Hot Heart

I've never even watched Homeland, but this board game (from the guys behind Firefly) sounds p cool. http://homeland.gf9games.com/ From what I've read, seems a bit like Dead of Winter and BSG but much quicker-playing, easier to grasp, and with an actual balanced victory point dynamic in there.

My new hero. http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/mar/02/full-text-of-michael-sheens-speech

Went to the cinema and did a 'Scored by Henry Jackman' double-bill (catchy title, I know). He does the best superhero scores. Big Hero 6 Despite the plot taking a little while to get going, and being a little thin overall, it's such a beautifully animated film. The facial stuff was really expressive, but then so was the big white blob. The central characters really do manage to carry it because I felt the supporting cast were actually a little lackluster. Some strong emotional moments too. Plus, I'm gonna be doing this all the time now. Kingsman: The Secret Service Some strong central performances from Egerton and Firth, and I'm fond of that slightly odd tone that Millar/Vaughn films have. However, it seems a little too proud of its "not like new JB stuff (Bond, Bauer, Bourne)" when it's reprising some of the more problematic elements of past Bond in the process. Then again, Skyfall was a shit show in that regard anyway... Still, an enjoyable watch with the same sort of humour and tone you'd expect if you've seen Kick-Ass.

With regards to the "war on drugs", I found this an interesting read. It takes on the angle of Philip Seymour Hoffman's death but actually speaks to the whole situation.

Yeah, it's like the "short" game of Hyperborea (or that starter scenario for Firefly). Enough to grasp the basics, but you definitely don't get the full experience. The other funny thing I forgot to mention is that our gaming day that began with Android (long, complicated, full of theme) ended with Fluxx... almost the complete opposite.

Might be that I'm the only one who checks this thread... besides Ethan, but there has been progress/news. First of all, there's an app for that. Okay, it's also on Steam, too BUT WHATEVER. Not much to it for now, but you get a bunch of cast interviews and things, and you can pay a little to get access to all the features and unlock some stuff for the actual game when it releases. Secondly, Wil Wheaton will be voicing the male captain you control (booooo) while Courtenay Taylor, aka. Subject Zero/Jack, Scarlet Lake, Juhani and hundreds of other characters, will be voicing the female captain (WOO!)

Played another game of Dogs of War. Now everyone was prepared, it went a lot quicker, although one player wasn't really paying attention, which probably upset the balance a bit. This was a cool experience because despite my best efforts, my moves were too bold, so when someone else started calling them out, it was easy for everyone to interfere in my plans. However, this also drew attention to them and so someone being very sneaky managed to steal victory while everyone was distracted. Great show! Had a first go at Xia: Legends of a Drift System, which my friends keep teasing is better than Firefly. I think Dean might have posted about this before, so I'll keep it brief. We only did the basic setup, with no NPCs and playing to 5 victory points (fame points), so I can't make a true and fair assessment of the whole thing. I see a lot of potential, and I had a little bit of fun using a mag-harpoon to hitch a ride on another ship as well as completing a smuggling job ("Hey, this is like Firefly!"), so I see the emergent story potential. The only problem I can see is how much the various dice are used for everything (D6 up to a D20) from movement to mission successes. No real mitigation, just roll a die and see what happens. The other problem with our game was, although I was a new player, pretty much everyone else had forgotten most of the rules anyway, which caused real problems when the earlier distracted player was missing the 'delivery' portion of his mission cards. Also not in its favour, someone else got fed up because of bad die rolls right at the beginning (move 1, move 1, take 10 damage), and the actual winner took the boring route of flying back and forth between two planets, in two adjoining sectors, buying and delivering goods five times. Definitely eager to try it again with the full experience and more time though. Speaking of (needing) more time... Android This was the game I went back and forth on buying. It looked so good and I kinda just wanted to own it anyway, but I wasn't sure I'd ever get it played with my friends... or at least more than once, like half my games. Well, I spent ages going over and over the 40+ page rulebook along with an FAQ, and the BGG forums, as well as getting player aids, then set a Sunday aside (because I'd heard it can take 5-6 hours) and got three of my friends together to give it a bash. First of all, there is a lot of stuff in this game. The basic interactions players take are simple, but there are so many little mechanics in there that it takes a good while to explain it all. There's a murder case, which revolves around following up leads and placing evidence on suspect sheets relating to your guilty and innocent hunches; there's a 'conspiracy puzzle', which allows players to earn other bonuses as well as modify other scoring conditions; there's personal plots, whereby each character balances their own stories with other factors; finally, there is the card play, by which players can use 'light' cards to boost themselves and 'dark' cards to hurt others. Even the movement mechanics are bizarre, but kinda cool. See that thing in the bottom-right of the picture? That's your car, and you place the ruler on those circle/diamond/triangle icons to see how far you can reach for one action point of movement. It's this amazing and odd approach where you control a detective, but also function as a 'storyteller' on other levels. For example, although you're 'placing evidence' it's not that you're literally planting evidence, just deciding the outcome of your investigation to better fit your 'story'. And the cards aren't you 'attacking' other characters but providing some sort of emergent, karmic balance where dark cards you play against others make it easier to play your own light cards to help your character and the other players will be doing the same to you. One of the coolest things is how each player has a unique detective with their own strengths, weaknesses and mechanics tied in to their basic abilities, plots and cards. There's a bioroid who questions his programmed directives (which both help and hinder him), a P.I. war vet with PTSD issues and a potential romantic subplot or someone like my guy, a corrupt cop looking to patch things up with his wife, break free from his mob connections or solve a cold case that has haunted him for years, who also has a good/bad mood mechanic which reduces the cost of light/dark cards based on which was last played. Our session was an interesting one, and in hindsight my guy seems particularly weak or at least needs to play far, far meaner than I was prepared to. He's well-connected and apparently good for ensuring he nails the guilty perp, but I never got to play to that strength. One, because the favours I had aren't worth anything without connecting the conspiracy puzzle to certain end points, and even when I did that correctly, someone else was better at the puzzle stuff and got to mess it all up, and two, because all my drawn cards seemed to focus on the favours side rather than the case-solving side. The big thing that got me though, was another player misunderstanding what I'd done at one point and deciding to completely fuck up my shit as a result. See, there was some card or event that involved me placing a 'hit' token on a suspect (implying heat from the real murderer). Now, before the game I'd explained that it takes 3 hits to kill a suspect, which means no one can score the guilty/innocent hunch for them (robbing someone of a massive 15VPs, potentially) and when I took the action, I said that I'd not really chosen any suspect for any reason because I wasn't going to follow up with two more hits. Seriously, I wasn't. It takes forever to get anywhere for my guy with his shitty short-range car ruler and wastes so much time and favours, which I'd been holding onto. Problem was, the player who had that suspect as their guilty hunch thought I had straight up killed that character with that one token. And so, he used pretty much his whole next turn to give my personal plot bad baggage. Each plot and stage has different conditions for ending them positively or negatively, this one allowed other players to give up 2 "time"/action points to give me 1 bad point on my plot. He used 6 of his 7, which gave me 3 and made it too much of an uphill struggle for me to claw it back, then proceeded to keep going after others with their dark cards. It wasn't until much later, after he'd completely screwed up my and his chances of winning that he'd realised his mistake. FFFFFFUUUUUU- The other issue was one guy had been moving all the leads right near to his portion of the board, but it just meant the other nearby player got to follow them up super easy all in one turn, filling the conspiracy puzzle for loads of bonus points and other bits while we could do nothing to prevent it. In the end, the scores were something like 52, 32, 20 and 9. That said, it was an enjoyable, unique experience and I'm still running it through in my head. And even though I came third, I enjoyed the theme and story of it. I freed 'myself' from my mob entanglements cleanly, managed to prove a bioroid's innocence, and found the cold case killer; although, it was too late for true justice and so I settled for my own personal brand. I definitely feel things will go a bit better overall now that we've got to grips with the basics, and the guys actually would play it again.

I think I preferred Vol. 2 to Vol. 1 but one's a martial arts film, the other's a western; so different strokes. Wouldn't go out of my way to watch them again though. Far better martial arts and westerns out there.

Starring Ralph Felines.

Souls are equally overrated.

For me, RDR was one of those games where I kept waiting for 'the great bit'. The moment that would really stand out or just take everything you've seen to another level. Sadly, it was just GTA Wild West, and I'd already played GTA that gen.

SPOILERS!1!!!

Full film of Fifty Shades of Grey. *wink* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yK_d_-3i6w

Zombies!!! This is possibly the worst game I've ever played. First up, actual components grumbles. The tokens for bullets and health points (shown as actual hearts) are tiny and square and greyscale. They look crap anyway, but also don't really fit with the rest of the game's aesthetic. Secondly, the map tiles could've presented the gameplay information more clearly since it involves placing zombies in buildings and movement involving in and out of doors. Finally, the cards could've been clearer in their language and should've used keywords or some other way of identifying certain elements so you didn't have to keep checking exactly what they meant. The actual gameplay itself is equally terrible. Mostly roll and move, roll to kill, roll to move zombies, with some extra cardplay to alter certain factors. There's a ton of screwage with the cards and it actually completely destroys one of the win conditions...well, both probably. See, to win the game either you kill 25 zombies or get to the helicopter tile (last to be placed) and make sure a zombie isn't occupying your escape vehicle. Problems being that you'll never move far with zombies everywhere, and it's easy to constantly screw over each others' efforts to get to the helicopter as well as mess up their zombie killing so that they die and lose half their accumulated zombie score. Just goes on far too long for what it is, and what it is ain't too hot. If Dead of Winter is the ultimate 'zombie game' this is the very antithesis of that. Dogs of War My new purchase and a successful one at that it seems (you have no idea how hard it is to please everyone in my group of friends). A somewhat simple game but with obscenely detailed and elaborate minis for what would usually be tokens/cubes/standees, but it is beautiful. Half the rulebook is filled with lore about the game that I haven't really bothered to read yet, but it shows a love of the design, which I can appreciate. Anyway, the game itself. You control a leader of a band of mercenaries, with your own unique ability, and can offer your aid to one of six warring houses who stage battles across four years. Because of the way you deal out the houses and 'order of battle' cards onto the board for each year, you'll find interesting match-ups and ways to manipulate things. Each round, you purchase troops with different costs and strength values then take it in turns adding your captains (the minis) accompanied by one of those soldiers to one side of a battle. What makes it really interesting is that you gain an immediate reward depending on where you place the captain in that battle, which can range from an extra captain or troops, to money, tactics cards (which can really mess up someone's day) and 'influence tokens' for that house. Influence tokens are essentially like shares in that company, and so you might find yourself now taking a keen interest in making sure a certain house succeeds, increasing the value of each influence token of theirs you hold. And so there begins the tug of war between the houses as well as you and the other players because, even before you've bought your first soldier, you are dealt a 'house card' which counts as two influence for one of the houses. Since everyone will have a different one, and every house actually starts as -1, it behooves you to at least make an effort to help that house a little or go all in. While we were still learning all the nuances, and it didn't quite throw up that situation where both horses houses you've backed go up against each other (in my case anyway) it was still good fun. I was left in the unfortunate position of favouring the exact same two houses as someone else, but he was garnering more influence tokens (got really stuck at one point where he used a tactics card to steal a bonus reward because it wasn't worth me wasting the strongest soldier I had to secure it) and no one could really stop that. Whatever I did would hurt myself equally, and while I did try and sneak a win elsewhere to get a hefty VP haul, I couldn't quite do enough to get anything besides a draw (and only because of his character's bonus ability!) Looking forward to trying it again though now everyone's got a better grasp of things. Should play a lot quicker too.

Not sure how far into it you are, but have you seen the Seinfeld episode "The Chinese Restaurant"? Anyway, yeah, it's hard to spot what it did so well because so many things have emulated it since. I believe it even became the trope "Seinfeld is Unfunny" because of it. There's the multi-strand overlapping plot element that wasn't really used before (and didn't really take off in Seinfeld until later in S2), the fact that Elaine was "one of the guys" rather than a romantic interest (though forced into that dynamic by the network for "The Deal"). Which also leads into the less than 'moral' nature of the show and its characters as well as the tendency to tackle those taboo subjects and grey areas in social etiquette. On top of that, there was the occasional element of playing with the format that is often overlooked. So, yeah, fantastic show. Feel free not to like it, but you damn well better respect it.

Yeah, I wasn't expecting anyone to get pedantic over my choice of words (but then you are a lawyer). I meant in contemporary comedy, everything the critics are calling 'canned laughter' is actually live audience.

Yeah, it's this that's pissing them off: Works for some shows, not for others. I wouldn't judge a show on that alone, but it can be an indicator of the type of comedy (constant gags, overacting for laughs, etc).

Hehe. I follow a bunch of comedy writers/script editors and they are all losing their shit over critics talking about 'laugh tracks' (meaning 'canned laughter' because that's the original term to which they are referring) in contemporary sitcoms (see, critics reviewing sitcoms from decades ago would be weird) because there's actually no such thing nowadays. These contemporary sitcoms, to which the aforementioned critics are referring, with recorded laughter are filmed in front of a stage audience, so it's all genuine. There's a case for the absence of recorded laughter being more 'sophisticated' and allowing for different pacing, but at the same time, many of the greats have used it (Seinfeld, Frasier, Father Ted etc.) I think it's mostly the Guardian's media section that is being run by a bunch of idiots, whose most recent thing was writing of Better Call Saul: "Like all the best comedies, it doesn't actually make you laugh." EDIT: HAPPY NOW, ETHAN?!

Ah, that's such a fantastic album. I was introduced to them thanks to Reel Big Fish, who have worked with Coolie Ranx (so good!) and actually did a little cover of that very song live (captured on the House of Blues recording). One of RBF's best tracks from their best album: I also forget that Coolie Ranx voiced Little Jacob in GTA IV.

Nah, it's more for organising fireteams for raids and weekly strikes. If you've got some friends who play regularly, that works just as well.