Located in the UCD students centre and back for its Fifteenth year.

The website is here (as linked on the right).

All Looks well for the con. So I hope to see you there.

Ωr

A recent post on the Leprecon blog has revealed that there will be free pizza for guests thanks to Just-Eat.ie

This is absolutely awesome and should be encouraged! Sponsorship of this kind is exactly what games conventions in Ireland need. Hmm – they cover my area too… I think I’m going to have to start using Just-Eat.ie

Fate/40,000: Prelude
Fate/40,000: The opening move
Fate/40,000: The magic number
Fate/40,000: The board is set
Fate/40,000: A flow of bodies
Fate/40,000: Secrets and Sins
Fate/40,000: Dark Alleyways
Fate/40,000: Unexpected
Fate/40,000: Circles
Fate/40,000: Interference
Fate/40,000: Revelations in steel

[edit 10th March 2009 : Updatd the link to http://www.theadventuringparty.net/]

Now, finally, after a long wait, Green Ronin have announced that “A Song of Ice and Fire” has gone to print!

(Ed – Opinion: Woo-Hoo! I can’t wait… I already have a lovely shiney special edition of the d20 / tri-stat “Game of Thrones” RPG from Guardians of Order but I’m keen to see what Green Ronin do with the setting as I think they do a great job with dark settings. The quick start rules which have been available for a while look pretty good!)

Over the game’s 15 year history, more and more cards have been printed that say something like, “If you control 1, 2 and 3 and an X, Y and a Z you win the game.” As a result, there are now all sorts of conditional winning effects.  Wizards of the Coast (WotC) even expanded the rules to use conditional effects for not losing the game.  Platinum Angel is a prime example, the card text of which says, “You can’t lose the game and your opponents can’t win the game.” To avoid the obvious confusion when effects interact or contradict with one another and occur simultaneously, there’s a primary rule in the game which states that: “102.3e If a player would both win and lose simultaneously, he or she loses.”  That such a rule is necessary is a sign of how crazy things became.

Back in the early days of the game, before 30+ flavourful cards appeared that stated other ways of winning, things were nice and simple by comparison.  When a player’s life total reached zero or when he or she could no longer draw a card when they must, that player lost the game.  It was good. Then Legends the 3^rd expansion for MtG came along and a third win condition was introduced; poison counters.

Back in the time of 4^th Edition when the popularity of MtG exploded we saw a few poison counter decks floating around in casual formats. They were always a little bit too slow for effective tournament play and eventually the poisoners fell out of general play.  This in itself was a pity because alternate win conditions are always something that the metagame loves to build strategies around.  Curiously enough, since first appearing in 1994 only 9 cards have seen print that can give poison counters.  Of these, 7 are creatures with the ability, 1 artifact that makes creature tokens with the ability and 1 enchantment that gives the ability to the creature it enchants.  Way back in Homelands (which is commonly felt even amongst MtG staff to be the worst set ever¹) they printed a white card designed to remove poison counters.

While so far this is a small number of cards, one of MtG’s lead developers Mark Rosewater (MaRo²) was last year quoted as saying that poison counters will be making a comeback in a forthcoming block.  This year’s release schedule from WotC sees the second two sets in the Alara block (Conflux in February and Alara Reborn at the end of April).  July is the expected release of the latest Core Set (Eleventh Edition for those of you keeping count³).  The last release of the year will be part 1 of a new 3 block set, currently codenamed Live – Long – Prosper⁴ which has MaRo as lead designer.

So, speculation is now rife that the Live – Long – Prosper block will now see the return of Poison as a mechanic.  The hint’s are there.  MaRo in a lead position was always going to start speculation that poison would return following his comments last year.  The other big hint was the future-shifted cards that appeared in Future Sight.  In a set where the “future” cards potentially spoiled forthcoming mechanics and cards, the only “future” game mechanic to appear on more than one card was Poison.  The fact that a keyword ability of Poisonous has already been assigned to the mechanic only goes to further support the theory.

As it’s still only speculation, there’s no guarantee of when poison counters will see resurgence but it will happen.  However, the rumour mills are usually on the ball about these things so I would be surprised if Live block, launching in September 2009, doesn’t bring back one of the oldest ways to win.  Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to dust off those Leeches either.  It’s the only known cure so far and it could be one of the few cards to save your life when people start running their old poison counter decks again.

^[1] Worst set – actually referred to as Magic’s all-time design low due to having no new mechanics and an unexpectedly low power level compared to previously released expansions, with very few cards used for competitive play.
^[2] Yes. The card Maro is named after him.
^[3] This will be a smaller sized set overall and will include reprints of the Lorwyn Planeswalker’s and Ravnica’s Shock Lands amongst others.  Also confirmed is that from 11th edition on, all core sets will be black-bordered.
^[4] All Blocks get wacky names in development.  “Time Spiral – Planar Chaos -Future Sight” block was codenamed “Snap – Crackle -Pop”.  After “Live – Long – Prosper” will come “Lights – Camera – Action” and then “Shake – Rattle – Roll”.

12-Jan-2009 Donn Maguire

I was thinking about what to post here that is relevant to all Irish gamers, casual and not so casual alike and I figured there’s one thing we’ve all come across at some point or other. Gaming at Christmas or more specifically gaming with family and friends who aren’t gamers. Christmas is traditionally a time where after one too many slices of Christmas pudding and having gotten bored of watching The great escape someone decides it’d be a good idea to play a game. In many homes this might stretch as far as your uncle saying “Ooh Monopoly, I bagsy the sports car” or Mum piping in with “Lets play Charades, I love charades” and that’s that, but sometimes it goes more like “Hey Johnny, Whats that funny little game you play with the cards/tiny men/dice/pigs” or ” you’ve got loads of games, why don’t we play one of them?”.

Pop quiz hotshot, what do you do?

Do you play it safe and pull out a classic like Risk or do you go out on a limb and haul out something a bit less familiar like Shadows over Camelot.

Maybe you’re feel like a real challenge and hand everyone a measuring tape and a codex. “Ok Auntie, you’re playing the Necrons“

Or do you dare risk trying to Roleplay with your family?

“Dad, that’s a crit 1, your head files off landing 1d6 feet away.”

So.. tell us about it. Did you game this festive season past? What did you play?

I was inspired to this by Omegar’s post about using technology in our games; why not use more technology in ourr gaming community? We’re a pretty tech savvy bunch (gamers in general I mean) and we do a load of stuff online (as proven by this blog and the tons of other gamer blogs) so why not give people who can’t make it a chance to watch what we’re doing at cons and laugh at us (comments and live chat on Qik are pretty cool!).

So – I’ll be editing this post as the weekend goes on with links and (hopefully) embeded video from CONFESS all thanks to Qik. For those of you who won’t be at CONFESS – watch the video and come next year!

Edit: As of now (17:00 by my clock) Qik is up and running so we should be fine for the weekend!

Edit: It’s Saturday and the Con is well under way… There are a few videos up on Qik – I don’t know if anyone else is going to stream from the convention but if they do here is the link to see all the videos: http://qik.com/event/346/Confess 2008

Embedding a Qik video in the post is a bit problematic – I’ll have to download and upload to WordPress and the broadband in the Southern Hotel is not great to say the least so I think I’ll just let you all go to the link above to see the videos…

Gonna try using vodpod to include the clips here… Hope it doesn’t blow up!
First impressions of the meet and greet were pretty cool!

That’s pretty good news for the card gamers who go to Gaelcon and great news for the Gaelcon Committee. Last year saw a resurgence of CCGs at the IGA’s annual convention but this will hopefully give the Con a boost and get the “Card Flopper” numbers right back up there!

While Hugh Lardner doesn’t “do quotes”, he has gone on the record as saying he’s very excited about this and more than happy to accomodate the hordes of Magic players who will be beating down the castle doors!

For more information see www.wizards.com (particularly helpful page here).

Surely, with all the people who go to Irish Conventions and the amount of major gamer activity we have in this country, we can do something like this (but bigger and better). We would need a delegate or independent viewer from Guinness World Records there to verify it of course but we should be able to do it! Even if it was just for an hour or so at next year’s Gaelcon, CONFESS, Warpcon, Itzacon, Leprecon or any con where there is enough hall space and enough tables!

It could be a group effort with Irish Gamers from round the country bringing a part of the terrain and assembling it in situ… We’d need someone to co-ordinate and make sure the terrain was all suitable and everyone knew where their peice was intended to go etc but it wouldn’t really be all that much work…

Oh – and obviously we’d need someone to come up with a game to play (so it won’t just be sitting there useless *grin*)

Anyone interested..? I’m going to start plotting right away! I know some pretty cool terrain crafters round the country!

[Ed: Thanks to Tygerkrash for sending me the original link from BoingBoing]