Free:// Original Thunderstone Card Game Print and Play

Just spotted that AEG are giving away the original Thunderstone card game as a free print and play PDF. The cards have been updated to the new format too which is nice.

If you've not played it, it's a great, fantasy deck builder and works really well as a solitaire game. Worth checking out if you have the card and ink.

Earlier this year, we had a lot of success releasing our new set of Legend of the Five Rings cards in an introductory print and play. Fans loved being able to download tournament legal card sets.
We loved it too. We loved it so much, we brought it back–for Thunderstone.
Now for the first time, you can download the heroes, monsters, and village cards from the first Thunderstone set, the one that started it all, absolutely FREE. Download the promo sheet and get started here.

These cards are updated to the Thunderstone Advance standard, and the art has been “remastered” for this print and play edition. Check out more samples under the jump!

Thoughts:// Doctor Who: Solitaire Story Game

In a bit of a Doctor Who mood, I've always had a soft spot for our particularly British slice of fantasy, I find it hard calling it science fiction but I guess that label fits for TV purposes.

I've always thought the whoniverse would make a great setting for solitaire adventures, since the adventures can go anywhere in time and space which gives plenty of scope for random creativity. Seems I wasn't the only one, in 2009 a chap named Simon Cogan released the free Doctor Who: Solitaire Story Game into the wild, and it has been not so gradually expanded over the last few years to contain a huge amount of material. It really is a labour of love from an obvious fan of the series, the amount of work that has gone into these books and expansions is quite unbelievable for what is a freely available game.

I'm not going to go into much detail here, but to give you an idea...

It's a numbered paragraph system split across four core books, rules, adventures, enemies, and events. During the game you will go to locations in the adventure book, perform one of a number of actions, roll for encounters which may lead you to the event book, or to a fight using the enemy book, you'll resolve plots to complete adventures, meet characters, gain and lose companions, and that's just what I can remember right at the moment. If you ever played the old game Barbarian Prince, you may see some similarities since I think there is some connection there at least in inspiration. The rules book will lead you through the system, but there is a great community at the game's yahoo group if you do need to ask any questions.

The game can be played using just those four core books, some d6 dice, and pencil and paper; although I've taken to using PDFs on my computer, dicetool, and Microsoft Onenote for this sort of thing so I may do that to speed things up a little.

Next post on this will be some sort of session report or review, and since I'm on a Doctor Who kick there are a couple of other ideas I have floating around so they may turn up too.

Want:// Party of 1: Kalgor Bloodhammer and the Ghouls Through the Breach (solo adventure)

OK, have some time to get posting again.

Just a little something I spotted to ease my fingers back onto the keyboard. Party of 1: Kalgor Bloodhammer and the Ghouls Through the Breach is a solo numbered paragraph adventure, which appears to be a self contained game based on the Pathfinder system.

It shall be mine.

This stand-alone adventure is designed for a single player with no GM and basic rules. All you need to play is some dice (d6, d8, and 20), a pencil, some paper, and this book.
The rules are explained as you play. Begin at paragraph 1 and proceed from there, taking notes as you go. As the dwarf hero Kalgor Bloodhammer, you'll use all your might and cunning to protect your home from an invasion of hungry undead.
Kalgor Bloodhammer and the Ghouls Through the Breach includes both a 1st level and 3rd level character sheet for Kalgor, fully compatible for use with any beginning party to continue your Pathfinder RPG adventures!

News:// Solo Tabletop Gaming Appreciation Month

I'd completely forgotten about the November Solo Tabletop Gaming Appreciation Month being promoted over at Solo Nexus. Been really very busy with the family so I've not been keeping up with my feeds.

Anyway I'm a little late to the party so I'm going to have to have a think about what to do. I've just received a cheap copy of Avalon Hill's Blackbeard which I've been wanting to try for ages so maybe I'll have a little pirate fun and wrestle with those scary looking rules. Or maybe a B-17 Queen of the Skies campaign, that could be fun. On a bit of a vintage board game kick at the moment so it'll probably be something along those lines.

Meanwhile there are some links over at Solo Nexus as to what other people have been getting up to.

Initial Impressions:// Mytherian Heroic Fantasy & The Goblin Skullkeeps of Rendaria

Have been incredibly busy lately but life appears to be returning to normal so hopefully I'll be getting some more reviews and things up here over the next few weeks.

First up is just a few initial impressions of Mytherian Heroic Fantasy, a pen and paper RPG for 1-6 players along with the first adventure setting for it, The Goblin Skullkeeps of Rendaria.

I first spotted this over at the solitaire gaming Solo Nexus blog, and I'm always interested in RPGs with solitaire mechanics, so I bought a copy as soon as it was available as a PDF.  I'm only now finding a little time to look into it and hopefully I'll get a play in and review or session report up. The author Erik Goodwyn has kindly released everything required as reasonably priced PDFs, and you can find those plus the hard copies over at Lulu. 

First is Mytherian Heroic Fantasy: Rules of Play, Perils and Treasures weighing in at a hefty 211 pages, you really do get plenty to read for your money. It has to be said the sheer amount of detail and data contained within is pretty impressive for product like this, there are some extensive tables and lists which leads me to believe that there is a fair amount of replayability to be had here.

The general layout and design is great too, it's clear, well written and the illustrations whilst mostly public domain are well chosen, and help set the mood for heroic adventure. Actually I really like some of the illustrations and I'm going to have to hunt some of them down, Erik has done a great job on finding and editing suitable stuff.

It looks like character creation is a straightforward affair, with a number of takes on classic fantasy heroes 

from the pious Sylmaran Paladin, to the boastful
Brendanian Blackwolf Knight, to the deadly Avithainian Ronin, the crafty Velian Ranger, the mysterious Londruinic Knight, the proud Sathenite Warrior and the mighty Svoedic Viking. 

Each comes with a small history, starting stats, items and one of those previously mentioned extensive lists of skills to choose from. It's great detail and Erik has obviously been working on this world for a long time, it really helps to create an interesting world to play in. The damage system is nice and simple too with everything having six wounds, but obviously some things are much harder to wound than others. As the author points out this makes wound tracking easy since a single die can be used for each character in combat.

Next is a section on magic or sorcery which Iv'e only skimmed over, and I don't have much to say on it yet. It does again have a nice long list, this time of spells available. I'm starting to think this game could really benefit from some cards to replace those lists, something I may look into if I enjoy it.

After that we have an explantion of how the adventure is played. On a brief read through it plays out like an RPG board game. You can move, explore new tiles, search for treasure and hidden exits, and of course encounter enemies and engage in combat. There is a neat looking system for wandering foes, using a number of warning dice which track enemies which might be getting closer until they attack.

The combat section is pretty meaty and I've only skimmed it, but it looks like there are a number of choices that can be made.

There is also a section on winning or losing and what happens next, like character advancement. Plus rules for a confrontational version of the game where one player takes on the role of an 'evil GM' and controls the enemies in order to beat the other players.

The second half of the book 'Perils & Treasures' contains what look like a set of campaign rules for stringing adventure together, and providing a load of city events and items to buy, plus some huge tables to roll on for random treasure.

The second PDF The Goblin Skullkeeps of Rendaria contains the setting for the first published adventure. This is required to play the game and contains the tiles to print, though you'll need to supply your own dice and miniatures or tokens. It's a shorter PDF at only 85 pages but it's pretty packed with events and enemies for the adventure. The board pieces could be more printer friendly, some contain large areas of black and they are quite big and one per page too. I've been doing a little photoshop work to try and create something a little smaller and I noticed they are not all the same size either.

Anyway this is all much longer and rambling than I intended. I think I'll give it a play and get some sort of session report up which will probably be more use than a review retreading the same ground.

Initial impressions...looks good, but I need to get it on the table and see how it plays. Great looking product for an independently produced game though. I really do think this would do better on RPGNow/DriveThruRPG though, Lulu isn't the best marketplace for this sort of thing.

Bought:// Victory Point Games

Look what arrived along with my wife, following a business trip to the US...

In case you are wondering, that's the boardgames Legions of Darkness, and Nemo's War plus it's expansion, both from Victory Point Games.

Victory Point Games are a small desktop publishing games company based in California, who do a great job of getting new designers and games published. No big boxes with tons of plastic, it's all bagged like those old wargames you could pick up pretty cheap. They make a lot of solitaire games which both of these are, and I've been meaning to try them out for some time. A business trip, great exchange rate and opportunity to avoid Royal Mail's handling charges was too tempting so I managed to get these ordered.

My thanks to Alan and Terry at Victory Point Games for helping to get these to the right place at the right time. Just about to put one on the table, hopefully I'll get some reviews up soon.

Play:// With Myself

I can still remember the joy of playing with myself as a young boy.

Sorry I really couldn't help myself. I am of course talking about solitaire gaming, solo gaming, whatever you wish to call it. See whilst this is a rather new obsession for me, I was always interested in gaming as a child but it kind of morphed into my interest in computer and video games, and it's only now that I'm rediscovering the joy of fondling cardboard.

Board games were for a long time, something my family did at Christmas when we'd run out of other things to play, and had nothing left to argue about. I loved playing them, the rest of my family were not so keen. Still I remember playing a lot of Monopoly (with a lot of bad rules) and I still have my much loved 'Deluxe' edition along with my copy of Scrabble that I never did seem to convince my family to play. I loved playing board games, and I'd play pretty much any board game with anyone who asked. I always wanted games as Christmas presents but they were never played as much as I would like as my family and friends simply were not interested most of the time. So apart from looking longingly at those ridiculously expensive wooden monopoly sets, my interest in board games died for the first time.

It was the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks which rekindled my interest in gaming. I loved the idea of role playing games, and once again finding myself in the position of wanting to play them and having nobody to play them with, gamebooks provided me with the next best thing. I still read RPG books and at the time there was a little hobby store in my home town and it was browsing here that I came across a board game I could play by myself...

That game was Curse of the Mummy's Tomb by Games Workshop. It really wasn't a great game but I played that thing until the stupid cardboard pyramid was practically falling apart. I wish I still had it but I think it made it's way to a charity shop and is probably sitting on ebay right now for some ridiculously inflated price. I don't think it was long after this that I got an Amiga 500 and once again board games became a distant memory.

Until now that is...and it just happens that my reintroduction was via another solitaire game, Zombie in My Pocket. It didn't take me long to find out there are now loads of options for solitaire gaming, and not much longer to realise that I still really enjoy playing solitaire games. I'm probably going to write a post soon going into more detail about why I play and love solitaire games but I just wanted to post this little introduction because I think it's a theme that will appear regularly here. I have more options for playing board games with other people now, hell I'm raising a couple of future opponents, but like a good book or film I really enjoy spending a few hours absorbed in a game by myself so I'll be sharing some of my reviews and thoughts on the topic here.

Try it out. It really won't make you go blind.