All posts by Michael Brettell - Gravitas Board Games

Board game player! Also husband to a lovely lady, and Dad to two beautiful girls.

Command Cards in FUSION

Akira contemplated his situation.  It was not good.  He’d been caught unawares transporting his cargo, and the pirate Uki had almost finished him off.  Hiding in the asteroid field had helped, but Uki had caught up to him and her deadly guns were ripping him to shreds.  In addition, if Uki’s missiles struck home, he’d probably be dead.  Akira’s Anti-Missile Drones were in the air, but Uki’s fighters were ready to launch, and that would take care of that defence.  Akira had a couple of cards up his sleeve though.  He had a virus that would allow him to steal a missile or drones, and his own guns could offer some defence.  If he could survive the missiles, it was just a matter of evading the worst of Uki’s guns one more time, limping along to the Dark Cluster and jumping away.  Simple, really.

Welcome to Fusion: Space Combat, the game of starship combat in the 23rd century.  In this two-player game, each player takes on the role of a special pilot that ‘fuses’ their intelligence with an immense spaceship and issues commands to their craft. You and your opponent go head to head, attempting to destroy each other or racing to deliver minerals to powerful conglomerates, all the while avoiding pitfalls such as asteroids, gravity wells and electric storms.

Continue reading Command Cards in FUSION

Designing a game – does it ever end?

You’ve designed a game. You’ve tested it against yourself 100+ times. You’ve press-ganged one or two people into being the initial playtesters and feedback group. The game is of course complete crap the first time they get involved, so you rightly blow up and redesign huge chunks of it. You test it against yourself 50+ times. That same group replay the game, because naturally you want to see if your changes have fixed the game. Of course they haven’t – what were you thinking?
Continue reading Designing a game – does it ever end?

FUSION Pilot Training

Sourced from Dr. Tetsuo Haldeman. Keeping the Peace: Hegemonic Discourse and Technological Coercion in the Periphery. Accessed from The Network on 2282 AD.

Continued from The History of PRISE and FUSION technology

2270

In combination with BCI Research, the Titan Space Academy college has developed the integration of brain-starship control to a finely controlled process.  Dubbed “Fusion”, the technology lets a single pilot control the huge starships required to transport unrefined actium around the system.
Continue reading FUSION Pilot Training

The History of PRISE and FUSION technology

Sourced from Dr. Tetsuo Haldeman. Keeping the Peace: Hegemonic Discourse and Technological Coercion in the Periphery. Accessed from The Network on 2282 AD.

1969

Monkeys learn to control the deflection of a biofeedback meter arm with neural activity at the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Washington.

Apollo 11 completes its lunar landing on 20 July.
Continue reading The History of PRISE and FUSION technology

Hellboy vs Cthulhu: A Storytelling Moment (and Stuff)

This article about playing a game encompasses what I love about game-playing – those cinematic moments…

patricksponaugle's avatarComparative Geeks

People play different games and they play for different reasons. Sometimes simply because they’re competitively-natured, sometimes it’s just to kill some time, sometimes to be entertained, and sometimes to be social. (These aren’t mutually exclusive reasons.)

Recently, my wife and I were over for dinner with friends, and we decided to play a game of Munchkin Cthulhu.

Our friends’ names are Chooch and Viv; I’m telling you this to make this anecdote flow. Allegedly.

At least one of those names is definitely a nickname. That would be Viv. Chooch might be a nickname. He looks like a Viking, so let’s just roll with this, shall we?


Everyone here knows how to play the basic set of Munchkin, right? If not, for a full introduction please check out Wil Wheaton’s YouTube episode of TableTop, where Wil plays the game with the lovely Felicia Day, the lovely Sandeep Parikh, and…

View original post 1,183 more words