July Crisis

Another night where I dont focus on game design or my regular job. Instead, we do a session of Mothership and pretend the world isn't awful for a few hours.

That's a pretty cool inheritance to have.

The host had an awesome setup. And if you look real close you'll see a bunch of Mega Force models laying around

Some more pics from the game

The scenario had some fun meta aspects to it. The conceit was we're living in the Succession Wars era and are watching a dramatic holovid of an SLDF Force running s rescue mission while fighting off Amaris Dragoons. Getting my heavy mech's pilot killed immediately really added to the narrative.

All that to say, Alpha strike has reignited my love of BattleTech. Even though my King Crab took a headshot on turn one, I still had an awesome time.

Played my first game of Battletech Alpha Strike this weekend. Back in the 90s I used to play BattleTech fairly frequently. Personally, I don't have the bandwidth for a full BattleTech game anymore either mentally or schedule-wise. More power to y'all that can manage it though.

No Android app...bummer.

This sounds like a great way to attract the worst possible most desperate employees. Or those that are likely to join a cult and disappear entirely

I always seem to do my best brainstorming when I'm existing in that brief liminal space between wakefulness and sleep. Would be awesome if I didn't forget 90% of my ideas though.

Played my first game of Sails of Glory last night. I played a lot of Wooden Ship & Iron Men back in the day and feel like my experience there helped me demolish the hated British.

Thats a good one. I read a ton of BT in the 90s and for some reason never read this one until a couple years ago.

Dumping was the right call for my score but in the end did not change the outcome. The weakest player went bust and a I ended up in 2nd place. The winner did have an asterisk on his performance. We allowed him to issue 2 shares for 2 companies in the first OR, instead of 1 each.

In Operating Round 3.2 I realized I was going to lose my 4 to rust before I could afford a 7 to replace it. So I dumped 5 shares of the most valuable stock. When we finish Ill let yall know if the gambit worked for me.

Got in my second game of Railways of the Lost Atlas. I'm generally pretty terrible at 18xx games even though I play them a ton. This one moves much smoother than most and the random map each game is really fun. Also buying a lnd running a train on your first turn is something all 18xx should do.

Careful now, you might end up as a heavily edited review blurb on the box. Something like"...an experiment and...actually worked...it looked good"

You're getting a follow simply because of ol' JB in your profile pic

The system would work pretty well with WW1. Artillery is very abstracted currently so I'd probably need to tweak things a good bit to represent the long ranges and devastating effect it had in European battlefields.

Yup, Anteitam has been my test map. I have several others in the works, 1st/2nd Manassas, Sherman's Atlanta Campaign to name a couple.

You could call this the dumb guys version of Napoleon's Triumph. the combat system is dramatically simplified and uses dice unlike the elegant NT system, which involves hidden unit strengths and no dice. I certainly drew much inspiration from the game, but didn't use many of its mechanics.

I had an epiphany in the middle of the night last week on a game design I've been struggling with for the last year. I completely overhauled the command and combat systems and ended up with something that is fast playing, minimal player downtime, light on rules, and most of all fun.

At the Williamsburg Muster this weekend and had the opportunity to host a game of FlickFleet from Eurydice Games. Super fun and easy to learn, perfect for a con.

I own a couple of the boxes with the laser cut acrylic ships. But I also bought everything in STL so I can print out massive fleets.

A poorly draw hex map showing the north eastern US

Started learning Inkscape last year. I'd been using a bootleg copy of MS Publisher, needless to say this is quite the upgrade. I'm completely out to sea on 90% of the functions of this program and I'm 100% certain I'm doing things in the slowest most inefficient ways possible.