Blog Archives
sThe First Class Monsters of the Tunnels & Trolls Game
Wednesday , 20, September 2017 Tabletop Games Leave a commentMonsters! Monsters! is a fascinating game. Keep in mind that the publication of role-playing games had only begun two years before. This was followed up with the 1975 release of “the poor man’s alternative to D&D”, Tunnels & Trolls. Monsters! Monsters! was released during America’s bicentennial and notice TSR’s response the next year. They produced the […]
This was our first game so we were overwhelmed by the number of options at the beginning. The sixth event to come out was a propaganda card, so those opening turns mostly involved us trading “Op + Special” moves with very little impact on the relative scores. In this phase, we behaved as if resources […]
Classic Traveller: Session Report 2
Thursday , 7, September 2017 Tabletop Games, Traveller, Uncategorized 1 CommentSo. I haven’t posted session reports since Jeffro, as a player, has been posting reports of our sessions. For a summary of how things have gone see these posts: http://www.castaliahouse.com/classic-traveller-session-report/ http://www.castaliahouse.com/on-the-table-honest-to-goodness-classic-traveller/ http://www.castaliahouse.com/on-the-table-journey-to-the-planet-of-the-amazon-women/ http://www.castaliahouse.com/on-the-table-pure-unadulterated-traveller/ However, I thought it time for an update of the overall course of things. The party has split. We have a Freetrader […]
ON THE TABLE: Silent Victory… to the Death!
Wednesday , 6, September 2017 Tabletop Games Leave a commentWhy is the solitaire war game Silent Victory way better with two players? Because context is everything. Oh sure, it does keep you honest. A player is liable to forget bonus and rolls that aren’t in his favor. Having two people on board makes for a much tighter ship. But having two players going through […]
ON THE TABLE: Can’t Stop Playing Silent Victory!
Thursday , 31, August 2017 Tabletop Games 4 CommentsThis game is really is an entirely different beast from The Hunters. Compared to the Germans, there’s a much greater chance of pulling an unsuccessful mission. Not only are Americans plagued with a greater percentage of duds, but the encounters in the Pacific are much more spartan. It’s so bad, I’ve taken to targeting the […]
What Really Happens in a Traveller Game
Tuesday , 29, August 2017 Tabletop Games, Traveller 14 CommentsClassic Traveller’s original three “little black books” are not broken. They are not incomplete, either. They have everything you need to experience countless hours of science fiction themed gaming. And here’s the thing: a lot stuff that has been tacked onto the game actually gets in the way actual play. It’s tragic. Not that the […]
Grappling! It’s an integral part of mythic adventure from Gilgamesh to Hercules and on to Tarzan. And yet… you just don’t see a whole lot of it happen in tabletop gaming. Why not? Because the rules for grappling have been just plain godawful for decades. And nobody uses them! This is lame. But now there’s […]
Pretty much everybody in the RPG hobby has games they have never played. I am no exception. But, to paraphrase Tolstoy, played games are played all alike, games not played are not played each in their own way. Sometimes the reason really makes no sense. It is a function of human irrationality. Here’s the story […]
Heightened Brain Talent: Tabletop Role-playing’s Debt to Brian Aldiss
Thursday , 24, August 2017 Appendix N, Tabletop Games 6 CommentsOne of the first role-playing games I ever owned was third edition Gamma World from TSR. For those of you that missed it, it’s a weirder, crazier variant of D&D featuring all manner of mayhem in a wild post-apocalyptic future. Instead of fighters, clerics, thieves, and magic-users, players take on the role of pure strain […]
This game. Oh, this game! I really didn’t expect it to be as nail-bitingly fun as it turned out to be. I certainly didn’t expect it to take over the weekly game night. But it did. Because this solitaire game really does get ten times as fun when you play it in two-player mode. It doesn’t […]
WARGAME WEDNESDAY: Marc Gouyon-Rety Interview at The Player’s Aid
Wednesday , 16, August 2017 Tabletop Games, Wargames Leave a commentGMT Games’s much-anticipated Pendragon takes the battle-hardened COIN-system that’s been used to tackle wars in Vietnam and Afganistan… and takes it back in time to the bad old days of Roman Britain when Scotti and Saxons were plundering the land. I got to try out a playtest copy at Prezcon and let me tell you: […]
Veins of the Earth and the Monster of Gravity
Thursday , 10, August 2017 Games, Tabletop Games, Uncategorized 7 CommentsIn an earlier column, I discussed a means to add tension to climbing and swimming in OSR type games by modeling gravity as a grappling monster using Douglas Cole’s Dungeon Grappling rules. I have refined that approach a bit and you can download the revised version here: Monster of Gravity. But, today I’d like to […]