Recently I've been wasting spending a lot of time on BoardGameGeek. I took advantage of the site to make some trades, and so today three games I traded for arrived: Colossal Arena, Hacienda, and Ys. When I opened the box, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the guy who sent it had also thrown in Station Master and Iliad because he felt bad about ( Read more... )

I thought this review was pretty well written, as the author seems to be pretty even-handed and unbiased. He's critical, but he seems to be criticizing the game on its own merits, rather than criticizing the changes because they're changes. He also doesn't seem to have the "get of my lawn you damn kids" attitude that I've noticed in some of the ( Read more... )

Yesterday, I spent about 15 minutes perusing the D&D 4th edition books. These are the impressions I came away with ( Read more... )

Recently, aquatea gave me a gift certificate to a gaming store, because she's cool like that. I used it to buy an rpg called Cadwallon that I've had my eye on for a while. This is probably the most beautiful rpg I've ever seen. The artwork is incredibly rich and full of flavor, and very different in tone from the typical D&D-influenced fantasy art I've ( Read more... )

Thirty is an 73-page indie rpg written by John Wick that's available as a pdf download from Wick's game company, Wicked Dead Brewing Company. Thirty is about the question of what happened to the 30 Templar Knights who disappeared, along with the Templar's treasure, when the Inquisition came to arrest the Templars for heresy in the 14th century. ( Read more... )

Last night I played Princes of Florence, a boardgame that I'd played maybe two or three times before, the last time being, I think, at GenCon '05. The premise is of the game is that the players are Renaissance-era nobles (from Florence, natch) competing for status by sponsoring the works of various scholars, artists, scientists, and so on. Each of ( Read more... )

The True20 system is the result of gamers taking the Blue Rose rpg and throwing out all the system-specific stuff. What they ended up with was a stripped down version of the d20 rules that can, theoretically, be applied to any setting. Character classes are gone; instead there are three broad archetypes - adept, expert, and warrior - that are ( Read more... )

In 1974 the president of Americo, Stanton Spobeck, was about to resign in the face of a massive political scandal, when a massive earthquake hit, plunging the west coast into the sea, and Spobeck declared he would stay in office until the state of emergency was over. It’s now 1976, Spobeck is still in power, and things have only gotten worse. The ( Read more... )

This is just for my personal use.

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http://www.llbbl.com/data/RPG-motivational/page_01.htm

edited, because all the picture links are broken, which annoys me to no end.