International TableTop Day 2016! This year’s 12 games!

It’s our 4th International TableTop Day! We have spent each year of this event by recommending 12 games before, so here’s our games from 2013, 2014, and 2015. But it’s 12 whole different games for this year, so you can see all those after the jump. A couple of words about each, and if you have any questions, you’ll find some TableTop videos or you can ask us questions in the comments!

Advertisement

Completionism and Board Game Expansions

So when looking on Amazon, and trying to finish an order (used to be for free shipping, now more from trying to round out a gift card…), I usually look back through my ever-increasing wish list of board games and card games. Good stuff – some we’ve seen on TableTop, some we’ve played, some that are recommended.

And then, just a huge amount of expansions.

Expansions to board games is a growing and exploding market. They tend to add a lot to a game – not only in terms of content and new stuff and new rules and options, but replayability. Suddenly there’s so much going on with the game – often a bunch that you haven’t experienced, or haven’t experienced in combination – that it’s always great.

Recently we realized – we don’t actually have a complete game set. Well, maybe for Miskatonic School for Girls… we got the expansion for that.

Though we haven’t played this expansion yet…

In other words, we have this whole game because it only has one expansion! That’s a really low amount for games anymore. So let me consider a few that we could pursue because we are close or interested – then I’d love to know what you think, or if you have any complete games, in the comments below!

Interview: Platypus Con 2016!

The new Platypus Gaming logo (by Pat Race: http://alaskarobotics.com/)

While we haven’t been able to do as much this year with Platypus Con as we did last year (just going to throw the Geek Baby under the bus here and blame her…), we’re still excited for the convention – and it’s this coming weekend! The busy event organizer took a few minutes and answered some questions about the Con, now in its second year.

You can find more about Platypus Con on their site, Platypus Gaming, and you can buy tickets here.

How do you do a roleplaying game via YouTube? Titansgrave.

We’ve been watching things from Geek & Sundry since before this blog started. We’ve been watching TableTop since the beginning. And we’ve listened to some of Wil Wheaton’s explanation as to why there are some games that are just harder to do on the show.

Which generally included Roleplaying Games, although they’ve done several multi-part episodes to show a little bit of roleplaying (and are in fact in the middle of doing so right now). But it’s hard to do – there’s a lot of thinking, and inside jokes, and imagination, and not a lot to show. Not without a lot of work.

All of which seems to be a problem they have done a lot to solve. They’ve created a new show, which I’m surprised Holly and I didn’t run and share immediately. But some of it is that it’s sucked us in more, week after week. It’s good. We care about the characters at this point – and you can tell the players do. And one of the best things that happens is Wil Wheaton gets the players to flesh out the small details of the world.

The show is called Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana, and it’s amazing. It’s ten episodes in now, and episode nine was particularly harrowing. Not that I suggest starting there: no no, start early. For fun, for glory. For five gold and a party.

Here’s the show in playlist form, starting with the introduction to the world!

Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories as the Munchkin Video Game

I have been playing Kingdom Hearts 1.5 on Playstation 3 and recently started the game Chain of Memories which originally came out on the Gameboy Advanced. I never got to play Chain of Memories originally so it has been really interesting to play through it now. There are some aspects of the game that I am not a huge fan of, but the story is the tie-in between Kingdom Hearts 1 and Kingdom Hearts 2.

The element that is particularly intriguing (although not always well executed) are the use of cards. The cards are used to generate rooms and to make attacks. David actually points out that there are quite a few elements that are reminiscent of Munchkin and Munchkin Quest and in fact could serve as a great example of how to make a Munchkin Video Game.

Munchkin Quest in action! From this post.