Tetsujin no Llama

Our gaming here is heavily shaped by a couple of factors. One is that we quite like cooperative games. Another is that we pay way too much attention to Kickstarter. Some of the games we've backed, notably Burgle Bros. , have been excellent additions to our gaming collection. So today, a new box showed up on our doorstep. How was it? Well... 5 Minute Dungeon from Wiggles 3D is a cooperative dungeon-themed card game. Two to five players have five minutes to work through a series of monsters and other challenges to finally face off with a boss monster. There's actually a series of bosses, so a full round of them can theoretically be accomplished in about a half hour. Each player chooses one from among ten different adventurers: the sorceress, the barbarian, the valkyrie, the ninja, and so on (for those who care about such things, the gender mix is evenly split between male and female). Each adventurer has their own deck of cards (which, by the way, are flexible enough to ...

I saw this on Doug's blog , and that prompted me to review why I like GURPS, my go-to RPG system since I first ran into it in...hmmm...must have been 1986. I use it for basically everything I'm willing to run (except Paranoia, of course). Why? Well... Mechanically Simplicity For all the hoopla about how GURPS is an insanely complicated game, it pretty much all boils down to a single rule: roll a target number, usually based on one of a character’s capabilities modified for the circumstances, or below on 3d6. That’s it. I’m not stats geek enough to care specifically about roll low vs. roll high or 3d6 vs. 1d20 vs. 1d100; the point is that it’s a single, standardized die roll. Such complexity as GURPS has in play is about figuring out which capability to roll against and how to modify it for the situation, but those are a necessary consequence of one of GURPS’s other virtues. Point-Based The point-based system provides a single currency and relatively open set of...

We have...several games. Enough that we have trouble keeping them all in one place. We've had some stacked in a corner here, under a bench there, on a bookshelf somewhere else. Recently, certain persons to whom I am married suggested that it'd be great to have some kind of rolling cart we could put our games on, which we could wheel out when we wanted to pull out a game and then put away when we were done. She thought it was something which we could build, and after looking at prices for library carts (we're looking at $300 for something with the kind of storage we need), build one it was. The lumber was reasonably cheap, less than $70 for manufactured pine panels, plus a few bucks for some nice wheels (two with built-in brakes to keep it stable when needed). An hour of router work gave me some reasonably functional dado joints, and construction went pretty quickly. The only really time-consuming bit, as ever, was finishing, which is always "lightly sand, put on a qu...