Erkki

Maybe it'll loop back to the beginning like DELETED

Also, for several minutes I didn't realize what you were talking about when you said two-cows (I was stuck in a cave in Far Cry 3 at the time). Took me a while to realized it was tucows.com , which we pronounced differently in Estonia IIRC.

I on the other hand would love to see Julian's Nukagricola! I like Agricola a lot, but the theme does make it seem a bit boring sometimes. I loved this episode and in fact it inspired me to rethink how I'm going to make progress with my game project. From the start I felt like I wanted some modularity, but I also wanted to keep the rules simply structured. I had many attempts at slightly different additional mechanics to make the game more interesting, none of which seemed like essential parts of the game. So I've actually added and later removed several variants by now. What if I embrace modularity and moddability fully? I could make the game's core really simple, and try to find a way to split the various additional rules and components into actual separate modules, while trying to keep the rulebook easy to start with and refer back to. I'm now starting my attempt to do this by converting the game to software, doing some playtests in software and later turning the software back into rules. This makes sense to me because I think I know very well where the boundaries of a software module are and how to enforce them, but it's not as clear to me when writing down rules as text. I also hope to find holes in the rules and ways to simplify them at the software level. Experimentation should also be easier when I don't have to do the physical setup all the time.

Updated: renamed to Lines of Fire, added an Aztec theme, rewrote the rules. See a later post. I dreamt about a board game a couple of nights ago, but of course couldn't remember the details when I woke up. All I could conjure up was an image of a sort of maze, and it somewhy reminded me of Bomberman. And then I thought, why not try to turn Bomberman into a board game. I have some free time (vacation) and could use a project like this. Could be fun -- a bit chaotic like Robo Rally, but less random and quicker. I sketched up some rules and drew a board, and did some test games with 4 players (all controlled by me), tweaking the rules a bit after each play. Seems ok so far, but I can't really test on myself, so I'll try to get some people to playtest during the next few days. I was wondering though -- Bomberman as a board game somewhy seems a rather obvious idea to try -- do any of you know about any similar attempts, or actual published board games that could be considered similar to Bomberman? I did a google search, and that came up with a couple of descriptions of similar attempts, one even included the rules text. A brief description of my version follows: Components: board, wall tokens, power-up tokens, player tokens, d6 The board is 9x9, layed out like bomberman usually is, with indestructible walls forming a regular pattern. The destructible walls are placed as tokens. Start & Goal: Players start with 1 bomb, and with firepower of 1. Power-ups (+1 to bombs, firepower or movement) can be picked up from destroyed walls. The goal is to bomb the other players to death and be the last man-of-bombs standing. Choose a starting player, although it doesn't matter much in the beginning. Rounds: Phase 1: The Bombening Players move (5 + power-ups), starting with the first player and then clock-wise. - drop bombs to a square you are on while moving - you can't voluntarily move so that you would be under fire when you stop moving (to prevent too early elimination) Phase 2: The Narrow Escape (Optional) - if any player is "under fire", they must "sprint" 1-3 moves (unless they are completely blocked) - the sprinting player's own placed bombs explode after the first step (of the max 3). if the player lives, they continue moving. - additional bombs cannot be placed, but power-ups can be picked up while sprinting - players who were not "under fire" do not move. Phase 3: Explode Mode or Ka-boom! - Bombs explode, using the player's current firepower (e.g. firepower squares in each direction) - For each wall the explosion hit, roll a die and place a power-up. Some walls guarantee power-ups, some have a 50/50 chance. The power-ups are: +1 bomb +1 firepower +1 movement - When all bombs have exploded, move the first player token clock-wise and start a new round if there is no winner There are some more details, but this is the gist of it. If the wall in the center of the board is destroyed, it will go into end-game mode, where players automatically receive additional power-ups at the start of each round. This seems to guarantee that there won't be a very long cat-and-mouse game, as one player should eventually be able to surround the other with bombs. I'm a bit concerned that the beginning is a bit boring -- every player starts in their corner and a few rounds are spent just exploding walls and picking up power-ups.

I've been letting this project lay dormant for a while, as I decided it wasn't as good as I wanted. I'm now taking a bit different approach to iterating and testing and will write a program that implements all the rules and lets me test digitally. Later I will try to simplify & modularize the rules by simplifying the program, then convert the program into new textual rules. Blogging about it here: https://villane.wordpress.com/

I've been thinking about getting a domain name for my blog&stuff again. If I end up doing it, I'll use hover.com/wizard! It was sad to hear that Nick Breckon has been dishonored . PS. bringbackbreckon.com is available

I totally want an adventure game store. Also Idle Thumbs store.

I just realized that I could have played Far Cry 3 with the notifications turned off from the start (I think I got it just around when the patch was released). I didn't realize that's what those options did because they were named in a non-obvious way and didn't have tooltips. Also I didn't want to turn off the tutorials completely at first.

I played a few very long sessions. 14 hours total.

I'd like to see a speedrun of Miasmata. Didn't find any on google, and probably not going to bother trying one myself. This is your chance to create the only Miasmata speedrun on the internet!

I watched it yesterday. Not sure what to think. It's weird in a way I don't fully understand, but somehow the song that plays during the end credits made the movie better ("Anonymous" by SSQM; also I now discovered SSQ, 30 years too late).

Congrats! Also congrats to Ys for being a cyborg!

Saw it as well. Liked it, although it seemed to try to make it more epic than the book was. Didn't notice the difference HFR brings much, except in some chase scenes, where it did seem more fluid than what I'd usually expect.

I think there are still as many of them as there are Estonians (1.5 M)

So this isn't a shooter? I remember seeing some trailer (maybe during the Steam sale?) and thought it was a simple FPS.

The nahua called it matzahtli.

Yes, it would be silly, because it works better with a Mac than with a Windows PC -- don't have to install anything, just plug it in and it works. Disclaimer: I've only used it once or twice with a mac, but the probably aren't any gotchas.

Word! Although I mostly use the list view to find the biggest things in a folder (e.g. steamapps) to delete.

I'm amazed that the Steam sale in combination with my discovery of the tradability of stupid TF2 hats, have reduced my Steam wishlist to 3 games *. And one of them is not even out yet. Backlog has grown quite a bit, though. * there's one imaginary thing there as well, though: Minerva's Den. Or maybe I can buy it for the steam version of BioShock 2 through other means?

Is that the dutch word? In Estonia it's also ananass.

Why does almost every controller-supporting game support only the Xbox controller? Because of not having a wired one, I recently connected my PS3 controller to the PC and had to set it to emulate Xbox controller for Steam big picture or games to work properly

Didn't you read the tutorial? You can put the plants on those trays in the houses/tents. There's six slots there and they are magically made available everywhere those trays are. The six slots were plenty for me.

The Arc Touch Mouse is great! Been using it at work and I even got used to the weird scroll bar. Still use an old IntelliMouse Explorer with a broken button at home. The button double clicks sometimes instead of a single click, which is sometimes annoying, so I've been thinking of getting a new mouse for ... 2 years. Really should get one.

Finished it. I must admit I cheated and looked up the location of the last piece of the cure that I was missing. That probably made me rush through the final areas more than I would have, but damn it was I sick of traipsing around those hills and rolling to my fever. This game had promise, but the execution was mediocre at best. I really liked the way movement was handled overall, but the rolling down the hill thing was getting annoying as shit. Especially if it was a high hill and it took half a minute. I'm not a grenade, dammit! Wish there would have been more options for

At moments this game is infuriating. At first it didn't bother me but after a while the slipping, rolling down a hill and getting a fewer is getting annoying. Plus the beast -- at times it just leaves me alone for a long time, and then it finds me 5 times in a row near the same place, not letting me get to a specific plant for one of the enhancement potions. That bastard!