"Okay, so galley #5 is sailing to Tripoli, and buying two crates of spices."

"Tripoli is under my control, so six ducats please."

"Six? You mean two!"

"No, we tripolled our prices. Wo ho ho ho."

(The game in question is Serenissima, one of our favorites.)

A few months ago I came up with a great idea for a creativity exercise: I got a stack of blank index cards and wrote the title of one of my GURPS role-playing game sourcebooks on each one (I have a lot of GURPS books); I draw three at random and try to quickly think of a game setting or plot that would incorporate all three. Today I went through ( Read more... )

"So you're Leprechauns? What do they do ( Read more... )

[We're playing Smallworld, a board game in which players control various fantasy races--elves, dwarves, trolls, etc.--fighting for dominance of the map. When a player's currently active race becomes too weak, he or she may choose to send it into "decline" (e.g. "the age of elves is at an end, the age of man is beginning" from Lord of the Rings) and ( Read more... )

G just played "Scotland the Brave" on pennywhistle using the roar of my spaceship's engines* as the drone note. Truman Household awesomeness has just gone up a level.

* in Kerbal Space Program, a spaceship simulator computer game

(We've been playing through our first attempt at Star Trek: The Deck-Building Game. Pretty fun so far.)

"So it looks like you have to discard Nurse Chapel."

"Aw, but Majel Barrett was helping me win!"

"Don't worry; she plays plenty of other characters too."

Last night I dreamed about playing a board game that, as far as I know, does not exist, but seemed pretty neat. It was sort of a sci-fi/fantasy hybrid strategy game depicting a war between factions of dragons on some other planet, with each player controlling one faction. I think each faction had its own unique elemental magic powers, but I don't ( Read more... )

Our intrepid heroes are piloting their cargo-laden space trucks across the galaxy when a fearsome PIRATE SHIP appears on the viewscreen.

"Okay, you just pulled ahead of me, so they attack you first. This '10' is how many cannons you need to defeat them, this '12' is how many credits you get if you do, and these symbols show where your ship takes ( Read more... )

We just tried playing Martian Backgammon for the first time. I was dubious at first but it turned out to be remarkably fun. Being played with plastic pyramids on an imagined 5x5 grid, it doesn't look anything at all like traditional backgammon, but there are noticeable similarities (and noticeable differences; for instance, piece size matters a ( Read more... )

Last weekend we picked up a copy of the Order of the Stick board game. We've been playing it for hours every night this week... and we're almost done with our first game ( Read more... )