Midway

Ah, the '80s! So much to love...including arcade games from Midway. The boys and I recently discovered an iPad app that gathers some of Midway's classic quarter-gobblers, including Spy Hunter, Rampage, and more. The only downside to the app is that the greatest '80s arcade game of them all -- Gauntlet -- remains locked. If I can pry the iPad away from Matthew and Nathaniel, I may just figure out how to unlock it!

d14...?

Okay, I'm intrigued. An ancient Chinese board game was discovered (click here for details) that involves rolling a fourteen-sided die. Dang, I wish the rules for this game still existed!

Mmmm...Pie...

So there's a baker in the Underdark who sells pies...fungus pies...

Roadhouse!

In our Tyranny of Dragons D&D campaign, the heroes are inching closer to discovering the headquarters of the Cult of the Dragon. In the next session, they'll reach a remote inn known as Carnath Roadhouse. The challenge for me will be getting through this episode without breaking into the "Roadhouse" bit from Family Guy...

Roadhouse!

SCL Survey

This month's survey on the Wizards site is about Sword Coast Legends. If you've played SCL, you can give your feedback here. I was pleased to see a question that asked about favorite NPCs and which ones we'd like to see in future D&D products. Bring back Hommet!

"I love it when the kittens explode!"

So says Nathaniel, who really digs the latest addition to our game library. Our first foray into Exploding Kittens was a three-player game with Matthew, Nathaniel, and myself. I amassed four of the six Defuse cards (the only cards that allow you to stop the little kitties from exploding) en route to a victory. In the second game, we managed to rope Amy into the action (she finds the game's humor to be rather puerile -- duh!), and a clever bit of card-counting allowed her to kill me off early in the game. Nathaniel, a notorious card-hoarder, outlasted Matthew and Amy for the win. The boys are eager to introduce their cousins to the game, so I suspect we haven't seen the last of those volatile felines.

Exploding Kittens

I was tempted to support the Exploding Kittens Kickstarter earlier this year, but ultimately didn't. I saw the game at Target yesterday and it just looked so tempting, so I picked up a copy. Looks like a hoot -- can't wait to play it with the family!

Sword Coast Map

Beautiful...high resolution...drawn by the remarkable Mike Schley...click here to download the best map of the Sword Coast you'll ever see!

Cool SCL Plot Twist

Spoiler alert! I don't want to give away anything specific, but I thought it was a cool plot twist in Sword Coast Legends when you're given the opportunity to recruit a character who has been bitterly opposed to the party. I figured this character would be a mid-game boss rather than a potential party member!

False Alarm!

Okay, never mind! I found another way to get where I needed to go, so -- bug or not -- I'm back in business.

Buggery!

Drat! My progress in Sword Coast Legends has come to a halt due to what may be a bug in my copy of the game. If I'm forced to start the whole thing over, I may just drop it entirely, despite the overall experience picking up considerably since I first started.

Rolling Thunder!

Okay, okay, Sword Coast Legends may be winning me over. I love the hilarious NPC wizard Hommet, and he's turning out to be something of a badass with his growing necromantic powers and new quarterstaff that has a flaming skull at the end of it. And he's not the only party member who's acquiring some interesting gear; my main character, a paladin, is now the proud owner and wielder of a rolling pin called Rolling Thunder -- in game terms, a club that inflicts massive lightning damage.

Star Wars Saturday

First an epic game of X-Wing (won handily by Nathaniel's Imperials), followed by some Lego Star Wars ship-to-ship combat, followed by setup for tomorrow's X-Wing battle, capped off by an episode of the amazing Star Wars Rebels. It was a Star Wars Saturday to be sure, and poor Amy was left out of everything!

Battle of Attrition

The boys have had a big X-Wing game going this afternoon, and ships are falling left and right. Nathaniel's Imperial fleet has lost all its TIEs, and Matthew has lost his beloved Luke/R2 combo. The Imperial Decimator and Boba Fett's Slave I are now hammering a lone B-Wing, but the remains of Matthew's Red Squadron X-Wings are just a turn away. This one is still anyone's game, but my money is on the Imperials...

Thoughts on SCL

I'm still not sure what I think of Sword Coast Legends. I suspect I'm still fairly early in the single-player campaign, and I haven't fooled around with the DM tools yet, so there's still a great deal to explore -- and I'm looking forward to it. Still, the game thus far has left me feeling somewhat underwhelmed. I had hoped for the second coming of Baldur's Gate -- an unreasonable expectation, I admit -- but what I'm finding is that SCL is more like a single-player Neverwinter. 

SCL really does feel like an MMO to me. The storyline is linear with bland side-quests ("Find me eight ooze samples!" and such) and the gameplay hardly resembles Fifth Edition (or any edition) tabletop D&D. Instead, characters have powers with cooldown timers as in any MMORPG, they never need to rest (electing where and when to rest is, of course, a major strategic component of "real" D&D), and they never truly die unless there's a TPK.

It's a fun game, though, and I have every intention of playing all the way through the campaign and then building modules with the DM toolkit. Creating my own digital Troya Nova -- or some other location from the Druid Cycle world -- will probably win me over to liking SCL more than I do now.

New 5e Options...Rangers, Take Note!

In this month's Unearthed Arcana post, we get some new Underdark-themed options, including a couple of new fighting styles for fighters, paladins, and rangers. The "Closed Quarters Shooter" style seems like a great fit for the chronically under-powered 5e ranger.

Farewell, Stumpley!

We made a bit more progress on our Tyranny of Dragons campaign tonight, and it was a memorable session indeed. The heroes continued to follow the Cult of the Dragon in the hope of finding their lair, but a wizard affiliated with the cult summoned a troll that killed off our wacky halfling NPC, Stumpley. It was a sudden and sad end for an NPC the boys loved (Amy, not so much), but I was kind of sick of the monk class and wanted to switch the main NPC to a fighter. So, alas, the Stump-meister had to go! Now the players have even more reason to despise the Cult of the Dragon, and I can introduce a new NPC ally the next time we reach a town...and Waterdeep is only a few miles away...