Master of Orion is a masterpiece of strategy gaming. The second one was fairly good too, but the first for it’s clean design and minimalist micromanagement was top drawer. Many teams have tried to build a better MOO and all have failed because whenever I play them, I just want to go play MOO instead. This excludes the boardgame ECLIPSE, which is the perfect MOO game that isn’t on a computer.
So it’s 2015 and the bad bad bad taste of Master of Orion 3 is probably washed out of most of our mouths and anuses and there is an announcement by the World of Tanks people that they are doing a new MOO game. All I can say is GOOD LUCK. They are going to need it. How many have tried since 1994 and failed? So many… so many…
Well it was busy and fairly drunk with a lot of Lamentations of the Flame Princess played. I’m tired as shit this evening on account of steve’s snoring Sunday morning. My god it was like a constant fart noise for 2 hours from his fucking MOUTH. We should bring a portable CPAP machine to stick on people that fucking snore during gencon– there is SO LITTLE TIME TO SLEEP in the first place. Since it was all burgers and sugar and beer and lack of sleep I’m going to need that XXXXXXL they are always sold out of.
I liked this year’s con. I had all the homies there, though so many that I didn’t get to game with all of them unfortunately, but it was great to see Dan at the Cool Mini or Not line 10 minutes into the con. Overall, it was very crowded, and for sure I want to hit Gameholecon and some of the other mid-west ones as a contrast this year. I’ve always had a lot of fun at Plattecon and that’s TINY. The overcrowding filled my fucking 3DS with PALICOS, which can only help the Monster Hunting right?
Lots of ‘news’ this year of you give a flying fuck about this sort of stuff.
First, the Zak S win of ennies for best writing, art, and another one for Red and Pleasant Land. D&D5 won about everything else, because D&D5 is very well designed and the books have top drawer production values. Apparently, in absentia, the Red and Pleasant Land guy was heckled by people when the win was announced and apparently it was one of the writers on the Marvel Heroic RP game(!?). Also, read this. People in gaming, no doubt about it, have the tendency to have a lot of social problems. GENCON with it’s sights and smells is case in point. When I can watch two fat dudes with pants 10″ too tight with their bone-white bellies hanging OUT below their tshirts by 2-3 inches and not bat and eye (and not have them constantly pointed at and laughed at by others, which would sadly or rightly would be the norm) or have someone who stinks like a cesspool walking around and not be phased (nor have other people make fun of that person openly by throwing soap at them, as would sadly be the norm), gamers are both an accepting and really, really socially struggling group of people. I won’t say our group isn’t terrible (which you will see from the coming pictures) and since the late 80’s we’ve built up a set of pictures that would send Richard Simmons into a fit. There was a day where we were playing Legends of the Five Rings or something CCG in about 1995/6 and there was a man that was as wide as three people with dirty sweat pants leaning over a massive FORTRESS EUROPA table. He farted there with his belly pressed over the table for hours until we couldn’t smell his ass-breath anymore. We took grainy pictures on a small camera and from that day on, a hobby was born.
Second, Games Workshop was actually at the con this year, and this is the first time I remember them being there for maybe a decade? What I saw on shelves were MASS amounts of boxes of Age of Sigmar all over the con both at the GW booth and retailers. The amounts of these boxes did not change and I never saw anyone with a box. I did see people buying shitloads of 40K stuff as normal. The diorama with minatures was nice looking, but I just can’t get past the shitty rules to even consider it. AoS might not tank, but certainly it’s core demographic was not at Gencon this year.
Third, Runequest was rolled back into Chaosium announced at the Con, pretty near when we were playing our game with Lawrence Whitaker of Design Mechanism. I noticed all the RQ guys I saw wearing Chaosium tshirts and was like: huh? However, based on the press release I think this is a good thing for the game, though if you have the big ass beautiful RQ6 book, HANG ON TO IT. We may not see it’s like again.
Fourth, where was WOTC? There was no TSResque castle that I saw, no D&D booth in the main hall, no MTG lines all over the place. D&D 5E has taken the reigns and just needs to ride.
Last, was the Ken Whitman drama over the Knights of the Dinner Table live action stuff. I saw what I think was one of the actors standing around outside a booth wearing a strange red wig for awhile. I think a core issue there is that, despite the costume, he looked like 15% of the crowd. Basically this guy was supposed to make some live action Knights of the Dinner table shorts, got kickstarter money and was supposed to have a filming of the shows at Gencon. Seems normal, but apparently people doubted the films would be done at all, and everything was sketchy as hell. I’m not seeing any info on what happened, but something to keep tabs on likely here.
While I just went there to game– there was too much internet kerfuffle to not pay just a small bit of attention to this crazy ass stuff.
Here is my fucking loot picture.
Heroes of Normandie, Monster Island, Junta, 2 boxes of EMPIRE OF EVIL, Strangling sea, a custom DM screen and a bunch of EPIC40K Orks!
we got in a Runequest game with Lawrence Whitaker and I was the only character that died (of a horrible disease). Then we got loaded at the ram again and got turned loose in the great hall.
While there we saw Tom Babbey who is a buddy that did some awesome art for D&D 5e. I think he won some awards last night which are well deserved.
Between that and the AEG game night, we rolled up and started playing a Lamentations adventure with STeve GMing. He said a phrase of boxed text and I thought for a moment I had read it before but it turned out it wasn’t the case (fuck for satan?)
The AEG game night was solid, we played a short game of Junta and a newer game called Game of Crowns which wasn’t my favorite. Junta is pretty fun but it’s old school design means you can get stuck with fuck all to do for 15 or so minutes at a time which is not great. the back stabbing though, is spectacular.
pictures: coming– I’m posting from my phone.
I like the ken Whitman drama story unfolding here as well. http://dontfundkenwhitman.blogspot.com/2015/07/ken-whitman-faces-lie-detector-in-his.html
I got my Zak s saved D&D tshirt which is ridiculous. going to wear it most of the rest of the con.
Blood Rage was there but there was a huge line to get it and fuck I kickstarted it and I don’t want to pay twice! it looks great and I saw Eric Lang who is a black dude that just put out maybe the best Viking game!
Now I am at the ram drinking and listening to Matt and steve talk about dream quest. it’s too bad the dream quest guy got sucked into the worthless hearth stone game.
GoT was good, but the final bit of last season where Tywin gets killed and Tyrion runs away and all that is about the end of the story in terms of where my interest lies. The parts with the dragons and Mereen and all that stuff is SO stretched out over the books that I lost interest completely. Think about it for a moment, the idea from the first book is that the dragon queen would attack westeros with an army of Kal Drago behind her. While her character changed over the period of books, barely anything weaved the two major character sets together in the first three books– it was a side show nearly completely. And in book 4 and 5, when things slowly get weaved together we are suddenly exposed to Dorne and Quinton and all those characters who, to someone that came into the first book expecting it to be about the Starks, it all a bit rambly.
The ancilliary character’s stories are interesting, but the core plot, the fate of the Stark children and their wolves, is really what I bought and paid for to see by both reading the books and watching the series. Let’s just say in books 4 and 5 that things get even more divergent.
Months ago, I thought, oh I better start on the series. I have to give it a chance, right? But then I happened to catch on youtube the scene where blondie rides off on the dragon, and try as they might, that was one of the cheesiest scenes I’ve seen yet in the series. Even when they were dealing with their tiny budget in the beginning of the show where they had to re-use sets (mostly in the red keep rooms) to keep costs down there was nothing that cheesy, not even close. So now they bring on the CGI…
So seeing that bit, I would say, without even seeing the rest of the current season, that that moment it may have all jumped the shark.
