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.

Status report after Christmas

Movie

My three years old son had never been in cinema, but last week we went to watch a movie, The Rise of the Guardians. He and my daughter enjoyed very much the show, however I had small problems with it.

1. The Rise of the Guardians is for Americans. Some of the 'heroes' are mostly unknown or uncommon (Jack Frost, Sandman, Tooth fairy) for the Hungarians. Santa Claus visit the children in 6th of December, not Chrismas Eve (then a baby Christ coming with the presents).

2. The story was in the usual frame/template. We got almost nothing new, we got the well-know storyline with supriseless twists.

In spite of these this movie was fun, not just the kids, but for me as well.

Film

During my long winter holiday (I have been home from 14th December... with the children.) I have time to watching films. I deceided to rewatch a great classic from my childhood, The Masters of the Universe. I had good memories when I first saw the adventures of He-Man. That was the day when I got my first Kinder Suprise! I remember how angry I was when the guests arrived and I had to cancel to watch that film...

The rewatch of The Masters of the Universe was shocking. The storyline, the costumes, the acting were ridiculus, but I still loved it. It was a little bit strange with complete dubbing, because first I watched one-man-dubbing on terrible monoton tune, with many missed or untranslated sentences.

I watched other films too (Mirror Mirror, The Dictator, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, etc) , but I don't want to blogging about them.

Series

I finished with the 4th season of Fringe, and I started to watch Farscape (with the children) and Lost (with my wife). Fortunatelly my wife and me both hate the Christmast movies on tv, so we quickly finished the first season of Lost.

Books

I won a short-story/novel collection with 10 writtings from a Hungarian publisher. It wasn't bad, but I wasn't fully satisfied with it. Somehow my favourite writtings from the 10 haven't won any awards, while the others yes.

I loved the story about the local superheroes in the Budapest's city steampunk version. The sour end of the novel - unfortunatelly - trully reflect the real Hungarian people.

Boardgames

Luckily the baby Christ was very generous this Christmas. We received a ton of games: Tales of the Arabian Nights, Arkham Horror.

And children got the followings:  Zooloretto, Piranhas, Buckaroo, Jack der Krähenschreck, Château Roquefort

Busy November

As you saw I was totally inactive at last month. Lot of things happened with me and my family.

Lets start with the most important: my wife is pregnant. Again. The doctors predicted the "Third One" to the end of May. Our small flat will be really crowded. Not just only with baby cry, but with 3 children.

I finished my short short story for the contest, but I was not entirelly happy with it. I think I had a very good core idea, but the 22,000 characters were too less. Unfortunatelly I left the spice from it because of the thickening the story. I had too much expectation about it, but it was good for start. Maybe next time.

I don't statisfied with my other running projects as well. I won't finish the translation of Sacred 2 this year. My boardgame designing project also stranded. Borned new ideas, but nothing serious.

Last week I bought a boardgame, which was on my wishlist for a while: Tales of the Arabian Nights.

My colleauges invited me to a Basketball Business League, so I has been playing to basketball championship this year. Due to the late night match schedules it doesn't cause any problem to my family. (My daughter has 2-2 ballet-dancing and swimming course a week, which is also modified our family calendar.)

I hope December will be much untroubled and not so busy.

Ticket to Ride Europe

One of the most easiest and popular boardgame in every corner of the world is the Ticket to Ride series/family (Zug um Zug at Germany). You can play it with friends or play with against artificial intelligence of a phone, tablet or personal computer. But the real fun when you play it with your friends gathering around a big table.

If you not familiar with boardgames or you not like them, then you can still give a chance for the Ticket to Ride or the Ticket to Ride Europe. I have the Europe version of it, because it add a little more spice to the gameplay. I won't introduce all of the rules, I just wanted to tell about this game briefly.

The major components:

- 45pcs (+3 reserve) plastic trains in 5 colour

- 3pcs stations in 5 colour

- main destination cards

- regular destination cards

- a gameboard with a map on it

- lot of train cars

The goal:

You draw 1 main destination card and 3 shorter destination card in the begining of the game. You have to keep the main destination card and choose least 2 shorter destionation cards from the 3, and this will be your primary goal. You have to build train routes with the help of the train cards. Each route have a value. If you accomplish the building of a route between the to city indicated on the card you'll give the point. If you not, you will loose that amount. At the end of the game the most points win!

A round:

At your round you can do 4 things:

1. You can draw another 3 destination card and keep least 1.

2. You can build a road with the help of your traincard in your hand.

3. You can draw 2 train card blind from the deck or 2 from the 5 face-up ones from the table

4. You can build a station.

The last turn start, when somebody left only 2 or less plastic trains.

Summary:

The rules are quite easy, but the fun factor of this game is high. With this game you can easily know the major city of Europe (or USA at the original version), you can build long train routes and defeat your fellow players.

I highly recommended this game for casual and heavy gamers at well. I think this is my wife (at the right side of the picture) favourite boardgame.

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.

Busy weekend with Formula One race

Friday my wife and me travelled to my parents and left there our children, because we were ahead a quite busy weekend. It was a pleasent ~250km long drive.

We spent the Saturday morning with cleaning and cooking some cakes for the Arkham Horror boardgame party. These preparation was exhausting, but luckily we just finished with everything just in time. The Arkham Horror boardgame party (with four of my twitter-friends) had took almost 5 hours long. It was a very interesting and exciting cooperative game, but unfortunatelly Cthulhu defeat us at the end. I enjoyed very much my first cooperative boardgame experince, with fighting against strange demonic monster in the dark city of Arkham. I think I want to get this game, but unfornatelly it's a little bit expensive.

Sunday morning I had to get up early (6 a.m.) because I got a ticket for the Hungarian Formula One race from a friend of my wife. Thank you Adrienn!

Saturday evening was a big storm, which only calmed down to the next morning. The rain still spat, so after I had fueled my car I went to buy a raincoat. The way to the race track wasn't as crowded as I expected. I was lucky and found parking place easily. When Adrienn and me arrived the rain stopped... and the hot and deadly ray of the sun started to roast us to red. Unfortunately the path from the gate to our seat was very muddy and slippery, so it wasn't easy to go up and down downs around the track.

We found our seats just in time, so we could enjoy the first race event of the day, the GP3 race with one Hungarian driver. He was on the 14th place on the starting grid, but thanks for the wet race track and the well-timed change of tires he finished at the podium, at the 3rd position. Unfortunately it was the most exciting race of the day...

To the second race, with GP2 drivers, the race track was almost dry, so the racers didn't have to change tires during the race. Due to this the number of overtaking dropped drasticly and we saw a boring race.

Before the main event, the Formula 1 race, we saw a so-called Porsche Supercup race too, but this was also eventless. That followed by the parade of Formula 1 drivers. They travelled a whole lap on the platform of a truck. They were waving to the crowd and answering the questions of the interviewer.

45-30 minutes before the race the drivers were trying the start procedure. I made a short video about it with my phone.

The Formula 1 race stated at 14.00. The sound of the engines were incredible. Especially at the start! Alas the race was boring, due to the special characteristic of the race track. As many drivers said, "the Hungaroring is very similar to Monaco, but without houses". There is no good place to overtakings. Furthermore Schumacher, my personal favourite driver had a very bad luck that day.

The feeling of a Formula 1 race is indescribable. The racers, the cars, the sound of engines, the crowd, everything...

The driving back to the city was a quite long. The mass of the cars moved slowly on the road, but we luckily arrived to the Arena, when the concert of Bryan Adams started . I met there with my wife, handed over to her to my ticket (our F1 tickets are valid for this event too) and the keys of our car, and I went to the station of the underground. Then a quick storm, with heavy rain arrived... I was soaked though in an instant moment. Yes, I was lame and left my raincoat and umbrella at the car.

These made my day complete and put into a frame: soaked, burned and soaked again. But I enjoyed this weekend very much, and I hope I'll have oportunity to repeat it again soon.

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?