Tabletop Spotlight: Saint Malo

Reader side-note: Yes, I missed last week. It was super busy with work and other things IRL, as they say. I hope none of you missed Tabletop Spotlight too much.

Welcome to yet another edition of Tabletop Spotlight, where I review board games (and games of all kinds) for your internet reading pleasure! Tonight’s spotlight shines on a recent addition to my personal gaming library, Saint Malo by Ravensburger. We first played it with my old boss after he came back from Essen-fest last year and it was an instant hit in my book.

Saint Malo is a strategic dice game for 2-5 players that uses a combination of area control on dry erase boards and pure luck of the dice roll. Now, I got a chance to try this game out a week or two ago with some of our WCR contributors… In fact, I got to play a game with Toonsem (and very nearly beat him!), and he seemed to enjoy it.

Pokemon Meme Part 3 and the Last!

Hey folks! Sorry I'm late again. Had a guest staying over and I didn't want to ignore her for drawing Pokemon. I don't think she would have understood. Anyways, I'm here to post the 3rd and final part of the Pokemon type meme. I had to split these six up because they were so big there was no way they'd fit on one piece of paper! So here they are:

Favorite Poison: Drapion, Favorite Electric: Ampharos, Favorite Water: Jellicent

Favorite Dragon: Flygon, Favorite Ice: Lapras, Favorite Fairy: Togekiss

So what are your favorite types? I challenge you (yes, you! the reader!) to do this meme. Ideally you would find a template and draw them onto the template but I don't like being restricted by small squares. I hope you've enjoyed seeing mine!
I'm tempted to do another, similar, drawing meme I found on tumblr. The first half or so is by type but it would give me the freedom to draw that one Pokemon really well and time to draw backgrounds and a scene and such. Click here to find the December Pokeddex Meme! It doesn't include Fairy types since it's a year old...so maybe draw your favorite normal and fairy type on the first day :)

I won't be posting on Thanksgiving for obvious reasons. That said, the next time I post it'll be the start of my comic series revolving around my SoulSilver team I wrote about awhile ago. (See linked post for more information).

Have a wonderful holiday everyone! I'll be back after my trip to VEGAS! Woohoo!

<3Billie

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Elephant.

Take a good look at this elephant.

You'll see him again next week.

Magic Forest strips are on their way as well.

Until next week!

On Magical Forests

Hey, it's Mizzy again, and this time I have some news!

I'm gonna be bringing a comic series to Whales, and it will hopefully someday be the first of many.

Read more about it by clicking the little doodad that says Read More.

Pokemon Type Meme Part 2

Favorite Steel: Skarmory, Ghost: Gengar, Ground: Sandslash, Psychic: Meowstic, Dark: Honchkrow, Rock: Tyranitar

Meowstic is not very happy about Sandslash coming up out of the ground and scaring her....
Anyways! Sorry for the delay! It's been a busy week! Here's another six from the Favorite Pokemon Type Meme! I realize that most of my favorites have also been part dark....whoopsy heh heh heh
*Ahem* Honchkrow is my favorite Pokemon to draw, by far. Such a great shape! I'm much better at drawing birds than dogs, ohmygoodness.

Anyways, sorry for the short post! Next week will be Part 3 of the meme to finish this up and then it's time for more from our friends from my SoulSilver dream team! (See this post for explanation).

Billie, out!

Preview for a longer story

     Hey all, this is Moonlit, don't have a full story this week but what I do have is a sort of preview for a longer story I want to start doing.  Here's the concept, we've all had moments in our life where we look back and say 'man I wish I could have done X differently'.  For some of us there are pivotal events in our life that have impacted the entire course of our life from that point.  As they say, hindsight is 20/20.  It's something that you develop as you get older but you never have an opportunity to utilize it.  That's what this story is about, hindsight.  The story will be about a man who is utterly miserable, his life has gone nowhere and he constantly reflects back to a pivotal event in his life.  He wonders if his decision at that event would have impacted his life in a better way.  This is set in the near future and there is a company that sells a product, this product is an absolute commodity.  That product is hindsight.  The company will allow our main character to go back in time to that pivotal event and with the gift of hindsight, see how it effects that timeline of his life.  He can preview the different timelines for free and for an absurd amount of money, he can choose one to be his permanent timeline.  Will he choose another timeline?  What impact do his different decisions have on his life?  Would you alter your own timeline?  Give your thoughts below if you're so inclined.

Whales Can't Craft

Recently, Mizzy shot me a request to make a Minecraft server for you fellow Whales.

But that's not the real beauty. The real beauty was how we tried to communicate this.
It was extremely difficult to read his first request since he used some kind of weird squiggly symbols requiring me to *READ*.

Now as a Whale, I can do many things. My favorite is making large ships beach themselves and do hairpin turns to maintain the legal required distance of 1/4 mile between you and a whale.
I guess they didn't figure on a whale actually having FUN with this. Reading, on the other hand, is... not exactly my strong point.

So I trained my parrot to ask Mizzy to repeat his request, and a homing pigeon to lead the parrot to Mizzy's treehouse. Parrots poop a LOT, but apparently make great self-transporting tape recorders.

Pros of a Parrot:
    * Records short voice segments
    * Recalls the recorded segments on command
    * Fairly large bird, so can carry heavy objects
    * Is generally an awesome looking exotic bird
    * Can fly

Cons of a Parrot:
    * Can bite
    * One parrot produces more poop than an entire cattle yard combined
    * Also recalls the recorded segments whenever it feels like it (say, 3:17 AM)
    * Is difficult to record a different message

I waited a few hours before I heard the sound of a hacked off parrot landing on my balcony. It would seem that Mizzy was unable to reprogram My Autonomous Voice Recorder [MAVD], and instead attached a data disk to the MAVD's leg. I connected it to my computer only to find my screen turn black as my computer starts to speak:

    "Hello, my name is Microsoft Sam. I am here today to relay Mizzy's request: to make a Minecraft server for all Whales. You should ask everyone else what they want out of it.
    It will need to be up 27/8, 372 days a year.  I take that back, I seem to error I am. I will run a self test and reassure myself that 1 + 1 is.... 47.2341892 + 17.47i.
   
    Well, f..."

   


My mission is clear: Build Minecraft before Mizzy sends Microsoft Anna to finish the job. And ask what kind of things you want out of your server.

I will be using Bukkit, a Minecraft server allowing plugins to be added. The main thing I like about Bukkit is the client does not need mods installed. They can just connect without having to know how to do that. It also makes maintenance easier since only the server admin has to update their plugins, as opposed to Forge-based ones requiring EVERYONE update at the same time.

These mods are usually either always on (eg, ToughBoat's indestructible boats), activated via a tool (like the universe altering WorldEdit), or via a command (eg, Essentials' laundry list of extremely useful commands)

The ones I like to use are:

• Essentials (mostly makes Op's life easier - monitoring chat, moving spawn, and giving starting kits are but a few things this can do)
• NoLagg (when you set off 4,000 blocks of TNT, this prevents my computer from going with it)
• MagicChest (automatically sorting chests - never do that manually ever again!)
• WorldEdit (think an absurdly powerful Photoshop that can change the landscape)
• WorldGuard (protect areas from griefing, block explosions in certain areas, invincibility in certain areas, etc)
• CoreProtect (records placing of blocks, removing of blocks, things that are spawned, things that are killed, basically the NSA - annnnd can recall this later at any time)
• ToughBoats (boats don't disintegrate if you so much as LOOK at them wrong)
• OldDays (can re-enable features found in older versions of Minecraft. I only use it to turn off Baby Zombies.)

I'd recommend the Whales staff mosey over to http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/ and see if anything else strikes your eyes. Some Google searches for Bukkit plugins can't hurt either.

Tabletop Spotlight: D&D Next

Break out that dusty d20 and order some pizza… That’s right, this week’s tabletop spotlight will have to be bright. We are going to talk about the dark and scary world of the greatest (and oldest) RPG out there: Dungeons & Dragons. To be specific, we will talk about the newest edition of the game, dubbed D&D Next.

Now, I have had the simultaneous pain and pleasure of being involved with a few different D&D campaigns, all with different folks at my side and running the show. I will soon be attempting to foray into the world of running a campaign myself. If that sort of thing interests you, hit me up with a comment down below and we can talk about it. Maybe I will even do a segment here on WCR about it, who knows?

Psychology

Vultey here, and I am happy to say that I've been experimenting with something called 'Psychology'. I hadn't really realized that this is what I wanted to study really until about 2 days ago. Psychology is something I've been sort of studying on my own without realizing it for quite some time. Some of my newest weekly-ish posts will be about some experiments I've conducted, so yeah. The difficulty is that when doing an experiment in psychology is that you could mistake an action or emotion with something else. So many variables to take into account! Wish me luck!

Elephants!

Miz here!

Over the course of the past week I've been working on an aminated-esque music video about an Elephant who goes to a ball and wins the hearts of everyone by twerkin' it and workin' it.

See some stills and concept illustrations below, I anticipate the final video taking a month or so to finish.

A different kind of story: PART 2!!

Surprise! Here is the other story I collaborated on with my roommate. This is the same process as the last story, using the same prompt where the two of us took turns writing this weird-ass story. The only difference is that one of us wrote the beginning of the first story while the other person wrote the beginning of the second story. See if you can tell which one of us wrote which parts. Hopefully it will be difficult for you. Have fun!

A different kind of story

Howdy everyone, Moonlit here and I bring you part one of two of a different kind of story.  My roommate Toonsem and I did an interesting writing activity last night and I'm going to share the results below.  It's something he did in one of his classes and I just had to give it a try.  The way it works is you have a writing prompt, all participants start writing a story based on the prompt and switch papers after ten minutes.  You then try to continue the other person's story, it's like a rotation comic.  So the story that will be posted below is a result of his words and mine, this is the one that he started.  Without further ado here it is.

Prompt: You wake up one morning to find that one of your arms has been replaced with a long blade, what do you do?

Favorite Pokemon by Type Meme!!!

Hey y'all! I've been wanting to do this meme for awhile now. You know, the one where you pick your favorite Pokemon of each type and draw them? Yeah that one. Since there are 18 types now, I decided to take it slow and start with 6 of them. The 6 types I drew for this week are: my favorite fire, grass, flying, normal, fighting, and bug type Pokemon! One from each category! It was hard to choose. Most of my pick are dual types that also happen to be dark. Whoops. Anyways, without further ado, here are my first six picks!

Fire: Houndoom, Grass: Chikorita family, Flying: Noctowl, Normal: Teddiursa, Fighting: Scrafty, and Bug: Vivillon!

So, readers, if you had to pick one Pokemon from each of this week's six types, which Pokemon would you choose? Feel free to comment below! I'll be getting a bunch of stuff ready for my comics that have an actual plot but in the meantime, I thought you'd enjoy this meme! Stay tuned next week for part 2!

<3Billie

Tabletop Spotlight: Sunrise City

Taking a look back at the games I’ve reviewed so far, I realized that I haven’t had much in the way of actual physical BOARD games. So today, our spotlight shines upon the dynamic and beautiful landscape of Clever Mojo Games’ Sunrise City.

Sunrise City is a nifty tile placement board game for 2-4 players with card drafting and auction elements tossed in for good measure. Before I get too far into the actual gameplay and everything, I have to stress how cool this game looks. This thing is freaking gorgeous. Isaias Vallejo started the game via Kickstarter early last year, and meeting their goals made it so the fans really see the quality in the materials of the game itself.

Mizzy says: What's Whales?

I promised earlier I would make a post to talk about what this blog is about, and the purpose it serves.

Find a bunch of text under the break!