This is another test round for the quiz I'm running next month. T will be at an evening class, so I'll be by myself (gulp). So this is the Top Ten round, which gives me a bit of a breather. The teams have to write down what they think are the top ten items in [category]. The previous couple of quizzes we did Greatest Britons and Biggest Towns in ( Read more... )

I make games for people to play and have fun with each other. Sometimes in the games people pretend to be other, more interesting, people. Sometimes they pretend to kill each other.

What do you do, using only the thousand commonest words? http://splasho.com/upgoer5/

(HT to vicarage, bibliogirl et al.)

(Warning: this will probably not be of interest if you're not a gamer. In fact even if you are, it still might easily not be :-)

( Don't say I didn't give you fair warning… )

We've got another London Road Community quiz coming up! - and as usual I'm asking you lot to be the hapless victims who test the hardness of the various questions. Thank you in advance!

So this is the connection round. As before, there's a connection between the ten answers (which are supposed to be fairly easy); and the earlier in the round you ( Read more... )

I was sorting out some old files the other day and I came across a game I wrote back in the summer of 1995 (and had completely forgotten about). It's essentially a larp, but set indoors and for just six players, with pregen characters. The working title was (the dreadful) 'Cannes-tasia' - the characters are movie people at the Cannes Film Festival ( Read more... )

http://toolserver.org/~johang/2012.html

Some of these are quite baffling.

• Why does a mountain in China dwarf all other Dutch pages, by a factor of nearly 12?
• Why is the page about the '@' symbol so popular in Spain? (Artefact of the analysis script?)
• Why are German-speakers so interested in cul-de-sacs?
• And why the obsession in France with an obscure ( Read more... )

'Tis the season and all that, so I thought it might be nice to share these with you. Courtesy of ar_boblad, about 15 years ago now I guess it must have been. Où sont les vampires d'antan?

• A crossbow bolt through the heart will stake a vampire.
• Cut off the feet of someone killed by undead, and they will not be able to walk if they become undead themselves.
• ( Read more... )

Can anyone recommend a portable (for inside-the-house values of portability) device that combines digital radio with playing audio off a NAS via wifi?

(And is there a generic term for such devices?)

Now this is definitely a piece of automatically-generated unsolicited commercial email. But would you call it spam? I would, but I guess it's a philosophical as much as a technical question. If they'd sent the same message manually via our contact form, rather than scouring the site to scrape up an obscure email address from a newsletter back issue ( Read more... )

I've now done an update of the rules for Haunted House, based on the last playtest - thanks to ar_gemlad, metame, ar_boblad, mr_snips and lanfykins for taking part, and for great suggestions and thoughts.

See it in its glory here: http://www.ukg.co.uk/free_games/haunted_house.htmlSo this is a bit simplified from earlier versions, with the removal of room Terror ratings adn teh change of ( Read more... )