Usually when I hear about musicians trying to expand their horizons and dip their toes into another medium’s pool, I openly reject the attempt and dismiss it as someone trying to take advantage of their fame. Whether that be to make themselves or someone else some money or to further some sort of artistic manifesto that really doesn’t mean a damn thing to me.
That being said, when I heard that Dandy Warhols lead singer Courtney Taylor-Taylor had written the graphic novel, One Model Nation, I was definitely intrigued. I’m a big enough fan of the band The Dandy Warhols to know that Taylor-Taylor is a bit of a weirdo, so I figured if he’s taken a stab at writing a graphic novel, it would definitely be worth a read.
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It’s been a while since I hunkered down with a good “traditional,” card game. Outside of losing a few games of Euchre during the summer, I haven’t sat and played Crazy Eights or Rummi for quite some time, so I was looking forward to getting into the game Tichu, from Rio Grande Games.
After some quick Wikipedia research, I find out the game looks like a variant of two Chinese card games: Choi Dai Di, which is Hong Kong slang that means “Step On the Little Guy,” (nice!); and Da Lao Er, Mandarin slang for, and I’m not making this up…”Big Penis.” With a lineage like that, this game should be big fun.
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Historically, I don’t like games that don’t have dice. Back in the day, I used to “play” Dungeons and Dragons and the Marvel Super Heroes RPG…but by “play,” I mean “make characters and then not use them,” because the generation process consisted mostly of rolling dice. Whether or not that points to some sort of innate gambling problem or what, I don’t know, but that was definitely the case. The last year or two has significantly changed my feelings on this, with my introduction to, and love of, Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne.
When looking at the Tasty Minstrel Games release Belfort, I got the feeling that it might be similar to those other games I had come to love, and since other TMG games (Eminent Domain, Martian Dice, Train of Thought, Jab), had received very good reviews on this site, I was pretty psyched to give it a whirl. My anticipation did not go unrewarded.
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Over the last couple of weeks, I have had two very different encounters with the world’s greatest animated family. With it being Hallowe’en (side note: I still spell Hallowe’en with the apostrophe. I’m a purist), I allowed myself to look past my increasing apathy towards the Simpsons, and give my favorite yellow characters (except That Yellow Bastard, from Sin City), another try and check out the latest Hallowe’en “Treehouse of Horror,” episode.
Consequently, while preparing for another board-game broo-ha-ha with some of my local besties, I grabbed The Simpsons’ Clue, because one of our group has Clue on the short list of games she will actually play. Besides, since it’s the Simpson’s version of a classic board game, it’s inherently fun, right? I just didn’t realize how much more I’d enjoy the board game than the show.
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I’m not going to lie: I’m still not sick of zombies. Even with all the video games, comics, movies, and TV Series, I’m still not sick of them. Not even Zombieland put me off them. And I really hated that movie. For whatever reason though, I’ve never read a single word of “The Walking Dead,” and I’ve only seen the first two episodes of the TV series (which I loved), but I was really excited when presented with the opportunity to play the new “Walking Dead,” board game, I jumped at the chance. It’s a board game based on the most successful modern zombie franchise out there, so what could go wrong?
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