Back in June 2014 I did a small post on a Kickstarter for Braille Dice, it seems Miss Jessica Goldsmith's finally has finalised the design for her dice and created a Shapeways store to sell dice to the public.

Now while I support the development of braille dice I can't help at frown at the high prices for the dice which vary between £4.50 to nearly £8 PER dice when considering that a set of regular role playing dice can be purchased from most stores for that amount. I must consider though that each dice can be customised and that this is a speciality item which always causes a hike in prices.

So I find myself now noticing that another kickstarter for Braille dice has been created not by a single individual like Miss Jessica Goldsmithbut by a small husband and wife company named 64 Ounce Games that focus on creating accessibility kits for games.

Richard Gibbs is the founder and lead designer at 64 Oz. and his wife Emily Gibbs is a teacher of Blind students and handles the web side of the business, quoting their own words
'Both Richard and Emily are dedicated to making great games everyone, including the blind and visually impaired, can play.'

Initially sceptical of the Kickstarter worried that it might be a simple cash grab by a company I found myself presently surprised at the range and scope of their ideas and planning beyond just the dice and after a little digging I discovered that they had created a kickstarter in 2014 to purchase their first 3D printer and open their store.


Unfortunately the 3D printer they purchased while fine for most projects was prone to breaking down and not suitable for the finer print details for items such a dice so this Kickstarter hopes to raise money to purchase a new one.

Beyond the kickstarter 64 Ounce Games have their own website which is quite interesting it itself hosting a podcast and provides some free accessibility kits for certain games, personally I think the piece that is most worth your time is the colour blind accessibility advice for game designers which will have you considering all sorts of issues and solutions you may have never realised existed.
Another reason I rather like this article is that it is pre-emptively seeking to address the issue of accessibility and may even help a designer fix an potential issue before a game is released.     


64 Ounce Games also have an online store which covers a staggering amount of games and ranges from replacement game pieces to braille card sleeves, predictably it is mostly print to demand and the costs do vary from reasonable to quite expensive between products but again these are speciality items and many of these games require a lot of items all of which are included in the packs.

If you'd like to learn more about 64 Ounce Games Geek and Sundry did a excellent post about them or alternatively they have several videos on their Youtube Channel.

Finally to end on a amusing note while some people are trying to make dice easier to read others are doing the opposite, Andrew NGAI over in Canada has created a successful Kickstarter to make dice printed in Minimalist design Binary Code of all things.

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November is normally a very busy month for myself as many of my friends have birthdays spread throughout the month often leading me to be involved in various parties events and general mayhem. This year in particular with myself struggling with sciatica and other health issues and the various other commitments of my friends have led us to abandon large activities so instead we put aside some days for some monster gaming sessions.

Collecting together on a Sunday just after lunch at the house of our host and Dungeon Master told us that he had managed to get a number of dungeon tile sets and a number of pre-made dungeons so we were going to do some 4 Edition Dungeon Runs and see how far we could get before we ended for the day or party wiped.

We decided to avoid wasting half the day creating a character we would use pre-generated characters, unfortunately due to our DM providing 30 to choose from it still took us 30 minutes of debating of what to pick.
Most of the characters came from the handy Pre-Generated Character Library of Dungeon Master's.com (Thanks guys) with myself selecting Belgos | Drow Ranger (Hunter) backed up by a Psion, a Sorcerer and a Warlord then an hour later after our first two encounters by two more players who chose Alvenor the Human Paladin and Jarren the Human Wizard (Evocation Mage).

Thankfully with the Pre-Generated Characters coming with clear move description we got into the play quick smashing our way clumsy through the first few encounters. Now there is something about my gaming group I have come to recognise while we work together well and respect one another's ideas and strengths we do not in fact have very good teamwork synergy on the board. This was very obvious in 4th Edition which now I've played it felt very much like a pen and paper MMO, however once we stopped treating it like a Pathfinder game and started using MMO tactics we started making progress.

Twelve hours, a mountain of dead kobold and a slain white dragon with an arrow lodged in its behind later I can honestly say I enjoyed 4th Edition even though I must admit I've often frowned upon it.
However the fact I had to treat it like a game of HeroQuest rather than a roleplay game kind of puts it in perspective, and I admit the group as a whole started getting rather bored with the mechanics due to the limited movepool and cool downs.    

Coming straight from Pathfinder and Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 I found the rule books to both be well labelled and clear in some sections but completely bare in others, in particular the levelling was rather confusing at first with it been so different from the standard Dungeons and Dragons layout and one moment of the day stands out to me was the lack of any random magic loot table. Combined with the minimal magic item examples made the rewards rather disappointing as initially our DM wished to avoid giving out custom loot for balance reasons.

All and all a fun distraction but there is no way we could really go through a long term campaign with the system due to it repetitiveness and feeling of lack of freedom.


The other game that caught our eye over the week has been The Resistance 2nd Edition.
This novel little game was a real mind screw and as a devious spy I got to wreak havoc on my friends discovering that I am rather the decent manipulator.
Resistance is a rather simple game and a version of it that can be played with playing cards is actually on wikipedia. In the game you are all members of a resistance cell that is attempting to topple a corrupt organisation or government however depending on the size of your cell (the number of players) there is a number of spies within your cell. The resistance win by succeeding in three mission while the spies win by causing three missions to fail, if this has peaked your interest below is a video of Wil Wheaton's Tabletop showing a play through.


    

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Well as the pumpkins are cleared from the street and the stores covert all the Halloween aisles to upcoming Christmas deals I hope you all had a fun Halloween, while my own was spent with friends eating far too many sugary treats and takeaways while watching old B movies and Mystery Science Theater some people out there did some amazing stuff.

I am personally looking forward to seeing what DeviantArt user Ceemdee has created this year with their impressive pumpkin carving, for those of you that haven't seen her work here are a few examples from 2012:

Shadow of the Colossus and Bastion

For anyone who would like to have a try Extremepumpkins.com has a tutorial for beginners.

Finally for you still in the mood for some horror to inflict on your fellow players on the gaming table I highly recommend watching Will Wheaton's Youtube series Tabletop, recently he played the classic horror game Betrayal at the House on the Hill a board game published by Avalon Hill (and more recently by Wizards of the Coast). Players all begin as allies, exploring a haunted house filled with dangers, traps, items and Omens. As players explore the mansion, new room tiles are chosen at random; until enough Hauntings and Omens have occurred and the scenario is discovered with one player often been a traitor.     
In any case its well worth a watch, but now its time to finish the Out in the Wilds series of articles.

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