Weekender XLBS: Bonding Over Tabletop Games!
September 9, 2018 by crew
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6am and I’m ready for xlbs!!! Happy Sunday everyone!!! Hope its been a great weekend one n all 😀
My wife and I met playing World of Warcraft.
I hooked her into RPG games (D&D, Savage Worlds, ect) and some board games.
She tolerates my table top miniatures games and Kickstarter habits (yes, KS is like a drug).
In the end, she agreed and encouraged me to convert a room in the house into a gaming room with multiple shelves to hold all the games, 4×6 Ultimate gaming table, coffee maker and frig, and much more.
Got my German Apple Tart! Tall glass of milk and its Sunday Morning with XLBS! Life is good. By the way @warzan whatever you rename this as make sure it rolls off the tong like XLBS!
Happy Sunday! 🙂
OMG!!! You have never played Diplomacy! That’s the DADDY of all board games! It may be old but you guys should definitely do a Lets Play of that. Seeing Warren & Justin going at it in Diplomacy would be awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’d love to see a let’s play of diplomacy, a game I really enjoyed when I started off in serious board gaming but haven’t played it in decades!
Agree, have not played it in a long time but it was the go to game of my High School and College Days!
Happy Sunday, I met my GF 9 years ago on a LARP Social Media platform. We both do gaming, I can´t think of any other person to love who don´t share my hobby with me. Gaming is a central core in our shared life.
What significant other…..
No, I would never take a geeky game into work of any variety to teach or team build.
When should you break the news to a non gamer partner that you lick brushes, sniff newly opened board games and pray to the dice God’s on a regular basis?
Is this episode leading up to a BoW Big Brother Dating Boot Camp! Game themes diplomacy and betrayal.
Could get someone to do the proper Gordie voiceover and everything and pump it through our sound system…
Pretty good topic. It was a good suggestion. I like the idea of getting to know someone by playing a boardgame. The problem is that my only boardgame is Kingdom Death. That’s definitely not something you just whip out ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) and play with someone you are getting to know. On the topic of Kingdom Death. I’ve introduced the game to someone at work and their friends. We are getting through it quite well, but when it ends, the group is probably over. Like Cass joked about, but serious for me, I don’t like people much and tend… Read more »
@warzan you might want to have a look at this Four Against Darkness: A solitaire dungeon-delving pen-and-paper game: Volume 1 (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Four-Against-Darkness-pen-paper/dp/1976371457) it’s a Fighting Fantasy but done with a group where you create a party. Just ordered it as I have heard interesting things about it.
A playthrough can be found here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyYbAnLd5hga31-wPXjesWt3ZWW90b1IH
Or he can talk to @brennon who spoke about it a week or two ago 😉
Trouble with it might be that it is lighter on the story to capture the little ones
Yup, the one that was hard to explain but well worth exploring as a concept haha
I met my other half on match.com. I had all my hobbies listed in my profile, so she knew what she was getting into. 5 and a half years later I’ve started to convert her to the tabletop skirmish gaming with the Batman Miniatures Game (she has a Gotham City Sirens gang) and she’s acquired some terrain. We’ve even taken up larping together. We’re getting married next year, and the wedding is going to be medieval themed (hired a castle and everything).
Nerds of a feather flock together.
Met my partner on Match as well! It really was a good site and I was very upfront about being a proper nerd and even included a Tolkien quote at the top haha.
Seems like it worked and on our first date she walked into Waterstones and wandered right to the Black Library section! True love 😉
Very happy to hear about the wedding next year and the theme! My partner still won’t let me just buy a sword though…
That is true love indeed. I tried to get my partner into Black Library, she wasn’t that interested.
Luckily I bought most of my swords before I met my partner. Although I’ve managed to convince her that I need a stab safe larp spear.
It took me about 14 years to tell my wife about my gaming geekiness! However this was mostly because I had forgotten myself for a while, rediscovering the hobby during an existential crisis in my early 30s. And I didn’t tell her as such, more she worked it out as the piles of miniatures grew and grew!!
Happy Sunday everyone… I have to say when I started playing RPGs in the 80s it was using D&D the original version… We just had pens paper and dice … Absolutely no mini’s this was how we played all our RPGs so the idea of using minitures never even occurred to us in fact so much so when we started playing mini games we never crossed these with our RPGs it was always two separate things. Interesting I am just about to start RPGing again with my gaming group on a Tuesday night we are starting with Traveller a game… Read more »
My experience was as yours, but this would be the 70s. We kept note books to keep track of our characters and used grid paper to map out our adventure. No minis al all.
My tip is to make sure you have reflec armour for being able to help stop Lazer fire.It can be combined with normal body armour which is good
whoa, whoa, whoa … the “most seasoned historical wargamers” don’t understand the term meta gaming? I must ave missed something in last week’s show. 😀 I’ll have to check out that comment stream again. Mind’s Eye in gaming started with White Wolf 2nd Edition in the mid 1990s, when they rolled out what they were calling “Mind’s Eye Theatre” in those days – what would become more commonly known as Live Action Role Playing, or LARP. I don’t think traditional White Wolf “five-dots” pen and paper RPG was known as Mind’s Eye. Been out of that scene for 15 years,… Read more »
That was me
Mind’s eye theatre was always in relation to the LRAP and never referred to the table-top game
You’re right. ‘Mind’s Eye Theatre’ was the brand / description they gave to the LARP version of their Vampire: the Masquerade setting.
I’ve not heard people use the term more generically. Although (annoyingly to me) the term LARP has come to be associated more with running around the forest with latex weapons over a weekend – something that seems to be fairly light on roleplay to me.
I don’t roleplay much these days but some friends are still running a Vampire LARP and I occasionally do cameo NPC roles which is a lot of fun.
@grimwolfuk and @angelicdespot – Sounds like we concur. 😀 That’s what I said in my post, unless you were just backing me up. 😀 I think MET / LARP for WW was also technically rolloed our for WtA and MtA, although I don’t think it ever took off like it did for VtM. Honestly, that’s when I quit VtM. Once people started playing rock-paper-scissors in night clubs, that was my cue to move on to a different game. We had some fun with WtA in modern times, MtA in World War II, and finally WtA in the American Revolution, before… Read more »
Just backing you up dude 🙂
Likewise! I played in a couple of pretty good Werewolf: the Apocalypse LARPs as well as a good Sabbat one. I don’t think any of the alternative settings were ultimately as suitable for LARPing as Vampire was / is though. I never tried the rebooted settings. As for Rock / Paper / Scissors in a nightclub, I’ve never done that but we did have some awesome special games. One Vampire game we had a live band playing and several people NPC’ing ‘normal humans’. It was a private event so although some non-gamers had been invited, they had also been warned… Read more »
Cool deal @grimwolfuk and @angelicdespot – I’ll say this much for the rebooted system – it was much more unified and clean-cut when it came to crossovers. Old Gothic-Punk / WoD was five games that were at least in theory inter-compatible … to a point. 🙁 The new WoD was one unified system from the outset, so the different “races” could play with / against each other much more smoothly. Just wasn’t a fan of what they did to werewolves in the setting (new tribes, background, etc), and Mage especially. Interesting to see it looks like the older settings are… Read more »
It never worried me that the old systems weren’t properly compatable. The problem was that most people didn’t seem to realise it. There was enough rules crossover to be able to do so as much as you wanted, provided you understood that you were playing from the perspective of one of the games. i.e. you could introduce all the other stuff into a game of Vampire without any problem, as long as you understood you were playing VAMPIRE and that the theme and the story would focus upon the stories of the Kindred. It made a lot of sense to… Read more »
I agree 110% @angelicdespot . I always preferred one setting, with one or maybe two others strictly as enemies or uncertain temporarily allies and NPC flavor. However, our single biggest chronicle was an “Avengers” model as you say 😀 … and while successful for most of its run, was also a nightmare – a mistake I never repeated.
@oriskany – Yikes! I think the biggest problem with merged campaigns is not the rules (which can be done well) but that you really cut down on story options. If the various factions / species are really different with their own agendas, then every ‘Avengers’ game becomes fundamentally about the relationships between different groups of people (or not people). And that story – while it can be interesting – is fundamentally the same whether you’re talking about Werewolves and Vampires, Ultramarines and Dark Angels in the Deathwatch or Hulk and Iron Man. If you don’t play ‘Avengers’ (and I would… Read more »
Overly-crossover-ed chronicles (yes, that’s a term I just made up … you’re welcome) I found also suffered in terms of tone, mood, motif, and theme, contrasting tones would “cancel each other out.” Spooky, dreary, eerie Wraith character stories and blood-n’-balls Werewolf didn’t mix, much less esoteric, metaphysical Mage and dark, Machiavellian politicking of Vampire. It’s like when you mix too many colors in your paint palette and you wind up with a muddy gray. I agree 100%, the stories were more interesting overall when you focused on the struggles, personal conflicts, politics, mysteries, and existential threats of one “race” (for… Read more »
They just have to set a time limit to the diplomacy between each turn! Watching Justin and Warren trying to out diplomacy each other would be awesome!
“Destroying Friendships since 1959” – Diplomacy can be a cutthroat heartbreaker of a game.
We want to see a fair number of the team locked in the studio for a full weekend playing Diplomacy, live streaming and/or live blocking the event
I think what made Diplomacy so “cut throat” and heartbreaking was the game length. Lots of games have betrayal, etc, and its not as big a deal because the game only takes 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes, etc. No big deal, you yell “aw, ya got me! I’ll get ya next time, ha ha!”
A game that you’ve been working at for 4, 6, or even more hours … and then someone stabs you in the back … that’s a different experience. 😀
That’s why we always had a hard and fast rule that all friendships must absolutely be checked at the door prior to agreeing to play the game. Once that was a standard prior to game play everyone understood that and no friendship was ever lost in the literally hundreds of games of diplomacy that I played. It did get to the point though that if more than three guys played against me that had played me before they knew right up front that they had to ally together and take me out first or else i’d be sure to beat… Read more »
When reading through Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Vampire: The Masquerade there was a section in the front of the book which talked about the types of RP you could do. Mind’s Eye was used as you suggest, for the basis of LARP, but it has become more of a universal term for a role-playing game which doesn’t use maps, grids miniatures and the like…at least within the circles that I have role-played with. I think it’s a pretty good term for it as well, even if it wasn’t its original intention. A game played out in the theatre of the… Read more »
Cool deal, @brennon . I’ll say this much, I totally agree that these are the kinds of games that are best run without grids, minis, hexes, or too much “wargame-ey” tactical detail … or at least structure. We’d always have a map of some kind, but this was much more of a “picture is worth 1000 words” sketch to just help people visualize where everyone was. We certainly weren’t measuring distances with tape measures of counting squares on a grid. 😀
That has very much been my experience as well.
Happy Sunday!
After a while together you may need a hobby that your other half ISN’T into such as Golf, or whatever you get up to in your shed… mine’s gaming. Sure ,my wife gets something out of it; a happier hubby and piles of boxes with nice graphics to stare at in several rooms.
I haven’t played D&D for a fair while since 3rd Ed, I’m sure that was “mind’s eye” and so did baulk a bit when I started seeing official minis etc appear in the shops with later editions… the cynic in me putting it down to the game having to adapt to a new business model. As for “meta”, I have meta-stuff in my work all the time (meta-data, meta-models, meta-languages) but have found different gamers dropping the term “meta” on its own to often mean completely different things… but if it helps this is what Urban Dictionary has to say:… Read more »
Also the DPS term that @Warzan had never heard of is also an MMO term
I am sure Warren would love a little tank and spank.
Ben mentioned Adrian Smith… Hate vol 1 book has been out of print and stock for a while, but got notification it may be available in a month or so (reprint) just in time for the CMON game in early 2019. In the meantime a certain online retail behemoth was selling Vol 2 for about £7 (from ~£30)… and I’ve just seen why!
That same website has pre-orders open for a vol 1 & 2 compendium landing in December 2018 to set the mood for the game.
Very cool – I love his artwork. It’s always raw and brutal with an alien quality to it, especially when he does Elves…they always look so cool!
I don’t think there are any elves in Hate… It’s all a bit brutal! 😉
HAPPY SUNDAY!!!!!! be back after I watch the video
The other massive advantage of using gaming as the hook for a dating experience is the fact that if this person is engaged with the idea you already have a connection to build upon.
Being comfortable in my own skin and over 40 I would never attempt to hide or be embarrassed by the person I really am. Life is to short to live with a partner who wants you to be something other than the real you.
For us we have always used minis and wipe clean boards for dungeons and fighting encounters in games. The only reasons were
1. It makes it so much easier for the DM to keep track of what’s going on
2. Most RPGs that have magic have areas of effect so it’s important to know who is where
There are plenty of RPGs where we haven’t used it. Games like TORG etc but minis (we used the same citadel Norman’s from skeletons to rust monsters) do help speed everything up
Happy Sunday everyone 🙂 I have a friend who arranges team building events for companies using board games. He also work as a volunteer for a house for young immigrants, where they play board games, helping the kids develop social skills and meet across different cultures and norms. So yeah, I think (board) games are totally great for developing social skills and get a team to understand each other better. Hell, even CIA use board games to develop their teams. Hopefully it’ll become more and more common to use games in this fashion as well. Having said above, then funnily… Read more »
Work and boardgames?
For me I like to keep work and outside work as separate as possible. So I’ll talk about football etc in work but I wouldn’t call any of them close friends like the ones I have known for 30 years and game with
First off happy Sunday all!!
Great show, and very interesting for me. I have always been very guarded with my hobby when dating, Its something I’ve wanted to share but just maybe lacked the confidence to come out with or its taken quite some time to reveal! I will certainly have to give the article a read now on the back of this to see what I can change going forward 🙂
“Don’t touch it! DON’T TOUCH IT!! It’s glowing!” Yet Cass can’t help herself…
Really? On a first date? 😉
Happy Sunday! @cassn – great to have you on the show and great article too. Really thought provoking. Have you seen / heard about Consentacle? I’ve not played it, but it sounds fascinating, and quite along the lines of the games you’ve already mentioned. The two players are a human and an alien, using non-verbal communication to have a mutually satisfying sexual experience! Here’s the kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/990619951/consentacle-a-card-game-of-human-alien-intimacy I told my girlfriend quite early on that I was a gamer. Possibly on our first date. In the past I’ve been very shy about gaming, but for a long time now… Read more »
I’m back from watching the video … (no please don’t leave .. please 🙁 ) Well I quite enjoyed that one. First of all Warren, just some feedback the sound was excellent it was easily the best XLBS audio wise. Seriously. It was interesting to hear Ben describe “Mind’s eye” roleplaying. I sarted on D&D Magenta/Cyan in the early 80s … progressed to AD&D, Traveller(Black books) Boot Hill, Top Secret, Runequest eventually AD&D second Edition . Never touched a mini or had an action grid for 10 years. That was how we rolled (heh 😉 ) It was the thing… Read more »
We Sam’s need to form a union.
It’s the definition I’ve grown up with when role-playing and think it works quite well. Coming from a wargaming background INTO RP I think it made sense to use miniatures but nowadays we don’t do that as much.
For example; playing a Savage Worlds game tonight without miniatures set during the Roaring Twenties!
Yes I can see your point, and the term makes perfect sense, but I was just reflecting on the fact that for most of the inital years that was the beauty of role-playing, no board needed and just an area to throw some dice. I was the reverse of you Ben, a role-player that evolved into a miniature wargammer, and I love making the mini scenes that make it clear to both players what the lay of the land is , as there isn’t a GM/DM to to it for them I have no real issue with the use of… Read more »
I have taken board gaming into the workplace and it worked out great! When I deployed to Iraq I took Diplomacy along with me and had all seven of my officers play a long running game where they came together every Sunday for one hour and played a couple of turns. It was a great way for them to de stress in a combat zone and further helped them develop their relationships and their ability to work together as a team. They were all pretty much reluctant at first but once they got into the game they couldn’t get enough… Read more »
That’s the first time I’ve heard anyone say they played Diplomacy to ‘de-stress’ – are you sure you were playing it right? 🙂
I agree with @angelicdespot . They played Diplomacy to DE-stress? What did they do after that, juggle burning chainsaws? 😀
I should say that I’ve never actually played it. Would love to, but between the time it takes and the brutality of it, I don’t know anyone to play it with even if I picked up a copy.
Think the key to the destressing is in the part about the deployment
Not digging the new mics lads, a little hollow and echoish?
I thought the same. Listening on headphones and the sound isn’t as nice as before. Also they are kind of big and in the way!