When I've earned enough XP in Pathfinder or Tales of the Valiant, or Requisition Points in a Warhammer 40,000 Crusade, or victories in Mansions of Madness, I convert those game points into real-world currency. The only bank that takes game points in exchange for cash is me, but exchanging ga...
I'm reading The Hobbit again, as I roleplay as a Tolkien scholar in an attempt to understand Middle Earth, its lore, and its effect on modern gaming. I'm reviewing each chapter of the book as I read, and this is my review of the final 2, Chapter 18: The journey home and Chapter 19: "The last s...
I'm reading The Hobbit again, as I roleplay as a Tolkien scholar in an attempt to understand Middle Earth, its lore, and its effect on modern gaming. I'm reviewing each chapter of the book as I read, and this is my review of Chapter 17: The clouds burst.
This review contains spoilers.
What
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Cannon Fodder 2: Females is a 28mm model kit by Wargames Atlantic that provides 24 female sci fi soldiers. I bought it because I needed a bunch of sci fi soldier miniatures, and I wanted some of them to be women. This is my review of the kit.
First of all, the models look great. Sculpt quality of...
Planning ahead for future adventures, I found myself in need of some dwarf miniatures. Citadel miniatures may well have top tier models, but they're very specific to Games Workshop games (I do wonder sometimes why they don't expand their line to include common mythical creatures). For that reason, m...
I helped fund a Kickstarter for dice with unusual number ranges. I ended up with several sets that include a d22, d19, d18, d17, d15, d13, d11, and d9, plus a hexadecimal dice (1 to F), a d3 in Roman numerals, and a d26 alphabet dice. My intent was to spring them on my players when their character h...
I'm reading The Hobbit again, as I roleplay as a Tolkien scholar in an attempt to understand Middle Earth, its lore, and its effect on modern gaming. I'm reviewing each chapter of the book as I read, and this is my review of Chapter 15: The gathering of the clouds and Chapter 16: A thief in t...
As obvious as it may seem, when I play a tabletop game with a roleplaying element to it, I never lose sight of where I am. I'm always aware that I'm sat at a table, manipulating game tokens or character sheets, flipping through pages of rules, rolling dice, and so on. After the game is over, and I'm...
I'm reading The Hobbit again, as I roleplay as a Tolkien scholar in an attempt to understand Middle Earth, its lore, and its effect on modern gaming. I'm reviewing each chapter of the book as I read, and this is my review of Chapter 14: Fire and water.
This review contains spoilers.
What h
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Back when I bought my first box of Warhammer 40,000 miniatures, I naïvely expected to open the box, follow the assembly instructions, and end up with a valid battle unit. What I found instead was that every soldier in the box could be assembled with any one of several weapons, heads (helmet and no...
There aren't any simple armies in the Warhammer 40,000 game. Even if you field 4 units of the same one-trick soldiers, there are army rules and enhancements and detachments and stratagems to consider. Simply put, Warhammer 40,000 is a game designed to provide options to the player and force diff...
I've been running dnd for a long time. The number of times I've asked a female player what class she'd like to play and she's answered "witch" is not insignificant. For a long while, this was solved pretty easily by just using Pathfinder, which I appreciated because it was a great excuse to run Path...
I'm reading The Hobbit again, as I live-action roleplay as a Tolkien scholar in an attempt to understand Middle Earth, its lore, and its effect on modern gaming. I'm reviewing each chapter of the book as I read, and this is my review of Chapter 13: Not at home.
This review contains spoilers....
Every time I play a complex board game, I think about crafting an organiser tray for all the game pieces. This imagined tray would have compartments for cards of varying sizes, tokens, dice, and so on, for several player characters, to help me manage and preserve the state of an ongoing game. A lot...
For the past year, I've been running Tales of the Valiant (ToV) for my local gaming group's weekly game session. The campaign started with Princes of the Apocalypse but after several side quests, the players have become thoroughly distracted and it's now a mix of Princes, Saltmarsh, and random K...
I love a good solo or co-op game, but I also happen to play a few board games with programmed "game masters". Sometimes it's a book, sometimes it's a deck of cards (as with Fallout the Board Game), and sometimes it's an app (as with Mansions of Madness). When something's programmed, it's essen...