Thinking Outside the Box

Deals and discounts. Everyone is looking for a great deal. They want to feel like money was saved, triumph was had, or just that something is worth more than was paid. I don't begrudge anyone these things, because I think they're inherently human drives. "What's he talking about now?" thinks the reader. Well as much as I love buying a brand new, shiny, shrink-wrapped box of board gaming goodness, I have also made the leap on occasion and picked up used or clearance games as well. The first one the I can recall buying was Age of Conan a little less than a year ago. The box was a little dinged up but when I opened it, I found that all of the contents were still sealed in their original plastic. Triumph indeed! Age of Conan is a spectacular looking game which I've sadly only tabled once, but is noteworthy as my first used game purchase. Over time I have found other games in a similar fashion...and have yet to be disappointed. Arena Maximus was the...

It's been a long time since I actually wrote an article about a VS System event, cards, or decks. This month due to scheduling conflicts I'll only be able to attend two of our weekly VS nights. The one I'm missing next week was actually something I was really looking forward to: DC Legend. Most of the players in our group know, but you might not, that I prefer the DC Comics universe over that of Marvel . While I do have some beloved characters over there (Alpha Flight anyone?), there's just something that appeals more to me about DC's denizens. How that relates to my experience with building legend decks is what I thought I'd talk about today. Going from memory I can recall four specific Legend builds of my own creation: Batman, Superman Sinestro and Darkseid. I've also tackled a Batman-Superman dual-legend which was a lot of fun to play as well. Batman lends himself too much to control/negation, which is not my favorite style of play. I enjoye...

Well it seems that in some ways I'm doomed to repeat myself. I don't mean textually, although I'm sure that I repeat myself quite often in my writing as well. However it seems I just can't leave well enough alone. Now that some of the more stressful things have passed (it's been a rocky start to 2012) I'm starting to feel more myself. That of course means that my schedule has settled into some semblance of normality, I'm not laying sick on the couch and I finally feel like a normal human being once again. Once I get typing I tend to find that I have started mid-thought. That might prove interesting for me, but then I realize I have to go back and try to explain myself, or at least lay out some context in order to provide meaning to the earlier vagueness. Here goes... By saying I was repeating myself I actually had a two-fold meaning, and neither of them is so dire or desperate as to cause doom of any kind. Yes, an inflammatory statement...I admit ...

A little over a year ago I tried running an adventure from the Dark Heresy role-playing game. If memory serves me right, we played four sessions. We were using one of the introductory adventures and some of the pre-generated characters. I had spent a fair amount of time prepping the materials for the game and getting familiar enough with the rules to actually run things with some feeling of competency. The players pieced together the clues a little more slowly than I'd intended, but that was more my fault as a first-time game master than their actual detective abilities. Unfortunately, the session in which they would have encountered the final villain of the story never came to pass. As a brief aside: I love the theme for Dark Heresy , which is set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. The game system seemed pretty good, but it was a little tough to handle for me and the players so that could certainly have contributed to our incomplete adventure. It seems that arranging gam...

If you have never visited my blog before, I would wonder how you got here and why. What random link on the interwebs did you (perhaps mistakenly) click to arrive at this point in space-time? I trust you'll find this site of interest; but if not I won't take offence. Besides, how will I ever know you were even here? If you have been here before, well, I'll simply question your taste in reading material. However, it's to you local regulars that I'm really addressing this entry to. You see, last night I purchased a copy of RISK: Legacy . Now, I have always liked RISK, but the original usually took too long and was no fun to watch once you were eliminated from the game and others were still vying for global domination. So I bought a copy of RISK: 2210 A.D. a few years back, and found it to be a vast improvement. It's a lot of fun and has some innovative changes to the game that I think are all better than the original. Now we have Hasbro releasing RISK:...

Last year I bought and played a lot of new games, both on my PS3 and board games on the table. I've never bothered to do a best of type of article that I can recall, so I thought it might be fun to do this year. I've also been thinking a lot about games the past few days, since I haven't been able to PLAY any recently, so that might have something to do with it. This article is basically unplanned, unscripted and unnecessary. So strap in and follow along, or click the back button and take off! Let me start out with the video game side of things. I bought my PS3 near the end of 2010, and it took a few months to find games that I wanted to play. I don't like online games, RPGs or any of the MMO stuff, so my list of likes is pretty narrow. It's also possible that some of these games weren't released in 2011, but that's when I played them...it's my list, so shut up and like it! My Top Playstation 3 Games for 2011 5. Transformers: War For Cybertr...

Over my extremely brief Christmas break, I actually did play a few games! While I was out doing my Christmas shopping I stopped in at Revolution Games . They're one of the smaller game stores in Calgary, but I think they have an excellent selection, and their staff are generally pretty nice people. The prices are average, but if you get your name put in their computer, you get a discount for every $100 you spend. That's not so bad, considering most games cost a minimum of $60 nowadays... I ended up with a used (but never used) copy of a game called Colossal Arena . It's a betting game by the much-loved, much-loathed Reiner Knizia. I've a few other games created by him and have never been disappointed, but I know that a lot of lifelong board gamers have a hate on for him. Anyway, we gave this game a try one evening after our regular VS tournament. It's a pretty odd concept, betting on monsters fighting in a tournament, but was actually a lot of fun! Every...