April 2015

Fallen, at last!

Hey folks,
Following my first game with Fallen last week, I felt like I had to come here and share my thoughts with the world. I’ve already talked about this once on a game day, but now that I’ve had a chance to play with it, and see how the game actually works, I feel the need to spread the word once again!

This originally appeared on boardgamegeek.

This is a card-based dungeon crawl game that launched on kickstarter almost two years ago now, although it only made it into my hot little hands at the beginning of this year. It’s a game that I had been very excited to take delivery of, as it had really captured my imagination back in the day. However, the long kickstarter wait dulled that somewhat, and by the time I actually got it, my enthusiasm had somewhat cooled. Hence why it took over three months to actually make time for a game.

Having now played a game, I can’t begin to praise this enough (nor berate myself for having taken so long to get round to it!) It’s a fantastic experience, and one that I can recommend to anyone who has a love of a wide variety of games.

The game pits a hero against a dungeon lord in a classic choose your own adventure style of dungeon crawl. I wouldn’t say you have to be a fan of that genre to enjoy this game, however, as the choices you make feel much more like a RPG than an adventure book. Over the course of your turn, the dungeon lord will read a short amount of story text aloud from one of the three Story cards that make up the adventure, and offer you a choice.

Once you’ve made that choice, more story is followed by an attribute test of some sort called a Challenge, which can also involve drawing Treasure cards (for the hero) or Omen cards (for the dungeon lord), which will beef up your character in the usual boardgame manner. The winner will gain XP, which can be used to upgrade skills (for the hero) or creatures (for the dungeon lord), and also access to rewards in the shape of drawing cards, dealing wounds, and charging your character’s special Ultimate ability (more shortly).

Creatures, you say?

While the hero follows the traditional model of being equipped with weapons, armour and items, and training in certain skills, the dungeon lord attacks through his (or her) minion creatures, which I thought a really awesome thematic idea – in the game, the hero is delving through a dungeon to fight its lord, so it makes sense that he wouldn’t be fighting that lord all the way through, right? It just felt like you are actually moving through the events of the story rather than merely pitting attribute-to-attribute.

Skills come in three different types, each of three levels, and the hero uses his (or her) XP to purchase higher-level skills that will grant you more dice to roll and specific effects to buff your character. Creatures can essentially be levelled-up, wherein they are replaced with more powerful creatures that grant the dungeon lord more dice to roll as well as more powerful abilities to trigger when they are used. Something I liked about these abilities is they often trigger on a win or a loss, so it’s not that you can just let your opponent win because even the loser gets the chance to draw a reward: you can often find yourself agonizing over whether to use a weapon (as the hero) to tip the balance in your favour.

During a challenge, you will always roll at least two dice, and the one who rolled the most swords wins. However, there are ways and means to add more dice to your pool – creatures bolster the dungeon lord, and weapons and skills do this for the hero. You also have a deck of 20 power cards, half of which are specific to your character. You need to pay for these, using Fortune that is only recharged at the very end of the Story card, so when to use this can be crucial. Some of them can also be really powerful, so there’s a strong strategic element involved here – especially as, in the game I played, the dungeon lord can force a lot of discards to the hero, making it unwise to hold on to them.

While the dungeon lord has his own power cards, he also has the deck of Omen cards that act as something of a cross between Power and Treasure cards (though more like the former). I really like the card back to this deck, it feels really classic-fantasy:

Finally, each character has an Ultimate ability, which needs to be charged before use. While a hero will usually have an innate ability with certain attributes – and buff these with skills and weapons – and the dungeon lord relies on his minion creatures, using your Ultimate ability can increase your dice pool at a critical moment, but can sometimes take a while before you can re-charge it. More strategy!

Something that I really like with about all of this is the Shadow Track. Six cards arranged in a vertical column from Brilliant to Night, which alter the flow of the game depending on how dark it is in the dungeon. A lot of effects can depend on this, predominantly the Ultimate ability of your character, which is affected by the dark in terms of which dice (and how many) you roll for it. One of the rewards you can receive for winning a challenge is to move the track one step, so you can pull it in whichever direction may be more favourable to you. It really makes for an atmospheric experience, and in my game I pretty much let it run down to Night as the end game approached for the thematic implications.

So what happens at the end game?

Once three Story cards have resolved (each has four challenges on, so it can take a fair amount of time to get through), the Final Battle begins. As an interesting twist, it’s now the hero’s turn to read aloud the adventure, as he (or she) battles the dungeon lord in his (or her) lair! The Final Battle cards are basically challenges much like the Story cards, though don’t necessarily follow on from each other based on the hero’s choice of action – a ‘battle begins’ card is read aloud first, then the cards resolve, then a ‘conclusion’ is read to end the game. The first person to succeed at three Final Battle challenges is the winner.

This game could so easily be reduced to ‘roll attribute dice, determine winner, draw reward, repeat at least fourteen more times’, but it really transcends this in my view to be a truly amazing game experience. The artwork on all the cards is just beautiful, and the stories can be truly immersive when you embrace the role-playing aspect of being your character.

All through this review, I’ve been struggling to think of something bad to say, as I don’t want to appear gushing, but there’s really very little that I can say against this thing. The cards are a little too smooth, and slide around all over the table if you’re not careful? It’s seriously just an amazing experience, with both sides quite evenly matched (the Final Battle in my game came to hinge on one card, as we each won two). There’s nothing that seems ridiculous/overpowered or anything like that. It’s just a tremendous game!

One of the kickstarter stretch goals was a multi-player expansion, which is apparently in development. It sounds interesting, as it possibly changes the entire nature of the game – obviously, tweaks would be needed if you have up to three heroes going against the lone dungeon lord, but rather than just an alternate set of rules, it looks like almost a whole new game, which intrigues me.

Something that I want to address is the nature of the kickstarter campaign. As I said at the beginning, I have everything currently available for this game due to the fact that I caught the kickstarter. A lot of people have missed out, and as a result they have slightly less than the backers, who have almost another game’s worth of content. There are nine sets of exclusive Story Cards, three new heroes and three new dungeon lords, along with a small pack of more Final Battle cards. While I don’t believe that any of these are integral to anybody’s enjoyment of the game – while I played against one of these dungeon lords (not the chap used in the pictures here, incidentally), only one weapon card I saw was ks exclusive, everything else in my game was base-game content and was fantastic – I fully understand the completionist mentality, which has driven me to throw money away at ebay in the past. I’m obviously glad to have this content, but I don’t agree it should be kept as kickstarter exclusive content, as I don’t believe gaming should be such an elitist hobby in this manner. I would really like the designers to be able to make this content available, perhaps as a webstore-exclusive thing. It’s a thorny issue, as I discovered when I started a topic on this a while back, but I would much rather see the game designer be able to make money off content that must have required a considerable investment of resource, rather than have so much one-time-deal stuff they can’t use ever again. No doubt so much ks exclusive content helped their campaign at the time, but it seems to foster an attitude of wanting to avoid this game at retail among a lot of people who, like me, are of the all-or-nothing mentality.

But I’ll get off my soapbox now!

Expansions have already been announced, hopefully coming out this summer, and they look pretty awesome already. Cursed Sands is the big one here, with really interesting new characters and new quirks to the flow of the game. Definitely looking forward to seeing these!

This game is such a massively enjoyable experience, I really do urge you to get yourselves a copy, which I think is currently only available direct from the company. But hey, you can get yourself an awesome game while supporting the publisher directly! Win, win!

I think I’ve prattled on enough about this now, so I’ll stop. Bravo if you actually read all of that, anyway! Some brief take-aways from this review are that the game is awesome, super thematic and wonderfully balanced, and while I don’t agree with the way the kickstarter has excluded so much content from so many people, the retail version of this game is so awesome that you really shouldn’t let it stand in your way of what is, ultimately, a really fantastic game!

Ten out of ten, Watchtower Games!

Ruins and Games

Hey everybody!

It’s the last day of another week off work, sadly, though this one didn’t go quite according to plan – I was supposed to be going to Milan, but as it turned out that didn’t happen. Milan, in case you’re interested, is a pretty great city to visit – you can check out my photos of a previous trip in one of my first blogs here!

It’s been a good week regardless, as I’ve celebrated my one-year anniversary of being here on WordPress and haranguing you all with nonsense. The festivities were centred on Indiana Jones, as I explored anew one of the great movie franchises, and managed to squeeze in a look at one of my favourite boardgames, Fortune & Glory! If you haven’t already, make sure you check that one out, as it’s a lot of fun!

Games haven’t featured as much as I thought they would, actually – I think I’ve been too annoyed at the change in plans to relax enough. I did have a game night on Friday though, where we tried out a couple of new ones (games I have had for months, but just not played yet – it happens a lot). This coming Tuesday, you can expect a blog on one of these two; it’s a game that has been mentioned on here quite a lot, actually – the game of Fallen!

I’ve largely spent the week split between my two great passions, heritage-hunting and Star Wars. I managed to get two ruins in during the awesome weather we had mid-week: Stokesay Castle, and Witley Court!

Awesome day in the sun at Stokesay Castle @EnglishHeritage @ShropTourism #history pic.twitter.com/pAVPDp2s4A

— Mark Griffiths (@Marrrkusss) April 21, 2015

Stokesay Castle is off the A49 in south Shropshire, and has long been a favourite of mine. I think the intimate feel of the place really plays a big part of this – it’s essentially the fortified manor house of a fourteenth-century wool merchant, so while it is a defensible structure, it’s not a castle in the sense of a military fortress such as Caernarfon, for instance. Instead, we get the rooms of medieval domesticity such as the solar and bedchambers, and it’s all really nice.

Fantastic day at Witley Court today – without a doubt, my favourite @EnglishHeritage place in the country! pic.twitter.com/waHY0abC1o

— Mark Griffiths (@Marrrkusss) April 22, 2015

By contrast, Witley Court is the shell of a country house, which was a centre of the Victorian country house party circuit before the disastrous fire of 1937 gutted the place. I first visited the ruin three years ago, after a day spent in the Hereford and Worcester area, and it quickly became my very favourite place in England. I haven’t been able to make it back until this week, but it was great to be there again, I have to say!

Perseus & Andromeda at Witley Court today – awesome! @EnglishHeritage pic.twitter.com/2Tbysisq8x

— Mark Griffiths (@Marrrkusss) April 22, 2015

It’s now quite famous for the restored fountain, which fires hourly during the day. As I got there, it was still going, but I hung about until the noon extravaganza too, and it was funny to see the amount of people who emerged from the ruins to witness the spectacle shortly before 12…

Driving often gives me a headache, and driving in the sun is not much fun for me, so I didn’t manage to get anywhere else. That said, I did manage to read some pretty awesome Star Wars bits and pieces – some of the very early newspaper comic strips (check them out here and here), and the new Heir to the Jedi, which I reviewed on Friday. For a quick recommendation, I definitely suggest you check out Heir to the Jedi, as it’s a really awesome book! It’s part of the new continuity of course, which alone had given me pause before I read it, but as it happens it’s pretty contiguous with the EU that I know and love. Well worth checking out, though! I’ve since moved on to reading another Luke story, Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, which I’ll doubtless be entertaining you with just as soon as it’s finished, though this is one that I have read before, so I can recommend it to you now, anyway 🙂

Also on the subject of Star Wars, I had the chance to try the new Armada game at the local games shop on Friday, and that’ll be written up in blog form soon no doubt. It was pretty good, too, though I’ll save my thoughts for the blog itself. But this brings me back to the subject of boardgames, and while I haven’t played many this week, there’s still plenty of excitement here!

I’d gone to the local shop to pick up some stuff, and got caught up in the Armada thing, but yeah: new Lord of the Rings box, and new Necron stuff! The Treason of Saruman is a new Saga expansion for the game, and follows the first half of The Two Towers. As such, there’s a new Fellowship hero, Aragorn! I’m quite excited, anyway, because I now have ten more Saga expansion quests to play through in my ongoing project, having now had Fog on the Barrow-downs as well, though I haven’t gotten around to any more plays yet. Soon, however…

Following the game of Warhammer 40k the other week, even though I don’t know when I’d be playing next – if at all, to be honest – I’m feeling vaguely more interested in what I’m actually modelling and painting now, beyond the way something looks. Buying the Doom Scythe was largely the result of a gameplay idea rather than wanting to build and paint one – these ships act as tanks for the Necrons, as they can transport up to 15 models, so following that game, where I could see how useful transport vehicles can be, I decided to get one. It doesn’t look too bad to build, either.

This week hasn’t been without its painting endeavours, either, as I’ve been working on three Tomb Blades – the jetbikes of the Necron army!

What fiddly models. In order to paint them, I assembled the main bike and the rider separately, but that meant I couldn’t attach the arms or hands to the rider, in case I did so at a pose that would ultimately be impossible to fit him in there. The rider is also hooked up to the bike itself, with two very small, very thin tubing-bits, and even using tweezers to put them in, I had a hard time getting them in the right place. Urgh! But they’re all (reasonably) assembled now, with all of the base coats (and some highlighting of the buttons under the riders’ hands, for instance), so it’s time for phase two of this operation. Though I’m not sure when that’ll be… They look really great as models, however, and I’m looking forward to having them finished!

I particularly like the look of my Necron vehicles so far, I think the green and the silver looks quite effective as-is, and doubt I’ll be doing anything more to it. However, when I shared a picture of the Command Barge on facebook, someone made the comment about it looks like a Hasbro toy that way. I’m pretty sure it was meant to be insulting, though given how successful Hasbro are as a company, maybe there’s a complement in there? I don’t know. At any rate, I’m not really wanting to do anything to change it right now, so will just carry on!

While we’re on the topic of Warhammer, though…

This has got me pretty excited, I don’t mind telling you! I love co-op games, as I enjoy working together to overcome something horrible. While PvP games can be good, I get tired of the effort that can be involved at times. With co-op, there’s a camaraderie that I feel just can’t be beaten – I mean, I’m friends with people because I like them, not because I want to destroy them! However, the potential for solo play cannot be overlooked, either. So I’ve preordered this from the local shop, and will look forward to getting it put together – if anything like Space Hulk, it should only be seven or eight months before I think about painting it…

Back in the day, part two

Hey everybody!

Last weekend’s look at some of the Classic Star Wars comics was so enjoyable, I thought I’d take a look at some more! Starting where I left off, then, let’s check out Luke’s mission to Fondor!

This is actually a good premise: set against the construction of the Super Star Destroyer Executor at Fondor, Vader attempts to wheedle out some treacherous admirals with the assistance of Admiral Griff, a new recurring Imperial character. Griff’s plan is to test the loyalty of the admirals by suggesting working with the Alliance to sabotage the SSD project, lest Vader’s prestige with the Emperor increase any further. A message is sent to the alliance at Yavin, and Luke volunteers for the mission to get away from Han and Leia, as he feels jealous of the relationship the two are building following Ord Mantell. At Fondor, Luke manages to spy on the project, storing the information in Artoo, then escapes with the help of the transport pilot Tanith Shire. Cue lots of early-80s-style “courtship”, which Luke is a bit taken aback by.

Anyhow, with Vader aware of a strong Force presence, Luke escapes in a barge drone, and crash-lands on Ophideraan, where it transpires Tanith has been sending Imperial barges to crash-land for the Serpent Masters. This whole story is a bit daft, if I’m honest, and it was a bit of a chore to get through at times because of that. Serpent Masters? It’s all a bit too fantastical for Star Wars, in my opinion…

Concurrent with this, Han has dropped Leia off at a planet called Kabal, where she’s trying to recruit more rebels, which seems to be a de facto role for her in most of these early stories. Anyhow, when Luke and Tanith escape Ophideraan, they land – where else? – on Kabal, where Leia sees them kiss goodbye. Oh, these early tales! In the pre-Jedi world, there was so much awkwardness around this triangle!

The Imperials show up, and the rebels escape Kabal only to find themselves in a deadly trap cooked up by an Imperial weapons technician. Some radiation experiment went wrong, and he’s now awaiting death at the hands of a neutron star or somesuch. Again, it’s a pretty weird story, and feels like a filler-story between the main storyline of the ongoing series – such as the newspaper strip can be called a series. Well, anyway…

Again, the rebels are escaping, and they rendezvous with one of Leia’s newly recruited rebels, a reformed pirate chief named Silver Fyre. It soon turns out that Han knows her from his chequered past, although nothing is really made of this beyond the fact that he knows her, and is suspicious of her because of her past conduct. Anyhow, Han loudly talks about the information that is still hidden within Artoo, convinced they’re being bugged, and it turns out that’s right! Some weirdness results, as Silver Fyre and the rebels go on an underwater safari in search for the Demonsquid. Yes, that’s right – it’s like that sequence in The Phantom Menace, only not…

The story carries over into volume two, The Rebel Storm, where the heroes survive the squid, expose a traitor within Silver Fyre’s organisation, and manage to finally get back to their base on Yavin.

Wait, they’re still based out of Yavin IV? Yes, apparently so! The Imperials know they’re there, too, as they have the moon blockaded, and yet nobody seems to have done anything about this situation. Hm. Anyway, the Falcon makes it through the blockade, and is followed by an Imperial craft that crashes into one of the Massassi temples, awakening a Night Beast! First serpent riders, then demon squids, and now this. It’s like D&D, only it’s not…

The Night Beast actually figures really quite nicely into the later stories around the Yavin IV temples, as it seems to be some sort of Force-aware construct/beast, something you could totally imagine Ludo Kressh creating. We also get to learn some of the early lore of the temples, as we’re told the beast is guarding the ruins after its masters left the galaxy – not quite how it was portrayed in Tales of the Jedi, but no matter. Luke manages to convince it to stop its rampage, and all is well in the world once more…

News soon reaches the rebels that Obi-Wan Kenobi has been seen on Aridus, so Luke heads on over to check it out. This is one of those stories that is actually pretty goofy, and yet has managed to permeate the lore to become more than it actually is. Spoiler alert: it isn’t actually Ben Kenobi returned from the dead, but an actor hired by Vader to lure Luke into a trap. Once this actor sees how much Kenobi meant to Luke, he betrays Vader and let’s Luke escape. Setting aside the fact that Luke has seen Kenobi die, he’s actually quite annoying here anyway – in order to set up the actor’s change of heart, Luke is given lots of “I love you, Ben!” style dialogue, which begins to feel a bit out of character. Yes, Luke thought he was “a great man”, but the way Luke idolizes Kenobi here begins to belittle Luke as a character, like he can’t function without his old mentor. But anyway, it’s not a terrible story, it’s just a little weird.

But weird is par for the course with some of these things! I’ll explore this some more in the coming weeks, but suffice it to say, the early years of Star Wars were replete with this, well, weirdness!

Heir to the Jedi – a review

Just finished reading this: it was AWESOME. Thank you @KevinHearne – it was AWESOME! (For clarity: I really liked it) pic.twitter.com/w4mXJ76JDi

— Mark Griffiths (@Marrrkusss) April 24, 2015

I can’t really say any better than this, but this book was awesome!

As has been mentioned here before, I’m a pretty slow reader, preferring to savour the experience as I go through the movie-in-my-head. However, this book has changed all that, utterly capturing me, and propelling me through the story right to the end.

Spoilers ahead – you have been warned!

The book is set some time between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, where Luke is still not really much of a Jedi, and is still pretty much the hero of Yavin. Originally planned as the third of a loose trilogy that feature the Big Three prominently in turn, Heir to the Jedi became part of the new canon when all that happened around this time last year, and as such exists outside of Razor’s Edge and Honor Among Thieves.

It’s also told entirely in the first person – Luke, naturally – which makes it the second Star Wars novel ever to use this (after 1998’s I, Jedi). I have to admit, I’m really not a big fan of this device. For starters, as a reader it forces me to follow one person around and, if I don’t like that person, I’m instantly turned off from a book no matter how engaging the story around the narrator may be. I’ve also never felt a sense of excitement coming from reading these things – no matter what happens, there’s a basic meta-assumption made that the narrator survives the events in order to be then relating them to me, the reader. I imagine first-person, present-tense books would be a much better read (and have tried to do this myself a few times), but anyway.

Full disclosure, Luke Skywalker is my all-time favourite Star Wars character from all media, Legends or Canon. So to start with, you can imagine that I’d be fairly invested. However, Kevin Hearne succeeds in making Luke such a likeable person, I feel like I really want to get to know him more – as if I haven’t already from the films. In fact, he makes Luke the kind of person I’d like to hang out with, generally! Far from being the noble hero, he’s just an all-round nice guy!

We get some time with Leia of course, and given the timeframe of the book, there are some confused feelings around that whole issue, though it’s not the hash that is Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. Hearne introduces a new character, Nakari Kelen, who evolves into a love interest for Luke entirely naturally, in my opinion, which is a refreshing change from previous stories. Back in the day, the Bantam plan had always involved Luke ending up with Mara Jade, of course, so anyone he met in the meantime (Callista, I’m thinking of you!) never had a shot, and always flitted out of his life by the end of that particular trilogy or whatever. Now that the EU slate has been wiped clean, however, I enjoyed the possibility of seeing more of her – right up until the moment she was killed (I did warn you about the spoilers!)

The reason I’m spoiling this for you here is that it’s an important part of how effective this book is. Nakari is a really, really interesting character, and one that you really care about – partially because we’re seeing her from Luke’s perspective, I suppose – and when she dies, it elicits a really emotional response. I mean, I almost felt a similar sense of personal loss, that she wouldn’t be in any more Star Wars stories, for instance (though she is in a short story from January’s Star Wars Insider). I was really surprised by this, which led me to really appreciate just how effective the writing is – and in turn, just how amazing this book is!

As among the first of “the new batch” of Star Wars novels, I was particularly interested to see what elements of the established lore has been retained, and am pleased to note that the answer to that is: a lot. The Givin feature prominently, and they’re still the mathematicians we know from, for instance, Edge of Victory Rebirth. Admiral Ackbar still has a mistrust of smugglers, and so on. It’s pretty heartening to see the galaxy isn’t irrevocably changed, and I still feel reasonably at home here!

Considering the novel is called Heir to the Jedi, I had expected we’d see Luke begin to use the Force more than we do. He does grow in his ability and his confidence, but it’s not as much as I’d expected going in. It’s a minor quibble, of course – we only really need to see Luke learn some telekinesis, given that’s the only thing we’ve now seen between the Ben tuition and the Yoda tuition. And we get that here, so it’s fine. However, there’s an earlier sequence on Rodia where Luke learns something about his father, and is given a lightsaber, which he tries to figure out how it works, but then packs away and never mentions again. It would have been interesting, perhaps, but in the event it’s not incredibly important.

All in all, this is an awesome book, and I am so glad I bought it in hardcover (another new departure for me!)

Cannot recommend it enough – buy it now!

New Star Wars stuff!

Hey everybody!

After the heady excitement of my Birthday Week, and the exploration of the Indiana Jones franchise, it’s back to Star Wars, my original true love, and some exciting news for gaming, following the Anaheim shenanigans last weekend!

Let’s start with Wave 7 for X-Wing! Releases for this game continue apace, as we get new ships for all three of the current factions. The K-Wing makes an appearance for the rebels, something I’ve been particularly pleased about since I’m a big fan of the Black Fleet Crisis trilogy. It also gets a new move, SLAM, which basically allows it to move twice, so long as both movements are at the same speed. The Imperials get the TIE Punisher, though most people will probably know it better as the TIE Interdictor from the Galactic Battlegrounds game. It’s basically an advanced version of the TIE Bomber (from Wave 3), and both this and the K-Wing have some pretty snazzy ordnance they bring to the table. Very useful is the Advanced Ordnance card, which lets you use missiles and bombs twice, so that’ll most likely become a staple!

Scum takes up half of this wave, which makes sense, given they’re still quite far behind the other factions so far. Black Sun’s Kihraxz fighter makes its appearance, which has got me excited to build a Black Sun squadron, and Trandoshan bounty hunter Bossk’s ship Hound’s Tooth rounds out the experience. He has the ability to escape his destroyed ship in the headhunter Nashtah Pup, which is a nice addition – I was surprised at first that we don’t actually get a headhunter model, but it would most likely drive the price of the expansion up to include it and, as was pointed out to me, most Scum players will have Most Wanted anyway.

So it’s a pretty exciting release, and since I’ve started to play this game, I’m really looking forward to it!

Speaking of X-Wing, we’ve also had a more in-depth look at the Imperial Raider, which I feel has been on the horizon for months already!

Announced back in December (I think – it seems longer!), it’s something that I’m pretty excited to get my hands on, even though I don’t foresee any epic play on the cards anytime soon. There are some interesting bits and pieces there, though – and who knows, now that the Imperials have a big ship as well, maybe we’ll see more epic play games…

More reinforcements have been announced for Imperial Assault, too. As someone mentioned on facebook, this is where the skirmish game really begins, and I can definitely see that. Up to now, we seem to have been having the lieutenant-like expansions similar to the Descent model, which basically replace tokens from the base game with actual miniatures, but with new chaps that we can bring to the table, it begins to feel much more like a miniatures battle game, much like the previous Star Wars Miniatures games from Wizards of the Coast and West End Games. Even though I haven’t been able to play with the base game yet, I’m hoping I can sell the idea to Tony with the skirmish side, then hook him in with the scenario-driven game. We shall see!

The miniatures do look great, though I’m not going to paint them – the manager at the local store has done his store copy, and that looks fantastic, but they’re too small and detailed for me!

Again, I’m pretty excited for these guys, even though I’ve yet to play the game. Star Wars Miniatures was one of my favourite games, back in the day – which is surprising, given that it’s got basically no story to it, and you’re just trying to wipe out your opponent before he wipes you out. But I played a lot of that game back in the day, and it’s really exciting to think we might get that sort of experience again, though on a much more sensible scale (as opposed to the blind-buy from Wizards).

And finally…

So. Much. New. #StarWars pic.twitter.com/20rCjUSHbq

— Mark Griffiths (@Marrrkusss) April 21, 2015

Making splendid use of my amazon vouchers, I’ve decided to go for the latest novels in hardcover. It seems Del Rey is moving to all their books coming out in hardcover now, so it’ll help to distinguish them from my now-Legends novels.

Adventurous thoughts

Hey everybody!

Birthday week continues here at spalanz.com, and I wanted to talk a little bit about creative writing today. Well, like I said at the top of the week, I was thinking of presenting something of a microcosm of my first year within the week. Indiana Jones is a great theme for this, with the amount of stuff that it has spawned over the years.

A few years ago, I entertained some dreams of adding to that spawn myself!

As a child, I was utterly enraptured by the sense of adventure in the Indy films, and used to try to continue and recapture that adventure long after the credits had rolled. As life wore on, I thought about the possibility of making something of those adventures by writing essentially fan-fiction, an idea that eventually mutated into my own original story idea. Somewhere, I’ve got a lot of stuff written down for an adventure story set in the 1930s and featuring a globe-trotting academic. I’m not entirely sure where, though I am sure that if I found that stuff, I would be fairly unimpressed with it.

The basic kernel of my idea was for a character who wanted to be Indiana Jones, possibly a schoolfriend or somesuch. The idea that this guy who he sat next to in class was off fighting Nazis and unearthing religious artifacts really fired his imagination, so he got together with another guy and they set off to have their own adventure. While George Lucas has described Indy as a guy who’s always getting in over his head, my guy was just inept from the get-go. I think he was fluent in Ancient Greek and Arabic, as he was a scholar of the dark ages and early medieval period, but he wasn’t much good at anything else.

The guy along for the adventure with him was also a medievalist, and had something of a fascination with medieval weaponry. I suppose this was an answer to Indy having a whip – this chap used a flail at one point, and I think I wanted to show him train with tonfa and three-section staff (I don’t remember the actual Chinese name for this). There was also a lady along with them, who was fluent in several languages, and an elder-statesman-like chap who may or may not have been a college professor.

Yeah – a large part of the adventure took place in China.

The story had something to do with breaking into an international gemstone smuggling ring, and trying to prevent the theft of some kind of legendary stone. It might have been my inability to develop this effectively that proved the undoing of this endeavour. Part of the story took place in Africa – I think I originally wanted to involve Egypt, but then felt it was too hackneyed and wanted to move into Nubia or someplace. My intrepid band was foiled at this stage, but decided to forge ahead through India and Nepal and into China, where the final showdown would take place.

For the villain of the piece, I envisaged all sorts of crazy, though I think I eventually settled on a Dutch guy. Diamonds, you know? Anyway.

Along the way there would be boat chases along the Ganges (or similar), airplane chases over the Himalayas, car chases through Peking, and midnight excavations with traps and terrors at every turn. It was going to be awesome.

And yet, it remains unwritten. A loss the world will no doubt have to bear! I think what put me off was The Mummy 3, which I haven’t seen, but which sounded too much like my projected tale, with its oriental setting and whatnot.

However, there were also a number of challenges that I felt insurmountable at the time, foremost among them being how could I write something this close to an adventure classic and still keep it original? A fear of becoming derivative was a constant companion. Another major consideration was whether I was intelligent enough to write it. I mean, it’s a story about a group of highly intelligent academics, and I suppose my constant insecurity led me to believe I couldn’t pull it off convincingly when I wasn’t in that same stratum. The vast majority of my notes for this story were mainly educating myself on things like weaponry and toxicology, for instance, to say nothing of ancient history of Africa and Asia…

I began to think instead of something more fantastical, which I could control – my fantasy story that I talked about some last summer. If I’m making everything up, then it’s much easier to write than having to do all that research – no matter how interesting it was! My fantasy story originally began life in 2006, but soon overtook my adventurer story, though neither has made any real headway!

It’s a series of ideas that have refused to go away, however, and every so often I find myself fondly looking back and thinking I might actually make something of it. I suppose time will only tell on that score…

Anyhow! We’re getting close to the end of Birthday Week now, but I hope to have something faintly interesting for you to end the week with… stay tuned!

The further adventures of Dr Jones!

Hey folks!

I’m continuing the Birthday Week theme today, with a look at the further adventures of Indiana Jones! Yes guys, there’s more to this franchise than some movies! (And, I think, a Disney ride?)

I get really excited when I discovered there were books and comics for a series like this. Last year I discovered comics for Ghostbusters, and was in awe! I discovered Indy books five or six years ago now, and snapped up what were described to be the best – the quartet by Max McCoy.

There are a dozen or so novels from Bantam, published during the 90s in the aftermath of Last Crusade, and McCoy wrote the final four. Some of the earlier books are apparently goofy, but these last four are apparently much better.

Well.

I haven’t read any of the earlier ones, but these chaps can be really pretty weird!

A small confession, I’ve only actually read three of the four pictured above, having not made it to Secret of the Sphinx. Why? Well, I’m not entirely sure, but I can’t honestly say that they’re the best books I’ve ever read.

They do have a classic adventure feel to them, and they obviously have the characters that we know and love from the movies. But overall, they just don’t feel like Indiana Jones. There are a lot of moments where Indy is completely out of character, predominantly in terms of speech patterns, that make me wonder what on earth I’m actually reading. A lot of the movie tie-ins that I’ve read in the past have been successful because the characters feel like those from the source material, and speech is a big part of that.

Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone began really promising, with a jungle adventure that serves to explain the remark from Temple of Doom about Indy’s activities in British Honduras. I was enraptured! But it soon fell quite flat, though there was the one saving grace that these books are really easy to read – I’m a slow reader, but I read half of this novel in a day. This book also brings Mussolini’s Fascists to the Indyverse as enemies, and it works pretty well.

The stilted dialogue, often arising out of the apparent need of the author to educate us, has made me think that perhaps these novels are aimed at a much lower age range. Not that I’m a snob or anything, but I sometimes felt I was being talked down to during this book.

My biggest criticism, however, comes from a sort of side-McGuffin. Indy is in British Honduras to retrieve a crystal skull, which he doesn’t realise is cursed. Indy winds up believing said curse, which causes big problems for him throughout the three novels I’ve read. Seriously? What happened to his Raiders attitude, of a lot of hocus pocus and the boogieman? Hm.

Indiana Jones and the Dinosaur Eggs is a bizarre one. Derivative of Temple of Doom, we see Indy head to Outer Mongolia by way of Shanghai, which leads to some gratuitous cameo appearances, but also fails to hit the spot for me. Remember in the second movie, Wu Han dies reminiscing about the many adventures he and Indy have taken? It always felt like they’d been buddies for many years, not the barely two years this novel sets it at. Also, Wu Han is barely in the adventure. But anyway.

Another entirely superfluous cameo comes at the very beginning, where we see Rene Belloq seemingly meeting Indy for the first time also. Some Nazis appear, but the main villains of this piece are Mongolian bandits, which also fell a little flat for me – we have Indy in China around the time of the conflict with Japan, why not investigate that a little? There is a lot of history here that has remained largely ignored by the West, I feel – perhaps because we had a lot going on with the growing Nazi threat in Europe – but it would have been really good to see it explored.

Anyhow, this is followed up by Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth. I have to admit, while I’m a big history fan, I didn’t really get the reference here – fortunately, all these books have a historical afterword that explains some of the real-life references made, seemingly in keeping with the need to educate. Apparently, a lot of intellectuals thought the Earth was hollow, with substantial space ripe for colonisation under the surface. Hm. It’s a notion that was kind-of explored in my absolute favourite science fiction novel, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, though I hadn’t realised it had actually been given serious thought until reading this, so I suppose the novel succeeded on that front!

While the other two novels are a bit weird, this one is downright odd. To start with, I don’t feel like it flows very well. The Nazis are the villains of this book, but there is a substantial part in the first half of the novel that feels like it should be a separate adventure, which really damaged the pacing for me. The premise of the novel is that Indy has been given a stone that leading members of the Thule Society are looking for, but after an extended altercation with the Nazis, they disappear from the narrative while Indy goes off on a treasure hunt, to raise the funds to pay Belloq (in another gratuitous cameo) for information as to the whereabouts of the crystal skull from book one. The search for the skull brings about the end game, an Arctic expedition that brings the Nazis back, but by this point there feels like too much going on, and the two strands of Thule Stone and Crystal Skull stories don’t really fit properly.

I suppose, of the three, I feel cheated the most by Hollow Earth, because it could have been so much better than it turned out to be, with the Thule Society references (remember my love of Tannhauser and alternative-history?)

But what about the comic-book adventures?

There are quite a few comics for the franchise, from Marvel’s adaptations of the films to Dark Horse’s endeavours of the 1990s. I’ve come quite late to Indy comics, picking up the omnibus when it came out in 2008, and have only actually read one of these stories, the adaptation of the Fate of Atlantis video game.

It’s another strange story, that sees Indy globetrotting in a whole host of contraptions, and while the initial setup looked like it could be going somewhere interesting, it ended up being just a bit weird and goofy again.

So this is something of a theme for the Indy literature out there, really, and leads right into Indy 4, too.

The Indiana Jones films have always taken some mystical object of religious significance, and spun a story around it of adventure and hijinks that has some sort of personal/moral level to it. These stories that I’ve been talking about here have taken a broader approach, by having the mystical object merely a historical artifact of some sort, and use it as an excuse to go on some random adventure almost for the sake of it. Which is partly the problem with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, for me. The vital element of any sort of reason for the adventure has been taken away, and we’re left with something that’s just empty.

The stories are pretty good if you just want some escapist adventure to read, and they’re all pretty quick to get through, too. Unfortunately, however, they don’t really feel like Indiana Jones stories! But hey, that’s just my opinion – if you’ve read any, let me know what you think!!

Fortune and Glory!

It’s birthday week here at spalanz.com! Who knew I’d still be posting junk twelve months on? Today is particularly special, as it marks the first day of my second year of blogging, so what better way to celebrate than with a game day post about a truly epic adventure board game? What better way, indeed!

So today, I’m looking at Fortune & Glory, from Flying Frog Productions, the same folks who brought us A Touch of Evil, and Shadows of Brimstone! The eagle-eyed among you might be scratching your head, wondering about the week’s theme I mentioned yesterday – well, all will be abundantly clear in short order, trust me!

There is so much to this game that I don’t really know where to begin! But let’s try with the board:

When your game board is a map of the world, you know you’re in for some truly awesome times! Unlike Eldritch Horror, the world is split up into spaces that cover general areas, some of which are countries – like Germany or Britain – and some are areas, like Congo Jungle and Yucatan. As is common with all FFP games, the production quality and theme is extremely strong, and even these area names are highly suggestive of adventure!

You play an intrepid adventurer in the game, seeking to amass enough Fortune to win the game. There are two distinct variants of gameplay out of the box: competetive and cooperative. In the former, you are competing against your fellow gamers to amass said Fortune, while in the latter you are competing against the game itself – in the form of Vile Organizations. A third variant is possible, which includes these villains in the competitive game. As a thematic gamer at heart, and also a solo gamer through circumstance, I heartily enjoy the cooperative game, and have had many hours of enjoyment from it as a truly immersive experience, so this will be the format that I’m going to use for this blog, anyway!

Your hero sheet has all the usual info on it, the skills and abilities you have, as well as your home city. There is a variant that requires you to make it back home to win the game, but in a normal game you only return back once you’ve been knocked out. Like the heroes, the villains also have a record sheet, as well as a tactics chart to help automate them.

The base game comes with both The Mob and The Nazis, and while I’ve played a few games with the former, the latter are really my go-to Vile Organization, simply because of the theme. I mean, above all else, they have a War Zeppelin that shoots around the board, dropping off soldiers! It’s really a no-brainer!

Heroes are competing against the villains to amass enough Fortune, which is achieved mainly by hunting down various artifacts and selling them off.

Artifacts are generated dynamically each game through the two card types, artifacts (surprisingly!) and adventures. In the examples above, you can make The Mask of the Dead or The Mask of the Crimson Hand! There are four artifacts available to hunt down at any time during the game, with any that are found simply replaced at the end of the turn. Finally, the artifacts, once generated, are located in random Locations (using the Locations deck), and marked with a different-coloured skull token on the board. Should you happen to find an artifact in a Deep Jungle space (a palm tree icon in a red border, such as the Heart of Africa shown above), you gain +2 Fortune when you sell it.

So how do you find these artifacts?

Well, the game uses an Adventure deck of double-sided cards, which have an adventure on the front, and a cliffhanger on the back. In the above example, Jacques Moreau is going after The Mask of the Crimson Hand, which is located in the Heart of Africa. As this is in a Deep Jungle space, he must first roll a die: on the roll of 4, 5 or 6, he has found the artifact and can proceed to the adventure; on a 1, 2 or 3, he is lost in the jungle, and must end his turn. However, he does get to draw an Exploration token, which gives him an extra die to roll to find the artifact next time, increasing the chances of finding it (this continues, with more exploration tokens adding more dice, etc).

Once he has found it, he must overcome a series of Dangers, as denoted by the number on the red shield of the Adventure card – in this case, 4. His first card is Stone Guardians, which requires a Lore test, on which he must roll a 5+ twice – the crosses next to the test denote how many successes are needed (and as you can see, if he were on a desert space, he would need three successes to pass). If the test is passed, Jacques has one of two options: camp down, in which case he gains the Glory shown on the card (3), and his turn ends, or press on, in which case he draws a new adventure card. As the cards are double-sided, they are always shuffled before you draw, and you always draw from the bottom.

As shown above, Jacques scored one success, so he can roll again in order to try and gain that second success. Expansions have since added the mechanic of Deadly Tests, which need to be passed with just one roll. There aren’t many expansions for F&G just now, but I’ll get round to discussing them more at length in later blogs!

Jacques’ next adventure is Underwater Diving, which requires a Cunning test with two successes of 5+. Jacques rolled his three dice, but did not achieve any successes! The test failed, the card is then flipped to the Cliffhanger side, all other adventure cards are discarded, and his turn ends. Next turn, he cannot move until he has attempted to defeat the cliffhanger. During a cliffhanger, the hero has the option of Exerting, which means he or she takes a wound to add an extra die to their pool (though you can’t exert if it would knock you out).

Once you have overcome the required number of dangers, you claim the artifact as your own, and it is replaced in the line-up with a new one. You must then make it to a City space in order to sell it. There are two types of cities, Major (with a gold border and individual artwork) and Minor (with a silver border). You can sell an artifact anywhere, but you gain an extra Fortune for selling in a Major city. However, before you do any of that, you must first encounter the city through the City deck. These are a mixture of good and bad cards, which can heal you or make you encounter villains and the like.

As well as selling your artifacts, you can buy Gear and hire Allies, which can all help in your search for Fortune and Glory! The currency of the game is this glory, which you obtain from overcoming dangers at adventures. For five glory, you can get yourself some handy gear or the services of an ally or sidekick.

Once your turn is over, it’s time for the villains to strike! In the base game, each Vile Organization comes with three Villains, who go out into the world and try to seek artifacts too. Each villain has a Search ability that dictates how many dice they roll (along with the usual combat and health, and special abilities). When a villain searches for an artifact, they throw dice equal to their search skill, and for every 4, 5 or 6 they place a danger marker on the artifact. There have been many times where I’ve seen artifacts disappear before my very eyes by very lucky villain rolls, let me tell you!

There are also villain events, which trigger at the start of their turn, a Secret Base that can potentially spawn more each turn, and the dreaded War Zeppelin! Each villain phase, the Zeppelin moves towards a new random location by drawing a card and rolling a die. If it reaches that location, it drops off a Nazi Soldier before moving on. These enemy henchmen block movement for the heroes, making it that much more difficult to make it across the globe without a fight!

However, heroes can both infiltrate the Zeppelin, destroying it for the turn, and sneak into the Secret Base, destroying it and stealing an artifact from under their very noses! I remember a particularly enjoyable game where Jake Zane kept infiltrating the secret bases to steal artifacts, rather than going after them himself… Wonderful times!

In common with other FFP games, there’s also a Villain Track, which escalates from various effects, notably from villains recovering artifacts. If that track reaches 20 (in the solo/2 player game), the Villains win! However, if you can recover 15 Fortune first, you win! Of course, 15 Fortune isn’t really all that difficult to get if you’re particularly lucky, and in fact with the right cards (particularly Secret Delivery cards from the City deck), you can get to 15 Fortune with ease. Because of this, and the long set-up time due to the amount of components in this game, I tend to keep playing until I grow tired of sitting in the same place, then determine an event (such as destroying the Zeppelin, or defeating a particular villain in combat) to trigger the end game. I’ve had epic 2-hour games in this manner, rather than the half-hour “is that it?” sort of games that often result from stopping the clock as soon as you get 15 Fortune. (In one of those 2-hour extravaganzas, I think my heroes had a collective 43 Fortune, and the villain track was only on 6 or 7…)

I mentioned before how there are many different variants for this game right out of the box, and alongside these are some Advanced elements, such as Temples. These are artifacts that are generated as normal, but are often worth significantly more. When they’re generated, a temple marker is also placed on the board, and a number of Fortune on the card. Each turn, you encounter the danger as usual, and if you’re successful, you place a danger marker plus take one Fortune from the temple. If the number of markers reaches the danger value of the temple, you replace them with a Collapse marker, and roll a die. If you roll a 2+, you’re fine and can press on as normal, but if you don’t, the temple collapses and you need to pass the escape test printed on its card or be knocked out. If you manage to make it out of the temple with all of the Fortune, you can also take the temple marker, which is itself worth 3 Fortune as an Artifact.

The above picture shows the sort of hilarious adventure chain you can go on when at a temple, due to the amount of Fortune there – after a Hidden Trap, a Car Chase ensued! Alexander Cartwright made it from his car to a plane, but was chased into the skies, whereupon he ejected into a boat, only to be followed downstream! He sought refuge in some Ice Caves, but was dismayed when the tunnel led to a Nightclub Rendezvous, which was no sooner passed than he came up against the dreaded Stone Guardians! What kind of crazy temple is this?!

Ah, pulp adventure at its best!

I can’t begin to tell you just how much I enjoy this game – especially with all the tweaks and options to customize it! To all but the totally blind, it also has the Indiana Jones theme to a tee, as you trot the globe, fighting Nazis and recovering precious relics of the past!

If you still don’t believe me over how awesome this game can be – just check this out:

(Though, y’know, pardon the goofs they made with the rules…)

Indiana Jones!

You love it!

Indiana Jones, for me, is one of the all-time awesome movie series. The adventure! Just awesome. I’m not about to launch into some hefty critique of these films, as there are plenty of such things knocking about online. Instead, I’m just going to put some random thoughts together for your general amusement on why I love these films – it’s my blog’s birthday, dammit!

I can’t remember how old I was when I first saw these films, though I do recall a dark period of only having Last Crusade on vhs (for you young kids, that’s physical tape in a plastic cassette, none of this dvd shiny!). Raiders of the Lost Ark was always the more serious film, I seem to remember – you couldn’t just watch it, it seemed to demand your attention, though obviously rewarded you for doing so. As a child, I didn’t really care all that much for Raiders. There was too much going on, plot-wise, and while I did enjoy the truck chase sequence, it didn’t really do it for me. I was also heavily interested in Mesoamerican/Pre-Columbian history, and felt cheated by the film’s opening not delivering on a jungle adventure, but that’s beside the point.

As an adult, I can now appreciate Raiders for the masterwork it is. It’s not just a great film, it’s a great experience. There’s a deep sense of history for these characters, and whenever I watch it, I find myself wanting to know more about them – let’s see how Indy and Sallah met! Let’s see more of Marcus!

The character of Marcus Brody is something of a disappointment for me, incidentally. Don’t get me wrong, I think Denholm Elliot is superb. It’s the character that disappoints me. In Raiders, he’s something of a father-figure for Indy, there at the beginning and the end of the adventure. He comes across as a really important figure in Indy’s life. Then in Last Crusade, when we get Indy’s actual father, he’s kinda sidelined into a buffoon. But there has to be more to him than this! What is he good at? We never see him shine the way we do the other characters, except those all-too-brief glimmers here and there in Raiders. I feel Marcus is a lot more than we see in these films, and could be a real force to be reckoned with when you’re on his turf.

René Belloq is another of these characters that I’d love to get to know more about. The darker side of Indy, I’d like to see him on his own escapades, rather than just stealing stuff from Indy, or acting just as a Nazi toady. Let’s see why he thinks he’s as good as Indy.

I’m one of these people who is secretly fascinated by Nazi occultism, and I’m a big fan of alternative histories such as that of Tannhauser or Hellboy (no doubt, future blogs will explore these!). As such, I really enjoyed the business of the Nazis searching for the Ark, and the historian in me has never seen anything wrong with Nazis in film. This period of history happened, after all, so I don’t see why we should shy away from it. But anyway!

Temple of Doom is my all-time favourite Indiana Jones movie, though it has taken this spot only very recently. I’m not sure how I can really get my thoughts across without sitting you down in front of the movie and pointing out everything that is just awesome about it, but let’s try.

The scope of this movie is truly epic. The Temple set is just frighteningly awesome in the very truest sense of the word – it inspires awe. The story has a genuine arc for the character of Indy, going from an almost-mercenary, contract treasure-hunter to someone who can see what happens when relics are blithely taken away from people. Willie Scott may be an annoying character, but she too deepens as the story moves along.

The story is also really quite dark for its genre, which helps to make it much more grown-up than the others. It’s still a great adventure film, but there is a very clear message coming through in this one of archaeological morality, which is a debate that rages to this day.

The cinematography of this film is absolutely incredible. Douglas Slocombe has been rightly praised for his work, but he really pulls off a tour de force with this one. The scene in the temple, where Indy is forced to drink the black blood and goes through that transformation, is quite possibly my favourite in the whole of cinema, just for the cinematography.

That sense of history from Raiders pervades this film, also. Just what adventures did Indy share with Wu Han? What happened in British Honduras? Inquiring minds need to know!

Of course, the film is not without its faults, not least of which is the blatant racist portrayal of the Indian subcontinent. The banquet scene takes the monkey-brains-metaphor to its extreme in what I assume was meant to be a joke, but instead just falls offensive. Depictions of the Thuggee, and incorrect portrayals of Kali all mount up to a fairly embarrassing film in this respect, and you can’t really brush it under the carpet in the same way you can with the Nazis.

For me, however, it doesn’t detract from what is still a fantastic film.

Watching Indy3 – still think Indy2 was the best though, cinematography, direction, development, it's all there! #TempleOfDoomIsAwesome

— Mark Griffiths (@Marrrkusss) February 23, 2014

Last Crusade was, for many years, my favourite of the three. I can vaguely remember it being released, and it was a big deal in my childhood. Something that I particularly liked about the film was just how stylish the Nazis were in this one. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not expressing admiration! But there is definitely more of the 1930s chic about this film than in the others. It was also interesting, for me, to have a more European flavour to the film, and seeing more of the history that I’m familiar with.

I do enjoy the early history of Christianity, and a film about the holy grail obviously allows us to explore this more. Heading off to the Middle East was both inspired and problematic, for me though. The sense of location has always been a strong point to these films, but long periods in the desert just made it feel like Raiders all over again. Also, that is NOT the Grail Temple, because it’s the Treasury at Petra. That was a big detractor for me, and irritates me whenever I watch the film nowadays.

It’s not all irritating, of course. Sean Connery as Indy’s father is an inspired move. Lucas famously pitched the Indy story to Spielburg as “something better than James Bond”, so having the original Bond show up is nicely poetic. Connery is also a superb actor, and the chemistry between the two is formidable. Elsa is also a fantastic femme fatale, and it’s great to see Sallah and Marcus once more, even if they are reduced somewhat to comic relief. Even though this is still undoubtedly an Indy movie, there is much more of an ensemble feel to it because of having this strong cast around the lead.

When all’s said and done, however, it just feels too much like a Raiders rehash to me, and falls flat as a result. It’s still head-and-shoulders above a lot of other action movies, but not quite to the level of the first two films.

I suppose there’s also something perhaps a bit more personal to my love for the franchise. As a child, I was always very studious and bookish, and the character of Dr Jones showed, to me, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it actively encouraged me to be more academic at least twice in my early years. Of course, I’m not a globe-trotting professor-cum-treasure-hunter, but a mild-mannered civil servant. But Indiana Jones has made history cool and exciting, regardless of whether that history was accurate, or his methods strictly correct…

This post has so far ignored the fact that there is that turkey, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, also in existence. I’m not about to launch into any kind of critique on that, as I haven’t for the previous films, but I’d just like to say that the film is perhaps the victim of its older siblings’ successes. If you were to remove any reference to the character, and have this as one of the many adventurer-type films that Indy spawned, it’s not actually all that bad. There, I said it!

The internets seem to be awash with rumours lately of a Disney reboot, and I have to say, having had a fair few weeks now to digest this possibility, I don’t actually feel all that bad about this. So long as it’s an actual reboot that brings a completely new experience. I mean, I don’t want to see Chris Pratt (or whoever ends up in the role) rehashing Raiders, because that movie has been done, is awesome, and needs little-to-no work (just an expanded Marcus part, really). It would really need to be a brand new story, though I’m sure it’ll be good to have Nazis back for the ride as well. But I’m not going to speculate this far out, as it isn’t even confirmed this is happening yet…

Let’s just stick with the fact the Indiana Jones trilogy is awesome, with the fourth having the odd moment of goodness. If imitation is the best form of flattery, this franchise is very rich indeed.

Go watch them all today!

Birthday Week!

Ta-daa!

Hey everybody, and welcome to day 365 of my blog! That’s right, this little corner of the internet has been overflowing with an abundance of awesome for one year – can you believe it? Well obviously you can – content this fabulous deserves to just keep on coming.

I’ve got a pretty special week lined up for you guys, anyway – there’s a theme week around one of the all-time classic movie franchises that will let me talk about board games, films, comics and novels, touching on virtually everything I’ve been doing on this blog over the last year. I’m also planning to have some more travel, but that’ll be at the end of the week. Unfortunately, I’m not entirely sure whether I’m going to be able to churn out any creative writing, which is a bit sad as it would really serve to highlight in the microcosm of a week what the last year has really been all about for me. You never know, however!

I have to admit, I honestly didn’t see myself in this position twelve months ago. I started this blog in a fairly bleak part of my life, where I had been feeling the need for a major change – career, location, whatever. It was partly done to provide a respite from this, something I could do to take myself away from trying to sort myself out, almost. I didn’t foresee it lasting very long, as I thought it would be just a transient thing while I was trying to make something of my life. Instead, I quickly learned that I really enjoyed just writing stuff here, though I still didn’t think I would last all that long – the novelty would wear off, and I’d go back to whatever it was that I used to do to pass the time (moving between facebook, twitter and email, mostly). The more I got into it, the more I enjoyed writing all this nonsense, and it became a fun thought, seeing how far I could potentially go with this thing. But I still didn’t think I’d be doing it very long.

Then I hit 100 posts within four months. Wow, didn’t see that one coming. I think that was the first time I really, seriously took stock of what I was doing here. It wasn’t just a half-assed thing I was doing to pass the time, but had developed a life of its own, with a structure (of sorts), and I’d somewhere along the line grown accustomed to generating new content – Tuesday Game Day being the biggest thing here, of course, but also weekend round-ups of game news, and the like.

I’d never really thought anyone would be interested in what I have to say, either, and the early days were a bit of a hazy, nebulous time where I didn’t really know who – if anyone – my audience was. I have some fairly wide-ranging interests, and seemed to only be generating interest when I made certain types of posts (food was the most popular, followed by travel – I know you’re interested…) But I was struggling to get into that ever-widening niche about which I am perhaps most passionate – tabletop gaming. By now, the board games category is my most-used, largely due to my weekly game blogs, but back then I often wondered why I was even bothering. But bother I did, and here I am today!

I am continually chuffed by the comments and likes I get – who’d’ve thought I have anything of interest to say?! But it’s an absolute delight to interact with the community here, and in so many ways makes the experience much more pleasant. So thank you to you all – I’m so glad you can derive some manner of satisfaction from what I’m doing here!

There doesn’t really remain much more to be said, beyond the fact that I’m looking forward to the future of spalanz.com – there are a few new things I’d like to explore with the space I have here, and if you’d like to see anything in particular here then please feel free to drop me a note to say so!

As to the theme for my Birthday Week – why, it’s Indiana Jones…