Normally, I don't like new year's resolutions that much - they seem to be a way to apply unwanted pressures to yourself by making unreasonable expectations of change - but this time I had a good one, and it is the time of the year, so here goes.

At some point during the next year I want to play a game of Ribbon Drive with a superstar line-up: preferably three or more of the following friends: Vellu, VilleA, JuhaH and Kahuna.

Ribbon Drive is an indie RPG where you play a road trip. The main mechanic of the game is based on mix cd's each player makes and brings for the game. You choose a destination and the issue the characters try to solve during the trip.

The game is said to last for an extended session; given that the superstar group of people I desire to play it with a short weekend somewhere could possibly be the most feasible option.

So why would these guys be my dream team for Ribbon Drive? I think that each of them has very good taste in music. What is more I think their individual tastes would compliment each other very well. They could bring the awesome cd's to make up an awesome soundtrack for the game. My main contribution to the game would be snacks and practical arrangements, i guess ;) . I kid, I kid, I think I could make a kick-ass mix cd of my own too. And I think I (and everyone else too) would be open and good with feeling and interpreting the mood of the songs everyone else brings. 

So, dear friends, would you be interested? If you are, I'll start making the arrangements. That'll have to wait until March, though, because I will have something else to do in February, I think.

Here are some links on Ribbon Drive: description in Arkkikivi (In Finnish) and the author's page on the game.

Note to everyone: So it's my new year's resolution to get to play with this superstar line-up at least once in the next year, but I'm also open to other opportunities to get to play Ribbon Drive with other interested people as well.

I've got this experiment with A Penny For My Thoughts that I'm gonna try. I'll invite a group of players and we'll play the game completely unprepared - no one will even read the rules beforehand. Why, you ask. Well let me explain:

Many of the indie role-playing games (oh come on, you know the games I'm talking about, don't ya?) are advertised as games that you can play without any preparation. What is usually meant by that is that none of the players need to do prep for the setting or the events of the game beforehand. This is excellent but it is a long way from the way you can, for example, pick a new board game and learn it the first time you play.

In my own experience you have to read the average indie role-playing game at least twice before you can introduce the rules to the rest of the group and facilite the play to a group of fellow novices. In many occasions you have to parse the game text thoroughly before you can introduce it to a group. There's even a thread on parsing game texts on Story Games .

In an ideal situation every player would figure out the game's rules before gathering to play. This doesn't happen very often, at least to me. An important reason for that (in addition to the game texts to be hard to learn) is that the reasons to play are varied: not all are interested nd invested in learning the rules. Maybe learning the rules is not part of the enjoyment of the game to some of the players at all.

One way to overcome this problem is to play new games with people that have played them before. This is not always possible. Additionally it would be practical to be able to refer to a handy rules tutorial in the midst of the gmae while learning games this way.

I've pondered if the game text itself could be a solution to this problem. Wouldn't it be practical if the texts themselves contained a tutorial that could be used while learning to play by playing? As I mentioned before it is possible to learn playing board games this way. The same goes for video games which have tutorials that teach the user interface of the game to the players. It doesn't seem unthinkable to achieve this in role-playing games too.

I would think this function of the game text would be important especially if the designer has aspirations to reach new players previously unacquinted to role-playing with his/her game. This seems to be the goal of many a designer nowadays as well as other rpg enthusiasts.

This thought popped into my mind when I started reading A Penny For My Thoughts the other day. The rules of the game seem to be written in the order they are to be learned and used nd additionally the symbols that express how the rule text they refer to are to be read (read on, stop here and use this procedure now, return here shortly etc.) seemed to indicate that the game is written to support learning the rules while playing. Which is just what I had hoped to get in a game.

And I thought: "I have to test if it works!". So I stopped reading the rules and started drafting players for my experiment right away. The disadvantage of this kind of experiment is that one player can test one game like this only once.

My first (and only, for me) experiment will probably consist of players that have plenty of role-playing game experience. It would be interesting to test the game with players new to role-playing too if my experiment goes fine. Finding the players could be a hassle though so maybe that won't come true in the near future.

But, if everything goes all right we'll experiment with A Penny For My Thoughts by January 15th. I'll write about my own experiences after that. I'll also request other participants to report their views on it too.

Red November is a co-operative board game by Bruno Faidutti, published by Fantasy Flight Games. The premise is about drunken gnomes in their nuclear submarine. Everything is wrong -- the gnomes must try to survive for an hour before the help arrives.

Mechanics: Mostly Clear

Making co-operative board games is not an easy task. The game has to avoid becoming like playing solitaire with a group of people (which is, if you have tried it, pretty irritating experience). In Red November this is tackled by introducing two important decisions -- players can affect their odds by spending more or less time on specific repair tasks and by drinking grog. Drinking grog risks passing out and spending less time risks wasting the repair time used altogether. Individual players can surprise their comrades by succeeding against the odds (and saving time in the process) or passing out in the middle of action and thus causing more problems to others. This is all good and fine, I guess.

The fixing mechanic of rolling a ten-sided dice will undoubtedly divide the players.Some will like the random factor and the possibility to either take a chance or use enough minutes to have 100% chance of succeeding. And I imagine others would prefer other mechanics to dice rolling. In this case I fall into the latter category, but that's just my preference and the mechanic itself is sound enough.

The mechanic of drawing (ominous) event cards when you use up minutes is stronger than the dice rolling mechanic. There's some randomity like rolling for which room of the sub is flooded or in fire, but it evens out in time and the game stays pretty tight throughout in most games. The only weak part in that mechanic is the beginning of the game where I have found some bewilderment amongst new players as to why they should do anything because advancing time just gets them into trouble. Astute observation and I don't really have a good answer to that.

Presentation and Production: Sleet and Hail

The main weakness of Red November, however, is the presentation of the game which is lacking in a few key points. First, the game box is very small and it is almost impossible to pack the various chits back into it after playing. Second, the item tiles are small and contain only icons. That makes them difficult to shuffle and makes learning their use more work. Third, the game board is very small; Also the minute track that is on its edges is tiny and on my copy clipped badly on one edge.

All these things make the game a hassle to play. Packing and unpacking the game are not major parts of the gameplay experience but I have to say that the ridiculous mismatch of the amount of chits and the tiny game box has made me hesitate to suggest playing the game as I know I'll be the one doing the packing after.

As for the tiles I think that the only viable reason for using tiles instead of cards is the size of the game box. And considering my previous point this isn't a viable explanation either. If the items would be on cards there would be room to print the rules related to the items on them also, making the game much easier to learn. When you have two rule summary cards for a maximum of eigth players that is simply too few. Plus the cards would be easier to shuffle and stack face down also (yea yea I know that you don't need to stack all the tiles on top of each other but turning them all face down is a hassle nonetheless).

As for the game board I would go for a larger one with ample room for the minute track. A larger board would allow for rule explanations for each of the special rooms of the submarine too, removing the need to consult the rule book.

All in all I really cannot understand why Fantasy Flight Games had to publish this game in such a small box. It isn't like you could play this on a train or the back seat of a car as you'd only lose all your numerouschits in the process. I guess price is a factor here. On the other hand this kind of usability problems have ruined this otherwise pretty good game for me. In short I'd rather play Pandemic which is performs admirable on production values and usability. Drunken gnomes and nuclear submarines is a great premise but it is spoiled by the execution - surprisingly not the game mechanics itself but the presentation.

So as of today I'm officially 33 years old. To celebrate I'll post a tip on how to make use of your old World of Darkness supplements for material to the excellent sword & sorcery rpg In a Wicked Age.

This idea stems from a short story game I run a couple years ago in Jyväskylä. The term short story game (novelliroolipeli or noverope in Finnish) was coined by our group; we noted we were too busy with life to complete long campaigns and opted for a story now! kind of solution -- cut to the chase and keep it short. No grinding, you want to play a master assassin, you play it now. No in-play setting of situations -- you want to play a guy with wife and children you don't have to woo, marry, build your housee etc. in play, just set that up pre-game. Et cetera. This was a couple of years before we even heard of Forge-style games.

But the game in question was based on the World of Darkness Hong Kong sourcebook. I had bought that game a hile ago for another short story game. At that moment I just wanted to see what other gamers thought interesting in Hong Kong, the setting of that other game.

For the Midnight Dragon (which was the name of the WoD Hong Kong inspired game) I ripped the situation straight from the sourcebook, photocopied the major NPCs and gave them to players to choose as their player characters and run with that. It worked great.

The point being that most of the old World of Darkness sourcebooks seem to have a situation ready to explode and all the main characters (NPCs of course) that are related to the situation. This is exactly what an IAWA oracle brings to the table (and more).

While it isn't necessarily less work than choosing a random oracle, I think that prepping the sourcebook material into a IAWA starting situation is very painless. Just select a couple of characters to include, let each player choose one as their player character, leave rest to the GM and set up best interests as normal.

It is important to decide how much of the oWoD canon you want to adhere to in your game. For most, I would suggest making an agreement that any setting fact not coming up while setting the best interests is not set until handled during play. This will make the play more fluid in my opinion and negate the need to start browsing WoD sourcebooks in every scene. With a group consisting only of WoD enthusiasts you are of course free to make a different agreement.

A couple of words about why I think this is a good match. First, I think that IAWA and WoD share a similar attitude: Individuals are more important than the society is. At second thought this is probably only true for the NPCs in the sourcebooks, oWoD player characters created by the rules presented in the rulebooks are pretty much mooks only.

The other thing that makes this a good match in my opinion is the graphic and active nature of the powers of different character classes (ha!) in WoD games. The exchange of blows mechanic of IAWA is pretty compatible with it.

So that was the advice, now go play vampires and werewolves if you still have the books rotting in some shelf!

image: Satanica by BATH0RY (creative commons -licensed, attribution, share alike)

I've officially gone mad. Just a day after our game creation challenge, and I'm participating on another one. This time it's the annual Game Chef, now hosted by Jonathan Walton. The format is a bit different this year, requiring each participant to start a new blog of their game design endeavour. Mine is http://altgame.wordpress.com/.

The great thing about this year's Game Chef is that they have a set of deadlines from which you can choose one or more: week, two weeks, a month and a year. I don't really have a lot of free time in my hands but I'm still planning to hit the week or two week deadline. From then on I'm gonna see if it is worth it aiming for the farther deadlines too.

Geiger Counter is a collaborative role-playing game designed to produce survival horror movie -like experiences. It is designed by Jonathan Walton and is available from his Bleeding Play blog.

The game is designed for one-shot games. You can create a whole movie in one evening. The suggested optimum number of players is from 5 to 7. There is no Game Master, everyone gets to both play a character of their own and contribute to the overall story, milieu and play the menace in turn.

I've not finished a game of Geiger Counter just yet. From reading it though it seems like a perfect fit to me -- no GM, light but effective system, focus on the story and making it together.

While the genre is probably familiar to everyone I think that additional tools and material to fuel the collaborative idea generation can help the first phase of a Geiger Counter session -- coming up with the premise and directoral style for the movie. So, I've collected a couple of links to survival horror movie trailers in Youtube for your viewing pleasure.

• Alien
• The Cube
• 28 Days Later
• Open Water
• Sunshine
• Black Hawk Down
• Target Earth
• The Mist

Please provide others in the comments if you have them!