Wil Wheaton's New Show: Tabletop 155
xwwt writes "Wil Wheaton is working with Felicia Day on a new show called Tabletop, which will air on the YouTube Channel Geek and Sundry. The show will be about board games and gaming in general. This is how he describes it: 'My ulterior motive with Tabletop is to show by example how much fun it is to play boardgames. I want to show that Gamers aren't all a bunch of weirdoes who can't make eye contact when they talk to you, and that getting together for a game night is just as social and awesome as getting together to watch Sportsball, or to play poker, or for a LAN party, or whatever non-gamers do with their friends. I want to inspire people to try hobby games, and I want to remove the stigma associated with gaming and gamers.' The first show airs April 2nd."
Board game night (Score:4, Interesting)
I just hosted a board game night for a a bunch of 20-30 somethings - it was a huge hit! I started each game off with giving players more than the standard loot, to get it going faster, and had an end after 1.5hrs so that they could all get 3 different games in in one night. We played, Masterpiece, Movie Maker, King Oil (all with 4 people) and then had a couple 2 person games for people who showed up late: Xomax and Polarity. We're looking forward to doing it again.
Re:Good Fucking Luck (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes.... but this is Will fucking Wheaton.
If anybody has a chance at reversing the polarity of the tachyon beams and calibrating the EPS conduits to dissipate that intensely strong anti-vagina field stuck to tabletop gaming and changing the rate at which some neckbeards get laid, it's Will Wheaton.
I look forward to the results of this experiment. albeit, with some skepticism.... and hope. Mostly skepticism.
Romantic Board gaming with Space Hulk. (Score:5, Interesting)
On a date, I broke out the Space Hulk ... but bear with me - it's instant romance - with some good mood lighting, a candleabra dripping with wax, a few good bottles of red wine (in metal goblets of course), some good gregorian chants on the stereo. . (The candlelight is important, as it means that she can't see the terrible paint job I did on the little figurines. I'm told chicks dig artists.)
Re:Good Fucking Luck (Score:4, Interesting)
This is mostly only a problem in the US. In Essen Germany there is a yearly games trade fair/convention called Spiel [wikipedia.org] that attracts over 150,000 people a year. Semi comparable conventions in the US get 14k for Origins [wikipedia.org] or 37k for GenCon [wikipedia.org]. Spiel is much more of a marketplace compared to people actually playing games at Gencon or Origins. Just another number to throw in, PAX attracts about 70k gamers. [wikipedia.org]
Spiel is a family event and the games being marketed there are definitely not your average superstore games shelf fodder like Monopoly, Hi Ho! Cherry-O, or Jersey Shore trivia game. Though some have have gotten better about this and now carry others like Catan, Carcassonne and Race for the Galaxy.
Where was this show... (Score:5, Interesting)
Where was this show when I opened my game shop in my small home town.
We got railed against by all the "good Christian people" who murmured nothing but evil rumors about us, and did their best to cause us any trouble they could. We had a church on one side of us, and a bar on the other side close, and BOTH tried causing us trouble. The bar complained if anyone stood outside our building, and the church was mental, crazy and looking for a way to burn us at the stake.
We had a cop come into the shop looking for a missing child because he heard that we played D&D there and that involved sacrificing of children to the devil.
We didn't sacrifice kids, though we threatened to if they misbehaved. It was a running joke in the shop.
I was one of those kids who grew up playing these kinds of games with my friends. I thought I was rather lucky. The crowd was very bright, a collection of some of the best minds in our school. We became a pretty tight nit social group and had a blast over the years growing up together.
It was the best social mix of people as well, we had jocks and geeks, welfare kids and rich kids, troublemakers and saints all working together and having a BLAST.
I can remember my dickheaded Dad finding my D&D books, and flipping out over the artwork. He accused me of being into Satanism and banned any of the books or anything related to it from the house and forbid me from ever having anything to do with it. Of course I just ignored him and kept playing, I just covered my tracks and didn't leave anything around for him to find.
But years later, he opened a used book shop and got some D&D books in some boxes of books he purchased. He got to thumbing through them and became interested. After he gave it a look over, he did a 180 degree turn, thought it was something cool and NOT a demonic thing. He then started selling them new and was well on his way to being a game shop when he was burglarized for all of the D&D stuff and he didn't have insurance. (small shop, very poor...) Karma got him as well, because some snotty cunt I went to school with wrote a nasty article on his devil worshiping D&D store in the local paper. I got the immense pleasure of asking him, "how does it feel?"
That's ok, he got even, I didn't get into Magic the Gather like he advise back when they weren't known by anyone and just starting. I missed vast pile of cash missing out on cards that became incredibly high priced. I didn't get in on it until Legends, but I still paid the bills with it and enough to take my card business into a full blown game shop. I just wish I had done it in a big college town where I would have more of a population and customer roll over as the students move along.
As was, I saturated the market in a 75 mile radius, and my other shop, a gift shop was failing, and I had a spouse who had no discipline in spending. Couple that with a couple of damning business mistakes, some wrong investments, a town full of religious zealots hounding you, cops harassing your customers, it all adds up to a nervous breakdown, financial ruin, and at last divorce.
You know what made it worth while? I started a gaming club, and the shop was open until ungodly hours on the weekend. I installed huge gaming tables, that we built ourselves. They weren't Vegas quality, but they were nice, clean and looked great and were HUGE and they were full of gamers. The D&D groups got so huge, I had to split them up. I wrote original content for it all and wrote material for the Dungeon Masters. We coordinated it all as one world and the groups would meet for some vast epic event. You have to break it down into smaller groups. I dungeon mastered groups of 20 plus, while they claimed to have loved it, the mechanics of it don't work out so well.
Two examples; With dungeon design, you have a lot of 10ft wide coridors to explore. When you have 20 people, you pray everyone doesn't fire at once at something ahead. I let them figure this out the hard way of course. But as a DM,
Re:Ummm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Kind of like Don Knotts finishing up his brilliant career on Hollywood Squares and Three's Company.
He's had his 15 min., this is his way to grab another minute or two.
I've had celebrity recycling on my mind lately. Hollywood is just littered with the " previously popular". Left unrecycled, they turn into junkies/criminals/prostitutes/drunks/politicians and become a drag on society. Leif Garret, Todd Bridges,Ronald Reagun etc.
There needs to be a program to repurpose these people and Hollywood needs to clean up their industrial waste.( A Charlie Sheen contamination of the public is imminent) These people need taught the job and social skills they were denied from youth due to experimentation with Hollywoood. The Entertainment industry needs to pay for fixing the broken sociopaths they just dump in public like a doggy on your lawn. We should start a petition, it's bound to get more attention than Marijuana legalization at this point.
Let's put poor Charlie behind the counter at Wendys and make him feel like a man again. WINNING!
Re:Weapons-grade uninteresting (Score:2, Interesting)
They aren't Nerds, they are poser geeks jumping on a bandwagon so they can fulfill narcissistic tendencies.
Sadly, this generation of geeks feel some need to have a 'leader' and celebrity image.
I guess with geeks being there own large market segment, it was inevitable.