The event is geared around four types of gaming.

• Video games (not what I expected and disappointing enough to not mention further… except that I’ve just found a photo that suggests there was more to it then I managed to find)
• Wargames (a fair amount going on, but a distinct lack of Epic — my current obsession
• RPGs — lots to see here. I managed to get a game of Paranoia in, and picked up copies of Savage Worlds and Starblazer Adventures. Savage worlds was cheap with a couple of fluff books that appealed to my desire to run Pulp games, while Starblazer takes my current favourite game system (FATE) and applies a space opera setting to it. Now I have many more games I wish to run.
• Boardgames…

Boardgames were the biggy here. I entered the Settlers of Catan competition and surprised myself by coming second. Meanwhile Declan won (no surprise there) but also pulled off first place at On the Underground and took the overall prize. Jim won Puerto Rico, and come top five in the Settlers and overall (he was the top player not to play in all three tournaments). My excuse for not doing well overall is that I only entered Settlers (quite a good excuse in my opinion), but next year I think I’ll take a punt at three.

This result means that the group of people that I play boardgames with most often were victorious at the majority of the tournaments, and took away over half the price money (or vouchers), which is impressive, but suggests we spend too much of our time doing this sort of thing.

Still, it gave me a change to pick up Days of Steam, a big collection of expansions for Zooloretto and Twilight Imperium.

With a weekend of boardgaming coming up in two weeks time (did I mention we spend too much time doing this?) I might be able to break some of them out and see how they play.

A few weeks later?

No? Oh well, time to upgrade then. The Core Worlds is now on Wordpress 2.7 (my main site is still sitting around on sBuilder since I’m not finding a lot of time to work on Axford).

I’ve also switched in a new theme since the width of the old one was annoying me every time I wanted to pretty up a post with a graphic. Plugins have recieved a bit of maintainence too.

OK, end of boring technical post. Normal service resumes now.

This is a simple mechanic that lets a series of actions, by various characters, build upon each other to effect the final outcome. Let’s run through an example from actual play to see how it worked for my group.

First, the objective: To include a consignment of post in our cargo when we make our next trip. The rules are this are nicely laid out in the core rulebook.

We wanted to try to trip the balance in our favour though, so we looked at ways we could persuade the postmaster that we were a nice trustworthy bunch who would be ideal to hand a massive box of mail to.

That would be a persuade check, but it might go more smoothly if we buddied up to him in a social setting. That would be a bit of carousing then.

The best place to do that would be to figure out where his local was and join him there. There are several ways our team could have done that, including being stealthy and following him, or investigating him. We eventually went with the option that best suited the skills of the member of our team who, shall we say, preferred to avoid legal entanglements.

The rest of that roll was compared to a table, which gave a modifier to the carousing roll, which applied to the same table to give a bonus to the persuade roll, and then to the final check to see if any mail was available for us to deliver.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work out and the last batch of mail had been shipped the previous night (that’s what happens when you miss the target number by one). Still, a certain postmaster really, really likes the diplomatic party member (that’s what happens when you roll a double six when you have a +6 modifier). Since we’ll almost certainly be coming back this way, it looks like a long term grav-tennis partnership might be forming.

I suppose I’d better say something about how I liked the rule, hadn’t I? I like it — it makes for a streamlined process of building a bit of story behind what would otherwise have been a simple dice roll, and it managed to introduce a bit of character development along the way.

I’m looking forward to the next game, when we blast off to take our cargo into a new system, and poke around the operations of a certain group that our patron is rather interested in.

At this point we discovered that the rest of our party (ah, the joy of sharing a car) was just starting a game of Lord of the Rings. There was only one thing to do!

OK. I lie. There were two things to do. First, we ordered some food (It is quite handy that OxCon takes place in a pub that sells decent food).

Second, we played another game. I’m a big fan of Ticket to Ride, so I was quite happy to give the Nordic edition a try.

There are some good things to say about the changes to the basic game they made for this edition. The smaller board means that you can have a three player game and still use the double routes (which in other editions requires a four or five player game). The cards are very pretty (having art featuring snow covered trains) and spotting places where people I know come from is always nice (I have a fair few friends that hail from that part of the world).

Unfortunately, what they did to the rules was insane. The game has become massively overcomplicated. I’ll ignore a few minor points that serve to complicate things further, but my main bugbears were that:

Locomotives cannot be used as wild cards, except on routes involving ferries (where you can also substitute any three cards instead of a locomotive). On these routes you must play a minimum number of locomotives equal to the number of ferry spaces (with the three card substitution in effect for them).

Complicated? Yes.

There is also one route of nine spaces that is worth a whopping 27 points. This is a grey route, so you need nine cards of any one colour. It doesn’t use any ferries, so you can’t use locomotives as wild cards. However, it has a special rule, unique to that piece of track. Like ferry routes, you can discard cards which combined will count as a wild card. Unlike ferry routes, the number is four cards, not three.

The game also has tunnels (as in the Europe version of the game) which may require you to spend extra cards to complete a route (or be force to take the cards you have played back and waste a turn).

I thought the game was needlessly complicated, which is a shame as I really enjoyed the original, Europe and Märklin editions. I won’t be getting a copy of this one (I do want to get my hands on a copy of the Swiss edition to give it a try though).

I ended up winning it, but it didn’t feel like a satisfying victory. Having completed the three routes on my ticket cards, I noticed I had five red cards in hand and set about drawing enough to go after the nine route. Over the course of a few turns, I pulled out a sixth red card and enough detritus to build the route.

Two turns later, I had exhausted my pool of trains, which ended the game.

Since I had completed my tickets and scored the 27 point route, I had a lot of points - and since I had very rapidly pulled the game to a close, the other two players were left with a stack of incomplete tickets (which counted against their scores).

So I ended up having a run away victory thanks to one slightly sneaky tactic — it didn’t feel like a well earned win.

With great timing, the Lord of the Rings players managed to finish off their game and join us in time to watch the last two moves of the final round (along with the score counting).

This let us all head off with a minimum of waiting around. There isn’t much to say about that, except perhaps to comment on having an unlikely discussion about the gas mixes and pressure when diving, and how that relates to Dr Who, on the drive home.

It was a fun OxCon, and I’m sure I’ll be going along next year. Keep an eye on the website and see if you can make it. If you enter the competition, you can play a couple of great boardgames against people who are really rather good at them. Between rounds, or if you don’t enter, you can try out other games that people bring along with people who love boardgames. It’s a great way to discover a new game (or decide that buying the Nordic edition of Ticket to Ride would be a mistake!).

I can’t claim to be really impressed by this.

First though, I managed to squeeze in a quick game of Galaxy Trucker before we were due to start. It’s a game I’ve played before, but not for a while - I’m going to have to make Jim dig his copy out next time we have a gathering of some description.

Settlers came and I didn’t do very well in the first game. It didn’t help that I got cut off from a build site I had built to (every painstakingly gathering up the resources) the turn before I had the chance to play the cards to build my second (not counting starting placement) settlement.

The most memorable game of the day saw me use a no more than one brick or wood as building material (I used lots of other resources though). When I did have brick and wood, it usually got traded away. I ended that game with three cities and sixteen development cards (one of which was Road Building, which is how I got the settlement without spending wood and brick on roads). That was one of the wins I’d managed to get.

I had a lot of close, tense games during the day, some of which didn’t end in time. I gather the day saw more time outs then any other OxCon. I don’t know why though.

Still, a game that times out gives you more tournament points then a loss, so it worked out relatively well for me.

I was also lucky enough not to be playing Markus (who has managed to win every year I’ve been and a number before that) or Declan (who had a pretty poor day).

So, I think it might have been more down to luck then skill that I managed to pull into third position (also known as second place discounting Markus).

I’ve got a lot to live up to next year though.

I’m not really sure what to make of this one. It is an interesting game, but I don’t think any of the players in the session I joined had figured out how to play strategically when we had finished.

Each round starts by each player choosing which of six cities to tax (with some made unavailable by random selection, so there is one city per player).

Each city produces different goods, and random allocation of tax discs (which have different selection arrows) mean that cities don’t produce the same combinations each time).

Two players can’t tax the same city, but a player who goes later can start a bidding war with someone at the city they wish to tax. The person with the highest bid gives that many guards to the other player, who has to move (at a cost of one guard per space).

In theory, if you run out of guard cards, you can sacrifice points in order to acquire more to pay off your debt, but none of us did that as we had no shortage of guards.

I don’t know if that was due to us not having good enough strategies, of it is just an effect of playing on the basic boards (the six cities are double sided with one side being recommended for more advanced players).

Each player then turns the tax disc in their city to point at the goods the city produces which they want. Some goods are actual goods, which can be exchanged for points. Others add more guards or influence your turn order in the selling phase.

In the selling phase, each player picks a shelf (which has a number of slots on it, marked with a colour and a bonus score). They then fill as many slots on it as possible. The other players then take it in turns to score points for the remaining slots. If the shelf is filled, the person who selected
it gets the bonus.

This makes it a tricky business to try to score as many points as possible, while forcing other players to put their cubes in low value slots, and to make it impossible for other shelves to be entirely filled (to deny the possibility of the bonus to other players).

I’m not sure what to think of this game. I enjoyed the one shot I had of it, but I don’t know how it will hold up under continued play. I might have to see if I can find a strategy guide to see if I’m missing anything about it.

Saturday was Puerto Rico, and the less said about my performance there the better, it isn’t my best game, but I managed to make several boneheaded moves during the day that left me cringing afterwards. I didn’t bother to try to figure out my ranking.

Around the Saturday competition, we managed to fit in a few pick-up games. Dominion proved to be very good, at least initially. Describing it by comparison to other games is difficult, so I won’t try.

In Dominion, there are three types of cards (yes, it is a card game).

• Money
• Victory points
• Actions

These are all oragnised into piles in the middle of the table (one pile per card name. So all the Action: Market cards would be in one pile, and all the Victory points: 3 cards would be in another.

Each player starts with a seven of the cheapest money and three of the smallest victory point cards in their deck. These are shuffled and a starting hand of five cards is drawn.

Each turn a player can play and action card and then can buy one thing.

An action card will have one or more special effects. It might allow cards to be drawn, or allow a section action card to be played - but with double effect. Some will hurt other players (such as by making them discard cards from their hand) and some will be useless under current conditions.

When buying, a player looks at the number of coins in their hand, and then takes a card from one of the face up piles and adds it to the discard pile.

Then they discard their entire hand, and draw more cards. Play then proceeds to the left.

The game is one of balance and timing. You need to add money cards to your deck in order to afford more powerful cards, you also need action cards because their effects are so powerful. Of course, if you haven’t bought any victory point cards when the game ends (when three piles of cards, or the pile of Victory point: 6 cards, are exhausted) then you’re certainly going to loose.

The problem is that if you have too many cards that are not money, you won’t be about to afford to buy the cards you want (since your hand of five cards won’t have enough coins in it to afford the good stuff). The same problem applies to action cards.

This all means that it can become a fairly strategic game.

To make things more interesting, the game comes with something in the order of 25 different types of action card - but only 10 are used in any given game.

This means that the combinations of cards that are available changes, so games can be quite variable.

Unfortunately, when selecting the cards at random, we found that they would often turn up sets with one very powerful combination effect in them. When that happened, everybody would tend to blitz those two or three card types and the game would end very quickly and without a great deal of satisfaction.

We found it worked better using the preconstructed sets in the rulebook.

I don’t think I’ll buy this one, but I will play it again. Having had half a dozen games (more of them quite short), I’d suggest that every circle of gamers should have a copy. My opinion might change after I have another dozen games though.

I’ve been looking around for software to run an online game, mostly focusing on video conferencing software. My efforts haven’t been all that fruitful though, every time I find something that looks suitable, it turns out to need a monthly fee to unlock essential features (such as supporting more then three people in the call).

So, since I think a few people are actually reading this blog now (thanks to RPG Bloggers), I thought I’d ask the community.

I think voice support is essential, as is support for at least five people. Video would be nice. A whiteboard, file sharing and dice rolling would be bonuses. I’d like to avoid paying money, but would be less annoyed by a one-off fee then something recurring. That said, if something is good and has a monthly fee, don’t be afraid to mention it.

What can you recommend? (Comments below please!). Thanks!

“I need to set up a Wiki or something”, said Jim, “D&D dungeon crawls are simple enough, but in Traveller there’s a lot more information to keep track of.”

I managed to resist for a whole three hours before I pushed aside the project I was working on (I’d hit a speed bump, and was looking for an excuse to procrastinate, that’s the joy of personal projects with no deadlines).

So, a system to track information about a Traveller campaign. Clearly, a subsector or two is going to be a key point of this, so we’ll have to represent that somehow (yes, let’s run directly to the output for the system). There’s a lovely standard map for these, so producing something similar shouldn’t be too difficult.

By trade, I’m a web developer, and two hours ago I knew next to nothing about dynamically producing graphics (so all systems were equal as far as learning enough to get going was concerned). The standard subsector map lends itself to vector formats, so SVG was the logical choice.

An hour later, and I’ve picked out enough from the specification to write a Perl script to generate an 8×10 hex grid with coordinates. You’ll need a browser capable of rendering SVG (which is pretty much anything except Microsoft Internet Explorer (which is years behind its competitors in everything but market share)) or a stand-alone program such as Inkscape.

I have plans for this (which include a nice database and lots of JavaScript), some of which might even make it to fruitition. I’m not holding out hope of finding a great deal of time for those plans, so I’ll publish what I do have (including the source code) and hope that you find it useful.