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Years ago I was watching some NBA game. T-Mobile (or some carrier) had this Five Friends, or some damn thing, promotion.
They were asking players to name their top five moments.
So, Horry listed five of his big game winning shots, and of course, you know his nickname is Big Shot Rob.
The interesting thing is he said that in one game he was 0-for-10 going into the final period and another game he was 0-for-11. So, two of his five career defining successes came when he was on the brink of total failure. Had the teams lost these crucial games, his complete 0-for meltdown would be brutally scrutinized. ESPECIALLY, if he had taken the final shot and missed. Coaches could be fired. Players traded. Obviously, this shit happens when teams lose a playoff or finals game.
So, some observations...
First, the coach was willing to put a player in who was DEAD FUCKING COLD that game. In the fourth quarter, at a key moment, in a huge game. That says everything about Horry’s reputation.
Second, Horry himself took the shot and did not let his previous failures affect him. As someone who has played basketball for decades, I know that when you start to miss, it gets in your head. But Horry (and most professionals) play their average. They know if they miss five, they can easily make five in a row and get their 50%.
Third, NOBODY remembers Horry going scoreless in those games, leading up to the final shot. I’m a lifelong Lakers fan and I didn’t know it. All they remember is he’s Big Shot Rob and that’s all that will ever stick to him.
I remember one game where they showed the Lakers locker room before some big showdown with the Kings or someone. Everyone was jacked up or anxious and Horry was stretched out on a bench, asleep.
Big Shot Rob.
For the past several months, my producer Boyan, and I built a list of about 140 games that were potential candidates for Tabletop. We spent the last five weeks playing them to find our final list of games for season three of Tabletop.
It was a very fun process that was also very challenging and kind of exhausting. #GamerNerdProblems
Before I tell you what some of them are, I wanted to talk a bit about the selection process, because it comes up all the time.
I did a Not The Flog all about this, but the basic rules are:
I have to love the game.
It has to be in print.
It has to be teachable in roughly five minutes (there are some exceptions to this rule).
It must have a good ratio of luck to strategy.
It shouldn’t have player elimination.
It can not have simultaneous play.
It needs to have good production values.
It needs to play in under 90 minutes with four players.
I’m sure there are some others that I’m not thinking of at the moment, but those are the fundamentals.
We also put games into categories, like:
Worker Placement.
Area Control.
Bluffing.
Co-operative.
Co-operative with a defector.
Bidding.
Negotiating.
Storytelling.
And so on. If we end up with two or more games that we really like that fit into the same category, we pick the one that we think would look best on camera, or is in some way a better representation of the category for some reason.
There were games that I loved, like Daniel Solis’ Belle of the Ball, which just won’t work on our show (Belle joins Sentinels of the Multiverse, in that regard). There were games that were so infuriatingly awful, like [GAME THAT SHALL NOT BE NAMED], they made me literally angry with rage. There were games, like Escape, that were supremely fun, but feature simultaneous play, so we can’t use them. There’s Rampage — which really needs to be played at human scale at conventions using cardboard buildings and plushie Meeples — that we can’t play because it’s impossible for us to shoot. There were games that seemed promising, but just fell apart at one point or another.
So we took over 100 games that we thought looked promising, and eliminated the ones that broke one or more of those rules. I’d say that left us with about 45 games in all those categories, which we played many times. I guess we’ll call those games the finalists, because I can call them whatever I want, since this is my show. In fact, we’re going to call them Batman.
So we took the Batman games and played them intensely over a span of about five weeks, ending up with 23 games to be played in 20 episodes. They’re all really great games in their various categories, and I’m super excited to see how they play out when we film the show.
I thought it would be cool to share some of the games we’re playing before we get into production, instead of making everyone wait until the episode comes out, so anyone who is interested in them can pick up a copy before the Tabletop effect hits, and also because I like the freedom to be open like this that comes with our crowd-funded season.
So, here are a few of the games we’ll be playing this season:
This is a gorgeous, perfectly balanced game, where players take a journey from Kyoto to Edo, along the East Sea Road. It’s from the same designer as Takenoko and Rampage.
In Libertalia, we’re all pirates trying to outwit each other and bluff our way to the best treasure. It’s super fast to learn and play, has massive replay value, and allows us to talk like pirates. Yar.
We describe this as “7 wonders express”. We’re all trying to have the best meal in a sushi bar, passing cards around the table and trying to keep what will help us, while we try to mess up what everyone else is trying to get. I just love this game, and it’s one of many that are simply outstanding offerings from Gamewright, a publisher that is increasingly becoming one of my favorites.
This is one of the few “gamer” games we’re going to play this season. It’s published by Days of Wonder, a company that usually publishes “lighter” games (like Ticket to Ride and Pirate’s Cove). I’m most worried about how we’re going to make this game work, because it has a ton of meeples and the art on the game, while beautiful, may feel cluttered on camera. I love it so much, though, I am determined to make it work. I even had my editor come over yesterday to play it, so he could give us ideas on how we can best film it. Not that it matters, but this was my favorite game at GenCon this year, and is so far my favorite of 2014.
Oh, I guess I should tell you a little bit about it, right? All these different colored meeples are on the board, and we pick them up and drop them off like in Mancala, as we use them to claim spaces, score points, and collect resources. It’s a little complex to learn (just because there’s a lot of information to digest), but once you climb the steep learning curve, the gameplay is very intuitive and easy to understand. Because it’s set in ancient Persia, there are Djinn that can help players, and it’s heavily thematic.
Also, while we were playing it yesterday, I got up from my crummy card table (I’m waiting for my Geek Chic table to arrive), bumped the table leg with foot (well, maybe I kicked it really hard because DEX is my dump stat), and not only did I knock all the meeples off their tiles, I spilled my iced coffee over all the djinn cards, and knocked a bowl of almonds to the floor.
Click to embiggen and get the full horror of my Anne Wheatoning.
It was the most epic and total destruction of a game I have ever witnessed, and I’ve been to France.
Not that it matters, but I ended up winning the game after we restarted with an entirely new setup. I’m really good at this game, so when I lose on the show like I always do, it’s going to be rough.
So there you have a few of the games we’re playing this season on Tabletop. Over the next few days or whatever, I’ll post some more of them. We go into production on Thursday the 8th, and we shoot until the 20th.
OH! And there will probably be a MAJOR AWESOME ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT SEASON THREE in the next few days. I hope you’ll join me in getting excited about it.
I’m working on a video game this week, called There Came An Echo. It looks amazing, the story is fantastic, and cast is pretty great (if I do say so myself).
Here’s a little spoiler, with some of the dialog I recorded yesterday:
I’ve written before about how useful I believe the bittorrent protocol is, and today I wanted to share something with you guys that you may not have known about (I’m pretty with it, as the kids say, and I didn’t even know about this until a couple of weeks ago): Bittorrent Bundles. The BT Bundles are all legal, official, and released by artists to promote and share their work with their audience. Instead of paying for server space and bandwidth, artists seed files, and let the bittorrent community do the rest.
Whenever someone tries to argue that torrents are just for piracy, I show them the BT Bundles, because it’s such an effective way for artists to promote themselves and share their creations with their audience.
This weekend, Anne and I went to Portland for Rose City Comicon. While we were there, we visited my sister and her family, saw a strange ball of fire in the sky that I don’t usually seen in Portland, and had an absolutely fantastic time at the convention.
I took a bunch of pictures, and I think they tell the story of the weekend very well, so this is mostly a picture post. I’m going to put the rest of this behind a jump, so my blog doesn’t take forever to load.
