Category Archives: Gaming

Gaming

The Beginner’s Guide

My wife and I have been spending some time together playing through some shorter independently developed games. For me, these games are a lot of fun because they are the short-story equivalent in the game world – they have a neat idea and spend enough time exploring it to be interesting and still leave some aspects open. Most recently, we played “The Beginner’s Guide”.

I heard about this game first on the Diecast, which is the primary reason I picked it up. I really enjoyed “The Stanley Parable” by the same developer (Davey Wreden), and the idea of a learning about someone by the games they designed was an interesting concept (especially with narration). Ok, it could just be that I’m a sucker for good narration. Continue reading The Beginner’s Guide →

Gaming, Programming

Thanksgiving Apocalypse Game Preparation

Thanksgiving is coming soon, so I’ve started to think about my list for this year’s Thanksgiving Warhammer 40K Apocalypse game. I still have some models to put together, but I also need to figure out how I am going to create my list this year.

A while back, I created my own Warhammer 40K army list creator database in Microsoft Access. This was a great planning tool for me as it allowed me to pretty easily select squads and equipment and it would compute points for my army. It also allowed me to print out easy cheat sheets with model stats, weapon info, etc. so that I could come to the table prepared to play. Unfortunately, the biggest part of creating this database was actually data entry – I had to enter in the point costs for each option under each unit profile; this meant that the database was tied to my codex, and became out of date as soon as a new code was released. Additionally, since data entry is the most annoying part of any programming project, once it’s out of date, I am not very motivated to update it. Continue reading Thanksgiving Apocalypse Game Preparation →

Gaming

Gamerstable

A bit over four years ago, I clicked on the only facebook banner ad that I have ever clicked on. It took me to the website of a podcast called Gamerstable. It had only a couple of episodes (one called Episode 0), but they seemed to know what they were doing. Sound quality was great, they managed to pull off a conversational style without walking all over each other or rambling for hours, and, above all, it was about role-playing.

In a very real way, Gamerstable picked up where the Escape Artists podcasts (Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and Pod Castle) left off. Since I was no longer bussing into work, I didn’t have as much time to focus-listen to podcasts. Instead of being able to listen to a podcast on the bus and focus on nothing else, I was listening to podcasts while I worked where I had to be able to focus on what I was doing. Gamerstable fit this paradigm much better as I could listen to the conversation, but if I missed snatches of the conversation because of my work, I could still follow the remainder of the podcast. Continue reading Gamerstable →

Gaming, Programming

Automatic Creation of Tab Separators

As part of my work to organize my Pathfinder ACG box, I found that I needed a way to create alternating tabs in a general way. In particular, a few times, I found myself in the position where I had designed the tabs in photoshop only to realize when I was done that I had forgotten something. Or, in the case of Wrath of the Righteous, that there were new cards that needed to go in the middle of the sequence. Since this would require re-ordering all of the tabs following it, this became a bit of a task.

To solve this problem, I decided that I wanted to write a program to lay out tabs for me, and automatically take care of that alternation. To prototype, I create a short function in perl that had the basic imagemagick commands that I would use, and took a big list of tabs as input. The script automatically “-flop”ed the template to perform the horizontal mirror, and placed the appropriate text in position from the correct edge (i.e. positioned from the left edge on the left tabs, and from the right edge on the right tabs). I used this prototype to figure out the basic features I would need, and created the tabs for Rise of the Runelords and Wrath of the Righteous. Continue reading Automatic Creation of Tab Separators →

Gaming

Dominion Box Consolidation

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I’ve been playing Dominion for a while, and, as you might expect for a game with nine expansions (I have seven), it takes up a lot of space. Dominion’s boxes and inserts were pretty good – they fit sleeved cards (with the exception of the larger stacks) and box organization made really good sense. This all fell apart though when I tried to add promo cards or do any kind of consolidation.

I’ve been considering consolidation for a while, but didn’t really find a solution that I liked, until a friend at work showed me his organized box. Each kingdom card had its own pack holder with a tab denoting cost and name. This made it easy to find cards, but it also made it easy to grab kingdom cards out of the box – just lift on the tab and the whole pack comes out! I was immediately taken by this concept, but I think I underestimated how much work it would be. Continue reading Dominion Box Consolidation →

Gaming

Organizing Galaxy Defenders

I’ve been working on organizing my game boxes lately, and some of these projects have been bigger than others.  I wanted to take a moment to talk about how I organized my Galaxy Defenders boxes.  In total, Galaxy Defenders has come in five boxes, and I have managed to consolidate it down to three (I really wanted two, but couldn’t fit everything). Galaxy Defenders has quite a few boards, a fair number of cards, a few oddly-shaped chipboard components, and a lot of miniatures and tokens. With the exception of the boards, each of these needed some organization mechanism. Continue reading Organizing Galaxy Defenders →

Gaming

Gaming Box Organization

I’ve been working on three major box organization efforts in the last few weeks. First, I’ve been trying to get my Galaxy Defenders boxes under control – with two new expansions and a ton of promo materials, there is a lot to organize. Second, I’ve been working through consolidation of my Dominion boxes – I have five boxes of Dominion (one of which is a “big box” holding the base game and two expansions), and this takes up a lot of room on my gaming shelf. Lastly, I have the Pathfinder ACG box that I’m redesigning to have tabs – I talked about this a little already, but I’m also working on a mechanism where I can make new tabs a bit more easily.

I have a few other efforts that I’ve been working on, but they are much more minor, so I’m going to kick off with those in this post, and cover the major reorganizations in posts of their own.

Continue reading Gaming Box Organization →

Gaming

Pathfinder ACG: New Box

It finally happened – I got rid of the Pathfinder ACG box insert. At first, I was rather pleased by the insert (in contrast to every other box insert I have ever had) – it seemed to support sleeved cards in the volume needed by the game, and all the components had a nice place to fit. This all came crashing down, however, when I noticed that the card sleeves kept ending up with bent corners. At first, I thought it was because of the cards themselves (they have rounded corners), but then I realized that the bottom edges of the insert were also rounded (presumably to fit the cards better), which led to the card sleeves bending to compensate.

This was a deal-breaker. Bent sleeves made the cards significantly harder to shuffle, and made it so that they didn’t sit flat on the table. Most importantly, it was damaging my card sleeves, which would decrease their life significantly, and, in turn, could cause a decrease in the life of the game itself (which is the whole point of card sleeves). As soon as I found this out, I began devising a new box solution.

Continue reading Pathfinder ACG: New Box →

Gaming

Lord of the Rings LCG: For Rohan!

Each Sunday for the last few months, my cousin and I have been playing the Lord or the Rings LCG. We are playing in campaign mode where we have been following the events of the Lord of the Rings plot with a different Fellowship of the Ring, and (slightly) different events.

Until just recently, my deck was a purple and blue deck featuring Aragorn, Theoden, and Eowyn; after the splitting of the Fellowship, however, Aragorn became a primary character, so I was forced to choose a new Hero to take his place. At that point, I decided to double-down on Rohan, and chose Erkenbrand to replace Aragorn for the purple slot. At this point, my deck looks like this:

Continue reading Lord of the Rings LCG: For Rohan! →

Gaming

Netrunner: Stealth Shaper

Once I had gotten comfortable enough with playing Netrunner, I got it into my head that I should build a Stealth Icebreaker deck. Where my Weyland deck is very focused on its win condition, this deck is focused on its shtick – the goal is to have fun and try to make Stealth Icebreakers work.

In choosing a faction for this deck, Shaper was the obvious choice. They have the most Stealth capability, and have (from what I can tell) the best tutoring capabilities. I also tend to favor Shaper in general – from an in-universe perspective, they are faction that is easiest for me to connect with. It may be an odd reason to choose a faction, but it’s one that I use quite often.

At any rate, this is what I came up with:

Continue reading Netrunner: Stealth Shaper →