The Complete Cul de Sac Announced

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Detail from Cul de Sac, 2013-03-27, via gocomics.comI’m a bit late with this news, but news this good never gets old: Richard Thompson announced on his site that this November brings with it the publication of The Complete Cul de Sac, collecting all of the “Cul de Sac” strips, including from pre-syndication in the Washington Post and, per a comment he made, tantalizing “other stuff.”

While I’m saddened that “Cul de Sac” is at a point where it can be considered complete, I trust that this collection will do justice to the best comic strip of the past decade (and more). It’s conveniently coming out for the holidays, so buy bigger stockings if you must, but stuff this book in there for all your friends and family.

(Image via gocomics.com)

Rolling the Dice on Kickstarter

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I’ve backed enough Kickstarter projects by now to fully understand that it’s not really a “pre-order” site. You’re supporting a concept, a product, or an idea, and hopefully said concept, product, or idea comes to fruition. As a wiser person than I once said, “You pays your money and you takes your chances.”

Indeed, of all the Kickstarter projects I’ve backed, only two have, thus far, delivered, though I’m not worried quite yet. I knew the lead times would be long, and my investment is hardly large. I received my most recent Kickstarter backer rewards just last week, a set of four Precision Machined Dice, and the results are quite stunning.

Precision Machined Dice

These anodized aluminum dice were machined from solid blocks of aluminum and have significant heft (and sharp corners). They’re not really practical for actually rolling, but they make lovely display pieces. I consider them propitiations to whatever forces control the flow of luck in the universe.

Thankfully, though, the creator of these dice, Amber Rix, has launched another Kickstarter project for Precision Machined Metal Gaming Dice, a little smaller (at either 16mm or ½”) than the casino sized dice from the original project and with rounded edges. As with the original project, they will be available in a variety of metals and, for the aluminum, a variety of colors. Plus, looks like you could roll them without damaging a table, though you’d still likely put your glass dice cup at risk. The creator of these projects has also mooted the possibility of metal polyhedrons as a future Kickstarter project. Yes, please!

Because at a certain point in every gamer’s life, you have to ask: Why roll plastic?

A Taste of 1989 at Labyrinth

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This past weekend, I had the pleasure of participating in a demo session of GMT‘s recently released 1989: The Dawn of Freedom, hosted by one of the co-designers, Jason Matthews. Held at the finest game store in Washington, DC (and indeed, the entire metro region), Labyrinth Games and Puzzles, as part of their “A Taste of…” series of game demos, the event filled the store’s back gaming space with players eager to recreate the struggle for democratic change in the countries of Eastern Europe during the tumultuous late ’80s.

Jason Matthews provided a nice overview of card driven games in general, spoke to his design process and the challenges of creating (and publishing) innovative designs in an increasingly crowdfunded market, and also worked through the rules for the game. It’s always a pleasure to be able to ask rules questions of the person who designed them.

Using a similar card-driven armature as Twilight Struggle, which Jason Matthews also co-designed, 1989 pits two players in the roles of Communists—attempting to keep control of the social and political structures of Poland, East Germany, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia—and Democrats, striving to gain control of the same. Players familiar with Twilight Struggle can jump right in, as the basic dilemma of using cards for either operations (to take actions on the map representing efforts to gain or wrest control) or events (representing significant moments from history) remains in place.

1989 The Dawn of Freedom via of Labyrinth Games and Puzzles

New to the system, the Power Struggle sub-game comes into play when overall control of a country must be assessed due to play of a Scoring Card. The Power Struggle—essentially a suit matching contest using cards apportioned via relative control of the country—adds quite a bit of uncertainty into what was, in Twilight Struggle, a very cut-and-dry calculation. You can go into the Power Struggle with an edge in country control and leave with no control at all. Some might find that variability unsettling, but I like what it adds to the game. There are no guaranteed victory points in this game.

As with most event-based card driven games, once you know the events and their placement in the game’s “storyboard,” much of the sense of wonder and discovery vanishes; I’ve played Twilight Struggle enough times to know which cards open me up to late game traps if I play them and which cards are mandatory plays as soon as they appear in my hand, certainly a strategic benefit, but I’ve also lost the thrill of watching the history unfold via the cards. While I don’t think 1989 will ultimately escape that fate (and it’s not a terrible one, for the basic game play is still quite satisfying), it’s nice to have another game in this vein where the gameplay is somewhat seat-of-the-pants, not knowing how one action will reverberate into another, as ultimately I game for wonder as much as winning.

My thanks to Jason Matthews and the always awesome crew at Labyrinth for hosting this demo session. It prompted me to pick up a copy of 1989, which I’m sure will see a fair bit of play.

(Picture via Labyrinth Games and Puzzles)

Three Lions, Eleven Stamps: Royal Mail to Issue Football Association Anniversary Stamps

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Leave it to the Royal Mail to issue another brilliant stamp series, this time in honor of the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Football Association and featuring an all-UK top 11:

Football Heroes via the Royal Mail

It’s great to see the lineup depicted at the peak of their individual careers (especially Keegan’s curly locks!) There’s understandably a bias towards the 1966 World Cup-winning team, but it’s hard to much argue about the selection: Gordon Banks, George Best, Bobby Charlton, among other stellar names. I’m sure, though, that there are debates aplenty about who was left out.

Due for release on May 9th of this year, it looks like I’ll be ordering more than just the Doctor Who stamp series from the Royal Mail this year.

(Image via the Royal Mail)

Doctor Who Project: The Time Meddler

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What do you think it is, a space helmet for a cow?

To end Doctor Who‘s first season, the producers pulled out all the stops in a historical tour de force with a large cast and elaborate costumes aplenty. The second season finale proves equally remarkable, but not for any creatures or effects or epic tales. Rather, Dennis Spooner’s “The Time Meddler” (Story Production Code S) marks the first story where none of the original three companions are present, and we also finally begin to understand something of the Doctor’s backstory. For he is not alone. There’s another time traveller out there, from the same place as the Doctor, with his own TARDIS, a Mark IV, no less. He’s only known in the story as the Monk, but the Doctor knows him as…a Time Meddler.

Of these two remarkable aspects, perhaps the former is the more important, because the show has the confidence to move forward with the Doctor as the central character. Previously, Ian and Barbara played, if not equal roles to the Doctor’s, at least counterbalancing roles, serving as wise and careful adults who keep events from getting out of hand (mostly). They were the literal and figurative teachers supporting the show’s nominal educational mission. The success of “The Time Meddler” is to present a Doctor Who story that is fundamentally about the Doctor and the mythology surrounding him, and it succeeds quite well, arguably the best story of the second season.

“The Time Meddler” could not have been produced earlier in the show’s run, for it relies heavily on the notions of time travel that prior episodes, particularly the historicals, have established. Both the Doctor’s strong reluctance to alter history (“The Aztecs“) and his inadvertent and significant participation in its creation (“100,000 BC“, “The Romans“) inform “The Time Meddler,” as the Doctor must confront one of his own kind who revels in changing history, “disgusting” behavior according to the Doctor. The faults of the Doctor’s TARDIS, elaborated over the course of two seasons, play a role in the story, for the Monk has a far better one that actually works. Even the intentional anachronisms—the Monk makes breakfast with a toaster and electric frying pan in an 11th Century monastery, for instance—play against the established structure of the historical stories, where every last feathered headdress and torn jerkin is properly reproduced by the BBC’s prop department. This is, at last, a time travel story in historical clothing.

While the story does feature the far-too-typical splitting of the party (the Doctor is separated from Vicki and Steven for three of the four episodes) and the inevitable inaccessibility of the TARDIS (underwater thanks to the tides), the Doctor finally has a reason to intervene in events in a historical story beyond the mere desire to escape: he must preserve the timeline. This imperative gives the story a narrative weight that prior historical stories lacked.

Not your typical to-do list.

And indeed, how could anyone not be mesmerized by a story that hinges on preventing the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066 by sinking a Viking fleet using an atomic cannon mounted on a Northumbrian cliff…

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Dungeons and Scanners: The Return of Downloadable D&D Material

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It goes without saying, in this era of the long tail, that canny publishers with niche products know all about electronic publishing and make their wares available legally (and profitably) to those who want to throw money at them. Well, most canny publishers, that is, for Wizards of the Coast, current license holders for the Dungeons and Dragons role playing game, stopped making their back catalog of long-out-of-print adventure modules and rules supplements available for legal download several years ago for reasons they never quite explained. Perhaps they didn’t like making money—or perhaps some wrinkle in their license terms prohibited the sale of scanned .pdfs of the products.

In any event, like a lich with an intact phylactery, Wizards of the Coast couldn’t keep their archive down, and they have brought their back catalog, er, back, at dndclassics.com. According to Wired‘s GeekDad, the products have been re-scanned as well. From the one module I’ve downloaded so far, the new scans are a serious improvement over the original offerings from several years ago, which had some instances of iffy scanning.

The downloads, ranging from classic adventure modules for Basic D&D through to rulebooks for the not-so-well-regarded D&D Fourth Edition, come as watermarked .pdf files with, wonder of wonders, searchable text. The watermarking is unobtrusive, placing your name and the order number in faint, tiny lettering at the bottom left corner of each page. Prices seem reasonable, in the $5 to $7 range for D&D and First Edition AD&D modules and rulebooks around $10—and really, who needs anything else?

Detail of a classic adventure

For a limited time, the site is offering a free download of Basic Module B1, In Search of the Unknown, so go give them a try and, if you’re of a particular age, relive some of your childhood as well.