The Stripey Hole by Inner City Game Designs is an old-school indy boardgame in a bag, with pages and pages of rules. The basic idea of being cons in the slammer planning to be the first out either by serving out one's sentence or bustin' outta the joint is a nice one, but to pull it off and include activities like tunneling, crawling through sewer lines and/or air ducts etc requires a bunch of rules I doubt I'll get anyone from today's audience to sit still for.
I found this one at Men at Arms in Center Island and couldn't resist it, or another Inner City game Gargantuan which is an attempt to survive a sinking ship as the decks flood under one's feet. Both these are sold in 8x5 baggies like the old Task Force Pocket Games used to be, have components that must be cut out and eschew color - actually, the standees for Gargantuan are in color, printed on photo paper.
If I said I had a weakness for games produced on a shoestring in someone's front room would I be surprising anyone? Anyway, if you are in New York of a weekend and want to play an old-fashioned board game of easy-to-moderate complexity, give me a shout.
Back in 1977, as my college days were coming to an end, I remember playing a wargame set in South Africa in which players took the part of Black South African rebel forces and White South African government forces as the two sides fight for control of the country still at that point being run under apartheid. I was the rebels. I lost.
The game in question had been given away in Strategy and Tactics magazine. This was an every-two-months publication from Simulations Publication International (SPI) and I often wondered what it would be like to replay it. The nature of the changes in South Africa would lend the game a surreal feel, I thought.
And so it was with some surprise that I found a copy of said magazine c/w an unpunched copy of the game inside on Amazon for a reasonable price. The game is now mine and I await the discovery of a worthy opponent so I can wreck my investment's collector value by punching out the components and playing the game with them.
I miss SPI wargames something fierce. Some of my best friendships were born over those four color maps, including that with Paul, the globetrotting wargamer of previous mention in these e-pages. But most of today's kids are scared of anything with more than a page of rules and won't try such games out.
Also scored a decent copy of Avalon Hill's Starship Trooper, a game put out in the early 1980s depicting the action from the Heinlein book. Like all Avalon Hill games it features a proper ("mounted" in game parlance) board in place of the paper maps of SPI. The humans get to fight two different sorts of alien (not at the same time), and the insectile sort have a hidden tunnel mechanism that looks like it will generate much fun for all.
Assuming I can find a player who isn't frightened off by the rulebook of course.
I picked up a digital handful of pdf game publications too.
More Lankhmar products for Savage Worlds including Savage Foes of Nehwon, a book of characters and adventure seeds featuring them - I have a similar book for Solomon Kane and it was great value for money - and Lankhmer Archetypes, a sort of quick start for players wanting to get a character up and running in double quick time.
I kickstarted into the Weird War I product launch and have a bunch of pdfs for that setting, including the GM and player handbooks and some scenarios, maps, archetypes and so forth. The product seems to be well worth what I kicked in and I can recommend these quick-delivery e-product kickstarters from PEG without reservation. I've been a part of two PEG kickstarters and each delivered in about a month or so.
Lastly, I grabbed me an e-copy of The Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition. Expensive at about $25 plus tax etc but people were singing up the changes, which for the first time since second edition were more than a cosmetic change in the rulebook and some tweaks to make the mythos bits even more unplayable.
I've some very strong opinions about what has been done to the game over the years. I honestly believe that by 6th edition what had been a very simple and easy to play game had become a nightmare of contradictory nonsense, mostly concerned with implementing rules that emphasized a certain set of "realistic" views on certain crucial factors in the game that sucked all the fun out for everyone except for a few moody teens.
But 7th edition was written as an attempt to drag back an audience lost to Trail of Cthulhu and Realms of Cthulhu and umpteen other game systems' <Insert Verb> Of Cthulhu offerings. It has been back to the drawing board and emerged a different beast (or so they say). I haven't gotten too far into it, but already I'm gritting my teeth over certain pesonal hot buttons.
However, I've cut the vitriolic story-so-far I wrote and I'll post a more considered view when I've read it through again.
