Rowan Tree and Red Thread

Brenda Brathwaite makes thought-provoking games.

(Thanks to Two Scooters Press for reminding me of this and pointing to this new article.)

Our gaming group has come to the end of a long-running campaign after about four years of play. We wrapped our Tudor Talents game, one of Elizabethan super-spies and superheroes. I hesitate to call the PCs superheroes, as they were definitely not in the heroic mould. Anyway, the campaign wrapped with fighting off not one but two alien invasions and beginning a rapprochement between England and Spain to pave the way for a less volatile 17th Century Europe.

So with that campaign finished we needed something to play last Thursday night, and I pitched a short one-shot game of Dungeon Squad, a game by Jason Morningstar that is available from 1000 monkeys, 1000 typewriters, an excellent collection of free RPGs.

Dungeon Squad is a really simple, easy to learn, rule set designed to provide a dungeon crawl experience for young players without the complexity of Dungeons & Dragons. It was ideally suited to a group looking for a quick game of dungeon delving and bashing things. This was, I believe, sammywol's first dungeon crawl of any sort.

The initial set-up involved the four players, Sam, Pete, Marie and Alex, creating characters. We ended up with

• Leaky the Snurker - Sam's character is primarily an Explorer, which is a polite way of saying she's a Rogue. Which is itself a polite way of saying Leaky's a thief. None of this modern politically correct class names for us.


• Dan - Pete's character is the combat magic user. He's primarily a lightning bolt chucker, with a sideline in sneaking about.


• P'ing - Marie's character is essentially big on thews. She's got a sword called Mr. Sticky, and some skill in healing, which proved useful later on.


• B'ert - Alex's character is also a magic user but one focused on defensive and buffing spells. He's not bad with a sword either.

( Their adventures are recounted behind the cut... )

I was pretty happy with the session. The rules are dead simple but capture much of the fun and rewards of ingenuity that early dungeon crawls provided, the two butt kickers in the group got to kick butt, but all the while all the players got to chew the scenery and pitch in with the problem solving. It was easy to come up with a scenario. I trawled the 'net for some maps, wrote a couple of pages of notes, mostly brief stats for the goblins and their dispositions with the mine, and away we went. The rules themselves are silent on the matter of scenario design, but in 4 pages (plus a page for a character sheet) what could you expect. These are clearly aimed new players, but with a more experienced GM to get things together.

Dungeon Squad is an excellent little game from Jason Morningstar, the author of The Shab-al-Hiri Roach and Drowning and Falling, and regular podcaster with the Durham 3, which I also highly recommend.

This crawl will probably last another session, but after that I'll be looking for another short-run game. Any ideas from the peanut gallery?

Last night a friend (alaimacerc) came over and we had a three-handed game of Puerto Rico, our first in a long time. So long, in fact, that I had to be reminded of some of the rules for setting the game.

Nonetheless I won convincingly. Well, I was convinced anyway. Final scores 44, 40, 39. I won with a primarily building strategy, the 4-pt building that gives you extra VPs for production buildings (Zunfthalle/Guildhall, I think) netting me an additional 10 VPs. It was closer than I thought, based on the apparent positions a few turns from the end. I was glad to end it where it did, as I think the shipper (alaimacerc) would have caught up significantly.

Nice game.

Rowan had a pretty good weekend. I had a tiring weekend. These facts are strongly correlated.

Rowan and I made chocolate bread on Saturday, but she didn't really like the chocolate, so we eat a roll or two together and I got the chocolate. I win! We also took Rowan to the playground twice, where she had a good old romp about, learning more about queuing and turn-taking in the process, as the playground was awash with kids and their parents on Sunday.

Rowan allowed nostalgia to get the better of her and dragged out an old cd-rom of simple games that she played a lot about a year ago. She learned how to use the mouse to move the pointer around the screen and enjoyed her Reader Rabbit cd-rom all over again as a result. I was as proud as any techie-geek could be of a child, watching her sneak back into the living room to sit at the computer by herself, pushing the mouse around the various screen events. I'd better remove any copies of my visa card number from the machine before she goes to Amazon and buys everything with a Balamory logo or Thomas the Tank Engine on it.

And she clambered up and down me so many times I can't count. We have a game where I lie on the bed in the spare room and make a mountain peak out of the duvet and my legs. Ritually, I have to say "NO one could ever climb 'Dada Mountain'! It's too tall!" Rowan then proceeds to elbow and knee her way up to the top of 'Dada Mountain', poking and prodding me en route. I'm ending up Brokeback Dada Mountain, only without the same-sex romance and sheep. Rowan then falls off the mountain, sliding down onto me in a heap, and I have to then quickly convert to a rescue helicopter and bring to a hospital. I am also the doctor.

Good weekend though, despite the bruises.