White Line Fever
car wars, crystal tours of duty and all sorts of other enjoyable nonsense...
Heyo! Thanks to everyone who checked out our new Hit Points newsletter last week, great to see many of you subscribing to it. As I said it will be a little infrequent at first especially over the next month as we get our new print issue finished, printed and distributed but there’ll be a lot more there soon enough.
Anyway, thanks to the aforementioned nearly finished new issue we’re a bit (a lot) frazzled and have precious little else witty or interesting to say right now so one last bit of housekeeping before we let you get on. A reminder that with Musk continuing to wreck Twitter X like the incurious child he is you can find us pretty much everywhere else here.
Most these places we’re just about maintaining a ghostly presence at the moment but we do have to say Bluesky has, so far, proven to be a surprisingly pain free experience with lots of familiar faces turning up, maybe we’ll see you there.
Right, let’s leave it at that and let you read the rest of this week’s Gazetteer as we have a couple of cool looking games for you to check out and a vast load of links to people that actually have had something interesting to say this week.
Till next time.
John x
Joyride - Survival of the Fastest
I’m a simple man, tell me about your ultraviolent Mad Max style car game and - once I’ve scuttled back from yet another fruitless eBay search for an affordable copy of Dark Future - you’ve probably got yourself a customer (and also probably being made to listen to Jesus Built My Hotrod at a punishing volume, but that’s another matter).
Which brings us to Joyride, the latest game from Rebellion Unplugged who have taken time out from not giving us a new big Judge Dredd RPG to at least accommodate our, I feel fairly reasonable, demand for more games where you can fire a harpoon at a Station Wagon.
Designed by Duncan Molloy and Pete Ward with art by Pye Parr, Joyride puts you behind the wheel of a tricked out ride in a last car standing game of smash ‘em, bash ‘em, crash em’ vehicular mayhem. Take your dinky little car meeple to one of the hex maps provided and, with up to 3 others, hit the road and probably each other as you race around the various courses.
Making use of a similar mechanism to another car racing fave, Heat, the gear you’re in decides the size of the dice pool you build, which in turn determines things like your speed and what manoeuvres you can pull of as you negotiate checkpoints and collect all kinds of power ups - rockets, mines and oil slicks, though sadly no bananas - as you go.
There’s two different sets available, a tighter dedicated 2 player version and the standard 2-4 player game, and there’s a couple of expansions available too, which provide you with more maps, cars, things to blow cars up with and also some kind of mutant baboon/hippo.
I’m not really sure how they fit into it all or indeed work, I assume they’re not actually driving a truck, but I generally find you can’t go too far wrong by adding any kind of mutant baboon/hippo into a game. I’m sure it will all make sense on the table.
Campaign Ends: September 7
Valiant Horizon
Taking a different route to crowdfunding over at Itch.io is Binary Star with Valiant Horizon, a new and complete game “inspired by the vibe of old JRPGs, but the mechanics of newer ones.”
The first fully released game using their own Total & Effect system, Valiant Horizon sees you play ordinary folk who have been imbued with the powers of ancient heroes and discovered that the people who run those little new age shops in market towns were right all along and crystals are indeed magic.
If you’re looking for grim and gritty adventures where drawing your sword from a scabbard runs the risk of chopping your own, probably pox ridden, arm off then look away now as Valiant Horizon very much bills itself as heroic fantasy. But if you fancy a brighter, bolder, more collaborative experience then this could be worth checking out.
The way the system works means that - generally speaking - you’re unlikely to fail in your actions, rather you must expend resources instead, with just the degree of success of your actions left up to the dice.
Amongst other things this means that once you’ve got to grips with the system, and it took me a couple of gos but we got there quick enough, stuff the combat doesn’t belong an interminably long dragged out slog and you have more time to spend at the table exploring - and indeed creating - the world and meeting, making friends with - and, ok, sometimes killing - the people who populate it.
Designed for campaign play, the scope of the game will expand as the characters progress and they build their own heroic legacies in the hope that one day they too may find their essences locked away in a geode and passed on to a future legend in the making and not end up in the middle of a dreamcatcher in a teenage witch from St. Albans’ bedroom.
A collection of other things, both interesting and inspiring, gaming related and not, culled from around the web...
Meguey Baker, co-creator of the Powered by the Apocalypse system that underpins probably a good half of all indie RPGs released over the past decade, needs the community’s help. Recently diagnosed with breast cancer, she goes into surgery next week and, well, the financial realities of the TTRPG industry and the American healthcare system both being what they are any help would obviously be hugely appreciated right now.
This is a bit, well a lot, inside baseball as they say but we really enjoyed this episode of The Painting Phase, featuring former Games Workshop product designer Tom Hibberd who speaks candidly about many of the realities behind how the miniature behemoth operates.
I’d like to think I have a reasonably clear eyed view of these things but Hibberd breaks down many of the myths surrounding the company and definitely corrected some of my own beliefs around their often odd seeming business practices.
I still think at least 80% of their, public facing at least, issues would be resolved with a much more robust & coherent - or indeed any- communication strategy but then that’s probably just the marketing/PR person in me speaking. Anyway even if you’re not hugely interested in Warhammer there’s some fascinating stuff here (though being into Warhammer will definitely help).It’s another Creator Day over on Itch.io where the platform waives their cut on all sales, go treat yourself! Maybe to a magazine…
Did you read Dan Thurot’s brilliant review of Undaunted Stalingrad? Did it leave you wanting more, because it should have. If so you’re in luck as just this week Dan spoke to the game’s creators, Trevor Benjamin & David Thompson, on his podcast which you can listen to here. Some really interesting chat here about the nature, taxonomy and future of wargames.
Obviously more aimed at the retail market I have to admit I’m quite tempted to get one of these A5 zine racks for the office, beats storing everything in piles of comic longboxes for sure.
The more I think about it the more I feel like hot air balloons are, perhaps weirdly, underrepresented in our games. Anyway here’s an interesting history of them which might inspire you to add one to your game this weekend.
We’ve never hidden our love of Mausritter under a bushel and if like us you’re always looking for more Maus then rejoice as the Mausritter Library has just launched this week, an invaluable archive of, at present, over 500 resources for the game.
There’s lots of reasons to love the British Library but here’s one more to add to the list, it now houses the sole copy of a reconstructed version of, Wyrd Science favourite, The KLF’s debut album. Definitely going to book a listen next time we can’t avoid returning to the UK.
One of this week’s throwaway stupid jokes/desperate bids for social media engagement seemed to have struck a chord for those, like us, unlucky enough to make ominous creaking sounds when gingerly getting out of bed in the morning.
Even better if, like us, you did misspend your youth typing hundreds of lines of code into primitive computers to create even more primitive games that rarely worked then you can now skip that frankly tedious process and just play DUNGEON OF DOOM online here.Really interesting piece by Geoff Engelstein here responding to a recent video by Amiable Holland about victory in conditions in games (Geoff has embedded the original video in his article), lots to chew over.
Finally to end on something completely different here’s a really great set of photos in The Guardian by Rob Lewis of the Port Talbot UFO Investigation Group. Very evocative with this weird, wonderfully Lynchian vibe to them. Not gonna lie if someone stuck these photos in a zine along with a barely coherent rules system they’d have at least one sale here.