And on the seventh day there was gin

So look at this planet I have created. Perhaps I will populate it with little people and make them dance to my will! Though I should probably create some land first, or give them some boats, lest they drown.

Day Twenty featured a heroine who likes to take pictures. One possibility is Fatal Frame, where you take pictures of ghosts to defeat them. Another is Pokemon Snap, where you get Pokemon to do fashion poses (beats using them in a glorified dog-fighting ring). In retrospect, both would have qualified as vintage, being more than 10 years old. But silly me, I go for the more recent Beyond Good and Evil, which also has the distinction of having the most obscure title of the set. In this game, the heroine, Jade, is a photojournalist who uses her camera to collect evidence against the evil government. It's most an action-adventure game, but also sort of a sandbox game, in that there is a large world to explore and you expose the game's plot as you go.

Beyond Good and Evil reviewed well, but possibly because Prince of Persia: Sands of Time got most of the marketing budget that season, sold poorly. Despite that, an HD version was created in 2011 for download from Playstation Network and Xbox Live, and there is a sequel in the works, so stay tuned for more adventures of Jade.

I'm missing a staff -- and I don't mean a Gal Friday.

Twenty days down, ten to go. My daughter is already asking me to shave. But to fight cancer I will stay strong...

The game pictured here isn't strictly vintage, being only 8 years old. It also doesn't feature a bearded protagonist; much the opposite, really. However, it does have the auspicious distinction of shared a name with a work by Nietzsche. So perhaps this is a picture of me taking a picture of the abyss.

Back in the day, the name Lucas used to be associated with quality, as opposed to taking a beloved franchise and turning it into a steaming pile of Gungan poo. The game company LucasArts was known for its Star Wars games, of course, but before that was known as the go-to company for point-and-click adventure games. Day Nineteen's game is the latest in probably the best known of their games, the Monkey Island series. Beginning in 1990 with The Secret of Monkey Island and continuing to today's Tales of Monkey Island, this series tells the tale of Guybrush Threepwood, aspiring pirate, rescuer of the fair Elaine, and foiler of evil plots by the ghost pirate LeChuck. And yes, in Tales of Monkey Island, his ship is devoured by giant manatee.

Unfortunately, the adventure game business died out in the late 1990s/early 2000s, pretty much with the rise of the first person shooter, and with it much of LucasArts. Tales of Monkey Island is being published by the new king of point-and-click adventures, Telltale Games. If you're feeling nostalgic, they're worth checking out.

Me parrot died, so now I all I have this is here manatee. Yarr.

So yes, this is me with a stuffed manatee. You'd think that manatees don't have much to do with vintage games -- and I would have agreed with you -- but it turns out that a remake of a classic computer game features a rather large manatee swallowing our hero's ship. Giant man-eating manatee -- those crazy game designers...

Yesterday's game was yet another board game: (The) Fury of Dracula. The parenthesis are there because the original name of the game as designed by Stephen Hand and published by Games Workshop was The Fury of Dracula, and when Fantasy Flight republished it, they renamed it to Fury of Dracula. It's a bit like Scotland Yard with extra cruft on top, as one player acts as Dracula and sneaks around the map, and the other players try to find him. I haven't played the original, but the combat in the new version is confusing and not a lot of fun, so it no longer makes it way onto our table any more.

Let The Right One In would make for an interesting game, on the other hand, but probably more as an indy roleplaying game.

Where's Buffy when you need her?

I've been chasing this damnable vampire for days now. Through all of Europe and across the Mediterranean. And now, after cornering him in Budapest, he's hypnotized me into shaving my neck and preparing myself for him. Hopefully Lord Godalming will show up soon.

Day Seventeen's game is Wiz-War, designed by Tom Jolly and first published by Jolly Games in 1985. The concept is that you are wizards battling in a dungeon, and your goal is to either steal two treasures from other wizards and place them in your area, or be the last wizard alive. Chessex had promised to release a new edition of Wiz-War for years now, but finally Jolly canceled the contract with Chessex and it was announced recently that a new edition is coming out soon from Fantasy Flight Games. Hopefully they didn't muck with it too much, as they are apt to do.

Incidentally, Wiz-War was an inspiration for another classic game, for which Pete has already provided a photo.

Using Hermione's wand does not make me less of a man

The beard is coming in so nicely, that I decided to submit my application to the Unseen University. Unfortunately, I seem to have irritated the faculty and so am now forced to fight for my life. Let's hope I can still remember the contents of My First Spell Book, read back when I was a mere tyke.

Yesterday's game, as you may have guessed, was born from the previous three games. Remember the guy who helped revise Chainmail? Well, his name was Gary Gygax. And the friends who took over running the Braunsteins? One of those was Dave Arneson. The origins of the game they created are a little fuzzy (due to how long ago it was, plus some legal action), but the way I understand it is like this:

Dave Arneson took over running Braunstein events from David Wesley around 1970, and one idea that captured him was using a fantasy setting. He borrowed some ideas from a naval warfare game he had designed, and briefly used the Chainmail fantasy rules for combat before coming up with his own. Rather than a town, Arneson started planning out underground areas with monsters and treasure. Arneson also used the Outdoor Survival map and wildlife encounter rules to represent the area outside of the dungeon. It made for a convenient map because it had no distinctive features. Thus was created Blackmoor. While more of a setting than an actual game with strictly codified rules (Arneson was more interested in collaborative storytelling than tying players down), the seeds of a full-scale fantasy RPG were there, including armor class and hit points.

Arneson had met Gygax at GenCon II a year or so before designing Blackmoor, and they had worked together on another naval warfare game that was published by Guidon Games. In 1972, Arneson introduced Gygax to his Blackmoor campaign. Gygax was immediately taken with it and created his own campaign, Greyhawk, based on the basic Blackmoor rules. With their twin campaigns, both men began collaborating on what they called The Fantasy Game. Gygax recognized that in order to publish the game a significant amount of work would be required, and so he started revising and tightening the rules. Unfortunately Guidon Games and Avalon Hill passed on the game, so it became clear it would have to be self-published. Arneson didn't have the money to fund such a thing, but in 1974, Gygax and two other backers created Tactical Studies Rules, and thus Dungeons and Dragons was published.

Anyone seen any fire-breathing lizards?

More donations have come in, so thank you very much, kind supporters. Still, I am behind and so am inspired to search for gold, silver and coppers. However, you can't look for treasure without being suitably armed...

Day Fifteen was again a bit obscure, both for the clues and because the game is not that well-known, never having been published. In Christmas of 1967 or 1968, David Wesley, inspired by a 1871 wargame training manual, ran a Napoleonic era game set in the fictional town of Braunstein. He was interested in games with more than two players, and he acted as referee, while the other players represented different factions in the town with their own agendas, from soldiers in the opposing armies to members of the town itself. The initial plays were quite chaotic, but despite this his group kept calling for another "Braunstein." So after a few more plays of the original with some tweaks (such as relaxing the winning conditions), Wesley created a second scenario (Piedra Morenas) involving spies in the fictional Latin American country of Banannia. After he left for Vietnam, other locales were used, from the Old West, to 1919 Russia, to 1944 Poland.

So to make it clear: we have a game with a referee, players with their own special abilities and agendas, and no clearly defined winning condition. On top of that, Wesley ordered a set of regular solids with numbers on them to use as dice for the game (though he mostly used the 12- and 20-siders). Thus, the "Braunstein" became the starting point of RPGs as we know them.

Josephine, that rash on my belly is back...

Today's picture should (at least in part) evoke an era. An era named for one short man... the game might also evoke a New York brownstone, but I don't happen to have one of those lying around.

By my calculations, we should be at the halfway mark. And by further calculating, we should have all raised an average of $125 to reach a monthly mark of $5000. That does not appear to be the case, and it is clear I for one am in the lower standard deviation, and so am shirking my duties. Expect that to change.

The game for Day Fourteen is Chainmail, a minatures game first designed by Jeff Perren, expanded by a friend of his in the LGTSA, and published by Guidan Games in 1971. It was inspired by Siege of Bodenburg, one of the early miniatures games, and was primarily intended to be played as a historical medieval warfare game (like Bodenburg). However, it is most notable for the Fantasy Supplement, which were a set of rules that allowed players to fight fantastical creatures. Thus it was one of the first of many fantasy miniatures games to come.

Now if Fantasy Flight would only put out a Lizardman expansion for BattleLore, I'd be a happy man.

How do you make a shirt out of this again?

So after Mur hit the deer, I thought it would be best if I started looking into armor technology. Plate mail being a bit on the pricey side, maybe another kind of mail would work. Then again, given the amount of chain I have, it'd be more suitable for a miniature car.

There were some obscure clues to yesterday's game in the text. The Isle of Apples is Avalon. And a mountain, not a Hill. And of course, the Outdoors. The game itself is Outdoor Survival, published in 1972 by Avalon Hill. As you might expect, it's a game about surviving in the wilderness, from finding food and water, fighting off animals, and dealing exposure and disease. Not having played it myself, I can't really comment on the quality of the game, but it's not rated very well on Board Game Geek. That said, according to the Avalon Hill company history it sold quite well, particularly at National Parks.

So why mention it? Well, it happens to be tied to a far more famous and well-respected game. As does today's game.

This is actually scarier than her Halloween costume: She's wearing eye shadow.

First off, many thanks to those donated to me in the past day. A little financial encouragement goes a long long way towards keeping the beard growth full, and the vintage games coming. I'll try to get a day in with two games at some point, just to make up for yesterday.

The fall leaves are just at about an end here, so we decided have some adventures outside. Unfortunately, the sun was setting, so we didn't get to climb Occoneechee Mountain (more like a hill, really) so we went to the lake at Umstead State Park instead. No Isle of Apples there, though.

Day Eleven's game is another multiple choice one, with the Champions RPG being one possibility, or maybe Superworld, but I was thinking of the original superhero game: Villains and Vigilantes, designed by Jeff Dee and Jack Herman and published in 1979 by Fantasy Games Unlimited. FGU was a significant force in the role-playing games industry in the early 1980s, with a large catalog of games. There was Bunnies and Burrows (think Watership Down), Chivalry and Sorcery (I think you know what this was responding to), Bushido! (feudal Japan) and Space Opera (obvious).

FGU eventually ran into hard times and was declared defunct by New York State in 1991. Dee and Herman decided to try to revive Villains and Vigilantes and are publishing it and its sequel Living Legends at Monkey House Games. In 2010, they were involved in a trademark dispute with FGU's founder, Scott Bizar -- I'm not sure if it was resolved or not.

Villains and Vigilantes had an interesting wrinkle in that you were encouraged to treat your life as the secret identity of your hero. Also, while you could advance in levels, your powers didn't really change, so Car Man will remain Car Man forever.

No vintage game today, still dealing with deer aftermath. Perhaps more tomorrow.