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Showing posts from June, 2022

Finding Nemo

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Finding Nemo turned out to be a fun little game.  It's easy to learn and each game is only about 7 or 8 minutes long.  Perfect for a spare hour before a 1-year-old's birthday party. The board is a network of tubes with some pieces missing, and you get to add and remove tiles to complete paths to the ocean, or break paths around your opponents.  Each turn you roll two dice, a red one that says how many tiles to place, and a blue one saying how many spaces you can move.  It flows very nicely.  It's fun trying to use the tiles to your best advantage, and confound the other players with broken paths they can't use. Overall, it does rely heavily on how the dice fall.  You can make it all the way to the ocean only to roll a bunch of zeroes and never make it to the start space.  But we did have a few games with odd decisions moments we had not seen before.  Which says that, while the target age is 5+, there is enough strategy to be casual fun for grown-ups, too. In this last s

Solo D&D Stuff

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While going through old binders of my 40 years of RPG notes, characters and "stuff", I got the urge to run some solo campaigns of my own.  I am still going through that stack of 200 issues of Dragon magazine I got when Anne went out of town last summer.  I still far prefer the simplicity of the D&D to AD&D (Old School) rules.  Starting with 3.0, the endless lists of Feats just hurts my head.  Sure it's fun in a Munchkin game where a character is a stack of cards with funny buffs and penalties, but a D&D 3+ character is a stack of 20-30 things, each with verbose, rules-lawyered rules.  I like the Old School days where, if it's a DEX challenge, you make a DEX check. I have a medium-sized glassine envelope with a mini character sheet and little slips of paper for the important junk they picked up.  It would still be nice to have a deck of cards with the full spell descriptions, and such things exist, but you only get one of each spell, and I have a folio of a

Delve: A Solo Map Drawing Game

With Anne out of town for two weeks, I scoured YouTube for some new solo games to try.  Well, they may have been around for a while, but they were new to me.  I was sold on Delve: A Solo Map Drawing Game after watching Kruggsmash play for a while. The overall idea of drawing cards and looking up the results in tables was fine, but to me it was very odd how it focused on the quality of your drawings.  Sure, I used to have time to do detailed illustration work, but lately I can do stick people and doodles if anything, and since I accidentally only printed half of the blank grid page and then ran out of paper, I had to split those empty boxes in half and there was no room left to draw anyway.  I suppose I could spend more time and spice it up some before scanning it and posting it here.  In this case, red cards were resources and black cards were natural features or creatures. Simple enough, so I ran with it for an hour or so. On its Kickstarter page , Delve claimed to be inspired by Dwa