Played board games in Fairmont this evening, 1 game of Vegas Showdown [1, 2, 3] and 1 game of Cosmic Encounter (the Avalon Hill version) [4, 5, 6].

This was the 1^st time I've played Vegas Showdown and the 2^nd time I've played Cosmic Encounter. I'll need to play a lot more before I figure out good strategies.

From Howling Tower: Complexity and Option Fatigue « Kobold Quarterly, by Steve Winter (ex-TSR, ex-WotC):

In the late 1980s, TSR studied the sales appeal of AD&D compared to “Basic” D&D (Basic/Expert, B/X, or BECMI, as it’s now known). The common wisdom was that Basic D&D was the best choice for beginning players because it was a simpler game—it had fewer rules. New and inexperienced players, however, actually saw that paucity of rules as a drawback. To them, Basic D&D was more complex than Advanced D&D, not less, because the DM and players were faced with more situations that had no clear solution. In contrast, AD&D told you exactly (or approximately) what to do in an enormous range of situations. The answers might be hard to find, but they were in those books somewhere. Extensive rules that covered more situations translated to the DM spending more time flipping pages in a search for answers but less time sifting through options. The end result was a perception that while AD&D had more rules than Basic D&D, all those rules made it easier to play. Inexperienced players liked the confidence that came from AD&D providing all the answers, so they gravitated toward AD&D. Experienced players liked having open-ended options and were the main audience for Basic D&D.

That result surprised a lot of people inside TSR. It was an eye-opener, and it affected design and marketing philosophy for years.

See also the comments thread.

Played a game of silly superheros - I was a talking black black bear whose powers were roaring, giving hugs, and ambling cutely. Fun!

My copy of Red Tide, Adventure in a Crimson World arrived today. A very interesting approach, following on from Stars without Number.

The items you can find on this blog under the category Actual Play and tag actual play (except for this entry) describe actual play sessions from some of my games. They tend more to describing in-game events, but sometimes talk about mechanical aspects of the game illuminated during the session, or creative aspects of running a game. Sometimes they're just a session recap, written so that when I come back to that campaign in a week or a month or six months so I can look up the details of the last couple of sessions to figure out what was happening and where the campaign is going. These latter sometimes are barely more than a list of the places the PCs visited and events of notoriety:

The PCs went to 20, where Olsman chopped the head off an ogre with one blow. Afterwards they started down the stairs to 23, but the stairs collapsed into a slide, and much hilarity ensued as they tried to avoid stabbing and bashing each other as they tumbled down and landed in a deep pool.