Games
- First RPG you played: WEG Star Wars
- Last RPG you played: Blades in the Dark
- RPG you played most often: Burning Wheel
- RPG you recommend: Dominion Rules is a hidden open source gem #ttrpg #ttrpgs
- Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters - light game, great with kids, excellent production/pieces/art
- Castle Panic - it’s tower defense: the board game
- Dutch Blitz - a staple among many Mennonite families, hailing from back when regular playing cards were not permitted
- Sushi Go! - I hadn’t played this in many years, but came back from last place 2nd round to win 3rd due to some strategic pudding reserves
- Shipwreck Arcana - I love love love this game for the deductive gameplay, intriguing art, cooperative play, and small game size
- pioneer in transparency, character goals, “say yes”, “let it ride”, and “use-based improvement”
- emergent story, character, & setting complexity
- unique, character-driven play
- minigames
- rewards mastery
- Bidiots: where you create “fine art” and then bid on art at auction
- Push the Button: where you have to figure out who the aliens are on the ship
A couple of my friends are launching a crowdfunded game, soon:
🎲 The Real Thing RPG an official Faith No More 🎶 PbtA game.
🕹 Feeling Mighty. That’s three days in a row with our new strategy.
🎲
🎲 First official RPG credits and the collection is gorgeous!
🎲 Torchbearer 2nd ed. set showed up, but won’t have a chance to look at it til tomorrow. Ob 4 Will test.
🎲 Played D&D and didn’t roll the dice once.
Doing it wrong?
or
Doing it very right?
Still think I’ll get a Steam Deck and Play.Date before I can find a PS5
You have quite a treasure in that Horadric Cube….
🎲 Took a break from GMing our long-running Burning Wheel setting, and we’re doing a little #DND5E
I’m playing a hobbitses merchant who accidentally made a deal with a fey. (Warlock) Gonna be pretty fun.
🎲 online or in-person for games asks Jeremy.
I love the convenience of online, and the tools have become very good. It’s amazing as a GM.
As a player, I find it can be distracting, as other things are constantly trying to grab my attention. At the table, I can put my phone away. It’s a little more complicated online, but I’ve developed steps to limit distractions when playing that way.
🎲 Enjoyed a game night with some folks from church.
Totally unplanned, but also perfectly appropriate for Mennonites, we ended up mostly playing collaborative games and Dutch Blitz.
Nice to pick up a book with contributions from a number of people I’ve met. 🎲📚
We had a going away party for the MYF (Mennonite Youth Fellowship, our high school youth group) seniors that were off to college. Good to celebrate and reminisce, and I got schooled at spikeball.
🎲 Paper App Dungeon is too easy to grind. You can just keep carefully moving and backtracking to avoid the bad stuff and hit the good stuff.
Suggestion: -1 HP anytime you cross over a path you’ve already trod, as your character experiences exhaustion.
What rules have you changed?
Beautiful Trouble updated their toolkit.
With the new toolkit you can slice and dice depending on what you are considering, and also create pdfs from your favorites.
This is a nice online companion to the deck of cards.
🎲 Great writeup of my favorite game system(s): Burning Wheel 🔥☸️
Summarizing:
2020: 🃏, 🎲, & 🕹 Review
To view other 2020 review posts, visit the main post here.
As you may already know, I enjoy games. Especially ones with a social element, or where we get to create some sort of emergent story together. In the year of the pandemic, a lot of traditional card and board games were harder to play (unless you took them digital or used tabletop simulation software).
Pandemic Gaming
For a handful of pandemic get-togethers, we played some Jackbox Party Pack games over Discord. Ones I particularly enjoyed include:
On that note, Among Us became another hit this year, with not too dissimilar play. I played this with some groups online, as well.
At home, we played some classic Hand & Foot, a rummy-like game where you have two hands (a hand and a foot, get it?). I’d link to rules, but like many of these classic card games, it seems like every family has their own version, and ours doesn’t match the varieties I’ve seen online.
Role-Playing Games
On the role-playing games front, I played a variety of things this year, as online games continued to work well. We typically play online with just a video conferencing tool and then Rolz for our chat & rolling.
My local game participated in a playtest for Torchbearer 2nd Edition. Torchbearer and Mouse Guard are a tight version of the Burning Wheel engine. I had not played very much of Torchbearer 1st edition, because our group is often playing different kinds of adventures than what it was best suited for. But 2nd edition is honing many things and introducing tools to facilitate more types of playstyles. I’m very excited about what Luke & Thor have created and am looking forward to this release. (Watch for our names in the credits!)
When the playtest was over, we took our setting (Mauragaaqtuq) back to core Burning Wheel, starting our 4th game in the setting (the 4 being: a long BW campaign, a one-shot LARP, the TB playtest campaign, and now another BW campaign). I’m really impressed by the richness that the players (aided by system components such as Wises, Circles, and Beliefs) have added to the setting. We just started Season 2 of Mauragaaqtuq: Murder of Crows.
My already-online game group with friends from Puerto Rico and Chicago (which also got our start years ago, playing Burning Wheel in the Wheel of Time setting….yes, of course we called it “Burning Wheel of Time”) has tried a few things this year.
First, we had a game set in Shadows of Esteren but using the Blood & Bone system. This was tough, as we were trying to simplify and not do a lot of homework, but it was tough to do in practice. The game engine took a lot of nods from things that worked in other games, but IMO failed to deliver them as a cohesive set.
Next, we went on to playing a fantasy-historical game set in a mythic version of Tyre. We used the hidden gem of a game engine Dominion Rules, with some added house rules. This is my favorite open source game, and still feel like it has a lot of potential many years after its release. Alas, this did not last as there was some COVID burnout.
Now, we are on to something new…err old. We’re using Palladium 1st edition and engaging classic dungeon-delving in a published module. Palladium Fantasy is new to me (though I’ve done a little Rifting back in the day), and I’m not big on the “old school” nostalgia (partially because “old school” for me isn’t Palladium and original D&D but West End Games' Star Wars, and partially because the “scene” is rife with miscreants and vice-signalling), but I’m having fun because the group is fun and I’m leaning into the randomness and weirdness of the setting and system.
Over break, I got to play the Labyrinth Adventure Game with my niece and nephew, and this was a blast. It’s a beautifully produced product with a simple system & great scenes that offer a lot of replayability for zany adventures to get back things stolen by the Goblin King. In contrast to many RPGs, there is plenty of excitement and adventure without having to focus on fighting.
As for live action games (or LARPs), those were mostly cancelled this year (and for good reason), but some communities continued to get together in chat and audio events. I played in a handful of these events on Discord, with my One World by Night main character, but obviously it is not the same.
Video Games
I tend to play non-twitchy open world-type games. This is both so that I can listen to podcasts or audiobooks while I play, and because I don’t need the adrenaline from twitchy games. (I get enough of that working in cybersecurity, TYVM.)
As in years past, most of my video game time was spent in the Bethesdaverse (e.g. Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, particularly, the “online” varieties this year) and the Borderlands franchise. I’m mostly on Elder Scrolls Online recently (add me for Mac/PC/Stadia: @groten), as I’ve got some family and friends who are playing, too.
I played some Disgaea as well, and though I love this game, the menus and repetitive motion mean that I can’t play very much at a time without sore hands/wrists, so I end up quitting before getting through the postgame fun. I hope they will come up with some improvements on that for future games.
What did you play this year? Any recommendations?
2020 Review
As has become my tradition, I’m spending the week around year-end reflecting each day. We grow most rapidly when we lean into and learn from challenges, and 2020 was certainly a year of many challenges.
While many of my reflections are private material, I will share reflections and recommendations in the following categories: