Category: Otaku

Buried Treasure

  • March 22, 2018

Last year I went on an expedition into a tomb that had been sealed for decades: a crawlspace upstairs in J & J’s house. I found some startling things in there, mostly in great condition, and one of the most remarkable was this:

The Game Of Time And Space eh? This beauty was published way back in 1980, and is a board game made for and by ‘anoraks’. Back then I would have loved it!

Here’s what it says on the back:

Note that the complexity claims to tend low…

The game includes a big board, some boring plastic pieces (instead of cardboard versions of The Doctors?) and loads of cardboard tokens.

Here’s the board:

And a closeup of a very fanciful depiction of Gallifrey:

And here’s a selection of tokens:

Gameplay is a little like Dungeon and consists of the player moving around the board trying to find several treasures which are initially face-down and often protected by monsters. A selection of items can assist with movement, combat etc. and once the player has the pieces he is after he returns to Gallifrey to win.

A read of the rules seems to contradict the summary on the back: this game seems overly complex and tedious to play. I couldn’t convince KLS to have a go, but I imagine the item wrangling and large variety of rules does not a quick-and-easy game make.

Look at this quick reference rulebook for instance, which every player gets a copy of for reference:

As I said, by nerds for nerds 🙂

It’s also got very little to do with Doctor Who, in the sense you could easily change some names and art and the game would be the same. Shouldn’t time travel or regeneration been themes?

One day I’ll play this, and possible I’ll update when I do. But for me it’s an ancient and treasured part ‘of the collection’!

We Boldly Went

  • March 4, 2018

Yesterday was my birthday, and despite the exhaustion I felt from opening an obscene amount of gifts we somehow managed to drag ourselves over to Dave and Busters to ‘play’ this:

I’d seen this a few weeks back when I was here with Y and J, but I hid my excitement from them because clearly this is a machine that only weirdos would be excited by.

It’s one of those sliding-floor token machines, where you drop ‘coins’ down a ramp in the hope of having them push other coins off the edge (the front of the above image) so you can win. In other machines of this type you can win the actual coins, but in this one you win tickets (for the redemption shop) and trading cards!!

As you can see it’s Star Trek themed, and there’s eight different card designs, with sixteen different cards in total because there are uncommon ‘limited edition’ versions of each. The machine periodically drops cards or plastic tokens down onto the playfield, and these can fall into the hopper and ultimately can be redeemed for tickets. The metal coins are recycled back into play automatically.

It’s a lot of fun. Dangerously entertaining perhaps. Aside from the lights and sounds (such as a phaser every time you drop a coin) there’s also a combo bonus, the thrill when a new card or coin falls onto the playfield and – best of all – the joy when something of note actually falls off the edge!

After an hour of play, here’s what I’d won:

The plastic tokens were worth 15 prize tickets each, and we had 68. The cards are worth points as well (100 or 200 for limited versions) but you have to turn them in so I didn’t redeem mine. With the 1020 total tickets we earned I bought this (for 1000) tickets:

And… it’s terrible! It barely turns at all and will likely be trashed quickly 🙂

So here’s some analysis. In total I sunk $45 into the machine, from which I got 1020 tickets which were redeemed for a $5 toy. But we also had an hour of fun, and (most importantly) I also left with these beauties:

6 of the 8 cards, 2 in limited edition versions. These are extremely nice, very high quality cards and I like them a lot. So much so I may return to get the other two (Chekhov and a Tribble)! The game is super fun, and I can’t deny I’d like to play it again.

Interestingly despite the cards all being original series characters, the machine is branded with characters from many different Star Trek series. Will they be cycling in new cards over time?

I also have a few doubles of some of the cards. To get one at random, leave a comment explaining why Enterprise was the best Trek series 🙂

The Tiny Arcade

  • February 11, 2018

Bernard gave me this for Christmas:

It’s a tiny arcade machine. Better yet it’s a kit that needs to be assembled! Here’s what it looked like out of the box:

The critical components are indeed tiny, and fit easily into the palm of my hand:

Here’s the screen being tested:

Assembly of the case was tricky but not difficult, and I actually had more trouble affixing the super-adhesive ‘cabinet art’. Once finished, it’s tiny (about 8 cm tall) and very impressive:

The back is open to access the electronics, which include on/off switches, a plug to charge the battery and a micro SD card port:

The unit runs off an arduino-derived chip (I believe), and supports a tiny OLED screen that is very sharp and bright. There’s several basic games included but to be honest most are little more than tech demos. Amongst clones of Flappy Bird, Tetris, Space Invaders and even R-Type there is however a charming little roguelike by a Japanese dev:

Bernard has one too and wanted to compete on some games. Like a cur he hasn’t submitted scores yet so here’s some for him to aim at:

(To be honest these were just my scores for one game of each)

Anyway I’m very impressed with this thing. It’s completely open so I could in theory write my own game for it. Wouldn’t that be fun?