What social message do you get from Riot?

Really, the only reason I made and tried out Riot was because it was by the same guys who designed Grunts. Grunts is a solaitire game that uses Roll and Move mashed together with a 70s British WW II comic. (Go ahead and try it. Print out one sheet and add dice and pawns.)

Riot is a game about the 2011 London Riots, the riots that happened after the death of Mark Duggan. And you score points by looting. Man, there’s a lot to unpack between those two sentences.

The actual game consists of eighteen cards and four dice. Six of the cards are locations and the rest are events. You pick out one location and then you shuffle the rest.

Each turn, you roll those dice. Every location has a list of die results. Cops will lock dice on the card. Clash will unlock a die on that card. Stand-off does nothing. Loot let’s you draw a card as loot. Regroup let’s you unlock any card.

And then there’s text. 

The 2011 London Riots were one of the first major riots where social media played a major role. It was used to help mobilize and organize rioters. And then it was used as evidence afterwards.

The text action lets you draw cards from the deck. That’s how events happen and locations get added. And, in the next turn, you Can live to any location on the tableau.

The game ends after six rounds, all dice are locked or you run out of cards. The rules don’t actually include winning or losing conditions. Interesting design choice.

Commenting on choices, Riot doesn’t have too many. Choose a location and the dice do the rest of the work. Since every location is different and can be modified by events, that choice isn’t meaningless but the weight of the game falls on what the dice say.

But I think the point of Riot isn’t it winning or losing or exerting your own agency. Riot is making some kind of commentary about an event.

The fact that the goal of the game isn’t political but looting as much as you can makes me make certain assumptions about the agenda of the designers. But I don’t know if those are fair assumptions. Using the Death of the Author theory, you can easily choose your own interpretation of what Riot means.

For all I know, the game may just be a way of expressing how the 2011 London Riots used social media and cell phones in a whole new way.

Riot isn’t a good game. You roll dice and they make all the decisions. But it did make me think.

Sandy Peterson and the reading list of doom

It’s October! One of the twelve best months to talk about the Cthulhu Mythos!

During a recent conversation about how the Cthulhu Mythos has become mainstream, I commented on how much Call of the Cthulhu (the RPG, not the short story or the telephone joke) and Sandy Peterson had to do with that. One of the other folks in that conversation proceeded to send me a link to Sandy Peterson talking about just that.

I am just barely old enough to appreciate how obscure Lovecraft and his influence was before Sandy Peterson began to share his love of Lovecraft and the Mythos. I work with kids who have always had plush Cthulhu’s in the world but there was a time when Lovecraft was basically a footnote in fantastic literature. Yes, August Derleth kept his name and work alive but Arkham House was a niche publisher at best.

These days, scholars write about Lovecraft. There’s a whole genre of cosmic honor named after him that includes literature, movies, video games and music. He is held up as second only to Edgar Allen Poe. But there was like half a century when obscure and thought  of as a hack if he was thought of at all.

And, while Call of the Cthulhu and Sandy Peterson didn’t single-handedly change that, they were one of the first dominos to fall.

According to Sandy Peterson, he had been a big fan of Lovecradt way before it was cool. And Chaosium picked him to design the game because he wouldn’t view it as a joke and he would be able to make a serious game.

Looking back, I realized that Sandy Peterson did one thing that was crucial to introducing audiences to the wider world of the Mythos. (Plenty of authors were influenced by Lovecraft, even when readers weren’t) He didn’t just include a list of source materials like Gygwx did with Appendix N.

No, for every entry in the bestiary, he included a quotation from a work that introduced or used that particular horror. And he cited the name and author of that work. Peterson integrated the reading list into the rules. And he didn’t just use Lovecraft’s own works. He also quoted August Derleth, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, and that’s not the end of the list. Sandy Peterson gave me a reading list that I’m still not done with, literally decades after I first read  book.

And I’m going to argue that that is why Call of Cthulhu didn’t just have an impact on RPGs but on literature in general. It didn’t just introduce us to Cthulhu or H. P. Lovecraft or the idea of Cosmic Horror burning away sanity like cobwebs under a flame thrower. It showed us a broader picture of the literature of Cosmic Horror. 

Sandy Peterson didn’t single handedly make it possible for me to buy Cthulhu t-shirts. (The fact that Lovevaft is now public domain has a lot to with that too) But he had a lot to do with making the Mythos part of mainstream culture.

Our son won’t let me escape Apples to Apples

After our son played Apples to Apples, the emoji version, he has been wanting to revisit the game. Now, I’d gotten rid of my copy of Apples to Apples ages ago. So we went to the nearest thrift shop because you can always find Apples to Apples at them.

While they didn’t have the emoji version our child craved, they did have the party box and the travel edition. Since I’m pretty sure the travel edition has unique content, getting both at thrift shop prices wasn’t a tough choice. (And a whole bunch of unopened Fimo clay so good trip)

Man, I cannot escape Apples to Apples. I own Dixit, for crying out loud, but not even that will save me from Apples to Apples.

And, while Apples to Apples bores me at this point, I can see why it still works.

When I was a wee little gamer, Trivial Pursuit became all the party game rage. It combined the worst aspects of roll and move with questions about minutiae. There can be good uses of both those elements (pub trivia, Backgammon, That’s Life) but Trivial Pursuit managed to be potentially long and frustrating.

Apples to Apples can end whenever the group feels like it and, quite frankly, strips away the skill requirement that almost all party games (or games at all) have. You don’t need to draw or to sing or to pantomime or have a large vocabulary or know the principle export of Zanzibar in the 1920s.  (Was it cloves?)

Which, on the face of it, sounds horrible. I mean, some kind of mental stimulation is the point of games. RCL is horrible because you just do whatever the dice tell you to do. Apples to Apples, though, is actually nothing but social interaction with a loose structure. 

Which can be horrible for some people.

But Apples to Apples has a very low entry bar. It can let a wide variety of people interact with each other. It focuses on the party part of party game, not the game  part.

And that incredible level of accessibility is why I can’t escape Apples to Apples. My child wants to play it. Random friends of his grandparents want to play it. It is the intersection of all kinds of people.

Seeing how Six Sided Stour has aged

Since I have been reading the Comic Book History of Beer (a fun but clearly biased read), I decided to revisit Six Sided Stout, a solitaire Roll and Write about home brewing.

Six Sided Stout got an honorable mention in the 2017 GenCan’t design contest. That contest jump started my interest in Roll and Write games and made me realize that Roll and Write games could go a lot farther than Yahtzee. And it’s been a fun journey that shows no sign of ending.

But, wow, it’s a surprise to realize that that was five years ago. I didn’t think it had been that long.  I’ve tried out a lot of R&Ws in that time.

Anyway. Six Sided Stout. It’s been five years since I last played it. It’s both simpler and more interesting than I remembered it lol

In the game, you take on the role of a home brewer who has ten days to new a stout for a contest. Each day, you either go to the market to get ingredients or roast malt that you gotten on an previous turn.

The actual use of dice comes in getting resources. You roll two dice to see how much you get from the marker. Rarer ingredients involve dividing the number. (Yeast, the rarest ingredient, has you divide by three so snake eyes  is a bad roll) You get four dice manipulations to add a third die and take the best two. (One for each ingredient and one wild) 

The core of the game is adding ingredients to a grid. It’s a nifty grid, tilted 90 degrees so it forms a diamond. There a big water drop in the middle so there is a jagged inner perimeter.

Coming back to Six Sided Stout after exploring a lot of different R&W ideas, I was surprised at how simple and slight it is. In fact, I suspect that the most reliable way to get a high score is get as much of the darkest roast of malt on the board and add the minimum amount of yeast and hops. In other words, I think you can brute strength your way over the puzzle aspect.

The best part of Six Sided Stout is easily the theme. While just mixing water, malted barley, yeast and hops together is a massive over simplification of beer making, it works for a five minute R&W. I wouldn’t have remembered the game, let alone gone and played it a few more times, if it wasn’t for the theme.

Six Sided Stout is an okay game. The fact that’s it’s free, uses little ink and has a short playing time helps its case but there are a lot of games that fit that bill. The beer brewing theme is what makes it interesting and a game I might play once a year or so.

Poorly organized, mildly incoherent thoughts about the Sandman TV series

Having finished the Sandman tv series, this is my opinion as a longtime fan of the comic book: it’s okay if this is your only exposure to Sandman.

(Mind you, the 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz proved to me that the movie can be better than the book. And after Robert Downy Jr said ‘I am Iron Man’ in 2008, all bets were off. If you refuse to read the original Tolkien books, though, you are dead to me)

That said, I can’t help but approach it as a comic book fan and compare the two.

Spoilers

Spoilers 

Spoilers 

Spoilers

Spoilers 

Neil Gaiman has been very active in the creation of the television show. And, at least for the first season, I feel like I was watching him take this as a chance to do a do-over.

For many reasons, I feel that the first storyline in the  comic books was the weakest. Gaiman and his collaborators were finding both their voice and the direction of the comic book. One obvious  change was pulling out all the DC characters. I’m sure that was for legal reasons but it also worked for artistic reasons.

One of the things that struck me about the translation of the first two storylines of the comic book was what I think of as the Margaret Hamilton effect. The 1939 movie made the Wicked Witch of the West the through line of the story, instead of a character who shows up for two chapters. The Corinthian serves as that through line, bridging the two stories.

I also enjoyed many of the changes they made to characters. Morpheus was more vulnerable, which was good because he is close to omnipotent most of the time in the comics. This Morpheus is easier to sympathize with. 

And I just erased three paragraphs about character developments. There’s plenty of room for argument but I am glad that Gaiman and crew took chances and made adjustments for the medium and thirty years of cultural shifts.

Speaking of adjusting for medium, I was surprised by how much 24 Hours was toned down but I think that was a very smart choice. Not because I think viewers would be shocked and offended but because I think the extreme of the original work would have broken the suspension of disbelief.

Wow. This has been more random bullet point than I expected. Summing it up: the creative team not only did a good job adapting the work, they made a product that can stand on its own.

My September Gaming

 While September wasn’t a particularly game heavy month (and I honestly don’t know when next I’ll have one), I felt like I used my gaming time wisely.

Months after I downloaded the files, I finally made a copy and played the demo version of Death Valley. I found there was a lot more game to it than I thought. I thought it would just be a push your luck game but the interactions of the card powers is where all thre decision making takes place. I would have tried it out sooner if I knew how good it is :D Making a proper copy is now a goal.

I also tried out the final contest version of Handy Brawl. It’s an in-hand game where you fight a monster with a deck of nine cards.

I’d tried an earlier prototype, which I found fiddly and confusing. This version was a serious improvement. It was tighter with different heroes and monsters so you can build different nine card decks. This takes the game from a novelty to a game I keep playing. 

I revisited Zombie in my Pocket for the first time in something like ten years. And it still delivers! Don’t get me wrong, it’s very light and has its flaws. But it’s consistently fun.

I have been trying to learn at least end new Roll and Write every month. This month was more of a struggle, in part due to time but also because I just wasn’t in a Roll and Write mood. I ended up trying out Paper Pinball: Fight Back the Winter.

I thought of this as cheating since I’ve played several games in the series. But, looking at the rules more carefully, I realized that the scoring had been changed in the second season. Different targets that could be worth 2 to 12 points in the first season were now 1 to 4 points. That made the scoring tighter and gave me a better idea how wel I played lol

Other mechanics had been adding making the games tighter and more ‘pinball’ like. In other words, I learned something that I had glossed over before and had a better experience. 

(I haven’t played WhizKids Super-Skill Pinball system yet. I’ve made the Carniball demo and I have high hopes for it.)

So, happy with what I’ve learned in the gaming world last month.

My September Print and Play

September wasn’t a super busy month for Print and Play crafting but I feel I made up for quantity with quality.

In September, I made:

Death Valley (demo version)

Handy Brawl (final contest version)

Zombie in my Pocket (original art)

I’ve been able to get in plays of all three games, which is always good. Crafting is its own reward but the point of a game is to be played.

Death Valley was my designated ‘big’ project but Handy Brawl was actually bigger. That said, that particular goal has become making a game that has been published. Mind you, I won’t be surprised at all if Handy Brawl gets monetized.

(At some point this year, although maybe not in October, I want to make a copy of the full Death Valley with the expansion.)

Honestly, months like this, where I make games that I turn out to enjoy playing over and over are why I keep on printing and playing.