We played again today, this time the fourth scenario: Deeper in Castile. I, once again, took the side with the goblins, while my wife had the dwarves on her side. I’ve got to say, those dwarves are really something. You get four units of dwarves in that scenario (three blue infantry and one unit of green crossbowmen), and they can really hold that line. I focused most of my attention on knocking those dwarves off of their hills, and I didn’t manage to get a single one to retreat a single step (though I did kill the crossbowmen and two of the units of infantry). I got to use my goblins a little bit more. It’s nice to have blue units that can both move two spaces and battle in the same turn, but their morale problems make them something of a liability. Having them retreat is almost as bad, if not just as bad, as taking a hit, so you’re going to want to make sure they’re supported by allies as often as possible. In the end I won, six flags to four, and all four of my wife’s victory flags were goblin units: both of my hobgoblin cavalry and both of my blue goblin infantry. They’re very tempting targets, apparently.

The battle made me think of how best to use the different mercenary troops. Goblins are at their best as skirmishers; they run in and attack a lone unit, they stick to forests and hills, and you try like hell not to send them up against bold troops. Dwarves, on the other hand, are the ultimate defensive units. Since they’re always bold, they always get to battle back. That makes them very tough nuts to crack, even more so when they’re supported. As such, you probably want to utilize your goblins as much as you can, and get as much mileage out of them as you can before they get killed off or run away. If you have dwarves, on the other hand, your best bet is probably to focus your energies on commanding your other troops and bringing them to bear offensively, while your dwarves just sit in defensible positions and hold off the attackers for as long as they can. A dwarf is really at his best when he’s surrounded by enemies, because (provided he survives), he’ll get to battle each one of them back as they attack him. Really, it doesn’t get much better than a blue dwarven infantry unit sitting on top of a hill; those guys are going to hold out for most of the game, chances are. I think that, if my wife had focused more on bringing her heavy infantry and cavalry into the fray and attacked with them, just leaving the dwarves to ward off attacks from my units, she might have won. Toward the end there, it really could have gone either way; I think I just got lucky.

Well, my wife and I played the second and third scenarios in BattleLore yesterday, and this time I won both battles. Some brief impressions follow:

First Chevauchee: I don’t know if it was the command cards we got or how we played them, but this scenario turned into a massive brawl pretty quickly. After the third or fourth round, seventy percent of the units on the battlefield were involved in an all-consuming melee in the center of the board. Seriously, it was like a meat grinder. Virtually every unit involved was supported by allies, meaning that every time anyone attacked, the opponent got to battle back, and nobody was running away. The scenario only lasted about half an hour before I got enough flags to win.

Burgos, Castile: Goblins. I had the side with the goblins, and I didn’t really get to use them as much as I wanted to. Mainly it was because they were on my right wing, and I had all left wing and center cards. In fact, I think it was on the fifth or sixth round that I actually got to use them for the first time, with a Green Banners card. My goblin light infantry got deflected pretty handily by my wife’s regular infantry and archers (all supported), though my hobgoblin cavalry did take out a few opponents. My regular goblin infantry, on the other hand, sat and watched the whole time, since I never got a card that really allowed me to utilize them. Meanwhile, though, the mass of cavalry and infantry in the center were being made liberal use of, and to good effect. I had managed to pull both of my hobgoblin cavalry into the center, giving me a grand total of three cavalry units in the center (two green and one red). After a while, I had whittled my wife’s troops down to one and two figures each, and my cavalry did a good job of mopping up.

All in all, good scenarios. I wish I had gotten a chance to really fully utilize my goblins, but I don’t see that as a failing of the system, just a quirk of luck.

I went out and spent some of my Christmas gift certificate money on BattleLore the other day, and I got to play it with my wife for the first time today. The game is just too massive for me to do a review of it yet, especially since the Agincourt scenario doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what’s available (no goblins or dwarves, no creatures, no loremasters). At any rate, I’ll probably post session reports from time to time, giving a sort of mini-review on a scenario-by-scenario basis until I can review the whole game. My session report on the Agincourt scenario follows:

My wife and I played the scenario, both of us beginners. She was the French, with their heavy cavalry and well-trained foot soldiers, and I was the English, my side brimming with archers. I opened with a volley from my bowmen, and for quite a few turns it looked like things were going my way. I kept on peppering her soldiers with arrows, picking off figures one at a time, while my side remained relatively unmolested. I even managed to eliminate one of her heavy cavalry before it was able to do any damage, scoring the first victory flag of the battle in the process.

We danced around each other for a while, me lining up my foot soldiers and hitting her with volley after volley, she packing her footmen into tight formations and bringing her cavalry around to outflank me. I attacked with a Foot Onslaught, but her units were well supported and devastated mine with their counter-attacks. The real damage came when she was able to bring her cavalry to bear on my foot soldiers: one blue regular cavalry and her remaining red heavy cavalry. Between the two of them, they must have wiped out three of my units by themselves.

The game seemed fairly close toward the end; we each had three of the four victory flags that we needed. However, her side was made up mostly of blue footmen and her aforementioned cavalry, while I was the proud owner of a number of heavily damaged infantry units and four sets of archers, who were really only picking figures off one at a time, not doing any serious damage.

In the end, her heavy cavalry (now down to a single figure) hammered one of my blue infantry units and sent it running, then hammered it again with a follow-up attack, rolling three (!) bonus strikes, one for each figure left in the unit. And that was game.

But I hear you asking, “Was it fun?” Yes. Yes it was. Despite the fact that there seems to be a lot that I haven’t gotten to use yet, I really enjoyed my first game of BattleLore. Even more impressive, though, was the fact that my wife enjoyed it and expressed her interest in playing again (in the same day, even), and she’s not usually a big board game player. The game seems simple enough that you can pick it up quickly (and the huge number of reference cards that come with the game certainly help), but deep enough that there’s a lot of room for nuance and strategy. I, for one, can’t wait to start playing with goblins, dwarves, giant spiders, and all the various loremasters and their associated powers. Thus far, I can find quite a bit to recommend this game.

Ok, in the last post I mentioned a plastic polar bear that craps candy. Well, we’ve uploaded a video to YouTube, and here it is for your viewing pleasure. Hopefully it’s finished being uploaded by the time you read this.

Also of note is the sheer volume of RPG products I got this year. Allow me to demonstrate.

I’ve included a can of coke (standard sized, full caffeine) on the left to give a sense off scale. On the right, you’ll see that my haul clocks in at just under five inches of role-playing games. All told, it’s just shy of 1600 pages of gaming goodness, and that’s not even including the bonus content that comes with Ptolus (another 400 or so), or even Deliria for that matter. It’s going to keep me busy for a long, long time.

[Edit: I bought Dragonmarked, another Eberron supplement, with some gift card money. I think that adds about another half-inch to that stack. Just in case you were curious.]

So, cheesy movie jokes aside, I had a pretty good Christmas. Tonight we went to my parents’ house, and I got a bunch more geeky goodness. I got 3 more (!) RPG books: the Player’s Guide to Eberron, Secrets of Xen’drik, and Deliria: Faerie Tales for a New Millenium. The first two are, of course, Eberron supplements, which I will put to good use in my upcoming campaign. The third is something I’ve been curious about for a while, partly because of my general fascination with fairy lore, but also because of what I’ve heard about the game on All Games Considered.

I also got a new stereo and an FM transmitter. These were both very well-intentioned gifts, but they were both just to the left of the mark. I did, in fact, want a new stereo, but one with slightly different functionality than the one I got. And I already have an FM transmitter, but I will be needing a special adapter for the stereo I want, so I can hook my iPod up to it. I’ll be exchanging this stuff for the other stuff when I go to get the stereo installed later this week, and I’m very happy with the intent and thought behind both gifts, even if they weren’t exactly what I was looking for. At any rate, they will enable me to get exactly what I’m looking for at a later date.

A couple of other things worth mentioning:

• a book entitled The 2548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said. It’s a great book to just open up randomly and read a few quotes from. Good conversation-starter.
• The Stolen Child, by Keith Donohue. It’s a novel about, as I understand it, a boy running away to live with the changelings, and it sounds right up my ally.
• A CD by a band (or artist, I’m not really sure) called Sigur Rós. I haven’t listened to it yet, and I really have no idea what to expect, other than it’s not in English (some sort of Scandinavian language, I think).
• A plastic polar bear that poops jelly beans. No, I’m not kidding.
• Various gift cards.

  Once again, Merry Christmas.

My wife and I exchanged gifts today. I got Firefly, which I’ve wanted for a while. I also got some other cool stuff: some nice clothes, A Dangerous Man by Charlie Huston, a hard case for my iPod, some Christmas coffee, new pajamas, and a heated car windshield scraper. All in all, I’ve had a good haul this year. I got my wife an iPod Nano and some skins, as well as the Scrubs soundtrack and the Sims 2: Pets expansion. Part 3 is going to come either sometime tonight or tomorrow morning, because we’re going over to my parents’ house later today for another gift exchange. Merry Christmas, everybody!

Last night we had a sort of pre-Christmas Eve party, complete with gift exchange. I got some really cool stuff, some of it very, very geeky.

1. I got a wine corkscrew set, which looks startlingly like a spaceship of some sort. A wine-opening spaceship. Very cool.
2. Apples to Apples. This is, quite possibly, the most fun you can have while you’re drinking. It’s pretty darn fun while you’re sober, too. Score.
3. Werewolf: The Forsaken. I liked the WoD rulebook, and I liked Vampire: The Requiem a lot. It stands to reason that I’ll like the new Werewolf game just as much. Expect a review of this at some point.
4. Russian Imperial Stout. I got a bottle of this, a full pint, and drank the whole thing last night. It’s dark, dark stuff, like drinking chocolate. I managed to get two full glasses out of this bottle, and after the first one I was pretty tipsy. I found out why a little while later, when I discovered that this stuff was 9.5% alcohol, almost as potent as wine (except that I was drinking a whole bottle by myself). Good stuff.
5. Ptolus. That’s right, Ptolus. Monte Cook’s ginormous, 700-page magnum opus of D&D goodness is now in my possession, and it’s mighty impressive. Expect a review, but not for a while; it’ll take me a long time to read this magnificent tome.

And that’s just pre-Christmas Eve. I’ve still got tonight and tomorrow to get through!

Happy Holidays, everyone.

My website just got moved onto a new server, so if you see some textual corruption in the posts below (particularly my NaNoWriMo posts, apparently), that’s why. In other news, I’ve been debating whether or not to put a forum on the site. I had one a long time ago, and hardly anyone posted. I think my readership is maybe a little bit bigger now, but I’d still like to know if there’s a demand for one. So, if anyone out there wants a forum on this website, post a comment stating just that to this post. Even if you don’t want one, post a comment and let me know that, too. Thanks in advance.

I just got back from seeing Eragon. Not a bad movie, though not a great one, either. It seems to bring up a bit of a catch-22. I really wish I had seen this movie before having seen The Lord of the Rings, because that movie set the bar pretty high for fantasy movies in general. I think, had I seen Eragon before LotR, I would have been much more impressed with it. However, I also recognize that this movie probably never would have been made prior to Peter Jackson’s magnum opus. Rings legitimized the genre in a way that no other movie had up to that point, and made Hollywood take notice of the fact that fantasy was, in fact, a viable genre for a blockbuster movie.

As to the movie, itself, though: like I said, it was alright. There’s nothing really terribly new or fresh or original in Eragon. At its heart, it’s basically a collection of genre tropes assembled together into a storyline that mirrors that of Star Wars: A New Hope pretty closely. There’s a Luke character, and a Leia character, and a Ben Kenobi character, and the dragon riders are basically the Jedi, right down to having been betrayed and hunted down by one of their own. There’s even an Uncle Owen character. Really, the most appealing thing about the movie is the dragon, which is admittedly very, very appealing. But the movie, itself, is pretty predictable. I don’t fault the movie for this, though, or the director or the screenwriter. It’s based off of a book (as you probably know), and the author was a mere fifteen years old when he wrote it. This, I think, shows.

Now, I don’t want you to come away with the impression that I didn’t like Eragon. I mean, I won’t be going out and buying the book anytime soon, but I enjoyed watching the movie, and I’d gladly watch it again, if only for the scenes with the dragon (and Jeremy Irons, who was also very good). Were I currently in the business of assigning cold, hard numeric values to subjective experiences, I’d probably give this movie a 7 out of 10. Not great, but a solid effort, and worth the time it takes to watch it.

Bookworm Adventures Deluxe is a wonderfully addictive little bit of linguaphilia. Each stage is a series of monster battles with a boss battle at the end, somewhat reminiscent of an old-school CRPG. The thing is, instead of just attacking with a sword or something, you spell words: the more difficult the word, the more damage you deal. There are fun little modifiers, like Power-Up Potions and the Bow of Zyx (which increases your damage for any words containing Z, Y, or X), and your enemies have all kinds of special abilities to use against you. All in all, it’s a fun, relaxing, mentally stimulating little word game.