A little disclaimer: This podcast is insanely long, but you get two great podcasts, all for the price of one! This time around, Darrell, TC and I invite Dan Patriss and Tom Gurganus of The Geek All-Stars to come over to Dice Hate Me HQ for a little round-table discussion of all things superhero. What was originally planned as a nice, breezy bit of podcast crossover time turned out to be an epic and passionate discourse on one of our favorite topics. We had a blast – I know you will, too! Just be sure to stay hydrated and find a comfortable chair.

Read More

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to another installment of The Crowded Table. It’s been quite awhile since the last iteration of the Crowded Table, but still there have been plenty of interesting games to grace the gaming surfaces at Dice Hate Me HQ. Some of them have been mentioned a few times on The State of Games and The Geek All-Stars, but I felt the games below deserved a little more written attention. Some of them you may just see (or hear and see) more about in a future feature on Dice Hate Me! And away we go:

Coup

Dedicated readers and listeners will immediately know that I am a social gaming junkie. If there’s a system to be gamed by gaming the other gamers through sly promises and double-talking, I’m all in. Since you know that I know what I’m talking about I’m here to tell all of you, definitively, that Coup is one of the best social games I have played in several years. In Coup, each player controls two secret cards that could be one of several different types of characters – each with a special ability to cancel the powers of another character. Each round, players take turns announcing what character they are using and activating that ability. It doesn’t matter if the player has that character, it just matters if the other players believe that they do. Otherwise, any other player can call the alleged bluff and attempt to cancel the action with one of their face-down characters. Of course, if the calling player is wrong (or are themselves bluffing), there’s usually a steep price – and lots of cackling around the table. The winning player is the one left with any face-down characters in front of them. It’s a simple system that does what any great social game aims for: Steps back and graciously lets the players transform the game around them. The original Coup design has been scooped up by Indie Boards & Cards and is currently on Kickstarter with a retheme from The Resistance universe. The production and art is top-notch, but I tend to prefer the quirky original to this new Hunger Games-like rendition. Still, if you don’t have it, you need it – particularly if your idea of a good time is to watch everyone around the table sweat while you’re bluffing your butt off.

Read More

This podcast is a little break from the recent norm, as I give usual co-hosts Darrell Louder and TC Petty III a tiny break (but they’ll be back!) and bring on some new knuckleheads in a fun and different Q&A format – turned on its quirky nogging. So sit back and enjoy some banter with two of the gaming industry’s nicest guys ever, Matt Riddle and Ben Pinchback.

Read More

From time to time on Dice Hate Me, someone will shoot me an email with a different sort of proposition. This time around, it was Jason Kotarski, designer of The Great Heartland Hauling Co., and he wanted Dice Hate Me to feature an interview he did with another designer, Jeremiah Lee. Designer on designer, and both with awesomely fun games? How could I resist.

Jeremiah Lee is probably a werewolf. Or maybe a spy. Or a zombie. Or maybe he’s just a really nice guy. This stay-at-home dad/game designer may play a lot of different roles but deep down, he’s just a normal guy who loves his family and friends and likes to play a good game every now and then. After the success of his solitaire print-and-play game, Zombie in my Pocket, it wasn’t long before Jeremiah found himself signing a publishing deal for a multi-player version of the game with Cambridge Games Factory. When not “unschooling” kids (look it up, it’s a thing), he serves in a marketing capacity for Indie Boards and Cards. He’s also developing a new game based on the original ZimP for Valley Games and running a Kickstarter project (Check it out now! There’s only a few days left! ) for a new company called Stupid Awesome Games, which he started with friend, Donn Stroud. We were able to spend some time chatting about game design, his favorite games, and his current project Zombie House Blitz.

Jason Kotarski: Let’s start with the standards. Tell me a little bit about who you are and how you got into hobby gaming?

Jeremiah Lee: I’m a full-time father of four young children, I’m a gamer, I’m a distracted designer (most of my ideas don’t make it to the prototype stage), and I’m always doing more things than I should be doing at one time. I got into gaming many years ago, as a kid, but I didn’t really get into the designer board game “life” until late 2007, when I happened upon some board gamers at a local game convention. I didn’t even really know what someone would do at a game convention (I didn’t know you had to buy tickets, sign up for events, or anything like that). I sat down, played Detroit Cleveland Grand Prix, and was hooked. I looked it up on BoardGameGeek the next day, and now I have less money but more fun. I had played some games in college, but it wasn’t until this event that I really got into gaming. Read More

In this video review, I take a look at Triassic Terror – a current Kickstarter project from Eagle & Gryphon games that is chock full of dinosaurs! Is this tile-selecting area control monstrosity worth the somewhat-hefty price tag on Kickstarter? Come watch and find out!

Happy gaming!
Chris

Dice Hate Me Games is pleased to announce the addition of three new games to its projected product line-up for 2013.

VIVAJAVA: THE COFFEE GAME: THE DICE GAME

VivaJava: The Coffee Game: The Dice Game, or, more simply, VivaJava Dice, is the successor to the well-received 2012 release of VivaJava: The Coffee Game. Just as in its predecessor, players of VivaJava Dice take on the roles of employees at the VivaJava CoffeeCo., scouring the globe for the best beans to keep the company on top while keeping themselves one step ahead of the rest of the executives.

Also as in VivaJava, VivaJava Dice has players making the crucial decision between blending beans and research, but with a quick, new twist. Players must now use the dice in their pool to blend – using the beans to create a best-seller for quick points, and then whether to press their luck in subsequent rounds for bigger points but less dice as the blends degrade – or to research, and use their valuable beans to gain an ever-changing variety of dice-manipulating abilities, new ways to score, and paths that lead to aiding a competitor for a later payoff or hindering that competitor for immediate gratification. VivaJava Dice also offers a unique system of cooperative dice-rolling that can help you rise to the top, but at the price of someone else riding your coattails

With an astounding mix of plug-and-play research abilities, subtle social play in semi-cooperative mode, and the chance to hog all the glory and blend the best for yourself, VivaJava Dice is all about choice, making each game fast and furiously different.

VivaJava: The Coffee Game: The Dice Game is a game for 2 to 4 players, ages 10 and up, and designed by TC Petty III. It is set for a late-Spring Kickstarter campaign with a Q4 release from Dice Hate Me Games.

Read More

The usual trio (me, Darrell Louder and TC Petty III) hit the road and pick up a fourth voice – that of game designer Benjamin Rosset. We manage to cram in a ton of gaming at a laid-back Virginia con that all of you should plan to attend next year, and the years beyond.

Read More