Sunday: Volity again, and games of various sorts.

[prog]

Saturday night, actually, I set up office at the Diesel and picked up Volity for the first time since mid-February. The difference between this and previous resumptions of The Work is that I don't expect to put it down again until it's finished. There are very concrete reasons for this which some of you may know about, la la.

Sunday, more of that. Made a lot of progress, and now I owe the mailing list some mail. Before bed had a lengthy phone meeting with daerr about our sinister summer plans.

Also:
Dropped in on cthulhia for a game of Upwords, which I hadn't played before. (I liked it OK.) Loaned her the novel I just finished.

Felt like buying a game, because, you know, I'm just not spending enough money. Lots of BGG top-20 stuff at Your Move. I almost bought War of the Ring (I surely am destined to pick it up eventually), which is said to be a most excellently designed wargame, but I think I'm still feeling LotR burnout, and the steep price tag ($60) was enough to turn me off for now. Spent two-thirds of that amount on Ticket to Ride instead. It's a gorgeous game that I've been playing a lot online, and I'm looking forward to bringing it to HoRGN on Tuesday.

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As for The Game Shelf: The way things are falling out with classes and all (assuming that SCAT will actually let me register at some point), I think that I'll try scheduling an hours-long studio reservation in mid-late May to film several board games, using the footage from one or two of these for the pilot, and the rest for later episodes (if it looks like we can actually make a series from it). Will send out invitations to known-interesteds when I have a better idea how that-all is working.

Comments

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

Is War of the Ring the wargame that was out long before the Peter Jackson movies? I used to have a War of the Ring wargame which had oodles of little army chips, and a bunch of character and monster cards, and a barrow wight was represented as kind of floating in tattered robes .. a skeleton holding a sword in one hand and making the daughter of Bush symbol with its other hand, wearing a crown or helmet of deer antlers, with a crescent moon behind it.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Nope, I'm thinking of a game released last year that uses plastic miniatures, as the new crop of jmac-approved wargames tend to do (see also my continuing infatuation with Memoir '44 and its dozens of little green army men).

The game you're thinking of is either this or this. Interestingly, they all seem to use the same mechanic of a traditional map-based wargame with a simultaneous and separate Frodo-and-Sam track.

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

It was the 1977 one. IIRC (look, look, an acronym), the box used to have the Balrog on the cover like on the rules book, but then when the Bakshi cartoon came out, the box art was altered. None of the other art in the game was.

There was another game I think by the same company, about previous ages (or age) in Middle Earth, and that one was called Sauron. I didn't have that one, but I remember its representational art was a wraith-looking figure standing high above evil troops.

For the 1977 game, I think characters had wills which had to do with how well they could withstand the ring. Monsters were part of a deck of cards meant to be shuffled, along with "not really a monster" monster cards that were in fact simply frightening rumors, so you could wind up with a barrow wight in Moria, or maybe get an "oh, there's actually nothing here" type of card.