Why I keep going back to Ambagibus

 I first came across Ambagibus in 2018, which is the year when Print and Play became one of my major gaming focuses. It’s a solitaire tile-laying game where you are trying to complete closed paths.

At the time, I felt that Ambagibus was a very simple game and I even questioned the value of the game. The decisions in the game are fairly obvious so why play it?

However, I kept on going back to Ambagibus. For three years, it was one of my Go To games and I think it was how many PnP games came out during 2020 that distracted me from it. It did make the cut when a cross-country move had me purge a lot of PnP games along with a lot of published games.

However, exploring A Gentle Rain reminded me of Ambagibus. I dug it up and got it back on the table.

And it was better than I remembered.

Part of that is that I acknowledged that I wasn’t interested in keeping score. I wasn’t playing Ambagibus to win. I was playing it because I enjoyed the process. The process of Ambagibus decompresses me.

Ambagibus isn’t a brain fog game. I want to play attention to the calming little maze that I’m building. I enjoy making the little decisions and seeing how the maze grows.

I’m still following the rules and I am trying to complete a closed network passages. I’m still treating it as a game and I do want to win. 

I’m just winning for different reasons.

Hazy memories of Vegas Showdown

 It has been a long time since I’ve played Vegas Showdown. That said, I remember it fondly and it is probably my favorite Las Vegas themed game. (In case you are curious, Cheapass’s Vegas (also known as James Ernest Writes Off Another Trip to Vegas) is my least favorite)

It was part of what I was told was initial games that Wizards of the Coast put out under the Avalon Hill imprint after they got the legal rights to the name. Which was a really weird thing to experience. Avalon Hill was an august institution that has helped shape the United States’ hobby gamer culture. Having games that weren’t high concept war games under Avalon Hill felt strange, particularly for people like myself who were too young to have actually experienced the Avalon Hill of old and just had the stories grognards told us.

Which in retrospect is actually pretty hilarious. Avalon Hill actually published a much wider variety of games, including reprinting Sid Sackson’s games from 3M. In fact, Monsters Menace America was a revision of Monsters Ravage America, the last game old Avalon Hill put out. More than that, the company had been sold almost eight years before Vegas Showdown and had plenty of products come out in that time.

So much of my understanding of how Vegas Showdown came into the world turned out to be complete balderdash and in fact gamer folklore. Vegas Showdown would have been perfectly at home with the older Avalon Hill’s catalog.

Still, Vegas Showdown represents an early point in my boars gaming life. A time when I realized that that GenCon wasn’t just for RPGs. (A lesson that would completely fill a walk-in closet with board games)

Vegas Showdown is about elements of a casino getting auctioned off and then putting them together in your own board to create your own personal casino. And it’s been well more than ten years since I last played so I’m blurry on some details. 

But what I do remember is that the satisfaction when you ended the game with a casino that filled your board and brought in both money and people. When you managed to bid for the right pieces and make them work.

And, since then, I have played a lot of games that are engine builders. And, yeah, when you make the engine purr like a kitten, it is serious happy. But Vegas Showdown was an early experience like that.

And I suspect it holds up. A casino is a small enough and concrete enough idea to be easy to immersed in.

When I signed up to playtest Casinopolis, I wondered if it would be an experience like Vegas Showdown. Of course it is completely different name but it was nice to have those memories come back.

Approaching Superman as a character, not an icon

 Enough folks told me that My Adventures with Superman was good that I eventually checked it out. And it is good, good enough for me to finish the first season and plan on watching more at some point.

Superman is a fascinating phenomenon. So

much of the superhero genre as we know is because of Superman. The character was a global icon decades before the internet made it lazy to be known worldwide.

And yet, because the character is kind of all powerful and unflinchingly benevolent, he is allegedly really hard to write. 

Honestly, I think that’s hyperbole. He hasn’t been out of print since 1938 and has held down multiple titles and that’s not counting other media. Every other media. That’s a lot for a character who creators aren’t supposed to be able to write.

I think it’s more honest to say that you can’t write Superman like Batman. (Except that that has been done. More than once)

That said, My Adventures with Superman does a good job. It’s Superman is just starting out and is still figuring out his powers, making him less all mighty. But more than that, he is always struggling to do the right thing. And that’s where the hook is.

This Clark Kent doesn’t struggle because he has some flavor of inner dark side. He struggles because he is inexperienced. Because he is dealing a world with a gray morality. And because he has the baggage of a more complicated Krypton. But that doesn’t change the fact that his end goal is to save everyone.

The drama isn’t how will Superman stop supervillains. It is how Clark will keep on making the good choice, no matter what it costs him. I mean, we all know he’s going to do both. The character stuff is just more engaging.

That said, that makes  My Adventures With Superman sound all serious. It’s not. It’s also actually funny and sweet without going overboard. My favorite characters are its interpretation of the Brain and Monsieur Mallah. They are a caring couple who also happen to be mad scientists who would be at home in Girl Genius. Man, I hope they show up in the second season.

My Adventures With Superman is sweet, uplifting fun. It doesn’t ask what does Superman do. It asks who is he in a way that makes us invested.

My August Gaming

 I didn’t learn that many games in August. In particular, I didn’t learn any remotely heavy games. 

I learned:

Greatest Beach Vacation

Evil Lab Biohazard Zone

Spooky Forest

Evil Lab Bio Split

Fliptricks

Scribbly Gum

I almost feel that the two Evil Lab games deserve an asterisk because they are just variations on the original Evil Lab game. They use the same rules, just with a little tweaking. However, they aren’t expansions but actual standalone games so they squeaked in. (I wouldn’t consider Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers an expansion, although knowing how to play Carcassonne will really help the learning curve)

I did not count some expansions I was part of the play test pool for. However, those really were expansions, no use without the base game.

I realized, looking over the list, that everything I learned was a Roll and Write, except for Fliptricks. Not that I have a problem with that. As someone who has been doing a lot of solitaire PnP, R&Ws have been a huge gift.

The highlight of the month was Scribbly Gum. I went in with relatively low expectations but it proved to be quite fun. It is the weakest R&W I’ve played from Postmark Games but Voyages, Aquamarine and Waypoints are some of the strongest R&Ws I’ve played so that leaves plenty of room beneath them for quality.

I am hoping to get at least one ‘heavier’ game in September but we will just see what life has in store.

My August PnP

 I really thought that August would be a month of slowing down my PnP crafting. However, demos and playtests helped bill it up. Plus, there were times when I crafted just to decompress.

I made:

Battle Card - maps 2-5

Drakard

Agropolis

Rallytaire Sheet #1

Solo Dice/Can’t Stop Express

Lingo Land

Criss Cross

Dragon Hero

Fire Brigade Mages

Spooky Forest

Fearsome Fog (Last Lighthouse expansion playtest)

Fliptricks

Scribbly Gum (maps 1-3)

Terrible Tides (Last Lighthouse expansion playtest)

Micromend  

Jose Garcia Saves the Alhambra (Postcard from the Front contest)

Astrology

Christmas on Track

Evil Lab: Tetra Terror

Evil Lab: Monstrous Monster Mixer

Evil Lab: Color Rampage

A Nice Cuppa (demo version)

Casinapolis (playtest version 2(?) )

Mind you, a lot of these are just laminating Roll and Write sheets. (And many were replacing ones I misplaced lol) But I went into the month thinking Agropolis would be my big project. 

My rough and ready method is print, cut, laminate and trim. I find finishing projects to be very decompressing and satisfying so I actually have a folder of laminated card sheets that just need to be trimmed. 

I also don’t want to get too much of a PnP folder of shame so I try not to make stuff I don’t see myself playing on the foreseeable future. That said, a number of my August projects still haven’t seen play.

I don’t know what September will be like. A balance of crafting for decompression balanced by how much time I have to learn to play new games.

I let Chi’s Sweet Home set the tone for my birthday

 I recently had one of those birthdays that’s supposed to make you think about your life. Since I’m not interested in having a midlife crisis, I don’t know how necessary that is.

But I did decide to make a point of making the first thing I read something that would set the tone for this year of my life. I do the same thing for the new year. Really, though, any book you read is the first book you read for that chunk of time. Or the last book. I guess last book makes more sense.

After contemplating reading something heavy and ‘meaningful’, I actually went with the next volume of Chi’s Sweet Home.

I’ve already written about Chi’s Sweet Home. It’s a slice of life manga about a kitten adjusting to being adopted by a family after she gets lost from her mother. (Chi didn’t actually lose her mother. She’s still alive, somewhere out there. Don’t get all dark about it)

Chi’s Sweet Home might be fluff but it might be more about the life of a fluff. It isn’t grandiose but I think it actually accurately reflects the life that we spend most of our time living.

And that’s why I decided it was a good ‘tone’ read. To remind myself that life is full of little wonders.

Finally actually looking at Battle Card Series 1

 Last year, I tried out Battle Card Marker Garden, which effectively was the prototype for the Battle Card series. (Come to think it, it also made me look at the Postcards From the Front contest)

I bought the Battle Card Series 1 at the start of the year as part of my buying the Post Mark Games catalog but I’ve only now played the first game in the series, The Malaysian Campaign.

Okay, the Battle Card series is a set of simple PnP solitaire one-page war games, although you can print the map and the rules on separate sheets and make them a two-sheet war games. You use dice as counters, with the pips being the strength of the unit, as well as a die for the timer and another for actually rolling on the Combat Results Table.

(As a longtime D&D player, I am found of CRTs. (Yes, I know D&D doesn’t use CRTs) Take care of all the math and try to make it work in your favor before you roll the die)

Each map has its own rules so is basically a standalone game. And each one is about a specific military action from World War II. I put it that way because I’m not sure what the line between a battle and a campaign is. 

The Malaysian Campaign has reinforced the opinion I got from the Market Garden prototype.

Okay, negatives first. As far as actual game goes, I don’t think there’s a lot there. The decision trees have been fairly limited. There seems to be really one course of action in each map and the dice have to be really nice to you to pull it off.  

Which sounds like a complete condemnation but that’s not the whole picture.

As history lessons, the Battle Card series are very engaging. And that is one of the goals of historic war games in general and I’m pretty sure the Battle Card series in particular. From that standpoint, the series works and works well enough to make the games worth experiencing.

Yes, even though I am not even close to an expert on WW II history, I am sure they heavily simplify the events. They are five minute games that play out in a maximum of six turns. They are clearly showing history in broad strokes. And I am sure that historians can show where they are wrong.

However, the Battle Card series gives you an interactive overview of battles and campaigns, a Cliff Notes version. They are very accessible, even to someone like me whose war gaming experiences are limited. And they point me in the direction if I want to do more reading, research or  gaming.

I don’t know if people who are active war gamers would get much out of the Battle Card series. But I think they are ideal for casual gamers like me. I can honestly picture them as ideal for class room use.

I feel that the Battle Series is the weakest product from Post Mark Games. Because Voyages and Aquamarine and Waypoints are very good and very accessible games with a lot of nuance and replay value. However, I will also stand by my continued recommendation that folks should just buy their entire catalog.