Gen Con 2008 Thursday

Today was my long day of running Commodore games and Cosmic Encounter. Had a bit of a hiccup finding my tables and getting set up; I had missed the location of an outlet that was behind the Train gamers' booth, partially because they had run their power over to the Rogue Judges' area and partially because I didn't search hard enough.

After that, though, everything went swimmingly. For M.U.L.E. I had 6 players and an observer in the early session and 7 players and an observer in the afternoon. Everyone seemed to have a good time, even the player who accidentally lost a M.U.L.E. in round 1 and was pretty much out of the game afterwards. I need to work on my instructions a bit. (I think an intro video would be cool.)

Sadly, nobody came to play Oil Barons. I may have to leave it out next year in favor of something like Archon.

CE Thursday was a reasonable success, but only 9 of my 16 players showed up for it. One of them brought his EON set, which was very cool. I played with three other guys on my half-built Mayfair set.

The only blemish on the day was that I was scheduled to play in this year's edition of Paranoia Trek after running all of these events but fell asleep back in the room after getting some dinner. I missed one of my favorite ongoing Gen Con events! :(

New Rule: No gaming after running eight hours, even if it's just board and computer games.

Big thanks to Odie and Brian for helping me haul stuff to and from the con. I think it's time to look into a sturdier folding dolly, though. And more bungees/straps.

Tomorrow: A glimpse of the Dealer's Room, Car Wars, Robo Rally, and perhaps some actual Paranoia...?

Gen Con Indy 2008, Day 0

We've arrived safe and sound. Got our hotel room, settled in, and went to pick up our stuff. As usual, our total wait time was about 5 minutes for badge, bag, and GM stuff. As irritating as the registration system is, it's much better being frustrated in the spring than the day before the con.

I went to the Forum Stink but didn't hang out much. Wasn't really in the mood this year, which makes sense since I didn't spend much time on the forums this year.

Tomorrow: 8-bit games and Paranoia Trek!

'Twas the Night Before Gen Con Indy 2008

packing...printing...
packing...packing...printing...
packing...packing...washing...packing...

Lots to do before 3 AM! AHH! Too much pressure!

CWVD 10.7.5 Released

It's been over two years since I've released a CWVD. I never thought that the 10.8 Weapons page update would take so long to do. Sure I've had distractions (finally finishing school, volunteering for Con of the North, SPARK taking a year off) but two years?

Ah, well. That's life, I guess.

To help tide everyone over, I've taken all of the bug fixes (thanks to everyone who reported bugs!) and ported them back to 10.7.4. CWVD 10.7.5 can be found at the SPARK Vehicles page; the change notes are below.

One big difference is that I've moved on from Excel 97. Hopefully everything will still work for people on versions of Office before 2003, but I can't guarantee that. It should, however, eliminate the corruption problems I was running into with 97.

Enjoy the new CWVD!

• This and future versions of the CWVD will be developed in Excel 2003. Please let us know if you have a problem opening it in an earlier version. (Minimum: 97 or higher on Win, 98 or higher on Mac)


• Fixed metal accessory costs.


• Fixed ram accessory cost and weight.


• Fixed acceleration for vehicles with Turbo lag and Overdrive.


• Fixed spaces for Solar Panels.


• All Accessories now show their Notes, even if the note is too long to display. (Click the cell to read it all in the formula bar.)


• Added gas tanks to the vehicle summary.


• Fixed B hubs/guards saying they were F in the summary.


• Changed all Misc dropdowns to the flat look (instead of 3D shaded).


• Resized all Misc spinners to be the same.


• Fixed Yet Another Order Problem on the Design Sheet.


• Fixed FT effect text.


• Negative Divisions now show an error and are considered Unlimited.


• The Set Zooms preference buttons now disable redrawing, which should eliminate their flicker and speed things up.

Queen's Blade Reference Sheets Made Public

Even though my set of Queen's Blade Reference Sheets have been posted on the Internet for a while, I've never actually told anyone about them. They've just sat there like my other miscellaneous documents.

Well, now that I've caught up with all of the characters I purchased at GenCon and afterwards and finally split them all into their own page I've gone ahead and posted a message to the lostworlds-rpg mailing list about them.

I hope they find them useful and that I don't get into too much trouble for using images from the books and text from the translations. :)

New Weapons UI Working

Not too long ago SPARK finally played some Car Wars again, and as a result I've been working on the new weapons page for the CWVD.

And boy, does it suck.

Currently each weapon entry has 16 controls. There's 13 weapon lines. Fixing a weapons block involves right-clicking on each control, pulling up the Properties dialog, putting the cursor in the right block, then either jumping to the end (using the mouse because the normal navigation keys move a cell selection cursor around) and editing the cell address to the right cell or collapsing the dialog box so you can use the mouse to select the right cell, then hitting Return a few times to OK out.

Did I mention that even putting the cursor in that field sometimes scrolls the worksheet so that instead of being right next to the cell you want you're a few pages up? Hope you noticed that when the entire page is 13 nigh-identical chunks of controls and data.

Along with those edits, a couple controls require changes in another block in the Properties dialog (easy to forget when you're going quickly), a simple (yay!) search-and-replace to fix all of the lookups, and a bunch of selecting boxes of cells and changing their Conditional Formatting using the menu and weird cell selection edit textboxes.

This is long, boring, repetitive work that's easy to screw up, but that doesn't matter anymore because it's finally done! Well, almost. I don't have the helper macros hooked up yet. I decided to take a break before doing that, so I've been putting together the proper pricing formulas. That's been going so quickly that all I have left is a couple of the mods.

At this rate, there might be a 10.8 beta before Gen Con! :)

New Diversion: Lone Wolf Action Chart

I was a huge fan of the Lone Wolf series of gamebooks when I was a kid. I don't own them all in multiple versions or whatever, but I do own US Books 1-20, the Gray Star set, the Magnamund Companion, both pairs of Combat Heroes, and some other related books.

When Mongoose announced they were rereleasing the entire series I decided to splurge and pre-purchase them all via their Collector's Edition Mega-Deal. I've gotten two of them so far and I've been very happy. (The expanded Flight From The Dark is a little hard to hold open at paperback size, but that's a pretty minor quibble.)

Given what I've paid for them, the last thing I'd want to do is write in the book. Even when I was young I used notebook paper for my character sheet, keeping the same sheet from the destruction of the Kai Monastery to becoming Supreme Master. So I've started working on a Lone Wolf character sheet...err...Action Chart and Combat Reference. You can grab it from http://www.esglabs.com/othergames/.

I'm pretty happy with it, at least for a first version. The one major thing it doesn't have is space for notes on your items. I know I used to write that on the back of the sheet; what I don't remember is if I moved the Special Item list to the back or if I just made notes on specific items when I needed them. I think I did wind up putting some or all of the item lists on the back and then used the extra space for combat effects in the CS/END areas, but I don't know for sure. Bah.

It also doesn't have built-in Lore-Circle notes, which can be handled by a quick note somewhere but might as well go into the sheet if I go to two pages. I didn't bother Acrobat Forming this one, both because it's a work in progress and because I didn't think people would be printing it every time their Disciplines changed. (That's the main thing that remains constant throughout a Lone Wolf run.)

Anyway, I hope people like it. Feel free to post comments here or email them to me.

For Sommerlund and the Kai!

Cosmic Encounter re-release in 2008

I know I'm late to the party, but one of our local game publishers, Fantasy Flight Games, will be putting out a new Cosmic Encounter set in 2008. It's great to hear that a true classic is going to be available again. Now let's just hope it's better than the Avalon Hill set! (Even with FFG's long line of overly-gaudy parts, I don't think it could be worse.)

Here's hoping they can sneak a playtest copy out to Con of the North... :)