Kurt Pankau Dot Com

🦸🏼 The World Needs A Hero. I AM THAT HERO! 2011, 3-5 players Complexity: medium In 2011, Christopher Badell and Adam Rebotaro pulled off a trick that every nerdy kid has dreamed of for years. They made a career out of creating a comic book superhero world. This game, the flagship property for Greater Than Games, has cast a long shadow. In addition to expanding its own content, there is a spin-off miniatures game series, a tabletop RPG, and a video game implementation--with some truly epic soundtracks--a tactical video game, a stuffed mechanical raptor, and more. There's a podcast devoted just to the stories behind the characters. There's a forthcoming collaboration with Green Ronin that uses this game engine with characters from Mutants & Masterminds. Let's See It In Action In Sentinels Of The Multiverse , you and up to four friends will join forces to take on a supervillain. Now, this game is fully cooperative, which means that it can be played solitaire-style witho...

 🐾 Schneebles Schnobble But They Don't Fall Down... 2017, 3-5 players Complexity: light I love trick-taking games. I grew up playing Spades at church camp and Hearts on the computer. I never learned Contract Bridge, but I bet I'd be into it. (Serious aside--at what point are Bridge players going to come up with a new word for "trump"? Because that needs to happen.) I hardly ever get to play them because they typically need four players, but I have an assortment, and this is my favorite. Let's See It In Action Schneeble is a suitless trick-taking game for four players (it includes rules for three and five, but it is ideally played with four) that has cards numbered from 1 to 10. What makes this different from other trick-taking games? Three things. The first is the idea of bumping. There are no suits in  Schneeble , so anyone can play any card out of their hand, which allows for ties. When two (or more) players play the same number, those cards are "bumped...

 🔱 I Ain't Got No Crystal Ball... 2016, 2 players Complexity: light The island of Santorini is a real place in the Cyclades archipelago in the Aegean Sea. It is known for--among other things--the striking architecture consisting of white cuboid buildings that are occasionally capped with blue domes. Game designer Gordon Hamilton drew inspiration from the architecture of the island to develop an abstract strategy game that he eventually self-published in 2004 (although versions of it have been around for over a decade prior to that), and that was recently re-released by Roxley Games. Let's See It In Action In Santorini , you and a friend (there are rules to make it playable with 3, but I don't recommend doing so--this is at its heart a 2-player game) will take on the roles of ancient Greek builders. The rules are very simple: on your turn, you move one of your two pieces and then build. Pieces can move to any adjacent or diagonal square. They can move up one level or down a...

🌈 I'd As Soon Destroy A Stained-Glass Window As An Artist Like Yourself... 2017, 2-4 players Complexity: light/moderate Skilled artisans have traveled to Barcelona to see who among them can build the most beautiful stained-glass windows for the Sagrada Familia. Draft dice that represent shades of glass while you assemble your masterpiece. Let's See It In Action In Sagrada , you and up to three players will compete to assemble the most beautiful stained glass windows by collecting dice over the course of ten rounds. At the start of each round, the active player will roll a number of dice equal to twice the number of players plus one (so, five dice in a two-player game). Dice are available in five colors and each face of the die represents a different shade. Once the dice are rolled, the active player takes a die and adds it to their pane in an attempt to fill out the design that they have selected. Each design has dots on the bottom right corner to indicate how difficult it is,...

Hey, everybody! I was interviewed for the podcast Semi-Sages Of The Pages . We talked for a little over an hour about writing, short story markets, characterization, and a whole lot of other stuff. It was a lot of fun and my mike only cuts out arbitrarily a few times. Thanks to Morrigan and Molly for having me!  Check it out here. Couple of links to things I mentioned: The Submission Grinder Ms. Figgle-DeBitt's Home For Wayward AIs by Kurt Pankau All 9,203 Episodes Of "How I Met Your Broodmother", Ranked by Jenn Reese I Am Graalnak Of The Vroon Empire, Destroyer Of Worlds, Supreme Overlord Of The Planet Earth. Ask Me Anything. by Laura Pearlman Some missing context for the Binti / Hackers  portion of the talk is that while I have a computer background, I actually know very little about hacking. And while we talked about taking a shotgun approach to short story submissions, I should have mentioned a couple of posts from Dawn Vogel on Writing Lots and Submitting Lots . ...