m. c. de marco

Tabletop is a new game blog I stumbled across while looking for Hex-like games, specifically, the game of Y. So far, most of the games covered seem to be abstracts, ranging over classics like Chess and Go, new games like the computer-designed Yavalath, and obscure games like the Javan Surakarta.

I caught up on Purple Pawn today and found all sorts of interesting gaming information:

• A game-themed crossword puzzle.
• A guide to open-source retro RPGs.
• Settlers of Catan online for beginners (but the Java interface didn’t work for me).
• Arimaa: making chess harder for computers to play.

It’s more of a toy than a real game, but Tor.com has announced the Makers Tile Game, v. 2x2, as part of the serialization of the eponymous Cory Doctorow novel.

I recently read game blogger Yehuda’s Berlinger’s review of The Path, a not-quite-video game or “interactive entertainment.” The non-game sounded like exactly the sort of near-future science fiction interactive world to which my characters inevitably become addicted, wasting their lives away inside Matrix-style pods, etc., etc. It’s hardly my original idea; the notion of a participatory movie-like secondary reality is more of a trope working its way up to subgenre status.

The thing that struck me about Yehuda’s review was that he didn’t like the game:

I was at Porter Square Books tonight and I saw a basket of what looked like giant mutant bananagrams. I don’t see them on BoardGameGeek or even the Bananagrams website, so I feel the need to report my discovery to the world. Giant Mutant Bananagrams look just like the regular banana-shaped bag of tiles, but twice as big. The label says 2—16 players. I can’t imagine sixteen people shouting “Peel!” at once…

Purple Pawn has a list of Star Trek-inspired games, just in time for the movie. Unfortunately they’re mostly wargames, but a few RPGs came up in the comments.

Purple Pawn catalogs the board games and RPGs of Cthulhu.