Q: How do Reavers clean their battle harpoons?
A: Put them through the Wash
Tag: Serenity
They can *all* read my thoughts!
I had occasion to play the Firefly board game with Paula and Bek yesterday. It was a lot of fun – although we actually played it a bit wrong – but I am kind of miffed because the whole thing is quite obviously stolen from the Firefly card game that I started to develop some years back – Plyin’ the Black.
Now, obviously I kid. I do not actually think Gale Force Nine are stealing my thoughts. The fact that a good 75% of the mechanics and ideas in the board game are the same as in my card game is a fascinating example of congruent evolution, and clearly the result of people experienced with a large range of existing games working from the same source material. It’s just downheartening to realise that the time and effort I put into my system has been wasted, because even were I to dig it out and finish development Plyin’ the Black would forever look like blatant plagiarism.
But hey, the board game is really well done and I’ll be buying a copy as soon as I have collected the requisite funds. And the master Plyin’ the Black rulebook is signed by Jewel Staite and Summer Glau, so let’s see Gale Force Nine match that! 😉
Later: Hmmm, maybe I could create a mashup of both games and create a boardless version. Something to think about…
Little Damn Heroes
You know it’s a shame that All Yours by Metric is associated with bloody-wooby-crap-sparkly-vampire movies, because it’s actually a fantastic love song.
Had to take Friday off work with a migraine headache. It was annoying because I was about five minutes from work when it hit, so I had no choice but to go in and try and do some work despite not being able to see properly (coding is pretty hard when half the characters keep popping in and out of visibility). After an hour I gave up, went home and slept until mid afternoon, at which point I was able to dose myself up on painkillers enough to do some work around the house.
On the plus side my extremely indulgent order from Quantum Mechanix came in. I am now the proud owner of a Firefly, and a limited edition Claudia-from-Warehouse-13 maquette (number 988 of 1000). The Firefly is sitting on my bookshelf, and Claudia is sitting by my monitor where she will (hopefully) keep my computer running more efficiently.
Finally big congrats to Helen and Rob on the safe arrival of Sebastian Robert. Here’s hoping you’re both getting enough sleep 😀
Bible! Kiss! Bible!
You either get that title or you don’t.
Hands of Blue, Two by Two
A big damn new start
So, I’m going over to Fabian’s place tomorrow, and he’s insisting that I bring my still-in-development Firefly card game, Plyin’ the Black (apparently people like it – I’m as surprised as anyone). So I fire up Open Office to print out a new copy of the rules. It tries to open the rules document as an ASCII file.
“That’s weird” I think, but I figure that if the .odt file is corrupt, I always have the .pdf version I saved. So I go to open that. No dice, Adobe won’t recognise it as a valid pdf.
Suspecting that something is up, I check out some of the other files in the directory. Then all the files in the directory. They’re all corrupt!
There’s only one explanation. I’ve been got at by the Hands of Blue!
Now normally I’d be in complete despair at this point – months of work down the drain. But I’m actually quite blase about it. All of the core mechanics of the game are in my head, and this gives me the opportunity to start over again without the baggage of all the arbitary rules I made up to get the game working in the first place. So Plyin’ the Black will rise from the ashes! (insert obligatory comments about big damn heroes, doing the impossible and being mighty. Oh and she’s our witch.)
(The only downside is I’ll have to type out all the rules again in an authentic Firefly accent. Last time I was talking like a cowboy for a week!)
In other news I have a new monitor. A 22″ HD LCD, which takes up a lot less room and has a much sharper and brighter image than the decrepit old CRT I was using. I’ve still got to get the resolution and colours completely calibrated, but it’s a major improvement. I’ve finally joined the 21st century! (in terms of monitors at any rate 🙂
