I am not a big fan of Kickstarter. If you consider it as an "investment", the safety mechanisms are worse than for collateralized subprime mortgages. If you consider it as a "prepurchase", it is simply a bad deal because you have to pay far too early, and wait far too long, if not forever. Having said that, the three Kickstarter projects I did back all did eventually deliver, albeit on average a year late. Where I least regret my purchases are the Kickstarter projects I backed for physical objects, because the objects I got that way now can't be bought anywhere; the Kickstarter project was a one-time deal.

So yesterday I backed another Kickstarter project to the tune of a hundred bucks. It is for a physical object again, a board game called The 7th Continent. The main reason I backed it is that I saw a prototype played at the Brussels Games Festival 2015, and it looked a lot of fun. It solves one of the problems of board games (who do I play with?) by being soloable. And it is of an exploration / adventure type where I played games of that type with my wife in the past and we had a lot of fun. Being huge it gets over the problem of you running into the same handful of events over and over. So it is everything that I am looking for in a board game today.

The Kickstarter project for the 7th continent was funded after 2 minutes and 38 seconds. The project still is less than a day old, and has collected over 5 times the required funding, having over 3,000 backers. It passed stretch goal #18 with #19 already rather close. With 2 to 10 additional cards per stretch goal, the initial 1000 cards of the larger explorer version (very few people went for the smaller, 700 card version) has already grown by 10%.

Now The 7th Continent probably will be available in specialized games stores at some point in time, so the one-time deal advantage presumably doesn't apply. But with all those Kickstarter-exclusive stretch goal cards I still feel I'll get something more than if I had waited for the game to come to shops.

On the other hand the planned delivery date is only in one year, and based on past experience might well only be in 2 years. Getting far more money than needed curiously has never helped any Kickstarter project to advance faster. Usually the project creators get dizzy from all the extra money and start expanding the scope, going for a much bigger and more complicated version of the project. And that then ends up being much slower, without necessarily being any better. Nevertheless, having seen the playable prototype, I'm rather confident that again I will eventually get this game delivered.

Instead Windows 10 proposes "live tiles" in the start menu. I fiddled around with those and managed to get some information of the the type I wanted in the start menu. But the live tiles are rather annoying: They don't appear to update all that often (a mail I had read and deleted still showed up on the mail tile 15 minutes later), and of course you need to open the start menu first to even see them. The Windows 10 desktop is completely static, with only icons and no updating information except for the little clock in the lower right corner. I have less current information on my Windows desktop than I have on my Android phone!

In the end I installed a program called 8gadgets and got my old gadgets back. Not a perfect solution as these are just legacy gadgets with no support whatever now. But until Microsoft realises that people might want to have useful information on their desktops, this is all I have.

In the previous session the musketeers of the Royal Homeland Constabulary saved the king's life by preventing a sabotage act organized by the king's sister, Duchess Ethelyn of Shale. The next morning it was back to the usual paperwork. Two messages awaited them at the RHC headquarters: One formal memo from Lady Inspectress Margaret Saxby, head of the Flint branch of the RHC, telling constables not to talk to the press about the sabotage "for reasons of national security". The other an invitation to be interviewed by Bartholomew Pryce of the Pryce of Progress, a progressive newspaper. The constables decided to follow orders and refused the interview. The next day the Pryce of Progress had a nasty article about them being responsible for the death of an "innocent" docker protester. And the Flint Tribune had an interview with Margaret Saxby, telling all details, with her taking credit for everything.

A week later the constables are called into the office of their direct superior, Stover Delft. There they meet Lya Jierre, Minister of Outsiders of Danor, and niece of the sovereign of Danor. Lya presents them with a puzzle to test their intelligence, which they only solve partially. Still satisfied with that, Lya tells them of the current situation: The duchess has fled Risur and taken Axis Island, the closest island to Risur in the Yerasol Archipelago. The archipelago has been the location of four wars between Risur and Danor, and now the actions of the duchess threaten to start a fifth one, while her brother the king is trying to make peace with Danor. So King Aodhan has agreed to Lya's demand that Risuri forces take back Axis Island from the duchess, and then hand the island back to Danor by sundown 3 days from now.

The musketeers are part of that mission, as they are the only ones having fought the duchess' troops before. They are tasked with giving backup to another RHC team of infiltrators, who will take point in sneaking onto the island through a sea cave, getting from there to the fortress, and opening the fortress's sea gate to let the Risuri armada in. Being familiar with the duchess, the PCs are tasked to interrogate the duchess once the fortress has fallen. Lya also asks them to save her cousin, Nathan Jierre, who has been taken prisoner by the duchess. After Lya leaves, Stover Delft tells them that he doesn't trust the Danorans, and would like the musketeers to keep an eye open on Axis Island for anything unusual.

At this point in the story the players receive a bunch of scrolls for the mission and a "stipend" of 728 gold worth of magic items. That is the system of the Zeitgeist campaign which replaces pseudo-randomly "found" magic items with a level-dependent stipend for players to select their own magic items with. I think the system isn't bad, but I need to handle it differently in the future: In the middle of a session it completely breaks immersion and distracts the players enormously from the story. It would be better to announce the stipend in advance and let them choose their magic items between sessions.

The musketeers then take the fastest RHC ship, the Impossible, to get to Axis Island, a voyage that takes them two days. On board they meet the team of infiltration specialists from the RHC, who will take point in this mission. At 9 pm on day 2, just 21 hours before they have to hand over the island back to Danor, the Impossible reaches the sea cave. Scrolls of water breathing are used on everybody, and the infiltrators go first, trailing a rope behind them. The plan is for them to secure the sea cave behind the underwater tunnel, and give a signal with the rope for the PCs to follow. But things go wrong: After 2 minutes there is a strange vibration and the rope goes slack. Eldion decides to immediately check out what is going on, and the others follow. They find that part of the ceiling of the underwater tunnel caved in, killing most of the infiltrators and crushing the leg of the only survivor, Burton the goblin. The survivor is able to tell them that there was something strange going on, the infiltrators found themselves for a second in a completely different environment: A swamp with yellow frogs, with a blue sun in a purple sky. Then they were back in the tunnel, and the ceiling collapsed on them. The group frees Burton, but his leg is beyond simple healing magic, so they bring him back to the ship.

So the musketeers have become the point team and must do the mission alone. The underwater tunnel is still navigable, and they traverse it carefully, keeping a good distance between them. They arrive at the sea cave, which is said to be connected to a Danorian mine, and we stop the session there.

Napoleon is said to have called England a nation of shopkeepers, presumably in contrast to warrior nations. But while there are a lot of games in which you can play a warrior, there are a lot less games in which you can keep a shop. Recettear comes to ming. Of course some MMORPGs like Ultima Online or Star Wars Galaxies enabled you to open a shop, but it is far more frequent that you're playing the hero instead of the shopkeeper. Recently the Apple app store featured Shop Heroes, so I went and tried it out. It turns out that keeping shop is more fun than you might think.

The basic gameplay of Shop Heroes is that you have a shop with workstations and resource bins. The resource bins create basic resources over time, and with the right workers hired and the right workstation you can transform those resources into weapon, armor, and other typical fantasy game equipment. Heroes come to your shop and buy things. Sometimes they ask for the stuff you already have in your inventory, sometimes they want something you need to craft first. There is also a system of "hearts", which you can spend to persuade your customers to pay more for an item, or to buy something else, and which goes up if you sell them what they want.

Curiously the heroes never equip the gear you sell them. Instead you can equip them with gear and send them out adventuring. They will earn xp and levels from that, and bring back rare resources for crafting. Crafting has a huge "tech tree", where crafting basic items often enough unlocks blueprints for higher level items. So over time everything levels up: The heroes, their gear, the items you can craft, the workers, even the workstations and other furniture.

In addition there is a city shared by 4+ players in an absolutely brilliant system: The buildings in the city level up in function of what the players invested in them. But your investments remain yours: If you quit a city or get kicked out by the major, you take your investment with you and contribute it to the next city you join. The sum of the investment of all players determines the level of buildings, and that unlocks heroes, workers, new resources, and gives various bonuses.

Shop Heroes runs on iOS, Android, and Facebook. You can link the iOS and Android versions to Facebook and run your same shop on different platforms if you want. The game is free, but of course you can spend real money on buying gems, and gems can speed up a lot of things, or get you additional slots for workers, crafting, or quests. In general I found the monetization scheme unobtrusive, except for one case: When you send out heroes on quests, there is a chance that a piece of their gear will break, and then the game is very pushy about offering you to repair that item for gems. But you can ignore that, let the gear break, and craft a new piece. Quests also can give you chests, and it is rarely that you find a key for those chests, so you might be tempted to unlock the chests for gems. I did buy the starter package for $5 which came with various additional slots, and found that to be good value for money. I wouldn't go overboard with buying gems and using them for everything, it doesn't really make the game more fun.

Overall I like Shop Heroes as a resource and time management game. You constantly need to make decisions, like whether you craft just what your customers demand, or whether you produce a lot of one specific item to unlock better versions. As crafting or quests frequently take minutes to finish once you have reached a certain level, it isn't a game which takes your full attention for hours; but it is quite fun if you just play it occasionally, or in parallel to watching TV. Recommended!

Lately I've been playing two games on my iPad which frequently have server connection problems: Magic Duels and Fifa Ultimate Team 15. That is annoying by itself, but the problem is clearly on the side of the server. Now I just updated my iPad to iOS 9 and the problem has become one of the operating system: A server problem on either of these games now causes the application to crash to desktop. Which makes retrying to get a connection a lot harder.

In short, up to now I'm not terribly impressed by iOS 9.

In World of Warcraft I finished building up my 5th garrison to all buildings having level 3, including the shipyard. Yay! Only that the exercise felt kind of futile, since it has become very clear that the garrison as player housing was only temporary and the next expansion will have something else. While the next expansion is still a year or so in the future, we already know that there is no more major new content added to this expansion. And so I'm kind of looking at all things with a regard on what progress I can make that is transferable to the next expansion, and what stuff becomes obsolete.

So for example having 5 characters at level 100 is a good thing for the next expansion, as that gives me plenty of options which classes to play. I'll also certainly have over a million gold and a bunch of WoW tokens in stock for the next expansion. As most of that gold comes from garrisons, I certainly don't regret to have build so many of them. But what parts of the garrison might still be useful once Legion hits?

Most buildings in the garrison clearly won't be of any use in Legion: The barracks, stable, pet menagerie, etc., all clearly state that the bonuses they give only apply to Draenor zones. Many others produce resources or crafted goods which will become worthless in the next expansion. Yes, I can craft epics and upgrade them to up to iLvl 715, but I guess that in the first zone of Legion green drops will have an iLvl of 750 or so. I could still vendor those epics, but the pithy sum that gives clearly isn't worth the effort.

Of the follower missions a good number will become equally useless. I already don't use the xp mission any more on most of my characters, and of the missions giving other rewards, many rewards like Apexis crystals or epics will have become obsolete. This most important exception to that is missions giving gold. Gold is always useful, even if price levels generally go up from one expansion to the next. Blizzard has already nerfed gold missions somewhat, and it is totally possible that they will nerf them some more in order to prevent gold mission farming to continue into Legion.

One possible use of the garrison in the future might be for teleportation: Assuming we keep the garrison hearthstone, it will be possible in Legion to use the garrison portal to Ashran and the city portals from there to quickly get to any old world city. On the other hand the third incarnation of Dalaran probably will also have portals everywhere, and everybody might have set his main hearthstone to Dalaran.

So overall I think it is completely likely that garrisons in Legion will be as little used as the Pandaria farms were used in Warlords of Draenor. I just hope that the replacement player housing, the guild halls, don't feel much less like a home. Overall I liked garrison, and their main drawback is that they are maybe *too* useful. As player housing goes, that is hard to beat.

There was a long discussion recently on this blog about whether game companies that pay some publication or YouTuber to report about their game would expect that this coverage was positive, basically buying a good review. I think the discussion somewhat mixed up two very different cases, which I would like to separate:

One case is big, triple-A games. This is really big business, and those games not only cost millions to make, they also have an advertising budget of millions. Gaming is now sufficiently mainstream that you can find huge ads for a game on New York's Times Square or painted all over a bus, and not just in specialized gaming publications. Which means that the game company can assume everybody has heard about the game in question, and then it becomes a problem of persuading people to choose this particular game among a large range of other choices. For triple-A games, review scores are important, and there is an interest in promoting positive coverage and in some cases even trying to suppress negative coverage.

The other case is everybody else, the much larger number of much smaller games. That can be established game studios bringing out yet another medium-budget game of a series, or indie studios launching a completely new game. In that case while of course a high review score on Metacritic is nice, the primary problem is that most potential customers haven't even heard of the game and are unaware that the game exists. Paying $20,000 to $30,000 to a YouTuber with several million of followers is not primarily about positive coverage, it is about coverage, period.

That is especially noticeable when the developers make a deliberately controversial game, like the JFK shooting simulator or Hatred. In such a case the hope is that negative coverage is better than no coverage at all. Hatred ended up getting a Metacritic score of 42 not because it was controversial, but because it was simple a rather bad and boring shooter game. Without the controversy, nobody would have even noticed the game. They'd rather have somebody like TotalBiscuit condemning their game in front of 2 million viewers instead of him not talking about the game at all.

From my point of view as a consumer, I can see the problem. I went from not being able to play all the games in my Steam library to not even being aware any more of every major PC video game release. Especially as I like games like turn-based tactical or strategy games, which aren't often the kind that get advertising at a bus stop. And while it's already bad on the PC, I am completely lost regarding iPad games, where I play a more or less random selection and have no idea which are the best games on the platform. It doesn't help that if you google for the "top 10 best iOS games" and look up 10 different sources, you'll get 100 different games with no game mentioned twice.

The more games we get, and that appears to be a rising flood, the more important simple awareness becomes. If millions of people are aware that a game exists, chances are that some among them decide to buy the game because of their specific niche interest, even if the game doesn't have a great review score. I bet among the games you are currently playing there are a few which have a not so good review score on Metacritic, but you like them anyway. And that problem of awareness means advertising that rather targets basic visibility than great praise.

In a pen & paper roleplaying game usually the players play their characters, and the DM plays the rest of the world. "The world" sounds like a huge job, but frequently it isn't: The world is really a huge blank slate, which springs in existence only where observed by the players. And there it is often spontaneously populated by a jumble of generic fantasy tropes. Your group is looking for a blacksmith? Sure! He's a dwarf, loves gold, and speaks with a Scottish accent. The world can be generic because it is only the backdrop of an adventure which most of the time could play in just about any fantasy world.

The Zeitgeist campaign I just started is very different. Basically there is a campaign story and the whole world has been designed around that campaign story. It is a one-shot world, it only serves this one campaign and isn't designed as a backdrop for different campaigns or collections of adventures. On the one side that is great, because it is a lot more interesting than those fantasy tropes. On the other side it means that this time playing the world actually *is* a huge job. I had to read and re-read hundreds of pages of campaign guides and adventures to understand how the world is operating and what is going on in order for me to tell that to the players.

Now, after the first adventure has properly started and we already had a rather epic battle aboard an exploding steamship, I am starting to become comfortable with that job of playing the world. The world is starting to come alive in my head. While thinking about the start of the next session I was able to turn half a phrase of text from the adventure into an idea of a short scene that fits perfectly into this world and gives the players a real choice of actions with predictable consequences. I've completely prepared the first adventure, already read the second adventure once and started preparing stuff for that, and generally am feeling up to the task. I just hope that this all translates into a great experience for my players as well, as this campaign is asking more role-playing of them than previous ones.

From time to time on this blog I post my opinion about some game. That sort of post might or might not have the word "review" somewhere in the title or text. I might have the word "recommended" at the end, but never a review score or anything similar. But most importantly I'm not getting paid $30,000 to write such reviews. Most of the time I received absolutely nothing, and even had to buy the game myself. Over the 12 years that I am doing this I received a handful of free "review copies", and in each of these cases I stated that in the post.

Personally I prefer to express myself in written form instead of speaking into a camera. The result is slower, but better thought through, because it is so much easier to edit writing. But I certainly can see the attraction of watching your game reviews on YouTube, especially if you can see the gameplay as well as hearing what the reviewer thinks about it. I can understand why especially a younger audience would rather watch a funny guy reviewing a video game on YouTube than reading a blogger's much dryer review of the same game. I understand while some of these channels have millions of viewers, compared to blogs having at best thousands of readers.

But when I hear some YouTuber writing to developers demanding $22,000 for a review, I am starting to believe that something has seriously gone wrong. The sum of all the worst accusations of corruption leveled against all video game review writers during Gamergate was just a fraction of the sums that appear to be common now on YouTube. And there are contracts between game companies and YouTubers which are definitively unethical, by deliberately hiding the fact that these are paid promotions, or by obliging the reviewer to refrain from saying certain things.

I do think that there are sufficient methods for popular YouTubers to make money via advertising and the like without having to resort to effectively blackmailing developers into payments, or disguising paid promotions as honest reviews. But with the current situation of there being far too many games out there struggling for a piece of the consumers gaming money, I'm afraid that we'll hear far more stories of shady dealings on YouTube for some time to come.

I was reading Ravious' opinion about Magic Duels on Kill Ten Rats, and found it far more negative than my own experience with the game. I still think it is one of the better incarnations of Magic the Gathering in a virtual format. So I'd like to address his points of concern and give my differing opinion on them:

"Easy AI has ridiculous answers to the deck I am forced to build.": There is a lot of complexity to this complaint. Magic Duels has quests, most of which require you to use the deckbuilding wizard, which doesn't give you full freedom to build decks, and thus often ends up with sub-optimal builds. And Magic the Gathering is, and has always been in all forms, a game with certain rock-paper-scissors elements: Certain decks work extremely well against certain other decks, but get crushed by yet another type of deck. So all together that means that yes, you can build a deck with deckbuilding wizard to do a quest, and then lose against the AI on easy difficulty because the opponents deck was just built with plenty of answers to the threats you put into your deck. But you can just as well play on medium and have an easy victory, because it just happens that your deck is the rock and the AI has the scissors. Note that Magic also has a certain degree of randomness, so you can always win or lose just because of what lands you or your opponent drew. Personally I find it good that I don't have a 100% win chance against the AI on easy. But I'm winning far more games than I lose at that difficulty level, so for me there isn't really a problem here. Furthermore I would like to point out that of course you can build a deck freely without the deckbuilding wizard and earn gold outside the quests. The game becomes a lot less limited if you don't limit yourself to doing quests.

"The “curated” meta where someone decided not all cards from the Origins set should go in to the game allows for cards like Nimbus Wings (1W aura for creature to gain flying and +1/+2) to become monsters.": Magic the Gathering in physical card form or as MtG:Online allows the player to put 4 cards of the same name in a deck. Magic Duels allows 4 if the card is common, 3 if uncommon, 2 if rare, and just 1 if legendary. That has consequences: Combinations of rares into a complicated engine work a lot less well, because you can't put 4 of each rare you want for the engine in your deck. With complicated engines being out, creatures (and creature enchantments) become the main way to win a game. Magic Duels in its current form is easier than real Magic, but also considerably cheaper, as you don't need to buy so many cards to get all those rares. Personally I think that is of more advantage than disadvantage. You don't copy "net decks" for Magic Duels, it is a separate format in which different cards are strong, and you need to account for that when building your own decks.

"The daily quests aren’t really daily because of server issues, and players roll for craps with the server anyway on seeing if they will get the gold from the completed quest.": Actually it says nowhere that the quests are daily. As far as I know it is intended that you get a new quest only every second day. On the plus side the quests accumulate, so after 6 days you have 3 quests waiting for you, which is nice for weekend players. Magic Duels does have server issues, but those depend a *lot* on the platform on which you are playing. On the iPad, once I am connected, I never had the problem of winning a game and then not getting it counted because of connection loss to the server. There appear to be far bigger server problems on the PC version of the game.

"I hope that there is a Hail Mary patch for this game, and I am looking forward to when Battle for Zendikar gets added.": The server issues especially of the PC version need to be fixed for this game to get anywhere, obviously. I don't expect a patch to change much on the gameplay side of things. I am looking forward to the Zendikar expansion, and it will be interesting to see how they are going to handle the format: Will the new quests require you to build Zendikar-only decks, or can you mix cards from different expansion, which opens up a lot more possibilities?

Overall I think that Magic Duels (not regarding the PC server issues) is pretty close to the best we could have hoped for as a virtual version of Magic the Gathering which is accessible to a broader audience than the card game or the much more cut-throat MtGO version. You can reasonably play for free, and even if you decide to buy cards, that doesn't break your bank like the other versions do. You can't build every deck you can build with the other versions, but that removes some layers of complexity which would be rather daunting for new players. In order to compete with a much simpler game like Hearthstone, Magic Duels is rather well done attempt.

In the previous session the group as members of the Royal Homeland Constabulary provided security for the launch of the first Risuri-built steam warship, the RNS Coaltongue. Having successfully dealt with some troublesome dockers, they were invited to provide further security on the ship, which was to make a short maiden voyage with the king and invited guests. So this session started with a tour of the ship. I had gone the expensive route of printing the map of the ship on two posters to 1" scale, and had an NPC, petty officer Elian Aughtbrook, give them a guided tour to be sure that they knew all the details of how the ship operated. They met a guard, Divianne Athel, at the ship's magazine, telling them how the firedust (powder) for the cannons was protected by wreaths enchanted daily with a fire resistance ritual. And they met the young engineer Fitzcairn Luckshore in the engine room, where he was shoveling firegems into the furnace with two rather more solidly built and older colleagues.

Via Elian Aughtbrook they also organized, as requested, a room for the sister of the king, Duchess Ethelyn of Shale, to nap in. That caused some discussion, as the players with some degree of meta-gaming concluded that this special request meant that the king's sister was in special danger; so they weren't sure to what degree they were supposed to guard just the king, or his sister as well, or the whole ship. In the end they tried to cover everything, but of course the ship was rather huge and patrolling it every quarter of an hour with just 2 people didn't turn up anything suspicious.

Apart from the king complaining about indigestion, which he said was probably caused by some local archfey wanting to let him know their displeasure about the use of technology, nothing much happened during the next hour. The band assembled, ready to play the royal anthem accompanied by fireworks, and after that a speech by the king was planned. At that point the group's boss, Assistant Chief Inspector Stover Delft approached them with a task: The duchess hadn't returned from her nap, and there was some concern that she might try to embarrass the king by being absent during his speech. So the constables were charged to give her an "escort of honor" and make sure she was present for the speech.

In spite of their earlier concerns regarding the safety of the duchess, the group decided that it would be sufficient if 4 of them went to provide that escort, while the 2 others remained on the top deck in case something happened there. The duchess' room was two decks below, in the back of the berth deck. The 4 constables went there and knocked on the door, and got a response from the duchess' handmaiden, Sokana. She opened the door just a bit and said the duchess was still sleeping. At that moment two things happened: The band on the top deck began playing the royal anthem at full blast, and near the duchess' cabin another door opened. Out came the halfling chef they had observed earlier with a tray of chocolates, but now he was wielding a short sword, and the green substance smeared on that sword didn't look like chocolate. Combat ensued, with the halfling assassin enjoying surprise over most of the group. Sokana wasn't surprised, pulled out a rod, yelled "an assassin, protect the duchess!" and went forward towards where the assassin was facing Merian the avenger, and Aria the sorceress.

Now I played this encounter as written, using the stats given, although I had a nagging feeling that the assassin was a bit underpowered with his 22 hit points. This turned out to be very much the case: The assassin landed a nasty poisoned blow on Aria, who couldn't act that turn due to surprise. But Merian, who stood right next to Aria, hit the halfling with a strong attack for 14 points, and Eldion the, who had likewise succeeded his surprise roll, finished him off with another strong hit. End of round one it looked as if the combat was already over.

At that point the real surprise was revealed: Sokana cast a whirlwind spell attacking Aria and Merian, which as a secondary effect teleported her past them. She then proceeded to summon 3 fire sprites as a minor action, and moved further towards the ladder to the engine room. Artus the ardent, standing at the duchess' cabin door, decided to check what was going on there and opened the door. The bed was empty (remember the empty bed in the vision last session?), the duchess had apparently left through the porthole and was seen outside riding a leviathan into the sea, fleeing the scene. Something was afoot, and the duchess and her people turned out to be the enemies here.

Now the group had to manage several things: Pursue Sokana, stop the fire sprites who were going for the powder magazine, alarm their two remaining colleagues on the top deck, and find out what the enemies were up to. Fortunately for them Sokana's whirlwind spell had missed both targets. And Merian the avenger was uniquely equipped with powers to pursue a single enemy. Sokana managed to summon more fire sprites, get down to the engine room, throw an enchanted fire ritual wand into the furnace and rusting shut the furnace door, but Merian was always right behind her, dealing serious damage. Aria also followed, and being a spirit medium received a message from the spirit of her dead father who is watching over her: Her father was a technologist and could tell her that the furnace was unusually overloaded with firegems (the "coal" of this world), and with the added heat from the fire wand the boiler would surely explode at some point. He was even able to calculate how much time they had to stop this, so there was a countdown until the boiler would explode and kill the whole group. Fun!

Meanwhile Eldion had gone and warned James and Malicia, the two group members on the top deck. Together with Artus they killed all the fire sprites, before they did any damage to the powder magazine, and then went down to the engine room. The guard of the powder room was found dead, apparently killed earlier by the assassin, and in the engine room the young engineer had been killed by his two burlier colleagues who were in on the sabotage and had bashed his head in with a shovel. The two engineers were busy sabotaging the pressure relief valves, and Sokana retreated towards them, blocking Merian's way with a wall of fire. Like a good musketeer Merian drew his musket and shot Sokana through that fire wall, killing her. She had succeeded in all her sabotaging objectives, but never did much serious damage to the group otherwise.

The furnace was hot enough to give fire damage to people standing close, but Aria had some fire resistance due to her dragon origin as sorceress. And unlike a weakly mage the sorceress had rather high stats in force, and was trained in athletics, so she was able with a lucky roll to break open the furnace door. She also found some tongs and managed to remove the fire wand from the furnace, which slowed the reaction down considerably (and doubled the number of turns remaining on the countdown). Meanwhile the other group members went after the two engineers and after a short combat killed these last enemies. Aiding each other they succeeded after a few attempts to unblock the safety valves, further adding time to the countdown.

Now the scenario has several different methods to completely stop the boiler from exploding. The group went for the not very spectacular but effective way of having Aria with her fire resistance shovel the firegems out of the furnace into metal buckets, with the others emptying those bucket through portholes upstairs into the sea. The group did also during this time warn the king about what was going on, but did so discreetly and said an evacuation wasn't necessary. The king's principal minister Harkover Lee called over the tiefling engineer Geoff Masarde, who had built the ship, who as tiefling also had fire resistance and could help Aria shoveling hot firegems. That way the reaction was stopped long before the countdown reached zero, and the ship was saved. On the list of possible outcomes from critical failure to critical success this was a critical success, because not only was the ship and king saved, but there wasn't even an interruption to the festivities.

The group received the personal thanks of the king, who was visibly shaken by the news that his own sister had betrayed him and tried to kill him. He feared there could now be a civil war in Risur. The king then gave his speech, in which he explained the situation to the guests, publicly thanked the constables and announced that after four wars with Danor he would now seek peace with them, convening a peace conference in a year to come, and planning to marry a Danoran lady of high birth. With this successful outcome we ended the session.

When Sid Meier said that a good game is a series of interesting decisions, he was producing a lot of turn-based games for which this is particularly true. In real-time games the player can get into the flow of just taking care of the execution and still be engaged. A turn-based game constantly disengages the player while he has to wait for the other players to make their move. So it becomes important that when its the player's turn again, he has something interesting to decide.

Armello is doing this very well, as it is a virtual fantasy strategy board game. You don't just decide on a strategy at one point in time and then spend the next hundred turns executing it. Every turn the situation has at least slightly changed and you will have to decide on your move accordingly. And you don't get hundreds of turns anyway: In Armello the king has been infected by rot, and is losing 1 health every two turns. As he only has 9 health at the start of the game, that gives a natural limit to the number of turns the players have to either cure the king, depose him, or become the new king after the king's death by prestige.

In every turn you draw cards if you don't already hold as many cards as you have wit in your hand, and then move over a very small hex map around the world. On that map you can capture settlements for a gold income, explore dungeons for random rewards, visit stone circles to heal, or just pass over different sorts of terrain. In the middle of the map is the palace, which you don't enter until you try for one of the victory conditions near the end of the game. As the map is small, you constantly run into the other heroes (Armello is a game for 4 players, but 3 of them can be AI), the king's guards, and the banes. That is an opportunity for combat, as combat gives you the prestige you need for the default prestige victory condition.

Combat is done by rolling dice with symbols on it. Sword symbols count as an attack, shield symbols as a defense, and the other symbols as either attack, defense, or nothing at all, depending on circumstances. And yes, that means that there is a strong random element to combat, although characters with a higher fight score get more dice and thus have a distinctive advantage. Before rolling the dice you can also "burn" the cards in your hand to get specific results on a die. That not only makes combat a bit more predictable, but is also a great opportunity to discard cards you didn't want to play anyway.

The cards which you draw every turn unless your hand is full are of three sorts: Equipment, which you can then transfer to your inventory for a cost in gold, spells which you can cast for magic, and trickery cards which can be used for various effects, usually to hinder other heroes. The overall effect of the various ways to hinder other players is that the three victory conditions which require you to cure or beat the king in some way are very, very hard to reach. Most games thus end with the default victory condition of declaring the player with the highest prestige the winner. That in turn makes the more fight-oriented heroes like the wolf clan members more likely to win than the other classes. This minor imbalance is the only point of criticism I have on Armello. Each turn *is* full of interesting decisions, and while each game is relatively short, you'll often want to start the next one right after it and try a different way. There is also a system where your victories unlock different starting bonuses for your next games.

Besides the excellent gameplay, Armello is also a very charming game. The characters are anthropomorphic animals, the king is of course the lion, and the different character classes are represented by different animals. Everything is nicely animated and the whole world looks just great.

Overall I can only recommend Armello. In view of the low price tag of $20, you don't even have to wait for a Steam sale in order to be able to afford it. :)

Golfers are known to wear funny trousers and Amazon has quite a selection of books with jokes about golfers. Any hobby has its particular customs which, from the outside, look somewhat funny. Golfers apparently don't mind all that much, and are in fact the prime customers of those books of golfer jokes. That relaxed attitude to a bit of ridicule unfortunately isn't shared by video gamers.

American television host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel recently made a joke about gamers. Or rather he made jokes about the new Youtube game streaming service. The core of that joke was that he can't see why you would watch somebody else play a video game instead of playing the game yourself. And he has a point there: It is a very specific behavior which looks funny to the outside world. Making a harmless joke about extrapolating that to people who watch people watching people watch video games didn't really hurt anybody. But of course gamers didn't see it like that, providing Jimmy Kimmel with a far more harmful opportunity to read out the various death threats he received from gamers because of his initial joke.

Gamers are establishing themselves as one of those extremist fringe groups that you only need to lightly poke to get a huge reaction of outrage from. And already several TV comedians have discovered that. The *reaction* of gamers to just about anything tends to be so completely blown out of proportion that it provides endless perfect material for comedy. Somebody playing a video game isn't inherently funny, not funnier than somebody watching TV, and the activity is so mainstream now that it only allows for mild humor. But somebody overreacting, foaming at the mouth because of some mild criticism or joke is incredibly funny. Even Jimmy Kimmel would be stunned if he knew that those death threats were in fact *not* sent by "12-year old boys", as he thinks, but by grown men. There is a greater than zero probability that one of the offended gamers will do something stupid like sending a SWAT team to Jimmy Kimmel's house, or calling in a bomb threat on his plane (such stuff happened before), providing Jimmy with even more comedy material.

Public ridicule is impossible to beat. It is a war that gamers just can't win. The only way to deal with ridicule is to ignore it. As some gamers aren't very likely to do that, they'll be inviting even more ridicule, painting the rest of us in a bad light. That's a shame.

Azuriel is complaining in this post that "When you use the word “entitlement” as a pejorative, all you are doing is asserting that someone has unreasonable expectations about something, without actually bothering to offer an argument or explanation as to why it is unreasonable.". Well, I'd be only too happy to offer an argument and explanation of gamer entitlement.

A game is an entertainment product. Somebody produces it, a process which involves cost, mostly in the form of manpower cost. Then he is trying to sell or otherwise monetize the resulting product. If he manages to make a profit, he can then produce the next game. If he doesn't make a profit, sooner or later he has to shut down shop and stop making games.

The gamer in this story is the customer. His value as a customer to the game developer is proportional to the amount of money that he is spending on the game. Whether the gamer is "a big fan", or "plays the game for hundreds of hours", or "is really skillful at this game" is largely irrelevant. It doesn't pay the developer's bills. The effect a "fan" has on sales by promoting the game is frequently rather small and insignificant.

The problem with entitlement is frequently that gamers think that the time they spent playing a game entitles them to special consideration by the game developer, in spite of them not having contributed more financially to the game than other players. They demand more content than the purchase price of the game justifies, they demand special exclusive content designed just for their needs, they even demand changes to the game that keeps other players out or restricts the content those other players can use.

I do think that there are cases where a player is entitled to be heard by the developers, for example if he spent $5000+ on the Crowfall alpha access diamond bundle. I do not think that somebody who is paying the same amount of money as everybody else, but is playing the game more, is entitled to any special consideration. That gamer already got more bang for his bucks by playing more, why should he receive any further favors without paying for them? The game is a product that is sold "as is", you take it or leave it. Game developers don't owe you anything unless you gave them a lot of money some way. It is unreasonable to demand special consideration from game developers without special financial engagement.

Now this must be a first! A Tale in the Desert changes its business model from Free2Play to subscription based. After a million headlines of games heading in the other direction, this is an interesting move.

I believe the economics of this is based on the fact that A Tale in the Desert is very, very niche. It doesn't profit much from a Free2Play approach, because it can't really hold casual players very long, being too far away from people's expectations. So for a very small and dedicated player base, the subscription model probably works better.

So patch 6.2.2 arrived and brought flying in Draenor to World of Warcraft. Despite the huge fuzz that was made about this feature, for me it doesn't change the way I play all that much. It is a minor comfort feature to reduce travel time a bit sometimes. My first use of it was with my freshly leveled to 100 paladin traveling between the garrison and the shipyard a bit faster. Not a big deal, but rather a minor comfort feature.

Flying used to be more useful to me in previous expansions, where gathering materials was still a big deal. But even with the added chance of finding Felblight in Tanaan Jungle, I don't see myself gathering resources in this expansion. The resources you get from garrison mine and herb garden have pretty much killed the interest in gathering professions. Neverthless I am thinking ahead: On two of my now five level 100 characters I abandoned one crafting profession and went back to mining instead. The idea is that come next expansions gathering skill will be needed again, and it is easier to skill mining up now with the help of the garrison mine than to try to rush it when the next expansion comes out.

I wonder if I should take up herbalism again as well, for example with my mage who has inscription. On the other hand I don't have a character with alchemy any more, that profession felt so utterly useless in WoD. What do you think?

Usually mobile Free2Play games rarely impress me. I mean, I play them from time to time, and some of them are fun on the gameplay side; but usually they are low budget affairs of small teams. Graphics and presentation are at best "okay", usually some cartoon style (and the same looking anime style for every single game of Asian origin), with little or no animation. So I was kind of surprised to stumble upon a Free2Play game with triple A production quality: EA's FIFA 15 Ultimate Team (FUT). I was barely aware that my iPad could even display such graphics with this fluidity, the game looks absolutely stunning.

Apparently FUT is some sort of a side-project to the console FIFA 15 game for consoles and PC, which you get as added extra when you buy the $60 FIFA game. The iOS and Android versions started their life as free "companion apps", but look like a full game to me now. So there are a number of slightly different versions of it, including also a version specifically for phones. I've been only looking at the iPad version here.

So what is FUT? At the heart is is a trading card football manager game. The most important cards are players, and you build a team out of them to then play football (soccer) with. That is done in two alternative modes, either you controlling a player on the field directly, or in simulation mode. The two very different modes mean that you can play FUT in a "kick a ball around" mode as a football action game, or you can play it as a pure football manager game, or something in between. The action game part is quite well done, especially if you consider that you can get that for absolutely free.

The trap is of course the trading card football manager part. Cards exist in bronze, silver, and gold, plus "rare" versions of each of those, plus some exotics. While your starting team will be mostly bronze and all sorts of nationalities and leagues, there is an advantage to putting together a team from the same nationality or league, as that adds to the team's "chemistry" and increases success chance. And unless you want to grind a lot of games to get the gold to buy the players on the transfer market, you might be tempted to buy bronze, silver, or gold boosters. Which you can buy for in-game gold, but also for a second currency available for cash. I have a strong tendency (out of interest in monetization schemes) to buy "something" in any Free2Play game I like and play for more than a day, so in this case I spent $15 which got me 10 gold boosters (opening 10 gold boosters happened to be a "quest" that awarded another gold booster). But with that investment and all the boosters I got from basically doing tutorial "quests" I am still far from even scratching the surface: There are 10,000 players from over 500 licensed teams in the game. A nightmare for completionists! :)

If collecting players doesn't get you to spend money, then maybe the other types of cards will. There are cards for your stadion, your team name, your home and away kit, various staff like managers, and various consumables. For example each player has a number of games he is contracted to play, so once those run out you need to use a consumable contract card on your player to further use him. There is some strategy involved in that: Why use your best player and use up his contracts if for the tournament or season or match you want to play a lesser player will suffice? What players do you use your training cards on? But the main activity besides playing is getting your squad right, putting players on their preferred position and linking them up with players they have "chemistry" with. FUT works quite well as a football manager game if you don't go overboard and start spending too much real money to get better players.

There is also another game in FUT: An economic game of buying and selling cards. There is a very active market with around half a million cards being traded at any given moment. Boosters give you random cards, so if you are building a team of a specific nationality or club, you need to trade away the players you don't need to get the gold to buy the players you need. That economic game uses the same currency of gold which is also given out as main reward for playing matches and can be used to buy boosters, so a good trader has a different source of income.

Overall FUT is quite a good game, at least as long as you play it for free or are good at limiting your spending. Server stability is sometimes a problem, and on the iPad version I was very happy to have linked the game to Facebook, because that saved my collection from a glitch that had reset the game. I also have open questions about FIFA 16 being released in three weeks with a new version of Ultimate Team on consoles and PC. Will I just get an update of FUT on my iPad, but keep my old collection? Or will there be two separate versions (which isn't ideal)?