Random – Page 2 – MRAAKTAGON

Iphone Puzzler of note: SPL-T

Puzzle games are mostly boring shite. Suduko, Candy Crush, crossword puzzles, all that crap bores the piss out of me to even think about (though I do like Bubble Bobble and Super Puzzle Fighter). There are a mess of puzzle games on the iphone, since it’s a device that has such a small screen it’s a good form factor for that type of entertainment.

One that’s come out recently that is of note is SPL-T. It’s a game that involves splitting your iphone screen in half vertically and horizontally until you no longer can. You score points in ways I still don’t fully grasp, but seem to get more and more the more splits you make. Until yesterday, the high score (just over 7K) I had was from the first time I played the game– playing completely randomly with no idea what was going on! This was only beaten when my wife tried the game and played randomly and beat my score. At that point I had to figure out what the hell was going on and I finally got an over 11K score shortly after. That said, it’s quite a good little game you can pick up and play fast, or think about it a lot and play slow.

Cara Delevigne on Dr. Who

This post is completely an excuse to put pictures of Cara Delevigne and will be my excuse to pick back up watching Dr. Who as I’ve been remiss as of late since Peter Malcolm Capaldi Tucker started. That’s all the text that needs to be written on this subject.

cara2

Hey! more Gencon 2015 pics!

Steam Selling Mods

Big Slam

Holy crap

Monster Brains posted a HUGE collection of Ghanian and Nigerian movie posters. I just can’t get enough of this stuff. What’s awesome is that you’ll see some newish hollywood releases mixed in with 70-90’s stuff as well as HK and Bollywood movies in one god awful mash of amateur art. Friggin amazing.

GENCON recaps!

I’m back from the con and it was good. I won’t be able to encapsulate my thoughts into a single post, and some of the topics DESERVE their own singular essays– so over the next few days I will try to decompartmentalize the madness. I was planning on posting DURING gencon itself, but other than the few pictures there just wasn’t time or sobriety to do so.

Topics up-cumming:
Hillfolk and the drama system experience
Sad news for Shadowfist
OSR stuff and Other RPG’s
Gencon Nightlife
Picture gallery
Random stuff that looked cool.

Gencon cometh

Next week the nerdgasm of the year starts and many of my three readers will be there. This year is ALL about the RPG’s with a new big shiny D&D version just out, a new version of Runequest that will be shaking it’s booty all over, a big shiny new book for 13th Age and Exalted….uh…. guess not.

Given the high focus on RPG’s I’m eschewing my normal Shadowfist tournament for playing some Dungeon Crawl Classics and 13th Age. This isn’t due to not loving Shadowfist, but the new version of the game has moved in unfortunate directions, being simply a vanity project for the current developers and their kickstarter backers.

All that aside, I think this will be an awesome time as usual. Most importantly:

BRING ON THE KILL LA KILL COSPLAY!!!!!

Joan Cornella’

Ascension – a percentage break down

I’ve long been a proponent that Ascension is simply an exercise in random card drawing with a random outcome for the winners. We play this a lot on the iphone/ipad and while I could never imagine putting up with the complete mess of cards that this one likely generates (in comparison with the excellent iphone app that cleans all that shit up for you) but, I now have over 210 multiplayer games under my belt and I can say with 100% pseudo-statistical confidence: Ascension is a random game. Your percentage chance of winning any game of Ascension equals 1 (you) divided by the number of players. 3-man games you will win 33% of the time, 4-man games, 25%, etc. I am not a good player, but I’m not a terrible player either, I know what cards are good and will win you the game if grabbed early or grabbed late, but I don’t use any tactics, I don’t watch what other players play and I don’t really pay much attention except to execute a singular deck combo I’ve started at the beginning of a game (like draw lots of cards or kill tons of stuff).I’ve seen a lot of combos, but there are some I certainly have not seen. The fact is, regardless of 100% knowledge of combos, you don’t know if you will have access to those cards that you feel you need to win. That said, let’s look at my stats:

2 player: 42 wins, 44 losses. This is statistically 50%.

3 player: 16 wins, 47 losses: 26% wins. this should be near 33% where 1 out of every 3 games, I win! (yay!).

4 player: 13 wins 59 losses. So here we have it being statistically low at 18% of wins, it should be 25%. I’m thinking if we had a bigger data set (for me) it would even out.

So what I’m going to do in the next few months is try to get good at Ascension– if that’s even possible. Playing with all the cards in the game (on iphone) and actually paying attention to what I’m grabbing, what other people are doing to actually use some tactics.

I’d like to see all stats for all players that have ever played– I think that would be just as telling as the percentages likely match those above. So here we go, I will actively be trying to kick your ass at this point to try to disprove that this is just like a game of War– totally random winning.