River Horse Announces FILLY SIZED FOLLIES, New Adventures for the TAILS OF EQUESTRIA Role Playing Game.

When I first read that Hasbro had licensed a role playing game based on the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic television series, my mood wavered between excitement and skepticism. Hasbro had already created one role playing game in an attempt to provide a gateway into the hobby for younger gamers. That game, Pokemon Jr. Adventure Game, was a fun game with a very simple design by Bill Slavicek and Stan!, but it never fulfilled its potential because Hasbro quickly abandoned the game line after sales didn't meet expectations.

My skepticism faded when I found out that the game would be produced by River Horse Ltd., a British game company started as a way for Alessio Cavatore to publish his own gaming material. Alessio was one of Games Workshop's key designers in the late 1990s and is one of the better war game designers in the industry. His past work includes Mordheim, Bolt Action, Kings of War, and several other excellent games. His past work in the Grim Dark alleys of Warhammer and the bloody fields of World War II, may not make him seem the best candidate for a My Little Pony game, but all of these games share one simple quality. They are all clearly written and free from cumbersome rules that can lead to analysis paralysis.

In short, he's exactly the kind of game designer who could create a set of rules that were simple enough for kids to understand while being deep enough for adults to enjoy. If you don't believe me, you really should check out Kings of War. It's a miniature war game that plays quickly and with almost no need to go back to the rulebook once you've read through them once. They are also complex enough that the game has come to fill the niche left behind by the absence of Warhammer Fantasy Battle pretty seamlessly.


Unlike the old Pokemon Jr. Adventure Game, which was published by Hasbro, the Tails of Equestria game has been extremely well supported by River Horse who is now publishing their fifth adventure for the game.

Filly Sized Follies contains three different stories for young gamers to play through, with adventures aimed at ponies of levels 2-5.

All around Equestria there are ponies in need, and only the player's ponies can help them!

In this book you will find:

Three brand new adventure stories that can easily fit into any ongoing game or be played by themselves.

A range of challenges for fresh-faced characters, through to experienced adventurers.

A whole host of new characters, each with brand new original artwork!

Past adventures in the game have focused on teaching players the value of kindness, teamwork, and friendship. This adventure is likely more of the same.
 

Learning from the Casual Gamer: What I Learned Reading Lauren Orsini's Review of Magic: Arena of the Planeswalkers

I've been excited about the upcoming release of Hasbro's Magic the Gathering: Arena of the Planeswalkers board game since I first got news of it last year. The game has already received limited release through brick and mortar specialty stores and on Amazon.com, but has an official wide release date of August 1, 2015. I've got my game on pre-order with a smaller FLGS who isn't on Wizards of the Coast's list of premiere stores and I'm eager to play it. My eagerness is two fold. First, the game has received praise on Boardgame geek and Tom Vasel has given it a big thumbs up. Second, the game looks to be heavily influenced by one of my favorite introductory miniatures games Heroscape.

My eagerness to play the game has only increased after reading an interesting, and mildly irritating, review of Magic: Arena of the Planeswalkers from Forbes, entitled "I played 'Magic the Gathering: Arena of the Planeswalkers' and All I Got Was Drunk."

The article was irritating because of its focus on drinking, used for humor I suppose, and the fact that it was a perfect demonstration of the ubiquity of tl;dr culture. If something is too long people will ignore it. It's one of those path dependent results of video games masking the the mechanics underlying game play. Video games implement the mechanics and players don't need to know how a game works in order to begin play and can learn how the mechanics work through play. There is still a learning curve, but it is an active learning curve.

I'm not entirely opposed to this, but it is a mentality that doesn't work too well with board games. You cannot play a board game without having some sense of the mechanics. This is one of the reasons that some games have "basic" and "advanced" rules that can be used. As I wrote, I'm not opposed to working toward making games more "open and play," but I am frustrated by how the transition to digital reading has lowered people's tolerance for long form journalism and games with rules longer than six pages.

The article is interesting because it demonstrates what an encounter with a "light" wargame is to a casual gamer. I have often wondered why Heroscape didn't do as well as I had hoped and Lauren Orsini filled in that gap for me nicely. To me, Heroscape and games like it, are popcorn and soda affairs that are quick to play and don't require a Master's Degree in Rules Acquisition like the classic Advanced Squad Leader does. Compared to the hundreds of pages of rules in ASL, a 20 page rulebook is nothing. But for someone used to pick up and play, or 4 page rulebooks, the story is quite different.

Image Source ICv2

For gamers like Lauren, Arena of the Planeswalkers 20 page rulebook is the referential counterpoint to those hundreds of pages of rule and being asked to flip through those pages to find a rule is similar to us searching for rule A25.45 which refers us to rule F.8, but is really referring to rule A25.53.

In Tom Vasel's reviews of the game, he talks about how quick the game plays and his group is playing it in less than half an hour. In Lauren's review, she describes how she and her group played for over three hours and still hadn't finished the game. She also expressed concern that her group might not have been playing the game correctly.


It would be easy enough to turn this discussion into a screed against Lauren and tl;dr gamers like her, but that's not what I want to do here. Yes, tl;dr culture irritates me. I don't like it when my students haven't read The Federalist Papers because they are difficult to understand and I don't like it when a gamer is intimidated by a "mere" 20 pages of rules.

 Having written that, 20 pages is actually quite a lot of rules. The basic rules of Chess, one of the greatest games ever made, can be written in two pages.

I think that as fans of games and gaming we need to take into account how intimidating a 20 page rulebook can be and not be surprised when someone is intimidated by it. Think about those game sessions when you wanted to play a new game, but hadn't read the rules yet, and read them aloud to the group before play. Remember how long that took? Remember how not fun that was? Playing a game with a longer rulebook requires home work to be done by at least one of the game group. Keep that in mind when designing games, but more importantly keep that in mind when playing with inexperienced gamers.

It is our job as game advocates and fans to familiarize ourselves with games so that we can teach them to others and make their experiences as much "open and play" as possible. I think that Lauren's article gives us some pretty good insight into how an inexperienced gamer approaches our hobby. She did her best to learn and play the game with her group and wrote a relatively positive review for someone as intimidated as she was.


Now...what Forbes was thinking when they assigned this article to her is another matter entirely.

Of Black Widow and "Boy's Toys" #WheresNatasha

It has recently been reported by Jenna Busch at Legion of Leia that Hasbro opted to solicit a toy based on one of the more exciting scenes in the recent Avengers: Age of Ultron movie. In this particular scene, S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and Avengers member Black Widow springs into action by dropping out of the Avenger's Quinjet on a suped up motorcycle.

It's a pretty amazing sequence and a scene I look forward to watching repeatedly in the future. It's one of those ideal moments when film manages to capture the magic of the comic book page and translate it into real life. Throughout a progression of Marvel inspired films, Scarlett Johansson has managed to bring the Black Widow character alive on the screen with a nice balance between snark and charm. This moment was created to give her character a well-deserved action spotlight. This makes the scene an ideal choice for a toy play set based on the film.

There's only one problem.

 

Hasbro's play set based on the scene doesn't include Black Widow. It doesn't include her in the box as an action figure, and it doesn't feature her as a member of the Avengers on the cover of the box. This is a huge problem that has been discussed at length on a number of Feminist and Geek sites. If you are interested in their discussion, and you should be, I'd direct you to start with the Legion of Leia  and The Mary Sue and move on from there. Even though I'm the father of seven year old twin daughters who adore Black Widow as on of the - too few - female super heroes featured on a regular basis, I don't have anything to say from that perspective that hasn't already been said better.

Instead, I thought I'd take a moment to address what I believe is an underlying assumption that informed Hasbro's decision to exclude Black Widow from their offerings. Surprisingly, this isn't the assumption that these toys are "for boys." That may be one of the assumptions over at Hasbro HQ, but I think this falls into the "boys wouldn't want to play with girls as toys" sub-category of that assumption. I think that Hasbro not only assumes that these toys are for boys, but that boys would have no interest in pretending to be Black Widow battling the minions of Hydra and Ultron.

They are wrong on so many levels. Way back in the before times, in the not now, when the consensus view of the 21st century was Zardoz... Okay, that time never existed, but let's stick to the before times, in the not now. A time we will call "The Eighties." During this dark and mysterious age, action figures were a relatively new phenomenon. Sure, full sized GI Joe's had been around for a while, but the smaller action figures that would come to dominate the action figure market were relatively new. I don't know if Star Wars action figures were the first of this new line of toy, but they were an early one and they inspired toy makers to create new action figures for kids to play with. 

Those toys included a new and exciting line of GI Joe action figures that tied in with an animated TV show of the same name. The first "series" of Joe figures included three characters who were then, and are now, my favorite characters in that line. I played with those toys for hours on end. I pretended to be these characters as they battled COBRA and its nefarious plots. To me, these three characters are my "core Joes." They define who I most liked imagining myself to be. They were Snake Eyes, Stalker, and...in a turn that makes Hasbro's decision to cut a character played by Scarlett Johansson all the more ironic.

Scarlett.

 

What was the name of the company that made this mysterious female toy that both boys and girls (ages 5 and up) could play with? 

Hasbro.

As I mentioned earlier, Scarlett was one of the characters I most liked to role play when I was fighting against Cobra. She had an awesome skill set, just look up and check it out, and she had a hand crossbow. A freakin' hand crossbow! 

So I'd just like to add to the chorus of voices that are pointing out that young girls just as valuable as consumers, fans, and players. That it is also true that there are probably young boys out there who would be eager to pretend to be Black Widow as she defends the world against the forces of Hydra. Heck, I even know a father of seven year old twin girls who would jump at that opportunity.

 

Would You Like to Play a Game? -- Hasbro's Original D&D Collector Box is a Part of a Corporate Vision

The new Original Edition D&D Premium Reprint from Wizards of the Coast is truly a wonder to behold, and it gives the buyer a good glimpse at Hasbro's D&D corporate strategy moving forward.  I'll discuss this a bit more in a minute, but first let's just have a look at the box.

The original three D&D booklets were sold as a part of a collector's edition which featured either a woodgrain box (super rare) or a white box (the version I have at home), and this new edition comes in an engraved wooden box that I found to be pretty spectacular.

One of the nice little features that stood out as a real highlight for me was the reflective image on the inside of the box top. Wizards/Hasbro could have let the wood alone speak for the product, and that would have been great, but this Wizardly image really sets a nice tone.

Here you get a glimpse of what the box looks like when the booklets are stored within. Notice the red ribbon? That ribbon will allow you to remove the 7 paper saddle stitched books without damaging the edges, this is a nice bit of design that like LORDS OF WATERDEEP demonstrates a significant amount of thought has been put into both presentation and utility.

The box itself contains the original 3 booklets as well as all four of the eventual supplements that were published for the original D&D game. This new edition provides new cover art for all of the booklets. The Eldritch Wizardry cover that freaked my neighbor out so much when I was a kid is no longer present, instead there is a picture of a Wizard summoning tentacles. This would probably still upset said neighbor, but it is a less controversial image. And the old cover is one that would stir up some serious discussions on my Facebook feed where the battle lines of some Lamentations of the Flame Princess fans would do virtual battle with some of the Athena Anthology supporters would debate its appropriateness. I won't enter that fray as I am a fan of LotFP and of many of the Progressive game design that has been created over the past few years. Regardless of anyone's thoughts on the Eldritch Wizardry cover, the Greyhawk cover is a beauty.

Covers aside, there is plenty to discuss regarding the interiors of the booklets which are unchanged from the original -- or largely unchanged. Part of me thinks this is endearing as it lets gamers see the art that inspired a 40 year old hobby. The other part of me thinks that if they were going to redo any of the art, they might as well have replaced the interior art. There are talented artists who could have done chiaroscuro work that was an homage to the old art, but didn't look like doodles that ...well...I drew. Then again, that might just be the point. Anyone is a good enough artist to draw visual monsters for their home campaign. All you need is suspension of disbelief.

There is no inclusion of the Chainmail rules set here, so you will have to play D&D using the "optional" combat system presented in the first booklet. Thankfully, that system was the basis for the modern d20 engine and can be easily learned by the modern gamer. Or, rather it can be created rather easily by the modern gamer as this game is nigh unplayable by itself without some interpretation and house rules. This is why there were articles written and an explosion of alternate RPGs. The modern gamer has 40 years of interpretation, precedent, and house rules to work with so we can actually use these rules, but I do warn you that they are a bit different from what you might be used to.

Which brings me to the point I hinted at during the opening paragraph. This product points to Hasbro's new corporate strategy -- or rather a better tactical application of their long time strategy -- they want to have "a D&D experience for every gamer at your table." They make this abundantly clear with an advertising flier containing that very quote. In the past, the tactic used by Hasbro to advance the strategy of "a D&D for everyone" was an attempt to create a "perfect D&D" that was balanced, appealed to old gamers, and was hip for new gamers. This was what 4th edition was trying to be, a D&D for everyone. That tactic failed. It insulted some gamers and further fractured the customer base.

The new tactic is very different and is what Hasbro should have been doing all along. That tactic is to provide products with D&D Intellectual Property and Brand that match the needs of various gamers.

Want old school games?

Cool. Hasbro will release old rule books in collectors editions and pdfs. You can play D&D as it was originally played.

Want to play 2nd through 4th edition? 

Those are being supported too in different ways.

Interested in D&D Next our new rules set that is a combination of old and new school design and fairly easily converted between editions?

That will be coming out this year.

Are you a Eurogamer?

Have you seen LORDS OF WATERDEEP?

Wargamer?

Have you seen CONQUEST OF NERATH?

Casual RPG/Board Gamer?

Our Ravenloft, Ashardalon, and Drizzt game is just right for you.

New to gaming?

Try DUNGEON out.

The same is true for video games etc. and I think that this is a wonderful approach by Hasbro. The games they have been designing to support their IP have been excellent. RAVENLOFT and LORDS OF WATERDEEP have been played several times by my group over the past two years and the digital app version of WATERDEEP is looking pretty compelling to me.

So how about it? Would you like to play a game?