I've been doing some high-ish quality wooden jigsaw puzzles, and I'm a bit worried about them getting damaged, so I'm using a puzzle mat. And...I hate it, so much. It's crazy hard to move completed sections around if you need to rearrange, which is often an issue since i always solve without looking at the image. This is the primary irritation, but it's significant, and there's also some secondary irritations like the board is just kinda annoying to deal with and it's itchy lol.

So, to people who do jigsaw puzzles, how do you protect your pieces? Do you use a puzzle mat? Something else? Just do it on a hard surface and all is fine?

(also meta-note: this is my first topic post here so I hope I've done this correctly, tell me if I haven't!)

Hey there! I posted this on r/magictcg a while back, but I've seen and received many new ideas for cards and I'd love to see if you have any new ones.

I had my Japanese copy of Sliver Queen in my wallet for years because my friend found it for $2 in a bargain bin, and I thought I could just buy another - not knowing it was Reserve List. Whoops. So I decided to build an Illegal Slivers EDH deck where every card is somehow not quite legitimate, with a few restrictions - no power 9, no OG duals, and if I can help it try to make as much variety between restrictions as possible, all while trying to keep it as a legitimate deck that aims to use Queen as the wincon. But I'm only about a quarter of the way there. Here's what's up:

• Cards from other games with the same or similar names are used; Swamp from Wyvern, Island from Dominion, Ancient Tomb from Pokemon, Xiahou Dun the One-eyed from Wixoss, Karoo from One Piece, Duel Masters copy of Muscle Sliver...

• I'm using relevant illegal MtG prints - World Championship decks, Mystery Booster playtests, an art copy of the Unearth Sliver I keep forgetting the name of, silver borders / acorns, etc. Also Clickslither (from Legions!) instead of Quick Sliver (from Legions!).

• I was looking for a Wheel of Fortune tarot card before I found that lööps sticker and decided to go with that.

• My favorite is that someone originally stole the shipment of Crystalline Sliver promos before they were going to give them out... So if you had a copy of it at one point, it was literally-illegal stolen goods. Eventually they retrieved them and distributed them.

I've got other ideas, and I'm trying to break each rule. Looking for:

• The best single thing from the ban list

• Lutri as companion, or one card used twice

• One ante card

• Planechase and Conspiracy

• The card Unquenchable Fury, to be confused with Unquenchable Fury

• A 30th Anniversary card

• Some oversize cards as regular-size proxies

• An AI generated Sliver as a proxy

• Some configuration of Unfinity Stickers to make a new Sliver card of my own

• A World's Smallest for something like a Night's Whisper

• An Armageddon trading card for Armageddon, a Hearthstone from WoW TCG, a Force of Will from L5R TCG, a whole bevy of cards from LotR card game... I still also need Sliv-Mizzet.

And once this is all done... Find 100 different card sleeves to wrap these in. I'd also love - LOVE - to get the Queen graded and still use it as my Commander.

So, Tildes - how else can I make this deck even worse? Thanks!

What have you all been playing this week?

My Saturday night games got cancelled by an impromptu family gathering, so I didn't play anything other than a couple of Unlock games with my daughter. We played the first two of Escape Adventures called The Formula and Squeek & Sausage. Definitely preferred S&S out of these two and a couple of the puzzles fitted the comic book styling very well.

Share your gaming sessions!

I've been playing a ton of the Star Wars deckbuilder lately and love how the game flows. Want a short game? Play to 3 planets. Longer so you can get a better theme going? Play to 5. I like that it bucks the points to win trend by putting people head to head in combat and that you can attack a lot of things, even the market. Plus it feels thematic.

Hello Everyone!

I am currently doing research on the TTRPG community, specifically the feasibility of professional game mastering. I have a survey for players and a survey for Game Masters. These surveys are system agnostic and are for everyone who plays TTRPG's. Please fill in the survey(s) that apply to you!

GM Survey - https://forms.gle/GVCQ6EfxGJPwt5so6

Player Survey - https://forms.gle/y5a3UmC4gfADrjdX6

Sorry Boardtiddleums, little late with the weekly thread!

Saturday I got in a couple of games of Bus!, securing a comfortable victory in the first and an even more comfortable defeat in the second. Every time I play Bus! I love it it that little bit more: central map with interesting decisions, worker placement where you choose how fast you burn through your workers, ability to lose a victory point to screw everyone else over...what's not to like?

After that we played Stockpile, which is always fun. We were a bit rusty on the rules so didn't play with any expansion material.

Finished up with a game of Cat in the Box, which a fantastic little spin on trick taking games. The deluxe edition that you can currently get is so overproduced, but in the nicest possible way.

So what have you all been busy playing this week?

My friend and I embarked upon a journey over the past few months to create a tabletop board game. The interesting part is that we were motivated by the emergence of generative AI and the capabilities it had in rapid prototyping concepts. On a whim we said, let's see how far we can push making a board game. We pushed Midjourney, ChatGPT, and a variety of creative tools to help build the foundation for our game. We both have design chops and are into diy, creative design, and 3d printing, and technology to help get this thing past the finish line.

We are now at the point were after many iterative sessions, we have a functional and fun to play game! Our intention is to give it away as a free downloadable that folks can 3d print and paper print all the parts so they can play too! Huzzah! We are balancing the rules and creating the instructions which is not something we are relying on AI aside sticking to the theme. We are in search of inspirato on what makes gameplay fun for folks today.

Question What are the most fun, exciting, or challenging aspects of any tabletop or board games you play? What keeps you engaged?

EDIT
I didn't give many specifics on the game itself, and figured it might help. Remember we used AI to come up with this storyline. The prompt was to write a story for a "Sci-fi Christmas Horror" board game...

The basic premise is that you are attending a party at the North pole celebrating the research of Dr. Frost on ancient Christmas magic. Predictably things go bad, and you have to find your way out before it's too late and you are killed by a troop of Christmas themed monsters.

The games objective is to work together to escape the facility by collecting sleigh parts, fighting monsters, navigating a maze in dark hallways, and visiting special rooms to solve puzzles. It's all kinds of ridiculous but fun it its own way.

This is a follow up to this discussion from the other day where I was getting ready to DM my first session of 5e. tl;dr from that is that I was chosen to be the DM by my group and we're playing through the Essentials Kit campaign, albeit with certain elements tweaked to give it more flavor.

Our first game was last night and I think I crushed it. Typical of our group we got a later start than intended, so we only made it through most of a single quest. But man it was so much fun. I was expecting the group to go routes I hadn't expected, but I really didn't account for them splitting the group...whoops.

Basically the first quest was to retrieve an elderly woman from a windmill. When they arrive, the windmill is under attack by a manticore. In my head the solutions were A) fight it there, B) distract it and save the woman, or C) go hunt with it for food.

The group ultimately chose all 3. One character started telling the Manticore riddles while another snuck around behind the windmill to try to get the woman out of the house. But conveniently the window was too small. It culminated in the Manticore going hunting with a Harengon alone, the rest of the group realizing what a bad idea that was and then shadowing them. And then ultimately the group jumped the Manticore and we had our first encounter. Thankfully I had nerfed the Manticore's health about 40%, so it was a pretty easy fight.

The weakest part was definitely the combat. I was never any good at that as a player, so me running it was a little rocky. But nobody died, everyone got to participate, and they defeated the Manticore at about the right speed to keep it interesting. The best was just the roleplaying. I got to play as 3 distinct characters (the starting zone guide character, the Manticore, and the old lady) and had a blast. The old lady's voice slowly slipped into a Terry Jones inspired cockney woman's voice, which is just so much fun to do.

Long story short, everything went really, really well. I know what did and didn't work, so I'll be adjusting accordingly for next session. Although very little didn't work. I was really pleased. And since we didn't even entirely finish the first quest (the turn-in part at least), I still have a quest/dungeon written up that I can use for next week.

Some brief backstory that is super common, I'm sure. I played 5e with some friends before the pandemic and that broke the group up, of course. Then our DM moved away so we've been without D&D since 2019 or so. I was recently nominated to be our DM because none of us knows how to do it and they all thought I'd be a good fit. Which is great because I love world-building, playing characters, and writing stories.

But I'm nervous because I was barely competent at playing the game to begin with (aside from getting into character), let alone DMing it. The whole group was, really. Because of the pandemic we're effectively all starting over as new players. So I've got a forgiving group to DM, that's for sure.

To help me out, I bought the Essentials Kit and am building our first couple of sessions around that, albeit it pretty heavily modified. I kept the setting and one quest, but already created a custom quest with a mini-dungeon for them. Also managed to inject my favorite played character as the central giver of quests and backstory within the game. Sir Lord Craymond Zephyrson Ponce IV, former heir to Ponce fortune and originator of the Ponce-y Scheme. Think foghorn leghorn meets 1800s railroad tycoon meets Trump. Not a nice man at all.

Honestly I started modifying the pre-built way quicker than I expected. My original plan was to play it by the book for the first couple of nights, but ideas kept popping in my head and I just ran with it. Then I started creating a windmill out of popsicle sticks and tiny rocks. I think DMing might be a gateway drug to greater creativity expressed through arts and crafts!

Our first session is tomorrow night and I've been feverishly writing complicated notes in OneNote. I've got a notebook for each session. Then a section for The main outline, quests, NPCs, locations, encounters. Then pages for each individual item under that category. Then I'm using the nifty "Link to Paragraph" tool to let me quickly jump between pages. Here's a screenshot to show what I've put together -- https://imgur.com/a/yA6IYUJ I think eventually, after a few sessions, the notes will be more condensed, giving way to more improvisational storytelling. Between chatGPT and old fashioned generator sites that can crank out NPCs, dungeons, encounters, etc. I think it'll be a lot easier if I can work toward just having a simple outline for a given session and let the tooling and my imagination do the rest on the fly.

Anyway, any general advice for a new DM?

Tabletildians,

Which games have you all been playing this week? Time to share and compare.

Personally, my group and I played a game of Racoon Tycoon, a simple but enjoyable little trading, auction and set collection game. We didn't do any auctions for quite some time at the beginning and I was starting to think the game was going to be a bit dull, but the auction really transformed it, and it was actually really quite enjoyable.

After that we played Iberian Railways. I wasn't too impressed with the board, as it looked bleached out like it had been left in the window of a shop. But the game was fun, marking routes with cubes, taking loans and claiming business contracts. Interestingly you're trying to earn money to buy the routes but you're measured equally on other criteria, like longest route, most cities, &c. It amusingly (read: disappointingly) ended in a three-way tie, with no tie-breakers. Don't think I can recommend this one, due mainly to the scoring.

Finally we played a few games of Cat in the Box. Absolutely fantastic trick-taking game where your cards have numbers but no suits and you decide the suit of each card as you play it, marking off that colour and suit combination on a board. Thus the gamut of possibilities for your remaining cards shrinks as cards are played. Really recommend this one, it was great fun.

I'm currently reading over and learning Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4e I'm moving more and more away from D&D and Pathfinder games towards others due to different mechanics, fantastic design, etc.

I've seen much conversation about WFRP 4e online and how it's not as good as 2e, or too complex, or other arguments. I'm not looking to start edition warring, but how many of these arguments still hold true in 2023 with the newer rules from Up in Arms and Winds of Magic?

If there are complexities/gaps in 4e, what variant rules, house rules, or homebrew are you using to fix those things or fill them out?

I'm not especially creative, but I love having props at the table for games. Some games seem like a better fit for props than others - for example, Call of Cthulhu's focus on investigation makes having prop newspaper clippings, diaries and journals, maps and other ephemera feel natural and rewarding. It's made that much easier when the publisher provides them with a scenario, which is what Chaosium does for Cthulhu - the starter set handouts are freely available at their site.

Recently, I've added a mix of etsy and more premium products to various games:

• a fun set of inn menus, maps and store price list handouts for Lost Mine of Phandelver (link)
• I'm waiting for the Silver edition of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist to release from Beadle and Grimm (link)
• For the introductory Cthulhu adventure 'The Haunting', I found some really nice non-combat maps on DTRPG (link) and added the handouts from the HPLHS Classic Game Prop Set (link)

I'm curious to know how other people use props at the table, if you make your own, or have found something on etsy or elsewhere that you'd recommend.

Looking for recommendations or ideas of organizations that might appreciate some well-taken-care-of board games. They range in complexity from classics like catan to more complicated ones. My knee jerk reaction is Goodwill but I figured there were other lesser known orgs that might receive direct benefit from them instead.

Hi boardtiddlers,

It's that time of the week again already. Another opportunity to discuss what you've been playing this week.

Personally I've only managed a single game of Hegemony, this time as the middle classes, with my opponents playing working class and state, and with a robot for the capitalists. It was a bit of a crazy game: capitalist automaton managed to open companies across all three rows of the board. I, as middle, had a fair number too, so production was massive and there was little unemployment. We actually ran out of unskilled middle class workers and influence cubes. Working class managed a comfortable win with state and middle coming joint second some twelve or so points behind. I really think we need to work out how to nix the working class, because they've been strong in every game so far.

So tell us about your sessions this week.

Curious to see if there are any other sports sim fans around here. If you're not familiar with the genre, the two most popular and longest running are APBA Baseball/Football/Hockey and Strat-O-Matic Baseball/Football/Hockey. Personally, I'm a big fan of Second Season Football and I'm playing with Back to Minnesota's 1965 season so I can bring Jim Brown and Cleveland back to glory!

If you've never heard of this before, think of these games as "story generators" where you can play two teams against each other and see how close the dice rolls and stats get to real life. I play as a sort of chill night where I listen to a baseball game or a podcast with a cup of coffee. Throwing dice around and watching Jim Brown plow through some poor defense is really enjoyable :)

You can also play head to head with another player! I highly recommend a smaller game like Pocket Pennant Run if you're interested in diving into games like this. A similar game would be Stone Cold Hockey for hockey fans and Fast Drive Football for football nerds like myself.

The biggest communities online are definitely the Delphi Forums for Tabletop Sports as well as the Digital to Dice Podcast Facebook page.

Digital versions of the APBA and Strat games exist, and there is a huge fanbase for the Action! PC Games, and a hugely popular game is Out of the Park Baseball which has simulator-like features but is mostly a baseball management game.

I'm starting a new campaign soon and I plan to create a homebrew setting and story like I've done in the past. I've used a combination of Google Docs, Evernote, and other general purpose tools for other settings and campaigns. Does anyone use something like World Anvil or Legend Keeper? Something else?

I'm still in the brainstorming stage of world building, and I'd like a place to collect my thoughts and plans. Ideally I'd be able to easily convert that into something searchable and updateable when it's time to actually play in the setting.

Do you use a single tool for creating maps, NPCs, plot points, history, and adventures? Or do you have a suite of tools you find works well to cover all those aspects?

This is an article I wrote on boardgames subreddit seven years ago, about a tournament game of Diplomacy which had lasted more than 3 years and was still ongoing at the time. It eventually ended in a draw with Italy leading, in Feb 2016, after 3 years and 7 months of play. I'm reposting it here because I'm quite proud of the article (and I want to move it away from Reddit) and because imo it still holds up as one of the greatest events in the history of Diplomacy and a very interesting event in niche internet history.

tl;dr - Seven players (less now that some have been eliminated) have been playing a game that simulates the First World War in a Tournament. They've been playing it so long that the First World War is now continuing on into the 21st Century. The game has been out for 57 years and this has never happened in a recorded game before.

If you are not familiar with Diplomacy, it's a war game based around negotiation where 7 players each play one Great Power in the First World War, attempting to gain control of Europe by taking key provinces known as Supply Centers. It's very similar to A Game of Thrones - The Board Game except that you can (usually) talk in private with other players and all players must submit orders for a phase before any are revealed, meaning that you don't know if your 'ally' will backstab you that phase or not until you've already set your orders. Other players can support your units into provinces, so negotiation is key to victory.

Everyone who knows about Diplomacy knows that it takes a ridiculously long time to play. In a face-to-face (FTF) tournament strict deadlines of 15 minutes per phase are set, and games are played from 1901 to 1908, meaning 4 hours for a game. In casual settings, where the timers aren't observed so harshly, a game of the same number of phases can take 8 hours.

Because of how difficult Diplomacy can be to start in real life, there are a lot of active communities for playing it online. In online play, phases are usually set to process every 2 days, and you only need to dedicate an hour or so a day to it. Because of this, the set end date (1908) used in most FTF games isn't needed, and the game can be played to the win condition stated in the rulebook - one great power controlling 18 Supply Centers - which isn't used much in FTF because it takes far too long to achieve. This in turn means that games can last months.

There's also the possibility of an 'eternal game' since there is no set end date. Usually, this is due to stalemates - there can be positions where no player can push any further forward, and no player can back off because another player can win as a result. These games are declared drawn, since no victory is possible.

However, there's a small possibility of a game that would go on forever while going back and forth, back and forth - one power gaining centers then being pushed back by the others, and then another, and so on, without the game being stalemated. In practice, this sort of thing rarely happens - going by statistics from webDiplomacy last year, out of ~43000 games completed, only 17 had legitimately passed 1930, and none of those had reached the year 1940.

The longest recorded completed game comes from another site and reached 1964 -note, I originally had a link to this game but it appears to now be dead. However, one non-completed game on webDiplomacy completely blows it out of the water.

The 2012 webDiplomacy World Cup Final has one game still ongoing, long after all the others have been completed. This game has just reached the year 2000! That is absolutely insane - if this had been a FTF game at a tournament, the participants would have been playing for just over two days straight. Since it's online, they have been playing for three and a half years.

I have checked with several important members of the Diplomacy community and it is indeed the first game ever to have legitimately done so (not just because some players decided to mess around until it reached that date).

Link to the game

What was/is the 2012 webDiplomacy World Cup?

The World Cup was an event held on webDiplomacy which mimicked the FTF Diplomacy Tournament that goes by the same name. Different countries (or regions, if there were not enough players in a country) would gather a group of players and play in a group of games with teams from 6 other regions, each having one player in each game, and gaining points based on how well they did in each game. The best countries/regions advanced from groups in a knockout style until the Final, which has not yet finished.

Why has it gone on so long?

That's a difficult question to give a straight answer to. It's a combination of several factors:

• These players are insanely good. The teams in question reached the final, and they picked their best participants at the Public Press Variant (which I'll come to next) for this game.

• This game is Public Press Only. That means that any messages anyone sends are received by everyone, which slows the game down a fair amount because players have to position themselves to make completely uncounterable moves if they want to coordinate them with allies, or they have to risk their allies misunderstanding what they are doing and not supporting them correctly.

• Nobody wants to lose or draw. Sounds trivial, right? Everyone wants to win any game they're playing. This one is different, though - every other game in the world cup has finished, so everyone in the game knows how many points all teams have. Every team in this game can still win the overall tournament, but for most of them it is only if they achieve a solo victory. One specific team will win if all players draw, so nobody except that team want this game to end in a draw, and certainly nobody wants anyone else to get a solo.

That said, fatigue is starting to set in and they may draw the game soon just to be done of it. That's only after over 3 years of trying to achieve a solo though.

Do you have a handy graph of how the SC counts of each player have changed throughout the game?

What a coincidence! I just happen to have one right here!

That game is really long. I want to just see the interesting bits.

Again, you're in luck! I happen to have an imgur album here which shows the high points and low points of each great power and explains a little what happened to them. The important provinces (Supply Centers) are marked by white circles with a black dot in them. The provinces and units belonging to each country have an assigned colour as follows:

• Pink, England
• Blue, France
• Brown, Germany
• Green, Italy
• Red, Austria
• Purple, Russia
• Yellow, Turkey

If you do want to look through the game for yourself, you can find the full record here. On webDiplomacy, red arrows represent move orders, yellow arrows represent support move orders, green lines represent support hold orders, and blue lines represent convoys.

Has any Supply Center never changed hands?

No. Every Supply Center on the board has changed hands at least once. Ankara has been taken the least, it's been held by Russia for the 76 years since he took it from its original owner, Turkey, in 1925. Rumania has been taken the most, it's been conquered an astonishing 26 times. Most SCs have been taken around 11 times, but in particularly contested places (like the Balkans and Scandinavia) the average is much higher.

If it's Public Press Only, can I read the messages the players have sent?

Yes! You can find all messages sent in the game here. Use the blue arrows above the messagebox to navigate pages. The chat from each country follows the same colour coding as their provinces and units.

Bear in mind, though, that there are so many messages to look through that they actually crashed the game at one point. The site administrators had to assign more memory to the chat of this particular game to fix it. There's also some profanity in some of the messages, although not many.

Diplomacy sounds interesting. Can I try it?

First off, playing the game in person is a very different experience to playing it online, and one that I find to be much more tense and exciting (although online is good too!). I'd very much recommend you play it in person first. You'll need a copy of the board game (it's available on Amazon) and 6 friends with 4 hours spare.

Obviously that can be a bit difficult to arrange, so you could also look for Diplomacy Face to Face groups in your area - there are quite a few of them around the world. If you want information about them feel free to PM me and I'll try to find out if there are any in your area and get back to you. Also, if you're part of a board gaming group, it's possible that someone there will have a copy so you might be able to play it with them.

If you are interested in the online version, there are many online sites that offer it. I'd recommend webDiplomacy but there are plenty of others if you don't like the interface there.

Is there anything I should know before I play?

Yes, specifically if you're playing in person. I'll let some board game celebrities say it for me:

"This game makes people mad, and I mean really mad." ... "The tagline is 'Diplomacy - Destroying friendships since 1965'." - Tom Vasel

"Diplomacy wounds run deep, and take forever to heal." - Wil Wheaton

It's not quite as bad as they make out, but it's worth making sure that you don't play it with someone you know will take lies and backstabbing badly. Also - don't play it over several sessions, the paranoia you get when you see other players talking to one another in the breaks can be unbearable.

Congratulations if you've read this far, and I hope others found this Diplomacy game to be as incredible as I did!

Hey tabletilders,

It's been another week. Let's share what we all played this week!

For me it was a single play of Pax Renaissance with a promo expansion that changes the starting state of the board. I completely dominated the trade routes and accumulated a huge stash of cash, but was unable to get the comet out to activate the win condition that would leverage it. My opponents then mowed down my commissions, so I had to pivot quite heavily. But I wasn't too worried as I had so much cash, so could nab any card I wanted, including the next comet.

Unfortunately two of us took our eyes of the ball and our third player managed a sneaky protestant victory. Annoyingly there was an apostasy I could have bought that would have nixed this, but I totally didn't see it coming. Great game.

After that we wound down with a quick game of Scout. Fun little game that makes me want to explore the trick-taking space a bit more, but it seems all the highly praised ones I read about are out of stock. I might see if any of these can be played with a poker deck.

So what have you all been playing?

Dungeon Crawl Classics

I think this game is great and I was surprised to see nobody recommended it in their non-D&D game lists. At the system level, Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) is a rules-light version of 3.5. You never need more than one sourcebook and there are quick-start rules to play for free on the website.

At its core, though, DCC is an old school sword and sorcery setting heavily inspired by the authors of Appendix N. For those not familiar, in the first edition of D&D, Gary Gygax published a list of authors that inspired D&D in an appendix in the back of the Dungeon Master's Guide. It has some obvious ones that I think most RPGs pull from (Tolkien and Jack Vance {of the Vancian magic system}, for instance), but there are also some deeper cuts that I don't think are really leveraged in many tabletop RPGs (Robert Howard of Conan the Barbarian and Solomon Kane, and H.P. Lovecraft). Those last two in particular, pulp-y fantasy writers who defined a genre, heavily influence DCC in my experience.

Aside from this, though, there are a few very unique and fun mechanics that got me totally hooked on this game.

The 0-level funnel and death as a narrative device

Traditionally in D&D, you end up spending the majority of your first session designing and building a character. In my experience, it usually takes around 2-4 hours depending on complexity. This results in mechanically unique characters, but it also ups the stakes for the DM. When was the last time you played a game of D&D and the survival of your character was ever truly in question? Nobody wants to spend 4 hours on their character only to have it killed off in the first play session -- that's not fun. But, in the end, it's also not challenging.

In DCC, it takes about 5-10 minutes to create a character (and there are online tools like The Purple Sorcerer that will generate them by the dozen). Every character starts with a profession (and by extension, a tool of their trade), a random piece of gear, and a block of random stats (3d6 rolled in order, none of these "points" or "4d6 drop the lowest" business). In the first session, you roll 4 of them and you play all 4 in what is termed the 0-level funnel. Over the course of this adventure, 2-3 of your characters will die -- after all, adventuring is a treacherous business fraught with peril -- and your surviving character(s) become level 1. At this point, they get a class and a couple additional abilities.

The core interesting thing to me about this is the emergent gameplay that results. Oftentimes, the character that rolled the best stats aren't the ones that actually survive. A single unlucky roll or an undiscovered trap results in unceremoniously striking down another one of the PCs, whereby they pick up the gear leftover from them and continue on their grim quest. I've seen the character with the lowest luck somehow being the one that survived and it forging a bond with the person playing it unlike anything I've seen in D&D. What did they do to earn that? What is in store for the doomed character that somehow managed to outlast 3 of his fellow villagers? It gives you a ton of tools as a DM and as a player to craft interesting narratives. And it also reminds the players that this character probably won't last forever. That opens the door for dramatic moments involving death that you don't really get to explore with D&D. Magic that restores life is exceedingly rare and would require a quest of comparable bravery to discover.

Magic as a dangerous and unpredictable tool

I've heard some complaints about Vancian magic in other topics and DCC also does away with this, but it does it with two chaotic and, at times, hilarious mechanics: the mercurial magic table and the spell table.

The Mercurial Magic Table

Magic is, by nature, a chaotic tool for the desperate. No two casters cast the same spell in the same way and the mercurial magic table is a representation of that. The first time a character casts a spell, they have to roll on the table to determine how they invoke that spell. There's a big chunk of the table that's just 'as normal,' but there are also things like 'every time you cast this, a digit on your hand or foot disintegrates. Take a -1 to dex for every two digits that disappear.'

How badly do you need to cast that magic missile? Is it worth invoking the unpredictable elemental energies required to do so? Is it worth....your thumb?

The Spell Table

Once you invoke the spell, you roll your spellcasting check and consult the spell table. The quality of your roll (of which there are a couple mechanics to affect this) determines what the spell actually does -- and they can be wildly different! That magic missile might fire a single missile that does 1 damage or it might summon 1d4 that do 1d4 damage each. Your darkness spell might allow you to create a 20' sphere of darkness at a point of your choosing or it might center a 5' magical darkness sphere on you.

Magic is chaotic and difficult to control. But as a result, it is almost always very powerful. Your spell might not do exactly what you expected, but it makes for much more interesting combat and on-the-fly thinking.

Should I play it?

Emphatically, yes! The rules-light nature of the game allows you to focus more on story-telling and mood-setting than being buried in the books all the time (except for looking up spell effects, everyone at the table seems to get excited when we have to do that). The deadly nature of the game has resulted in both better and heavier storytelling than anything I've done before -- stakes without it getting personal, as it were. And the adventure content is awesome -- there are some great resources on Sample Adventure Paths, but even the starting 0-level adventure in the back of the sourcebook is strong. I swear I'm not a shill, I just want more DCC in the universe.

I think this has to be one of the oldest questions there is in the TTRPG world, but I wanted to see if the general consensus has changed with the rise of virtual tabletops.

When you have a player cancel on you, do you skip the session, or play without them?

What is your reasoning behind your decision?

Personally, I always play without them. This is a change from when I first started DM'ing, as back then I wanted to be 'fair' to my players. As I left University and went into work however, waiting until everyone was able to play became such a rare thing that it would mean hardly ever playing.

It's been another week and I thought – if there's not too much protest – we could all talk about what we've been playing again.

Personally I got in the one game of Hegemony at three players. I've played it twice before at two, and adding the third player really took the tension up a notch.

I played as the proletariat, which I think is the simplest class to play. Once again played no strikes or demonstrations, so I really think I might be missing a concept as it never seemed like a worthwhile pursuit. But it's really hard to predict how pulling any particular string in this game will resolve, so I think I'd just go for it in a subsequent game to see what happens.

The capitalists, like in previous games, started very weak but by the last few rounds were raking in the points. I managed a very narrow victory of four or five points over the capitalists. Middle class, who had to take a loan mid-game, never really recovered and were twenty points behind. Fun game, I can see why it's popular.

So what have you all managed to get played this week?

I'm looking for some games I can play with my team at work as part of our next team building event. We're 7 people, so finding a game that can seat everyone is challenging (and we don't want to split tables in this case).

My favorite board game is 7 wonders, which obviously is perfect except for the fact that it's pretty rules heavy and my team is mostly not boardgamers, so will probably be overwhelmed.

Cards against Humanity was also mentioned but is probably not PG enough for a work event.

What would you play?

My friends and I have been striving for the perfect score of 13 in Just One, and there's almost always one or two cards which make it seemingly impossible unless you're very lucky.

Just One if you're unfamiliar, is a game where your teammate wants to guess a word -- and you each independently give a one-word clue, "Donkey", "Dreamworks", "Ogre". If two or more players write the same word, all those clues get hidden -- so your clues can't be too obvious.

The words vary absurdly in difficulty from words like "Wine" and "Snake" where you can basically break the game by listing wines and snakes -- to words like "Mexico" and "Strawberry" where you can come at them from a few directions. ...But about 10% of the words are things like "Grotto", "Couscous" and "Ramses" where honestly, you could possibly sit down with someone for 30 minutes describing them in excruciating detail, and they might still not come up with those particular words. Could you describe "Couscous" to your 10-year-old nephew who lives on Chick-fil-A and Mcdonalds? Could you disambiguate a "Grotto" from a cave, cavern, bunker or lair? Sometimes it's a vocabulary thing but more often, it's just words with a lot of synonyms.

I call these "land mine" cards and I'm curious if anyone else has noticed this phenomenon. Have any of you gotten a perfect score in Just One? If so did you randomly dodge these land mines or did you overcome them with a really perfect clue?

I've been interested in getting into it for the last few years but haven't managed to get started, no one I know personally is into it, and within online communities I'm a part of I sometimes miss dates for campaigns, often due to my work schedule.

Hello Tildes board gamers!

I got a 3D printer last year, and over the last few months, I've started printing organizers other people have designed from Printables and Thingiverse, especially for games with poor provided organization or lots of tokens and cards... however there are a number of games I have where people haven't designed a good organizer, or the ones which exist are lacking in some way (don't fit my boxes, missing boxes for expansions, only support all the expansions, etc)

Does anyone have tips on getting started with designing my own? I've got some very basic 3D modeling knowledge, but my primary strengths are as a programmer, so leveraging something like OpenSCAD would be ideal. I saw the boardgame insert toolkit, but it seems relatively basic - there are lots of convenience features I'd love to add as well (like curved walls for token holders to make it easier to get tokens out). Is that a good place to start, or should I look elsewhere?

Even just some ideas about tolerances and/or tips for how to size sections for cards would be super helpful.