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Some cool things |  |
This past week was my spring break, and I got a chance to do some gaming and watch some really good movies. In no particular order:
- I got to play some Runebound this week, which was great. I haven’t played Runebound in a while, but I thoroughly enjoyed playing it again. The first couple of times that I played this game, it took 4-6 hours to resolve each session, if not more. My friend Chris and I have built in some house rules (more starting gold, soft knockouts, lower experience costs for levelling up, and more gear in the towns) that bring this down to a very respectable 2-3 hours, without detracting too much from the feel of the game. If anything, it makes you feel like more of a badass even sooner, as you’re starting to cleave through yellow encounters fifteen minutes into the game.
- The last time this week that we played Runebound, we played with the Sands of Al-Kalim expansion pack. Highly recommended. One problem that I always had with the original game was that it was, at its heart, a competitive game, but it felt very much like a cooperative game until the last half hour or so. Let me rephrase that; it felt like it should have been a cooperative game. Thematically, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that the various heroes of the land would be competing with each other to be the first to save the world from Margath and his dragonlords. Shouldn’t they be cooperating with each other, fighting the greater evil? The theme was somewhat at odds with the mechanics. This problem is pretty much alleviated in Al-Kalim; players are competing to be the first to gain fame, glory, and immortality by embarking on and completing four legendary quests. They’re not trying to save the world, they’re doing it for their own aggrandizement which, while less noble, causes the competitive mechanic of the game to make a lot more sense. Besides that, it’s an excellent expansion with some truly cool and fun additions to the core gameplay. There are day/night mechanics, a new ’story step’ that you can do when you’re not adventuring or exploring a town, and the legendary quests themselves are actually a lot of fun to undertake. It’s an excellent expansion, and I highly recommend it.
- The Pursuit of Happyness was very, very good. Will Smith continues to amaze me with his talents (I mean, he was the Fresh Prince, after all), and the storyline grabs onto you from start to finish. There’s a real sense of desperation during this movie, and a real sense of relief when he gets just a little bit of a break from time to time.
- Speaking of movies, I also saw Children of Men, which was also excellent. The movie does a great job of painting a very bleak, yet very believable future, without too many sci-fi bells and whistles that might have detracted from the feel of the movie. The acting is superb, the special effects are flawless and, for the most part, very low-key, and the last half hour or so of the movie, I think, kept me from breathing. Great stuff.
Anyway, that’s it until next time.
