games and grumpiness and go team uuugh *thump*

In the morning jtroutman met with daerr and I, and gave me even more things to do before Wednesday. Press releases, flyers. We'll see.

Games at dougo's. Was taught Richard Borg's new Command & Colors: Ancients and played it twice. Loved it, though too bad about the giant step down in production quality from Memoir '44. I really don't mind using wood blocks instead of plastic miniatures, but the Battle Cry-style dice are unfortunate and the paper-thin board, terrain tiles and even playing cards are a crying shame.

People with industry ties there, and got some good networking and some lame networking in, though I can smooth over the latter in email. Had fun watching dictator555 get beaten up by a baby while teaching people to play Settlers of the Stone Age but then it was time to join doctor_atomic and company for the Venture Brothers season two premiere. That was a good time.

Now, though, I am grouchy because a jokey thing went sour, putting me into a bad mood that followed me all the way home. I think really I just have a high base level of grouchiness going on, between having no money or time and... oh, yeah, I guess that's all of it.

J lent me Perdido Street Station. I haven't read any fiction in weeks. I think I'll go to bed with it now. Way too much to do tomorrow, including a new Gamut release before the Werewolf test if I can swing it.

I wanna do the license thing tomorrow, but, grunt, it's occurred to me that they might make me surrender my license to get the temp Mass one, leaving me with no valid-looking photo ID at all. So I will have to call and ask them about it first. I hate calling about stuff like this. Bleaaah.

Grousing about game titles

You know, what kind of a name is "Command & Colors: Ancients" anyway? "Battle Cry" and "Memoir '44" are both far more evocative than "C & C: American Civil War" and "C & C: World War II Europe", respectively. The cheaper game components are one thing, but I don't think GMT can use the excuse of a smaller budgets than Hasbro or Days of Wonder, here.

"Ancients" isn't even very specific as to which ancients we are dealing with, even though the game is specifically about battle tactics used by Rome and Carthage during the Punic Wars. I would have been a lot happier if someone did the typical dealie of grabbing a sentence fragment from some chronologically appropriate speech and making that the title.

Other than that though, I really enjoyed this game and will buy a copy when I can afford to do so. If you enjoyed either of the other two Command & Colors games you will like it too.

Gamut 0.3.7

Gamut v0.3.7 is out. As usual, go to http://volity.net and click the shiny blue button to get it.

Changes, according to radiotelescope

• Added a "nicknames" field to the Seat object you get in the ECMAScript
UI. So you can do info.gameseats[0].nicknames. (This puts us at ECMAScript
API 3.2.)

• Added a "Request Bot From..." menu option, for when the bookkeeper doesn't
know about your bot.

• Gamut now supports the new bot and bot factory API. If a parlor supplies
a list of bots, Gamut will let you choose one; if the parlor supplies bot
factories, the client will query them and display the bots they have
available. If no bots are available, the "invite bot" menu option will
be greyed out. Old-style parlors will get the old-style behavior (a single
"invite bot" menu option, whether they offer bots or not).

• Added a "Remember password" option to connect dialog box.

I also improved the Windows installer based on some critique from dougo, which should further improve the Web <-> Gamut compatibility for Windows users.

Werewolf reminder

Tonight at 7EDT. Grab the latest Gamut and meet up in the devchat. Mob violence and unspeakable lycanthropic mayhem to follow. I have no idea how many games we'll play, because I'm not sure long they take via Volity. I haven't even played this yet.

If you're in the area, feel free to drop by the office (just tell the security guard my name and he'll nod you through), and bring your own laptop if possible. Otherwise, we'll see you online!