Board games are not quaint

There’s an article in The New York Times about dating sites hosting board game events, and the less said about that the better. Dating sites, I mean. But I also came across another thing in the same article, which inspired me to vent just a tiny little bit:

While they may seem quaint in the era of mobile games like Angry Birds, the category of board games, card games and puzzles has had year-over-year growth in two of the last four years, and totaled $2.2 billion in 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, according to Euromonitor International, a market research and data firm.

A Web series hosted by the actor Wil Wheaton, “TableTop,” features Mr. Wheaton and celebrity guests playing board games, which may sound less than riveting but has been popular.

Yes. Original, that. Board games are “quaint” and “less than riveting.” I wonder if the asshat who wrote that has ever even seen an episode of TableTop. Probably not, since that would only have gotten in the way of all the sneering and condescension.

I’m only saying this: The pervasive “board games are boring” cliché will never go away as long as the world is full of morons who think that all games are toys for children, and who only know how to play Monopoly wrong since when they were kids.

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As expected, Cthulhu Wars flew past its Kickstarter goal in less than a day.

No self-respecting cultist can go without this:

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The artwork and the miniatures are superb, the game looks fantastic, and you get to be one of the Great Old Ones and destroy Earth. Who could possibly resist? Even if Nyarlathotep does look as if he has a pair of concertinas for legs. But never mind that, this is a must-have, no matter what the cost. Which, unfortunately, is a bit on the steep side. Especially with international shipping. But I still… I can’t… resist… Must… get… Unglunl… rrlh…

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Go here to pledge. It is, again, the will of Great Cthulhu.

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The rules for FFG’s Elder Sign: Unseen Forces are now online

Elder Sign – the younger, faster and easier to play cousin of Arkham Horror – has gotten its first real expansion, soon to be released, and the rules are available here.

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Pic stolen from here.

Elder Sign was one of the games featured on the first season of TableTop, with Wil Wheaton, Felicia Day and Mike Morhaime (and one of the idiots that inflicted The Big Bang Theory on the world, but let’s not hold that against the guy, or the game).

How to create insane handwriting.

Recently, over on the Yog-sothoth.com forums someone asked an interesting question relating to hand-written props for a Call of Cthulhu game. In a nutshell: how do you create large hand-written documents where the writer’s slow descent-into-madness is evidenced through the qualities of his or her handwriting?

That is an interesting question, and you should go here if you want to find out more.

Roger Luckhurst on H. P. Lovecraft and his impact on Western culture.

In this brief video with this guy, Lovecraft and his importance is summed up quite well, although there is of course a huge amount of detail that could have been included had the video been longer. I don’t know that I agree completely when Luckhurst talks about Lovecraft being obsessed with the idea of invasion. There is something to that, but I think it is more important to mention Lovecraft’s cosmicism and indifferentism (as his personal philosophy), in combination with his frequently stated desire to evoke a certain mood in the fiction he wrote. He may have been a “mere” pulp writer in his day, but he never wrote like one (or saw himself as one), and there are still so many people who are utterly clueless about what he was really trying to do.

More on Luckhurst here and here.

Addendum: And W. H. Pugmire doesn’t give much for the new edition of Lovecraft’s stories. But, as he says, at least it will bring more attention to Lovecraft’s work.

Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition quickly reached its Kickstarter goal.

I am sad to say I haven’t played a roleplaying game in ages, so reading about this makes me all misty-eyed and nostalgic:

The Great Old Ones ruled the earth aeons before the rise of humankind. Originally they came from the gulfs of space and were cast down by even greater beings. Remains of their cyclopean cities and forbidden knowledge can still be found on remote islands in the Pacific, buried amid the shifting sands of vast deserts, and in the frigid recesses of the polar extremes. Now they sleep — some deep within the enveloping earth and others beneath the eternal sea, in the drowned city of R’lyeh, preserved in the waters by the spells of mighty Cthulhu. When the stars are right they will rise, and once again walk this Earth.

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Pic stolen from the Kickstarter page, which is here, which is where you should go to support this project, since there are still stretch goals to be met.

It is the will of Cthulhu. Iä.