Goodbye To Chess

Chess was important growing up. When I finally got my own room as a kid, it was the former den, filled with my father's chess trophies and books from his time on the Penn State chess team. I wasn't terribly into chess, but I read all the books in the den, mostly sports novels (ugh), chess strategy and how-to books. For a while in high school, I brought my chess set and played in science class, where the game was socially acceptable. My player's handbook stayed at home. I was a solid, thinking several moves ahead kinda kid, so the chess books were mostly aspirational. I felt like I wasn't quite smart enough to go full chess, like a wannabe wizard with an eight intelligence. Magic missile was just out of my grasp.

When I opened the store in 2004, I had a very respectable collection of chess sets, amazing really, for a 940 square foot store (amazing equals dumb for non retailers). These were all on full display, and about once a week, I would remove the pieces of each set, dust the board, and put them back on. My father was impressed when he visited. When it came to chess, I knew how to represent. This was all incredibly time consuming and eventually I lost several boxes, making selling them pretty difficult. Oh, and then there were the missing pieces. Realizing the queen is missing from a $250 Egyptian chess set will make you seek out boxed chess sets pretty fast.

As the display sets sold, their replacements tended not to get re-opened, and eventually not re-ordered as the plain white box did nothing to help move them. Chess sets sold poorly. They have always sold poorly. They sell poorly now. Stores in the region who do much better with chess, who dominate with chess? They sell poorly there too. It's a legacy item, an item that says "games" to the general public. It's a touchstone for me and my father. But chess, to be honest, is a complete waste of space.

That's not true everywhere. There are stores in the Midwest that do gangbusters with chess. But here? The serious players buy their sets online, often through chess organizations or just Amazon. In the store, I think it's enough to have a tournament size Staunton set and a roll up travel set, but beyond that there are hundreds of themed chess sets that will make you crazy as customer seek them out. Civil War? Simpsons? Harry Potter? You could stock an entire store with what's out there ... and promptly go out of business.

I used to special order sets and it was time consuming and unrewarding, unlike the work with other types of games. Help a board game customer and you may have created a regular board game customer and maybe even a board game hobbyist. Help someone with a chess set and you've sold them a chess set and you'll never seem them again.

I've watched my classic games numbers stagnate, even when I double or triple my selection. I've tried more and less and different and boxes with pictures and on display and nope, none of it works. It's dead here. I've been foolish not to drop it sooner. I would look at the corner where our "classic" games reside and fantasize about what I would put there. Frisbee golf. A coffee kiosk. Anything but chess.

With 25% Chinese tariffs, I'm extremely concerned about board games. But then there's chess. All those classic games come from China, really. I had forgotten. It's not even on my radar anymore. We just didn't re-order classic games after the holidays and nobody seemed to mind, except the occasional random customer who has clearly never been here before. We send them to the regional store that has a better selection and also doesn't make money selling them. Then that classic game space got taken up with profitable stuff. So with tariffs on the way, a better use of that space, and performance numbers that I use an example at trade shows of what you should drop, I think it's time to say goodbye to chess. Sorry dad.

Grav-StuG Kickstarter Inbound!

Just 48 hours away from the launch of the Grav-Sug Kickstarter!

Works In Progress

  A few shots of some of the things on the paint table right now. The giant mammoth man is from the Reaper Bones IV Kickstarter. The Van Saar gangers are from the boxed set by GW. The Pathfinder Goblin pyromaniacs are also Reaper Bones but not from the Kickstarter.

Barely started...

Still a good ways from finished.

Not really happy with the wash I chose so I am going to go back and redo that bit.

Plan to do the tusks last.

Closeup. Going for a black bodystocking with light gray armoured plates.

Energetic items are blue-green (eye lenses, power sources, high tech pony tails, etc.)

Some metals will be bronze, most weapons will be matte black.

Working on these not-really-all-that-little guys I realize how bad my eyes are getting.

A bit sad about that. Oh well, that's why I have a magnifier visor I guess.

Storium Basics: Playing Off Each Other

Welcome back to Storium Basics, where each week I'm going through a basic aspect of Storium play. This week, I'm going to talk about something that's a little bit more advanced: playing off of each other and leaving openings. 

Storium games are stories, and that means that scenes work best when they feel interconnected. It's easy to lose sight of that when you are writing independently, often at different times from the other players. However, it is important to make a conscious effort to tell a continuous story between your moves and those of other players. You're not just writing the tale of your own character - you are writing the story of the challenge, and the scene, overall.

When you write a move, look back at what has happened so far in the scene and call upon it to set the stage for your move or give you things to react to. Is a statue falling over? Show it crashing to the ground. Did a friend just get hit? Call out if he's okay, or go to his aid. Did someone just do something totally awesome? React to it!

Tell the overall story, not just your own actions.

Additionally, I encourage you to leave openings in your moves for others to use. You don't have to call out specific other players to use them - in fact, unless you have a very good relationship with a player I advise against doing that - but it's very helpful to your fellow writers if you raise a situation in your move that you do not resolve or close.

This could be noting that a bandit escaped and you couldn't get him, or that you got kicked into something heavy and now it is starting to fall, or that there's an enemy starting to draw a bead on you and you don't see it, or an enemy wizard casting a spell...as appropriate for the situation and story, of course, but you get the idea. If you are writing something other than the final move of a challenge, leave cues out there people can pick up on.

If someone does leave those cues out there for you, use them. You can resolve them quickly (maybe you call a warning or shoot the enemy who was lining up a shot on the previous player, then go on to do other things), or make them the focus of your move (your entire move is about how you race against time and get there before the shot, maybe, or about the fight between you and the bandit when you get there).

Then, leave your own openings too!

One quick further note on this: This is another reason you want to have detail and story to your moves. It is much easier for people to play off of moves if there are details they can latch on to, and if you show your impact. So when writing moves, Add some detail, and especially remember that if you play a card you need to show what impact the card has on the scene. Don't just explain how your trait is good or bad - show the effect it has, and make us feel it.

For instance, if you're "Clumsy," maybe you trip up and bandits get past you...and run straight for a group of villagers, brandishing their weapons and putting them in danger. If you have "Mighty Muscles," you move a heavy stone in front of the gate...and the bandits struggle with it before being forced to go another way, giving you time to send some guards that way too. Things like that. Don't write the entire battle in one move, of course, but be sure we feel the impact of each move.

Finally, Storium works best if there's at least a little shared writing rights to the player characters—and definitely to the NPCs. Here are my rules - these are what I find work well, but different games may have different rules on this, so be sure to check on this with your narrator.

Player Characters: Players should allow other players to use their character for basic statements, basic questions, or assistance with actions as required for moves without requiring them to ask beforehand. They can always politely request a change if they want, and the writer should be amenable to doing so. If you want to write more heavily for another player character, I advise then asking for permission first, unless you've already established a good collaborative relationship. And, of course, if you're writing for someone else's character, keep their portrayal consistent as you can.

Non-Player Characters: Non-Player characters, especially those established by the Narrator, are generally totally free for players to write in whatever way they choose, within the bounds set by a challenge. I may sometimes provide guidelines for NPCs, but by and large, they're your tools to play with. In rare cases an NPC heavily important to the storyline may be treated more like a player character, but I'll always say so if that's the case.

Those are what work well for me, but again, this is a good thing to check on with your narrator. Some games have a tighter atmosphere where characters need to be more solidly held by their creators, and others have a very loose atmosphere where even more is allowed. Some players, as well, will permit more with their specific character even if the rest of the game is tight.

If in doubt, there's no harm asking.

Want to know more about playing off of each other and leaving things open? Here are some further articles I've written on this and related topics:

• Leaving Things Open
• Giving Up Control
• Using Another Character
• Making Everybody Awesome
• People, People Who Need People
• Let's Make Some Trouble
• Questions and Answers

And The Streak Continues!

What's going on everyone!?

Today for the #2019gameaday challenge I played a solo game of Colt Express and didn't do so well. 

As each round went on I would feel like I got this. 

Then I would worry that I hadnt.

And by the time the game was over I placed 3rd unfortunately.  But the game was still fun!

As always, thank you for reading and don't forget to stop and smell the meeples! :)

-Tim

Xenogears- Anti God Or Anti Demiurge?

There are an increasing number of Xenogears fans out there I think, it's an interesting game, but a game I have never completed.

I reached disc two at least a couple of times but the game is far far from perfect and after beginning as an amazing game, a game which you are thinking is going to be one of the greatest games of all time, unfortunately it gradually and then quickly runs out of steam almost from 3 hours in. 

I really love some of the soundtrack though, it is a masterpiece and the vocals are awesome.

The big problem for Catholics with a lot of JRPGs is their blatant anti Catholicism and their promotion of false anti-God philosophies.

I have traditionally seen Xenogears as anti God in a really really big way...sham religion to control people, 'god' himself is an antagonist, reincarnation, etc etc. 

 but I recently saw a video that made me reconsider this a tiny bit, and the video has some good points. The argument is that the Japanese who are godless and largely propelling to eternal damnation like to use Christian terminology to make their games and stories seem more occidental and strange, often applying names incorrectly and with nothing to do with their original reference points. This is certainly the case in Xenogears in a way perhaps unparalleled. 

And so whilst at the centre of xenogears there is this god thing trying to revive itself by farming and feeding itself humans who it has created, this thing isn't really a god at all, it is a demiurge a being that is itself created and yet has the capacity to create as if it were a god. So a created being posing itself is god is the enemy.

But then there is this wave existence- is this the true God? Obviously not, since how could God get trapped by a demiurge (which seems to have happened in xenogears) the whole stuff about the wave existence in xenogears is just incoherent, an all powerful being from another dimension is somehow trapped in a man made robot demiurge and wants to be set free....

So in xenogears we are not dealing with the true creator of the universe in any of this, we are not fighting uncreated existence, we are not fighting the supremely simple, perfect and holy God, we are not actually fighting the supreme being in any way, nor are we helping him escape from the demiurge. 

Xenogears fails in as much as it does not bring to light to fact that whilst the demiurge Deus is a phony god that is rightly destroyed, there is a true God sustaining all things Who Himself exists without the need of any other, a God Who simply Is and cannot fail to Be, a God without which all things would fall back into nothingness.

Hear are some ideas of altering the plot to make Xenogears more Christian:

1) Wave existence has to go. 

2) the continual reincarnations of elly and fei not true incarnations but vocations given by the true God 

3) Just as the demiurge has his false religion in xenogears through the ethos, the true God too ough to His own religion in the world of Xenogears which is acknowledged by the end of the game to be true.

4) The true God wishes to see the destruction of demiurge through means of humans, as humans created this false god the true God wishes that they destroy it.

A Word About The Polish Gaming Market

Last January, I was travelling in the European east. The main purpose of this trip was to finish my post-doctorate research about "Advergames: games as marketing tools" that I developed with Paneurópska vysoká škola at Bratislava (Slovakia). I presented the results and it was great (one more trophy achieved on the academic game).

After some days in Bratislava, I travelled to Kiev (Ukraine) and then to Krakow (Poland). In the last part of this trip, in Poland, I visited one awesome gaming studio named Moonlit. Knowing that the Polish land is a great market for games, I sent some e-mails trying to contact people from the local industry to share some ideas and discover new points of view. I talked to Mateusz Wanatowicz, PR and marketing specialist in Moonlit Games. Below, I surmised our conversation, sharing highlights of the polish gaming industry, Moonlit projects and an overview of polish gaming market.

1.Why do we need to pay attention to the Polish gaming market?

Well, it's one very important market in the central Europe. According to the last Newzoo gaming research, the country (with a population of 34 million people) has profited around 500 million dollars with gaming products. In comparison to Brazil - a country with 210 million people and a profit of 1.3 billion dollars in the gaming market - it's a very interesting emergent market to pay attention to.





2. About Moonlit Games studio

Moonlit is a gaming studio and a software house. In 2018, the company started to produce two authorial projects: Playerless - an arcade game where you need to fix bugs and the NPCs to run it correctly (PC); and Ignis - a battle arena game with wizards, sorcery and combats (PC and Xbox). Below, you can check some trailers and contents from both games.








3. Some aspects of the Polish gaming industry 

It is a promising industry as we saw in the first topic. According to Wanatowicz, the government of Poland sees this industry as a profitable area to invest money in and an entry door for many startups and small initiatives for new business. Wanatowicz highlighted that big events, games jams and young talents are receiving support from the government; and, another important point: careers in gaming area (coding, game designing, 3D art etc.) are also prominent in the academic area.

Another important thing to mention is the fact that the games from the series "The Witcher" were a way to present the Polish gaming industry to the whole world.

It is important to say that board games and card games have a main role in this context too. Local production of analogic games is growing year by year.

4.Polish gamers

Wanatowicz also said that Polish gamers, in a general way, support the local industry and they are proud of the national industry and gaming production.

5.A final message to the Gaming Conceptz audience

Mateusz Wanatowicz emphasizes that part of the success of a gaming industry is about how government, gamer community, studios/companies and universities can join powers to create a fertile ecosystem for different kinds of projects. Big initiatives as "The Witcher" series are fundamental, but supporting indie studios, small startups, events and clear marketing rules are also a key for a good gaming market.



Note: check Moonlit works in the official site and social media by clicking in the links!

#GoGamers