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When NASA needs to ship its outsized spacecraft components between production, testing, and launch facilities around the country, there is only one plane big enough, powerful enough, and—most importantly—wide enough to do the job: the Aero Spacelines Super Guppy.

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Many geeks – myself included – have sometimes passed the time by debating who would win if this famous person squared off with this superhero, and so on. The upcoming collectible card game Triptych is a lot like that. The game features characters both fictional and real as well as other entities and geeky concepts.

At the core of it, Tryptich is a game of addition. Each card has a number on the top right corner. Players form a deck of 30 cards, but the total value of the cards in the deck must not exceed 120. Each round players draw three cards, and the player whose cards have the highest total value wins the round. Of course, it won’t be much of a game if that’s all there is to it, so the makers of Triptych added card types and abilities to the mix. For instance, George Washington has an ability called Revolution, which lets you subtract 5 to the value of a card with the royal or leader type.

In addition, abilities fall under four classes: Body, Mind, Spirit and Anytime. After players draw their three cards for the round, they play one game of Rock, Paper, Scissors to determine what abilities can be played that round. Rock is Body, paper is Mind and scissors are Spirit. As its name implies, Anytime abilities can be used regardless of the result of the Rock, Paper, Scissors played.

After playing Rock, Paper, Scissors, each player takes turns playing one card at a time, activating a usable ability if they choose and immediately resolving its effects. When both players have played three cards each, you then add the final value of your cards. As you can see, because of the abilities the individual values of the cards have most likely changed at this point. The player with the highest total card value wins the round.

The loser must then remove cards from his or her deck equal to the point differential between their total card values, e.g. if you scored 20 and your opponent scored 25, then you have to remove 5 cards from your deck. The game ends when one of you runs out of cards, with the winner naturally being the one with a card or cards remaining in his or her deck.

Those are the basic rules of the game, but there are other rules that I didn’t explain here. You can download the rulebook for free on the Triptych website. In fact, like Cards Against Humanity, not only can you download the rulebook, you can also download and print the starter cards and the first expansion for free.

Triptych also shares one of the weaknesses of Cards Against Humanity – some of its cards may offend or unnerve some people. For instance, there’s a Jesus Christ card and a Martin Luther King Jr., card. It’s nowhere near as offensive as Cards Against Humanity, but you should still avoid playing this with certain people.

Pledge at least $27 (USD) on Kickstarter to get the 90-card starter set as well as 12 dice as a reward. As mentioned in the video, the printed cards you’ll get as a reward have a higher quality compared to the free PDF of the same cards, so that’s a nice incentive to buy the set.

There are also higher reward tiers that let you send your own image or artwork to be printed on a card. Can you, Moby Dick and sports beat Albert Einstein, foreshadowing and drugs? Get Triptych and you’ll find out. My money’s on your team.

[via Geeks Are Sexy]

A group of Emperor penguins encounter a rope across their path. What to do? They aren’t exactly high-steppers. One eventually accidentally steps on the rope and crosses without incident. That’s why he is now King Penguin. There’s also a version of this video with penguin language translated into somewhat accented English. (via Arbroath)

In the pantheon of the mightiest four-cylinder engines, surely Mitsubishi's "FQ" Lancer Evolutions stand near or at the top. This series of UK-only special edition Evos were tuned to produce as much as 400 horsepower in Mitsubishi FQ-400 form. Great news, rally hoons! Even more juice is coming.

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BuzzFeedVideo shares with us some of the secret tricks used by advertisers to determine their customers to buy their products.


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Alibaba, the enormous Chinese e-commerce company set to IPO in the U.S. soon, faces threats from Chinese regulators and state-owned banks.

Alibaba and other companies working in China's fast-growing, trillion dollar mobile payments space want to offer services traditionally handled by banks, like virtual credit cards and online investment funds. Banks have slowly been releasing restrictions and regulations that could hinder their progress.

For example, four state-run banks have placed monthly limits on the amount of money that people can spend on their smartphone through mobile payment products like Alibaba's Alipay, according to The Wall Street Journal. Alibaba, of course, wants citizens transferring as much money as possible through Alipay, especially if they're buying products from its two huge Web stores, Tmall or Taobao. Presumably, people don't want their banks telling them how much they can spend. Limits are hovering around the equivalent of $1,500 a month. 

China also halted the use of virtual credit cards and QR codes, which Chinese consumers use for online shopping, earlier this month, MarketWatch reports. 

Alibaba's online investment fund, Yu'e Bao, which has traditionally had better returns than those of state-run banks, might have to start holding minimum reserves on the deposits they collect. Yu'e Bao now has more investors than the country's equity markets. The Wall Street Journal also reports that Yu'e Bao users with money in the Industrial Commercial Bank of China are having trouble transferring money into the fund from their accounts, with the bank saying that it's "cutting back on resources needed to process such transfers."

Chinese regulators say that new measures come out of a concern for information security. Jack Ma, founder and current chairman of Alibaba, however, makes it clear he thinks that these decisions are politically motivated. 

"Let the users decide who wins the game, not monopoly and power," Ma said in a comment on Alibaba's messaging app Laiwang.  "The market is not scared of competition. But it does fear injustice." 

SEE ALSO: This One Graphic Tells You Everything You Need To Know About The Fiercest Tech Rivalry In China

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Thanks Mike (from Spain)

 

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Sadie is doing a good job of keeping Foxey away from his food bowl. He doesn’t even seem to sweat about it…

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I spent two nights last week wearing 3D glasses in a dark theater, watching four German men in reflective Spandex bodysuits sing about computers, transit, and architecture.

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Come April, PlayStation fans can enjoy the same masochistic waiting game as Steam users when preloading comes to PS4. Sony itself has yet to confirm the feature but Sucker Punch, the studio behind Infamous: Second Son, said on Twitter that it's on...

I love these yoga pants.

It’s da troof! So let’s put a big smile on that face! (Well, most of us will.)

Via Bored Panda.

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Now in athletes!

Photo courtesy of Justin Schornack.
Foot cream found at 100 yen shop in Japan.