Some Frugal Alternatives To Popular Spendy Games

Enough, I say!  Enough!

I wrote a post.  It was about increasing prices and decreasing points values and the two-way gouge perpetrated by miniature wargame companies.  It wasn't bad.  I'm just sick to the back teeth of doing nothing but advise people on how to negotiate with these big bad corporate entities, how to play the popular games without being played for fools.  It's possible to play that game and win, but a better way to win is to not play.  With that in mind, here are some of the free or cheap things I've been painstakingly hoarding, in waiting for the day when I can persuade people to play them and not something you buy in the shops.

War Games

Hordes and Heroes, by Kallistra, is a 10mm fantasy game revolving around abstract units made of several models on a single base.  It uses a very clear, very clinical hex terrain system, which is probably the clearest set of rules I've seen for terrain pieces in a long while, but is perhaps incompatible with your existing terrain collection unless you're prepared to do a bit of work or invest in Kallistra's proprietary terrain sets.

This is why I'm also going to recommend Hordes of the Things, by the Wargames Research Group.  It's currently out of print (I bought one of the last paper copies, it would seem) but the WRG have been good enough to provide a download of the current edition as a stop-gap until they can bring it out again  (and thanks to arabianknight for pointing that out!).  Hordes of the Things is another very tight rules set with the advantage of working in a variety of different scales - the measurement distances and number of models that qualify as a 'unit' changes, but the actual mechanics don't.  Both games use generic unit types that are wide open to choice regarding which manufacturer's miniatures you use, and both have a historical variant (Hordes of the Things is in essence a clone of major historical system De Bellis Antiquitatis, also by the W.R.G., with rules for dragons, gods and magicians bolted on) if that's more your bag than outrageous fantasy.

On the skirmish side of things, allow me to big up Dave King's Skulldred.  Skulldred is currently in beta testing and has been for some time, largely because Dave wants it pretty much as tight as he can make it when it does finally go to a commercial release.  At the moment, it's free to download, and has the advantage of being open to use any set of miniatures in the same scale (although, as is my way, I recommend 28-32mm for anything where individuals matter and 10-15mm for anything that's more about regiments).  You'll need to perform some jiggery-pokery with dice, either using the wraparound template Dave provides or investing in some blank d6s to make your own.  Or you could use a look-up table, but that'll get a bit wearisome if you have to do it for every roll.

Roleplaying Games

Swords and Wizardry is a free-to-download open-source 'retro-clone' of several early editions of Dungeons and Dragons rolled together (I confess to not being up on the game's early history to the point where I can tell you what's been rolled into it; furthermore, I confess to not caring).  The point is that it can do pretty much whatever you want to do with Dungeons and Dragons - scale up, scale down, convert settings, make your own setting, imitate Basic, Advanced or Old Dungeons and Dragons - and it doesn't cost anything or come with the promise of splatbooks ranging out into infinity.

If you find Marxist taxonomies of characters and rolling tons of dice to be faintly distasteful, meanwhile, allow me to point you in the vague direction of Atomic Sock Monkey Press and their excellent free-to-download Prose Descriptive Quality system for diceless roleplaying.  They also make a few settings for that system to be used in which, while technically costing money, come with enough free downloads for you to bodge your way through it with a bit of imagination (and let's face it, you'd need at least a bit of imagination to play a diceless RPG).

Computer Games

Battle for Wesnoth!  It's free, it'll run on damn near anything, and it's a charmingly addictive hex-based turn-based fantasy strategy game.  I recommend Wesnoth doubly because of an active user base that's forever churning out new single-player campaigns and offering multiplayer if that's your thing.  The only bad thing I have to say about it is that large battles with three or more computer players get pretty boring; you can skip the computer players' turns but then you'll start yours with half your units missing and no idea what killed them or what to avoid when you save and reload - which you'll be doing a lot, since the AI is intelligent enough to go after things that you don't want to die and very, very cut-throat in its application of attack probabilities.

Torchlight is in essence a Diablo clone.  You remember Diablo.  It was a one-armed bandit thinly disguised as a fantasy dungeon crawl game where you hit monsters to see what loot fell out of them.  It was single player World of Warcraft, in essence, and it was mindlessly addictive.  Torchlight did not set my world on fire, but the demo's free, the game's cheap, and it even looks suitably old-school.  I've just been spoiled for single-player games by the chat-to-other-players aspects of MUMORPEGGERS, I think.

Guild Wars is one of those MUMMORPEGGER things, only it isn't subscription-based: you buy it, you play it, and the only money you need to spend is on expansion packs if you want to play through those.  Looks like World of Warcraft with more sophisticated graphics and less bad pop-culture jokes.  The former stopped me from really getting into it, as there was enough lag to break any sense of immersion or engagement before it really had the chance to develop, and I get the impression that it's a slow-burner anyway.  Not designed to addict with quite the same cunning and effectiveness as World of Warcraft - definitely more of a make-your-own-fun kind of game that relies on you interacting with other players in some meaningful way, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.  Champions Online is closer to WoW in terms of its early-game-hook design, although operating in a different genre, and is nominally free to play, although the free version is so cut-down that you'll probably end up spending some real money to unlock some options for yourself.  Still no subscription fees, though.

Given my druthers, I would play all of these and not their more expensive counterparts, but the trouble with games and gamers is that they are in essence social pastimes and if you want to share other people's play time you often end up playing what they play.  I can sit up here in my Frugal castle with my sense of self-satsifaction and full wallet but that's piss all use if everyone I know wants to play Pathfinder.  That said, I still want to fly the flag for alternative games; they are cheaper than what people already play, they are often more flexible and freeform and imaginative than what people already play, and they are probably every bit as much fun as what people already play.  I'd know, if I could persuade people to play them.

EXPO-say: Von's Frugal Picks from the UK Games Expo

There's nothing quite like attending a gaming convention with no money to sharpen the old critical faculties and make you consider the value of the beautiful, shiny objects being paraded about before your eyes.  I'd recommend it to anyone.  Leave your wallet at home.  Take your ticket and a packed lunch.  Just look at things and think about them.  You might notice, as I did, that many contemporary RPGs are needlessly bloated behemoths that attempt to meld the best of four or more existing systems and disguise the stitches with glorious full-colour and glossy paper; you might notice that those very nice lizard-persons are glorious but at £10 for two owning sufficient numbers of them to use them in any sensible context is ludicrous; you might play and discuss the hot new skirmish game in town and finally work out how the design principles generate sales past the buy-in.  I will talk about all of these things later in my usual meta-contexty way but first I want to talk about the bargains that you might find and endorse at such an Exposition, because I told these lovely people that I would.

You might, at this hypothetical event, have a nice chat with the lads from Arkenstone Publishing, whose names are too Finnish for me to remember or spell (sorry chaps) and who are pimping out the Nordic approach to Old School Roleplaying and the rather curious Inquisitio, which reminds me of the party game Werewolf, complicated by the idea that everyone is guilty of something and some amount of guilt will come out.  They described the game as 'a race to not lose'; it sounds like it requires a lot of concentrating but apparently it's possible to play fairly randomly without paying much attention and still end up somewhere in the middle.

You might encounter the excitable Benjamin Dale of Tied to a Kite Games, who produce the marvellous old-school D&D clone Blackswords and Bucklers, which strips out the hippy fantasy nonsense and replaces it with a grubby, low-fantasy Elizabethan English vibe that's pitched halfway between Call of Cthulhu and Blackadder.  The core rules are fifty clean, accessible pages with a heavy emphasis on making the details up as you go along and not burdening the system with unnecessary personalising-my-special-snowflake cruft - the first of a range of supplements adding further classes and mechanics (usually one new class and one new mechanic per book, delivered in detail) is already out - and did I mention it's a fiver?  Five quid for a roleplaying game that won't put your back out.  Bargain.

On the subject of bargains, they also make a came called Numerix, an 'abstract chance strategy' game that reminds me of Go with dice.  It's easier to play than to explain and an explanation is helped by a picture of the board, thus:

Action shot!

Basically, the dice give you three options in the placement and moving of pieces (either place one piece on a square with that number, or move an existing piece into an adjacent square with that number).  It's up to you which of those options you take, and the objective is to enfold the other player's pieces on three sides to remove them from play.  There's a lot of control over what looks like a very random mechanic and the minimal number of pieces means it should be fairly quick to play.  Again, it's very minimalist, without any unnecessary context of the sort that gets Coop so agitated and drives up the cost of everything with the need for pictures and stories and suchlike woven around it.  The wooden one is a cautious £16, the laminated card and plastic one is a trifling £2.10!  Lovely.

In the act of endorsing Tied to a Kite, you might be noticed by Oliver Piotrowski of Table Warfare, who present themselves as the ultimate frugal miniature manufacturer.  After a good whinge about How Those Other Companies Think They Can Get Away With This, the chaps might present you with the notion of a free rules system with an open-ended time travel narrative that allows more or less any miniature or terrain to be slotted in around the Table Warfare factions.

Now with 100% more reflections of your intrepid reporter!

They also make some rather nice fantasy figures which picked up the Best New Miniatures award, and well deserved it is too.  Photographing them was a bit hard what with all those mirrors and Mr. Flash not being my friend, but I did my best.

Trust me, they're pretty.

Oh, and they price the whole lot at around £2 per infantryman and sell them in single blisters rather than the 'buy one for lots or buy more than you want' straitjacketing engaged in by other firms.  It's a small range but it's definitely one to keep your eye on.  Again, endorsed heartily.

You might, finally, pass by the Mantic Games stand and see Jake Thornton, author of Dwarf King's Hold, doing demos and explaining the future for what looked at first like a rather closeted little game.  I like the idea of Dwarf King's Hold, but I frequently find myself needing games for more than two players; while team play seems like a viable option, it's always nice to have a sense of ownership over what your little mens are doing.  Fortunately, it seems that Mr. Thornton agrees; after a similar start-up set involving Orcs and Elves, he has plans for a pseudo-roleplaying approach with named heroes and a multiplayer option involving multiple factions, all on the same dungeon-tile-based grid - part Warhammer Quest and part Song of Blades and Heroes or similar skirmish endeavour, it would seem.  Interesting stuff.  At £35 it's a little steep for a board game, and I'm not sure about replayability with six fairly tight scenarios and not much apparent randomly generated fun to be had, but I'd be interested to see how it develops and how it might synchronise with other Mantic releases (for instance, it could top up the armies from Mhorgoth's Revenge, and adding another game to your collection and adding miniatures to your armies with one purchase seems like it might have some merit).

Also, the 3:1 scale demo figures Mantic take to shows are fit.

Vonnington, Vonnington, where have you been?

Or, as they say in the old country, "'ere bey, where you bin?"

It's that time of year again: the time when actual gaming begins to edge out typing nonsense about gaming on the Internet.  Life on the miniatures front has slowed down somewhat of late, since I don't live anywhere near the Dice and Decks lads any more and have yet to rally the local Warmachine crowd around my banner (steps are being taken and I've been pleasantly surprised to find battle boxes hiding on various people's shelves around the town - now to get the wretched things onto the table!).

However, life in roleplaying has kicked up a gear, and with remarkable frugality too, as I'm currently playing a game I actually own nothing for.

via absoluteastronomy.com

See, the thing about roleplaying is that not everyone needs everything, if you catch my drift.  Most seasoned roleplayers possess dice in abundance (although recent events have led me to believe that I could do with another d20 or two).  If the gaming group has access to two or three core rulebooks and one copy of any supplements that are needed, that usually does the job.

via onceuponageek

This sort of thing is hardly a requirement just to play the game a couple of times a week, after all.

I recently parted with my hoard of No Quarter magazines, in accordance with certain sage wisdom that invites us to inquire whether we actually gain anything for our time and money.  Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I did at the time; the roleplaying content in No Quarter is generally of excellent quality and the terrain building articles are very inspirational, if unhelpfully US-centric in their materials listings and purchase advice.  However, the magazine is not endlessly re-readable, and hoarding paper copies as insurance against that One Day when the article might come in handy is somewhat cumbersome, especially when you move house as often as I do, so I've traded them all away (except for the two which cover new model types for Warmahordes - it's still cheaper to buy two magazines for the sake of two articles than to buy a whole new rulebook for the sake of four pages).  Before I passed them on to their new owner, though, I did take the liberty of scanning in the articles I was still interested in, just in case that One Day comes around.

Mo' like DUH-ngeon Tiles...

Today's crafty tip and fiddle from yer uncle Von is all to do with RPGs and maps.

Even for an armchair-theatre type like me, roleplaying sooner or later ends up generating the need for maps.  Now, necessity is the mother of invention, and consequently many RPG manufacturers have invented things for you to spend your money on in order to establish just how far into ur base the characters are, and how many d00dz still require killin.  Things like this.

Don't get me wrong, it's very pretty, but it a) costs money and b) only represents the one thing.  I am a) poor and b) inclined to run lots of different roleplaying games, in lots of different settings and with lots of different environments coming up in the space of one story, sometimes even in one session.

That's why I use one of these instead.

Oh, I admit it doesn't look as nice, but the thing is, I'm not limited with this.  I can choose to have a grid, or not to have a grid, can choose whether this blank white space is a dungeon, or a field, or a lava flow, or whatever I like.  If I'm feeling terribly artistic, I can even draw out multiple areas in different colours and use them to trigger events in play.  I also don't have to spend a fortune on graph paper.  I tend to whip it out for any particularly busy encounters and then put it away again, rather than tracking the entire course of an adventure on it, but in theory, smaller pieces could be used to track out quite a substantial area.

In the UK, Wilkinson's sell the board and a black pen for £2.  They also, for just over £4, do a larger board that's half whiteboard and half cork, allowing you to pin resources like world maps, interesting documents and other stimulating papery things onto, but since I can't fit that one in the Nerd Bag (of which more later), it's so far been a no-no.

Back on the Wagon

My gaming has been suffering recently. I’ve definitely been on target with ‘spend less’ – although the temptation to grab a new rulebook or two has been pretty strong, I’ve managed to avoid it. Unfortunately, real life has been getting in the way of getting any actual gaming done – I’m busy, my gaming group is busy, no-one ever lines up a day together. I have, however, used a few days off of work to get ahead on my Dark Elf painting.

The particular style of batch-painting that I favour is ‘do every model at once’, meaning that my current batch is about 60 Corsairs. The downside to this is that until you pick up a model and examine it, as I did this week, it becomes difficult to work out how far away you are from completing. I’m just about entering the final detail stage, which for me means that I’ll be dividing models up into groups of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ for particular things. The first will probably be gemstones – every model with a gemstone goes in one group, which becomes a small batch for painting. When that’s finished, I’ll go through the batch checking out models to see if they need anything else done – belts, buckles, whatever. If they don’t, then I can actually call that model finished! So for me, entering this ending stage is very exciting, because the psychological obstacle of having sixty scowling warriors staring at you on a painting table makes the sense of achievement that much greater. And the increased sense of achievement will make me want to play more, meaning it’ll be more likely that I manage to organise a game!

Another thing I was doing with my free time was planning a role-play campaign. I’ve got a rough skeleton story sketched out, I just need to flesh and structure it a bit more and see what it becomes. My gaming group also have a role-play campaign going that was geographically inaccessible to me, but has fortunately moved closer, that I’m now invited to. That’s a weekly affair that will score many many points on the ‘play more’ part of the deal, and possibly save me the trouble of buying new rulebooks – role-play groups are great for borrowing and sharing books, or buying second-hand. That should also help nip the temptation to spend in the bud.

I think role-playing games are one of the best kinds of games for a frugal and/or social gamer – you might well buy a few expensive rulebooks, but you can bet that someone else in the group has done the same and that becomes a pooled resource. To get started, all you need is to borrow some dice (or still rather frugally, buy your own set for a few pounds) and there you go! I’d heard somewhere that they first took off in popularity around the time of a recession, where people were watching their spending and to have a game based almost solely in imagination was a very frugal way of enjoying yourself – it may not be true, but it sounds plausible!

So to recap, I’ve had a lousy time of not playing enough games. Real life has been interfering, preventing the planning of games nights (for my board games fix) and regular wargaming opponents. But it looks like regular gaming is getting back on the agenda, and if there’s one thing that I’ve learned from my new year’s resolution experiment, it’s that having a real plan of action (not just a hopeful goal) will make all the difference. So you can expect next year’s plans to be much more solid!

Von's Frugal Year: Month the Fifth

Written in mid-June, about May. Sigh. We're all falling behind a bit, mostly due to actually doing things instead of blogging about them.

Spending Less - well, I was mostly good. I did shell out £25 on a Cauldron of Blood (since my Dark Elf army needs one in order to destroy you), but that has brought the Dark Elves to a point at which I can say "these are done, I don't need more stuff to play them, have fun and do well".

I've been sticking my fingers in my ears and ignoring the Warmachine releases (although I am, at the very least, going to pick up the Cryx and Mercenary books, a Harrower helljack and a box of Steelhead Riflemen before the year is out), and bracing myself instead for the upcoming release of Warhammer's eighth edition.

Most of the stuff they're releasing around it looks like overpriced ephemera that's not actually massively useful to the practicing gamer, although I admit to quite liking the new template set - and I've paid more than that for plain templates in the past.

The rulebooks themselves are now verging on 'prohibitively expensive', and so I might be borrowing Dave's strategy of waiting until the boxed game comes out, taking out the templates and mini rulebook, and then flogging the rest. GW staff members will no doubt be wailing and gnashing their teeth at this, but the truth is that two hundred (or three hundred) pages of background is a) a luxury for which I'm not able or even willing to pay and b) bloody heavy to carry on your back when you cycle or walk everywhere.

It will mean I have to wait until whenever the box comes out to actually start playing eighth edition, but what the hell, I've still half a Dark Elf army to paint and a couple of Warcraft characters to level.

Ah yes. Warcraft. Let's talk about that in a bit.

Gaming More - I've had a couple of Warmachine knockabouts with the honourable Shiny, and plans for a decent-sized WFB game are in the works (is that this week, chaps?).

These games, and the one between Dave and Shiny the other day, are being recorded, nay, chronicled in fact, using BATTLE CHRONICLER! (yes, you have to shout it. It's the rules...) which is a rather nice and very free utility for making battle reports like they used to have in White Dwarf back in the day. It takes a while to get used to the controls, especially if you're trying to manipulate individual figures (facing in particular has a tendency to stray when a report is in progress and you're clicking and dragging your dudes about), but it looks quite nice when it's done. The first report (on a Warmachine game) will be up on either GAME OVER or Hand Cannon just as soon as the chap who's hosting them gets back to me with a merry "yes Von your stuff is online now". I have the notes together for Dave and Shiny's game, but... well, did I mention I'm qualifying as a teacher in the next few weeks and have rather a lot of paperwork to do? Well, I am, and I do, and my gaming time is being spent... elsewise.

I've started painting Dark Elves (the Executioners, Witch Elves, Shades and Assassins are all on the go and have all had something painted: skin and metal mostly). It seems like a slightly bitty way to get things done, but when you've mixed up too much flesh or metal you might as well use the paint, and it does mean there's a lot of variety on my painting desk (so if I feel like painting armour, I can do some work on Executioners; if cloth, Shades; if big Eighties hair, Witch Elves). I'd rather have the variety to inspire me than have one project on the go and then not advance it when I just don't feel like painting those minis right now.

Also, I've been playing World of Warcraft. Quite a bit. See, my guildmates have finally become frustrated with me for rolling low-level characters and never bothering to do much with them, and so I've pledged to concentrate on my two highest-level pixellated slayers of lesser beings and actually get them to the endgame before the next expansion comes out.

This is beginning to be problematic Serious Warcraft Business territory, and I'm having to remind myself that time, once spent, cannot be regained. With that in mind, I've been setting up both my characters to spend extended periods of time resting, gaining double experience points when played and therefore levelling at something like an efficient speed, getting more done in the time available. I've also been using profession levelling guides to cut down on the amount of faffing around a bit.

So far I've got one character parked at level 70 (I want to take my time a bit more with him, since it's the first time I've taken a wee dude to Northrend and I want to enjoy the scenery and story a bit) and a Death Knight busily mining and grinding and battlegrounding away, not gaining experience, Resting so that when I do start playing him properly he'll rocket through the levels like there's no tomorrow.

Oh, and the Dark Heresy's going well. We're three sessions in and the plot is slowly beginning to move: the lads have requested More Combat, and so next week's session ('The Killing Floor') will be an extended fight scene with tanks and rioters and aircraft and things so they can get the urge to roll dice and consult charts out of their systems.

This means I actually have to learn how combat in Dark Heresy works instead of fudging it as garishly as I have been. I'd, um, better get on that. And painting Dark Elves. And actually finishing my teacher training on time. It's possible that I need to look at my time management skills again... although I have cut right back on my blogging/foruming time, so that's a start.

Frugal Roleplaying

No, I don't mean pretending to be Frugal (you'll need to read everything else I've posted to do that).

It's occurred to me, as things sometimes do, that I talk a little bit too much about miniatures gaming, and not enough about the other, arguably more Frugal kinds of gaming I also do. I'll have to brew up some more stuff on the computer side of things, but for now I want to share a few thoughts about roleplaying.


First thought: roleplaying can be done with precious little stuff. While quite a few modern roleplaying games are either big boxes full of special stuff designed for use with that game and no other (forcing the customer to buy something with only one use), or very obviously built with miniatures and a mat and accessories like that in mind (naming no names), most are not. If you're not into detailed combat-heavy roleplaying and prefer a sort of armchair-improvisational-theatre approach to the business, you can probably get by with books, players and a bag o' generic, not-too-pricey funny-shaped dice.


Second thought: most of any given roleplaying product line is junk. I could go on (and have done, at length, in the past) about how this came to pass, but the short version is that big-name roleplaying game developers have a lot of overheads to cover and they cover them by releasing a steady stream of supplements which, as the game continues to age, contain increasingly irrelevant content. What I've found, as the years have gone by, is that a decent roleplaying game will have a lot of inspiring narrative possibilities implicit in its core rulebook; so many that I frequently want to run two or three games at once so I don't cram all the ideas into one and end up spoiling it. White Wolf are bizarrely good at coming up with interesting and inspiring core manuals that stand up very nicely on their own - I say 'bizzarely' because they're also the dark lords of splatbooking and seem to base their business on releasing a pretty expensive book for every kind of player character, every faction they might join, every location they might visit and so on ad infinitum et nauseam.

Actually, for all that I've had a go at White Wolf, the supplements for their core World of Darkness game tend to be quite good. I've had a lot of mileage out of Antagonists, Mysterious Places and Ghost Stories - the early weeks of my Mage game were essentially a character, location and story hook from each of these books sort of smooshed together, and you could probably run a decent long-term horror game just out of these and the WoD core book.


Third thought: roleplaying has some hidden expenses, not least of which is the cost of feeding four or five visitors to your forbidding doom fortress (hush now Dave, beige walls are VERY forbidding) instead of one or two. Pete did a post on his board gaming night a while back and frankly the same principles apply to roleplaying: if everyone brings food the cost stays down (also you get to sample some fine quality grub, as my Dark Heresy players will attest). I'd mention the time investment here too, but to be honest I'm not sure there's such a massive one. If you're one of those game-runners who insists on having every possible pathway mapped out, every room detailed, every last currency unit assigned to the pocket of an NPC, yeah, it'll take a while. If you cultivate your improvisational skills, you can keep the time investment in a roleplaying game down to the point where it's not much more work than playing a miniatures game once a fortnight would be.


What I look for in a roleplaying game, then, is something that can be run out of one or two core books, that has a lot of replayability (i.e. is flexible enough to tell different stories with and doesn't just fall into predictability the third or fourth time out). What I look for in a supplement is something with more than niche appeal - I'm much more likely to buy a book of generic story hooks than I am a book that details a particular location, or a particular player-character construction option that'll only be useful if someone in the group happens to choose that particular path for their invisible kleptomaniac avatar.


I have a lot of love for Savage Worlds, which is generic enough to run action-heavy games in a lot of different settings, and minimalist enough to allow for stories beyond the pulp adventure stuff that its system is built to facilitate. The core book basically presents you with a wide-open rules system that can fit in anything from robots and spaceships and lasers and stuff to half-orcs and bird-people with honking great swords (and can in fact accommodate both of those in the same game if you're feeling a bit mental), which lends itself to the imaginative campaign designer who doesn't mind doing their own world-building, or who has a background book by someone else lying around to do that bit on their behalf.


In a similar sort of way, Atomic Sock Monkey produce a system called PDQ, which is similarly broad and generic, designed around story-heavy, narrative-driven, lots-of-word-talking gameplay that fits the action in without breaking it up to search for immersion-breaking polyhedra. If your group are quick thinkers with sharp tongues and not afraid to do a bit of describin', I'd recommend this system without a doubt. Oh, and did I mention that it's free? And that the demos for their various settings are also free?

Thought that'd get your interest.

Von's Frugal Year: Month The Third

Turns out that I've finished my latest batch of essays a day ahead of schedule, so I've time to leave you with some food for thought before I scurry off to the Barbarian North for a week and leave the laptop behind.

First things first: how did the Frugal March go?

Spend Less - brilliantly. Not a penny spent. Jokes about the state of my bladder are not welcome. ;)

Game More - brilliantly. Minor dilemma resolved with minimum of gamer angst. Some thoroughly enjoyable games were played, too, beyond the Space Hulk and WFB I've already used precious bandwidth to opine about.

We broke out Zombies! when an old mate from Wolverhampton came down to see us, which was fairly enjoyable up until the elimination of two players in short order. Zombies! is, in theory, a first-past-the-post game that should avoid situations where two players are out and waiting for the rest to finish, but a run of bad luck can leave someone eliminated early and two players of equal skill can stonewall each other from meeting either of the victory conditions for quite a while. While I like the screw-your-opponent potential of Zombies! a lot, I can't help but feel that the zombie apocalypse setting works better for co-operative gaming, and the thing about co-operative gaming is that there's no advantage to eliminating another player. You might even want to let someone who's 'died', or otherwise had their presence removed from play, back in, so they can continue with the fun times. The other thing with Zombies! is that it suffers from a bad case of expansion creep, with a lot of extra little boxes out to tempt with foolish expenditure.

The House of Von also had a little away-day when another old mate and former Mage player came back down for a weekend visit, and we decided the time was right to play 1000 Blank White Cards again. We've traditionally sat down and played this astonishingly Frugal game (pack of blank index cards, pair of scissors, some black biros, DONE!) in pubs or coffee houses or other public places (because it's hilarious and because we meet all sorts of nice people who are interested... plus the occasional batch of less-than-nice people who find people having fun in public offensive to their delicate sensibilities, but we don't care about them because they're dead inside) and it's usually a damn good laugh.

Finally, the Dark Heresy campaign is lurching forward. Three characters have now been generated, but a schedule conflict has forced one of our players to bow out (he works on an odd rotation and the only days when he's free at the same time as everyone else are days when we're already committed to doing other, non-gaming stuff), so it's back on hold for that bad boy until I can recruit another player or two (going to see some people who might be interested tonight...).

Oh, and I got some more work done on the battlefield: a set of eight modular hill pieces have been cut, painted and textured, as has a cover sheet for the river (so the table can be extended to its full 4'x4' dimensions for games where the extra six inches of flank might be important). I'll get some pictures taken of those (and the Dark Elves) when I'm back from the Northern Wastes.