International TableTop Day

I ran into the below linked video today.

As you all know I'm a big fan of boardgames. I love almost kind of boardgames which are more than roll a die and step as many as the die shows. Rolling dice are fun, but I love more exciment, when I have oportunity to control the events throught my deceisions. However you can find the luck element in every game.
According the announcement of this video, 30th March will be the International TableTop Day. Because it'll Saturday I almost sure I'll play some kind of boardgame with my wife and children.

I'm very excited about our future choice, what we will play that day.

Do you have favourite boardgames? Do you will play that day? And if your answer is yes, then what'll you choose?
 

If you're interested about it more, then you should visit the Official website of this event.

Projects

I have admit I quite lazy about doing things. Mostly I like spent my sparetime with passive thing with watching series/film or reading books. But I'm running some projects pararell in my active sparetime, and I'd like to tell some words about them in my blog. I put it them different categories.

Boardgame

Because my whole family is a gameboad geek nest, it's almost obvious I'll try to do something like that. In my previous post I wrote about the bedtime tales spiced with a small portion roll/role-playing. I came to the conclusion I'd like to improve it further, with creating a map, with random events and 'children-friendly monsters'. It's a little bit funny, because many bad, horrible thing happens in the tales. There you can find hereos and the enemies of the heroes (villains, monsters, other bad things). There are many confrontations which have to solve with force or use of the cunningness of the mind. I'd like to implements these items and factors to my boardgame. I'm in the very beginning of it, but I have many good ideas and concepts.

Translation

At the past I translated many computer games from English to Hungarian. Translating things to my native language is not so hard thing, it only depends on the understanding of the original texts, and write them on Hungarian. Usually I have freedom enough to from the things as I'd like. There were some non-official translation (I did them voluntary without any payment from anyone) where I didn't translate everything words by words, and I Hungarising the texts not translating.

My last official translation was the Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, which is an Diablo-clone. The creators of the game were German, which means the original texts were German too. First the developers translated the texts to English then sent them to the translators of many countries to modify the texts to their language such as French, Italian or Hungarian. It was interesting because we got the original German texts are well, and we saw there are many difference compared to the English. So we had some hard, cumbersome time with the translation of the game, but the final product was really great. At the end my colleauge and me translated nearly 1 million English words to Hungarian.

Unfortunatelly the Hungarian distributor didn't agreed the term of distributing of the expansion of the game, so you can't buy Sacred 2 Ice & Blood and Gold from the local shops. We didn't get any support from the developers of th troubled company. We had offered them to translated the texts of the expansion for free, if we got translation tools but they refused.

But a German team wanted to pimp the game for the fans. They added to the game new monsters, quests and texts which means they've got a translation tool. Fortunatelly I got it from them, so I can export and import the texts I like. Now I'm at the 2/3 of the texts of the expansion. I hope I'll finish it this year.

(Here you can find my 'translategraphy')

Novell

I deceided to participate a novell-writing contest. I have to write a short novell with 5000-20000 words in fantasy or sci-fi genre, but in western style (like Firefly). In the story itself must be a sheriff, a priest and a dynamite. I almost finished with it, but there lot things to do with it. BUT, I knowing myself well enough to rewrite the story every time, when I look into it.

Discworld: Ankh-Morpork - The Boardgame

I love fantasy genre, I love humour, I like Terry Pratchett books as well, which take place in the strange Discworld. These elements led me to buy Discworld: Ankh-Morpork - The Boardgame by Martin Wallace.

Background story

Lord Vetinari left the city, so the lords of Ankh-Morpork want to get the rule over the capital of Discworld. Our aim to lead one of them to reach his aim, against the others. Is it looks quite simple? Well, it isn't. Ankh-Morpork is the city of chaos, where everyday strange things happens.

Components

The components are quite good, and we have a feeling we got quallity product from our money. The cardboard map is awesome! The artwork on the cards are funny amazing, the wooden pieces (minions and buildings) are good. I have a little problem with the wooden coins and the inner storey, but it doesn't matter.

About the game

It's a 1 hour, 2-4 player game with many confrontation, backstabing and - as I mentioned before - with many chaotic element. I don't want to write much about the setup of board and this game, just only every player gets 5 card and $10. After we have choosen a personality card secretly, we can start the game.

The goal depends on the personality card we choose: we have to control x area, we have to x minions on the  board, we have to x troublemarker on the board, we have to collect x amount of money or we have to let play until the last card of drawing deck.

During our turn we play out cards, then drawing back 5 hand of cards. The played cards determine our actions: we can place a minion, we can build a building (this add some kind of bonus to your turns), we can remove a trouble marker, we can kill a minion, we can get money from the bank, we can interrupt an action, we can play another card or we can play an event card. Playing out random event cards means you start something chaos over city of Ankh-Morpork, and with these cards you can ruin the strategy of others... or yours. This add a funny part to the whole game, but sometimes it can be annoying as well.

Conclusion

I think it is a good, funny game with quallity components. If you like backstabing the others, and if you haven't got any problem with a little luck base then maybe it is your game. The interesting world of Terry Pratchett's Discworld adds lot to this game. If you didn't read any books from him, it's no problem and if you read... then you can met many familiar character from the books. You can quickly learn to love it, if you don't take it too seriously!

(source of the pictures: bgg)

Am I geek enough?

Sometimes I just wondering how geek I am. I don't know, I'm very unsure the answer. Maybe I just put on the wrong questions. Am I a geek? Or I just want to be a geek? Or not?

First, I love any kind of electronic gadgets. I'm so lucky to be an owner of iPad 2, and I have admit I love it! But it isn't jailbreaked (yet?). As I have a smartphone with android OS, which is not rooted (yet?). Maybe I'm not really geek or not brave enough to be a real gadget-geek. (Sadly, I have to mention last week somebody stole my wife smartphone.) My love towards to any kind of computer and computer games is a well-known thing. I love look in to the case of PC's and identifying, upgrading the parts of it.

At my Hungarian blog I many times wrote about boardgames. It add an anothet geek-factor to my personality. 10 years ago I said the boardgames are stupid things and they just for kids/children. It's not true! Maybe a boardgame just a game as the name suggest it us, but it means great fun. I bought dozens of boardgames at the past five year, and nowday I live them better than the computer games. Unfortunatelly I haven't got chance to play with many geekish one as Battlestar Galactica or the famous Arkham Horror, but my favorite is a real tough game, the Race for the Galaxy.

I'm owner of 43 boardgame (excluded expansions), but I really count as a boardgame geek?

When I was teenager I bought many comicbooks. I adored for the colorful advantures of X-men, Spiderman, Superman or the mighty Transformers, as I had eagerly read less know comics like Bobo or Góliát. But somehow this devotion is suddenly disapeared. I don't remember the reason of, but something is changed. From an exact point I hadn't bought any comics for a long time, while at 2009 I bought the Watchmen series. Suprise! My all time comicbook adoptation is this movie! The Sin City was great, the new comicsmovies were great (Iron man, Captain America, Thor, etc) and I liked the Spiderman movies, but my personal favourite is still the Watchmen. I have to admit I haven't seen yet The Avengers, but I don't think it will change my mind... But who knows?

I always was a big science-fiction and fantasy fan (I'm sure I'll write about it later), which is still strenghten the geek-factor in me. 

So, as you see from my short post I love doing geek things. But may I say to myself "I'am a geek"? Or am I geek enough?

Legend of Grimrock

When I first met with the Eye of the Beholder, I didn't know about anything Waterdeep, the Forgotten Realms, Faerűn or the strange creatures of this fantasy world. In spite of these I loved the theme of the game, and the enviroment with dark, dirty and stinking maze of underground tunels.

Unfortunatelly my English was very poor that time (I had learned Russian language at primary school years), so I barely understand the story and way to play the game. But it doesn't matter, because the Eye of the Beholder looks very cool with fighting against monsters, using sorcery, magic and the holy powers of clerics. But, somehow I never finished this game or its sequels. The quests and puzzles weren't easy to solve, and I had to draw a map about the dungeon.

But some years later I managed to finish the Lands of Lore (1 and 2) games, which were very similar to EoB because these are using the same engine. I still remember the gameplay, when I eagerly turning the pages of the English-Hungary dictionary. These games helped a lot to improve my vocabulary with many-many (useless) world.

Last week I run into a very pleasant suprise, the trailer of Legend of Grimrock. As I see this game will be deliver us the feeling of old-school PC role playing games. Unfortunatelly the new role playing games, such as Mass Effect, are very simple, built to console-base, and they aren't so complex than the old ones. This is the reason why I so happy about releasing Legend of Grimrock.

I just only hope it won't be a disapointment, but due to the decent price of game it will worth a try to buy. Is there any hope the golden are of RPGs are return? The releasing of Legend of Grimrock and the news about Baldur's Gate Enchanted Edition towards this way. And if these games came to iPad....

Imperium Galactica 2 for iPad

Today morning I run into a very pleasant suprise. My first thought was it's just an April's fool joke, but the date of the news entry was in 30th March and I found it the Apple Store also. So, the big news is the famous Hungarian PC game, the Imperium Galactica 2 released to iPad!

According the early short reviews there are many bugs in the game and sometime freeze, but... BUT... This is Imperium Galactica!