Category: Games

The shit ass economy claims another victim, and this one will hit close to home for a lot of geeks. Topps announced that “WizKids will immediately cease operations and discontinue its product lines.“

Allow me to be the first to say (on this blog, anyway) well, shit.

WizKids Games is an awesome company. They’re best known for their Heroclix and Horrorclix games, but my personal favorite is their Pirates game. Pirates packs an entire game into something the size of a pack of trading cards, including Dinky Dungeons-esque dice. It’s really fun to play, and scales well with gamers of varying experience levels.

HeroClix and HorrorClix are really fun tabletop minis games that take all the bookkeeping and stats of a wargame and put them right into the base of the figures. I got Nolan into 40K via HeroClix when he was in 6th or 7th grade, and I’ve heard similar tales from countless other Geekdads. As I write this, a HorrorClix Great Cthulhu sits on top of the bookcase behind me, keeping watch over everything I do, ready to devour me if I ever slack off.

I don’t know anything about the business behind this decision, but I wonder if this has more to do with Topps consolidating and returning a focus to trading cards, instead of WizKids’ games not selling well or enjoying popularity among gamers. In fact, I kind of hope that’s the case. According to GeekDad, “Topps will immediately pursue strategic alternatives so that viable brands and properties, including HeroClix, can continue without noticeable disruption.” Hopefully, gamers won’t experience much of a disruption, but I’m sure the people who work at WizKids and lost their jobs will notice one, and that sucks. I’ve been lucky enough to meet several WizKids employees, and they’re all great people.

I hope that WizKids will find a way to stay together and keep putting out their unique games, not only because they’re fun on their own, but because they are perfect entry points for GamerDads like me, who have a vested interest in creating the capital-G Gamers of tomorrow.

I Propelled this story earlier today. If you’re a propeller member, would you Prop it for me?

OMG:

True Realm – A HUGE two-day “gamer theme park” that is packed with TWO DUNGEONS and TD mini-events!

It is a shared gamer-geek dream that someday there would be a “theme park” just for medieval fantasy gamers – and it is finally here! Due to the overwhelming response from volunteers and players regarding the “True Dungeon: Director’s Cut” event, we have greatly expanded the scope of the event to create a medieval fantasy cityscape loaded with cool gaming events. Not only will the “theme park” be DOUBLE the size of the Gen Con Indy True Dungeon event, but there will be TWO unique True Dungeon modules offered as well as many cool TD mini-events. You can spend two full days completely immersed in “True Realm” while living out your “True Gamer” dreams!

True Realm will be housed inside a 40,000 sq. ft. cavernous warehouse, and it will be divided up into the Dungeons and the City. The Dungeons will take up about 28,000 sq. ft. and it will be the area where all the True Dungeon events are held. The City will be a 12,000 sq. ft. detailed medieval fantasy cityscape complete with cool, high-quality facades and lighting.

I did True Dungeon once at GenCon SoCal. I absolutely loved it right up until I died in the spider room. Now, I realize that telling “how I died in True Dungeon” is like telling a bad beat story in poker, so I’ll go ahead and give you all 1d6 GP if you read this story and ever play in one of my campaigns.

We were in the spider room. Most of us avoided getting webbed, including me, the cleric, and the fighter. I was a Bard, so I started singing a song to inspire the fighter. The fighter started wailing on the spider, who decided that the best defense was to only attack me. The cleric was so busy laughing at my song, he never healed me (thanks, Cal) and I died pretty quickly after taking two massive blows on successive turns.

Here’s the thing: afterward, the woman running the room made a very big deal about how she “didn’t take it easy on Wil Wheaton.” Gosh, thanks for that. Her, um, “logic” was that the spider saw that I was powering the fighter, decided that I was a more serious threat than the fighter – who was beating on it with a sword – and acted accordingly.

Okay, let’s just take a moment and consider this. Dungeon Masters, I’m talking to you now: What’s the Monstrous Spider’s average intelligence?

Taking a look at the 3.0 Monster Manual (which is what we were using at the time) a Monstrous Spider has an intelligence of wait for it … zero. Now, I’m just a simple country chicken lawyer, but isn’t it kinda hard to know that the guy wailing on you with a sword would be a slightly smaller threat if you took out the Bard who was inspiring him with song when your fucking intelligence is zero? I’ve only been running games for 20 years, though, so maybe I’m using some arcane interpretation of the rules that wasn’t operative at the time.

It was an incredibly frustrating way to die, because it seemed unfair and arbitrary. I wouldn’t mind dying some kind of heroic death, or falling into the Pit of Infinite Falling You Dumb Ass because I did something stupid, but getting thumped because the DM for that room didn’t want to “take it easy on Wil Wheaton” seemed really lame to me.

For what it’s worth, I’ve talked to other people who played that year, and lots of them have similar complaints about the way that particular room was run. Everything else, though, was spectacular, and I’d highly recommend the experience, which is wonderfully memorable whether you survive or not.

Anyway, enough about me. Where and when is this magnificent True Realm happening?

True Realm will be open on Friday, April 3rd and Saturday, April 4th 2009 from 9:30am until 11:00pm. The two True Dungeon adventures (as well as the two TD mini-events) will have start times from 10:00am until 10:00pm. The event will take place in a very easy-to-find warehouse in southern Illinois just six miles west of Interstate 57 at Exit 58.

There are a ton of events, including mini-events called True Raid and True Grind that are exactly what they sound like. What can you do when you’re not crawling through one of the dungeons? Get your emm effing geek on, that’s what:

Between the times you spend playing all of the ticketed events, you can have fun enjoying many free activities like the aforementioned Bard’s Contest and the Costume Contest. Or, you can visit the Inn or the Tavern for some refreshment while picking up an open game or trading some tokens. Also, you can sit down to strategize with your team for an upcoming event, or you can just sit back and talk about old gaming exploits while enjoying a turkey drumstick – barbarian style.

Okay, I’ll have to bring my own Tofurkey drumstick, but I think I can handle that, because this sounds like the greatest thing for gamers since they put dice in a bag.

(Thanks to reader DM for the link!)

I’m four days behind on work, so before I have time to share how awesome Sacramento was, I’ll have to get caught up.

Until then, I have a link that’s going to make Gen Xers go nuts:

The Top 10 Most Influential Educational Video Games from the 1980s.

People who grew up playing video games are influenced by them, especially when designing games of their own. Those who played through the 1980s are reaching their professional prime, and the games they played in school are worth examining. Here we’ll take a look at what I consider to be the top ten most influential educational games from the 1980s.

I’ll refrain from telling you what the games are, because a big part of the fun for me was scrolling down the page and jumping a little bit as each one was revealed, saying a little too loudly to my empty office, “Oh my god I played that!” Feel free to geek out in the comments here or at Propeller, though. This could easily turn into a radical ride on the 80s nostalgia bus.

(Huge thanks to my fellow geek Brendoman, who found this and submitted it to the Geeks Group at Propeller.)

NB: I’m an idiot. I left the very important word “Educational” out of the link to the story. I’ve added it.

(Full story at Kotaku.)