Monthly Archives: November 2010

Flying Saucers of the Third Reich

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A Nazi prototype or someone's backyard project?

Following on from last week’s discussion of hexes, Hitler and cultural appropriation, Phantoms and Monsters brings us a double-shot of Nazi UFOs. That links to a pair of articles about Nazi experiments with UFOs or UFO-like craft. The first, originally published in the Daily Mail, relates the assertion that a “bell-shaped craft was being created by the Nazis” during World War II. The article has some interesting photos, like the one to the right, where the disc-shaped part of the craft is a ring of overlapping vanes that spin to provide lift.

The second article in the blog post relates “Hitler’s Roswell,” an incident in Czernica, Germany — now part of Poland — where some kind of flying craft crashed in a farm field. The Nazis, like all good regimes, gathered up the bodies and scraps, intending to reverse-engineer the technology.

For some reason, Nazis and ultra-technology initiatives go hand in hand in so many role-playing games. Probably because some of their real world efforts were so frightening. Suppressed Transmission‘s column on the topic, “A Dish Best Served Cold: Antarctic Space Nazis,” even worked Neuschwabenland into the mix. The linked articles provide some really excellent documents and images, including German language diagrams of the craft, and some more shots of the alleged Nazi prototype. That would make a great dossier prop to pass around the table.

A Cry in the Darkness

The craft is still there, in the collapsed rubble of the complex in the Gory Sowie mountains. And it’s alive, slowly healing from the injuries wrought by the Nazis’ attempts to reverse-engineer its secrets. Without light or sufficient density of biomass, it’s taken the craft sixty-five years to rebuild its systems to the point where it can call for help. Now its psychic distress signal tears through the mind of every sensitive in eastern Europe. And the reach of its call is growing, at the rate that it will fry the mind of every person with psi talent on the planet long before anyone arrives to deactivate the beacon. A team must descend into the abandoned complex, find the ship and somehow silence it before it liquifies any more minds. Only no one expected that as part of its repair efforts, the ship has co-opted the local biosphere, creating plants and small creatures designed to assist in repairs. And they’re very eager to acquire fresh, well-fed biomass for their work.

Mr Hughes’ Plane

Far from being an extraterrestrial space craft, the prototype bell-shaped craft was based on plans stolen from Hughes Aircraft. The photos leaking out of Germany show that the Nazi aeronautical engineers are unsettlingly far along in realizing the potential of Mr. Hughes‘ design. The special projects division of Hughes Aircraft has scrambled to get their own prototype functional, as it’s the only craft with the speed, maneuverability and stealth capabilities to penetrate that far into Nazi Germany. Its crew, a combination of civilian specialists and military operatives have to not only recover the plans, but extract the prototype or otherwise nullify it.

Friends in the Future

The Czernica crash was the first of a dozen — and unfortunately for the Allies, the only failure. Eleven flying spheres landed somewhat more gently across the German countryside in the summer of 1937. They proved instrumental in the blitzkrieg campaigns of the early days of the war — and the fall of London shortly thereafter.

None of this matches Time Agency mean history, of course. These spheres represent an extra-temporal incursion into the history of twentieth century Earth, presumably instigated by a downtime agency with an interest in altering the course of events to benefit the Nazi regime and their descendants. The Time Agency dispatches a squad of field operatives to the era with a two phase operation: backtrack the spheres to their arrival point, calculate their temporal trajectory from there, then unhappen the secret allies before the changes in the timeline ripple forward far enough to change the Time Agency itself.

Happy Thanksgiving

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It’s Thanksgiving weekend here in the United States. Yesterday was the big day of giving thanks and celebrating the harvest — which I guess is a little nonsensical now, since global transportation allows us to take advantage of growing seasons all around the world — so Friday is, for me, a day of recovery and rest. Others have their own shopping traditions. Good luck to ’em.

See you all on Monday!

A Seriesful of Doctor Who Plots

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Build your own Doctor Who. Photo by Josh Burker.

The Door in Time, Craig’s Doctor Who role-playing blog, recently did an impressive series of posts breaking down the archetypal plots of Doctor Who, calling it “A seriesful of classic Who plots.” This covers both the original 1963-89 series, as well as the 2005 revival, so Craig’s breakdowns explain not only the series structure conventions that Russell T. Davies created, like the Season Opener, but also the time-honored — and often over-worn — plots like the Base Under Siege that recurred throughout the original run of Doctor Who.

For the newcomer to Doctor Who role-playing, this is useful for understanding the meta-structures that underlie the series and how they’ve influenced its development. The Season Opener, for example, is useful for kicking off an on-going campaign because it introduces the common elements of the Mysterious Individual archetype to players who are unfamiliar with Doctor Who, as well as setting expectations for the whole group.

For the more seasoned fan of the show who knows the property and is ready to take it to the game table, it becomes a menu of choices: “Why yes, I believe I’ll have a Historical Celebrity appear in the Season Finale that is a Secret Invasion of the Daleks.”

And if that’s not enough, Craig’s also posted a plethora of adventure hooks to plug into your seasons of Doctor Who. There’s enough there to sustain a campaign for months, if not years.

Hexing Hitler

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This photo series on Life.com depicts a “hex party” convened by some adventurous souls in 1941 with the goal of hexing Adolf Hitler. Yes, hexing — or rather, “to kill Adolf Hitler by voodoo incantation.” The amateur magicians’ supplies included “a dressmaker’s dummy, a Nazi uniform, nails, axes, tom-toms and plenty of Jamaica rum,” along with a manual of sorts, Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today. The dummy and Nazi uniform became an effigy of Hitler, which the rite’s participants cursed, attacked and even pierced with nails through the eyes — to cause blindness — and heart — to cause death, presumably. Make sure you click through the whole slideshow or you’ll miss the shot of the dummy’s decapitation by axe.

I’ve got two initial reactions to this piece. The first is this is very clearly excellent gaming fodder. In a Weird War-like setting — or even in the world of Angel and the Demon Research Initiative — of course there’s going to be a magical front to World War 2. The leaders of the day would be well-protected with layer upon layer of warding spells. (I’m reminded of the super powered alternate World War 2 setting Godlike, where the most sought-after Talents were the Zeds, who had the power to nullify Talent abilities.) In such an instance, the hex rites need to be powered by such overwhelming sorcerous might that they punch through any number of talismans and anti-magic fields, which means globe-trotting adventures to tap into long untouched mana wells or artifacts steeped in same; or they have to be done stealthily, practically on top of the target, where only a few defenses still stand. Reminds me of crashing a conference at Wewelsburg.

My second reaction is cultural appropriation isn’t cool. And that’s an unexpected reaction for me to have, because I’ve been pretty gung-ho about it in the past, cribbing bits of this and that and other things to write about here. Role-playing is, by and large, built on borrowing and stealing different pieces of this and that to make something new. People have argued that doing so trivializes the source by oversimplifying, ignoring meaning or failing to perceive distinctions. And I don’t disagree with that.

So I find myself with the conflicting reactions of “Hey, that’s a great plot seed for role-playing” and “That’s some white people using Hitler and another culture’s customs as an excuse to act like buffoons.” But then, when did people need an excuse to behave like buffoons?

Find a New Game App

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Find a New Game is a website application designed to help you find new board games that might suit your tastes. By telling it what games you love and hate, Find a New Game suggests a short list of games that may be to your liking, based on ratings pulled from Boardgamegeek.com‘s user population. This is an iterative process; the more likes and dislikes you feed into the app, the more useful its suggestions should be.

There are three ways to rate a particular game: love, ignore and hate. It’s not an application with the ability to distinguish fine shades of sentiment. After a couple dozen clicks, I generated this list:

Others who love Puerto Rico, Ticket to Ride, Dominion, Pandemic, Dominion: Seaside, Dominion: Intrigue, Small World, Pandemic: On the Brink, Arkham Horror, Dominion: Envoy Promo Card, Dominion: Prosperity, Dominion: Stash Promo Card, Tales of the Arabian Nights, Carcassonne: Traders & Builders, Arkham Horror: Dunwich Horror Expansion and hate Agricola, The Settlers of Catan, Power Grid, Memoir ’44, Caylus, El Grande, Chess, Bohnanza, Dominion: Alchemy, Race for the Galaxy: The Gathering Storm, Last Night On Earth: Growing Hunger, Space Alert, Bang! The Bullet!, Le Havre, BattleLore, War of the Ring Collector’s Edition, Chaos in the Old World, RoboRally, Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization are passionate about the following (ignoring Galaxy Trucker, Ticket to Ride: USA 1910, Lord of the Rings, Tigris & Euphrates, Small World: Cursed!, Small World: Grand Dames of Small World, The Settlers of Catan – 5-6 Player Extension, Battle Cry):

  • Battlestar Galactica
  • Steam
  • Warhammer: Invasion
  • Thebes
  • Talisman

[Portions bolded above to improve readability. In the original, text color is used to pick out titles from the sentence structure.]

You can click and click as long as you want, trying to build up a better picture of what games you might like, based on the ratings of other game players. I could click like on Talisman, ignore on Steam — since I’m not a huge rail fan and have heard it’s a heavy game — to get a further refined offering and so on.

It’s a neat little app, but it reminds me of the fact that the suggestions are only as good as the data used. The ratings come from users on Boardgamegeek.com. So it’s a small portion of the game-playing population, not only because it’s people who made an account on Boardgamegeek, but it’s people who made an account on Boardgamegeek.com and bothered to fill out ratings. Of those people who bothered to rate games, most of them probably haven’t done so comprehensively or consistently. I know I certainly haven’t.

There’s also the question of whether Find a New Game pulls individual user ratings or overall ratings, as Boardgamegeek reportedly uses weighting mechanisms to keep users from unfairly skewing the aggregated rating of a game — this, apparently, has happened with a few titles; a selection of the population decides something deserves to be at the top, so they deliberately underrate other games to drive it up the ranks.

But anyway, it’s an interesting way to see what games are out there that are probably worth me trying. Unfortunately, everything Find a New Game has suggested so far, I’ve at least heard of. I’m looking forward to the time it throws up a brand new title.

National Gaming Day 2010 at the Fletcher Free Library

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The eternal question of National Gaming Day: "What shall we play next?"

Saturday was National Gaming Day 2010. In observation of the day, the Fletcher Free Library here in Burlington hosted an afternoon of board games. I didn’t get to stay for the whole afternoon, having agreed to run demos as a Man in Black down at the Gathering of the Gamers in Middlebury, which just happened to fall on the same date as National Gaming Day this year.

Along with a pair of plastic bins full of board games, Brennan brought fresh baked bread still warm from the oven, which was a great snack paired with Cabot cheddar and/or raspberry preserves. So we had something to nibble on while we played Pirate’s Cove, one of a pair of a games I’d set up in anticipation of potential players arriving. As it happened, it was mostly the gang from Tuesday nights, plus one young newcomer, Max. Meanwhile, a second group formed to play Dominion with a healthy helping of Duration cards from Seaside.

Pirate’s Cove went okay. It’d been long enough since I last played that I had to keep reminding myself how the game went. Max turned out to fit the model of a young player, to be honest, which has led me to wonder if I’m courteous or excessively picky about other people’s behavior while playing a game. After Pirate’s Cove, we kept up the piratical theme with a round of Liar’s Dice. By then, I had to head south to Middlebury. From what I’ve heard, the rest of the afternoon was given over to Age of Empires III, Citadels and more Dominion.

Saturday was gloriously sunny, abnormal for mid-November in Vermont. I’m thinking that had something to do with the turnout for National Gaming Day — it was good in terms of spending time with friends, but as a way to get more people playing board games, it was pretty weak. While we’ve gotten good at spreading the word within the existing social circle of Burlington gamers, I think we still need to work on reaching people who aren’t necessarily connected via social networking or other means. That and the Fletcher Free’s involvement came relatively late in the ramp-up to National Gaming Day. Hopefully, next year they’ll get on board sooner and take a more active role in promoting it to interested patrons.

Meanwhile, over in the Northeast Kingdom, Border Board Games hosted the gaming at the Goodrich Memorial Library. They had a pretty excellent turnout, with lots of new faces. Kudos to Bethany and Richard for being such great game hosts!

Continue reading →

[Tuesday Night Board Games] 221B Baker Street

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Sherlock Holmes (r) and Dr. John B. Watson. Fr...

Watson struggles to maintain the illusion of being impressed. Image via Wikipedia

Last Tuesday, Andrew led us through 221B Baker Street, a vintage board game in which the players are all detectives investigating a crime that left Scotland Yard utterly perplexed. It was an obviously well-loved copy from his youth. Andrew had a couple funny reminisces about playing the game with his siblings.

In 221B Baker Street, sleuths first learn what they’re up against by reading the case card. We played “The Case of the Bashful Benefactor.” The case card gives the story leading up to the start of the investigation and sets the goals, the pieces of information needed to solve the insoluble, usually items like a motive, a killer, method and so on. To answer these questions, such as “Who killed Melanie Blakesly?” players travel around the board gathering clues from different locations: the Tobacconist’s, the Pub, the Carriage Depot and so on. Movement uses the old school “roll a d6 and move that many spaces” technique, which conjured up memories of Clue for me.

Once a detective arrives at a particular location, they look up its specific entry in a long list of clues that cover a whole stack of cases. The Carriage Depot may have clue 57 in one case and 219 in another. In some cases, a location may not have a relevant clue or no clue at all. Some clues give information about characters described in the case. Others may be segments of word puzzles. One of the goals in the case we played through, the motive of one of the characters, was a sentence made up of homonyms of questionable accuracy.

Eventually, a player feels they’ve gathered enough information to be able to formulate a hypothesis about what really went on. They return to the starting point on the board, 221B Baker Street, and announce their answer. Then they privately check the back of the clue booklet. If they’re right, they confirm it to the rest of the group. Otherwise, that detective is out of the game and everyone carries on.

No one in our game got the answer completely right. We all got pieces of it, some more than others, but never all four, which is the requirement for winning. When I finally got back to Baker Street with a full notebook of clues, I spent four or five passes around the table trying to make sense of that really terrible wordplay puzzle.

Rolling the die isn’t the only thing that determines who gets to which clues first. At the start of the game, each player has a police badge and skeleton key card. The badge can lock one door of a location — a few have multiple access points, which can be useful in getting around the board — keeping other players from reaching the clue there, while the skeleton key removes the badge permanently. More keys and badges are available at the Locksmith and Scotland Yard locations, which can play a role in how one chooses to move around the board, particularly if people are being aggressive about barring other detectives from certain clues. I used my first badge early on, acquired another sometime later, but then never thought it to use it, even though there were still players who hadn’t acquired clues I was reading.

Before we started, Andrew warned us that the game can take a long time. I thought he was referring to individual turns running long. Actually, it’s because the turns are so short: roll a die, move your pawn that many spaces. If you end in a location, look up the relevant clue in the clue book. There is, however, only one clue book for six people. This leads to needing to track who gets the clue book next versus whose turn it actually is. There can be five people waiting for the book while the sixth copies down their clue, only to learn it’s time for them to roll and move again.

221B Baker Street is a weird game. It’s got that super simple roll and move mechanic attached to what are logic puzzles and brainteasers. I can see playing just the puzzle aspect by giving everyone the clues, but they’d probably need their difficulty upped to still make it fun and draw the game out; maybe by specifying the order in which they’re revealed and ensuring they’re all interdependent.

To continue the retrogaming theme, Nonny broke out Talisman after that. I was distracted by Betrayal at House on the Hill and Tsuro before taking up an abandoned Thief in Talisman, who, to be honest, is probably a little broken when you can lift the wand from someone just by saying so.

National Gaming Day 2010 is Tomorrow

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Tomorrow, November 13th, is National Gaming Day 2010. Over 1800 libraries are participating this year, celebrating the twin goals of playing more games and visiting your local library with both board and video gaming, including tournaments and prizes donated by game publishers.

In Vermont, there are about a dozen libraries participating in National Gaming Day. Of two of them, I can tell you more. Richard and Bethany, they of Border Board Games in Derby Line, will be sharing some of their favorite board games at the Goodrich Library in Newport, Vermont. Their favorites and whatever else they can fit into the Big Frakkin’ Bag — which, frankly, needs to be documented to be believed; it’s just that big.

Meanwhile in Burlington, I and some friends will be at the Fletcher Free Library playing games and hopefully meeting some new folks. Until I need to cut out to go demo games as a Man in Black at the Gathering of the Gamers in Middlebury. It’s going to be a busy Saturday for board games!

If you’re not sure what’s going on in your area for National Gaming Day, you should check out this Batchgeo map that shows all the currently registered participating libraries — Burlington isn’t on there yet, but they’re definitely on board.

Get out and play some games tomorrow!

When Do You Correct the Game Host?

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Well, when? RPGs invite house-ruling more than board games. At the very least, board game house rules tend to be stated upfront, perhaps with somewhat more clarity and directness, as they change one or two things, where an RPG GM’s interpretation of the rules as written can be substantially looser.

Often when playing a game, someone in the group takes the role of resident guru. They may own the copy being used. They may simply be the most well-versed in it. They may be the GM, if the game calls for such a thing, such as most role-playing games. At any rate, they get a certain amount of deference when it comes to interpreting and remembering rules. This guru, though, is not always the game host, the person who owns the copy or did the legwork of getting everyone around the table.

This situation happened to me over the summer, playing Arkham Horror at a friend’s house. He’d invited folks over for an afternoon’s game. As the raving Arkham Horror fanatic, I found myself often teetering on the edge of uncertainty in the course of play: should I mention that technically, a rule worked one way, rather than the other, or not worry about it?

In that instance, I think I corrected more than I let it go, which doesn’t say much for my ability to lean back and not worry about the rules as written — at least when it comes to board games. In role-playing games, I manage to be much more laissez-faire, particularly when GMing.

At the role-playing table, it’s at least a social faux pas and more likely an astonishing breach of courtesy to quibble with how the GM interprets the rules. Or I think so. I’ve been in a few groups where interpreting rules is a god-given right to anyone who plays. And honestly, listening to the back and forth gets downright miserable. Take for instance one table discussion I sat through about Raise Dead versus Resurrect in Dungeons & Dragons. None of the characters at the table could cast either of those spells, but the bickering over what they could do went on for forty-five minutes.

So role-playing games are a situation where I’m almost always going to defer to the GM’s interpretation, simply because they’re so prone to house rules and modifications that arguing for “rules as written” is wasted time, taken away from playing. Even in board games, though, I try to defer to whoever owns the game or proposed they play it; usually because they know it best, but also for expediency’s sake. I’d rather just play the game than quibble fine points of proper play. During the game, that is. After the game ends is the appropriate time to debate those questions of rules interpretation and, when feasible, look up any online errata that may exist.

Betrayal at House on the Hill Warpgate Continues

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Quick update on the warped Betrayal at House on the Hill components: a poster on Boardgamegeek reports that Wizards of the Coast informed him “The replacement tiles we will be sending won’t have the same warping problem. Also, there may be a delay in getting the replacements mailed out to you as we are waiting for the corrected replacement tiles ourselves.”

I hope this includes the replacement set I was promised. It’s been two weeks since I received confirmation they would send me a set, which I choose in interpret as meaning that they were waiting on a second, unwarped batch.

More as it develops!