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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Julian Lighton" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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07:42 pm
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Dominion: Seaside
So, it came out on Monday, my copy arrived Friday, and I played it some Friday and a lot today. I haven't seen all the cards in action yet, but I can give an opinion.
It's very good, better than Intrigue so far.
The primary new mechanic is "Action - Duration": an action card that sticks around and does something for you at the start of your next turn as well. They're not as immediately strong as a one-off Action card, but they give your deck consistency. It adds some bookkeeping load, but not much once you get used to it.
The overall theme of the set has been described as setting up your next turn, and it does that fairly well. In addition to the Duration cards, there's quite a few cards to manipulate the top of the deck.
None of the cards looks useless or overly specialized. (I'm sure there's another Thief in the set, but I don't see any Coppersmiths.) Treasury sticks out as likely overpowered, but it may actually be that Market is underpowered. Still, it feels like I'd be willing to pay six for it.
It plays very well. The games felt closer to plain Dominion than to Dominion plus Intrigue -- more straightforward constructive play, less screwing the other players. (Although there was still plenty of that, especially in the game with Throne Room, Cutpurse, and Sea Hag.) Things seemed to move faster, and I'd say the set is more friendly to new players than Intrigue -- there are fewer effects that are complex or require decisions once played.
It also make Intrigue better, just by diluting it. (Don't get me wrong; I like Intrigue, but it's better in smaller doses.)
The production values remain high: the art is better overall than Intrigue, though perhaps not as consistent as the original set. The tokens and play mats provided for some of the card effects are solid, and the mats are small enough to pack in my card boxes with no trouble.
My biggest complaint about the game is that it's getting heavy. I've condensed the sets down from their huge (but nicely-designed) boxes into 400-count trading-card boxes. (Three sleeved sets plus four players' worth of money and VP takes four boxes.)
Current Mood:  tired
Current Music: Garbage, "#1 Crush"
Tags: gaming, review
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05:24 pm
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Dominion Variants
I've been playing a lot of Dominion lately. (Shocking, I know.)
We've been playing locally with a variant where, when the game ends, you still finish the round, so everybody gets the same number of turns. This reduces the advantage of going first.
Another idea to make things fairer is to mandate the 3-4 money split in the first two rounds. The 5-2 is usually way stronger, and it's pure luck.
(It would also be a handicapping method -- give the stronger players 3-4s, and the weaker 5-2s.)
Current Mood:  happy
Current Music: ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) drcpunk figuring out her turn in Dominion
Tags: gaming, geekery, variants
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04:08 pm
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Origins 2009
Been a while since I posted here. I blame Facebook. It's so much easier to toss out a quick status update than to write something that feels worth posting to LJ.
( Anyway, Origins )
All in all, a good con, with no significant low points other than my inability to operate the Board Room. I spent more time in the Looney Labs room this year, and played no Shadowfist. (The only event I was willing to play and had a deck for clashed with Icehouse.)
Current Music: a playlist of various Katamari songs
Tags: gaming, geekery, origins
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02:09 am
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Post-LARP
The game ran. There were some bumps, it could have used at least another week to write it.
But it was good. Not as good as Ghost Fu, but good. We had good players and a solid foundation. We know a lot of what we did wrong, and it's fixable.
Current Mood: fried
Tags: gaming, larp, presque vue
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12:13 pm
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Can I panic yet?
We'll be at Intercon in a week, where we're running two LARPs.
One of them isn't yet written. Yeah; it's mostly written, but I don't think it's as finished as Ghost Fu was at this point last year, and that one was finished at close to the last minute. (Though, to be fair, Ghost Fu had a lot more components to generate.)
Current Mood: worried
Current Music: The Beatles, "Help!"
Tags: gaming, geekery
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05:35 pm
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Sniff
I was just in Neutral Ground for what's likely the last time. (Tomorrow's their last day.)
I've been going there for about thirteen years. A huge portion of my friends, including everybody reading this, are people I met due to events that went on there. (Mostly indirectly, through Shadowfist or meeting mnemex playing Shadowfist.)
They're apparantly hoping to reopen, but I have no high hopes.
Current Mood: sad
Tags: gaming
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03:22 pm
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Well, bugger
Neutral Ground are shutting their doors at the end of the month.
It was always easy to complain about them, but a game store with publicly usable play space in Manhattan was a good thing.
Current Mood: sad
Tags: gaming, sadness
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01:38 am
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Rock Band 2
Picked it up today, and played some with ladymondegreen and akawil.
Really, it's Rock Band 1.5. Most of the rough edges are smoothed out, and there are 84 new songs in the package. (With an additional free 20-song download coming "soon".)
My biggest complaint is that it can't import your RB1 characters. On the other hand, clearer hammer-ons, bands not locked to a character, characters not locked to an instrument, the ability to pick fill-in characters so you don't get the psycho lumberjack singing, instrument-level difficulty visible while picking songs, random setlists that are restricted by difficulty (so nobody has to go through what lordess did, and have to tackle a top-level drum song on their second attempt), and a bunch of other improvements that I forget or haven't yet noticed.
I think it's well worth it if you like this type of game. And supposedly the instruments are better, especially the drums, which won't leave a trail of broken kick pedals wherever they go anymore. (I'm not buying new instruments unless the old ones die.)
Of course, I think everybody else who reads this and might get the game has a PS3, so you all have to wait a month. (Except for zrealm, who got to play before I did.)
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Jonathan Coulton, "Skullcrusher Mountain"
Tags: gaming, review, rock band, video games
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04:39 pm
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Harmonix make me sad
Harmonix just announced which songs from Rock Band won't be able to be exported to be played in Rock Band 2. I'm sure they could have ended up with a worse set of choices from my perspective, but it wouldn't be easy:
Iron Maiden, "Run to the Hills"
Metallica, "Enter Sandman"
Both of these are songs I like quite a lot, and can sing reasonably well. (For me, at least.)
Black Sabbath, "Paranoid"
This is just my favorite song ever, and the only song I've been able to manage to sing consistently on hard. (Not that I've tried many.)
Current Mood: sad
Current Music: Warrior Soul, "Lullaby"
Tags: gaming, rock band, sadness, video games
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12:29 pm
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The 80s left their mark
For the first time in about a month, I'm planning to buy some of the downloadable songs for Rock Band.
And it's Duran Duran.
Current Mood: shocked
Current Music: Metallica, "The Shortest Straw"
Tags: gaming, prattle, rock band, video games
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12:38 am
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Soul Calibur 4
mnemex picked it up today, and I spent some time opening a can of whupass on him.
My first impressions:
( This is longish and likely of limited interest to most of my friends list )
All in all, it's more Soul Calibur. I can't judge the main change to the mechanics very well, but it doesn't feel like an improvement.
If SC3 were available for the Xbox, I'd probably get that and pass on this. As it is, I don't know if I'll get it, but I suspect I will.
Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Metallica, "Leper Messiah"
Tags: gaming, review, video games
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01:35 am
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Immediate DexCon aftermath
I'm home.
'twas a good, if not perfect, con. Had a couple of RPG events that could've been better, one of which was a pretty bad misfire, all things considered. (Probably an acceptable game, run competently, but not for me at all.)
I'd been hoping to get a chance to plat D&D 4, but there were only a couple of events, and the session on Sunday afternoon that I signed up for got canceled, and I'm not in the least bit sad about that. :)
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Nirvana, "Lithium" (internal)
Tags: dexcon, gaming
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01:03 pm
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Polaris at DexCon
Polaris isnlt exactly a role-playing game -- it's more a negotiated storytelling game. Normally, it's the game of tragically doomed prettyboys at the North Pole. (More accurately, knights fighting to defend society from the encroachment of the demons of summer, ultimately doomed to either die or betray their people.)
For this session, we were instead in a science fiction setting, eventually defined as a posthuman society, living in Dyson Spheres, and fighting against an incursion from dark matter beings from another dimension, absorbing the galaxy into a black hole.
This exchange probably best sums up the way things went:
"I'll take over all the AIs, replacing their minds with my own."
"But only if the enemy (who had provided some of the tools needed) end up with a back door into your mind."
"You ask far too much."
"OK. How about: but only if, during the takeover, life support fails throughout civilization, kiling 95% of the biological population."
"Sounds good."
Current Location: DexCon
Current Mood: slightly horrified
Tags: gaming, rpgs
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05:45 pm
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I'm at DexCon
I will return to reality on Sunday night.
Maybe.
For once, I got every event I signed up for. Except for the one I thought I was signing up for, but instead signed up for a D&D 3.5 game from midnight to 4 on Saturday. Apparantly I can't tell the difference between 209 and 296.
I also seem to have managed to sign up for two events simultaneously. Oops. I think I can manage to play in both of those, though.
Current Location: DexCon
Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: The Who, "Behind Blue Eyes" (internal)
Tags: gaming, prattle
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04:34 pm
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That's a lot of music
They've just announced the Rock Band 2 setlist and feature list.
The feature list is nice -- it looks to fix all of the non-hardware annoyances of the first game.
The set list doesn't look as good as the first one, although I don't know a lot of the bands, and even when I do know the band, I don't always know the song. And it's got Jane's Addiction, which is always a bad thing.
It's still rather low on female singers, but for some reason, I usually seem to be the one who ends up singing, (And it's not because of my leet skillz.)
Still, there's no question I'm buying it when it comes out.
Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Nirvana, "Lithium"
Tags: gaming, rock band, video games
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06:40 pm
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Origins 2008
This was my first Origins ever where I wasn't running anything. It was weird having the opportunity to plan my schedule in advance. (Not that I did, but it's the principle of the thing.)
I think this may have been more tiring, but also more fun.
( Long )
Tags: gaming, geekery, prattle, rpgs
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03:36 pm
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Busy week for video games I pay attention to
Harmonix just announced Rock Band 2 for later this year, and a 12-pack of Who songs coming in two weeks.
And Blizzard announced Diablo 3.
I think my wallet just whimpered in pain. (even if I don't have to buy new instruments for RB2.)
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: The Who, "I Can't Explain"
Tags: gaming, video games
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09:53 pm
[Link] | Things that sound like a better idea when you're signing up for them on Wednesday:
10 PM-2 AM events on Saturday night.
Current Location: Origins
Current Mood: tired
Tags: gaming, prattle
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12:07 am
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Non-obvious perils
There are obvious ways that having a cold, even a mild one like mine, can suck when going to a con -- ear pain on the flight, scratchy throat, etc.
Now here's a new one for the list: this evening, it could have killed my character.
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Soul Asylum, "Without a Trace"
Tags: deliberate obscurity, gaming, rpgs
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06:24 pm
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D&D 4
Maybe it's just because i skipped 3.5, and mostly skipped 3, or maybe it's just because it's a first attempt, but statting out a first-level character is a fair amount of work.
Or maybe it's because I wandered off the beaten track (wizard multiclassing into warlock) immediately. I find the multiclass rules kind of disappointing -- the inability to get at the second class' base-level powers annoys me.
Current Mood:  blah
Tags: d&d, gaming
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