Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Geek ? Read on !

This will be of probably little interest to you 'norms' out there. If you have no kinship with the world of boardgames, you might just want to stick your fingers in your ears and start going 'la la la la la' loudly now.

I'm not sure WHY you might want to do that - because, y'know, you'll still be able to READ this - but it might be a laugh.

Now - to the meat of this entry !

Man - I just saw that some board-game company in Canada got the rights to re-issue 'Titan'. Wow - I never thought that would happen. I'm not sure that Titan would REALLY be my kind of game ... but I'm tempted to get it to sort of have a link to a piece of gaming history.

You'd be bummed if you'd just spent in excess of $200 USD to get a old school Avalon Hill copy though wouldn't you ?

In the 'what the hell?" zone though - I just read on-line that Fantasy Flight Games are going to re-issue the classic "Dune" board-game ( yay ! ) - only it WON'T be "Dune" ( freaking HUH ???? ).

Turns out that FFG, for whatever reasons, can't get the Dune license to do it. Why ? Who the hell knows - most likely reason is that the gaming rights have ALREADY been sold to someone else who is going to do something infinitely more crap with it.

So - instead, they're going to use the same game MECHANICS, only set in the Twilight Imperium universe.

Personally - I don't see that working all that well. Part of the appeal of the old game is to play the warring factions of the Dune story ... I don't think the alien races of TI are really going to cut it ( mind you - I've not actually played TI, so I can't say that categorically ). And I don't think that either sandworms or a quasi-mystical spice played much of a part in the TI game, so I have no idea what they're going to do there.

Sigh. So close to getting a new 'Dune' and yet so far.

I signed the on-line petition in support of FFG, but I doubt it will have much of an effect. You should sign it to ! The spice must flow !

I should just pony up the cash to get a copy on E-Bay maybe. It's not that much more for a present-day game I guess.

/geeky board-game related stuff.

I've been working on a couple of other 'Critical Mass' comic strips - one 3 panel ( already scanned and cleaned up - awaiting colour and text ) and one full page semi-origin story ( 80% penned - would be finished, but stupid arty pen ran out. Feck ). Hopefully you'll be able to see them soon !

Right - tired now. Sleep.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yah Dune - definitely you should buy a copy! Check out the Spice Harvest expansion as well if you haven't already (and if it is available out there in the wonderful world of the Web) It's a completely different game mechanic to the standard game (a lot like Junta, so also a lot of fun...)

Sean

Seraph said...

I would LOVE to have a copy of the 'Spice Harvest' expansion ( as well as 'The Duel' expansion ) along with the standard game. There was a French re-print done a few years back which had BOTH of them thrown in ( pity that it was in French. Still - I'd get a copy of that if it were still in print ).

I really find it hard to understand why it isn't easier to re-issue some of these great games of the past. The demand for them still seems to be there !