Pair O’ Dice Games

Last night was my first opportunity to play Vegas Showdown with five players. With three or four players it’s a game I enjoy immensely, but adding a fifth player seemed to break it (despite the scale enhancements in the rules).

While we didn’t implement it quite in time to save last night’s game, here’s a simple house rule that I think will keep the game fun when playing with five.

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Playing Dominion with a random supply can be fun sometimes, but inevitably requires slight editing of the random selection to ensure a range of prices and effect types. Here’s simple house rule inspired by that editing process that takes things a step further for more fun semi-random supply sets in Dominion.

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Want to try your hand at designing custom ships for Silent Death? The new Ship Builder app is now live! Check it out!

Then battle your friends’ ships in Silent Death!

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I just wanted to make a brief mention of excellent multiplayer rules for a game I have a special soft spot for: Netrunner.

The Big Sell-Out is a Netrunner variant for four (or more) players, pairing a runner with their corporate “sponsor” for cyber-hijinks in the vein of Magic’s Two-Headed Giant.

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My group played Dominion: Intrigue, Kung-Fu Fighting, and Wreckage, and instead of an in-depth analysis or review I thought it might be fun to share a few quick thoughts on the experience with each game.

Plus a card set for Dominion: Intrigue.

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Rolemaster is a fantasy role playing game with a detailed combat system. Here I’ll provide some tips players of low level characters can use to stay alive, and kick some butt.

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I tend to prefer being a gamemaster versus a player in a role playing game. Thus I read a lot of role playing books. This weekend I finally started a new activity while reading that I’ve been thinking about for a while: I’m taking notes.

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First let me say, I do plan to get back to writing here soon but work has been beyond insane lately and I simply have not had the time to game enough (at least for my taste) much less write about gaming.

However, I did want to say that for those interested in the game, Eclipse Phase can now be purchased in PDF format!

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Since my return from Origins I have been distracted, both by the myriad of games I have been playing and by the piles of work that seemed to amass from simply taking two days off. I have a few posts I would like to write but I have simply not had the time to focus on them and get them done. Still I wanted to take a little bit of time and write about three games that are on my radar.

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Last weekend I went with Josh and a couple long-time friends to Columbus, OH for this year’s Origins gaming convention. It was the first big convention for most of us, and I snapped a few pictures to commemorate the event as well as bringing back some thoughts and observations that might be of interest to anyone who considered going but didn’t make it (and possibly to those who did make it as well).

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Just an interesting tidbit from the Dominion: Intrigue instruction book.

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If you have a D&DI subscription you can head over to Wizards.com and check out Revenants.

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Spielfrieks user group, of which I am now a member, has narrowed their choices for the Meeples Choice Award down to 25 selections. The original lists were quite extensive so while this may still look a bit unwieldy it’s certainly better than what came before.

The list is as follows:

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A couple weeks ago I decided to take a break from my Dungeons and Dragons game. I love the system, it’s such a vast improvement over 3.x (for me anyway) that I can hardly consider them the same game at all. Still, running a game can be stressful and I’ve been pretty tired lately.

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So, now we have the answers to all of our speculations. Dominion: Intrigue is a bit less intriguing in that all the cards are available for your perusal and in addition the rules have been released in pdf format on Rio Grande’s site.

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Since we started playing BSG The Board Game (and boy have we played it, I would say we have played this game more than any other recently) we have bantered about “the expansion”. Mind you no expansion had been announced but hey, it’s Fantasy Flight there HAS to be an expansion coming.

Well… now it’s official!

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All of the new cards for Dominion have been posted on BGG. I suggest you get over there and check them out and then come back here and comment. I know that’s what I plan to do!

Small changes going on this time at Pair O’ Dice Games. I’ve added a sidebar on the right (yeah, dramatic, huh?).

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Tric Trac a French online game magazine has posted three more Dominion cards.

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This is pretty cool! Days of Wonder is having a design contest for Small World. Many of us had already assumed that there would be some kind of expansion for the game and it does indeed look like the company has plans for this.

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Today Wizards announced some new stuff coming soon to D&D Insider. In addition to the (already mentioned) Players Handbook 3 content that will be pre-released on D&D Insider, the insider will have an exclusive race and an exclusive class that, according to Bill Slavicsek, will never appear in any book.

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The Dice Tower has announced their Gaming Awards for 2008 and I wanted to comment on them briefly.

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In my Review of Reviews post I touched upon some of my thoughts on reviewing games. As I have been thinking more about game reviews lately I felt like addressing some of these thoughts.

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Just over a year ago I wrote a post that I called The State of My Gaming Life. It was basically a rundown of all the gaming I was doing at the time. Honestly it was pretty self indulgent and rather pointless but kind of fun to write and neat to look back upon.

My goal is to continue this annual posting so that I (and others if they so desire) can look back and see what has changed and so that those who wish to understand a bit more about me as I write about other topics have this information available to them.

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We already have a pretty good idea where they are trying to take Dominion from the discussions and comments over at BGG but we get an even clearer look from the three cards previewed in Finland and translated by some fine folks for us.

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Thanks to a BGN post I have learned that there is a game company out there called Pair-of-Dice. With our names being so similar and the fact that they too offer Print and Play games I thought I should throw a link up for them.

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For the past few weeks the site has been acting up, courtesy of our [previous] web host. My apologies to our readers and contributors.

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I already Twittered about this but I decided I wanted to write a bit more after reading through the rules, which can be found here.

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Recently my life has felt rather chaotic and not in the old “chaotic good” kind of way but more in the “completely confused or disordered” kind of way from dictionary.com. I don’t really want to go into my problems, everyone has problems of their own of course, but it did kind of make me think about something I have been missing recently in games: chaos.

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Scott has been looking into getting Twitter set up on this blog. One of the main reasons I have been asking for it is things like this post. Generally these posts are simply things I have found amusing and thus wanted to share but often don’t because I don’t feel as though they deserve a full “post”.

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Dave Arneson has passed away. Just the other day The Escapist had a posting about Arneson, who some believed had already passed. Unfortunately after a two year battle with cancer Arneson has indeed left this world.

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A while back it was mentioned on one of the BGG forums that Dominion: Intrigue would have rules for playing with up to eight players but that the eight would be divided into two “tables” of players. I made some kind of snide comment (you can search for it if you want) saying that the rules would be “to play with eight players, divide the Kingdom Cards in half and play two games!” but after popping over to Rio Grande today I noticed that yes, indeed, they are touting Dominion as an eight-player game.

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Recently I put together an Amazon Wish List and, lo and behold, it has a bunch of games on it!

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Wizards has posted a playtest article for what they call Hybrid Characters, if you’re an Insider member you can check it out.

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This is truly a bit of randomness but I really don’t care. Anyone that knows me knows I love rats. I find them to be incredibly fascinating animals that are also amazing pets. Recently my wife and I adopted two new baby rats that will be joining Bartleby and Rufus shortly. For now they are in a separate cage.

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Everyone who plays Dominion has a few ideas of what they think would be cool to add to the mix of kingdom cards. Pat and I were discussing a few ideas a while back and thought it would be neat to have a card called Sheriff that was basically a moat that gave treasure instead of cards. I think we agreed that it would most likely be a 3 cost card that gave two treasure but had the Moat reaction ability. Seems, at a glance, like this would be a decent card and we found it pretty thematic.

I was thinking about some card ideas and came up with a card I would like to see in the next next expansion (Seaside).

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So for those of you who are like me and are eagerly awaiting the next Dominion expansion we have three of the cards that will be appearing in it. I have spoken a lot about Dominion and its expansions in the past. Here are the cards:

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Recently I have been thinking a lot about casual games and I wanted to ramble about these thoughts and provide you all with a small theory I have.

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One of my players was a bit unhappy with his characters plot (or rather lack there of) and decided he wanted to bring in a new character. As he was one of the two leaders in our six-player party he decided to stick with a leader character but bring in a Shaman as they are good at group healer while the other leader, a Cleric, could hand the single target big heals. In our first game with this character things seemed to go fairly well but an issue came up with one of his paragon path powers (say that three times fast!).

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Matt Thrower has a problem with language independent games and he decided to voice this problem over on Board Game News. If you scroll down you will see that I commented on his post and I wanted to make sure I linked from here to there.

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This post is sort of a follow up post to what I wrote yesterday about Dominion as we have a bit of information right from The Donald himself. (No… not Trump but he had a pretty cool game too!)

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I was planning on picking up a copy of the Player’s Handbook 2 at our local game store yesterday but when I stopped in I didn’t see any copies. It’s possible they weren’t out yet or I missed them but after getting back to my house and having two of my players bring copies, a third mentioned they had one on order, and a fourth said they would probably pick up a copy at some point, I decided that spending the money for a copy of my own just felt like throwing money away.

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So, I was on BGG yesterday popping around and I saw this forum title: Reallocation: the uber card. This made me scratch my head as I have discussed just how bad I thought Reallocation was. This lead me back to the rules and to discover that we had been doing something wrong for all of the years we have been playing.

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A couple things recently have gotten me thinking about local game stores and I decided I just wanted to post a quick little ramble about them. I would, as always, love to hear some comments about this topic so please stick around and leave a few words.

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I have a few pieces of info I wanted to share but neither really felt like they deserved their own post so I crammed them together. It’s days like this that I wish we had a twitter on this blog…

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Over the past few months I have played a lot of new games. I have written about some of them briefly and reviewed others but there are a few I have played that I haven’t even mentioned yet.

The three that spring to mind are Agricola, Shogun, and Android.

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Click here for a bit more info about Rebel vs Imperium for Race for the Galaxy.

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I have been following Small World, a new game coming from Days of Wonder, for a couple weeks now and I wanted to put up a couple links to some information about it.

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I just wanted to link to Critical Hits in the same way that I linked to The Core Mechanic as they both linked to my skill challenge example.

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I already mentioned that BGG was going to be distributing the Envoy card for Dominion but I just noticed today that the Geek is now taking orders and not only do you get your Envoy cards (10 plus 1 for randomizing) for your 1 cent plus 4.99 shipping but you also get a copy of Black Market.

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