Gary Gygax R.I.P

I blame today's sick day from work for me missing this news from yesterday until, well, just now.

Gary Gygax, father of dungeons and dragons and all things dice / geek related has passed away.

Pretty much most of the gaming and geekery I'm into is somehow tied to this man, so it felt wrong not to mark his passing away with a brief post, and a quote from the man himself:

"I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else."

There coming to get you, Barbara !

Mini-Hobby update - my boardgaming quest for the perfect boardgame may soon come to an end...

Over time I've picked up a number of games which on a high-level can be split into Eurogames (limited randomness, quite simple rules, quite deep tactics - e.g. Chess, Settlers of Catan, Gin Rummy, Ticket to Ride) and Ameritrash Games (greater randomness, lots of cool looking bits and normally strongly themed - e.g. Mousetrap, Fury of Dracula, Zombies!!!, Monopoly).

Now, I have some great Eurogames, but these can be off-putting for some people and are best played with a certain number of players. Ameritrash games tend to appeal to more people (due to pretty pieces) and can be more fun, casual games that work with a wider variety of people. So thus my quest begun to find the ultimate Ameritrash game, which needs:

• Quick to play
• Zombies !
• Good player interaction (teamwork / conflict)
• Zombies !
• Simple rules

By all reports, Last Night on Earth, The Zombie Game has this in spades. Released 2 months ago in the US, it has been getting great reviews from everyone over there. And it was pegged for a UK release this Halloween (how appropriate). But... today I found out that a tiny release of stock is being released this week (6 copies are headed to the shop that I spoke to) and then lots more stock will be released in 4-5 weeks (surely they mean "28 days later..." ?!).

And I am happy. As I have bagged one of those six copies :) Assuming royal mail put down the kettle and start working again, I should have my grubby hands on it something next week...

Braaaaiiinnssss...

Introducing... virtual vampire !

Recently I have been unsettled in my work and much of this was due to not having indulged in some good quality coding for quite a while. So I am intending to join the open source on line community with my own application - virtual vampire !

This tool will be primarily an exercise in building a complete system, with a decent front end and expandable modules, for running one of the sides in a board game - Fury of Dracula. The idea stemmed for another effort by someone where he had written an AI to randomly move for the hidden moves of Dracula in the game, and the player could then ask the system if Dracula was in the areas he was exploring or not.

It almost might be harder to play against a random opponent than a human who you can second guess. However, I intend to initially write a random movement AI for the game, then expand it into a more logical style opponent, looking 2-3 moves ahead like a rudimentary chess computer might. In this case, assigning probabilities to various choices and acting on that information, but still slightly randomly, to prevent an opponent second guessing the computers reactions. It may be possible to take this one step further and assign the AI various attributes (such as cowardly, aggressive or overly bold) to create a different flavour of play style each game - allowing a human player to pick up on this play style and counter play accordingly.

In any case, it's a work in (slow) progress, and all current hosted on the google code website