Photos from Con of the North 2012

Con of the North

Lou Zocchi on Dice

These are interesting videos on dice-making by Lou Zocchi, whose starships got me into Star Fleet Battles, which got me into more gaming. I got him to sign one of my dreadnoughts at Gen-Con-Milwaukee.

Polishing and how it affects corner radius:



Polishing and how it affects presentation:



"Fresh oats cost more than used oats even though the used oats have only passed through the horse one time" - Lou Zocchi.

Both are from his site, gamescience.com

Here is his patent for a Braking System for Dice.

Game Crafting

It looks like self-publishing of games might now be a reality. This is a pretty neat site I ran into, Matt Worden was using it for his Jump Gate game.

Here he his in a video for the Game Crafter:

[edit] We ended up getting Space Mission which he described as a European published variant of Jump Gate.

Every Day I'm Phasering

Just created this quick meme:



Related to what I was doing Saturday night at the Con of the North:

Liberation: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Blake’s 7

Started reading this book by Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore. It does seem more interesting than the Muir edition, having access to previous scripts and working in sociology into the comparisons.

Stevens, Alan; Moore, Fiona (2011-04-27). Liberation - A Complete Guide to Blake's 7 (Kindle Locations 8-16). Telos Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Yazoo

Yazoo - Don't Go



Yazoo - Situation



The Assembly (Vince Clarke) - Start/Stop

Blakes 7 RPG

I'm thinking it would be interesting to run a Star Trek RPG in the Blakes 7 universe for a Con. Same rules, other side. Similar group, different events.

Here are some ideas:

• my blakes 7 script log


• Unisystem rules


• Main Characters


• Blakes 7 Online


• Play Aurons as Vulcans, without the pointy ears.

More design sites for inspiration

http://www.behance.net/ - Nick had this up today.

CQRS

Interesting reading if you are a services coder.
* http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CQRS.html
* http://codebetter.com/gregyoung/2010/02/16/cqrs-task-based-uis-event-sourcing-agh/

My Valentine's Present

I don't really need gifts for Valentine's Day as my wife makes every day Valentine's Day. She bought me a one-of-a-kind game, Space Mission by Matt Worden. He spoke with me a couple times about the game at the Con of the North. He actually has two games and this was more interesting artistically. He thought it might be too advanced for younger players. The box said 10+, but we played at home and Preston, 6, won.



I mentioned how I had made a hex tile game, Manifest Destiny and in describing it to him, he suggested that I check out Terra Prime. It looks interesting. My tiles were actually large hex tiles made up of smaller hex tiles though, I wonder if that could be adapted to theirs.

Twilight Imperium: Rex

Got to play a couple games today at Con of the North, Runebound: Frozen Wastes, and Fantasy Flight Games was demoing Twilight Imperium - Rex: Final Dates of an Empire. Supposedly the latter is like an out-of-print, hard-to-find Dune board game.

I could see Trevor getting into Rex but I'm not sure I could get others to like it.

In both games I had some trouble getting the nuances of all the rules, didn't figure out the strategy right away. I hope tomorrow goes better.

Also, the play tester/referee received a copy of Space Assault, which sounds like a quick one-scenario Star Fleet Battles, while we were playing. It looks interesting nonetheless. It looks like you can order a copy from Print Press.

Plot of the Budget

Visualize expenditures.

The 90s Pure and Simple Every Time

The Lightning Seeds - Pure


Soup Dragons - Free


Enigma - Mea Culpa



Jesus and Mary Chain - Far Gone

Another Earth add...

Another one for the Another Earth goofs page is: completely violates celestial physics understanding, when the other earth starts to get close enough that it's larger than the moon, some severe disruptions are going to occur.

ASCII Star Wars

Not bad...

ASCII Star Wars

To look at: Lua

Lua (wiki) (official) is being used by Wikipedia, World of Warcraft.

Gradle

Today I looked at Gradle, a tool for building projects similar to ANT/Maven, based on groovy. Spring 3.2 will be built using this.

This is the gradle manifesto: Make the impossible possible, make the possible easy and make the easy elegant.