I had my first play of Thunderstone (BGG Page) last night. This Dominion-like game takes the "build-a-deck-as-you-play" mechanic and tosses it info a fantasy dungeoncrawl.

The game has promise, but a combination of first time playing with terrible card draws left me unhappy with the game after my first play. But I'm not passing judgment yet. There's a cool concept here, and a few neat mechanics, so I'm heading back to the BGGCon floor to find players and try it again.

This isn't as streamlined and elegant as Dominion in its design, but it shows a lot of promise.

More thoughts after I get more plays under my belt.

We've announced Cthulhu Dice and Zombie Dice, two fast-paced dice games that have chewed on my brain for about a solid month now. Lots of planning, production, and print buying thought has gone into these -- my side of the development and playtest process was mostly to make encouraging sounds and participate in brainstorming -- and I think we've got two hits on our hands.

Zombie Dice was originally planned with a dice bag, but as we worked on it we slowly reached the point that we could pack a dice cup with the game.

I expect to see factory dice samples next month, but for now we're using laser-engraved prototypes that Will colored by hand. They look great, but I fully expect that the professionally-produced dice will blow our prototypes away.

My most popular post at Battlegrip yesterday had to be 5 Steps to Turning Your Constant Hunt for Toys into Exercise. Not only did it generate more comments than most posts, the traffic was also about twice what I normally see for a non-review post on the first day.

I guess people want to walk. Either that, or they're trying to figure out what's wrong with me and my step-counting nonsense.

3,052 so far today.

I know, that was over a year ago.

We went for our morning walk, about 10,500 steps round-trip to grab breakfast at Starbucks in Kyle. The Starbucks breakfast sandwiches are actually pretty good, and when you have a long walk as part of the process you don't have to feel guilty drinking hot chocolate (with non-fat milk, of course). I skipped the hot chocolate this morning, but only because I decided I wanted a Diet Dr. Pepper. And that didn't work out so I found myself drinking a Coke Zero. Not as good, but it did the job.

Now to unwind. I'm trying to get next week's battlegrip.com reviews finished. Two down, one to go, plus I managed to stock the site with posts for the next week and even finished another round of correspondence with a couple of printers. Yesterday turned out to be a great day; I hope today goes just as well.

I grabbed the new Alice in Chains album, Black Gives Way To Blue, this afternoon and it's not exactly what I expected. To be honest, I was afraid it would be more like Jerry Cantrell's solo efforts (see Wikipedia), both of which did nothing for me.



Well, this new album may not sound like classic Alice in Chains, but there are enough similarities that it's more like Alice in Chains than it is Cantrell's solo albums. This is a very good thing.

It's definitely no "Jar of Flies" or "Dirt," but so far it's a fun album. We'll see how it handles repeat plays.

I spend a lot of time at the office working on print buying; the occasional book (boring), many card games (eh), and games with completely new components (yeah!) all compete for my time with printer and factory reps. Diving into a project, brainsttorming solutions to problems, and figuring out tricks to shave pennies off the unit cost is a lot of fun and one of the tasks I enjoy the most during my day.

On the other side of the coin there's web-based marketing, which I don't actually touch on much at the office. I love digging through web traffic reports, figuring out ways to make an exit-heavy page keep people clicking around the site longer, and the social network side of web marketing is constantly changing and exciting. I wish I had time to spend hours every day working on this at the office, but basic management and emergencies eat up most of my time.

So if I had to choose only one to be my full-time occupation which would it be? Probably print buying, since that has the most direct contact with people and it's the job I have the most experience in. Fortunately, I don't have to choose just one since my career keeps me constantly bouncing from one task to another completely different task. But there are days that I think it would be fun to specialize in one type of work.

Another month down, and another list of top reviews at battlegrip.com. This time around there's really not all that much variety in the top spots, and only one of the toys is a mass market release. What an odd month October was. Let's dive into November, guys, and prepare for the upcoming fun of the holidays.

• Real X Head/Onell Design Pheyaos
  
• Ashley Wood’s Adventure Kartel Shadow Zombie
  
• G.I. Joe 12″ Cobra Trooper
  
• Hot Wheels Battle Force 5 Zelix with Zemerik
  
• Star Wars ARTFX Clone Trooper Statues
  
• Ashley Wood’s Bambaboss DIY

You know, between everything I can do with Twitter and the work over at Battlegrip I've completely neglected LJ. I'll try to get better about updates here. Especially life and work-related stuff.

Available from Atomic Overmind, at GenCon at the moment, this is a fun book that I didn't intend to read in one sitting. But once I started I couldn't put it down because Ken's such a fun writer.

"If Lovecraft had wanted bad writers to avoid Cthulhu Mythos stories, he wouldn't have written back to August Derleth."

Man, I hope Ken never decides to write mean things about me. I'd hate to have to pay him for saying nasty things about my lack of talent (because I would pay him; his books are just that entertaining to read).

I'm in Dallas today for the Dallas Games Marathon. I played a game of Revolution last night and peeked at a post-apocalyptic game Steve found . . . a post-apocalyptic game with a Dominion-like mechanic.

I'm so trying that game today.

Too much going on. I've directly contacted the two people who were interested, but I wanted to post that I will not be running the game this weekend. Please don't go to Great Hall Games looking for me.

How did Admiral Ackbar "It's a TRAP!" get a page at BGG?

Okay, I'm home and pretty well rested. Who in Austin wants to try Revolution this weekend? Maybe a Saturday afternoon game.

Nico's Tacos in Tucson is yummy.

Only four points of articulation, but my crazy bootleg action figure design is coming together. Casting and assembly is finished and now it's time for paint. I've built six of these and before even finishing the work all of the pieces are spoken for.