Rolling Freight and Pathfinder
This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2012/05/26/rolling-freight-and-pathfinder.
Boy, having a kid changes how you do stuff.
Way back a year ago, before I had had to stop freelancing to get insurance, I was a fairly early user of http://www.kickstarter.com/, enjoying searching the site and finding things to put money down on. This was way before the explosion of board game kickstarters, and so when the kickstarter for Rolling Freight showed up I was all in on a copy. For one, my wife runs the train gaming at GenghisCon and is a major train gamer, and I thought she'd probably find having a copy of this useful. For another, I had a lot of disposable income when I was freelancing. I figured it would have been a great Christmas present for Tammy last year, but production of the game dragged on, and amusingly enough I got the package only a few days shy of the first anniversary of when the kickstarter finished.
But, however much time it took to finally get the game, it did finally arrive, and recently (after Rose was abed) Tammy and I dug it out for a quick game. We liked it, so we brought it along to a gaming meetup locally and gave it another try, although we weren't able to finish the game because of Rose needing to go.
Basically, it's a fun game. The system involves rolling a bunch of color-sided dice for 'resources', but a fair number of things can be bought partially or totally with just generic dice, so a few bad rolls don't set you too far back. Unlike the crayon rail games, the possible tracks are fixed between towns, and it's the demands that are set and the supply of goods that is (mostly) random.
It's a lot of fun, but if I were to put down one piece of advice, it's this: The rules say you can only deliver one load per turn... so that means that on every turn, it's important to try and deliver a load. You won't always be able to, and there might be good reasons not to this turn - but it's something you need to get done.
In other news, I'm refocusing my regular gaming on online games. It's getting difficult to play games in real life, because that involves a regular chunk of time out of my life where I need to leave home... which is something that my wife frowns on because she'd like some company in the evenings. Or, it's a game at home, and then my wife gets pretty distracted by babystuff and doesn't really get to game.
So, when a coworker of mine proposed an online Pathfinder game, I decided to go for it. I've never really played Pathfinder before, but I've got piles upon piles of 3.5 manuals, so it's not that different. I enjoy wizards, often, so this time I went with trying out the Summoner class, which is a sorcerer variant which is able to summon something that levels with him, in addition to piles of Summon Monster spells. It's a bit complex to build, as I'm effectively creating two different characters, but we played our first game last week and so far I'm enjoying how it goes.