Posted by Steve on March 18th, 2011 — in News
If you’re in the D.C. area and would like to come to the “Taste of Fiasco” event at Labyrinth Game Shop tomorrow, there are still a few open seats. The event will be held from 3pm to 7pm. To reserve your seat, call kathleen at 202-544-1059. No experience is necessary and all materials will be provided!
Labyrinth Games & Puzzles is located on Capitol Hill at 645 Pennsylvania Av. SE, Washington, DC 20003, a half block from Eastern Market metro station (blue/orange line).
Posted by Jason on March 16th, 2011 — in Fair Play
Daniele di Rubbo lays it down, Serious Man style at La Torre d’Avorio:
This makes me so happy!
Posted by Jason on March 16th, 2011 — in Fair Play
Greg Costikyan reviews Bloody Forks of the Ohio for his Tabletop Tuesday column. I hope this will persuade people to try it, to try Lady Blackbird, and to see the potential for unhinged hacking that both games demonstrate iteratively.
Posted by Jason on March 4th, 2011 — in News
Brad Murray, one of our friends at VSCA (makers of Diaspora and other fine games) had produced a something I’m really in love with: T-72, a Fiasco playset revolving around the miserable crew of a Soviet tank in 1981 Afghanistan. If invading Afghanistan doesn’t qualify as powerful ambition and poor impulse control, I don’t know what does! The playset promises grim topicality, the blackest humor and maybe a touch of pathos. I can’t wait to try it out.
Posted by Jason on March 4th, 2011 — in Fair Play
So there’s this One Page Dungeon contest, which is a fantastic idea. I wanted to enter last year but was over-committed. This year as soon as it was announced I jumped on it.
There’s a certain freedom in the tightly constrained format. One page – not too much detail, not too much situation, not too broad an area, not too complex an idea. Everything needs to be just right. So I started thinking, and it went something like this:
Dungeon – chaos – confined space – density – urban landscapes – insular community
And the first thing that hit me was a discrete ethnic enclave. I love Herbert Asbury’s take on the Bloody Sixth Ward in Gangs of New York, so that could only mean an American Chinatown. I started looking for maps of the area from the early twentieth century. Columbia University has gorgeous Sanborn fire insurance maps, but you need to be affiliated to access them. They also have some pretty good general maps as well, including a non-Sanborn fire insurance map that simply omits Chinatown entirely. Eventually I found one from 1913 of the block contained by Bayard, Mott, Pell and Bowery – the stronghold of the Hip Sing tong at the time.
I enjoy the research, but I kept thinking “I could just make this up”. But you know what? When you see the actual, organic sprawl of actual buildings, that’s not something you can really reproduce with any fidelity. The actual alleys and shotgun tenements tell a story for which my creative input is just an overlay.
The end result is a sort of pulpy, yellow-peril-Asbury-inflected “dungeon” rooted in real history. I hope you like it.
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