So the last two episodes of Critical Role [link] had Felica Day and Mary Elizabeth McGlynn sitting in with regular players Laura Bailey, Travis Willingham, Sam Riegel and Taliesin Jaffe at Matt Mercer's D&D table. It was a riot and a fairly self-contained adventure, so new watchers shouldn't worry about lack of knowledge of the backstory.

This week and next, the remainder of the crew (Liam O'Brien, Marisha Ray, and Orion Acaba) will be playing with Wil Wheaton and Will Friedle. I'm looking forward to it.

RftG

Before we start another game, I'd like to call attention to on aspect of game play from the previous game. That's card flow. There are a number of different strategies one can pursue, but all of them benefit from getting to draw more cards. Looking at how it played out this game, Connie mostly had card draw bonuses when trading cards. She drew 6 bonus cards during the game. (That's in addition to the base draw for trading goods. She consistently traded more valuable goods than the other players.) However, she also needed fewer cards to pay for her layout because of her military focus.

askye had more discounts than card draws; she didsn't pay full price for either developments or worlds. (Replicant Robots can be a great card.) she saved a total of 8 cards off the regular price, and drew another 6 cards from production bonuses.

chrismg wound up with card draw bonuses from developing, trading and producing. All together, he pulled 20 bonus cards during the game. He also saved 3 cards off playing worlds, from the Contact Specialist discount; and saved 6 cards when playing developments.

However, the star performer here was omnis. At just 5 cards in his layout, he could pull bonus cards in Phase II, Phase III, Phase IV and Phase V. He drew a whopping 30 bonus cards over the course of the game.

There was a very strong relationship this game - the players that drew the most bonus cards were also the players that managed the highest scores. It doesn't have to be so ironclad; but it does illustrate, card flow is an important consideration in this game.

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One other thing I wanted to check on, how is everyone going with understanding the cards? The symbols they use to convey the various powers, and the other properties of the cards, is highly consistent and easy to use - once you're used to what all the symbols mean and how they function. But that's a highly variable learning curve. Some people pick it up very quickly, other people can take some time for it to coe together.

I have a reason for asking, and that's the time it takes to put together emails to all the players. The biggest time investment is in writing up the cards' properties and powers. Of course, I'm happy to do so as long as it's needed; but as players feel able, it'll be a time saving just to send out the card images. (Of course, if you find any particular card to be unclear, you have but to ask.)

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And with that, I will open things up for game 2. As with game 1, we can have up to four players. I feel we should use the pre-selected starting hands for at least one more game, unless players feel strongly otherwise.

Who would like to be in game 2?

I'll be in the second game.

Your summaries of the cards and advice was very, very helpful. What I need to do is download the images of the cards so I can blow them up and read them. I think I'm getting a better handle on what everything means now.

Count me in! My ego wants me to say "pfft, I got a handle on this", but reality has proven otherwise a few times there. And the images did help a couple times when at work, for me to flip between emails to see what was on the table, and in my hand.

I'll pass on this. Watch everyone else play.

I'm in. Think I need to get better at the action-picking strategy.

Our Friday night Roll20 D&D game fell through, so we ended up playing BSG with a program called VASSAL. Interface is a little clunky, but it did the job once we got it figured out.

Fate apparently decided the humans were doomed from the start. We had 5 players, playing Starbuck, Baltar, Helo (myself), Boomer and Adama. I drew a Cylon loyalty card (damage Galactica) right off the bat. We had a couple new players and I was the most-experienced, so I was trying my best to be helpful, but not too helpful. (I strictly avoided trying to trick people or suggesting poor courses of action, though.) I was also apparently drawing all the XO cards, because I was getting tons and no one else seemed to have them when they were needed.

The crisises were a long string of Cylon attacks and Crisises without jump icons. The humans finally jumped for the first time at the start of round 4 (at the cost of 3 population on a failed roll) for 1 distance and then the next crisis was 33 followed by yet another Cylon attack.

At this point, the humans were down to 4 population (having taken heavy civilian losses in the skies from the unending Cylon attacks, including the loss of two 2 population ships), were surrounded by Cylons and all but two of their vipers were damaged or destroyed.

So I promptly revealed as a Cylon, damaged the Hanger Deck (where Baltar had moved to try to repair some vipers) and Command (where Adama was trying vainly to use the remaining redshirt vipers to keep the raiders off the civvies) sending them both to sickbay and preventing them from making any sort of defense of the civvies still in the sky. Boomer was up next and promptly revealed as a Cylon as well, sending Starbuck to the brig.

At this point the human players called for surrender because there didn't seem to be a remote chance of them pulling out a win.

ETA: I didn't even feel good about the "Win" as I think the humans would have been only slightly better off if I had been human from the start. The reveal at that point was mostly to just put them out of their misery quickly.

Thankfully, everyone still had fun. The humans were brutalized so badly that everyone just had to laugh at it, rather than be angry.

Hey Gamers! Sorry to intrude upon your thread but it looks like you're in between games and I wanted to pick your brains. I'm hoping I can take advantage of the hivemind with a project I'm working on.

I'm doing some freelance writing for a startup company that creates toys. These are experienced toymakers and, indeed, the two brothers I'm working with are the children of the guy who created Mr. Potatohead. So, the family business.

Their current project is exciting but sprawling as well, and one of the things I'll be helping them with is the narrative for their investor pitch, as well as some meetings they have with big media (currently Canadian TV, but looks like they'll pitch in Los Angeles as well).

I've been tasked with creating some basic game design for this pitch because the whole project was conceived to be transmedia from the beginning, and the implications of their product are wide ranging.

So game design is where I'd be picking your brains.

The basic narrative involves a young girl, Giapetta, who is a tinkerer from a long line of them. She accidentally opens the portal to another world (very Steampunk) and meets another girl from that world. From there she discovers portals to a variety of worlds and has adventures.

So far so good. A familiar enough set of tropes but nothing revolutionary.

This narrative though is the off-shoot of the original conception of their project which was to bring Etsy-like jewelry construction together with STEM education for girls.

They began working on creating a jewelry that was programmable and interacted with an app that would open up on this imaginary world.

The thing that's opening doors for them and getting them into these meetings is that they've created an app that interacts with the jewelry itself which doesn't actually have electronics in it. (It just needs brass in the jewelry to engage with the app - which, fortunately, works well with the steampunk aesthetic.) I've seen the demo video for this and it has a significant "Wow" factor. I think it's a genuinely unique and revolutionary interface with computers and will have implications for computer games, and beyond.

It basically allows you to create your own magic talisman which interacts with a computer. You can create an earring or a Buffy-villain power center talisman necklace that you place on your tablet and it unlocks doors, or moves things around, or opens windows into another world.

They have a patent pending, but please be discreet about discussing this outside our thread, because they're still meeting with investors.

The implications for their product are wide ranging, but they want to maintain that STEM for girls/ creating/programming element that was at the core of the original concept.

What I'd like is gameplay that teaches a basic aspect of computer programming which can also be manifested physically as jewelry.

My first thought on this was using a Fibonacci sequence as an introduction to the idea of an algorithm and then incorporating that into the design of the jewelry.

Do you have any ideas on how you would set up a simple bit of game play that required figuring out the Fibonacci sequence and then applying it to problem solving? I would think the first part would be identifying the sequence - seeing and then understanding the pattern. Then there would be an element where you work out that pattern and see it's implications. And then finally you apply it by creating the object itself, which could then unlock something in the app.

Thoughts? Feelings? Numbness at the extremities? Please throw your notions and responses at me.