December 2017 Newsletter

 This is our new newsletter. Are you excited to read it?

Sorry for the long delay! The holidays delayed us a little, but I promise that it’s worth it. 

CMRN’s Part

I’ve recently gotten into the world of Playstation 2 emulation, and I’m excited to attempt some Streamed Content over the next few weeks based on that emulation. I played quite a bit of Minority Report: Everybody Runs, one of the best games ever made, and I also went back to the team-controlling stealth shooter SOCOM to see if it was as good as I remembered. It’s still pretty good.

I’ve also been DMing a Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition campaign, and although we talked about some scenario release stuff in the podcast, I also think that I might record some short videos about DMing that I think will be helpful for people. I’ve been watching a lot of the stuff that Matt Colville does, and I’ve skipped around WebDM, and I think both of those series are very great at “big ideas” and are a little less helpful in the pragmatic, useable information zone. I really enjoy when Colville talks about specific instances from campaigns, and this is what this would be -- just a simple campaign diary reskinned around a theme of solving specific problems. That’s the idea, anyway. 

Danni’s Tabletop Corner

Codenames:

Codenames is a 2015 board game for 2-8 players designed by Vlaada Chvátil and published by Czech Games. It’s a word game. You know, like Scrabble or Apples to Apples or Boggle. But it’s also very different. I play board games with a diverse group of coworkers that don’t really play games elsewhere. For most, before my play group started the last game they had played was probable either Cards Against Humanity or Monopoly - perhaps also Cranium. A few others are fellow aficionados - lovers of groggy games, tabletop role-playing games, and one even has an unhealthy affinity for Arkham Horror.

All this being said, Codenames is a universal group favorite. People absolutely love it. It’s one of those games that have almost completely transparent mechanics and even neophytes to the hobby can immediately grasp it’s depth. Every game I am impressed with how its loop both creates beautiful human dramas and resolves them.

In Codenames, you divide your group into two teams - red and blue. Each team then chooses a Spymaster. Even players are better - I think 6 is a great number - 4 is for more experienced playgroups.

You then deal out a grid of 25 cards in a 5x5 square. Each card has a noun on it. Bird. France. President. Orange. Leprechaun. 

The spymasters are given a grid-key card to share. It is a little card and you put that card in a stand so only the spymasters can see. It represents the 5x5 grid in front of them, and denotes that some of those words are red, some are blue, some are beige, and one is black.

The theme or fiction of the game is this: as a spymaster, you are trying to get your team of spies to contact certain individuals. These individuals are using Codenames (!) Those codenames are the words in the grid. But you can’t just say their names. You have to try to get them to contact those folks by giving them clues. Clues are always in the following format: WORD - NUMBER. So, Hot 3, for example. That means “there are three words in this array that each relate to the word “hot” somehow. So I might be trying to get you to guess “dog,” “fire,” and “desert.” Or do I mean “texas” instead of “desert?” … Oh shit.

And this is the core engine of drama in Codenames. A well-intentioned Spymaster thinks long and hard about a clue, gives it, smirks with self-assurance, and then watches in rules-enforced silence as their team slowly talks themselves out of the “obvious” solution. Or, a hasty Spymaster issues a clue, and then immediately is filled with embarrassment and regret - there are countless valid interpretations. (I vividly remember saying “delta 2” wanting my team to guess “blues” and “mud” and they went on to debate “airplane” and “drone”

If your team guesses incorrectly lots of bad things could happen! If they guess one of the beige squares, that’s just an innocent bystander - your turn is over and the other spymaster gives it a shot. If your team guesses a square that’s the other team’s color, the other team gets a point! If either team ever guesses the black square, they just lose!

A game of Codenames is not complete until every participant gets a shot at the Spymaster role - it’s absolutely central to the experience and you can’t really appreciate the game fully until you’ve been in the hot seat.

The game comes in classic, picture, co-op two-player, and “adult vocab” varieties, but they are all great and I heartily recommend Codenames!