Cross-Post: Free RPG Day Haul

http://grognardia.blogspot.ca/2012/06/free-rpg-day-haul.html

This is hubby's post from his blog about the swag he collected for Free RPG Day.
Happy Father's Day to an excellent father! (His present was Castle Ravenloft, a D&D board game. He's excited to try this game with us; we'll report on it here when we play.)

Students & Snorta

The other day, I introduced the board game Snorta to a group of Grade 2-3 students in my media class. Snorta is my personal game but my son hated the game so much (even though he won the one and only game he played) that I took it to school so he didn't have to see it. Seven of us played and the kids liked it so much that they requested we play it again soon. Beth Gallaway recommended this game to me during her presentation at the Ontario Library Association Superconference a few years back.  Maybe, like yesterday's post, I'll have to try and persuade my son to give it another chance.

Dice

My husband posted this photo on his blog of some funky new dice he bought - the far right one is a three sided dice, with rock-paper-scissors also imprinted. It reminded me of how in love my kids, especially my son, were with the various dice my hubby owns. As a dedicated role playing gamer for a long time, he has a large collection of dice. The kids used to go into his dice box when they were little (not too little - dice are choking hazards) and choose the prettiest ones to cart around and treasure like jewels. Hubby has said that his mental math is strong because of the quick calculations he'd do while playing - when kids count the individual pips on a dice face to figure out the score, it's sad. Hubby tells a great dice story on a podcast interview he did - I don't know where it is but it's very funny - I'll have to locate it.

2nd chance for Last Night on Earth

Even though I haven't been posting, we have been gaming - it's been busy, but not so busy we can't have family fun. Last week (June 10), my friend Denise came over, originally so she could teach us how to play Arkham Horror with our family gaming friend. After socializing, we realized that we chatted for so long that we wouldn't have time to play Arkham Horror, so instead we decided to play Last Night On Earth. If you recall, we played this once before and weren't too impressed. My daughter is fond of saying something like "what's the point when a FIRE AXE can't do decent damage!" This time was a lot more enjoyable.

Near the start of the game - keep 'em out!

There were five players and four played people and our family friend played the zombies. The scenario we chose to play was a more interesting, and do-able one: to prevent nine zombies from entering the manor in 17 turns. The funny part was that we lost, but it was satisfying; when we played the first time, we won but it was unsatisfying and we griped about it.

Characters battling the mindless horde!

The thing that did us in was that Dave played a lights-out card which limited our movement inside the manor to one square per turn, and several players lost their weapons. I was the sheriff, which was great because even when my firearm ran out of ammunition, I was able to retrieve it next turn instead of moving.

The end view of the game. Overwhelmed by zombies.

I was pleasantly surprised that a game we had written off as annoying and not-fun turned out to be the opposite. It's good to give things a chance.