That is actually very fitting.
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I posted my Top 25 (20-16) on Friday.
Also, today I got another play of Crusaders: Thy Will be Done in (this time playing it right and it was a lot better!). And then another play of Architects of the West Kingdom (I love that game so much).
This time I started with Ada (I think, the one who starts with 11 Virtue and no money). So I decided to go for a high virtue cathedral strategy. Ended up at the top of the Cathedral and Virtue track (27 points) with a couple of buildings (7 points) and some gold/marble mixed in there.
Ended with 39 points. Sadly, first place had 43 points and second place had 41, but it was close! If I could have built my last two buildings faster than I did (was missing resources), the others wouldn’t have had the time to jump back up the Virtue track to finish tied with me.
Oh well. Still a really fun game.
I am absolutely throwing money at One Deck Galaxy.
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Thanks to Bruce Geryk over at Quarter to Three for pointing out this interesting, occasionally entertaining and apparently ongoing engagement with the copious footnotes to the rulebook of Phil Eklund’s Pax Emancipation by a real historian
With some “counter-engagement” from Phil himself.
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This is a dangerous website for my wallet.
I’m not usually a fan of Eklund’s libertarianist bent, but unfortunately saying things like:
This note clearly says that colonialism was good because it destroyed slavery:
And
except for a few coveted precepts, everything is basically slavery.
Just goes too far and is silly. You can make some good criticisms of Eklund, especially the too-general approach to the Enlightenment and the West, but it requires knowing stuff and not responding with generalisations in turn. I’m reminded of the response to his essay that accompanies Pax Pamir, which was little more than stupid shouting against something the crowd found objectionable.
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And thanks to you for pointing out said discussion here.
I love Phil Eklund’s Lords/Pax series and own nearly all of them apart from ‘Pax Emanicipation’ and ‘Lords of the Spanish Main’ (I have yet to find the latter at a reasonable price). After reading through some of the recent back and forth over Emanicipation I now definitely want to pick it up.
So cheers!
Edited to add: Phil Eklund’s often exasperating Capitalism-Cheerleading notwithstanding.
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Phil is definitely a genius game designer and just as definitely a political crank. I still have to get Pax Renaissance to the table, but I have to figure out the rules, first!
Yep. And more power to him. The presence of such a strong (idiosyncratic) mixture of talent and temper is what keeps the field interesting.
He’s like if the uncle nobody wants to be cornered by at Thanksgiving also made incredible and intricate turkey and stuffing.
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Interrupted my Top 25 Games Played to do my New to Me: January list.
Sadly, I think I’m going to have to skip game day on Sunday because of this damned cold. And I missed our lunchtime game day this week due to it as well.
Next game probably won’t be until our lunchtime Smash Up game next Friday.
I’m going through withdrawal!!!
So … Dice Masters, what do folks think?
I’m a Tom Vasel fan (yeah, I cringe when he does the component drop gimmick, I read that’s why he does it, but I support his Dice Tower Kickstarter despite that, heh 
), and he’s a big fan of the whole Dice Masters thing (at least in Nov, 2014, it was his #1 dice game in their Top 10 Dice Game video). I had seen there were solo rules up on BGG, but despite sometimes wanting to sling dice with the best of them, I had not chosen Marvel or DC or D&D or TMNT or Yu-Gi-Oh!, etc., and tried Dice Masters … up to now.
However, they’ve now gotten their hands (like everyone else in game development!) on the WH40K license, and are going hard into Warhammer 40,000. They started out with the campaign set of Ultramarines (of course) and Death Guard plague marines, with expansion packs for Orks and Space Wolves last year. Looks like this year they’ve got Dark Angels and Blood Angels already announced. I thought maybe @Private_Prinny, or others, might have some thoughts?
ETA: Oh, golly, another campaign set coming out this year, Fracture of Biel-Tan Campaign Box with Daemons of Chaos and Ynnari factions. 
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Finally got my White Tribe vassal module all set up the way I want it…and we’re going out of town this weekend. I absolutely swear to god I am gonna finish a game of this. I think it’s quite good, actually.
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Sorry, never heard of it. May have to see if my brother is interested in that Game.
My RL 40k-aficionado connection is a bit thin 
He goes for Iron Warriors and Khorne Berserkers (Chaos Marines) while I am going for Raven Guard, Dark Angels and White Scars (Space Marines) so the Ultramar Packagage (Ultramarines vs Plaguemarines) is a bit of a stretch for both of us if only tangentially interested…
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I quite like Dice Masters. If you’ve heard Tom Vasel talk about it, you’ve probably got an idea what it is about. If you e ever played Quarriors, you’ve also got an idea what it is about. In DM, two people take turns drawing dice from their bags, rolling them, buying character and power dice to add to their bag, then attack/defend. There is a bit of Magic: The Gathering mixed with deck building like Ascension or Star Realms.
At first, Dice Masters was a collectible game. You could buy starter sets that could give you a basic 1v1 game, and then augment those decks with .99 boosters. Opening boosters and getting collectible dice was a lot of fun and you could get a lot for your money.
The new sets are no longer collectible but I do believe they fail to give you enough dice, so if you want to play exactly the deck you want, you may need a second set, much like FFG does with their LCGs.
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I read about this on BGG, and was a bit perplexed. I like that for the WH40K sets they are moving from the CCG to the LCG format, so no need to chase rares, but not packaging enough dice to fully populate a card’s options, as I understand it, has confused me. The sense of it I got was that the expansion packs are likely to frustrate players the most in not having enough dice, so for those packs one favors (which I expect will be Dark Angels, for me) it’s best to buy two of them.
I don’t think there is any excuse for it other than them being cheap. But it is what it is. Having only 3/4 of the dice in what is supposed to a a “complete” set is obnoxious to me, but that is offset by the ability to buy a single box that gives an almost full playing experience.
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I played some Dice Masters with son a while back, and it seemed okay. If Star Wars: Destiny is in the same category for you, though, I prefer it. Really neat system. Either game could be better given the available card pool, though, I think.
I’ve now returned to my Top 25 (this time with #15-11) after a couple of days of…well, it’s not visible on the blog but a lot of controversy with Stronghold Games.
Have a Smash Up game scheduled for lunch tomorrow, and really looking forward to my usual Sunday game day after missing last week with this miserable cold.
What’s the deal with Stronghold?
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