Birthday and Father's day Loot

Hi All,

I feel like I'm falling behind on all the great stuff that is going on with various blogs right now, so I thought I'd write a short post about what I've been doing and some upcoming plans.

First off my wife and kids got me Munchkin Bites and Munchkin Cthulhu for my Birthday.

We just played Bites and it was fun. The puns are pretty goofy. I thought my wife and kids would like it because they like the whole Evolution/ Twilight war between the Vampires and Werewolves thing. My son won easily, with coaching, while my wife and I floundered around doing nothing.

I bought myself The Walking Dead and Rocksmith video games. I had read a review of the old walking dead game somewhere after reading that the new one was not very good. The old one is tense and filled with hard choices.

The Rocksmith one is interesting in that I get to plug my guitar, and bass, into the Xbox and play along with popular songs. The interface is similar to Guitar Hero/ Rockband in that the strings are color coded and the notes cascade toward you. Forgetting where your hand is on the neck can become problematic. Right now I've only played two songs in dummy mode and it reminds me of playing "easy" in the other games. You play select notes while the song is blazing away and it doesn't feel like anything they give you is actually on the beat. Hopefully it will get better as I go along.

I still have a gift card from Amazon burning a hole in my pocket, I'v got my eye on a Charles Grant title and some other things.

I also received my prize from Doug over at Doug's land of the Dead, but it is so cool it deserves its own post.

If I were to do a post line up it might be:

Doug's Prize: What I won.

Thoughts about ACW on the eve of Gettysburg.

SWC Bloggiversary giveaway.

(Line up subject to change as the next thing takes my fancy)

PS- I may be doing another complete overhaul of the blog design. But that is for another post as well.

Games played, Comics read, giveaways entered.

Hi All,

Still on vacation, and as usual not really finding the time to get to all the things that I packed for down time during the trip.

We just finished our second game of Conan Munchkin in as many days. My daughter won yesterday with an actual strategy and some fairly cunning play. It makes a barbarian father proud. My son won today, and although my wife helps him make most of his decisions, he had a pretty good end game for the win. My wife threatened me with the sofa after I played a Level 19 wandering monster on her to stop her from reaching level 9. She ended up having to run away and died in the attempt.

I purchased a couple of graphic novels yesterday. The first was King Conan: The Phoenix on the Sword

From www.comicastle.com

Good quick read, great art. I think you can't go wrong with any of the Timothy Truman Conan comics.

Next was the Walking Dead Vol 1.

From darkfaerietales.com

I am an avid follower of the television series and considered buying the compendium, but didn't want to carry the phone book sized thing in my luggage. So I've gone with the trade paper graphic novel. Even if you know the story from the show the book is different enough to keep it interesting. This book was like potato chips, I devoured it and wanted another immediately. Although it has a lot of swear words my 7 year old was very engaged by it and even picked it up and read some on his own. I'll take it because he is not a very strong reader and avoids reading at all costs. If he has to be exposed to a few "sentence enhancers" along the way, that's a price I'm willing to pay. He hears that and worse from his old man anyway, so who am I kidding.

Now onto pimpin' the giveaways.

I got over my self pity and threw my name in for the Darksword miniatures over at Wargames and Railroads here.

I then also jumped in on the 100K views giveaway happening over at Trouble at T'Mill, you can see the prizes for Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3.

Good luck to everyone entered.

Planning games for vacation.

As I mentioned previously, I am going on vacation this weekend and I need to put together a gaming kit. I intend to do some more Chronicales of Loa, and perhaps an RRtK battle in the Talomir campaign. In addition to this I was thinking on how I could make a sort of portable gaming kit.

So here is my plan so far:

I've ordered some stands from Precis Intermedia for paper figures here. I'm going to print out some figures from Paper Friends and print out some terrain form the various sets that I have.

I'm thinking of focusing on WHAA/ Swordplay / WHL for a dungeon crawl. I also have the Jewel of Murinae scenario from THW. I still also want to do a Cthulhu themed game of LTL. Thus far I have read WHAA and LTL but only thumbed through Swordplay and not read WHL at all. so I may cut my losses with WHL. The other question is if my brothers friends want to play. He said they will be coming for this big party my folks are throwing and like to game, but I'm not sure I'm ready to go live with a bunch of gamers. On the other hand it could be fun.

I also did a little retail therapy the other day and bought a card game box and die bag made by Fantasy Flight Games from my local Barnes & Noble bookstore. The box is meant for holding your Magic cards, but will work well for holding Munchkin Conan. It even has a little box that attaches to the bottom that I'm going to use for holding the die and level marker tokens.

Two part card game box and large die bag.

What is best in life?

Crushing your wife at Munchkin Conan and hearing her lamentation!

We played another game yesterday, just my wife, son and I. My daughter was busy watching tv or something. This game was at my wife's insistence.

The boy actually won the game, and I was in last place and willing to leave it there. But no! Someone had to beat me. So we continued play. As we both got up in levels I came up against a high level monster. My wife had a card in her hand that gave it +10. I was down by 5 and then I saw it. I had a +3, one use only item and noticed that the monster gave an additional +2 to one use items. That coupled with the fact that I was the warrior class and won all ties allowed me to win the encounter and beat her.

Here is a link to a youtube video of Wil Wheaton playing a game with Steve Jackson that goes over the rules pretty well. It's a little long at 29 minutes.

And Dale of Dales Wargames turned me on to Munchkin Land, some great podcasts of Munchkin game play. Always interesting and funny.

I've been meaning to post here but actually have so much to post about I'm a little bit paralyzed by the amount of stuff.

I've gotten in a bunch more figures but am concerned that I photograph them right, I don't want to hurry and give you a bunch of crappy pictures with a good camera, like I did with the BUM stuff.

I'm finally sorting myself out in the Loa campaign so that should be heating up again and I think I have some inspiration for painting in doing some figures from the Caesar Adventurer set. Hopefully I can get my act together this week.

I've been cleared to start exercising a little and it has been killing me. My abs are doing okay but it feels more like 2 years than 2 months since I've had a proper workout. I ran 1.25 miles today but it felt slow and heavy. I also have been having weird anxiety dreams the last few nights and actually woke up this morning thinking it was Monday. All this from a guy who doesn't have a job.

So I've gone off my diet a bit and am relaxing with a little wine and this update to you my friends. Hope all is well with you and filled with fun toys and games.