Month: June 2013

06/22/13

Origins 2013 – Costumes!

Brant Guillory 22 June 2013

One of the more entertaining benefits of game conventions is checking out the excellent costumes that some folks wear to the show. This year’s Origins was honestly lacking in full-on costumed convention-goers, but a great many people were sporting something, like a set of steampunk goggles, or a set of antennae on their head. I didn’t notice as many animal tails hanging off of people this year, however.  There were a few WH40K pictures that I’ve seen since Origins, but I didn’t see them while I was there.

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The demo team for Catalyst’s Leviathans game were most decked out in some nice costumes.

 

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Steampunk costumes continue to be popular.

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06/21/13

GARPA 21 – GrogHeads Advanced Research on Projects Advisory

GARPA #21 – Dan Pinkham and Lloyd Sabin

GARPA is now 21 … old enough to drink here in the US. These online tech articles grow up so fast. Make sure before you take GARPA out to hoist a few that there is a designated driver. And here take this … no no, shut up and just take it, you never know when you’re going to need it. Better safe than sorry I say, and I’ve seen GARPA’s taste in women. Just hang on to it and if needed GARPA will let you know, trust me.

And now … the best in crowd-sourced PC, board, miniature, and card games. You know, to pass the time until you go out drinking and carousing with a more mature (and on the hunt) GARPA.

PC Games

Data Dealer by Cuteacute

$560.00 pledged of $50,000.00 goal, funding ends Thursday, July 11.

Yes Cuteacute is a terrible name for a studio, I agree. But the developers are Austrian so that explains it and gives us a good reason not to mess with them further.

GARPA21-DataDealerOn any ordinary day, the idea of Data Dealer would be a great one: run your own social network and collect millions of online profiles and other bits of potentially secret information. Note that Data Dealer does not place the player in any sort of governmental role…you’re in this just for the thrill of learning millions of tiny little secrets and finding millions of virtually closeted-skeletons. And of course monetary profit! Millions of dollars of monetary profit!

Data Dealer is browser-based and there is a beta version available right now at the appropriately named www.datadealer.com. The developers have been working feverishly to get the game in the state it’s currently in…the Kickstarter campaign was started to get the game in a final state and make it available to as many people as possible.

Take the role of a positively shady information age tycoon and run every kind of online company you can think of: mobile apps, dating sites, search engines and social media are all available to you. But those components are just the beginning.
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06/20/13

Warlock Four-Player AAR

LongBlade: Sometimes I think working here at GrogHeads is like living in Valhalla. We fire up wargames, fight all day, at the end of the evening retire for some rest, pour a drink, and chat on our forums. Then we get up the next day and do it again.

In this AAR four of our forumites have taken up the sword and are playing a four-player multiplayer game of Warlock: Master of the Arcane. Although I know their real names (and they’re good ones) we’ll file each of these reports under their nom de guerres on our forums so that folks can direct any questions to them there without confusion.

MetalDog appears to be the instigator of this particular game (no surprise to any of us who follow the forums regularly) and he’s the guy setting up the game. I’ll let him set the scene from here:

MetalDog: Choosing the parameters.  Not sure how well versed everyone is, so, I chose Normal Difficulty.  Ten minute Turns should be enough time and you can only win by eliminating your rivals.

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The map is cylindrical allowing movement East to West over the border of the minimap and is made up of continents.  There are four total combatants and three other worlds.
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06/18/13

Interview: Cthulhu Wars Creator Sandy Petersen

Few things simultaneously strike as much terror in the hearts of sane men and glee in the minds of sci-fi fantasy fans as great Cthulhu, sleeping in his underwater tomb of R’lyeh. Similarly, few things strike as much glee in the hearts and minds of wargame and boardgame fans as lavishly detailed, large scale, and high-quality miniatures tromping across a map. Well, Sandy Peterson, design director and front man of Green Eye Games has a project that intends merge the terror and fanatic reverence of the Old Ones with the hardcore world of table top miniatures. This project, Cthulhu Wars, has just recently been added to Kickstarter and is poised to be a huge success. I’ve tracked down Sandy Petersen in his eldritch lair and, communicating through dark magiks, was able to ask him a few questions.

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Son of Montfort, Senior Boardgaming Editor for GrogHeads (GH): Thanks, Sandy for agreeing to talk with us about your exciting new project. Many fans will instantly recognize your name as the author of the original Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. But you have been absent from the world of tabletops and pen & paper for quite some time. Could you tell us a little about the pedigree of you and your team and why you decided to return to your “Great Old” roots with a game set in the Cthulhu Mythos?

Sandy Petersen (SP): Well, I will be frank. I had decided that I would have to return to the digital gaming world, take a salary, and henceforth work for other people, on their projects.  Cthulhu Wars was going to be my swan song – my last-ever venture into Cthulhu for tabletop gaming. I got together with Rob Atkins and Rich Luong, as partners and artists to put this together. Our plan was to create a fun little game that would become a cash cow to give us all an income stream on the side. I had already accepted a job offer to begin working making iPhone games for a foreign-based firm.
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