Yes, it’s official: Legend of the Cipher – The Game of Hip-Hop is finally released to the public. This is the tabletop hip-hop deckbuilding game I’ve been working on for the past year. We had our grand release just a week ago, at PAX East, where many dozens of people sat down to try their hand at the game, and it was gratifying to note that almost all of them really enjoyed themselves. Many were delighted at the unique idea, as I had been a year ago when I first saw the game and decided to join up. So, the game is now available to purchase through the Game Crafter, a POD outfit.*

We’ve gotten just a touch of press after our first week of released game. A fellow who demoed the game wrote up a review about Legend of the Cipher at PAX East. Then AllHipHop.com wrote up an article about how Card game Legend of the Cipher teaches players how to win the real Rap Game. The video at the end of that article may or may not include a few brief clips of my terrible freestyles along with various players demoing the game. But the real joy was watching gamers who had never rapped in their life, go from being too afraid to rap, to rapping, in just minutes. I have no doubt that anyone playing this game regularly would become a much better freestyle rapper.**

Anyway, I’ll hope to have yet more updates about that later, but feel free to go buy the game now. Speaking of games, I recently reviewed Zen Garden on BGG. And speaking of things I write, this past month I’ve written two columns I’m quite pleased with, one about a Chrono Detective, and one that’s a simple Pope Quiz. And speaking of creative output***, I attended more poetry events, have upcoming comedy events, and hopefully will get back to writing my next book now that PAX is over.

*Technically, although fully playable, this is still a beta version, as we are hoping to gather enough demand to one day do a mass printing. But who knows when that will happen, and meanwhile this is the real deal, full color quality cards and all, and it’s pretty dang fun.

**Improv troupe members, take note.

***And speaking of weak segues…

February was a pretty full month for me, performance-wise. Pittsfield held their 10×10 Festival, which I participated in as much as I could, performing poems and stories for WordXWord at the Y Bar, performing some stand-up comedy as part of a comedy showcase put together by friend and fellow comedian Tom Lewis, and just earlier this afternoon, performing a full show of improvised mini-musicals with the Royal Berkshire Improv Troupe. All in all, a pretty full and satisfying month*.

I also finally sat down to do some more game reviews, which I’d been too swamped** to do for a while. You may not remember my review of Rivals for Catan at About.com***, but their new expansion was just released, and I’ve got the first review up on BoardGameGeek for Rivals For Catan: Age of Enlightenment. I also had to put up a review of Path of Exile, not least of which because I can’t stop playing it. And this weekend I’ve been looking over the proofs for Legend of the Cipher, which I will be demoing at PAX East next month.

Meanwhile, with a marriage equality bill having passed the Rhode Island House of Representatives, and now in the Rhode Island Senate, my most recent column is titled “To Rhody, With Love”.

*Well, satisfying to live, anyway. Admittedly, reading about hilarious shows is a lot less fun than attending them. This is why people usually write about disasters; they’re much more fun to read about than attend.

**”Do you want to review this new black deck for Magic:The Gathering?” “No thanks, I’m too swamped as is.”

***But I suppose it’s commonplace not to remember things when you’ve never read them.

Well, that was a long post that my computer just ate. So, here’s the slightly shorter version.

WordXWord was an awesome week-long literary festival every August. It still is that, but it has now expanded to include exciting literary times in Pittsfield every Tuesday night. A poet friend of mine made it her new year’s resolution to attend these, and I have tagged along, and so far it has been awesome. We read poetry at some open mics, performed in a storytelling competition, and tonight she’s MCing an Invitational Slam for three of NYC’s top slam poets, and three Berkshire poets, of which I am one.

Work on Legend of the Cipher continues apace. I think after the latest round of playtests and revisions, the game is now something I’m very pleased with; it’s fun to play, offers some interesting choices, and moves along at a good clip. While I’d love to still squeeze in one more round of playtests and numbers tweaks before we go to print, I realize at some point you have to call a game done, and can’t be rebalancing forever. I’ll be running a demo booth at PAX East in March; more about that in a future post.

Aside from Legend of the Cipher, it’s been less board games and more video games for me of late. Path of Exile just released an open beta, a Diablo clone with FFVII-materia-inspired active skills, and an FFX-inspired passive skill grid of literally over 1,000 nodes (of which you can only have 100 or so), making all sorts of expansive choices.

You have choices too. You can read my column about How to Argue, or my column explaining why so many are Living in Denial.

I know, I know, it’s 2013 now. And a happy new year to all both of my readers. I really do try to post here once a month, but December was fairly busy for me. I got a bit of freelance work for an educational company that took a lot of time, and have been working on refining Legend of the Cipher*, which is the exciting card game that we hope to be showing off in a few months at PAX East. I’ve been playing, reading about, and even working on designing this game, but haven’t done much reviewing of late. More in 2013, I promise.

Meanwhile, I’m still busy even now! It’s the season for parties with friends, from last week’s Heathen Hullabaloo (because it wouldn’t be Christmas without Chinese Food) to the New Years Extravaganza which I am still amidst and should go to sleep so I can wake up and rejoin it.

But here’s a holiday column in the meantime; I re-wrote a song just for you. Well, not just for you, but for anyone who feels sesquipedalianisms would improve a song like “Winter Wonderland”. I call it:

“Seasonally Low Temperature Imaginary Dreamscape”**

*I think marketing will be the big hurdle for this game, as few people seem enthused about the game when I tell them about it, but most people so far have really enjoyed the game after trying it.

**Rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Or as my partner said about a portmanteau I recently invented, “It trips, stumbles, and falls off the tongue.”

Yes, I know, I should be assembling a more proper Holiday Gift Guide like I did in 2010 so you can buy stuff from my friends. But between empty Etsy storefronts and my own laziness, all I’ll do is point you to that link, rather than try to compile a new list for this year. By next year, there will be enough new products made by friends that I will make a new list. I promise.

Meanwhile, there are worse places to start for holiday gifts than my own books. You can click on the big heading above that says “Books” in fancy font (or HERE), and see summaries of all five. The newest, It Happened In Rhode Island, was officially released at the beginning of this month. It is a series of true stories about historical events that happened in Rhode Island.* These range temporally from the first settlers before the state was officially founded, to last year. They also range in seriousness from a Titanic-like tragedy, to Bob Dylan swapping his acoustic guitar for an electric one.

Naturally, my four other books remain available for purchase. From God To Verse is a line-by-line rhyming translation of the first five books of the Torah/Bible, making it a perfect holiday gift for your religious friends. Rhode Island Curiosities is not only filled with weird people, places, and things to see around Rhode Island, but also sprinkled with limericks and bad pun photo captions. Think You’re The Only One is a collection of sixty-odd profiles of odd groups, a perfect book to adorn your bathroom reading rack. And Shards is my first novel**, about a programmer turned artist, his comedian friend, and begins on an up note.

Anyway, enough hawking of my writing and asking you to pay for it. My columns I give you for free, so here’s last week’s impassioned plea to help defend America from The War On Thanksgiving. And this week I discuss the Hostess with the Leastess.

On the boardgame front, playing lots of new boardgames has taken a backseat to playing the classics overflowing my shelves, while I’m trying to improve the design of the game I’m working on, “Legend of the Cipher”***. It’s been a lifelong goal to design a game, and this one is pretty fun to play, so I hope sometime next year it will be ready to share with the world.

*(“My word,” you exclaim, “I would never have expected that from the title!”)

**And technically, only novel. But don’t let that cheapen it for you.

***I met the LotC team when they were showing off an early version of the game at PAX East. A bit of my cipher may have been caught on film at that point, but I’m not proud enough of it to link to that. Anyway, the important part is, now I’m on the team, and there’s no I in team, although there is an I in blathering.

Yes, once again I decided to stay up all night after the debates and translate the entire thing into rhyme. I guess to some people that might seem like a ridiculous task, but honestly after spending a decade writing From God To Verse, an all-nighter spent translating a presidential debate is pretty much a lark for me. Granted, unlike GTV, this one is a summary and not a line-by-line translation, but I feel like I still hit all the important points.

Editor Bob Whitcomb, of the Providence Journal, was kind enough to post it on their New England blog, so I present:

2012 First Presidential Debate in Rhyme

Meanwhile, if you’re sick of politics even in rhyme, unlike the past few weeks, this week my column doesn’t mention anything political even once. It does, however, contain many bad jokes. So come receive your Punnish Mint.

Also, you may notice a new addition to my Books page. I’ll post a little more about that in a few weeks, since it’s not technically available for purchase yet, although there is currently a pre-order discount through that link for those of you who enjoy that sort of thing.

On the board game front, I’ve been chatting with some folks putting together a hip-hop-themed card game. As I’m joining their team somewhat belatedly, it’s unclear whether I will have a strong hand in redesigning the game, or simply wheedle my way into getting my own card, but either way I’m clearly the target demographic.

So, I guess other things technically happened in September. I mean, I started doing a little extra work for the local paper, doing some features for their religion and food pages. And we cooked all sorts of delicious food. And I wrote a bunch of humor columns, the most recent one which discusses a problem I share with Mitt Romney.*

But really, if I were to summarize September in three words, it would be Alphabetic Boardgame Challenge. Yes, this year was the fifth annual occurrence of this glorious event, where my partner and I play 26 games over the course of three days. And for the first time ever, she won. I’ll keep this blogpost short, but there are plenty of bad puns in my summary at that link.

*And I don’t just mean being a socially awkward white guy. Well, not only that, at any rate.**

**”At any rate” is a weird phrase. I mean, if I say, “I know you bought tickets, but I don’t plan to watch ballet, at any rate”, what does that mean? Am I both refusing to watch ballet in real-time, but also slowed down to 10 frames per second, or sped up to 999,999 frames per second? What other rates are there? I guess there are interest rates…but if I continue this footnote any further, your interest rate will drop.

Well, technically of humid air, but then it rained a lot and the air got fresher*.

Anyway, this month has been interesting, but I’ve already forgotten most of it, because I’ve been pretty busy. Not quite busy enough — need to do more recording tomorrow for the exciting project I was hired for last month — but busy nonetheless.

The biggest event of the month for me was probably the WordXWord Festival in Pittsfield, a week-long event celebrating the spoken word where some of the country’s best performance poets came to perform, and it was totally awesome. But don’t take my word for it, take my 600 words in a parody of Poe’s Raven. Which will probably be taken down a few days after I post this, but oh well.

My most recent column, rather than being celebratory, is a lot more depressing. However, I think it’s also something important to note that I really wanted people to read, and of particular interest to anyone interested in humor in general or politics, which I believe covers almost all of my readership, so I encourage you to read (and share?) my musings on The Death of Satire.

That column came out two days ago, and already I’ve had numerous new examples sent to me since then. I think it really is a disturbing trend. Almost as much as people making abnormally short blogposts that end abruptly**.

*More fresher? Re-fresher? Freshluggner? Good thing I’m not a writer.

**But I guess the footnotes can go on for a bit. At least, I can. What my column doesn’t mention about the WordXWord Festival is that I found out another local poet was also a freestyle rapper, and neither of us had ever known the other rapped. So at the afterparty for the festival, one of the more-famous-than-us poets announced this fact, and invited us both to the stage to do some quick freestyle line trading starting on topics of the audience’s choosing. This ended up being a $10 bill and Battlestar Galactica, the latter of which launched our rhymes into a series of delightful nerdery, and it was the most fun I had all month, and basically I thought of all of this now because during that freestyle session the other fellow said that his rhymes needed large footnotes, and I replied that my footnotes were the tallest, because I was the rap world’s David Foster Wallace. Granted I’m not actually the rap world’s DFW, I’m probably more the rap world’s Calvin Trillan, but anyway, I was thinking about footnotes, and so that’s why I told you all this, and wow, this sentence has gone on way too long, and I’m surprised you’re still reading, but nobody stops in the middle of a sentence, so I guess if I kept using commas to create an infinite pest sort of run-on sentence, you’d be stuck reading it forever, which would suck for you,  sort of like a vacuum cleaner, which nature abhors, abhors love men with nice abs, okay I’m going to stop typing now.

What can I say, when it comes to bad pun titles for blogposts, I just have an itchy trig finger.

For me, freelancing often feels like a sine wave, as the projects tend to come in “boom” and “bust” cycles.* A few months ago was a nice boom, when I wrote the rough draft of my next book, and also did some work for Fodor’s Travel Guides travelling the Berkshires. Then I had a bust cycle, and I re-discovered that I am addicted to video games between Steam and a ceaseless torrent of indie bundles.

Now, it is boom time once again, with the page proofs for my book having literally just arrived a few minutes before I wrote this post. This means I basically get to re-read my book and fail to find typos because I am so familiar with the material that my mind will probably miss them. But the good news is, I am pleased to announce that before the end of the year, my next book It Happened In Rhode Island will be available for purchase. More information in coming months.

Meanwhile, the most exciting new development for me is that I have been hired on to help with an educational project. This is still in the early stages, so details will have to wait for later, but suffice to say I am finally able to both put my talents to use and have the result be educational in addition to entertaining, and to get paid for that is pretty much what I want to do with my life.**

Oh right, my life. Well, I am Still Not Dead, albeit no thanks to my parents’ pantry, and continue to enjoy each day. My partner, whose office you may recall was closed down a few months back, has decided to take up knitting as a career, and has been cranking out socks that look pretty awesome. Once these are in sufficient quantity to be for sale, I will let you know. I can tell you from personal experience last winter, these are much, much better than normal socks for making your feet happy.

Meanwhile, an increase in knitting*** means a decrease in boardgaming, both due to time constraints, and table covered in knitting stuff. We’ve still played a few games, like Vikings and Ascension, but with everything else taking up time and space I may have to — *gasp* — sell some of my board games. Not my favorite ones, of course, but just some of the others. I guess that’s a bit of a tangent.

*** If I were a knitter, I’d have some clever pun about increases and decreases here. For once, I’m sad not to be a knit-wit. Maybe a joke about clutching your purls? I don’t understand knitting.

Just back from performing stand-up at a Chocolate Festival. This marks the first time I can recall where there were so many kinds of chocolate to sample, I became full before I’d even tried half of them. I definitely hope to go back next year, especially since the stand-up went well too. Here’s a joke I didn’t think was good enough to tell: I used to have blackberry bushes in my backyard, but then I found out my soil was contaminated with lead. So I tore out the bushes because I couldn’t stop eating the berries anyway. In retrospect, I could have used them to make Pb+J.*

So, my set was funnier than that. Speaking of food firsts, June also marks my first time making nime chow at home, a delightful experience I hope to repeat often, because yum, nime chow. My most recent local restaurant review was of a new Austrian place, and while I found it only mediocre, I’m pleased with my headline for the review.

Speaking of headlines**, my column this week was about Headline News, basically headline jokes the kind you might hear on a talk show. And the week before that I explain that my endeavors in comedy stem largely from the fact that I am seeking approval.

Game-wise, a friend lent us Through The Ages, and we have been playing it obsessively. As in, sometimes 4-5 times a week, which is a lot for a 3-hour game. We haven’t played a game this much since Goa. At some future point, I’ll have to review it, but I’ve only played a single multi-player game so I’m still holding off. Meanwhile, it’s an incredibly compelling 2-player experience, and always leaves me thinking, “Next time I’m going to try…”, which I believe is often a sign of a great game.

* Making puns about “lead” is very difficult in writing, since the pronunciation as “led” screws up a lot of the possibilities.

*** Which is another joke I decided to cut from my stand-up this time around.