Descent: Journeys in the Dark

Curse you, Wil Wheaton! Curse you TableTop! Darn you for opening a door to entertainment that gets me away from the television and hanging out with my friends. If not for you I would probably not have wonderful new games to play or be willing to try new games that you haven't featured on TableTop, because they look like fun. Every time I watch TableTop I want to open my wallet and give you all the money and play all of the games. One of the games that has not been featured on TableTop that has made it into the house is Descent: Journeys in the Dark. 

Descent: Journeys in the Dark is a game that my husband researched and picked up. He spent a lot of time painting all of the game pieces. Decent is a dungeon crawler with a hundred different pieces. There is an entire story line that goes with the game and the objectives change with each twist and turn of the story. Each time you play the game the experience from previous boards follow your character to the next plot twist in the story. It sounds complicated and it is, somewhat. It is one of those games, that while it may take a while to set up the dungeon because there are different snap together boards and to set up the tokens and game markers. Once everything is set up, it is actually a pretty smooth game of strategy mixed with chance.

Today we played part of the second mission called The Fat Goblin. We enter into the town of Arhynn to trade and restock supplies when the Goblin Horde ransacks the place and is trying to make off with the harvested crops, which would leave the town destitute in the winter. Not only are there goblins scampering all over the place pillaging the once peaceful village, they brought with them a pack of ill mannered zombie dogs that have fleas and maggots and are running a muck, scaring small children in rough simple clothes. The rudeness knows no bounds.  It is not easy being a hero, when stuff like this happens. I am pretty sure that all Grisban the Thirsty wants to be doing is not wielding an axe at the scruffy mutts and would rather be raising a mug and telling drunk tales of the adventure he just came from. A heroes work is never done.

With a combination of good card play and really bad dice throws on my part, Grisban the Thirsty along with the help of his fellow hero companions, Asherian, Leoric of the Book and Avric Albright, the heroes were able to wrestle two out of the four harvest bundles from the scampering mischievous goblins with minimum damage to their health and stamina.  I am pretty sure that more villagers and crop bundles would have been lost if not for the strategic planning of Leoric of the Book.

Rescuing the bundles of harvested crops is only part of the quest, because now the fearsome foursome have to go rescue all those idiots that weren't smart enough to run and hide when a goblin horde is messing up the neighborhood. There is a farmer that believes his brother is being targeted in this, and even though Grisban thinks the blood spattered farmer in rough simple clothes has had one too many knocks to the head from fending off some maggoty zombie dogs, he has agreed to get drunk after they rescue his brother and the rest of the missing villagers, despite the fact that he fights better drunk.  Asherian thinks that is really big of him, but Grisban is pretty sure that Asherian is just being sarcastic about the whole thing.

And this is the end of part one of The Fat Goblin. The next part of the journey is where the heroes invade the Goblin Horde's home base and try to take back what is theirs, while trying to keep from dying. A lot of Goblins have been made orphans by these heroes and are probably out for revenge and farmers probably taste good in stew.

I am looking forward to the next round of this game. The more you play, the more you get into the different twists and turns of the story, and the more you come to appreciate the different aspects of the characters involved. If you are interested in seeing more of the amazing games pieces that my husband painted, here is a link to his blog on Board Game Geek.

We All Live In A Yellow Submarine

It is raining. Not a little bit of rain but the sort of rain that makes you wonder if you need to build an ark and flood warnings have gone out hours ahead of time.  It has slowed down at work just a smidgen and because of this and everyone is a little punch drunk silly from a long work week. Two of my cubicle mates from behind me joke about how they needed a submarine to get to work. Maybe it was the word submarine, or the fact that you shouldn't joust with standing water in your car, not entirely sure what started it, but one of them starts singing “We All Live in a Yellow Submarine” and then the other joins in. One of the voices is sweet high and bubbly and the other deeper, slightly out of tune. 

Just for a moment it brings me out of the bland gray walls of my cubicle and back to a time when I was stuck in traffic with my mom and high school chum on the way to a band competition. There was nothing to see, but fields on either side of us and stand still cars in front and behind us on the road. My mom is a big Beatles fan and had one of their greatest hits CD in the car. That song came on, and we sang it at the top of our lungs with the windows rolled down and hit repeat and did it again and again until traffic started moving. By the end of the car ride we were laughing so hard that we had tears leaking out of the sides of our eyes and we were gasping for breath.

My work life might be crazy and my private life is sometimes swinging off the chandelier in all different directions, but just having that moment of Deja vu of a the goods times can take a potentially hectic day and calm it down just a little bit.

Hinterkind Vol1: The Waking World

Free Comic Book Day is one of my favorite days out of the year. My local comic shop, Comix Connection goes all out for it. Not only are there free comics, but there are discounts on graphic novels, figurines there is a food drive and there are great discounts on back issues and a whole lot of Storm Troopers wandering around.  It is one of my happy places. This year. I had a wedding of a dear friend on Free Comic Book Day, and there was a hard choice to be had. Do I ditch the wedding, after all what is one less bridesmaid, or do I miss the comic shop and my free comics?

With a lot of prep work on my part the night before, and with the aid of my husband I was able to do both. What is a little less sleep when there are comics free comics on the line? Fuel by a cup of tea and a whole lot of hair spray, we were at Comix Connection early before it turned into a complete mad house or comic mayhem.  I probably had the fanciest hair there while I was picking out my free comics.

Among my acquisitions that day I picked up Hinterkind Vol 1: The Waking World by Ian Edington. The summary on the back of the graphic novel talked about how it was a post apocalyptic world, where all the creatures that are in fairy lore are actually real and are reclaiming the world as their own. After reading the first volume I am hooked, and have started to follow it in single issues.  The creatures of fairy lore are not sweet innocent and forgiving of the years of hiding in the shadows. In fact it seems like most of them have a taste for the flesh of humans and that the human race is not longer the dominate species, because of it.  In fact they are closer to an endangered species.  There are some interesting twists as to what some people will do to survive and the story moves along at a pretty quick pace.

This is not the sort of comic that you would be able to miss an issue and still figure out what is going on in the following issue.  The art and color work well with the writing and it is a joy to look at and adds depth to the  story. I absolutely loved with in the the opening where they were hunting a zebra in an abandoned sky scrapper office that turned into a jungle habitat. It sound convoluted when I describe it, but the concept and execution brings everything together. If you haven't checked it Hinterkind out, do so. It isn't like every other post apocalyptic comic out there, it has some fresh idea's and makes a person go hmm.

Fatale: Death Chases Me

Fatale: Death Chases Me by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips published by Image was an unexpected delight.  The story is complex, but no so complex that you can't follow it. It is the sort of complex that makes you want to turn the next page and find out what sort of sick twist is going to happen next. 

This is not a series for the queasy and easily offended, since there is a fair amount of murder and mayhem going on among the corruption, lust and lies.  The way that the story line is set up it some times reminds me of the  William Holden's narration in Sunset Boulevard and it other ways it reminds me of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski with the way it jumps back and forth between the assumed present and the assumed past, with part of it being a story within a story. 

The art in this works very well with style of the story. If makes you feel like you just walked into an 1950's movie, complete with the style and sass of the era.  I am very much looking forward to following this series and can't wait to see what other creatures get pulled from the lore and into this alternate reality and where this blood soak path the femme fatale is going to lead to.