Well, September is game month for me. In addition to once again completing the 26-game gauntlet that is my annual Alphabetic Boardgaming Challenge, this weekend I am off to the Boston Festival of Indie Games (free admission!) to showcase my hip-hop card game Legend of the Cipher. I will admit, while I’m in the tabletop area, I’m also hoping to meet Carl Chudyk (designer of some of my favorite card games, Innovation and Glory to Rome) who will be there showcasing his new game Impulse.

WordXWord was totally awesome, and I am really glad to have gotten to be a part of it. That’s two intensifying adjectives in a single sentence, so you know I’m serious.* Did some poetry at The Mount for their WordFest the other week, and at the end of the month I’ll be doing a stand-up comedy show again for the first time in many moons.**

Speaking of comedians, my humor column this week is about the misattribution of Internet forwards to famous comedians. So if you’ve recently seen a John Cleese terror alert or a George Carlin homily, take a look. And if you haven’t, just stop this crazy weather, because 63 degrees to 90 degrees to torrential rainstorms is too much for me to handle in the span of two days.

*As in, containing veracity. Not containing gravitas, obviously. I don’t really do a lot of gravitas. I think that’s why I like root beer floats.

**It’s lunacy.

Yes, April was National Poetry Month. So, in addition to participating in a few local poetry slams and open mics, I once again signed up for WordXWord’s 30/30 Poetry Challenge, a site where I (and many other poets) produced a poem a day every day during April. It has been pointed out that if I were a capital-P Poet*, I would produce a poem a day every day all year round, or at least if I were a capital-W Writer, I would do some creative writing every day all year round. But as I oft lack this motivation, April was good for me to get me writing more often**.

Admittedly, maybe only half of those daily poems were of any substantial length, and I probably wrote about a dozen of them as haiku. But this isn’t always bad. Actually, one of my favorite poems came from a prompt where I spent a long time writing a poem, became frustrated with it, and threw the poem away, deciding to write a haiku about that instead, which I will share here:

sadly, a bow drawn
on a second fiddle string
sounds just like a whine

Other poems of mine (and many other poets as well) are available on the site linked above. Naturally, I have continued writing my column this month as well, and so if you would like to read about Laundry Day (and a terrible pun) or The Invention of Meals, I encourage you to do so.

On the gaming front, I’ve got a review up about Road Rally USA, which is a reasonable light racing game but not my cuppa. I’ve been playing more Innovation, which is totally my cuppa, and I continue to think it’s a brilliant game. And I tried a 4-player co-op video game called Monaco, which is basically like an 8-bit Oceans Eleven — or the way my group plays, a Keystone Cops meets the Four Stooges heist movie. Either way, pretty entertaining. And lest I forget, Legend of the Cipher continues to not get very much press, but people who try it tend to like it, and people who take a look tend to be intrigued, most recently the gamer geeks over at Shut Up & Sit Down, who mention it in their latest round-up.

Tonight, I am off to another story slam at WordXWord, where I will tell the audience about a weird food I ate this weekend***. And then tomorrow it will be May, a month where I haven’t signed up for any particular enumerated challenge, but should really try to write more regularly nonetheless.

*e.e.cummings, of course, never had to worry about such things.

**Not to mention bringing together an International community of poets. There’s something cool about having a random highschool student from Malaysia say that she liked your poetry.

***Which, oddly enough, was from Malaysia. What can I say, I like living in an international world where ideas, art, and food can be freely shared and exchanged.

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.”