'Nathan Burgoine's Blog, page 16

Tabletop Tuesday — Deck of Worlds, or “What to do when your idea well dries up before a session.”

Right now, I’m narrating three campaigns, though one of them is in a holding pattern. I’ll be running a Mutants & Masterminds one-shot for an upcoming charity play (check out Bag of Giving, by the way), and I’ve got two Star Trek Adventures campaigns ongoing, like I mentioned last week. And while I’m generally Mr. Plan Ahead when it comes to being a narrator, sometimes a session looms, and I look at my notes for ideas and nothing seems good.

And I can’t think of anything else, either.

Now, one solution that I 100% endorse is picking up some pre-written adventures for any system you’re running a game for. I have a half-dozen M&M adventures in my back pocket just in case I hit a wall, and I’m going to be running one of those Astonishing Adventures for Bag of Giving, but sometimes, nothing lands right, feels like it will set the right tone, or you want to create something new and only have one piece of the puzzle.

When I hit that point with gaming—and even with writing, too, since I’m an author and the same thing happens sometimes when it’s time to start a new project—I have a couple of boxes I reach for, both put out by The Story Engine. One is the initial product, the Story Engine itself, the other is the newer release, Deck of Worlds, and that’s the one I’m going to talk about today.

Pick a Card, Any Card

At its core, the Deck of Worlds is a set of cards broken up into six categories: Region cards (think of these as a major terrain type), Landmark cards (a geographical point of interest), Namesake cards (which you can add to Region cards or Landmark cards to name a location), Origin cards (which bring up a key moment of the location’s past), Attribute cards (which gives you insight into the present day of the place), and then Advent cards (which points out how things are progressing toward a future). Just by drawing one of each, you create a setting, and even better, that setting comes with a prompt or two built-in that’s just perfect for a RPG session.

Let me walk through an example, drawing only from the Worlds of Chrome and Starlight set, as though I was sitting down to create an adventure for one of my Star Trek Adventures games, and see what happens. For my Region, I get “Crater(s),” so maybe we’re talking a moon? That’s cool. The crew often visit moons in Trek, so that works.

I draw a Landmark next, and these cards each have two options on them (you tuck it half-under the previously drawn card, hiding the other half). My draw has “Factory” and “Observatory” on it, and I decide I’m going to go with Observatory, because I like science-based adventures, and I can imagine the crew finding out about whatever strange science thing is going on at said Observatory, or maybe even showing up there to find out why they’ve gone dark? Either way, Observatory it is.

Next comes a Namesake, and these cards have four options on them, around the edges, and you choose one and tuck it under either the Region or Landmark (or you can draw more if you want and do both), and my draw gives me four options: “Prime,” “…that warps,” “…of Data,” or “…of Drills.” As much as “Observatory of Data” or “Crater(s) that warp,” give me pause, I really like the idea of this being the “Prime Craters,” as that’s a name that says something major has happened here, and add in there’s an observatory here, too, and I’m intrigued. Maybe the rest of the cards will help me flush out just why this is an important first site, but if they don’t, I can always draw more.

An Origin card is next, and this is another card with four options. My first three choices are “Founded by hacker(s),” “Waypoint on an interstellar treasure map,” and “Never recovered from an economic crash,” which are all fine, but it’s the fourth one pairs perfectly with that whole “Prime Craters” feeling I liked: “Created by reckless experimentation.” Now, technically, the Origin card is supposed to be placed under the Landmark card, but I like this so much better for the craters, so I tuck it there instead, and already an idea is forming: whatever happened in that experiment, the fallout of it requires observation.

The Attribute card choices are another foursome where you pick one, and the options here are “Known for body modification(s),” “Wired directly into the source,” “Hiding spot of world-ending tech,” and “Irradiated landscape.” Either of those last-two sound great, but I decide “world-ending” is too high-stakes for the tone I want to set—I’d rather mystery and wonder than nail-biting danger—so I go with “Irradiated landscape,” which lends itself to the whole “something went very wrong with that reckless experiment” vibe.

Finally, it’s time for an Advent card, and here there are two options. The first, “An anti-tech movement is rapidly gaining ground: due to a disaster, data leak, or fake study,” which would suit just fine given the circumstances—I could see said movement taking over the Observatory and trying to shut down any further experimentations, say—but then I read the other option: “Scientific impossibilities are being reported in the area: time anomalies, spatial warping, or gravitational fluctuations,” and hello! We have a winner.

Welcome to the Prime Crater Observatory

At this point, I’m all set with a setting for my adventure, complete with a few initial roadblocks and plot hooks by virtue of the draws. The crew will be called to Prime Crater Observatory on a moon orbiting a Federation World with a history of war and violence. In the past, the moon was used as a testing ground for new weapon systems, and the devastation wrought by a subspatial weapon test gone wrong irradiated the moon. At the Prime Crater site, a weakness in subspace formed, and a small, shielded observatory was built to keep an eye on the anomaly, which mostly stayed quiet, but had a tendency to fluctuate during times of solar flare activity. Recently, the anomaly has started to show signs of further instability—and, more worrisome—growth.

The crew will need to come up with a way to compensate for the radiation, which keeps spiking—EVA suits, perhaps, or the Chief Medical Officer could buy them exposure time with a medical option—and once down in the Prime Crater Observatory, they’ll start to study the anomaly, and try to figure out just how big a threat it might be, and what is causing the instability, given the local star isn’t particularly active.

Now, a setting doesn’t an adventure make—after all, who or what is behind the anomaly acting up? Why now? But it’s a place to start—literally, it’s a place—and I’ll dive into some antagonists, NPCs, and conflicts next week in a follow-up post using the Story Engine deck to build the people and conflict into this adventure setting. See you next week, and in the mean-time, tell me your favourite idea prompt generators. Do you go for walks? Do you have a book, like the Writer’s Book of Matches? Story dice? Hit me with your favourites.

Tabletop Tuesday — Supporting Characters, or “The O’Brien Effect”

Hey! It’s Tuesday, so it’s time to talk nerdily about games. Over the past few months, I’ve been running two Star Trek Adventures games, a Tabletop Role Playing Game put out by Modiphius, and I have to say I’ve been freaking loving it. Both my games are currently set in 2371—which is the first season of Voyager, the third of Deep Space Nine, and when the Enterprise-D crashed on Viridian III (don’t you dare blame Deanna, she did a fantastic damn job given what was happening, thank you very much). Why two games? Well, funny enough, when I sent out the call to ask people if they’d like to play, I got eleven affirmatives.

Yeah, eleven.

Now, here’s the thing: I’m a full-time writer, I work from home, I have no children—though I do have a delightfully needy husky—and my husband and I are basically homebodies even when there isn’t an ongoing pandemic. So, it occurred to me that given how it often takes gaming groups two or three weeks for people to find a single day they can all play together, I asked everyone who’d said “yes please!” to come up with a character, and decided if I ran two distinct groups, I could easily alternate between them, and likely that would still, at most, turn into one or two sessions a month given adults-gotta-be-adulting, and how busy people were, and that’s more-or-less how it has been playing out, so I’m in my happy place.

Oh look, another Trill! Boldy going…

When people started giving me their character concepts, something incredible happened: Trill. More than half the people wanted to play Trill characters. Luckily, beyond that, only two of those players both wanted to play Science officers, and when it all washed out, I had one group of nearly entirely Trill to work with (with the exception of a half-Betazoid, half-Vulcan ship’s counsellor), and one group that was more mixed, with humans, a Trill (the second Science Officer), a Betazoid, and a Vulcan. I decided to roll with the Trill thing and that group joined the crew of the USS Curzon, a Nebula class vessel just entering service, and the first Starfleet vessel to have a majority-Trill crew. This opens up so many storylines on the basis of them being a “first” ship, and the whole Trill culture thing is just an awesome playground, frankly.

The other group turned out to have the Borg in common: almost every single character had rolled up losing a ship or a close friend as part of their character background, so I floated those characters as being survivors (or adjacent) to Wolf 359, and that was accepted, and so that second group began as part of Commander Shelby’s “rebuild the fleet” task force, though they’ve since been stationed on an Intrepid class ship, the Bellerophon. (I’m going to be using a lot of Modiphius’s Shackleton Expanse campaign for this group.)

Character creation in Star Trek Adventures is done through something called a “Lifepath” process, where you choose your species, start with where your character as born, what their upbringing was like, and slowly work your way through them becoming an adult, joining Starfleet, and then filling in their career up to the point of their first gaming session. It’s a trove of role-playing nuggets, and it really leaves you with a well-rounded character. It also takes a bit of time, and while you can roll everything, most of the players in my groups chose as they went instead (which is also great). When you’re done, you’ve assigned points to six Attributes (Control, Daring, Fitness, Insight, Presence, and Reason), six Disciplines (the departments in Starfleet: Command, Conn, Security, Engineering, Science, and Medical), picked six Focuses (areas of expertise for your character, which can be anything from Anthropology or Warp Core Mechanics to Emergency Medicine or Zoology, and aren’t taken from a fixed list—the sky’s the limit here, anything you can come up with), chosen four Talents (abilities that let you fiddle with the rules as written for your character, such as “Technical Expertise,” which gains you an extra dice whenever you’re using a ship’s computers or sensors), and four Values (which are a core element of STA, and are basically four statements that guide your character’s actions, beliefs, or outlook on the universe, and can, again, be pretty much anything, like the Vulcan aphorism “The Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few” or something a bit less philosophical, but still character-illuminating, like “Honest to a fault.”) Throw on some equipment, and your character is ready.

But sometimes? Sometimes your character isn’t needed. For example, the scene shifts to an away team checking on why an automated sensor relay station has gone offline. One of your players is the Chief Medical Officer. It’s not like the station needs her to wave a medical tricorder around, so she’s probably not joining the Away Team. What then?

The O’Brien Effect Let’s not talk about his rank pips…

Here’s where one of my favourite things about Star Trek Adventures comes into play: Supporting Characters. Let’s go back to that example: you’re not bringing a Medical Officer onto a malfunctioning automated station, but an extra engineer would be a great idea, no? After all, your starship is full of crew who are trained and know how to do their jobs, and we saw them all the time in the various Star Trek shows, and sometimes they even got names!

You can introduce up to a certain number of Supporting Characters each adventure, drawing on “the rest of the crew,” and any player without their character present in a given scene becomes that Supporting Character for the duration. Now, I mentioned how lengthy and involved the character creation process is for a player’s character, but this is the great thing about the Supporting Character option: you instead do a quick-and-simple bare-bones creation on the fly. You begin with assigning a fixed spread of numbers for Attributes—then adjust three of them for whatever the species of the character might be— then you do the same thing for Disciplines with another six fixed numbers, and then you pick just three Focuses. Name the character, and they’re now functional enough for the scene and play continues.

So, in this example, we’re adding Crewman Bell to the Away Team for the player who usually plays the Chief Medical Officer to control for the duration of the scene on the broken relay station. Since we’re looking to diagnose and repair the issues on the station, the player gives Crewman Bell solid Reason, Control, and Insight scores, letting the other Attributes fall more-or-less wherever they land (she puts the lowest score in Presence, and decides that Crewman Bell doesn’t tend to speak up much, and tends to be comfortable around people she already knows, so she’ll tend to speak to the Chief Engineer, not the First Officer). Her Disciplines are easy enough: highest goes to Engineering, then Science, and the lowest two are Medicine and Command, leaving Crewman Bell more-or-less a well rounded officer in the operations division. Finally, for the three Focuses, given the Away Mission, the player gives Crewman Bell these three: Diagnostics (which will help her track down what the heck happened over here), Computers (because the station’s computers are offline), and—feeling whimsical, and because not everything has to be about Bell’s job—Violin, because it turns out Crewman Bell has been playing the Violin since she was a kid, and she’s very musically talented.

Boom. Those quick choices and numbers are set, and Crewman Bell is beaming over to the Relay Station and is a useful, helpful character. Her numbers aren’t as good as a regular player character’s, but when it comes to engineering, she’ll be more-or-less as good as a player character, especially if her Focuses come into play. Crewman Bell doesn’t have any Talents or Values, so she’s not as complex a character to play, but the important thing is the player who is the Chief Medical Officer doesn’t have to just sit there twiddling her thumbs while the action moves to other characters.

And even better? Crewman Bell is now on the list of supporting crew for future adventures.

Oh, hey, it’s you again!

The Subspace Relay Station was repaired, and the players left it long behind, and they’re now on a new mission in a new episode, weeks later. This time, there’s been a terrible accident on a colony, and there are lots of wounded to deal with. The Chief Medical Officer has beamed down to the Colony hospital, but the hospital’s computer systems—which regulate everything from the biobeds to the medical replicators—are offline. While the Chief Medical Officer is working triage alongside the colony medical staff, the engineering team beams down to try and fix the hospital computers. This time, the player who normally plays the first officer has no real reason to beam down. He’s not an engineer. He’s not a doctor. This isn’t a particularly dangerous situation, either, and the Chief Medical Officer has the rank and ability to handle organizing people, so he decides he’ll join the Away Team as a support crew… and remembers Crewman Bell. She was good at computers and diagnostics, she’d be a great help to the Chief Engineer.

Now, since Crewman Bell already exists from last time, this time, the players don’t need to create her from scratch. Instead, they get to add one new thing to the character every time she shows up again as a Supporting Crew. This can be another Focus (eventually giving Crewman Bell six, like a normal player character), her first Talent (eventually four of those can be assigned, just like a player character), her first Value (again, eventually Bell can have four of those, too), or even nudge one of her Attributes or Disciplines up by 1 (which can only be done once each, raising a single Attribute once, or a single Discipline once). Given Crewman Bell is someone who the player wants to be useful at figuring out what’s gone wrong with the computers, the player chooses to give Crewman Bell her first Talent: “Studious.” This Talent allows her to get more information out of the me whenever she asks questions. Bell beams down, gets to work on the computers, and soon discovers that the accident was no such thing—someone set things up to fail!

The next time someone takes the reins for Crewman Bell, she’ll already have the Studious Talent, and they’ll pick something else to grow the character. And you end up with what I can’t help but think of as “the O’Brien effect.” Miles O’Brien went from “nameless guy at the helm” to “Chief Miles O’Brien, Transporter Chief, veteran, father, and enjoyer of model ships in bottles,” to “Chief Miles O’Brien, head of Operations, Deep Space Nine” over the course of his appearances.

Heck, Crewman Bell might even get a first name at some point. Just imagine!

No! Don’t hurt Ensign Tran!

The other thing I love about this is how it plays against the “Redshirt” feeling. When players bring in a Supporting Crew, they start to invest in that Supporting Crew. Every revisit of that character means they’ve become a little bit more useful mechanically, yes—gaining Focuses, Talents, and Values especially—but that also makes them valuable in a different way. Starting over with a new Support Crew will take multiple adventures, so there’s a built in desire not to want any of these Supporting Crew to take a TOS redshirt exit out any time soon.

On the USS Curzon, no one ended up wanting to be the pilot, so Ensign Joal Tran was created: he’s an unjoined Trill fresh out of the academy, and so far he’s been played as a young man with endless enthusiasm for most things, and since he’s in a major position on the Bridge, he’s already been “brought back” a few times, to the point where I can already see he’s a player favourite. I can role-play him as a background character when no dice need rolling, and the players can nab him for Away Missions of scenes on the Bridge. Most often so far, Ensign Tran has been in the hands of the player of the Ship’s Counselor, whenever there’s no reason for him to be on the Bridge, and Ensign Tran already feels synonymous with “antics.” The rather grumpy Chief Engineer created an Assistant Engineer who is great at talking to people. When the crew found themselves trapped in a temporal event they couldn’t explain, they brought out a Science officer with a mind for temporal mechanics. There are seven hundred and fifty people on board the Curzon, and thanks to the Supporting Character mechanic, it feels like it.

It’s great. It adds so much to the game, and this “here’s someone to play when you’re not around” mechanic is not something I’ve seen in other games before, but really love.

How about you? Have you played any Star Trek Adventures? Have you played any other games that have a mechanic for giving players something to do while their character isn’t involved? Let me know.

Tabletop Tuesday — Gloomhaven

This box is giant. Huge. I cannot explain how large this game is.

Hey all! It’s Tuesday, and that means tabletop day for me this year, and I thought today I’d talk about the game I’ve played the absolute most over the last few years (or, well, it and the expansions and follow-ups): Gloomhaven. I backed Gloomhaven back when it was a Kickstarter—I had never spent this much on a board game before in my life and was terrified it would be a mistake—then wrapped it up for Christmas in 2017. The next year, we gathered two friends, Jason and Kim, and started playing and… holy flying crap, that was a journey. It took us years to get through this giant box, playing on a mostly-weekly basis, and I’m not sure I can explain just how much of a trip this game was for us, but I’ll try.

First off, the mechanics are deceptively simple, and it’s all about cards. Your character comes with two decks of cards. The first deck is your character’s abilities, upon which there are three items of note: a top half (usually some sort of attack or other big action), the bottom half (most often a move action of some kind), and in between, a number, which is your initiative (lowest first). Every turn, you select two cards from your full range of cards, with one of them designated “the lead” to be the initiative number you’re going to act on, and once everyone has chosen their two cards, they’re revealed. There are AI decks for all the monsters, which tell you what the monsters are going to do, and their initiative count, and that’s the core “how you choose what you’re doing each turn.”

Now, there’s no drawing when it comes to these ability decks, you start with access to all of your cards, though you do have to choose to leave some of them behind every adventure, and as you level up, you gain new cards to add to your library of choices, so you’re messing with your deck on a fairly regular basis, or even just on a case-by-case basis for certain adventure scenarios. But after you play cards, they go into your discard pile, or they’re “lost” (removed from play for the rest of the scenario), or some stay in play as an ongoing effect (or for a certain number of turns, or what-have-you), and when you run out of cards, you have to rest—either a short rest (you shuffle your discarded cards, move one of them at random to the “lost” pile, and you’re back to choosing cards) or a long rest (you don’t do anything this turn, but you get to choose which of those cards is lost, and you also heal a little bit, which can be important). If you’re out of cards completely (ie: you don’t have a way to draw two, even if you’ve rested) you exhaust, and your character is done for that scenario.

So, basically, you’ll have all your options slowly reducing as the game goes by, and those cards you have that are immediately lost are definitely ones you want to use at the right time, as they also shorten how long you’ll be in the game. The characters are a really cool mix of options, and while you can play this one with two players (and we did, especially the “random dungeon” option, during the pandemic when it was just myself and my husband), we found it to be a lot more fun with four, most specifically because of the ways the various character abilities can blend and work together—or sometimes not work together well. It is a cooperative board game, but some characters make you feel like that’s not always the case.

Hi. Let me introduce you to my flamethrower.

Speaking of the characters, and there are seventeen of them—you start with six options right off the bat, and eleven wait to be unlocked (your characters have life goals and retire over time once they reach them, often unlocking new characters). Each of those characters has unique abilities and the world building in Gloomhaven is fresh and interesting (if at times rather dark), so this isn’t elves and dwarves, but the elemental-wielding Savaas, the bull-like Inox, and the demon-tainted Valrath, alongside humans and ratlings (sorry, Vermlings), and in the unlockable classes, some truly disturbing species. They’re not just mages and rogues—though there is a “Spellweaver” and a “Scoundrel”—but things like “Tinkerer” (he has a flamethrower, which I enjoyed using), and “Mindthief” (who can manipulate and control the monsters—and other players—on the board). The flavour is fun, and the titles of the various cards are fun to announce on your turn. “I’m using my net gun, and potent potables!” And when you’ve got a team that really works well together, it can be almost painful when one of them hits their goal and retires. Though the good news is, you can create a new version of that same character type, if you really didn’t want to start a new and exciting character type you hadn’t tried before.

The randomness is dealt with by the use of modifier decks (that’s the other deck your character gets), of which the monsters have their own twenty-card deck (a miss, a critical hit, some zeroes, some plus ones, some minus ones, and a single plus two and single minus two), and the players each start out with the exact same deck to work with, so when you’re making that “Attack 3” you flip a card and it could be a critical (doubling it to 6) a miss (nuffin’), or adjusted up or down by one or two, or just as-is, if you draw a zero. But as your character grows, you also get to mess with that deck, swapping cards in our out, adding new cards, and personalizing that deck for the character in ways that are a lot of fun to play with, and make the sense of “I’m getting stronger” really work as the character progresses. There’s also equipment, and even more ways to modify your character that unlock as the game progresses.

You want me to tear the card in half? I… I can’t do that.

It is a legacy game, in that you open envelopes, add stickers, and make changes to the game pieces as you play, and for me that was a huge stumbling block at first, but I got over it—this was my first legacy game—and honestly, most of what you do can be undone and reset if you wanted to start the game over again—and I didn’t tear up cards. I just put them in an envelope marked “destroyed.” The slowly revealed story is interesting, opening up the little envelopes is cool, finding the hidden messages is neat, the scenarios are varied, and really, the only thing that was a bit frustrating was the set-up, which can take a long time, and the inclusion of some riddles and codes that sometimes ground the game to a halt and interrupted the flow as we tried to figure something out before we could continue. But that was fairly rare in the base game of Gloomhaven, and honestly, it’s barely a speed-bump in the enjoyment we got out of the game.

For someone who loves Role-Playing Games, this was like RPG-lite—it’s not roleplaying, though there are decision points you make before and after scenarios that we found ourselves doing “in-character”—but the flavour and theme of each character absolutely lends itself to certain styles of play, and it scratches most of the same itches of playing an RPG in my experience, though I’d never say it replaces one. That said, I don’t think I’ve ever played a thief in an RPG, but I was the Scoundrel in Gloomhaven, and man did I hoover up the coins while I played her, even when I wasn’t trying to. It was just the way her cards worked, and it became a running joke. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to take these coins, but…” And it was fun. Even when we players were groaning at how the characters were stumbling, fumbling, or getting in each others ways sometimes, it was amusing, not frustrating.

Scenarios are an evening’s investment, time-wise, much like an RPG session, and though we occasionally did lose a few, it didn’t happen often enough to stymy our enjoyment, and you can just start over again, and you get to keep the experience and money you earned on your failed attempt, so really, failure isn’t so bad. A few times, on holidays, we got together and played a couple of scenarios back-to-back, but more than two tended to leave us all feeling a bit woogy. Finally, everything fits in the box when you open it, but putting it away in a fashion that makes it easy to set up the next gaming session is really just not an option. I ended up spreading it out among three boxes just to make it somewhat easier to set up—grouping the various monsters, their AI cards, and their little figures into a zip-loc bag each, for example—and that made it take up way more space, but was so worth it when it came time to set up a new scenario.

But wait, there’s more!

Gloomhaven’s success was meteoric, and there have been three sequels since, one of which is actually a prequel, Jaws of the Lion, which is a simplified (but not too simplified) version of Gloomhaven that eases you into all the mechanics and the game itself, which it was unfortunate didn’t exist when we first played it, as I think it’s the best way to start, really. Then there’s Forgotten Circles expansion, which… remember how I said things were amusing not frustrating? Forgotten Circles wasn’t like that, unfortunately. I played the Diviner, the new character that comes with the expansion and… Actually, you know what? I think I’ll save discussing Jaws of the Lion and Forgotten Circles for another day.

Coming soon, though, is Frosthaven, which is shipping right now and is a full-on sequel and I cannot wait to tear into that box once it arrives. We’ve played through Forgotten Circles, and Jaws of the Lion is a few sessions away from being done so we’ll likely hop right into Frosthaven thereafter.

Tabletop Tuesday — Better than Real Life (Or, Down with Math!)

As strange as this will sound for a lover of board games and someone who has to ration his time with a screen for migraine reasons, today I’m going to talk about some games that are so much better to play online. Now, for transparency, these are games I’ve played on BoardGameArena.com, and the only reason I even tried to do so was the pandemic—my husband and I have another couple we game with every week on Tuesdays, which was originally a D&D group, then became a Gloomhaven group (I’m sure I’ll include a post on Gloomhaven at some point in this series), then two Gloomhaven follow-ups (or, rather, one follow-up and a prequel), and we’ll likely dive into Frosthaven when that appears, too. But when the Pandemic hit, one of those friends had an account on Board Game Arena, and we started exploring games that way.

I’m not a complete novice to playing games over the computer. I also run three different RPGs over Zoom, but I do “theatre of the mind” in those—roll20 is amazing, and I’m sure it’s fantastic to work with, but roll20 is just one of those online interfaces that sets off my headaches, fast. And the same can be said of quite a few of the games on Board Game Arena—Viticulture, which is a game I enjoy, didn’t just give me a headache but a full-on migraine trying to discern all the tiny writing on the cards, and a few others we’ve tried also left me aching, but over time we’ve gotten into a habit of a few games nearly every time.

So, what sorts of games aren’t just not-headache inducing but also—dare I say this—way, way more fun to play online while you’ve got a Zoom window open to chat with than they would be in person?

It mostly comes down to math, actually. And not having to do any of it.

Two Games to Have Fun With Math Without Doing Math

Can’t Stop Express

Trying to explain Can’t Stop Express is always a little crunchy, and honestly it’s easier to just say “try it!” but here we go: every turn, five dice are rolled. All the players use this same roll, but they can do their own thing with said roll. First, each player then chooses one of those dice to be tucked aside—and marks that they’ve chosen this number as one of the three numbers they’ll be using for the game Once they’ve chosen three different numbers this way (either on the first three turns or however long it takes them), they always have to choose one of those three numbers, if it’s possible. The four dice left over are then arranged into two pairs, resulting in numbers from 2 (snake eyes) to 12 (double six), with the probabilities inherent in that spread (ie: 7 is the most common, then 6 and 8, then 5 and 9, etc.)

On a pad much like Yahtzee, those pairs are noted, and once everyone has done so, the dice are rolled again. Each number from 2 to 12 has its own row with ten boxes to tick off, and this is how you score points. First off, every number with four ticks in the box or less scores you -200. Every number with five ticks in the box is now worth zero points. After that, every tick in the box is worth a positive amount that grows the further you get from the most common result of a 7 (which is worth 30 points per tick above five ticks, 6 and 8 are worth 40 points per tick above five ticks, 5 and 9 are worth 50 points per tick above five ticks, and so on, with 2 and 12 being worth a whopping 100 per tick above five ticks). So, on your first turn, it’s likely you’ll be at -400 points (or maybe -200 if you managed to create a pair with the four dice you left behind). Once everyone has chosen their pairs, the dice are all rolled again, and you pick another dice to single out, but that’s the built-in timer: say you’ve chosen to pull aside a 1 and use the four other dice to earn ticks, and then you choose a 3 the next round, and then a 6 the round after that. From now on, every time there’s a 1 or 3 or 6, you’ll have to choose to tuck aside a 1 or a 3 or a 6—sometimes that means choosing from all three, sometimes it means your choice as one of them because the other two don’t show. Then you mark a tick in another little three-row area counting down the number of 1s, 3s, and 6s you’ve chosen. As soon as you hit eight ticks in any of those rows, your game is done and you tally up your points and wait for everyone else to finish. (Rarely, you’ll get a “Freebie” where there’s no 1 or 3 or 6, and in that case, you choose any dice to pull aside, and don’t mark down a tick. Lucky you!)

So, if you’re like me, even just looking at all that made you think, nope. I mean, just imagine you roll 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 in my example above. You have to stop and think, “Okay, if I take the 1 aside, then I can make 5 and 9, 7 and 7, or 6 and 8. If I take the 3 aside, then I can make 3 and 9, 5 and 7, or 6 and 6.” Followed, almost immediately, by, “Wait, what were my numbers if I took the 1 again?” Oh, and everyone else around the table is doing this, too, mumbling numbers, which of course makes you lose track of what you’re looking at. Basically, it’s torture. Math torture, is what I’m saying. (Or, I can hear my math-degree husband point out, it’s arithmetic homework, because math is fun, but arithmetic is boring as hell.)

But, play this game automated on Board Game Arena and suddenly you’re laughing at your own ability to be completely ruled by the laws of randomness in action, as each turn makes someone in the group say, “Oh my god, I have to open up two numbers no matter what I choose, there’s another -400 points!” and someone else says, “How can it always be a one?” and honestly? It’s a blast. It’s also super-quick, thanks to that built in timer and the fickle gods of random chance. Is there strategy? Well, yeah, from the sense of probability, and how you nudge said probability depending on which dice you choose as your three—if you pick 1, then your chances of having numbers that can only be reached by 1s drops (2s and 3s), and so on. But honestly? I’ve yet to see much in the way of strategy working out thanks to the whole random thing. And because of that, it’s just a silly, wild, ride. I cannot tell you how often I’ve seen games where someone is in the hole hundreds of points while the winner has made it to hundreds in the positive, but both are laughing.

6 nimmt!

Speaking of wild rides, 6 nimmt! is exactly that, and I mean that thematically: this card game has a bull theme, and you don’t want to get the horns. Basically, there are 104 cards, numbered from 1 to 104, and each card is worth a certain number of horns (most are worth one, but cards ending in 5 are worth two horns, cards ending in 0 are worth three horns, cards that are multiples of 11 are worth four horns, and that makes card 55 worth seven horns, because it ends with 5 and is a multiple of 11). The cards are shuffled, four are drawn to create four starts to four rows, and then everyone gets ten cards each in their hand. Then, each player decides which card they’re going to play, and once everyone has put their card down, they’re revealed, put in numerical order from lowest to highest, and then those cards are played onto the four rows using—you guessed it—math. Cards are always placed next to the card on the board with the smallest difference between them, so if a row shows a 6 and you’ve got a 7 in your hand, you know where your 7 is going to end up. Now, as the rows get longer, they never go longer than 6 cards, and whoever’s card becomes the sixth in a particular row scoops up the five cards that came before it and now owns those bullheads (which is bad), and their card becomes the first card, leaving four safe spaces beside it. If the lowest player plays a card that’s lower than all the cards currently at the end of any given row, they have to choose any single row to pick up (even if it’s just one card), and then their card becomes the first card in that row, and play continues with the rest of the players as usual.

Each player starts with 66 points, and each bullhead picked up reduces their total by the amount of bullheads on the cards. Players keep going until their hands of cards are empty, at which point the score is checked—did anyone reach zero (or, more likely, below?)—and if not, everything is shuffled for a new start and you get your ten cards again and a new round begins. Until someone goes out, you keep going. There’s definitely some tactics to this one—especially in when you play a low card to purposefully take a row, which you can do specifically to make sure the other cards being played by the rest of players end up differently than where they might have imagined—but mostly it’s about considering the likelihood or where your card will end up, and whether or not you’ve got a way to avoid the dreaded sixth-spot in a row (or, if you’ve got an amazing memory, keeping track of which numbers have already gone by, but good luck with that). And of course, as the rounds continue, you have less options. Also? Sometimes you just get ten really, really crappy cards, and it’s funny, and you might think, “To heck with it, I’m going full chaos mode!” and just try to make the board as random as possible and hope you can screw up everyone else’s plans. I mean, so I’ve heard, anyway.

Now, in person, this means everyone revealing cards, figuring out who is lowest, then figuring out which card is the closest card less than the card in that player’s hand, and then repeating over and over without making mistakes in a slow game and also counting horns and subtracting them from your 66 total in between rounds of “how is it fun to do this much subtraction?” You know what doesn’t make mistakes and can subtract as you play for you? The computer. And while the computer is doing that, you’re hearing amazingly funny stories about our husky. Or drinking tea. Or doing anything but counting. Win-win. It’s faster, shuffles 104 cards really quickly, and—again—no math (sorry, honey, arithmetic).

The Best Queer Audiobooks to Walk Your Dog By…

I’m over today at Shepherd.com talking queer audiobooks, and five of my favourites in particular to listen to that made walking Max in all types of weather an experience to enjoy, rather than suffer through. And we’re talking Canadian winter here, so let’s be clear: it takes one hell of an audiobook… You can click here or the image to be taken to the site.

While you’re there? Check out the Queer shelf, and see some other amazing lists gathered by other authors sharing their favourites!

Tabletop Tuesday — Two Players, Competition

Last week, I popped in with some of my best experiences of co-operative games with two players, and this week I figured I’d flip that and list the “versus” style games my husband and I have enjoyed on our trip through the gaming jar. The gaming jar was our way of trying out all our board games that say they’re okay for two players and figuring out which of them really were fun for two players (unsurprisingly, it’s a lot less than advertised) but there were a few surprises where we went in thinking “oof, this will be bad,” and… it wasn’t. That risk of un-fun seems higher to me when it’s not a co-operative game, but not always.

Five Competitive Games Fun for Two Players

Creature Comforts (1 to 5 Players)

Okay, it’s possible the reason this one is so fun is the sheer, absolute adorableness involved in the artwork and thematic of the game, but we still had fun with two players (and even more fun with four). The set-up for Creature Comforts is simple: you take on the role of one of five animal groups—bunnies, raccoons, squirrels, foxes, or hedgehogs, all of whom have two options for a special ability—and then you spend Spring, Summer, and Autumn getting ready for Winter to come, with the goal of making yourself a snuggly, warm, super-comfortable home for when the snow flies.

This one is a worker-placement but also dice-rolling mix, and the resulting mechanic is really interesting—you each roll two dice of the colour matching your animal tokens, and then place your workers on various spaces around the board which will require one or more dice with particular rolls to activate on your turn (meaning, you know two of the dice already so you have two dice you’re sure will be the numbers you might need) but then once everyone has placed their animeeples, the first player rolls four more dice, and everyone uses that same set of dice results on their sequential turns. So there’s a random element, a bit of a gamble (will dice be rolled that I need to make the space where I’m putting my little fox activate?) but there’s a nifty balancing mechanic, too: any of your little animals that don’t end up getting activated earn you a “lesson learned” token, which you can use to modify a dice roll in another round up or down by 1.

Gathering resources, building things, and then snuggling down is the whole process, and there’s very little about this game that feels “versus” in play—you’re mostly doing your own thing, with the exception of someone perhaps picking up a comfort card you wanted, but honestly, you’re mostly trying to optimize your own space, so it was never done as an “attack” in our experiences. The replayability is solid—the turn order of each season’s cards is random, and there’s also a traveling guest who comes to stay and offers up specific deals every turn—and the game itself has a built in number of turns you play before final scoring starts, so it doesn’t run overlong, either. And it’s adorable. I mean, snuggly foxes in their den knitting blankies and collecting books for winter? I’m in.

Dinosaur Island (2 to 5 Players)

Definitely not snuggly and cozy, this game is totally a riff on Jurassic Park, only with all the serial numbers filed off. It’s also not adorable in design so much as it’s 80s Neon To the Max, Dude! in theme. You play as owner/operators of your own Jurass—er, sorry—Dinosaur Island theme park, where you splice DNA, create dinosaurs, fill paddocks, set up exhibits and concession stands, greet guests, and try really hard not to let anyone get eaten (or at least, not so many people as to ruin your reputation or lose your business, because 80s Capitalism is totally down with some people getting eaten, as long as everyone else has fun and buys a T shirt).

I think where Dinosaur Island really shines is the ability to play a short, medium, or long game by virtue of choosing from short, medium, and long goals, and there are enough of those goals that random draws make for different game strategies every time you play. That said, we did have one two-player short game where I won at the end of something like the second turn, which was more amusing for me than my husband, and definitely wasn’t worth the set-up time for the game, but it did mean we played another game right after, which went in a more balanced way. The dice—did I mention they’re 80s Neon To the Max, Dude!?—control the randomness of the game, and from there it’s a blend of worker placement and to a lesser degree a tile-placing game as you design your own island in front of you. You can hire specialists, choose how dangerous a dino you want to introduce to your park (more dangerous dinos get you happier customers, but also increase the risk of said happy customers being eaten), and while the crunch to this one is a bit complex in places, by the second or third game you’ll have it down.

A quick note about the 80s Neon To the Max, Dude! thematics, though—I have a really, really hard time telling two of the colours on the dice apart. I’m colour-weak (not colour-blind) and there are also shapes on the dice, but those shapes are complex rather than simple (they could have gone with Triangles, Squares, Circles, etc., but instead they went with… I don’t know what they are, frankly, but I have to stare at them a while to make sure I’ve got it right). So that part is a bit of a frustration. Still, it’s a fun game. And it came with a slap-bracelet, because 80s Neon to the Max, Dude!

Parks (1 to 5 Players)

If Creature Comforts is adorable fun and Dinosaur Island is neon capitalism danger fun, Parks is a more beautiful fun, albeit fun that also jacks up a kind of tension in the sense of you’ll only be able to accomplish so much, so you really feel how every turn counts. This is another game we had even more fun with beyond two players, but with two is still good. Of design note is how absolutely freaking perfectly the game stores, packs away, and sets up. The world needs more game boxes designed like this gem, frankly. The theme of the game is simple: you’re hiking through the national parks of the United States of America, and more or less “collecting” memories of doing so.

It’s a worker-placement and resource-gathering kind of game, where you’ve got Sunshine, Water, Trees, and Mountains (and wildcard Animals) which you use to trade in for specific parks to add to your personal checklist of visited places. You get those resources by moving forward (never back) with one of two campers, and that’s the crunch of the game: if you jump ahead on the trail to a spot where you definitely want the resources it offers (and the first person on any space also gains bonus sunshine or water, depending on the weather), any spaces behind become harder to get to. Each season, you add one more space to the track (and in larger player games, you have extra spots from the start of the game), and there is a Campfire mechanic that lets you join a space where another hiker (even yourself) is already placed, but believe me when I say choosing where to advance one of your hikers to can be really, really nail-biting, even while you’re looking at the gorgeous artwork on the cards and thinking, “I would totally love to go explore Alaska someday! (No, no you wouldn’t, ‘Nathan, you can barely tolerate Ottawa winter.)”

You can purchase equipment, start the game with a hidden goal that will adjust how you’ll likely strategize, and while there’s definitely a frustration element of “you just took the park I was going to take, damn you” again it doesn’t feel like an attack. Both of you are just trying to do your best with what you’ve got. If someone gets quite a bit further ahead point-wise, catching up can be difficult, which can also put a damper on the fun, but Parks is also a fairly quick game with a built in number of seasons before you’re done. And given the randomized seasons, available parks, weather, equipment purchases, and personal goal cards, the replay-ability is really high. You’ll evolve some tactics, yes, but I’ve not really felt like I’ve played this the same way twice.

Patchwork (2 Players)

It’s hard to come across a list of fairly recent two-player tabletop board games without bumping into Patchwork on that list, but honestly? I get it. It hits a bunch of really great sweet spots for me as a competitive two-player game, and more importantly, both myself and my husband find losing doesn’t feel bad in the slightest on this one. Thematically, you’re both making a patchwork quilt, one covered in buttons for some reason, but I’ll put that down to a quirky grandmother who realized she had a big honkin cookie tin full of buttons or something and decided to just what-the-hell it and put them on a big ol’ blanket.

The things Patchwork does so well are these: Set up is quick. Gameplay is quick. The mechanics are simple, and there’s a kind of built-in balancing effect via the way the turns work depending on who is furthest behind on a track that I freaking love. There’s a puzzle-placing element to it. It’s super-portable (ie: small-ish). All those things are great, and when you’ve got them all in one game, even better. We routinely pick out Patchwork when we’re feeling up for a quick game, but don’t want to spend ages setting up or anything super-challenging. Also, the closest you get to “versus” feeling is when the other player picks up a patch piece you were hoping for, but again, the other player is trying to make their own quilt. Sabotaging the other player isn’t really a strategy that works in Patchwork.

Setting up involves making a big circle of patches, doling out your buttons (which are currency) and placing the starting marker inside that circle. The player can buy a patch within a certain range of the starting piece, and “buying” involves either time (which advances your marker on a game board), buttons, or both. Then the player moves the piece forward to the empty spot where the patch was, and the player furthest behind on the game board goes next. It’s possible to take multiple turns in a row, and it’s also possible to jump way ahead and end up not having a turn for a while, but both can lead to victory. As you place the pieces on your large board, there are bonuses for filling in a certain sized square, and then, at the end, there’s some math done with how many buttons you have, how many open squares aren’t covered in, and ta-da, you declare a winner.

Timeline (2 to 6 Players)

Was the can-opener invented before or after stainless steel? When was gravity discovered? When were the pyramids built? The good news when it comes to playing Timeline is you don’t need to know the exact dates for any of these questions. The bad news is you need to be able to put them in order, but that’s also still good news because it’s both fun and funny and, well, informative. Timeline is a deck of cards with the same image of some piece of history on both sides, but on one side the date is listed. Everyone starts with the same number of cards (6 each for two or three players, less for more players), and then a single card is flipped up and placed in the middle of the table with its date showing.

After that, your goal is to get rid of your cards by placing them in the ever-growing row of cards in the centre of the table in chronological order, which sounds simple, but can get quite vexing the longer that line of cards grows. If you place your card, flip it and it’s correct, it gets added to the timeline. If you flip it and it’s wrong, you discard it and draw another card to put in front of you to place on your next turn. You always finish a round, so if someone goes out and the other player(s) only have one card left, they get a shot at tying the game (and then it becomes a face-off between those players) but in my experience that doesn’t happen much, especially if my father-in-law is involved, because apparently he knows everything, which I’m sure is super-fun for my mother-in-law.

Strategy-wise, there’s not a lot beyond potentially hanging onto cards you’re most sure of till the end, since you’ve got a better chance of placing them correctly and going out, but I’ve had that backfire on me when I knew a card was for-sure in the 60s, but not more specific than that, and later on in the game cards ended up on the timeline in 1961, 1964, and 1968, making “I know this was the 60s,” rather less helpful then than it would have been when the only cards on the table were dated 1804 and 2001. The game cards are small, making this one very portable, and there are multiple sets out there you can absolutely mix and match to your hearts content to make the deck larger—we have the Canadian-specific Timeline, among others—and from a Stocking Stuffer point of view, this game is fabulous for multiple years in a row if you find someone who enjoys it.

What about you? Do you have any two-player head-to-head games you enjoy you think I should check out? As always, I’d love to hear about new games, so pop a comment below if you’ve got one you love.

Tabletop Tuesday — Two Players, No Competition

When the pandemic started, my husband and I had recently gone through our board game collection and tucked a few aside as games we hadn’t played in a long time, and weren’t likely to play again, and had even found new homes for those games, though they’re still in a pile because, well, pandemic. When it became clear we’d be socially isolating for a while, I made a “game jar,” by cutting up little slips of paper and putting the name down of every game we had that declared itself playable by two players, and we started pulling them out of the jar and making our way through them and discovering that for a lot of games, “Two to Four,” “Two to Five,” “Two to Six,” or even more really meant, “You should probably play this with three or four people at least, but it’s technically possible to play with just two, albeit much less fun.”

That said, we did discover quite a few games that were fun to play with just the two of us, and to start with, I’m going to stick to my favourite kind of games to begin with: cooperative.

Cooperative games are the “everyone wins, or we all lose” of board games, and they’re my favourite precisely because of the lack of versus involved, and that comes into play all the more with only two players—when it’s a competitive game and you’ve got only two players, very often it’s clear who is going to win early on and that can rob the game of a lot of the fun. Or, it means the whole experience is about doing the other player dirty, stymying them and getting in the way of their plans, and that’s not generally something I enjoy doing to someone else, or enjoy having done to me, frankly. I’d rather us work to a common goal, and have some sort of AI board game mechanic to defeat. That isn’t to say there aren’t fun competitive two player games—there are, and maybe I’ll do that post another day—but cooperative games always have my heart.

Five Co-operative Games Fun for Two Players

Castle Ravenloft (1 to 5 Players)

Castle Ravenloft was a game that we took a while to warm up to. For one, it had the unfortunate 4th-Edition feel of Dungeons and Dragons, a version of the game neither of us enjoyed, but as a tabletop board game, that landed better for us than trying to role-play. I’d also tried it solo and got absolutely slaughtered, so my first impression wasn’t entirely positive. But when we set up a two-player adventure and grabbed characters and made our way through it with a surprising amount of fun. It’s not a slower-paced game, plays sort of like a streamlined dungeon-crawl, and it’s not the kind of game where you can afford to let your character hesitate. The game functions with tiles being revealed on most turns—and if you’re not opening up a new tile, the game tends to make the bad things already on the board even worse, and you’ll end up overwhelmed. That works to jack up the tension and keep your characters on the move.

Crunch-wise, the mechanics weren’t too hard to figure out—I watched a video walk-through first—and from a replay point of view, there are five characters with different abilities and you choose only some of those abilities for each adventure, so you can absolutely play the same character a different way from adventure to adventure—of which there are more than enough to play through before you’d need to start repeating—and the same can be said of the treasures and equipment your character will have. Finally, from a theme and world-building point of view, this is Ravenloft, which frankly goes down as one of the best D&D settings ever, and there’s just something about facing off against Strahd, no?

Meeple Party (1 to 5 Players)

If Castle Ravenloft can be a bit frenetic and make you feel like you’re always teetering on the edge of overwhelmed, Meeple Party is a much gentler gaming experience, but it still has its own ticking-clock mechanics and ever-shifting goals. The idea behind Meeple Party is simple enough: you’re a group of roommates having a party, and trying to give everyone a good time and make some memories and snap some photos. But people are people—in Meeple Party, they’re all categorized into five types: jerk, flirt, party animal, wallflower, and cool—and as new people arrive and you have others mingle, the crowds that form in the different rooms of your house get more and more complex.

Each player has their own individual goals, which are the photographs of groups you’re trying to gather, often in specific number or specific places in the house—but the game is won or lost as a whole on the basis of anyone “stressing out.” How you stress out depends on the cards you have—”Peer Pressure,” as one example, means having no rooms with Party Animals and Wallflowers—and every turn more people arrive at the party and more people mingle. It’s cute, fairly quick, and the mechanics are deceptively simple but create a decent puzzle—moving a Jerk into a room, for example, will send another meeple already in that room two rooms away (because, well, he’s a jerk, and probably did or said something bad); moving a Cool into a room draws two meeple from adjacent room(s) into the same room to hang out. So, strategically, the players move meeple around to try and set up the groups of they need in the rooms they need them in, all while trying to avoid the stress-causing disasters. Once enough photos have been taken and the clock hits the closing time of the party, the game is won.

Onirim (1 or 2 Players)

Onirim is a rare solo Solitaire-like game that also has a two-player mode, and thematically it’s a game I adored so much I couldn’t resist mentioning it in my first YA novel, Exit Plans for Teenage Freaks as a favourite of the main character, Cole. In Onirim, you’re lost in a strange dreamworld, trying to find your way through doors in time to escape before the dream ends. It’s played entirely with a deck of cards, and the two-player version creates a back-and-forth as you each try to find four doors of the four colours and place your cards down in the right pattern to unlock them, or luck into—and discard—the keys you need. Meanwhile, nightmare cards lie in wait.

Onirim has just the right balance of luck and skill for me. When we lose, it doesn’t feel like it was completely out of our control, but enough of it is poor luck, so it doesn’t sting as much, either. Playing together also involves a lot of “okay, if I do this, then I’ll get my door, and then we can try to get you your next door…” discussions, and the laying down of cards (trying to get three of the same colour in a row, though no two played cards in a row have the same symbol) has just enough complexity to be challenging without feeling like too much. It also has a bunch of expansions, and we’ve played with a few of them, but for the most part, it’s fun by itself. It’s quick to set up, fairly quick to play, and doesn’t have a steep learning curve.

Paperback (2 to 5 Players)

While thematically, Paperback is a game about being a pulp fiction writer who is paid by the word, and trying to write that elusive best seller, from a gameplay point of view, it’s a deck-building game where you use the pennies you earn from the word you assemble from your personal deck of cards to buy more cards from the communal “shop.” The bought cards are added to your deck, and those cards earn you more cash that you can then use to buy better letters, often having powers that grant you boosts to your earnings, and on it goes. The competitive version of this game is fun for two players, too, since you’re building from your own deck and it doesn’t involve any attacking, really, since you’re just trying to buy more victory point cards until two of the piles of victory cards run out, at which point the game ends and you tally up to find the winner. The cooperative version, however, gives you a limited number of turns with which to empty out a pyramid of those victory cards, and I find it all the more satisfying because the tactical move isn’t always to get those cards as fast as possible, but rather to make sure both players are building decks strong enough to handle the next layer of the pyramid.

Where Paperback really shines is if you’ve got a couple of word-nerds (like myself and my husband) and you can help each other out, figure out which tactic your individual deck will focus on (I tend to like building decks that let me draw extra cards, and my husband likes to get cards that give him more buying power) and playing to your strengths while you watch the ticking clock of the pyramid of cards you need to clear. Both players start with the same basic decks, but they soon become very different in how they play as you use the money you earn on each word to add more letters (and more abilities) to the cardss you draw. When it comes to the co-operative version of the game, we often win by the skin of our teeth, which is just so satisfying.

Sentinels of Earth Prime (2 to 5 Players)

Last week I talked about Mutants & Masterminds, the superhero tabletop role-playing game, and Sentinels of Earth Prime is a card game is based on the RPG, using the “Earth Prime” setting, but offering up a deck-based card game with a lot of replay-ability, and a satisfying amount of individual crunch. When you play with two players, each of you picks two of the decks of hero cards, so you are technically playing two characters each and the equivalent of a four-player game, but honestly, it’s just as fun to play with two heroes, so if it’s a “cheat” to call that two players, I’m not going to call anyone out on it. Those four heroes then go against one of the villains (who has their own deck), and then a setting is also put into play with its own environment deck. I kickstarted this one with a bunch of expansions, but the basic set has ten heroes, four villains, and four environments. Even just considering which bad guy you’re taking down and where that bad-guy is being fought that’s sixteen different options that change the way the game unfolds, and which heroes you bring jacks that up to a lot of variability. Add in the expansions and it goes even further.

The hero and villain and environment decks are all listed with complexity levels, which is nice, so you can start out with more simple games as you get the idea of how your hero works, what sort of curveballs the environment might throw your way, and the tricks the bad guy has up his sleeve. The way the rounds progress creates a clever sort of AI for the villain, and it was interesting to see how quickly my husband and I ended up with “favourite” hero decks. (I like the Doctor Metropolis, Johnny Rocket, and Lady Liberty decks, whereas he liked the mechanics of the Captain Thunder and Star Knight decks the most). I should also note Sentinels of Earth Prime stands alone, but is also cross-compatible with another game I don’t yet have, Sentinels of the Multiverse, for even more combinations (and thereby fresh gaming experiences).

What about you? Do you have any two-player games you love to play? Are they co-operative, or are they competitive? I’m always interested in hearing about new games, so drop me a comment if you’ve got a gem.

Tabletop Tuesday — Character Generation with Mutants & Masterminds

It might be obvious to anyone who ever read, well, anything I’ve written, but I’m a bit of a nerd. Okay, I’m a lot of a nerd, and specifically, I’m very much a gaming nerd. Tabletop board games and role-playing games have been a staple of my entertainment and social circles since I was a wee thing gifted that first red box of Dungeons and Dragons (and colouring in the dice with a white crayon so the numbers were easier to read).

These days, I don’t just play D&D, and my board game collection has grown to a near-embarrassing proportion (except I’m not embarrassed, I love board games, and frankly refuse to feel bad about enjoying them), and it occurred to me I could take a day here and there to talk about said games.

So: Tabletop Tuesdays.

Maybe it’s a review of a gaming product, a game, or game-adjacent thingamajig, maybe it’s just a discussion of a new game on the horizon I’m looking forward to, maybe it’s a dive into any of the role playing game campaigns I’m playing in at any given time, but I’m going to attempt to pop in on Tuesdays here in the blog to specifically chat about my nerdy joy, and hopefully maybe pass some of that joy along to any of you who might be interested.

One of the most difficult things about starting a new RPG is knowing where to begin with making a character. There are often so many rules to try and digest, often things like ability scores, skills, and other numerical stand-ins for “how good is my character at this thing?” to learn about. When you’ve got time to make a deep dive, that’s fine. I truly, truly adore RPGs that offer up a system so open to variation it basically says, “Tell me what you’d like to be, and we’ll make that happen.”

On the flip side of the coin, though, I also love a system that says, “Here, let me walk you through this in a way that lets you make choices, gives you ownership of your character, and you’ll have a character in about five minutes that’s fun to play.” Those games let you figure things out as you go, without losing hours to character creation in the first place.

You know which game does both of those character creation approaches brilliantly? Mutants & Masterminds.

Random-ish

Mutants & Masterminds is a superhero role playing game that I bumped into more-or-less at the start of the COVID pandemic and was frankly one of the ways I kept my sanity throughout. I am lucky enough, through Can-Con and other writing conferences, to know a lot of authors, and as such, I was able to ask a quartet of my fellow authors if they’d be interested in playing a superhero game set in Ottawa, and in no time at all, they sent me their character concepts, and I did a deep dive into the various books to figure out how to make all their powers work.

Now, I did that because I was playing with Marie Bilodeau, Brandon Crilly, Kevin Hearne, and Evan May—all of whom are super-creative authors who came up with really cool and unique powers and superhero characters—but what’s important for today’s discussion of making characters in a new TTRPG is that when it came to Mutants & Masterminds?

I didn’t have to do that. I mean, I did it because I totally wanted to make the characters they came up with. Kevin Hearne’s wizard who tosses bombs of impossible-to-resist-delicious-gravy, for example, wasn’t exactly listed as an example power, but once I understood the flexibility behind the “Affliction” power, I realized I had everything I needed for his “Gravygasm” potion, and the game mechanics worked perfectly as imagined. I have yet to bump into an ability for a superhero I can’t figure out how to build with the various powers in Mutants & Masterminds, and honestly that is so freeing.

But what if you want to throw together a quick game and don’t have time to do a deep-dive into gravy-based power creation? No problem. The Deluxe Hero’s Handbook has you covered. There’s a fifty-page section of the book, the “Quickstart Character Generator” which is, hands down, one of the best “get a character and get playing” systems I’ve ever bumped into. It’s entirely done with d20 rolls—so is the whole Mutants & Masterminds gaming experience, for the record—but at any point it’s perfectly acceptable to simply say “I’m going to choose this one” instead of rolling. The twenty different types of archetype heroes make sense to anyone with a toe dipped into any superhero knowledge (with basic categories like “Speedster,” “Gadgeteer,” “Battlesuit,” “Weather Controller” and the like), and then the rolls you make on each individual archetype specialize your character even further, until, a few rolls later, you’ve got a character completely ready to go, complete with a few seeds from which to build your characterization of the character for role-playing moments. Even if two people choose the same archetype, they’ll easily end up with two different characters, and be ready to go in a short amount of time. The more difficult to grasp archetypes are also clearly marked, so beginners don’t end up with a character that’s very complicated to play right out of the gate.

Let me 100% roll up a character right now and give you an example.

I got an 11 for rolling my archetype, which gives me “Powerhouse.” This is your strong guy superhero, like, uh, well, Strong Guy. The archetype breaks down into three paths, and I roll an 8, which says “Innate Power.” However I got my powers, they’re not a fluke or an accident or anything like that. Maybe I’m an alien from a race of beings who are all like me, or I’m from some hidden offshoot of humanity with incredible powers, like the Amazons or Yeti or something. This roll also gives me my basic ability scores—unsurprisingly most of my points go to Strength, Stamina, and Fighting.

Next up I roll twice to gain some advantages, and get a 2 and 14, which translates to “Driven” and “Tough” and grants me two talents that dovetail together well (mechanically, I’ve got the option of pushing myself past the usual limits via a talent called “Extraordinary Effort”, and also “Ultimate Effort (Toughness Checks)” which basically allows me to force a natural 20 when it comes to withstanding something rough). Whoever this hero is, he can take a punch, that’s for sure.

Skills are up next, and I get 9 and 12—”Charmer” and “Rough Upbringing.” The skills make me not only good at persuading, reading, or misleading people, but also intimidating them if all else fails, as well as knowing my way around rough parts of town. Right at this moment, I decide my character has no idea why he’s got superpowers or where they came from. He’s just always had them. And his childhood was full of people on the wrong side of the law happy to use him for their own advantage. Not knowing where my powers come from—Am I an alien? A descendent of a god?—also gives me and the game’s narrator something to maybe weave into an ongoing story as I try to figure it out.

Now we get to powers. Under Offensive Powers, I roll a 12, which is “Super-Strength.” My Strength ability score goes from 4 (which is already somewhere around olympian level strength, to be clear) to 12, with the added bonus of 4 more points when I’m lifting something, which means my character can now lift 1,600 tons. He be strong. Under “Offensive Powers II” I roll a 18, which is “Thunderclap” and is totally that thing where a super-strong character claps their hands together and creates this cone of blammo, and I love it. During his wayward youth, you just know he blew out all the windows on the block, at least once. Defensive powers come next, and I get to roll twice. First I roll a 19, which is “Thick Skin,” which grants me an Impervious ability that leaves me untouchable by a lot of types of damage. This fella doesn’t have to worry about most bullets even, but this is a game of superheroes, and there’s always someone out there with a bigger blast. Then I roll a 4, which is “Life Support” which means I don’t have to breathe, or eat or drink, weather or environment exposures of any kind, and poison and diseases just don’t bother me. This feels like it lines up well with that rough childhood again—no one could physically hurt this guy, and the people who were using him for their own ends didn’t even have to take care of him in any real way. I get to roll again for a movement power—a 9, “Super Leaping,” which translates to jumping 4 miles at a time—and one last roll for a Utility Power gives me “Like Hitting a Brick Wall,” which is an amusing little ability to have people hurt themselves when try to punch me, and, I decide, his go-to nickname/superhero name: Brick. I also decide that his youth is by no means long gone. This guy is in his late teen years or early twenties at most, and whatever the first adventure brings, it will be his first time truly trying to be a hero.

I get some bonuses to my basic defense scores, and then it’s time to choose “Complications” (which are the Mutants & Masterminds way of giving the narrator a bit of bargaining power over your character in the form of in-game things that stymy your character during adventures). These are a la carte, and I decide on “Motivation—Responsibility” (taking care of the little guys who can’t look out for themselves, especially street kids like Brick once was himself) and “Relationship—Chosen Family” (a very small group of friends from that rough neighbourhood where we all grew up who this character looks out for beyond all else), and barring a little bit of math, the character is done. Brick, protector of his fellow street-kids, enemy of those who’d use and abuse them, and likely still running from the people who used to control him—a crime family, maybe—who may or may not have the answers as to where his powers come from in the first place, but would definitely like to have him under their control again.

All from random rolls.

Do you have any games you’ve played with awesome character generator tools? Let me know! Also, tell me what games you’re playing. I’m always interested in learning about new-to-me games.

At the Closing of the Year

It’s time to close out 2022 today, which means a quick glimpse back at accomplishing a few writerly time things, and doing some social media housekeeping. Let’s start with the accomplishments, though, eh?

Three Left Turns to Nowhere Cover Art by Inkspiral Design.

First off, there was Three Left Turns to Nowhere, a trio of YA novellas released by Bold Strokes Books which included my story “Hope Echoes” rounding out the bunch after Jeffrey Ricker’s “Roadside Assistance” and J. Marshall Freeman’s “Scavenger Hunt.”

Three strangers heading to a convention in Toronto are stranded in rural Ontario, where a small town with a subtle kind of magic leads each to discover what he’s been searching for. In “Hope Echoes,” we meet Fielding Roy, who has a gift for seeing the past. His year isn’t going well—he’s had to stay behind while his friends begin their first year of university—but he’s on a trip to see them in Toronto when a downed tree forces a stop in Hopewell. He’s convinced this is the worst thing ever, but a long-lost love letter, two local boys, and the realization this situation is unique in a way he’s never encountered gives Fielding the freedom and courage to try something very new. And that gift for seeing the past? This time he might not just watch. This time, Fielding might be able to fix the present.

The tone and theme for “Hope Echoes” is one I’ve explored before: the queer past and the queer present, and how much extra effort it can take for connections to be formed between the two, but this time I got to play with Fielding also discovering what it’s like to be queer when you’re in a situation where any kind of rejection—if it comes—will be uniquely temporary. There is freedom in being somewhere you’ll never be again, and Fielding steps forward with that confidence and realizes that the feeling of being honestly himself in every way might be worth exploring elsewhere, too. I also got to do something I’ve wanted to do for ages, and that was write a YA where there’s no romantic angle for the main character. Fielding doesn’t meet the boy of his dreams in this story. Rather, he makes two new queer friends, and that new friendship is foundational to Fielding’s growth and ability to admit his own state of mind.

Faux Ho Ho on Audio Once again, the brilliant Inkspiral Design for cover art.

I cannot tell you how happy I was to work with Giancarlo Herrera again, nor how freaking awesome it was to hear him voice Silas and Dino in “Faux Ho Ho” this year as an audiobook release of my second holiday novella. He previously did an amazing job on “Handmade Holidays” and brought the same amazing energy and skill to Silas and Dino’s story, and I would not be lying if I said I’d already listened to it multiple times. The thing about hiring someone with the hard-earned performance skills like his is you get just that: a performance. Herrera doesn’t just read the books, he brings them to life, and I sincerely hope I have more opportunities to work with him.

If you like fake dating fauxmance, and you like queer holiday romances, and you like chosen families, and you like audiobooks performed by someone who makes you think you’re listening to a whole cast? Well. Give it a try.

Also, the scene where Dino is pretending to be a video game character for a group of kids and does a voice is so hysterically funny I scared the crap out of someone because I was listening to it while I was walking the dog and suddenly burst out laughing as this woman was walking by. Sorry, random lady. Nothing personal. Promise.

For those who asked me about the possibility of audiobooks of my other works, the short answer is a repeat of that: I hope so. But that choice is up to my publisher, which means it’s about sales, and… well, I’m a pretty wee author. But I will champion the accessibility of audiobook releases as much as I can, promise.

Felix Navidad Cover, you guessed it, by Inkspiral Design. Yep. They’re amazing.

Ah, Felix! I can’t believe I wrote an entire novella quartet, but as of this year, it happened! “Felix Navidad” from Bold Strokes Books rounds out the journey I started with “Handmade Holidays,” “Faux Ho Ho,” and “Village Fool,” and I could not be happier with how it’s been received. One of the best parts about playing with Holiday Romance is you get to lean so heavily on tropes, and “Felix Navidad” was my turn at a forced proximity romance, as well as a dash of there’s only one bed, though the latter I played with in a way I was beyond nervous about. Happily, on the there’s only one bed front, most reviews have been positive in regards to how it turned out, so I’m pleased. Taking risks is always harrowing in writing, but this was something I wanted to showcase.

Much like “Hope Echoes,” “Felix Navidad” carries a theme of intergenerational queer history, compassion, and friendship, but also it’s about a good guy trying his best—which hasn’t always gone right, especially when he gives in to his impulsive side—and coming across the unexpected when his plans for a holiday vacation fall through. Ending up stranded in a cabin with a good friend’s ex instead of lounging in the warmth of Hawai’i is not how Felix intended to spend his first real Christmas vacation, but it’s what’s happening.

Apart from what I wanted to do with the there’s only one bed trope, with this story, I got to really highlight the way queer community has always worked and felt to me—interconnected (initial) strangers working together to try to make a future for those they don’t even know yet. That facet of queerness: that we’re born at random to families nothing like us, and have to go find each other to even being to learn about ourselves, and don’t even know what we don’t know, is something I talk about a lot here, so I won’t go over it again, but I think “Felix Navidad” is maybe the piece I’m proudest of on that front.

Also? Today is the last day for the Low-Angst Festive MM Reads that “Felix Navidad” is part of alongside twenty-three other books. If you haven’t checked that out, today is the day!

Short Nonfiction

I really do wish I could send a time-travel message to myself in regards to these next two little releases, because I cannot tell you how freaking astounded, amazed, and amused past me would have been to learn I’ve been published in two more Chicken Soup of the Soul books. I used to shelve them in the bookstore and—brutal honesty moment—during the holidays they used to do this “two for $25” deal that was a huge, huge pain in the butt to try and stock and shelve and sticker and keep organized, so the idea that I am taking part would have made past me flip me off even as he congratulated me.

“Keeping Cards, Keeping Memories,” appears in Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Magic of Christmas. It’s a story about the first time I met my husband’s grandmother, and a discussion we had about cards, and how I revisit that memory every year when it’s time to put up the Christmas card string.

“Looking for the Source,” appears in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Too Funny! It’s a bookstore era story, funnily enough, about that time someone came into the store and all they could tell me was they were looking for a book. Just a book. With words in it. You know, that one? That one.

I’ve enjoyed writing these little memories up for Chicken Soup, and I’ll likely continue to try for more. It’s a lovely way to sit down and the sense of accomplishment at hitting “Submit!” is good for the seretonin levels.

Social Media

So, I’m going to leave Twitter as of today—for what I imagine are obvious reasons, but to state them anyway: it’s a cesspool of white supremacy and racism, antisemitism, queer hate, and I could go on for days—and while Twitter has been an amazing place for me to build a queer community, I can’t keep supporting it the way it is, even passively.

I’m over at Mastodon, under @NathanBurgoine@romancelandia.club, and I’ve also got Facebook, and an Instagram account I mostly use to share pictures of my dog, and of course, this blog. Will 2023 be the year I finally organize a newsletter beyond a sign-up page? Who knows. Certainly not me. But my current plan is to attempt to be better at using all those other channels, while mostly keeping the major news and noise coming through this blog and Mastodon.

Eleventh Christmas

The audio edition of Handmade Holidays, narrated by the brilliant Giancarlo Herrera. Cover art by Inkspiral.

I thought I’d take today to revisit Nick and the gang for the last of the missing years. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, my wee Christmas novella takes place over fifteen Christmases, but not every Christmas gets a chapter—three are skipped. In the original outline, every year happened, but I soon realized pacing meant some of the years needed to go, as either not much happened to move the story forward (year three and year eleven), or they introduced characters we’d only see that one time and wasn’t worth it (year eight).

Still, as an Easter Egg, why not? So a few years ago, I wrote the missing third year—where the most famous of all the ornaments was up for grabs—which was the first of those skipped years, where the five original Misfit Toys spent their last Christmas in Nick’s terrible, tiny bachelor pad. Then I wrote the eighth Christmas, which happens five years later, after Haruto has had to move home to take care of his ailing father, but comes back to the Misfit Toys party—this year being held at Fiona and Jenn’s.

And now, finally? Eleventh Christmas. Ru is still in Oneida, where he’s taking care of his father and dating Kevin, and Nick is having another one of his annual Misfit Toys party.

So, if you’ve read “Handmade Holidays” before, I hope this revisit brings you a wee bit of joy, and if you haven’t? This link will take you to where you can start your own trek through fifteen Christmases with Nick and the rest of the Misfit Toys.

Eleventh Christmas

Nick had just managed to put his box of ornaments onto the small kitchen table when the buzzer sounded to let him know the first of his guests had arrived downstairs. He hit the button to let them in, then filled his kettle and eyed the nine mugs he had ready with cocoa powder and marshmallows and little candy-cane stir-sticks.

Johnny and Matt came through his apartment door a few minutes later, with Johnny’s sing-song “Merry Christmas, bitches!” making Nick laugh.

“Just boiling the kettle for hot chocolate,” he called back from his small kitchen. “Come on through.”

The buzzer sounded again before Johnny or Matt could answer, and Nick did a quick dash to hit the door button again. It gave him his first glimpse of the couple, and he snorted out a laugh at the sight of them.

Nick had always thought Johnny was more beautiful than handsome. Johnny’s hair was a frosted blond, his teeth capped, his lean, almost willowy body maintained mostly by hours on a treadmill or an exercise bike, and his skin given just enough of a tan via booths when the summer months were over. He’d often given Ru a run for his money with his chic style, but for the party he’d clearly decided to leave his usual look behind.

Both he and his boyfriend, the stockier Matt, wore matching green-and-white sweaters that appeared to be hand-knitted, the white of which created three lines—a row of snowflakes above and below knitted letters that read “Ho Ho Homosexual!”

“Wow,” Nick said, once he’d recovered. “Where in the world did you get those?”

“His grandmother,” Matt said, putting one arm around Johnny’s shoulders and shaking his head. “She knitted them.”

“You have got to be kidding me,” Nick said, stunned. He’d only met Johnny’s grandmother once or twice—he and Matt brought her down to visit now and then, a couple of years after they’d moved in together—but she’d seemed very…

Well, like a grandmother. Like, sweets in her purse, not knit a pair of gay sweaters.

The apartment door opened again, and Phoebe and Dennis came through. As always, Phoebe looked like a million bucks, tall and glamazon-like with what he had no doubt was a crimson-and-white shawl of her own creation around her shoulders. Dennis, for his part, took a few seconds to help her take off said shawl and jacket before shucking his own bomber jacket and scarf, revealing—surprise, surprise—a green Henley.

The man really leaned into the whole otter hipster lumberjack thing he had going on for him. Though Nick supposed if his own chest looked that nice in a Henley, he’d probably buy one, too. Dennis stroked some snow from his beard, and smiled. “It’s really coming down out there.”

“Right?” Matt said.

“Oh my god,” Phoebe said, pointing. “Those sweaters!”

“Never mind my grandmother’s sweaters,” Johnny said. “Look at you. Holy crap, lady.” He gestured with both hands at the white linen dress Phoebe wore, with—it took Nick a few seconds to realize—had tiny beaded snowflakes from one shoulder down to the waist, where it was tied to one side with a kind of sash.

“Thank you,” Phoebe said, doing a little twirl that flared out the edges. “It twirls. And it has pockets.” Once she’d finished her spin, she pointed a silver-fingernailed finger. “But for serious, those sweaters. Are you saying your grandmother made them?”

“She did,” Johnny said.

“I could sell those, you know,” Phoebe said, taking Johnny by the elbow and walking him into Nick’s living room. Dennis followed, carrying two small packages and shaking his head, amused, and Matt paused to eye Nick. He had a plastic bag in one hand, and inside that bag, Nick saw two small gift bags.

“Need a hand?” Matt said.

“Nope, go ahead and set up.” Nick waved him off.

The door buzzer went off again. Perfect timing. He hit the button a third time and then went back into the kitchen, pouring the first mugs and then refilling the kettle.

The arrival of Jenn and Fiona had barely begun before the buzzer went off again, and they’d barely gotten their coats and boots off before Morgan and Zach entered—and in Zach’s case, very much filled—the small entrance area of his apartment. They all exchanged greetings and hugs and Nick told them to head on through, grabbing the first round of hot chocolates and bringing them out for those already settled before heading back for the next round.

By the time the hot chocolates had all been poured and delivered, everyone had settled in on the couch, seat, or kitchen table chairs—and in Johnny’s case, cross-legged on the floor in front of Matt—and Nick joined Johnny on the floor and raised his mug.

“To the Misfit Toys,” he said, and the cheer was returned in kind and everyone took a taste of their hot chocolate. Nick had splurged and bought individual packages of what he’d hoped would be better-than-usual instant hot chocolate, and his first swallow was indeed good enough to make him feel like he’d made the right choice.

“I didn’t know if we were going to make it,” Jenn said, toast done. “Between getting the kids to bed, the sitter being late from the snow, and then getting here…” She shook her head.

“At least it won’t be a green Christmas,” Fiona said.

“I was starting to think we’d never get to ski,” Zach said, nodding.

“Which would have been a tragedy for my Viking,” Morgan said, patting Zach on the shoulder playfully.

Nick smiled, glad Zach and Morgan had come. Slim, ginger Morgan worked with Phoebe at Urbane Myth, her consignment clothing shop in the Village, and had always fit right in with ease. His husband Zach, on the other hand, was a very large and muscular guy, intimidatingly so, and hadn’t always struck Nick as being super-comfortable around them all. Nick wasn’t sure if it was Zach’s later-in-life coming out, or his job as a police officer, which, well. Cops and queers. But Zach worked with the Hate and Bias Crime Unit, at least.

“This is good,” Matt said, lifting his mug. A fellow sugar-junkie and retail worker, he and Nick had often seen eye-to-eye on the sweet tooth front.

“I looked up a recipe for making actual, melted, real chocolate and for-real marshmallows and then I remembered I work retail and bought a bunch of packet mixes and a bag of marshmallows,” Nick said.

“No one has time to make real hot chocolate,” Jenn said, holding up one hand. “And Matt’s right, this is just fine.”

“Can we stop pretending we’re civilized and start the game, please?” Fiona said, lifting her purse and putting two wrapped packages onto the table. “Because I brought a winner this year.”

“Oh God,” Nick said, turning to Jenn. “How bad is this about to be?”

“She wouldn’t show me,” Jenn said, raising both eyebrows. “So… Bad.”

Fiona flashed her tongue-stud at her.

Matt took a few minutes to get a deck of cards ready, passing them out to everyone while Morgan went back to the entrance hall to grab the two ornaments he and Zach had brought from his coat pocket, and then the pile was complete. Matt dealt out the cards, and Nick got a four, and then they made their way through the rest of the deck, revealing an ornament at a time—or swapping, or stealing—going three rounds before someone—Morgan—finally chose Fiona’s wrapped present and tore into it.

It was a penis. An ornament of a penis in a Santa hat, with balls and a bright red cock-ring, complete with jingle bells.

Silence fell around the table until Jenn let out a long-suffering sigh, then Morgan and Johnny burst out laughing, and Nick had to join in. Zach leaned over to get a better look, and when he said, “Why would Santa be circumcised?” that set them all off again, even Jenn.

From that point on, Santa Cock became the ornament most traded between Johnny, Morgan, and Dennis, while the rest of them played for more traditional ones, including a beautiful orange glass-blown ornament Phoebe brought from FunkArt, the gallery in the Village, which—at the end—Nick was more than grateful to have in his possession.

After, they decorated his tree, had another round of hot chocolate—this time with Baileys—and though Johnny and Matt called it a night after that since Matt had the early shift at work, the rest of them watched Die Hard on Nick’s television as their choice of Christmas Movie for the year.

“All the Christmas movies are too straight,” Dennis said, once they’d all cheered John Mcclane’s note about having acquired a gun, ho-ho-ho. “I mean, John is great and everything, but…”

“They should remake this with a butch lesbian John Mcclane,” Fiona said.

“Oooh, yes,” Phoebe agreed. “Joan Mcclane.”

“And Holly could pretty much stay exactly the same,” Jenn pointed out. “As the sheer perfection she is.”

“You up for writing that, Nick?” Morgan said. “I loved your last story, by the way.”

“Thank you,” Nick said, smiling. His most recent short story had been in a gay romance anthology released a couple of months ago. “I’ll add Joan McClane to the list of ideas.”

“You know, if you write a screenplay before you write a novel, Ru will hunt you down and murder you,” Fiona said.

Nick laughed. “True.” He decided to call Ru when the party was over, and show him this year’s blown-glass ornament.

“Ah well,” Phoebe said. “So much for Joan.”

They went back to watching, and Nick smiled, waiting for Hans Gruber’s fall and the sincerely satisfying punch that was always his favourite part of the holiday classic.

If you’re looking for more low-angst holiday reads, how about Twenty Four Low Angst Festive MM Reads? You’ll spot my own Felix Navidad on that list, the fourth of my holiday-themed queer romance novellas, but if you’ve already read Felix, there are still twenty-three other stories to discover!