Saturday!

I went out to lunch with Brother Fish yesterday and in discussing the video games, he told me that the Humble Bundle this week has Guild of Dungeoneering in it (at the “beat the average donation” level… which, at this very moment, is $5.30).

Sure, it also has Borderlands (oooh, for $10, you get the first one, the second one, *AND* the pre-sequel!) and it has, oooh, look at that, Endless Legend and the Final Cut of The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing but the one he specifically mentioned was Guild of Dungeoneering.

I’ll try to recreate what he told me: “It’s kind of like Munchkin. You kick in a door, you fight a monster, you get your heroes stronger fast enough that they can take on the big boss at the end. The first time I played, I immediately died. The second time I played, I immediately died but when I sat down and studied the mechanics and figured them out, I played the third time and managed to beat the boss. But then I figured that I had figured it out and played again and then died in the middle. So it’s not just a pushover once you figure out how to play.”

He talked about the graphics being cute: the map is on graph paper, the characters look like cutouts that have been hand-drawn… you know, like we used to do back when we were gaming as teenagers and didn’t have any money but did have graph paper and that one kid who could draw.

The main thing that sold me on it was this: “I figured it’d be a game that I sat down and played for a half hour and then I’d never touch it again and then I noticed that it was two hours later.”

As such, I’m going to pick that up later today.

So… what are you playing?

(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]