Top ten of the year

Here are my top ten posts of 2009 (I’m writing this a week ahead of time, so the last few might change, but the top spots seem assured).

1. Dungeons and Dragons: Map Tile Generator
2. Dungeons and Dragons: Map tiles
3. Glossary
4. DnD Map Tile Generator – User Accounts
5. Roman Numeral Bingo
6. More Necromunda Resources
7. Dungeons and Dragons – Into the Sewers
8. Carrcassonne and its expansions
9. Superheroes
10. Writing Riddles

Unsurprisingly my most popular item, the Map Tile Generator has had most interest, with more than 2,000 reads of the various pages. Necromunda resources and the Roman Numeral Bingo game continue to prove popular.

Game reviews and discussions are also well read, with the Carrcassonne post just making it into the top ten, and posts on Twilight Imperium in the top 15.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this blog over the last year, enjoyed playing the games and using the provided resources, and are looking forwards to more in 2010.

Happy New Year!

Necromunda – The Heist

The Heist is a Necromunda scenario for two players.

One of the gangs have been hired to guard the vault of a bank, the others have decided to try to steal the money stored within.

Always Act

Quite often in a game you’ll be given the chance to take an action, or to pass your turn.

If you can act, do it, or have a really good reason not to. If you do something then you’ll force other players to react to you, you’ll be controlling the pace of the game and you’ll have the initiative.

If you choose to passively wait then you are handing the advantage to your opponent, they get to choose what happens and when. If you spend all game marshalling your forces to an imagined perfection then you’ll probably find yourself out-manoeuvred by another player who’s moved more quickly and acted decisively.

Act when you get the chance and your opponents might make a mistake you can exploit, do nothing and you won’t be able to force these errors.

DnD Map Tile Generator – User Accounts

I’ve done some more work on user accounts, you can now create one with a standard user name and password combo.

Just hop on over to the Map Tile Generator and create an account once you are ready, to get access to all of the extra features, different tile styles, savable layouts and dungeon furniture.

As usual I would like to hear about your experiences, and will drop a few credits to anyone providing constructive feedback.

The Metagame

I was playing some Magic last night, and only hand one deck available to me, a fast white deck with no real way to deal with problem creatures (Things like Wellwisher, which will gain life faster than most decks can deal damage, unless you can destroy the Wellwisher).

My opponent had a lot of different decks, and once she had an idea of what I was playing, was able to go and find a deck that could exploit my weaknesses, and win pretty much any game we played.

That’s an extreme example of the metagame, where you are picking what you will play based on maximising the chance you’ll beat what other players choose to play. To do well at games like Magic you’ll need to get practised at the metagame, picking decks that can beat the rest of the field. You’ll not have it as easy as my opponent did last night, but situations like that are a good place to start.

New Logo

I’ve just added a new logo for the blog, hope everyone likes it.

It’s based on a CC licensed photo from Flickr user Ella’s Dad, Dice. I took the image, played with the Colour levels to make it more orange, and expanded it to be a bit wider.

After that is was just a case of adding a simple white to transparent gradient fill over the top, putting on the text and rounding off the top corners.