Ever feel like playing board games, but don't have the company? Or just don't have the time to invite a bunch of people, wait them to show up? Do your friends diss that game you particularly like?

No worries, there are tons of free computer board game applications with AI players that you can game with. Sebastian Sohn has compiled a GeekList of them on BoardGameGeek called SoftBoard Games: Free, Commercial, and Abandoned Computer Version of Board and Card Games with Computer AI (Artificial Intelligence) Opponents with Screen Shots . Many other BGG dudes have contirubuted on the list as well. There's over 180 games listed so you are bound to find something you like there.

Of the games listed, I've played at least Space Hulk, Can't Stop, Wizard's Quest and Ra. Other notable mentions include Modern Art, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Blue Moon, Street Soccer, Samurai ... ok, there's too many to mention. Just check it out yourself!

When Gregor Hutton of the indie rpg publisher BoxNinja announced the publishing of 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars rpg on Story Games forum a couple of weeks ago , I was only mildly interested at first. Upon closer investigation, the theme of the game seemed similar to Starship Troopers and GW's Space Hulk, which seemed cool. I've also planned on running a soldier rpg of some kind for some time and 3:16 seemed to produce a different twist on that so I thought it might give my own ideas a boost too. When people started to lay hype on 3:16 in the Story Games thread, I had already kind of made up my mind. I ordered the pdf from Indie Press Revolution . The price was 10 bucks, not a lot for an european these days.

To quote the author: This high-octane Science-Fiction role-playing game for 2 or more players has your Space Troopers killing bugs all across the Cosmos. You’ll advance in rank, improve your weapons, slay civilization after civilization and find out who you are through an innovative “Flashback” mechanic.

Terra’s plan is to kill every living thing in the Universe to protect the home world. See where your tour of duty in the 3:16th Expeditionary Force takes you and your friends. Revel in the kill-happy machismo and enjoy a campaign of Carnage Amongst The Stars.

I've written a more thorughout feature of the game in Finnish. It seems like a cool and promising game. The lack of need for too much preparation combined with the promising flashback and intra-squad relationship mechanics makes it very interesting. I'll write more about 3:16 after we've had a chance to try it out next week.

In English you can find more information on the game through the following links:

• The Games's Official Pages on BoxNinja (With links to Actual Play reports and material)
• The Press Release of the publication on Story Games
• The game's page on Indie Press Revolution

I 've recently pondered starting a new rpg. Our Hyborian adventure Kingdoms in Flames is eventually going to come to an end  and I would like to start some face-to-face gaming stuff in Helsinki too. I've got two ideas that I'll discuss later, but for now I'm gonna thnk about what should be decided by the gaming group before starting the game. This of course is a reaction to my own ponderings on the successes and failures in the Hyborian game.

The other influence was a conversation with a friend on my on the drive to our friend's summer cottage (and back). He was thinking of a new game of his and looked for me on advice to construct (or choose) a working system for it. After the conversation I spotted the following written by Marshall Burns on Story Games (http://www.story-games.com/forums/?CommentID=150542) paraphrasing Vincent Baker on Forge and Anyway:

"I love the way that Vincent has broken down System, on the Forge and (mostly) on Anyway, to the way that you answer two questions:

• What should I contribute to the game?
• How should I treat my fellow players' contributions?

When everyone knows the answers to those questions for THIS group, for THIS game, for THIS session, then you've got a real type of thing goin' down."

This is kind of the basic level of the system. More specifically, in planning a game, I (should) look also at these kinds of questions (which are of course related to the previous ones):

• What is the theme of the story?
• What is the style of the story?
• What is the general structure of the story we are going to create?

• for example, the kinds of scenes, sessions and production seasons in PTA

In my opinion, all of these have to be clear and unambiguous within the group before starting the game. The GM does not have to decide all of them by himself, but in our group(s) it seems best that he lays down most of the restrictions.

Or how we learned to play Hyborian Adventures with Dust Devils.

And how it was different from what I imagined it would be.

Before we started to play the game, I made some vague promises (or described the gameplay very vaguely at least) to be only moderately intra-team confrontational. Well, that's how I imagined it. On retrospect, it was a pretty bad judgement. I also anticipated that I could have lots of Dust Devils conflict action just from putting the players in a situation and watching it play out. I even thought that we wouldn't need that much 'conventional' role-playing scenes (my character says this etc.) fro the game to work. Wrong again, even though I think that the interplay between regular rpg scenes and conflicts is not explained very clearly in the Dust Devils book.

So the first two sessions were okay, but the lot of us were just feeling around, trying to make sense of how to use the rules of Dust Devils to produce something valuable. Then a couple of things happened at the same time: We as players felt that we had 'gotten' the system and the excitement that comes from the five-card draws in Dust Devils and I started to read actual play reports of Dust Devils in the Forge.