in the logarithms (or super-logarithms) of our scores to make it easier to handle. When I’ve figured out my score, I’ll let you know, and I’ll also report what the other players scored.

Also today I worked hard on my current secret project. It’s approaching completion – so close I can taste it. Potentially I could knock it over tomorrow, but it will probably take until Monday or Tuesday given I have other things I want to work on too. You won’t see the finished result straight away – its publication is contingent on another thing happening first, but it will finally be ready, and that other thing will happen within a few weeks. So all the teasing is nearly over – you will see the result soon.

For dinner tonight, I took my wife out to the French galette and crêpe place in the next suburb. They’re having a series of special “French flavours” this month to celebrate Bastille Day. I had a galette with duck confit, carrots, potatoes, Swiss cheese, and pickled onions as my savoury meal, followed by a sweet crêpe with poached pear, flaked almonds, and chocolate sauce. All very delicious!

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