Come down and learn a new boardgame or play an old favorite.  Downtown Missoula Montana.

From the article….

A lot of writers are worried about online piracy, but Stackpole dismissed those concerns. “People downloading my stories from the big torrent sites were never going to buy them anyway. It’s no money out of my pocket.” He even admitted to downloading some of his own books from bittorrent sites if he didn’t already have a digital copy, saying it was far easier than scanning it in himself.

I haven’t ever read any of his books, but I did happen to go to a panel at the miscon convention where he said, “Here’s one thing that a lot of writers who aren’t as good do…’  I suppose when you have somewhere around thirty published novels you can afford to make pompous statements like that.

To be fair, he did follow it up with good advice about escalating your plot in a believable way.

Here is the article.  It’s about building a group of followers online so you have an audience once you start getting books published.

The Best Way To Break Into Science Fiction Writing Is Online Publishing

Michael Stackpole is the author of many Starwars and Battletech books as well a a number of other science fiction novels.

In the game, you basically run around a board and blast people.  The goal is to blast people until you have three frags under your belt.  Then you get a statboost and a new round starts.  If you can win the first couple of rounds, you can basically become an unstoppable juggernaut.  Or at least the number one target of everybody.

Had this game been around in the late 90′s It would have been great.  The game has kind of a Quake 2 feeling to it… well as close as a board game can get I suppose.  Instead the jokes and cards make you feel like you’ve gone back in time to where computer games were sketchy and connections were unreliable.  This is 2009 baby! Wake up!

I do have a couple gripes about the gameplay itself.  All of the movement is on squares and feels ‘chunky.’  There are not a lot of freedoms.  I wonder if a hex board would be better?  I have no idea!

Secondly is the lag… the time spent waiting between your turns is just staggering.  Especially considering a fps game is supposed to be cooking along.  It would be cool to have 2 turn tokens that get passed around.  When you get one, you can move and blast people.  Then pass the token.  Of course this would need some playtesting to see if it would even be feasible in the first place.

From some of the SJ games I’ve played, I wonder if ‘playtest’ is in their vocabulary.

Of course we had a game store backing us at the time. Sadly the store has closed leaving the spiel knights board game group out on their own. A small dedicated group of us have been able to continue playing great games since that time. Although the acquisition rate for new games has gone down dramatically, we still have a TON that we haven’t even been able to try out yet.

This year, the Spiel Knights will not have the backing of a game store. We are getting two merchant booths at the front of the convention. We will have a couple of different games, game tokens, trinkets, and other miscellaneous odds and ends. Please stop the Spiel Knight Merchant Booth by and say hey!

Or if you see anybody wearing a Spiel Knights shirt, they are always willing to play games.  If you need another person in your game, a Spiel Knight would gladly jump in.

Last year we ran a Miscon poker tournament, this year we’re talking about doing one again with a buy-in and jackpot.  We’ll just have to wait and see on that one.

Guests of Honor include cartoonist (and illustrater of  the Munchkin Series of games) John Kovalic as well as science fiction author Michael Stackpole.

There is not much more to say, other than here is a dorky little video from 2008 about it.

‘Come to Miscon‘