Ogres

Yesterday was the first day of the Ogre release party.

About a year ago, Steve Jackson Games ran a Kickstarter campaign for a new edition of Ogre. Unlike the previous versions, this one would be enormous: giant hex mapboards, 3d-ish cardboard slot-assembly Ogres, over a thousand pieces. The campaign quickly went out of control with stretch goals and bonuses, so it took them a year to print the thing and the result weighs about 25 pounds in a box a good two feet on a side.

One of the stretch goals was a launch party where any of the backers could come, pick up their game, and play it with other backers. It wasn't a huge event but it was in Austin, so I figured it would be fun to go down there for a day. I left after work Friday, spent most of Saturday there, and came back last night.

I had forgotten how good the hole-in-the-wall Thai place I go to in Austin is. I went there Friday for dinner, and it was even better than I remembered. Pad Thai beef, Thai tea, chicken Satay.

The party was first, a lot of standing in line: stand in line to register, then stand in line to pick up your game, then stand in line to buy the bonus counter sheets (one of the funding levels was "we'll print you your own counter sheet with whatever you want on it"). It was actually sort of fun talking to the people with me in line. At one point we were talking about switchblades and everyone pulled out their quick-open knives to compare. I love Texas fandom; that's just the kind of conversation you wouldn't have at Origins.

After that there was less gaming than I expected and more punching out bits. It took me about 3-4 hours to punch out a complete copy, minus the bonus sheets. It was sort of like shelling peas. Everyone sat around and talked about gaming, cons, giant tank physics (we decided that carrying Ogres was essentially the same as transporting deepwater rigs), while assembling their games. Randomly, James Dunson was there, from VTSFFC. He's running Ogre at Rising Star next weekend, so he came down to pick up his three (!) copies and bring one back on the plane.

I played a round of Munchkin while I punched out bits, with a nice group of people including what I'm starting to think of as a gaming con archetype, a teenage girl who's very into nerd things. After I finished I played G.E.V. with (and got trounced by) an Austinite, then drove back after stopping at my favorite Indian buffet.

Sadly I did not get to go to Austin Books & Comics this trip, but I still have a lot of things to read from Worldcon.

Now, in a month, BGG.con!

Kerbals

Around 2002, when I was living with Adam and Keith and Vond, I got majorly obsessed with a game called Orbiter. It's still there, it's free, you can play it, although they took the development in a direction I didn't really want to go.

What it is is a flight simulator for spacecraft. You pick a spaceship, launch, get into orbit, and then do whatever you like. What I liked was to play around with changing orbits and learning orbital mechanics. Take off, rendezvous with the ISS, transfer to Mir, zip out to Lunar orbit, and so on. It had some problems, serious ones like the in-atmosphere model was really broken (which made it hard to reenter because there wasn't enough drag, you'd just bounce out again), and time dilation made it really inaccurate (which meant I had to leave it running for hours at a time in between doing things in real time). Also it was only for Windows, which meant that when I got sick of Windows and switched to Linux, and then Mac, I had to stop playing.

Then I found Kerbal Space Program. It's still under development, as an early-access beta thing. I bought it sometime last year, thought it was sort of cool but not that great, and stopped playing. Then I saw an article last week that said it had improved a lot, so I tried it again.

Holy crap.

First of all, it doesn't have any historical ships like Orbiter does. Instead you design your own rockets, and it models the stresses and aerodynamic effects of them. I've had more than one rocket fall apart during ascent. Once you're on orbit the controls are different too: instead of Orbiter's cockpit-like controls, KSP shows you a map of the orbit and you can click places, "add maneuvers," and it will give you a countdown and a delta-v amount. So it's actually a lot easier to figure out what you're going to do.

It also supports a ton of other stuff: spaceplanes, satellites, space stations, EVAs (!), landers and rovers... All actually stuff you can build that you launch and then dock with. Orbiter had space stations but they were built into the game. In KSP you could conceivably launch something like an Agena, dock with it, and use it to get to the Mun.

Which is another thing: the humor. The theme of the game (and it's actually a game, not just a simulator) is that your alien race, the Kerbals, are nailing together junk to build rockets and explore space around their home world of Kerbin, particularly their Mun. Pilots have two attributes, courage and stupidity. The flavor text on rocket components is hilarious. The overall effect is to make the inevitable spectacular failures sting less; of course your rocket blew up, what did you expect? Wasn't it pretty though? Let's do it again!

So far I've spent about four hours with this version, and gone through a few milestones: a bunch of suborbital flights, two of which actually got out of the atmosphere. A ship that orbited once and reentered. A ship that got into a stable orbit, then I built another one, rendezvoused with that one (well, almost; within 4 km), and then reentered it (powered landing that time). Next I think I'll do some satellites, maybe a Skylab-like thing that I can dock with.