neotoma

Someone (Games by Play Date) has turned coming up with fan fiction pairings into a card game! I found out about this Thursday, when greenygal and I went to Board Game Night at Labyrinth. We played the early American history version of Chrononauts, Pandemic on the extra-easy level, and a couple of rounds of Anomia. As we were walking out the door, I saw a gamebox on another table entitled Slash: Romance Without Boundaries.

It's a card game where you have several cards with different pop-cultural characters and brief descriptions written on them -- well known ones are worth 1 point, not so well known 2 points, and obscure are 3 points. Players take turns being the Matchmaker, who puts one of their character cards down on the table, and the other players have to put down a character card with the idea of the two characters making a great romance. The Matchmaker decides whose pairing suggestion is the best, and awards that player both cards and the points on each for their victory pile. Players can dispute the decision, but then have to come up with a narrative that explains why their pairing was a better choice, which is then voted on by the table. The game ends when one of the players reaches 20 pts.

This sounds like a hilarious game to play with a bunch of fangirls. There is a print and play option where you download and print a .pdf, but I just might buy the regular version and bring it to Con.txt. It seems like it would be a hit, and might be a great icebreaker or midnight room party game.

I had dinner with holli and ellen_fremedon tonight where we discussed the script that holli has written for a YA SF comic that she's planning to have finished in time for Small Press Expo. It sounds like a lot of fun, but both ellen_fremedon and I thought that a corportatist world that had so much control over media that people had to come up with labor actions from first principles was in for a rough time of it -- peasants' revolts tend to kill a lot of people, for example.

After the pizza, we went back to ellen_fremedon's place and played a round of Chrononauts, which was a lot of fun and I would definitely play again. I might even buy it for my nephew for his birthday next month. You get dealt cards for your mission and your identity, so you have two secret win conditions, either of which wins you the game if you complete it before anyone else and without 13 unresolved paradoxes on the table.

Playing cards like 'Discontinuity -- everyone pass their cards to the player next to them' and 'Time Vortex - collect all player's cards, shuffle them, and without looking deal them out evenly starting with yourself' is a way to get yourself accused of playing as chaotic neutral and as The Meddling Monk (I described myself as 'puckish'). Considering My mission's win-condition was 'Cretaceous Park' -- I had to get 3 of the 4 living dinosaur cards in play among my artifacts -- I was definitely The Rani.

As it turned out, holli's win conditions included World War III, which eliminated 1999, which was a key point in my ID win-condition, so I focused on getting my dinosaurs and sowing enough confusion that neither she nor ellen_fremedon could be quite sure what I was aiming at -- holli's focus on averting the Hindenburg disaster was kind of a give-away that it was part of her win-condition, at least after the third time she changed it...

Anyway, through sneakery, good luck, discarding interesting but not useful cards, and keeping one on my dinosaurs in my hand instead of on the table, I managed to get one of the action cards that one ruffle through the draw deck for any single card just after the entire discard deck had been shuffled and redealt as the draw deck. I got my third dinosaur, and won!

And then I kind of turned into a pumpkin, because I have work tomorrow... but it was fun! I definitely need to play more table games with friends.