CNN became the first round-the-clock news channel in 1980, during the Cold War era. Media mogul Ted Turner, founder of CNN, understood well the threat of nuclear war during that time. While many television stations ended their broadcast day by playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a sign-off, Turner knew he only wanted CNN to sign off once: at the end of the world. He had an eerie and somber—yet patriotic—video made for CNN to broadcast on such an occassion, but with a band playing the song “Nearer, My God, to Thee” instead of the national anthem.
Normally, when a TV station begins & ends the broadcast day, it signs on & off by playing the National Anthem. But with CNN–a 24-hour-a day channel–we would only sign off once & I knew what that would mean. So we got the combined Armed Forces marching bands together–the Army, Navy, Marine & Air Force bands–& took them out to the old CNN headquarters & we had them practice the National Anthem for a videotaping. Then, as things cranked up, I asked if they’d play ‘Nearer My God, to Thee’ to put on videotape just in case the world ever came to an end. That would be the last thing CNN played before we–before we signed off. And, I’ll tell you, those guys in the military bands knew what I was up to.
I keep this tape around because when the world ends it’ll be over before we can say what we wanted to say. Before we can leave any final messages.
Michael Ballaban, a former intern for CNN, shared a view of the warning on CNN’s archives for the video that reads, “HFR [hold for release] till the end of the world confirmed.”
The band Phish From Vermont had their biggest hit single, "You Ate My Fractal", in 1897. 28 copies were sold, which is actually two copies for every Vermonter.
From left: Sophia, Jung, and Charles Starrett play D&D at home.
By Ethan GilsdorfGlobe Correspondent
Ethan Gilsdorf
Some updated player’s and dungeon master’s guides for D&D.
As a teenager in the 1980s, Charles Starrett spent hours playing Dungeons & Dragons with his pals but stopped after high school. His interest was rekindled as a father when he introduced basic role-playing games to his two daughters when they were six years old, and he also persuaded his wife, Jung, to play.
“They just gobbled it up,” Jung Starrett says of her daughters’ interest in D&D.
Now the couple and their now 14-year-old daughters, Sophia and Julia, gather around their Brookline dining room table regularly on weekends to toss polyhedral dice, slay orcs and hobgoblins, and tell an unpredictable, unfolding fantasy story, together.
As it turns 40 this year, the pioneering role-playing game (or “RPG”) appears to be enjoying something of a renaissance after a period of decline. Once the province primarily of white, suburban teen boys and young men, D&D is drawing a more diverse group of players, owing in part to the widespread popularity of fantasy books, films, and television shows. And a new update of the game is renewing interest among veteran players.
An estimated 20 million people have played the game and spent at least $1 billion on its products since D&D’s early days. But the game, which experienced strong growth throughout the 1970s and ’80s, began a slump in the 2000s. The game’s publisher, Wizards of the Coast, does not make sales figures available, but analysts say that RPG sales have been declining for years, partly supplanted by the surge in video games and Internet culture.
In response, Wizards, a Washington subsidiary of Providence toy-and-game giant Hasbro, launched a revamp of the game’s rules this year, informally known as “Fifth Edition,” that returns D&D to its story-based roots. The response has been positive.
“Nearly every player I’ve spoken to says they like the new rules,” says David Ewalt, author of “Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It.” When one of the core rule books, the D&D “Player’s Handbook,” was published in August, it climbed to the top of Amazon sales charts and hit number one on both Publisher’s Weekly and Wall Street Journal’s hardcover nonfiction lists.
Distributors and retailers say the new edition is selling better than expected, says Milton Griepp, founder and CEO of ICv2, a publication that covers geek culture. “And expectations were high.”
Nationally, and locally, retailers are saying the new edition is doing well and drawing players to game nights. John Beresford, books manager at Pandemonium Books and Games in Cambridge, reports that the store’s weekly in-store D&D events have grown by at least 25 percent. “Fifth edition is getting a lot of nostalgia gamers back in to take a look and is also drawing in a number of new gamers,” he says.
Unlike the last edition, released in 2008, the new D&D focuses less on mimicking video game-like action and combat, and more on ease of play, role-playing, and narrative. Also making the game more accessible, the rules ask players to consider characters who do “not conform to the broader culture’s expectations of sex, gender, and sexual behavior.” Your 12th level wizard might be gay.
In addition to getting a boost from the game update, D&D and other RPGs are also finding fresh player bases.
“There’s been a real expansion of the audience in recent years,” says Ewalt. When Ewalt went to his first game convention 20 years ago, the attendees were largely white, male, ages 15 to 40. When he attended the massive role-playing game and tabletop game convention called GenCon this summer in Indianapolis, “there were men and women, kids and adults, and people of all races and cultures.’’
Liz Schuh, head of publishing and licensing for Dungeons & Dragons, agrees. “We are seeing a broad mix of ages playing D&D today,’’ she says. “The game spans generations, as parents introduce their kids to the game that inspired them as kids.’’
One reason new audiences are embracing D&D is that so many of its key concepts are already familiar to a generation steeped in video games. D&D spawned a legion of game designers and programmers, and the industry borrowed heavily from D&D tropes such as outfitting characters, leveling up, cooperative game play, representing character traits as statistics, fantasy battles, dungeon environments, and controlling avatars.
D&D also benefits from the popularity of fantasy entertainment such as the “Lord of the Rings,” “Hobbit” and “Harry Potter’’ books and movies, and hit TV shows like “Game of Thrones.” As in the case of video games, the appetite for consuming fantasy worlds is one that D&D actually had a role in nurturing.
A whole generation of screenwriters, novelists, directors, musicians, and actors who once played D&D — including Stephen Colbert, the late Robin Williams, Matt Groening, Vin Diesel, and George R. R. Martin — have proudly embraced their basement-dwelling days as a nerdy badge of honor.
“All those kids who were obsessed with the game in the early 1980s have grown up, and many of them entered creative pursuits because D&D got them excited about telling stories and creating adventures,” says Ewalt.
The game’s imaginative reach extends beyond popular entertainment. “Gaming certainly provided me with an imaginative praxis that helped prepare me for the imaginative praxis of being a writer,” says Junot Diaz, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer and MIT professor whose group played D&D in the 1980s. “The game was an important source of solace, inspiration, learning excitement and play for us.”
Chris Robichaud, author of “Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy” and a D&D veteran since age 10, is bringing RPGs into the classroom as a learning tool. At the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where he is a lecturer in ethics and public policy, Robichaud has been teaching D&D-like simulation called Patient Zero. “I wanted to give policymakers the creative, outside-the-box thinking opportunities that only a tabletop design with a gamemaster at the helm could really create,” says Robichaud, who believes his game “has the distinction” of being Harvard’s first “zombie pandemic tabletop simulation.”
The potential educational benefits are not lost on younger players. Back at the Starrett home, Julia and Sophia say they play primarily because it’s fun, but the game has also imparted valuable life skills.
“I have the reputation as a walking dictionary, which I got from playing D&D,” says Sophia, who has been blogging about “the benefits of playing D&D.” Beyond building your vocabulary, the two sisters reel off myriad other boons. The game improves critical thinking, decision-making, spatial intelligence, and team-building.
“In D&D, if you’re going to succeed,” says Julia, “you have to be part of a group of very diverse individuals all going for the same goal.”
Indeed, the role-playing game is a perfect tool for forging communities and connections “which can further knit our society together,” says dad Charles. “We can even explore living a life as someone who believes quite differently from how we actually believe, which increases understanding and empathy towards those who differ from ourselves.”
Like a warrior after an epic battle, D&D has survived to fight again — and its players hope it will keep on rolling for another 40 years.
At Brookline’s Knight Moves cafe, owner Devon Trevelyan (center) offers some tips for playing Nuns on the Run.
By Ethan Gilsdorf
This article is featured in the Nov. 30 issue of the Magazine.
WHEN WE WERE KIDS, we played games.
I don’t mean games of make-believe or cops and robbers or video games, although we played those, too. I’m talking about games packed in boxes with cards, dice, and metal figurines — Candy Land, Parcheesi, Monopoly, Risk, Life, Clue, and hundreds more. Folded in the middle like a book, game boards were worlds we entered over and over, as if returning to a favorite story.
But we grew up, right? We put away those childish games and graduated to others on our devices and game consoles — “Call of Duty,” “Candy Crush,” “Angry Birds,” “Grand Theft Auto,” “Mario Bros.,” “Madden NFL,” “Minecraft.” Or did we?
It turns out plenty of people still play board games. Not only grade-schoolers and nerds, but average folk who partake at home, in game cafes, and at massive conventions. Feeding their appetite is a new wave of board, card, dice, and so-called Eurogames (also known as designer games, they originated in Europe and emphasize strategy, not luck). Quirky, challenging, and innovative, with themes ranging from pirates to pandemics to power brokers, their chunky boxes and metal tins are emblazoned with names like Small World, Eldritch Horror, Sushi Go!, Iota, and Cards Against Humanity.
“For several years now, we have been seeing a secular trend in gaming away from games played on a screen and toward tabletop games played in person with other players,” Milton Griepp, CEO and founder of ICv2, says by e-mail. ICv2 covers the business of pop-culture retail via a website and magazine. “There are no signs that this trend is abating.”
Non-digital games and puzzles racked up $1.9 billion in sales in the United States in 2013, according to the Toy Industry Association Inc., up 3 percent over 2012. The more focused “hobby game” market — which includes card games like 7 Wonders, dice games like King of Tokyo, and tabletop miniatures games like Warhammer 40,000 — has grown 15 percent a year on average for the past five years, and that segment was worth $700 million in 2013, according to ICv2. The toy and game giant Hasbro, based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, saw sales rise 23 percent in 2013 for its Wizards of the Coast division, which publishes Magic: The Gathering and the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Mainstream board-game sales — of the Scrabble and Taboo variety — are also up. According to NPD Group Inc., a market research company, sales of family board and action games, such as Sorry and Life, grew 5 percent in 2012 and 14 percent in 2013. In short, you might say we’re in the middle of a Golden Age for board games.
Star Trek: The Next Generation alum Wil Wheaton has followed his passion for board games into a new gig, hosting his own Web series, TableTop, for three seasons now. Promoters describe the series as “Celebrity Poker for board games,” and fans are gobbling it up: Season 2 of TableTop pulled in some 8 million YouTube views, with an average of about 500,000 views per episode.
“I personally think that it’s wonderful that it’s becoming a mainstream hobby,” says Wheaton of analog games. “If you walk into Toys ‘R’ Us, on the shelves with Cootie and Monopoly and Ants in the Pants, you’ll see Settlers of Catan, and Munchkin, and Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride. That divide isn’t really there anymore because people are just playing games.”
It may not truly be giving the multibillion-dollar digital game industry a run for its money, but the board-game subculture is thriving. And as it happens, plenty of this tabletop-game inventing, tinkering, and fervent playing is happening in Greater Boston.
“Boston has become increasingly important to the national board-games scene — from providing must-attend conventions for board gamers all along the East Coast to cultivating an active society of game creators across the spectrum of hobby gaming,” says Jonathan Bolding, senior tabletop editor for the gaming website The Escapist. Representatives from Illinois-based Mayfair Games, the English-language publishers of the blockbuster Settlers of Catan, “have said to my face they wouldn’t dare skip the Boston conventions,” Bolding continues. “I wouldn’t either.”
Aram Boghosian
Knight Moves guests can choose from hundreds of games.
‘I’LL PLACE A TILE instead of eating.”
“I’m going to move the panda.”
“Did you roll ‘rain’?”
“You can do that? All right.”
“NOW it’s your turn.”
“Can the panda just eat? Wait, he can’t
eat three!”
On a Friday evening in Brookline, Micaela Rodriguez and Joshua Brinkmeyer, both 19-year-old college students, are playing Takenoko, a Euro-style game about a panda, a farmer, and growing bamboo. They’re not sitting at home or in a dorm room; they’re at Knight Moves Board Game Cafe, one of several such venues that have opened across the country from New York City to Seattle.
Devon Trevelyan, a gamer and former game-shop employee, opened Knight Moves in Coolidge Corner last December. For a $10 cover, you can park yourself in what’s akin to a living room decorated with card tables and mismatched chairs and a (nonworking) fireplace to play any of hundreds of games. His customers are folks who want to socialize but are interested in alternatives to bars and drinking, Trevelyan says. Knight Moves serves coffee, soft drinks, and snacks, but if you want to have a beer or glass of wine, you’ll have to bring your own. You don’t have to come with a partner, though; Trevelyan delights in matching strangers with games and each other and teaching them how to play. “I act as a test-drive facility,” he says. For his customers, it means a chance to try games like Last Night On Earth: The Zombie Game before plunking down $59.95 for it at the store. The cafe is a popular spot for dates, too: Knight Moves has become an OKCupid “hot spot,” Trevelyan says.
Aram Boghosian
Dominion is one of the games Knight Moves guests can play.
Board gamers looking for a night out have plenty of other options locally. Bars such as Good Life and the Highball Lounge, both in Boston, Brass Union in Somerville, and Tavern in the Square in Cambridge are among those that host game nights and/or have games on hand for customers to use.
“The pool of gamers in New England is quite concentrated,” says W. Eric Martin, the North Carolina-based news editor at BoardGameGeek, an online community with more than 780,000 registered users and content on some 70,000 board and card games. “You can find game groups almost every night of the week in the Greater Boston area that will be willing to play anything that you bring to the table.”
Boston has helped to propel the Eurogame revolution in the United States since the 1980s, when Carol Monica, owner of the longstanding Harvard Square shop Games People Play, became the first US importer of games like 1829 and Civilization. As Euro-style games developed as a genre, Monopoly’s monopoly began to weaken.
“Board games were moribund through the mid-nineties or so. Then you had this German board-game explosion with Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne,” says Tyler Stewart, who has run another local gaming destination, Pandemonium Books and Games in Cambridge, since 1989. Many now recognize Settlers of Catan, a strategy game about colonizing an island, as the tip of the iceberg when it appeared in 1995. A worldwide 18 million-unit seller, Settlers’ English-language version flies off of shelves at a clip of some 750,000 copies a year and is carried by all the big-box stores.
“Board games have been steadily growing,” says Stewart, whose shop offers packed gaming events — for fans of everything from D&D to My Little Pony — every night of the week. “We don’t have enough space for everything we want to do.” Whenever the TableTop show plugs a new game, Stewart says, it routinely sells out not only at his store but also nationwide. “Wil Wheaton is there creating chronic shortages.” The 10-year-old horror-themed game Betrayal at House on the Hill, for example, just came back in stock for the first time since last Christmas, Stewart says.
The area’s board-game roots run way deeper than the Reagan years. In 1860, a Springfield lithographer named Milton Bradley invented The Checkered Game of Life. Decades later, Bradley’s namesake company went on to publish Candy Land, Twister, Battleship, Scrabble, and many others, including a modernized version of Bradley’s prototype called The Game of Life.
In 1883, just a couple of decades after Bradley got his start, a young entrepreneur from Salem named George S. Parker invested $40 of his $50 net worth to create a wealth-building game he called Banking. “George Parker was the rebel of his day,” says Phil E. Orbanes, former head of research and development for Parker Brothers and an expert on Monopoly. “When he was 16 years old, he decided he’d had enough of games that were moralistic, which almost every game was. Parker decided that ‘games should be fun,’ ” He went on to found Parker Brothers, which would churn out more than 2,000 games, including household favorites Clue, Risk, Boggle, and its all-time bestseller, Monopoly, now available in 111 countries in 43 languages.
Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
At Hasbro’s plant in East Longmeadow, workers assemble games like Risk.
Though classics from Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers live on, the companies are no more. Hasbro acquired Milton Bradley in 1984, and in 1991 it bought the Tonka Corp., which owned Parker Brothers. The company is now the second-
largest toy and game maker in the United States (right behind Mattel), having snapped up Wizards of the Coast along the way. With 1,700 employees locally, Hasbro has held onto Milton Bradley’s East Longmeadow location — which Orbanes calls “the premier game manufacturing facility in the country to this day” — where games such as Monopoly, Battleship, and Connect Four still roll off the assembly line.
Other area companies have exploited what Jason Schneider calls “cracks in the foundation” of Hasbro’s stronghold. Schneider is the director of product development and marketing for Newton-based Gamewright, maker of “no screens, no batteries” family games. “When I used to play games as a kid, I used to just roll some dice and move around a board and hopefully get to the end and maybe pass ‘Go’ and collect two hundred,” Schneider says. “Now I’m actually able to create a world or negotiate something interesting.” Since 1994, Gamewright has been expanding its catalog of games, most of them playable in 30 minutes or less, and winning awards. Its hits include Forbidden Island, which sold 100,000 units in 2013 and, according to Schneider, is on track to top that number this year, and Slamwich, which has sold more than a million units.
Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
East Longmeadow workers also produce stacks of Monopoly money.
In his post-Parker Brothers life, Orbanes has himself become a game entrepreneur. His specialty? Nostalgia. With three other industry veterans, Orbanes in 1995 founded the Danvers-based Winning Moves Games, which releases “classic, retro, cool, and fun” versions of board games such as Sorry! and Risk.
From all this “fertilizer in the soil,” as Orbanes calls it, many a local game entrepreneur has blossomed. The Greater Boston/New England area is home to “easily over a hundred tabletop developers,” says Aerjen Tamminga, designer of Pleasant Dreams: A Card Game and former cochairman of the Boston Festival of Indie Games and Game Makers Guild, who now lives in the Netherlands.
There’s Cambridge Games Factory, founded in 2004, whose top seller is Glory to Rome, and Arlington-based Asmadi Games, which launched in 2006 and is known for Innovation and Red7. Brookline’s Your Move Games, founded in 2004, creates fantasy, sci-fi, and war games, including Battleground and Battle for Hill 218. Anomia Press, based in Roslindale, has sold 200,000 units of its Mensa Select award-winning free-association card game Anomia since launching in November 2009. Marlborough-based Greenbrier Games, founded in 2011, is best known for its zombie-themed hit Zpocalypse.
The biggest indie slam-dunk in the region might be Bananagrams, the tile-based word game invented in Narragansett, Rhode Island, that comes packaged in a banana-shaped fabric pouch. “I think we’ve given the big boys a run for their money — in the nicest possible sense,” says Bananagrams CEO Rena Nathanson, from her office in London. (The company also has a Providence office.) “Our goal is to get it into every classroom, every household, and be up there with Scrabble, with Boggle, with Monopoly.” With more than 6.5 million units sold since its launch in 2006, Bananagrams looks to be well on its way.
ON A TUESDAY NIGHT in October, in a basement not far from the baseball heroics of Fenway Park, about 25 game designers are trying to “break” two games.
This is an intensive play-testing session of the Game Makers Guild, a Boston-based community of more than 500 game developers, play testers, and would-be entrepreneurs. Tonight’s goal is to troubleshoot two games in development by guild members, so the testers are hunting for weaknesses or scenarios where the rules don’t work or are confusing. Maybe the player who goes first has an unintentional advantage. Maybe there are moments when the action drags or becomes rote.
Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
Puzzles are produced in Hasbro’s East Longmeadow plant, too.
One of the games on the testing block is Zarathustra, “a cooperative science-fiction game where everyone is a traitor,” according to its designer, Daryl Fougnie, at the time a Harvard postdoc in psychology. The other is Ursa Miner, a family-friendly strategy game where players take charge of teams of honey-mining bears and try to harvest enough royal jelly to be named the Ruler of Mount Honeycomb. Gamers hunch over tables, playing the games again and again.
“They played through the first game and they broke a piece of it,” says Eli Kosminsky, co-creator of Ursa Miner and chairman of the guild. “So we changed the rules on the fly.” Designer Jeff Johnston, from Wilmington, says the guild’s play-testing sessions improved his newest game, Flashlights and Fireflies, which is being released by Gamewright next spring. “It’s a very generous group for advice, feedback, and support,” he says.
Another guild member who’s found breakout success is Gene Mackles, a 66-year-old graphic designer/artist who spent 23 years with WGBH. His card game Iota, packaged in a tiny tin resembling a Band-Aid box, was published by Gamewright in 2012 after it won a Mensa award. It went on to sell more than 100,000 units in the United States, Russia, and the Netherlands. After his success with Gamewright, Mackles founded his own company, PDG Games, and recently published a trio of card games — BOP!, D!Git, and Q!nto — all of which he play-tested at guild meetings. “I’m almost always amazed that you work something out in your head and think, ‘This is perfect,’ and then you try it out and it’s not only not perfect, it’s awful,” Mackles says. “If there’s one thing that I’ve learned, it’s that you can’t play-test a game too much.”
Designers whose games don’t get picked up by companies like Gamewright have plenty of other paths to publication. Local annual gaming festivals like JiffyCon, TotalCon, and the Boston Festival of Indie Games celebrate “indie” game development; Kosminsky is a co-director of the last, which has become the largest such gaming event in the nation. PAX East, an annual gaming convention for both video and analog games, draws more than 50,000 game enthusiasts to Boston; like the Festival of Indie Games, PAX connects designers with audiences and hosts sessions on the business of tabletop games, among a bevy of other topics. The largest US convention of this type, Gen Con in Indianapolis, is an important venue for board games to find a national audience; attendance has grown by more than 10 percent for each of the past four years. Meanwhile, websites like BoardGameGeek, ShutUpandSitDown, and Lowell-based The Cardboard Republic offer candid reviews and forums. Emerson College’s Engagement Game Lab and the MIT Game Lab are additional gaming incubators. And digital tools like 3-D printers and online retailers allow game inventors to produce and sell their own designs.
Essdras M Suarez/Globe Staff
Boston’s Game Makers Guild troubleshoots games in development by playing them and looking for flaws. Pictured, the guild playing Zarathustra.
Then there’s the boon of Kickstarter, probably the biggest seismic change in the game-making landscape. The crowdfunding site lets “people who may not have the intestinal fortitude to start a game company,” as Schneider puts it, “test the waters in a very low-risk environment.” Novice inventors can scrape together some graphics and a video and see if they can get people interested in it, Schneider says. “And, voila, it might turn into the next Cards Against Humanity” — the edgy party game that’s consistently a bestseller in Amazon’s Toys & Games category. In the crowdfunding realm, board games have seen success, even beating out video games: According to The New York Times, in 2013, Kickstarter raised $45.3 million for digital projects and $52.1 million for tabletop.
But even with outside funding, it’s tough to make a go of it in the board-game industry, says James Takenaka, chief sales officer of the Londonderry, New Hampshire-based company Game Salute. “The biggest problem after some of these companies go through Kickstarter is they don’t have the connections to sell [their game] into the hobby market.” Game Salute helps indie designers with sales, distribution, warehousing, and even Kickstarter consulting. Its business has grown from representing a dozen clients in 2008 to more than 100 active clients today, and now the company sells and distributes more than 250 products. “Every year, we’re just seeing huge growth,” says Takenaka. The company has also shepherded more than 165 successful Kickstarter campaigns, “the most of any one organization in the world,” according to Game Salute CEO and founder Dan Yarrington. Alongside California and Texas, the Northeast, he says, is an area that has “lots of activity.”
Which brings us back to the giants like Hasbro. Does the company see all this upstart action as a threat? Hasbro still has more than 60 board games on the market, and its mass-market chestnuts like Scrabble and Monopoly remain huge sellers. Cleverly, Hasbro has remade them for new generations of players. My Monopoly allows players to personalize property spaces and game tokens with customized stickers; Scrabble with “Electronic Scoring” speeds up play.
Essdras M Suarez/Globe Staff
The guild playing Ursa Miner.
“Our focus is really how we can continue to make these brands relevant and exciting for consumers,” says Hasbro’s vice president of marketing for games, Jonathan Berkowitz. Two key trends, Berkowitz says, are strategy games and party games, which sit at “polar ends” of the market. “The party-gaming consumer is looking for something that’s easy to get into, with very few rules,” Berkowitz says. “They can pull it out of the box and play right away.” For example, Cards Against Humanity or Apples to Apples.
Then there’s the popularity of strategy-based Eurogames, which attract players looking for a longer, more complex experience. “Every year we’ll get a ‘Settlers: It’s the Monopoly Killer’ article coming out,” says Ben Rathbone, Hasbro’s vice president of gaming design and development. The company hopes to capture both the mainstream and hobby market next fall when it releases a game Rathbone and his team are working on tentatively called Magic: The Gathering Strategy Board Game, based on the hugely popular collectible card game.
Analog games have, of course, gone digital, too. For example, there are versions of Monopoly for smartphones and tablets, Rathbone points out. Hasbro and video game publisher Ubisoft this month launched the Hasbro Game Channel, where gamers can download Monopoly Plus, My Monopoly, and Monopoly Deal for game consoles such as Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4, with games like Risk and Trivial Pursuit Live to roll out later.
“That’s the whole breadth of different gaming options you have around one brand,” Rathbone says, fiddling with an Elvish Planeswalker figurine on a conference room table at the company’s Pawtucket offices. “Rather than us worrying about gaming getting smaller, gaming is bigger than ever.”
The reason for that may go right back to those game boards, cards, tiles, and dice we learned to love as kids gathered around the kitchen table. People are craving “to engage as human beings, personally,” says Bananagrams’ Rena Nathanson, “one-to-one, face-to-face, or in a group.” That’s something worth rolling for.
Tell me if GURPS and GURPS Lite would not be a good place to start once Dara is old enough to try role playing games. I also found a BURPS simplified character sheet that looks easy.
GURPS Lite is a 32-page distillation of the basic GURPS rules. It covers the essentials of character creation, combat, success rolls, adventuring, and game mastering for GURPS Fourth Edition.
The purpose of GURPS Lite is to help GMs bring new players into the game, without frightening them with the full GURPS Basic Set and a stack of worldbooks! With GURPS Lite, you can show your players just how simple GURPS really is.
NOTE: This is the latest edition, revised August 2004.
“Busk” is a documentary short by Icarus that explores the lives of five musicians making their living by performing on the streets and subway stations of New York City. Released through Vimeo in 2013, the doc follows a diverse group of performers, including Japanese beatboxer Reo Matsumoto, bluegrass banjo player Morgan O’Kane and bucket drummer Anthony Smith-Little.
Sea stacks at the Oregon coast (Not for sale, thankfully!)
The Northwest has islands for sale. Now, I know what you’re thinking—“Oregon has islands?” Yes, indeed. It’s every nature-loving hermit’s dream: a private island in the Pacific Northwest. A rugged, pine-soaked landscape to surround a tasteful two-story cabin with modern amenities. A lone dock pokes into the river, free from tourists with inflatable kayaks and digital cameras commenting on the cute baby ducks. Your boat sits silent in the lapping water while you sit on your deck deciding whether to go into town tonight, or just stay by the fire pit with a cold beer, counting the stars. It’s a beautiful life—if you have over a million dollars to kill.
Here are four of Oregon and Washington’s most prized private island real estates. The fantasy is free—the land is not.
Tanglewood Island
Tanglewood Island Location: Puget Sound, Washington (near Gig Harbor) Size: 16 acres Price: $889,000 For those that don’t want the responsibility of owning a whole island, this historic parcel may be the answer. Tanglewood supports four homes and a community lodge (complete with swimming pool). The available eighteenth century house has been completely remodeled, and sits nestled in the trees, evoking the intimate feel of a private island, but with the convenience of knocking on a neighbor’s door because you forgot to buy toilet paper. (And you really don’t want to fire up the boat just for a run to Fred Meyer.) Situated near Seattle and Tacoma, this is the perfect retreat from big city living—without having to leave the big city.
McCaffrey Island
McCaffrey Island Location: Newport, Oregon Size: 1.5 acres Price: $1,250,000 Located on the Yaquina River, this private island paradise comes with an elegantly rustic, fully-furnished, five-bedroom home, apple trees and the occasional deer. It includes a house built for entertaining, sporting a large, open kitchen with granite countertops, and a back patio complete with fire pit where guests can cook whatever creature they caught off the dock that day. A trip to the mainland will take five minutes depending on what kind of fancy boat you have to match your dapper new home, and is only six minutes to the open ocean—which makes this the perfect wealthy pirate hideout.
Elk Island
Elk Island Location: Roseburg, Oregon Size: 15 acres Price: $2,200,000 This partially developed island is ripe with potential: it offers lush flora, making it the perfect space to open a botanical garden; it’s secluded enough for a small, private resort; and it comes with a plethora of local fauna (awkwardly, no elk), making it a shoe-in for a wildlife reserve and educational center. It seems silly to keep this island all to yourself. In addition to the island, it comes with 10 acres of water rights, an adjacent lot for building a bridge to shore, and a 2.5 acre lot, presumably for parking. It already has a home and a farmhouse, orchards and field crops—all you have to do is decide whether you want to run an island fairground or a relaxed fishing lodge.
Ram Island
Ram Island Location: 9 miles from Anacortes Size: 10 acres Price: $3,500,000 This undeveloped wild land has 3,800 feet of water front. Thick pines give way to stony outcroppings where you’ll enjoy 365-degree views of landmarks such as Mt. Baker, the Olympics and neighboring islands. The end of the island slopes down to a narrow white sand beach—perfect for sunbathing or snorkeling—while the rest of the property is outlined by jutting sea cliffs. The land is zoned for a home, but is currently without power, access to fresh water or sanitation services. (Also, no rams.) But why should that matter? You just bought a three-million dollar island. Build a tree house a la Swiss Family Robinson and call it a day.
Every other Tuesday: Weekend escapes, travel deals, lodging and dining picks, and ideas for Northwest getaways. (See an example!)
What do you think you get if you add 1+2+3+4+5+... all the way on up to infinity? Probably a massively huge number, right? Nope. You get a small negative number:
This is, by a wide margin, the most noodle-bending counterintuitive thing I have ever seen. Mathematician Leonard Euler actually proved this result in 1735, but the result was only made rigorous later and now physicists have been seeing this result actually show up in nature. Amazing. (thx, chris)
Update: Of course (of course!) the actual truth seems more complicated, hinging on what "sum" means mathematically, etc. (via @cenedella)
hodad
