Articles of Note
The State of Games, Ep. 188 – The One About Milk
Chris sits down with Josh Mills, designer of Milkman
The State of Games, Ep. 187: The One About Unpub 2023
Chris, Darrell, and TC talk highlights from the Unpub con.
The State of Games, Ep. 186: The One About Our Robot Overlords
Chris, Darrell, and TC talk the impact of AI on gaming
The State of Games, Ep. 185: The One About Crossing the Line
Chris and TC talk about games and bad behavior
The State of Games, Ep. 184: The One About Catching Up
Chris, Darrell, and TC catch up after a long hiatus
The State of Games, Ep. 183: The One About Works in Progress
Talk of upcoming projects; importance of adapting
The State of Games, Ep. 182: The One About Getting the Brand Back Together
Darrell, TC, and Chris talk the separation of DHMG and GTG
The old station creaks under the strain of the vacuum surrounding it. A couple of hours have passed since you watched your android gunner be taken down in a hail of surprise suppressor fire by one of your original teammates. You turned and made a break for it, cold sweat covering your brow, and have since made it further into the complex despite those damnable bugs that have been popping up all over. Suddenly, a sound to your left makes you turn and jump. Out of the shadows steps Nina, your most trusted team confidante. “It’s ok,” she purrs, stepping closer, “we’re all in this together.” She slowly extends her hand, an object held tight. “Here, let’s trade – I have something that will help with those wounds.” You pause for a moment, wanting so badly to take her hand, to trust her with all your might. And yet, you hesitate. You rifle through your satchel and choose just the right item – the something you’ve been holding onto since the very beginning that may provide protection. Without further hesitation you draw it, and in one swift move take her item and leave her holding your only protection against the growing infection: a gas can.
That’s right, a gas can. Welcome to the Panic Station.
Placing the somewhat-absurd opening narrative aside for a moment for a brief explanation of the core mechanics, Panic Station is a paranoia-driven social game with a traitor mechanic for 4 to 6 players. The players take on the roles of a group of xeno-exterminators, sent to a remote station of some sort to investigate and eliminate a malevolent alien life form. To do this, they must find the alien nest, collect three gas cans which fuel one of the massive flamethrowers carried by a human team member, and thoroughly torch the room. However, during the mission, one of the group members will secretly become infected by the alien parasite. The infected’s mission: To infect as many other team members as possible, without detection, until all the humans in the team have been assimilated or eliminated.
Somewhere, deep in the heart of the city, a villain perfects his nefarious plan. His constant obsession: to rid the city of its pesky patron saint and to finally rule the weaklings that walk its streets. Meanwhile, high atop the tallest skyscraper, a hero watches, his razor keen senses attuned to the slightest stir of trouble. The hero knows that it won’t be long before the villain emerges from beneath the urban sprawl – and wherever evil rises, the hero will soon strike it down. The setting: the colorful city of Gold and Silver Age comics – the world of Super Showdown!
Super Showdown is a card game that pits two players in the classic struggle of hero versus villain in the world of classic comics. The rules are pretty simple to grasp, but allow for a surprising amount of depth for such a small game. Players are dealt 9 cards each which have a color (either white for a heroic card or green for a villainous card) along with a certain number that determines that card’s power. If you have more white cards in your hand, you’re the stalwart hero – if not, you’re the nefarious villain!
Dice Hate Me and Go Forth and Game have joined forces to bring you some of the best gaming interviews on the web! That’s right, from time to time here on Dice Hate Me, Tom Gurganus will contribute one of his comprehensive conversations. In his Dice Hate Me debut, Tom sits down for a detailed chat with our good friend David MacKenzie of Clever Mojo Games, makers of Alien Frontiers. Enjoy the interview and be sure to let us know if there are other designers, artists or gaming insiders that you would like to know more about!
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Tom Gurganus: David, welcome. Tell us about yourself.
David MacKenzie: I’m just an ordinary guy. I played Parker Bros. games as a kid, party games with the family as an adult, and, now that I’ve reached the half-century mark, my interests have turned to designing and publishing hobby games. Those are the phases everyone goes through, right?
Tom: Happy Birthday belated!!! I hear you brother! I’m almost 50 and I went through those phases. Risk and no one would play it with me. Though we did play a lot of Monopoly. Ok, so now for Clever Mojo Games. How did it come about? Why did you choose to self-publish?
David: In 2007, my brother introduced me to Settlers and Carcassonne, dragging me into the hobby game scene. By the end of the year we both had ideas for games in our head and a chance conversation brought us together to develop those ideas. We were originally going to try and license our games to other publishers, but after one deflating evaluation we said to heck with that, we can do it ourselves. We decided that I would create Clever Mojo Games as a sole proprietorship, but Fred has always been my not-so-silent partner in this endeavor.
We’re not always hobnobbing with the celebrities of gaming, or jetsetting to hotspots like Columbus, Ohio and Lancaster, Pennsylvania – sometimes we just like to stay at home and talk about board games. This would be one of those times, and if you’re down for a full hour of our rambunctious ramblings, boy have we got the podcast for you!
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Like that poeticized beast whose time has come round again, so slouches another Arkham-based game toward your local retailer. Many gamers have asked just how often Fantasy Flight Games can dig into that cyclopean well of Mythos and mystery. Luckily for us Lovecraftian fiends, with Elder Sign the well has not yet been tapped. And yet, despite the gritty goodness that lurks within, from the moment I cracked the box I knew that the loss of sanity would be inevitable. For contained within this eldritch vessel lie dice – lots and lots of dice. Specialty dice, actually, with strange symbols etched into their glimmering surfaces; symbols that – for want of a more apt description – continued to taunt me at every turn and on every roll.
Yes, this time around, Arkham’s fate is sealed all in the roll of a die. Judging by the name of this blog you might think I would not consider that entirely a good thing, but on the contrary it is the brooding atmosphere, tight mechanics and tense rolls that breath fresh air into the realm of these dusty tomes.
Like its bigger brother, Arkham Horror, Elder Sign delves into the realm of H.P. Lovecraft, with horrific beasts that prowl the night, scheming cultists that seek to awaken an ancient evil, and star-born gods that seek to rule the world once again. That realm is no less vast in character in Elder Sign, even though the flavor is more condensed. For those veterans of Arkham Horror, there are lots of familiar faces, places, and things present here – but not so much that those less familiar with the streets of Arkham, Mass. might feel lost. We’ll come back to those faces, places and things in a bit, but for now, let’s turn our attention to the dice.
As stated in the Dice Hate Me charter, bad dice karma isn’t just a clever name, it’s a way of life around these parts. It seems that wherever Dice Hate Me appears at conventions or gaming events, there are gamers who immediately identify with the sentiment set forth by the brand, and then there are a select few who laugh, but brush aside the mention of such foolishness. Well, I hate to say it to those latter folk, but – I told you so. Case in point, the following brilliant post about dice-rolling statistics by FrontRangeGamer from Front Range Gamers. Lest you think that this guy is just blowing about some hot air, he dabbles in quantum matters at the National Institute of Standards and Technology which, for us laymen, means he knows a thing or two about probability. As for me, the following involves a lot of math. For those of you who know me well, you know that I’m not exactly a math guy. In the words of Han Solo: “Never tell me the odds.” In this case, I’ll make an exception – this brilliant breakdown of how the dice may, indeed, hate me was too good not to share with all of you. So sit back, get your math on, and take a look at dice karma from a scientific perspective.
I played a game of Settlers of Catan recently, and was frustrated by the dice rolling. I’m sure everybody has had this experience, when it seems like statistics have gone out the window. You start to think that you should have built on that spot with an 11 instead of the spot with the 6, because that what keeps coming up. It turns out that this is exactly what statistics says should happen, people just aren’t very good at thinking about randomness.
I’ll start with a quick explanation of how Settlers works. Each turn you roll two dice with six sides (2d6), then everybody gets resources if their settlements or cities border land that has that number on it. There are number tiles from 2-12, with little dots on them that tell you how often that number should happen. So 2 has a single dot, and 6 has five dots. A good settlement might a 6, a 5 and a 4 for a total of 12 dots.
We’re going to take a look at what statistics says should happen in games like this. First lets just look at rolling 2d6. The fundamental idea behind trying to figure out what should happen, is that every time you roll a dice, each number on that dice is equally likely. It will help to understand if the dice are different colors, orange and black. Every time I roll, the orange die will randomly pick a number from 1-6 and the black dice will independently pick a random number from 1-6. Every number is equally likely for any given die, but if you are interested in the total of both die, then some numbers are more likely than others.
All the possible combinations from rolling two six sided dice. The black die will randomly select a column, and the orange die will randomly select a row, so you can see that each entry in the table is equally likely.
The table shows the results from two dice, black and orange, and their sums. Imagine rolling the black die to pick a column, then rolling the orange die to pick a number from that column, and you will see that each entry in the table is equally likely. So the probability of getting a certain value in a 2d6 roll is the number of times that value show up in the table, divided by how many numbers are in the table (36). We can see that 2 should happen 1 time in 36 rolls, and 7 should happen 6 in 36 rolls. The dots on the number tiles in Settlers of Catan are exactly how many time that number shows up in this table. So 2 has only one dot, while 6 and 8 have 5 dots. So if you add up all the dots next to your settlement, you should get one resource per 36/(number of dots) turns.
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