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Couple of comments so far...as I'm only about halfway through...still on the interview with Geoff and Brian about TAP.
First - I got a laugh about Craig's dismay with the Steven Erickson book, Gardens of the Moon. Similarly, I had heard great things about this book and series. I think I started Gardens of the Moon twice, before finally getting through it on my third try. Like Craig, I wasn't enthralled, but I could sense a good story in there somewhere. I read the 2nd book, and it was infinitely better. Unfortunately, I then proceeded to the next books in the series. I think I got through book 5 before finally giving up the series. I like the overall idea...which is that each of the first 4 books or so takes place on a different continent, with (almost) completely different characters, but you can get glimpses of a larger story. By book 5 he starts to bring events and characters together. But it's just TOO MUCH. Each book has a huge laundry list of characters, and they become increasingly hard to tell apart between books. That, and the characters are just too uber-powerful. I like George R.R. Martin and the "gritty realism" of those books, but I don't mind books where the characters are fantastically heroic either. But Erickson just goes too far. You meet a character in one book who's the greatest warrior ever...only to be one-upped by a character in the next book he's even more of the greatest warrior ever, and so on. Characters are literally leveling mountains at one point. Too much. So, anyway, if you bail on the series, no loss - although I do recommend the 2nd novel, Deadhouse Gates, as it's virtually standalone, and by far the best book in the series.
Second, I haven't made it through the whole interview segment with Geoff and Brian yet, but one comment that I just got to caught my attention. Geoff commented that they had wanted to try really hard to make it truly a "real time game", but the card flipping was just too much. This reminds of a game demo I've seen the last 2 years at WBC (World Boardgaming Championship) in Lancaster PA. A gentleman had a game he was calling "Wartime" - and I believe it was picked up by Valley Games this past year. It was a fairly simple game, where you had 2 types of warrior - knights and archers. The board was a basic hex grid - I believe he was using a Memoir 44 board for his demo. The goal was to kill all of the other guys troops, or get one of your pieces off of the opposite side of the board. For the demo, each "figure" was a stack of poker chips that represented their hit points. Deplete that stack of chips, that character was dead. The real-time aspect came into it, in that each side had 4 (or 5?) sand timers. In order to move one of your figures, you had to have a fresh timer. As soon as you moved a figure, you took a timer and turned it over next to that figure. That timer couldn't be used again until it was completely drained. All the timers were not the same, I think you had 2 30-second timers, 1 60-second, and 1 90-second, or something to that effect. Combat was very simple - archers could do 1 point of damage from up to 3 hexes away, and knights could do 2 points if they were next to someone. Maybe it was 2 ranged, and 3 in close combat...I don't remember, but you get the idea. The game starts out slow, but as your timers get out of sync, you find yourself constantly moving pieces, and trying to figure out what the other guy is going to do - it gets very fast and very furious quickly. Average game time was something like 5 minutes. I'll be interested to see how the publisher handles the graphic design, in particular the models used for the figures. Anyway, just thought I'd talk about it a bit, as it's the only truly "real time" board game I've seen.
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