Risk Legacy: The designers are magnificant bastards

I haven't managed to pick up the game yet, but this little fact has been confirmed on boardgamegeek:

Along with all of the envelopes that say "DO NOT OPEN UNTIL [game event X]", there is one envelope that says "DO NOT OPEN. EVER."

And there is definitely stuff in there.

As a purist, I plan on following the instructions completely, and literally never opening it (at least not until long after there's ever a chance of playing the game again), and staying away from spoilers about its contents.

But I will always be curious........................

Risk Legacy

Have I written a blog post about Risk Legacy yet?

I probably should.

I'm really interested in this game.

For those who don't know what it is (and don't feel like reading the BGG link above)..

You've probably heard of Risk.

It's like that, except everything changes.

During and after each game, you literally modify the game components. New rules, new cities (named by the players), a list of winners... adding and DESTROYING things. Secret card packs that are opened at specific points in the game, which aren't necessarily in order.

Everything down to the basic rules changes.

After 15 games, you're basically done "creating the new world", and you still have a customized boardgame which is affected by the people playing it.

It seems like a great game to encourage a playgroup to regularly meet.

15 games of BSG can be fun and result in cool stories, but 15 games of Risk Legacy end with a game you uniquely designed.

I can't wait for it to be available, I will try and get PlayGamesWithJosh to play it as much as possible.

MORE Gaming

Hey, a gaming post on my gaming blog!

PGWJ actually happened this past Wednesday, and it was pretty awesome.

Some old friends from college came over who I haven't seen in a bazillion years, AND we played Glen More! Twice!

So, Glen More is a pretty neat game. It is a collection of a whole bunch of little Euro mechanics in a single Scottish package. (Although, just as with many Eurogames, the theme doesn't matter).

My real only gripe with Glen More is the cube resources. A few times we had trouble telling between the Gray and White cubes in costs, and they do take away from the little bit of theme that there is. If Power Grid can have fuel that is at least roughly representative, then Glen More should have sheep that look like sheep. I might order those animeeples from Maydaygames after all.

The game itself sometimes feels like Carcassone (meeples, and tile-laying that needs to respect a river and road), but it also has trading mechanics (the market, which you can only use when necessary, so you can't deliberately monopolize a resource) and a very cool scoring system.

You get points based on the difference in how much of a Thing (chieftains, whiskey, and special locations) you have more than the person with the least.

So if you focus only on Whiskey and Distilleries, for example, then you're going to be giving away points to everyone else who has been collecting other stuff.

In the end, you actually lose significant points if you have too many tiles more than the guy with the least, which is a nice balancing factor.

The turn-order, which allows you to have an imbalance of tile numbers, is based on your meeples walking around in a perpetual circle. Really, it's easier (for me) to visualize it as one of those cartoon escape sequences, where the characters are constantly running and the path behind them is crumbling away...

The person at the end of the line gets to take a turn (pick up and activate tiles). If they're still at the end of the line, they get another turn, etc. If you jump too far ahead for a good tile, you'll be waiting around for your next turn. But if you take too many baby steps, those tiles had better net you more than 3 points each in the end.

I really like how it all fits together, and looking forward to playing it again. It even has built-in mechanics for playing with 2 players (a die that randomly eats tiles), although I'm not sure how well that plays. Worth a shot.

Glen More gets a GRRRRR on my arbitrary Ossian scale.

Phone Phlip Phlop

The decision was made. I was counting down.

The Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the first Ice Cream Sandwich phone ohmygodawesome!

With an NFC chip!

720p screen! 32GB of storage! Wowser wowsy wow!

But...

The other announced phone, the Droid Razr, has some significant advantages.

It's billed as being damn durable.

Kevlar construction.

Gorilla Glass (officially confirmed to NOT be on the Nexus)

"Splashguard" coating.

I've got a 3-year-old, and I'm not exactly the most graceful person myself. My next phone will get dropped and scratched.

Some other advantages too, like a removable SDcard.

Sure, it has a smaller screen, and no NFC chip (sorry Google Wallet!). Will be running Motorola-branded (not "Google Pure") Gingerbread out of the box, and will have to wait a few months for ICS (also probably not "Google Pure"). Non-removable battery (which could cause trouble in emergency situations).

But it is looking better for my actual use cases.

And then there is the HTC Rezound, formerly known as Vigor.

It's supposed to be in the same class as these two phones, but nothing has been announced about it officially yet. I don't know what that means.

It's a good thing I have some time to weigh the options and read the blogs.

I still don't think I will be waiting for the Galaxy S 3 (which could come in 6 months and might not be on Verizon), but the Nexus is not looking as shiny or obvious-choicey as it did. :/

A post about phones

I've been venting about phones on social networks for months, so I might as well make it into a full blog post, now that the Signpost has opened up to more subjects.

"Feature Phone" (non-smartphone) users have an advantage: the advantage of ignorance. You get a phone, possibly for free-with-contract. You can use it as long as it lasts; literally until the battery will no longer hold a charge, or until you run over it with your car, or the carrier pries it away from your cold dead hands. When it's time for a new phone, you go into the store, get the cheapest one, they transfer your contacts, and you have another phone. You don't really explore the full extent of what your phone can do; or if you do that, it's about "the phone I have now", and not about the platform it's running on.

iPhone users have an advantage: the advantage of consistency. "The next iPhone" comes out, and you either get it or you don't. iPhone features are predictable and build on each other, and the experience is consistent. (Please note: I'm not trying to start a platform war in this post.)

Android users have an advantage: the advantage of diversity. Each phone has its own hardware advantages/disadvantages, its own take on the operating system, and its own little quirks. But sometimes, diversity is frustrating. And here is the motivation for my post.

I've got my original Motorola Droid, the flagship Android phone for Verizon from early 2010 (ed note: the Droid actually came out in late 2009, but I got mine in Mar '10). I love it, but it is like an elderly grandparent. It's showing its age, it can't keep up with the times.

I've put it on life support (rooted it and installed some helpful apps) to compensate for its weaknesses, but there's only so much you can do.

As luck would have it, my Upgrade Eligibility date is up in a few weeks.

And there are some really exciting phones being announced. The Motorola Droid Razr, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and the HTC Rezound right around the corner.

Watching the Razr and Nexus announcement events, it's really difficult to choose between them. The Razr has more physical durability and some cool Motorola-specific features; the Nexus has a bigger screen, an NFC chip, and ships with the latest version of Android (Ice Cream Sandwich). The Razr has a removable SDcard, the Nexus (probably?) doesn't. Etc etc.

I'm leaning toward the Nexus, and it will be a HUGE step up for me, but it is not my "perfect" phone.

For one thing, no physical keyboard; this seems to be an unloved feature in newer Android phones, but something I'd actually use.

There are other ways that I'm sure the Nexus isn't "perfect", but I can't verbalize all of them.

But my goal is to get a phone as soon as possible after my Upgrade Eligibility date, so that I have the best phone I can possibly have for the next 18 months. Right?

Well, maybe not.

There are rumors of "the NEXT NEXT BIG THING" coming out later next year.

Of course these rumors are always there. Of course the longer you wait, the better product you'll get. It is the way of tech.

But maybe, just maybe, the NEXT NEXT BIG THING (Quad-core processors, even-HighDefier screens, more gigabytes, whatever) is super-duper enough that it could actually -- *gasp* -- last me more than one Upgrade Cycle, without me feeling left behind in a year and a half.

In the meantime, though, I'd need to continue to limp along with my old Droid, for up to another year, and maybe even fix it up more so I don't keep treating it as low-class. And there's no guarantee of when the next advance in Android Technology will come.

Sigh, this is the dilemma of a gadget geek.

And more about CSS

CSS was the one thing that really wasn't focused on at jquerycon weekend (I took an entire day overview of HTML5, but CSS was just incidentally spoken about in talks).

So this stuff is particularly new to me.

I really wish there were a way to have semantics in CSS for "next to"

Something along the lines of:

#div1 {

nextTo: #div2 side(right) top(30px);

}

to say "div1 is on the right side of div1, 30 pixels down." and have them stick together. At least for use with IDs. Obviously it can be worked around in javascript, or the math can be done in advance, but that's a pain.

Anyway, this brings me to programmatically-created CSS.

This basically gives me 3 options: LESS, SASS, or PHP/roll-my-own script.

I have to explore these options to see which one is worthwhile, if any.

They all basically do the same thing; allow for variables and less repetition when writing, but outputting standard CSS to the browser.

None of them seem to have the "next-to" functionality that I desire, except in making it easier to do the math.. But that doesn't make them bad.

I will try some stuff out.

So, I should start doing that..

Today's magical discovery: media queries

http://css-tricks.com/6731-css-media-queries/

I haven't even done stylesheets for the standard different media before (screen/print/etc) but this looks super neat.

You can change the style by how big the screen is; that opens up a whole lot of possibilities, especially for a webgame where the interactive parts of the game really need to stay on the screen.

For example, deciding not to use images when the screen is too small.

It's simple stuff. And probably not new to you. But cool.