Monday, July 21, 2014

Favorite Gaming Moment


Well said :')

I just got home yesterday from MCing my friends Sean and Becky's wedding in Ontario, which was hands-down the coolest wedding every. Three words: mass lightsaber battle. Once everyone had collapsed from dancing with glowsticks and gorging on milk and cookies, we started reminiscing about tabletop gaming stories, and eventually came around to my favorite gaming moment:

In my last year at Waterloo, Sean and his friend Ian decided to run a game of Mage: The Awakening with 10 players split into two rival teams. I was a player in Sean's group, and we were racing against Ian's team, who were playing in another room (with information passed back and forth between Sean and Ian), to acquire several magical artifacts scattered around Chicago. My character was a modestly powerful mage with spells involving opening portals.

After some tribulation we managed to beat Ian's team to an artifact located deep in a sewer, but we knew they were hot on our trail and likely to intercept us. One of my character's spells allowed me to open a portal to any location I had physically been, and it just so happened that my backstory involved a backpacking trip through Nepal. Thus I was able to open a magical portal to Nepal, but escaping through it would be terribly inconvenient seeing as the rest of the artifacts were still in Chicago. However Kaitlin, one of the other players on our team, specialized in invisibility magic, and she happened to be a high enough level that she could hide our entire team from view, provided we huddle together very quietly in the corner.

When our rival team shortly arrived on the scene, they spotted the open portal (as well as the absence of any artifact) and "pursued" us through it without hesitation, after which I closed the portal and stranded them all in Nepal without them even knowing that we were comfortably still in a Chicago sewer. This of course meant that Ian's next session would require writing a completely extraneous adventure in Nepal that would lead them nowhere. Knowing I was the portal mage, when Ian met me alone in the hall after the session, he simply muttered "I hate you so much" a couple of times before walking away.

It made me so very happy :)

(Also Ian looks like a young Jim Carrey, if that happens to improve the story at all.)

Also also! SU&SD mentions my good friend Paul Saxberg's award-winning upcoming game Coven in their latest news post!

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Crawl

Well dang, this looks pretty awesome!

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Steampunk Rally

I'm very pleased to announce an upcoming boardgame I designed called Steampunk Rally!

It recently won the international Ciutat de Granollers design competition in Barcelona (as well as currently being a finalist for the Canadian Game Design Award), and will be pubished through Kickstarter by Roxley Games.

You can check out some of the fantastic art by David Forest and Lina Cossette on boardgamegeek.com, but here's the 140-character Twitter pitch:

"Famous inventors at the turn of the century construct fantastical steampunk contraptions in a no-holds-barred race through the Swiss alps!"