danmassey.com

Dan is lost in a gibbering non-Euclidian maze and would love your help!

Dan is looking for two more orphans to sacrifice and would love your help!

I enjoy a good game of Flames of War¹ and I’m a hopeless science fiction gamer. Although you could use any 15mm alien miniatures with these rules, I have included silhouettes of the 15mm.co.uk Grey Alien miniatures² as a recipe for how to field them under these rules. They are my favorite of the 15mm options for 1940s alien invaders.

These rules envision an alternate course for the end of WWII. The “foo” fighter visitors are not content to buzz our battlefields. The major powers have Top Secret research teams dedicated to exploring the strange phenomena reported by sailors, soldiers, and pilots. The aliens spend the early and mid wars experimenting on us and the late war and beyond killing us.

The Greys are meant to represent a near unstoppable force, at least during the time period covered. The key to fun Grey games is to play with the intended force asymmetry, in particular exploring different victory conditions. The intent is for the Grey machines to be just barely vulnerable to the most powerful human guns while giving them a high likelihood of destroying their targets.

This is the second draft of the unofficial force description. Further playtesting will result in suggested changes.

Download the rules pdf here

f1. These rules are unauthorized and are in no way official. Flames of War, Intelligence Briefing, and Intelligence Handbook are trademarks of Battlefront Miniatures Limited. They are used without their permission, however no challenge to their status is intended. All rights are reserved to their respective owners.

f2. 15mm.co.uk is a brand name of Alector Ltd which also owns Alternative Armies, the home of the famous Flintloque and Slaughterloo fantasy Napoleonic wargames, Typhon the game of Greek Mythology, Erin the game of Celtic Mythology, Attrition the SciFi adventure game, HOT and HOF 15mm systems and Alien Squad Leader (ASQL) 15mm SciFi wargame. Also 28mm Generic Fantasy ranges and the DarkeStorme fantasy skirmish system for 15mm and 28mm gaming. Any references to or representations of 15mm.co.uk products are used without their permission, however no challenge to their status is intended. All rights are reserved to their respective owners.

Katie and I played our first game of Arkham Horror months ago. She won’t plat it again (see below). It’s like a dark combination of Clue , Talisman , and The Lord of the Rings Board Game . It’s like Clue in that you run from location to location catching clues to make progress against a goal. The characters with their complexity, items, battles, and journeys between different areas all have the feel of Talisman. The cooperative nature of the game is something like the LotR game.

The first thing you notice about the game, even while setting it up, is the insane amount of state that must be maintained. Each character has statistics, maintained in two different ways, items, trophies, etc. The board has gates, monsters, clues, gate seals, mythos activities, and other elements. I think state (measured by the amount you have to write down to put a game in progress back in its box and restore it) is a useful metric to track in board games.

The goal of the game is to defeat a horrific member of the Cthulhu pantheon, either by closing gates to other worlds or by waiting for the being to come to Arkham to kill you.

We had to play a game with a partial understanding of the rules to wrap our heads around how all the mechanics work. I’m working my way through the rules again, to complete the picture. The game has a decent reference page, but it could be better. Even with that back page reference, you have to refer to specific pages in the book to get at the simple formulas involved in the resolution system. The book is also horribly cross-referenced. Someone should have noticed and put it together in a different arrangement. That said, the examples are nicely done. One other bit about the back reference page. There are some key maximum values of things, like the maximum count of monsters in various regions, that depend on the number of investigators playing. Those are in the back reference sheet, but it would be more useful to have those values in reminder blocks in the relevant regions of the game board.

The setup is a laborious process. Even though I have most of the components segregated in plastic bags, it’s still a bit of work to lay out all the card decks and tokens. That said, all those bits are very nicely produced.

Once you internalize the game mechanics, the game pace is good. The resolution system is an interesting attempt at something novel, but is a miss. You have a score that represents the number of dice you roll for a test. Each test has some modifier (-2, +0, +1, etc.) that represents the change in the number of dice you are allowed to roll. Each die is considered a success if it comes up five or six. Typically, you need only one success, but a test, particularly in combat, might require more successes. The mechanic isn’t bad, similar to some RPG dice pool systems, but it’s odd to see the modifiers presented that way. You also have to keep up with the modifiers provided by various pieces of equipment. All-in-all that bit is odd.

Along with keeping track of the effects of your items, you also have to keep track of the various Mythos “activities” that come into play, essentially challenges for the group that result in a reward when “passed” and/or a penalty when “failed.”

The mechanics of evading and combating monsters are okay. Monster movement, keyed to the Mythos card mechanic looks good at first blush, but often makes for monsters bouncing back and forth between two locations. Each monster has a symbol that matches symbols potentially found in one of two sections on each Mythos card. If a monster’s symbol is present on the card, it moves in the direction indicated by the which of the two sections (black or white) that it is in. It looks like a great mechanic to solve the problem of random movement, but is clunky (matching all the symbols) and goofy (watching the monsters pace between two locations) in reality.

One area where I think the game shines is in the harmony between theme and mechanics. The opening and closing of gates, the encounter system, the terror and doom tracks… all fit nicely into the impending horror of the Lovecraft genre.

I’ve played another game with Ian. As you would expect, it plays much faster when you have a better grasp of the rules, but it is still a long game. Ian and I enjoyed it. When played at pace, it almost feels like a season of Buffy unfolding. With two players, we gave up on attempts to close gates, as we were losing in the “whack-a-mole” like contest. Instead, we spent a good chunk of the game preparing for Cthulhu to show up. Arkham basically fell into hell, but when Cthulhu showed up (after four hours of play) our intrepid heroes were ready for him. I’m curious if there’s any other workable plan when you are playing a game with only two players. We’ll have to try with more people next time. There will be a next time.

and now, Katie’s feedback

TOO MANY COUNTERS! Also, it took way, way, way too long to set the whole thing up (20 to 30 minutes would be a fair estimate). And it took up entirely too much space – this game does not employ the most effective use of space – instead of being able to set up on one (fairly good size table), we had to bring in other pieces of furniture. Playing a board game should not include having to rearrange several pieces of furniture to fit the set up. There also is not a lot of character interaction – don’t know if this changes as you get more players or what. I think whomever designed this game made it much more convoluted than it needed to be.

My first read through of Daniel Jackson’s Software Abstractions: Logic, Language, and Analysis with Alloy 4 open in front of me reminded me of the excitement I felt when I first cracked open my first edition of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs --thank you Frank Corley -- sitting in front of a Scheme interpreter. I’ve been watching Alloy for a long time, but most of my modeling work has been in UML/OCL or EMF lately. Beyond a bit of UML, most of my current work is in nuts and bolts JPA, Spring, and Wicket, but we have a few thorny problem areas that I would like to tackle with the help of Alloy. Modeling in Alloy feels like test first development or coding in Eiffel.

A while back Dave Astels wrote a great article on behavior specification versus traditional approaches to unit testing. Read it if you want to know why I bring it up here.

Loving Vinyl was an interesting experiment, but in my rush to describe the mystery of the box, I broke a big rule. There’s no real conflict. The main character has an obvious goal, with reasonable stakes, but the story doesn’t go anywhere. I appreciate Karl’s comments as well. I’m going to incorporate them into the next edit and, hopefully, make the whole thing go somewhere. Meanwhile, I have to finish Mooers’ Law this week.

This part probably makes more sense if you read pt. 1 first. It’s been a long day, so I’ll probably need a few more parts to finish the draft. In there somewhere, I need to get out the edited version of the rest of Mooers’ Law . On to the story.

Hal trudged around the corner of the brown brick building to the cracked cement parking lot. He threw his bag in the passenger side window of his silver ‘88 CRX. It landed on a pile of cracked cassette cases. He pulled the green ‘The Real Heroes’ flyer out from under his windshield wiper and climbed into the car. He reached over to open the bag enough to peer in, before starting the car, “Gotcha.”

Hal sweated through the fifteen minute ride home, occasionally glancing over at the bag and the corner of the black box he could see in it. He abandoned the CRX near the curb in front of his one story green pastel hardy plank house. He BUZZ!!

Yeah… it’s too late, just cranking out drivel. Maybe pt.3, tomorrow evening, will get this draft back on track. The six to nine meeting on process improvement this evening, probably wasn’t the best preparation for writing time. I’m going to go read Y: The Last Man #55 and think about Stephen’s feedback on Mooers’ Law.

Bonus TwitterFiction

They covered U2. Dave recorded a solo single. They split between prog rock and folk punk. Dave reunited them for prog punk. No one cared.

Hal picked up the three inch black cardboard cube from the glass counter. He started his inspection at the top flap. He read the light blue graffiti style letters, ‘vIgo’s bLock vol. 2.’ One of the rounded corners of the flap was slightly bent, “Brain, you sure this hasn’t been opened?”

“Positive,” the scrawny kid with the greasy black hair went back to reading his comic book.

Hal moved on to the front and sides of the box. He could barely make out the cubist skyline done in charcoal and a few thin white lines, on the black background. The back of the box was more of the same, with a couple of boxes of information. The top half of the back panel was a white text box with small black san serif type, ‘vIgo’s bLock volume two features eight of the second story residents of the block and two of vIgo’s imaginary friends. They bring new life to the block and new toys for the other residents.’ The rest of the back featured small white mostly-bipedal silhouettes with little white labels under them like ‘oUija,’ ‘doG,’ and ‘mR. rigHtsize.’

Hal glanced at the bottom, noting the familiar copyright notices, ‘Made in China,’ ‘www.vIgosbLock.com,’⁺ and the ‘IL’ logo, “Hey, Brain, it looks like someone had a price tag over the address. It’s a bit sticky.”

“Fine, I’ll knock five dollars off it.”

Hal looked up, his green eyes focusing intently on Brain, then drifting back to the box, “That’s still mint pricing. Between the flap and the sticker crud, you should cut off fifteen.” He pursed his thick lips and dug a knuckle into a dimpled cheek. Glaring at Brain, he made a couple clicking noises.

“Alright, I’ll take off ten, but that’s it. You know the next guy in here will buy it for that.”

“And you’re sure it hasn’t been opened?”

“I’m positive. We found the case, in shrink wrap, in the store room yesterday, and I held one box for you,” Brain slowly set down the comic book and shuffled toward the register. “That it.”

“I’ll take the loose Snorse and a couple of Donuts for Anisa,” Hal flipped a Visa onto the counter.

Brain pulled the small blue Snorse from the display under the counter. Then he picked out two little boxes from a blue and red display case on the shelf behind the counter. Thirty seconds of key mashing on the cash register later, “That’s fifty eight ninety three.” Brain picked up the credit card and slid it through the credit card terminal. He frowned and slid it through two more times and then a third time in the opposite direction.

“Hasn’t J. fixed that thing yet?”

The terminal beeped and spat out two short slips of paper. Brain slid them both over to Hal with a chewed up Bic pen. Hal scribbled “Harold Beckers” on one and put the other back in his wallet with his card. Brain handed him the bag, “I hope it’s ‘dWight’.”

“One in twelve, right,” Hal shoved the bag into his torn blue canvas backpack and pushed through the bumper sticker covered door, ‘Don’t blame me, I voted for Roslin,’ into the bright light of the ninety degree afternoon air.

I guess we’ll pick up tomorrow with the part where Hal gets home and opens the box.

⁺ *I didn’t register the site, so I wouldn’t visit it.

After twitterpated I couldn’t resist trying my hand at some TwitterFiction. It was fun.

“What’s in that white box?” barked General F. “Computers. White’s cooler.” “Paint ‘em green. Damn if computers will be cooler than my men.”¹

“I think you’re bluffing,” he tossed in his chips. I pulled my shades further down my nose, “You would,” I laid down the flush. “Damn!”

His iPod lay on his desk. She put in an ear bud and pressed >||, ”...through the night we stayed. And in my way…,” >||. She walked away.

In 2078, NASA launched the first hundred of the Fermi project’s B-VN probes. That’s when ‘their’ local sentinel decided to ‘contain’ us.

Silence, then the spaniel darts into the bushes, scaring out the sparrow. The little black mutt takes it on the fly. I clean up the mess.

“How long is this one?” she asked from the kitchen. “It’s got Rowan Atkinson. It doesn’t matter….and Patrick Swayze.”

Brigit tended the bonfire on the beach. The ghostly African boat came to shore. She called, “Is this beautiful Bres for whom I shall burn?”

Code Name Rage lowered himself into the corridor. His super senses noted the security guard’s bullets as they shattered his spine.

He caught Paula with cummings, Rosie with lies, Vickie with wine then Brad, Faye with love, and Tara with his wedding band.²

Fan fiction: Their hands joined on the phaser. The beam vaporized Wesley. Kirk, leaning in to kiss Spock, said, “The good of the many…”

“You don’t get it,” she said. “But I do. I just don’t like it.” “You don’t have to like it. They’re family.” “Fine. I’ll put on the hat.”

¹ special thanks to Don from whom I stole and bastardized this story

² I use Kleimo’s The Random Name Generator for almost all of my character names.

I’m not really interested in using Twitter , although I like the idea of TwitterFiction . This isn’t TwitterFiction (this is ). It is a trite You’ve Got Mail or Griffin & Sabine meets Web 2.0 presence kind of story. It also offers an interesting set of constraints. ...and I like the word twitterpated . I didn’t vet the ids I chose. Apologies if they match anyone in particular. They aren’t intended to. ...work of fiction… blah. blah. Oh yeah, and the Twitter-style lingo and interaction have been changed a bit… dramatic license. Last bits: it’s not Hills Like White Elephants , but don’t we wish everything we wrote could be, and I do owe something to Ian for his inspired personas and scenario writing.

Morning coffee. Reading Slate. When did Helo become McAhab?

get

Square WoW:BC Lvl 63 2 minutes ago from web

scintilla Jogging in Town Lake Park… beautiful day. half an hour ago from txt

mickles Blonde Redhead is too cool. I’m dreaming about Kazu tonight. about 9 hours ago from txt

Lawrence Looking for Mickles. Outside at Stubb’s. about 10 hours ago from txt

nudge Lawrence

invite 512-555-1212 AmieRugg

AmieRugg accepted your invitation

AmieRugg Waking up to hammering from the house behind mine. It’s Sunday! less than 10 seconds ago from web

Lawrence What day is it? Where am I? less than 20 seconds ago from web

D Lawrence Where did you go last night? We waited for you?

Lawrence Switching to Skype… less than 5 seconds ago from web

scintilla Brunch at Whole Foods with Maddy. Yummy. less than 5 seconds ago from txt

AmieRugg Ikea is calling and the hammering is driving me away. less than 5 seconds ago from web

Square WoW:BC Gruul’s Lair less than 5 seconds ago from web

I need a new bookshelf. still ticked at Lawrence

nudge mickles

D scintilla What are you doing after brunch?

scintilla Finished brunch. Bought eat pray love and a long way gone at Book People. Shopping with Maddy at Amelia’s. less than 5 seconds ago from txt

mickles found a granola bar… still thinking about Kazu http://www.blonde-redhead.com/photos.html less than 5 seconds ago from web

D Square Hey, man. Take a break. Go shopping with me.

Square Sure. Pick me up. Honk twice. less than 10 seconds ago from web

40404 Picking up Square to go find a bookshelf.

Square Branch is honking. L8r. ‘gone fishing’ less than 20 seconds ago from web

AmieRugg Standing in a long ass checkout line. ‘I’m sorry I said Ikea sucks.’ less than 5 seconds ago from txt

scintilla At least the morning was good. Back to frelling work. Did I mention how much I hate work? less than 10 seconds ago from web

Lawrence Watching Grady at his soccer tournament. He’s playing tough D. less than 10 seconds ago from txt

Andy Richter Followers, did I mention my new show, Andy Barker, P.I.? Thanks for watching. less than 5 seconds ago from web

mickles Nap time with the puppy. less than 5 seconds ago from web

40404 Square and I stopped at Starbuck’s. No bookshelf.

scintilla Work sucks. sucks. sucks! SUCKS! less than 5 seconds ago from web

AmieRugg Thai or Indian? Thai or Indian? Vietnamese less than 10 seconds ago from txt

40404 Going to see scintilla, save her from work.

scintilla Did I mention work sucks? less than 5 seconds ago from web

Square With Branch, pulling Cynthia away from her keyboard, so I can update. less than 10 seconds ago from web

40404 Pho anyone? Square, scintilla, and I are trying the new place.

Lawrence The Dark Power win again. Taking Gradey for Pho with the gang. less than 20 second ago from txt

scintilla Taken against my will to eat noodles from a bowl. When can I quit my job? less than 10 seconds ago from txt

40404 D scintilla very funny

40404 Pho with friends

mickles eating cold cereal at home, because no one called me about the noodles less than 5 seconds ago from web

Square WoW making jewelry less than 10 seconds ago from web

Lawrence Family time less than 5 seconds ago from txt

AmieRugg It’s 80’s retro time. Elysium on Sunday. Please, don’t anyone try to dance with me. less than 10 seconds ago from txt

scintilla If I ever have to look at another Power Point slide again, it will be too long. less than 10 seconds ago from web

Back home, but not ready to give up the weekend yet.