Working Title: Glove Of Twats

I've played Gauntlet of Fools twice now, and each time I've had a blast.  It's a combination of wonderfully simple games mechanics and a setting that, assuming you have a half-decent imagination, can lead to all sorts of amusing silliness.

I haven't read the rulebook, so I don't know whether there's an "official" explanation as to what the hell is going on, but as best I can tell, each player represents a contestant on some kind of medieval fantasy game show.  Each round every player has to fight the same monster, and earns points if they can kill it, whilst trying to avoid getting wounded in the process.  It's a bit like the Krypton Factor, if Gordon Kaye had ever had the contestants attempt to survive a stampede of woolly mammoths.

Your chances of surviving the whole array of gribblies are close to zero; death is all but certain.  Presumably your grieving families are awarded your prize money whilst the Gauntlet's back-stage staff are scraping your remains off a giant's knuckles.  Smart strategies and use of unique abilities can keep you alive for longer, but really the best way to make sure you survive long enough to pay off the mortgage on your wattle and daub cottage is to make sure you're a rock-hard killing machine in the first place, and that you're toting the juiciest weapon possible.

Thus, the game is broken up into two phases, which canbest be termed "boasting" and "stabbing". Boasting is the method by which characters are chosen. One random character (sporting one random weapon) is laid out for each player. The first player chooses from those available to them.  The second player can then choose a different character, or they can steal the first payer's character, boasting that their martial skills are so great they can make better use of the character, even were they to suffer under a disadvantage such as a raging hangover or an irresistible urge to juggle during combat.  Each of these disadvantages results in an in-game penalty, and they're cumulative.  So if the second player steals the first player's character, then the third player steals from the second, the poor character will now have two in-game penalties.  Sooner or later your rock-hard gladiator with his all-conquering morning star will start to look so shabby even the slingshot-armed jester might start to look appealing.  And if this neat (though far from fool-proof) method of handicapping inevitably leads to a race to the bottom, character-wise, the image of a one-armed barbarian trying to beat up a magically-animated scimitar without access to either vision or a decent breakfast more than makes up for it.

Once all characters have been assigned, the monsters are unleashed, (generally) one by one, and each player must try and defeat one copy of the same critter.  Each character has a defence value, determining if they're wounded (four wounds and you're hellhound-meat), and their weapon has a number of dice, which are rolled and totalled to see if the monster's defence value is overcome (monsters themselves have a fixed score for attack).  Each player also gets (usually) two character tokens and two weapons tokens, which allows them to do interesting things.  An armourer, for example, can use character tokens to build himself a better defence value.  The whip allows you to dodge a creature you've been unable to kill, keeping yourself from harm for that turn.

And that's pretty much it, which is diverting in and of itself.  True hilarity is only unlocked when one chooses to slap together the most implausible back-stories possible for one's character.  Last night, having acquired a hungover barbarian armed with a sceptre, I chose to play the role of King Throgg I, of the Hanover barbarians, who had entered the Gauntlet as part of a drunken bet the night before: if he survived the carnage, his barbarian barons had to shut up about trying to slap together the First Barbarian Republic.

(Tragically, after some early success grinding a swarm of killer bees beneath his boots (which cleared up his hangover, interestingly), Throgg had his sceptre melted by a sentient puddle of powerful acid, and it all went downhill from there. His dying wish was that his prize money be used to pay an assassin to take out whomever the first President of Barbaria proves to be.)

It's fast, it's fun, and it allow the spinning of ludicrous stories in-between explosions of gore.  Highly recommended.

Mario Taught Me How To Be A Plumber On Mushrooms

Anyone else remember The Last Starfighter, that cheesy but oddly lovable sci-fi film from the mid '80s about a kid who beat a fiendishly difficult arcade game that turned out to be an entrance exam for an elite interstellar fighter squadron? It's maybe most famous for being one of the first films to make use of CGI:


How have I never noticed the similarity to a Starfury before?

but I think it's more notable for this idea of video games as secret method of training, which a plot born straight from the dreams of a hundred thousand teenage boys. Who doesn't want to find out that all those hours logged playing Operation Wolf/Pole Position/Frogger has made them a kick-ass Green Beret/brilliant F1 driver/expert at amphibian preservation in built-up areas?

But secret game training has its dark side!  Who can believe, that after a week in which the Coalition are under great pressure to defend their recent choices to scale back spending on the prison system that this:

is mere coincidence?

Gamers of the country, ask yourselves: do you want to play your favourite game? Or does David Cameron want you to want to play it?

"It Is An Exceedingly Clever Nickname"

Just passing this along (via Robert Farley); a very long and wonderfully thorough study of Petyr Baelish's activities to date (in book terms; TV-only Thrones fans should steer very clear).

Littlefinger is easily one of the best characters in the series, and it's worth reading the whole thing as a reminder of just how well he's been playing his hand.  There were several things in there that I'd forgotten, and one that I'd entirely failed to pick up on, and which now has me thinking about what might be headed for Petyr and Alayne come The Winds of Winter.

International Pride

Obviously, I heartily endorse this ad campaign, not because I fear an influx of Eastern Europeans, but because hating oneself is a great British tradition, and the sooner our new citizens get some practice at that, the better.

That said, I think Mr Nathan Page has the right idea: why just complain about our own country, when we could try and persuade people to head elsewhere instead?  France is a fine shout (though personally I'd have plumped for "If you want to be fire-bombed by racists, why bother crossing the Channel?"), but we could easily extend it to, say, Belgium:

Spain:

or even Germany:

I tried coming up with one for Italy, too, but nothing sprang to mind. "With pizza this good, who cares about endemic corruption and national insolvency?", maybe?

Friday Talisman: Tea Leaf

This time around, I've painted up the thief from Talisman.

I seem to have ended up with what can be broadly considered a more realistic effect this time round, at least compared to most of my paint jobs.  Indeed, there's almost a John Blanche air to it, assuming Blanche ever just feels like utterly phoning it in.

When All You Have Is A Hammer...

I came across this last week, and thought it needed reporting immediately.

I like to think things there go a little like this:

An American Fairytale

I wasn't going to comment on this story, what with having done a couple of US politics/religion posts already recently, but it just got a coda that makes the whole thing too perfect an encapsulation of Republican and media bullshit to leave alone.

It all starts with Virginia State Senator Henry Marsh; one of the six black senators in that particular body (all of them Democrats, natch). Marsh worked for the Civil Rights movement back in the day, so it's hardly a surprise that he'd want to attend the second and final inauguration of his country's first black president.

So that's what he did.  Unfortunately, the Virginia State Senate is divided equally between the parties, with 20 on each side.  Marsh made the count 20 - 19 in favour of the Republicans for a single day whilst he was selfish enough to observe history being made, watching another in a seemingly endless series of barriers to black advancement finally come down.

Those twenty Republicans, each of them white, then pushed though a bill that no-one outside of their caucus had seen or even heard was being put together, which announced a redrawing of district boundaries. Said re-drawing took a whole host of black folks that reliably vote Democrat, and added them to what was already a safe Democratic district, meaning that the district they were taken from is now a much easier Republican pick-up, or might even disappear entirely.

So, whilst a black senator with a history with the Civil Rights movement was watching President Obama's Second Inauguration, nineteen white dudes and one white lady took steps to ensure black votes that were preventing their all-white caucus from having control could no longer do so.

The bill passed, naturally, by 20 - 19.

That was where the story ended, until yesterday, when the Washington Post decided to weigh in:

Shame on the witless Democrats for not anticipating that Republicans, given the chance, would resort to dirty tricks. And shame on Republicans for continuing their campaign to transform the General Assembly into a nasty, underhanded clone of Congress.

There are two very important things to note here, and both of them involve a degree of cowardice so pronounced that Scooby Doo himself would suggest the Editorial Board nut the fuck up.  First of all, consider what the Post's line of argument is here: Democrats share the blame in this because they didn't adopt a strategy of 100% attendance at all times in case the Republicans decided to pull a fast one.  No days off, you lazy bums!  No weddings, funerals or internationally significant historical events for you!  Blaming the Democrats for this is like blaming a family for going on holiday and coming back to find the house was broken into. Or, to return to a previous theme, blaming an older brother for leaving the house and returning to find his little brother has been in his room and torn up all his favourite books out of spite.

The second issue here is much, much worse, because the Post are being pretty damn racist here, and they don't even have the courage to be open about it.  Placing blame on twenty Republicans for each voting for this horrible piece of crap is entirely fair.  Placing blame on twenty Democrats because Marsh wasn't around to vote is ludicrous.  What the Post means here is "shame on the witless Marsh", but it doesn't want to say that because it knows that calling a black man witless for not sacrificing his own desires in order to maintain constant vigil on the white people who want to fuck him and his people over would be an act of transparent, ugly racism.  Far better to blame the whole caucus, because then it can be implied that all twenty Democrats can be held responsible both for the actions of their opponents, and for the actions of their black colleague.  The fact that this in effect results in the Washington Post suggesting a predominantly white caucus is responsible for controlling the actions of their black minority is an irony I absolutely promise you entirely escaped their notice.

Joseph Heller once said that American democracy is the most rigid aristocracy on earth.  What he forgot to mention - though the horrendously underrated Good As Gold rather proved - is that it's frequently the source of the blackest comedy imaginable.