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Game-in-a-Game: Lucky Chess of Fall

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This game-in-a-game just appeared in Backpack Merge.  You have to clear Stage 3 to get the button.  It's a simple roll-and-move game, and your goal is to get stars and bonuses.  The stars count on the bonus bar at the top, so it takes 40 stars to get that first bonus.  Come here when you see the red dot on the game icon on the main page, and click the green Go button to claim dice for completing quests.  You can get a purple "magic die" by watching an ad. Then, on the main board, click to roll dice and move.  Some of the odd bits: - the crystal ball at top left highlights one of the stars on the board -- I could not see a reason - the train zooms you over to the right to the 300 magic dust - the jail at top right gives you three chances to roll doubles (feels like Monopoly) but you always get out anyway - the checkerboard on the right edge appears to swap the entire board from a right-half to a left-half. - the lucky die lets you pick a number from 1 to 6 to move where yo
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Humble Bundle for Cthulhu 7th ... and Stake Thy Neighbor

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This popped up on one of my feeds over the weekend, and wow, I had to grab it.  It says 26 books for a recommended $25 or pay-what-you-like, but most of the "books" are multiple volumes of content. The Humble Bundle Call of Cthulhu Pack should keep me reading for months.  I don't have any players I could run through these eldritch horrors, but I have always enjoyed reading sourcebooks and scenarios as if they were their own genre of fiction, which in many ways is true. This deal ends in 5 days, so I'm not sure if any readers will see it in time, but it's worth noting on my stream of events in my gaming life.  I still have some of the CoC first edition books, and ran some pretty scary nights of fun back in the day.  Which reminds me of this true story ... "Stake Thy Neighbor" I don't know if you remember that old Salem's Lot miniseries from about 1980 where dead Danny Glick floats up to that kid's second story window and starts tapping with h
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Thrifting in Ramona, CA

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We headed up to Ramona today to see some live music at a winery at 2PM.  We were early enough (thanks to the extra hour from setting our clocks back) that we had a chance to look into a few antique shops and thrift shops. At the Ramona Food and Clothes Closet, there was a surprisingly long shelf of board games, about 8 feet long down at ankle level.  We almost didn't do inside at all, since it "food and clothes" didn't sound like the right place for what we were looking for.  And we saw no food items. But they did have games.  It was mostly kid stuff and trivial pursuit packs, even a big box game of trivia about wine, and a few Bible learning games (no thanks).  But we did find some keepers: Box One was the big game put out by Neil Patrick Harris a few years ago.   Blokus looks like a tetris game where you try to block each other on an actual board. Utter Nonsense might be fun, and there were some card game for $2: Low Down, Skipbo Junior and Bold. We did a quick firs
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Depths of Endor = Not For Me

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This is another dungeon runner.  You make some PCs and start in the City where you have the usual choices.  Go into the Dungeon any time, where you are a small blue box moving through hallways and getting into fights.  I don't mind minimal graphics.  Sometimes, that's a charm. The class system in this one is interesting: everyone starts as a Nomad with all stats set to 1, and each time you level up you get a "+" button to update one stat.  You change to a real class by leveling up to the required stats and going to the Guilds area to switch.   The City My team made it to level 5, and now exploring level 1 is too easy, most of the foes can be taken out with two clicks.  You just have to keep an eye on your hp bars running low.  Bring lots of the red life potions to heal.  I've been to parts of level 2 and 3 and it's more of the same layout with some different foes.  Still no rhyme or reason. I got one of my PCs up to Dexterity 7 so he could join the Thief Guild
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Category Jump?? From Dice Match to 2048

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I like to find a style of game app and then look at similar games to see the range of possibilities.  Since Halloween is totally dead this year, I thought I should look through my phone and tablet for apps I have not mentioned on the blog yet. I gathered up some dice matching app games back in late 2023 to early 2024.  In these, you get one or two dice per round and can place them on the grid (rotating the two dice first if needed).  Typically, three 1s becomes a two and so on up to the three 7s which disappear and free up some room.  If you run out of space, game over. Those are all very simple, but they are good for short breaks at work.  Some I found are: Seven Dots, by Funvent Studios Dice Craft And this one simply called Merge.  In the App Store it's "Dice Merge" by Staple Games.  It last updated 30 Aug 2024.  I saw no difference from the previous version.  It's very basic, time to drop it. Most of these look like hobby projects, not slick commercial games, but I
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HyperRogue is so ... Hyperbolic

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Following up on the last post about old "roguelike" games, I looked at a few of the entries to the 7-Day Roguelike Dungeon Challenge, and here's one that went in a completely unexpected direction ... HyperRogue has your PC running around on a hyperbolic world.  You're essentially in the middle of what looks like a hex grid, but on a hyperbolic space, the paths double again and again as they near the edge, so as you walk in any direction, more hexes unfold in ways that hurt the brain.  I can't imagine trying to find my way back to a previous location.  It's not technically hexagons, either, the space expands by including heptagons in just the right places, and each of those brings in a new branch of tiles. There is an extensive Tour/Tutorial where you hint Enter to get to the next slide, and it turns out there's a massive world here divided into about 40 regions, each with unique tiles and mobs.  There is an explanation of hyperbolic geometry, and how the n
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It's Roguelike ... But Do You Remember Rogue?

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I have been reading the histories of some old classic video games, going way back to the DOS/text era.  I got seriously retro watching let's play runthroughs of things like Dungeons of Moria.  These days, you can't browse ten games without someone saying "it's a roguelike dungeon."  So, I was just trying to find the origin of the phrase "roguelike dungeon", and it turns out they were clones or inspired by the actual game called Rogue. I was happy to stumble onto the Youtube channel of RogueLove .   And Here is the start of his long long playlist of Moria -- over 100 episodes. He also covers Nethack although he spends a lot of time confused by the obscure command system.  His playlists page is a regular museum of the ancient. He does have a few episodes about the original Rogue game.  There are plenty of other people covering it, but I think RogueLove does some of the best walkthroughs; he's calm and knows what to do. To put credit where it belongs
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