Following my embarrassing defeat at the hands of the Spiders of Mirkwood, I plan to build a new deck using some of the many cards from the various expansions I have.
The Lord of the Rings
I am feeling in the mood to play The Lord of the Rings Card Game. This is a deck-building game like Magic, Netrunner and Call of Cthulhu. Instead of playing against another player you team up and play against the game. It is cooperative, which is nice.
You get to play some of the well-known characters from The Lord of the Rings, such as Aragorn, Gandalf, Gimli and Legolas, and you get to travel around locations in Middle-Earth and fight spiders, goblins, orcs, trolls and Nazgul. Its great.
The following takes place
01:58AM
“Zoe, get me out of here!”
Stirling skids around the corner and pelts towards the emergency exit. He slams into the door and swipes the stolen key card on the panel. The panel beeps at him disapprovingly.
“I hate on-premise datastores,” he mutters, “Why can’t everything be in the cloud where it’s easy to get at?”
Zoe’s voice pipes in his ear-bud.
“I can’t access the security seals on the door from here, you’ll have to hack them locally.” she says.
Stirling swings his backpack off his shoulder and pulls out his mini-console. “What’s going on behind me?” he asks.
“I’m accessing the cameras… I can see three Haas Corp-Sec units approaching from the south and west. 30 seconds out.”
“Can you keep them off my back while I do this?”
“Sure, Stirl. I’ll just distract them a moment.”
“Stop calling me Stirl.”
(Pronounced ‘drè-‘d ‘ke-‘thoo-‘loo)
What’s better than a cool Cthulhu token (a faithful replica of Henry Wilcox’s famous “The Horror in Clay”)?
It’s good to talk
<in: hi>
<out: hello// please state your identity>
<in: Rielle// what’s your name?>
<out: ICE-Barrier Heimdall// please state your source>
Rielle relaxes. Heimdall is bioroid ICE with a cyborg AI behind it. She terminates her pending icebreaker thread, it won’t be needed. All she needs to do is talk.
It is an inverse Turing Test. She must convince the computer she is one of them, and she has a huge advantage.
She is a cyborg, too.
Stupid Boy
Director Haas crumples the data-foil in her fist. She continues to glare out of the panoramic window, her back to the conference room.
The last of the C-Levels closes the door hurriedly behind him. Only her virtual assistant remains in the room. Its holo-visage is deliberately bland and neutral.
At this altitude, the window looks out above the city smog. Sunlight streams into the room, highlighting the meeting table and chairs in a golden glow. Despite this, Haas’s face is dark.
“Where is he?” she snarls, “Where is my idiot son?”
Forsaken Lore unboxing
Forsaken Lore Expansion
Eldritch Horror is one of my favourite games to come out recently. It seems to have distilled the best bits of the co-operative doom-track genre into an exciting globe-spanning adventure.
We just received our copy of the first expansion, Forsaken Lore.
This is a small-box expansion, and it contains mainly loads more cards for the various decks, along with a new Great Old One, Yig.
Walk like an Egyptian
The splashing subsides and David Gore watches Maki Watanabe clamber out of the crocodile pool. Her hair is dripping wet. She sheaths her katana and limps off into the gloom between the pillars.
David edges closer to the sarcophagus. The aisle is dark and empty, but there is an eerie shuffling in the distance.
The whole pyramid shudders and there is a thundering crash as another block falls from the ceiling.
He can hear the Russian cursing on the other side of the chamber. The puzzle-lock on the artefact case must be proving tougher than expected. David grins and jams his crowbar under the sarcophagus lid.
The lid grates as it slides to one side. Ancient dust puffs out and he coughs and blinks.
A scorpion scuttles up to his boot and he stamps on it quickly. He turns back to the sarcophagus and reaches for the golden statuette inside.
Another crash reverberates through the tomb. The beam of sunlight illuminating the vault suddenly narrows. The frescoed passageway is plunged into shadow. Time is running out.
David fumbles for the figurine in the darkness. He can hear shouts as the other adventurers scramble for the entrance through the fallen stonework. He tucks the statuette into his backpack as the echoes of the last collapse fade away.
There is a low moan behind him. He starts to turn, but a final falling slab blocks out the last of the light.
Mummified fingers wrap around his neck.
‘Gateway’ games, like gateway drugs
I find a lot of people get the wrong idea when I tell them I like boardgames.
I suspect they immediately think of traumatic childhood family experiences playing Monopoly or Cluedo (known as ‘Clue’ in the US), or maybe they remember feeling dumb in Trivial Pursuit or having dinner parties that ended with couples bickering over Pictionary.
So when I say “I like boardgames”, I can see them taking a mental step back from the obvious loony stood in front of them 🙂
Not all those who wander are lost
Lost Cities is a nice two-player card game. The theme is as thin as the plastic wrap around the box but the illustrations are beautiful.
Tim's Boardgames 