My first virtual convention of the year turns out to be for Pokémon Go :D

The one virtual convention that I have actually attended so far in 2020 wasn’t for either board games or role playing games but for a casual video game, Pokémon Go. Pokémon GoFest 2020. Mind you, part of the reason it worked for me was because it was a casual game that I didn’t need to set aside a designated time to participate. I could also do it with my wife, which was a big plus.

Lockdown parenthood doesn’t allow for extended downtime, which is why I have yet to play a game of Scythe online despite meaning to for months. (Plus trying time remember how to play and use the interface :P) But a casual video game that is designed to be played in tiny bursts, that’s a lot easier to do.

That said, it was really the fact that I could do it with my wife and it was a family activity that really made it work for us.

While we had fun finding shiny Pokémon and fighting Team Rocket as they flew around in balloons (Niantic has worked hard on making a game based on geo caching still work when you can’t go anywhere), the real highlight was using the invite function of remote raid passes so we could play with folks we haven’t seen in months.

The last message of the event was about playing under the same sky. Virtual conventions are a shadow of in-person conventions but they are all about community.

Why did nobody tell me about McAuslan?

How have I spent decades actively reading and only found out about the McAuslan stories a month or so ago? A famous series by George MacDonald Fraser, it apparently influenced later authors like Terry Pratchett. The stories consist of Fraser tweaking his experiences as an officer just after World War II just enough to make them fictional and funny. 

As I have often written, since 2020 has been such a stressful year (for everyone!) and I‘ve been on the lookout for decompressing reading. Which, curiously enough doesn’t necessarily mean fluff. I’ve been reading heaps of L. Sprague de Camp who certainly has a lot of joy in his writing but there’s meaning there too.

(Oddly enough, Wodehouse, one of my favorite authors and a master of frothy writing, has not worked for me. Maybe I’ve read so much of him that my tolerance is too high?)

Back to George McDonald Fraser. So I read The General Danced at Dawn, the first McAuslan collection. The stories are actually about the narrator, Lieutenant Dand MacNeill, who is in a Scottish Battalion that manages to live up to most of stereotypes of Scotland. McAuslan, the dirtiest soldier in the world, isn’t even featured in half the stories but, boy, is he memorable when he dies show up.

The stories are an undeniably biased view of the British army in the 1950s with each story being about another misadventure that have to be muddled though. And that might be why the stories worked so well for me right now. They are grounded in reality, in Fraser’s actual experiences. But things do work out and problems do get solved. It’s a view of an imperfect world but a hopeful one. It actually takes me back to stories I heard from veterans as a child.

From what I’ve read, Fraser had an old fashioned view of the world, particularly in regards to woman and minorities and some people of that bleeds through. I do keep that in mind as I read his works. It’s not flawless but he has a great voice and there’s some stuff to ponder.

Wow, Howard Tayler finished Schlock Mercenary

On July 24, 2020, Howard Tayler wrapped up Schlock Mercenary, after slightly more than twenty years of daily webcomics. And it really was daily, without any gaps. And Sundays were extra big comic strips on top of that.

Beyond saying that Schlock Mercenary was a satirical dramedy about an intergalactic mercenary corp in a dystopian (or at least cynical) future, it’s hard for me to really describe the series. There is just too much. Too many plot elements and twists, too many characters, too many tears, too many jokes.

As near as I can tell, I read it regularly for thirteen years, although I did go back and read the story up to that point. I may very well may try and go back and reread the entire run, one volume at a time to make it manageable. Maybe after that, it won’t make my head spin trying to keep all the details straight :P

Reading Schlock Mercenary every morning has been part of my daily wake up routine. It does feel weird not having it there but, boy does Howard Tayler deserve a break. He has said he has more stories to tell in the setting and I do look forward to them. But if he needs to take a five-year break, the man has definitely earned it!

Yeah, I still love Ingenious

Okay. I decided to participate in a recent geek list about favorite games: https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/274188/what-your-favorite-game-and-why-no-repeats-no-nega

It is actually a really tough question because, frankly, the answer can change depending on my mood and the situation. Catan and Go are in the running because both are games that were instrumental in getting me into the hobby. Dominion and Race for the Galaxy provided hours upon hours of play in my most regular gaming group. Six and Qwirkle were a big part of my wife and me getting to know each other.  I play Onirim almost daily these days.

But I ended up going with Ingenious, although I dearly love and would cheerfully play all of the games I mentioned in the last paragraph. There was a time in my life when I was playing it almost constantly, thanks to the BSW website. I do really like the game.  But that’s not why I still think of it as my favorite.

I really like abstract games and Ingenious gives me a really top notch abstract experience in a very manageable time frame. While the board is small enough to make the game a knife fight in a phone booth, there’s a lot of interesting choices. When you have Tigris and Euphrates scoring, that can either mean trying for balanced play or crushing your opponents’ chances in just one color. You can choose to be make the game unbalanced and try to control that imbalance.

But here’s the thing. Ingenious is the game that broke me out of the idea that abstracts had to be perfect information. You randomly draw a hand of tiles but you can discard and draw a new hand if you don’t have any tiles in your lowest color. The random element is very manageable but still adds a lot of uncertainty and replay value to the game.

It has honestly been a while since I last played Ingenious and I know it would take a few plays for me to find the groove again. However, I know it’s a game I could get back into playing all the time and it definitely changed how I see abstracts and games in general.

A comic book whose point was going off the rails

I recently bought a bundle of Graphic Novels which includes the complete Ghost Fleet, which I had never heard of. And it was so much like reading someone’s fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants RPG campaign that I have to comment on it.

(Since I really only read comic books by buying the odd bundle of graphic novels now and then, I don’t really blog about comic books since I’m always years behind on them. That said, is there any reason for Bruce Wayne to hide his identity other than avoiding endless civil and criminal lawsuits that would accrue every issue?)

Lots of spoilers ahead... lots of them.

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Spoilers

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The book starts off explaining how Andrew Jackson and Jean Lafitte set up a black ops smuggling infrastructure called The Ghost Fleet, which has continued to operate into present day. I mention this only because this demented bit of world building never comes up again, which is a shame because there’s some definite potential there.

Anyway, Trace and Robert are two operatives of the Ghost Fleet until Robert betrays Trace but leaves him alive. So Trace goes on a roaring rampage of revenge that basically involves stealing a semi-truck carrying a McGuffin. It’s an action adventure involving explosions, master assassins, crazy shoot-outs and big trucks slamming into things.

MASSIVE SPOILER

And in the last issue, the McGuffin turns out to the Death, the fourth horseman of the apocalypse, who possesses Trace so Death can Kung Fu battle the devil for the fate of the world. Death wins and the world becomes a post-apocalyptic world of mutants, robots and demons.

what

Okay. There was some foreshadowing and it turned out what the McGuffin actually was mattered to the story (sorry, Alfred Hitchcock) But the book jumped from cheesy summer action flick to gonzo crazy over the course a few panels. 

And, yes, I have a specific GM I know in mind who would run a game like this :D I don’t know if he ever ran an octaNe campaign but it probably would have looked like the end of The Ghost Fleet.

I’m not saying the Ghost Fleet is good. There are some bizarre plot holes, including that the guy who Robert sold Trace out to was also their employer, making the betrayal actually make very little sense. The need for either the betrayal or Trace not being a part of it just isn’t there. Basically, cool overrules common sense every time.

And I’m not saying the Ghost Fleet wasn’t fun. But, despite what I hear some critics say, fun isn’t that hard to find in comic books. 

But if it had had a less fantastic ending (Like: ‘we were hauling illegal nuclear weapons the whole time? Time to shoot everyone and drive off into the sunset’), I’d have forgotten the book already. And I’m going to remember the Ghost Fleet.

Another gathering that won’t happen this year :’(

Eight years ago, a friend of ours started having their own private convention. They’d rent a large meeting room at a hotel and set up a block of rooms so everyone would have a place to sleep when they weren’t playing games. And between the thirty-odd friends that would show up, the game library was always huge. There was even  a weekend long tournament of different games for bragging rights.

I haven’t gone in years, seeing as how we moved to the other side of the country. However, I have stayed on the mailing list and I’ve even visited through the power or video conferencing/

And, yes, it has been postponed and finally canceled in 2020.

In the grand scheme of everything that COVID-19 has done to the world, I admit that this is pretty small potatoes. I mean, this isn’t even the end of the event. Unlike events that folks have to pay for and turn a profit that are probably facing bankruptcy right now, all this needs is one person’s persistence and determination and, trust me, it has that.

Still, it’s kind of sad.

Bickering on the job as an RPG

It’s been a bit since I looked at a quirky little RPG. Dungeon Janitor’s Apprentice is definitely quirky and little but I don’t know if even my very lax definition of RPG can be stretched enough to cover it. Even calling it a story-telling game is a stretch. It’s a discussion game for two people.

The concept of the game is bigger than the game itself. One player is the Dungeon Janitor, a grumpy old bastard who knows exactly how the dungeon’s supposed to be. The other player is the Dungeon Janitor’s Apprentice, a slacker who wants to just get drunk and laid. The janitor wants to get the job done and retire. The apprentice wants to get fired.

Here’s all the game mechanics and all: the janitor tells the apprentice to go do something. The apprentice gives some kind of excuse. The janitor tries to come up with a solution for the excuse. The apprentice comes up with a new excuse. You keep going until someone chokes and the other person wins that argument. Whoever wins five arguments first wins the game.

It’s ‘There’s a hole in the bucket’ as an improv routine/RPG.

Was this game designed for long car rides? While the real appeal of the Dungeon Janitor’s Assistant is the theme and the humor potential you can get out of that theme , it is seriously minimalist in what you physically need to actually play it. The rules have you use tokens to track who wins the arguments but even that is superfluous.

What the Dungeon Janitor’s Apprentice really reminds me of is Kazekami Kyoko Kills Kublai Khan, a story-telling game that was designed to be played via instant messaging. Both games very much built around call-and-response dialogue. In fact, I suspect the most likely way I will ever play The Dungeon Janitor’s Apprentice would be via forum or some form of instant messaging. I can even see having more than two players and just going around, alternating janitor and apprentice and not worrying who wins.

The Dungeon Janitor’s Apprentice is a silly, slight game. But it’s a fun idea and it’s ridiculously assessable. It has the potential to be a lot of fun.