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They are doing a full reprinting of Millennium Blades for those that missed it before
(www.kickstarter.com)
Chess
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For discussion of Chess and other physical tabletop games that are not roleplaying, see [email protected] for those.
Including Card Games, Board Games, Wargaming, or classic games like checkers, go, & majhang.
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https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/budget-beginner-teaching-decks-1-green/
https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/budget-beginner-teaching-decks-2-red/
^^ the two decks I used, I played green and the ai was red. Still getting the hang of this game but with over like 50k cards in the library and endless combos it's so deep. The AI is quite smart on Forge too. I've never played MTG in my life so this is all new to me.
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Inspired by this comment: https://hexbear.net/comment/3962687
Ideally this card should destroy itself when the conditions for the first effect no longer exist but I wasn't sure how to word that without making the language over-complicated or repeating myself.
The card art is AI-generated.
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Only 4p, sadly, because one guy dropped out to go on a date (valid, but incorrect). Rather short game, ending on turn 5, after ~6 hours (with meal break). Disregard the flipped over objective cards, we just wanted to see what they were post-game.
HS1 is Sol, HS2 is Xxcha, HS3 is Hacan, HS4 is Ghosts of Creuss:
Winner was the Federation of Sol, played by yours truly, because the others more or less forced me onto Mecatol Rex and once in position my ability to drop in infantry squads made me impossible to shift. Also got very lucky with my secret objectives lining up with the publics (2 unit upgrades + 2 faction upgrades, which are the same for Sol, and own 4 planets of any color + own 4 Blue). They let me score Imperial twice which is way too many. Nobody made an attempt to dislodge me until Turn 5, too worried they'd be backstabbed, which, in fairness, was probably accurate for every player but the Xxcha. EDIT: Sol has a rep as being overpowered, so we nerfed it by reducing its starting fleet by 1 carrier. This did not seem to be enough, and it is now on the ban list, along with Jol-Nar.
Ghosts in second with 7 points because both other players gave him Support points in exchange for him suiciding into my invincible army on Mec Rex (not knowing that the game was already over unless they took my home system). This player is generally the weakest in the group, and failed to secure their slice until way too late, leaving them with little to do.
Hacan and Xxcha in third with 4 apiece. Hacan didn't really do much interesting, just spent infinite money to build up a giant fleet but that was no help with invasions, and was too late anyway. Xxcha built a fucking wall of PDS (6 total in a ring around Mec Rex, plus the flagship for 8), which prevented me from reinforcing with ships, but I think made taking it too dangerous for anyone else to consider. He also really fucked over Hacan early, blocking his movement with a cruiser move T1 onto tile 27.
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Technically it was done a while ago, but now there's a comm for it! The hull gun on the front is magnetized and can be swapped out for a laser, and the sides are magnetized as well so I can put sponsons on if I ever get around to having some 3d printed. The turret-hull connection is just a giant circular hole so it pops off real easy and I have taken to blu-tacking it in place for transport/games.
The actual name for the model is "Mars Alpha Leman Russ Incinerator", and I run it as an Executioner in 40k.
Behold, the warm glowing warming glow of the turret gun (which I'm still not really happy with even after like 10 revisions):
The last thing space fascists see before being run over:
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https://www.catan.com/sites/default/files/2021-06/catan_base_rules_2020_200707.pdf
Catan, previously known as The Settlers of Catan or simply Settlers, is a multiplayer board game designed by Klaus Teuber.
Players take on the roles of settlers, each attempting to build and develop holdings while trading and acquiring resources. Players gain victory points as their settlements grow and the first to reach a set number of victory points, typically 10, wins.
The players in the game represent settlers establishing settlements on the fictional island of Catan. Players build settlements, cities, and roads to connect them as they settle the island.
The game board, which represents the island, is composed of hexagonal tiles (hexes) of different land types, which are laid out randomly at the beginning of each game.
In 2016, editions of the game were released with a conventional fixed layout board in this configuration, the hexes of which cannot be rearranged.
Players build by spending resources (wool, grain, lumber, brick, and ore) that are depicted by these resource cards; each land type, with the exception of the unproductive desert, produces a specific resource: hills produce brick, forests produce lumber, mountains produce ore, fields produce grain, and pastures produce wool.
On each player's turn, two six-sided dice are rolled to determine which hexes produce resources. Players with a settlement adjacent to a hex containing the number just rolled receive one card of the corresponding resource; cities produce two cards of the corresponding resource.
There is also a robber token, initially placed on the desert; if a player rolls 7, the robber must be moved to another hex, which will no longer produce resources until the robber is moved again.
That player may also steal a resource card from another player with a settlement or city adjacent to the robber's new placement. In addition, when a 7 is rolled, all players with 8 or more resource cards must discard their choice of half of their cards, rounded down.
On the player's turn, the player may spend resource cards to build roads or settlements, upgrade settlements to cities, or buy development cards.
Players can trade resource cards with each other; players may also trade off-island (in effect, with the non-player bank) at a ratio of four-to-one resources for one of any other.
By building settlements adjacent to ports, players may trade with the bank at three-to-one (three of any single resource type) or two-to-one (two of a specific resource) ratios, depending on the port's location.
Players score points for each settlement and city they have. Various other achievements, such as establishing the longest road and the largest army, grant a player additional victory points.
Resource cards can also be spent to buy a development card. There are three different types of development cards, including cards worth one victory point; knight cards, which allow the player to move the robber as if they had rolled a 7 (but without the remove-half rule); and the third set of cards which allow the player one of three abilities when played.
Catan will teach your children and teens unrealistic economic theories that will eventually doom this planet.
Children and teens playing Catan, will grow up thinking that when you use a commodity, it simply goes back into the existing reserves.
When your children play a game that treats natural resources like iron ore are renewable instead of finite resources, they may grow up into climate change deniers or believe pseudoscience like abiogenic oil. Or even worse, they might grow up into economists.
Catan also encourages competition for the limited resources of Catan instead of cooperation among all of the players. Your children and teens will be taught to steal resources from others, engage in hoarding and monopolistic behavior, and negotiate inequitable trade agreements, instead of trying to make Catan a better place for everyone.
Playing with an alternative set of rules seeks to address this. In order to more accurately model a closed system with finite resources, remove resource cards from the game as they are used during gameplay. Your children need to learn the consequences of the downward slope of Peak Brick on the transportation infrastructure of Catan while they are still young.
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Most mancala games share a common general gameplay. Players begin by placing a certain number of seeds, prescribed for the particular game, in each of the pits on the game board. A player may count their stones to plot the game. A turn consists of removing all seeds from a pit, "sowing" the seeds (placing one in each of the following pits in sequence), and capturing based on the state of the board. The game's object is to plant the most seeds in the bank. This leads to the English phrase "count and capture" sometimes used to describe the gameplay. Although the details differ greatly, this general sequence applies to all games.
If playing in capture mode, once a player ends their turn in an empty pit on their own side, they capture the opponent's pieces directly across. Once captured, the player gets to put the seeds in their own bank. After capturing, the opponent forfeits a turn.
Equipment is typically a board, constructed of various materials, with a series of holes arranged in rows, usually two or four. The materials include clay and other shapeable materials. Some games are more often played with holes dug in the earth, or carved in stone. The holes may be referred to as "depressions", "pits", or "houses". Sometimes, large holes on the ends of the board called stores, are used for holding the pieces.
Playing pieces are seeds, beans, stones, cowry shells, half-marbles or other small undifferentiated counters that are placed in and transferred about the holes during play.
Board configurations vary among different games but also within variations of a given game; for example Endodoi is played on boards from 2×6 to 2×10. The largest is Tchouba (Mozambique) with a board of 160 (4×40) holes requiring 320 seeds, and En Gehé (Tanzania), played on longer rows with up to 50 pits (a total of 2×50=100) and using 400 seeds. The most minimalistic variants are Nano-Wari and Micro-Wari, created by the Bulgarian ethnologue Assia Popova. The Nano-Wari board has eight seeds in just two pits; Micro-Wari has a total of four seeds in four pits.
With a two-rank board, players usually are considered to control their respective sides of the board, although moves often are made into the opponent's side. With a four-rank board, players control an inner row and an outer row, and a player's seeds will remain in these closest two rows unless the opponent captures them.
The objective of most two- and three-row mancala games is to capture more stones than the opponent; in four-row games, one usually seeks to leave the opponent with no legal move or sometimes to capture all counters in their front row.
At the beginning of a player's turn, they select a hole with seeds that will be sown around the board. This selection is often limited to holes on the current player's side of the board, as well as holes with a certain minimum number of seeds. Awale players
In a process known as sowing, all the seeds from a hole are dropped one by one into subsequent holes in a motion wrapping around the board. Sowing is an apt name for this activity, since not only are many games traditionally played with seeds but placing seeds one at a time in different holes reflects the physical act of sowing. If the sowing action stops after dropping the last seed, the game is considered a single lap game.
Multiple laps or relay sowing is a frequent feature of mancala games, although not universal. When relay sowing, if the last seed during sowing lands in an occupied hole, all the contents of that hole, including the last sown seed, are immediately re-sown from the hole. The process will usually continue until sowing ends in an empty hole. Another common way to receive "multiple laps" is when the final seed sown lands in your designated hole.
Many games from the Indian subcontinent use pussakanawa laps. These are like standard multi-laps, but instead of continuing the movement with the contents of the last hole filled, a player continues with the next hole. A pussakanawa lap move will then end when a lap ends just before an empty hole. If a player ends his stone with a point move he gets a "free turn".
Depending on the last hole sown in a lap, a player may capture stones from the board. The exact requirements for capture, as well as what is done with captured stones, vary considerably among games. Typically, a capture requires sowing to end in a hole with a certain number of stones, ending across the board from stones in specific configurations or landing in an empty hole adjacent to an opponent's hole that contains one or more pieces.
Another common way of capturing is to capture the stones that reach a certain number of seeds at any moment.
Also, several games include the notion of capturing holes, and thus all seeds sown on a captured hole belong at the end of the game to the player who captured it.
Some photos of the different types of boards used in this family of tabletop games
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backgammon, game played by moving counters on a board or table, the object of the game being a race to a goal, with the movement of the counters being controlled by the throw of two dice. Elements of chance and skill are nicely balanced in backgammon so that each is usually essential to victory. The game became highly popular worldwide in the late 20th century.
Precursors of backgammon are among the most ancient of all games and may date from as early as 3000 bc. The ancient Romans played a game, Ludus Duodecim Scriptorum (“Twelve-lined Game”), which was identical, or nearly so, to modern backgammon. The game is still most generally played in the eastern Mediterranean countries.
Backgammon is played by two persons. The board comprises four sections, or tables, each marked with six narrow wedges, or points, in two alternating colours. A vertical line called the bar divides the board in half, separating the “inner” and “outer” tables. There are 15 white and 15 black pieces, often called stones. Opposing stones are moved from point to point in opposite directions around the board, the exact number of points shown on the dice. The two numbers may be applied separately to two different stones or, in turn, to one. Doublets (identical numbers on the two dice) are taken twice over; e.g., two 6s count as four 6s.
A point occupied by two or more stones of one colour is “made” by that player and cannot be occupied by the opponent. A single stone on a point is a “blot,” liable to be “hit” by an adverse stone landing on that point. If hit, a blot is picked up and placed on the bar, and the owner may make no other move until it is reentered. Reentry must be made in the adverse inner table upon an open point of the same number as is cast with either die.
On getting all 15 of his stones into his own home (inner) table, a player may begin “bearing off”—moving his stones to an imaginary point beyond the edge of the board. The player who first bears off all 15 stones wins the game. If the loser has borne off at least one stone, the game is a single; if he has borne off none, it is a gammon and counts double; and if in addition he has any stone left in the winner’s inner table, it is a backgammon and counts triple.
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mah-jongg, game of Chinese origin, played with tiles, or pais, that are similar in physical description to those used in dominoes but engraved with Chinese symbols and characters and divided into suits and honours. A fad in England, the United States, and Australia in the mid-1920s, the game was revived in the United States after 1935 but never regained its initial popularity. In the United States the official governing body is the National Mah Jongg League, founded in 1937.
The game is probably of 19th-century origin. Before World War I each Chinese province had its own style of play and dialect name for it. The name, signifying “sparrow” (maque), has been variously transliterated as ma tsiang, ma chiang, ma cheuk, and ma ch’iau. The sparrow or a mythical “bird of 100 intelligences” appears on one of the tiles. The name mah-jongg was coined and copyrighted by Joseph P. Babcock, an American resident of Shanghai, who is credited with introducing mah-jongg to the West after World War I. In order to promote the game in the West, he wrote a modified set of rules, gave English titles to the tiles, and added index letters and numerals familiar to Western card players. The game as described hereafter is prevalent in the United States; other forms of the game may be found in other Western countries.
Modern mah-jongg sets are usually made of plastic instead of bone or ivory. A full set contains 136 or 144 tiles, depending on whether the flowers or seasons are used. Some sets include 20 flowers.
The table provides the names and numbers of mah-jongg tiles.
The bamboos are often called sticks or bams, the circles are called dots, and the characters are cracks or craks. The mah-jongg set also includes a pair of dice, a quantity of tokens or chips used for scorekeeping, and a rack used to keep the tiles upright and to keep their faces hidden from other players.
The game is usually played by four individuals. The object of play, similar to that of the rummy card games, is to obtain sets of tiles. There are three kinds of sets: chow, a run or sequence of three of the same suit in numerical order; pung, a sequence of three tiles of the same suit and rank, such as three dragons of the same colour or three identical winds; and kong, a pung plus the fourth matching tile. The winner is the first player to hold a complete hand—i.e., four sets and a pair of like tiles (a total of 14 tiles). The strategy of mah-jongg, like that of rummy, is both offensive and defensive: to complete a winning hand as quickly as possible, to block other players by not discarding tiles useful to them, and to build a high-scoring hand.
Players begin by drawing 13 tiles; “east wind” (who collects or pays double according to whether he or another player wins) takes 14 and begins play by discarding one. Thereafter, the other players in counterclockwise rotation each draw one tile, which may be the last discarded tile or a loose tile from the “wall” (comparable to stock in rummy). Any player may claim the previous discard to complete a set. (If two or more players claim the same discard, there is a detailed order of precedence.) Losing players settle with the winner and with each other according to an accepted schedule of values for the sets or combinations of sets. A concealed set held in the hand scores differently from an exposed set on the table. Under certain rules, exceptional hands—picturesquely named “the three scholars,” “four small blessings,” and so on—are scored differently.
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go, (Japanese), also called i-go, Chinese (Pinyin) weiqi or (Wade-Giles romanization) wei-ch’i, Korean baduk or pa-tok, board game for two players. Of East Asian origin, it is popular in China, Korea, and especially Japan, the country with which it is most closely identified. Go, probably the world’s oldest board game, is thought to have originated in China some 4,000 years ago. According to some sources, this date is as early as 2356 bce, but it is more likely to have been in the 2nd millennium bce. The game was probably taken to Japan about 500 ce, and it became popular during the Heian period (794–1185). The modern game began to emerge in Japan with the subsequent rise of the warrior (samurai) class. It was given special status there during the Tokugawa period (1603–1867), when four highly competitive go schools were set up and supported by the government and go playing was thus established as a profession. The game became highly popular in Japan in the first half of the 20th century; it was also played in China and Korea, and its following grew there in the latter decades of the century. Play spread worldwide after World War II.
Traditionally, go is played with 181 black and 180 white go-ishi (flat, round pieces called stones) on a square wooden board (goban) checkered by 19 vertical lines and 19 horizontal lines to form 361 intersections; more recently, it has been played electronically on computers and on the Internet. Each player in turn (black moves first) places a stone on the point of intersection of any two lines, after which that stone cannot be moved. Players try to conquer territory by completely enclosing vacant points with boundaries made of their own stones. Two or more stones are “connected” if they are adjacent to each other on the same horizontal or vertical line, as are the white stones in group e in the figure. A stone or a group of stones belonging to one player can be captured and removed from the board if it can be completely enclosed by his opponent’s stones, as white is by black in groups a, f, and g and prospectively in groups b and e in the figure. A stone or group of stones is “live” (not captured) as long as it is connected to a vacant intersection, as are the black stones in groups c and d and the white stones in b and e. A stone cannot be placed on a point completely surrounded by enemy stones unless it makes a capture by so doing, as white does in group c. Groups of stones are in effect invulnerable if they contain an “eye,” which consists of two or more vacant points arranged such that the opposing player cannot place his stone on one of the points without that stone’s itself being captured. The black stones in group d possess such an eye. The black stones in group c in the figure, however, do not possess an eye, and a white stone placed on the indicated point would result in the complete enclosure and thus the capture of the black stone group. A player’s final score is his number of walled-in points less the number of his stones lost by capture.
Go demands great skill, strategy, and subtlety and is capable of infinite variety, yet the rules and pieces are so simple that children can play. Special handicap rules allow players of unequal skill to play together. Aspiring professionals typically begin apprenticeships at a young age and train for years. A Japanese Go Association, founded in 1924, supervises tournaments and rules and ranks players, both professional and amateur. The European Go Federation was founded in 1950, and other regional and national organizations subsequently appeared. The first annual world go championship was held in 1979, and in 1982 an International Go Federation was established in Tokyo.
