Steve Jackson's Blog, page 64

February 16, 2024: To Sleeve Or Not To Sleeve?

I'm curious: What're folks' thoughts on sleeving their card games?

To be clear, that question is entirely to sate my personal curiosity. As far as I know, the Hidden Masters have no particular plans or use for this information . . . although I suppose if enough mysterious billionaires answered in the affirmative, then 1) we'd probably take notice, and 2) please play nice on the forums, like everyone else.

Speaking personally, I've developed the mindset that if I'm going to play a game frequently, then I want to keep the cards in decent shape. I'd hate to revisit a once-loved game in a few years only to discover that there's a bent card I forgot about, or scratched-up edges from overeager . Plus I like the peace of mind that sleeved cards give me. My own clumsy nature means that I'd either have to learn to be more careful at the game table or stop bringing snacks and soda with me – and the odds of either happening are only slightly less than having a cabal of mysterious billionaires suddenly appearing on the forums. I know myself.

However, I also know that sleeving can get expensive, especially with as many games as I like to buy. In addition, sleeved cards are harder to shuffle, they often don't stack right, and they take up more space in the box. So the whole issue is a topic I revisit mentally every so often. Like now.

If you have any insight you'd like to share, I'm all ears. Or eyes, actually. Feel free to drop on by the forums and share your thoughts.

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

February 15, 2024: Munchkin Minus Some

If you and your friends have played a bunch of Munchkin (any flavor!), are familiar with the cards, and are looking for an easy-peasy variant, here's one to consider.

Before the game starts (and before the deck is shuffled!), each player looks through the deck and removes one card from the game. Is there a card that did you wrong last game and you want your revenge? It's shunted to the box! Do you want to be strategic and gain an advantage by exiling a particular card? Okay! It's up to you; you're the munchkin!

The number of cards removed in this way can be adjusted based on the number of players and cards. (For example, "each player removes one card per set included" shouldn't be too disruptive.)

If any one gives this a try, I'd love to hear how it turned out; feel free to drop a line on the forums.

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

February 14, 2024: Find Last-Minute Gifts At Our Valentine's Day Sale

Valentine's Day has snuck up on me like a vampire rogue at midnight. You know the one. I can only hope that I'm the only one who has been taken by surprise. But if you're also staring at the calendar in a last-minute panic, there's hope. The Warehouse 23 Valentine's Day Sale is still going strong, which means you have one last chance to pick up something your significant other will love. Our sale includes an assortment of bundles and accessories, as well as a selection of games that support two players. While your purchase won't arrive by dinnertime tonight, it will arrive – and what better way to keep your Valentine's Day celebration going for a little longer? (Pro tip: Hint at the gift's imminent arrival on the card that came with the flowers you picked up today. You remembered those, right?) If all else fails, there's always a Warehouse 23 Gift Certificate. Its virtual nature ensures that it arrives in minutes. Best of all, it guarantees that the object of your fancy wil get exactly what they want for Valentine's Day this year. What a great way to show how much you care! Our Valentine's Day Sale ends tonight, so don't delay! After all, that's what got us into this conundrum in the first place . . . 

– Katie Duffy

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

February 13, 2024: Zero Shuffles?!

Long-time readers know that I'm on part 47,813 of my exploration of card shuffling. In the previous installment, I mentioned having two more insights. This is the promised second one.

I love playing big "all-expansions"-type games; obviously, Munchkin is a great candidate for such super-deck shenanigans. One problem with this, however, is that a single "deck" of all cards can get pretty unwieldy. That many cards makes it a challenge to shuffle them so that they're completely random each time.

I would argue that, if one is playing such a mega-deck game multiple times: Why shuffle?

Sure, you need to randomize them once or twice, especially if they're new sets and you're just now breaking the cards' plastic wrap. But if you're playing multiple games and you're only 20% of the way through the chonky, teetering deck, then that means 80% of the deck was basically "random" from your perspective already. Why bother shuffling those? Or, at least, why bother shuffling the whole set 15 times, as the math might suggest? It'd probably work just as well to tuck the previously used cards in small batches into the previously unused deck, and then shuffle the whole thing once or twice – a nontrivial savings, time-wise. To quote Meatballs, "It just doesn't matter!"

Or, heck, if your group has a really big deck, just keep playing. Treat new games like subsequent hands of blackjack; if the Gazebo is in the discard pile, then all you card counters can rest easy knowing its deadly threats won't bother players until a reshuffle. Sure, those card counters might have a slight advantage, but it's Munchkin ; the other door-kickers tend to take care of most balance issues if one adventurer starts seeming too much like a threat.

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

February 12, 2024: If It Says Label Label Label On The . . . Wait, I Messed Up

Here's a quick recommendation: Get a labeler. I often end up with oddball bits of ephemera that would be handy to label, and I've found (no real surprise) that a labeler works great for that. In particular, the Dymo LetraTag LT-100H Portable Label Maker has been my weapon of choice for a decade. This isn't a recommendation, per se. Although I like this one, it's not like I did exhaustive research when picking that one . . . and even if I did, that research would be a decade out of date now. You might find something cooler and niftier.

Still, this one is fast, it's readable, and it labels, which are all marks in its favor, as is the fact that it can do two lines of text. It's not terribly loud, which is nice. I find the tape for it to be affordable. It also doesn't use ink or toner, so it's pretty fool-proof in that regard.

As a bonus tip if you get this or any other labeler: I found it helpful to add examples of the font sizes on the back of the labeler, so I can figure out at a glance if small/medium/large would suit my needs better. Eagle-eyed readers might also notice the ribbon loop I have attached to it; I normally keep it hanging on a wall right by my computer.

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

February 11, 2024: Double The Decks, Double The Fun

I've been on a bit of a shuffling kick lately here on the Daily Illuminators, and I have at least two more insights to share in this regard. We'll cover one here.

Readers of the learned that a 168-card Munchkin set doesn't need more than 11 shuffles to be sufficiently shuffled. That's a lot less than I tend to do when I'm absentmindedly shuffling, but it's still not a trivial amount of shuffling. If you're with a group and trying to cram in as many games as you can, this can slow things down. So I have a modest suggestion:

Two sets.

Unless you're playing a real-time fast-paced game like Super Kitty Bug Slap , the odds are not terrible that there will be downtime between turns. If you're on a Munchkin spree and are playing multiple games in a row, and two players have a copy of Munchkin (and why wouldn't they?!), then bring the second set to the festivities and have a player shuffle that one during the current game. That way, the second game is ready to go and start playing the moment the first one ends and is scooped up.

Now, I'm not suggesting that everyone goes out and buys a second set just to shuffle . . . but, as the Hidden Masters have made clear to me, I'm not not saying everyone should go out and buy additional sets for whatever reasons the orbital mind-control rays instill.

Alternatively, if a player has two different games (say, Munchkin and Munchkin Zombies ), then the second one can be shuffled and prepped during the first game. (In fact, that plan might be better, because then there's less danger of the cards getting accidentally combined or lost.)

We've used the "shuffle ahead of time" technique in our own games, and it speeds things up incredibly; for example, when we play 7 Wonders , we pre-shuffle and divide all the cards for all four stages of the game before we play, so that each stage just requires us to hand out the pre-divvied piles. Doing the same with two different decks can really help you . . . err . . . get ahead of the game.

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

February 10, 2024: I Was Told There Would Be No Math

In a recent Daily Illuminator, I laid some of the groundwork for how many shuffles it takes to randomize a standard deck of cards (SPOILER: seven), and name-dropping some sources.

Today we're taking a deeper dive into how this affects us, and I use some shaky math to generate something useful.

So, I can't make heads or tails of most statistics papers. But I can understand the abstract of "Trailing the Dovetail Shuffle to its Lair," the foundational article that explores how many shuffles are needed. Or, more correctly, I can understand enough to be able to ask my kid what it means. And in this case, the foundational formula of "how many shuffles is sufficient," according to the abstract where "x" is the number of cards in the deck is: (3/2)log2(x). And that's enough that I can articulate the question for my kiddo. ("When are you ever gonna use this stuff?" the youth may ask. "When daddy needs to write a Daily Illuminator article. Now teach me about logs!")

Some internet searching later reveals at least one nice, basic log base 2 calculator. Checking our math, we plug in our standard 52-card deck and discover log2(52) is 5.7, which, when multiplied by 1.5 (that is, "3/2") gives us . . . umm . . . 8.55, which is more than the "seven is enough" that the internet promised me. Honestly, discovering a piece of wrong information on the internet has shaken me to my core.

However, poking at the article further, I remain convinced that seven shuffles is around what it takes because – at that point – there's basically 0 (rounding down) cards' worth of "non-randomness" between any two cards, which is what we want. Regardless, the gulf between "seven" and "8.55" isn't so huge that it's worth my worrying about it too much more – and 8.55 is much closer to my Dick Van Patten ideal of eight shuffles.

All of this means that, if we're looking for an answer of "what's the number of shuffles you need that's sufficient and probably a bit overkill?" then that can be calculated via the (3/2)log2(x) formula.

And that's a formula we can use to sort out how many shuffles we need for a good-and-random deck of some favorite games.

Breaking out a copy of Munchkin ? No need to shuffle its 168-card deck more than 11 times. Adding 112 cards of Munchkin 2: Unnatural Axe ? Then you only need 12 shuffles to get ready to play. Switching things up to Illuminati ? Then 10 shuffles and you should be good to go!

Of course, actually shuffling 1,000 cards in one "riffle shuffle" isn't terribly likely unless your nickname is Longfingers. But it at least gives you an idea of how many riffle-like shuffles you'd need of an entire deck to get that deck of 1,000 cards shuffled . . . which is, perhaps surprisingly, about 15. (Logarithms are fun but weird.)

For those of you better steeped in math and statistics than I am, or who have a mathier kid, if I'm dabbling in arcane forces I don't comprehend and you feel compelled to set the record straight, please feel free to share your insight on the forums.

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

February 9, 2024: The Beatles: Get Back Is A Must-Watch For Fans

I know I'm probably late to the party, but have you seen The Beatles: Get Back yet?  I missed out on the original debut of this three-part documentary because we might be the only household in America that hasn't yet subscribed to Disney+. (It's a conscious decision on our part – my husband and I are both writers, and we didn't feel right subscribing to a company that has stiffed writers in the recent past.) I remembered hearing about the show and almost giving in, but I didn't. I wish I could say it was because I felt a strong need to stand by my principles, but that was only part of the equation. The other part of it was reticence to watch one of my favorite groups break up in real time. What would we see during Get Back? Would Peter Jackson detail painful arguments and shouting matches? Would the many rumors about an acrimonious split end up being true? And would I want to sit through it all? It would take me until this year to find out. I received a copy of The Beatles: Get Back from my husband as a Christmas gift, and it didn't take us too long to sit down and watch it. I didn't know what to expect. And frankly, I was bracing for the worst. Fortunately, the worst didn't come to pass. The Beatles: Get Back is a portrait of a group at the end of its run, but not because of spite or anger. In fact, most of the interactions between the Fab Four are joyful and full of love. It's an intimate portrait of four young men – all of them are still in their 20s – who care deeply for one another, yet have a desperate need to find themselves as individuals. It's a pleasure to see how each of them is evolving into the public solo figures that we'd come to know during the 70s and beyond. In particular, John Lennon's unabashed admiration for Martin Luther King, Jr. and George Harrison's brief discussions of the group's spiritual awakenings in India are poignant glimpses of their future personas as an activist and a seeker. You'll need to set aside plenty of time for Get Back – the total run time for the entire series clocks in at close to eight hours, dwarfing two of my other recent rock doc recommendations:  Moonage Daydream and The Sparks Brothers . But a somewhat daunting run time is a small price to pay for the experience. The intimate footage combined with Jackson's stunning restoration makes you feel as if you're in the studio with the group. You almost come to feel that you're part of their inner circle toward the end. And when the end does come, you may find yourself wondering what might have been.

– Katie Duffy

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

February 8, 2024: Dare You Enter The Devil's Workshop?

The dilemma of trying to describe a brand-new adventure for the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game is that you don't want to give away the secrets contained therein. So, with the release of Dungeon Fantasy: The Devil's Workshop , we don't accidentally want to give would-be heroes an unfair advantage in figuring out how to avoid the [FNORD], how best to deal with the terrifying [FNORD] waiting for them, or how to [FNORD] before it's too late.

But whatever difficulty we have in trying to convince you to buy this short-and-sweet adventure from Dungeon Fantasy RPG architect Sean Punch, they pail in comparison to the obstacles facing the heroes in that adventure when they . . . umm . . . gather for cookies and ice cream in a totally nonthreatening situation.

If you'd like to overcome the challenges we've presented here (either in marketing or adventuring), we encourage you to download The Devil's Workshop – only from Warehouse 23!

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

February 7, 2024: What Is It About Pins?

I've flirted with pin collecting on and off throughout my life. My high school and college backpack usually featured quips or witty slogans on basic button pins. I received a small collection of Beatles pins as a birthday gift years ago. (Don't worry – they're displayed in a shadow box, safe from the harsh and unpredictable weather of the Midwest.) And now that I've started going to conventions as part of my job, I've embraced the tradition of festooning one's lanyard with pins of all sorts. But why? What is it about pins that is so appealing to so many? I can't speak for serious collectors, since I've never felt compelled to own hundreds of enamel pins or to purchase complete sets just to have them on display. For me, pins are a subtle means of self-expression – perfect for a relative introvert who has trouble with small talk. My lanyard collection has helped me open up discussions about the need for artists to be paid fairly in the digital age, my love of cuddly characters and fantasy fiction, and my support for our company and its values. At PAX Unplugged this year, I picked up a three-pack of dog pins as a tribute to some of the little guys that have made my life better. (I also got it because the pack featured a Pomeranian – a tribute to one of my TTRPG characters and his pet, an awakened Pomeranian that the party has taken to calling "Werner Herz-dog" on account of his sardonic nature.) If you're a pin person, you may want to check out a few offerings during our Valentine's Day Sale. The Uniduck , Deadly Doodles Dragon and Super Kitty Bug Slap pins are all on sale for 50% off, so it's the perfect time to pick one up for you or someone you love. If you do, be sure to stop by our booth during GAMA Expo or Gen Con so I can see it on your lanyard. You'll know me by my odd mix of dogs, sprouts, pyramids, slogans, and music pins. I mean, does look pretty cool . . . 

– Katie Duffy

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!