Dice Throne Remixed Season One

 

Look, folks,  this not a game box that passed any of my prejudices. Not only is it expensive and bulky, but it's what I call a treadmill game: the game wants you to buy more of it, over and over, as you get more and more tricks and gimmicks to add onto your ever-growing collection. Bad treadmills are explicitly about getting the next thing and experiencing the next dopamine hit. Good treadmills are actually good games, with the dopamine hit. I don't have the space, so I put a pause on my buying of Heroes of the Grid. I'm sure as hell not going to go buy another treadmill game. Welp, a friend of mine gave it to me as a gift. A year ago. You don't turn down gifts. I've played it almost every day, sometimes up to five times a day. I've played it with a variety of ages, from young kids to grannies. And I can say this, pretty definitively: I'm still learning these eight characters in the box. There's a depth going on in this 99 dollar box that I did not expect.

Let's get down to brass tacks: Dice Throne's center is "just" Yahtzee. Pick up the five pretty dice, roll 'em three times, keeping whatever you like, all to get a result from on the board, which has special abilities and attacks. 

This means that, in order to successfully pull anything off, you aren't rolling against another player, per se, but instead against your own luck. And this has a real effect for the table environment: it doesn't feel as personal. In fact, sometimes you feel bad when they don't pull off an attack, or at least I do! If they do pull off an attack, that's fine, you usually get a defensive roll, which is unique to your character. And these defensive rolls aren't just "cancel the hit", but can sometimes get the defender real advantages that shift the game in their favor. There isn't a moment when everything is shifting around. If you pick up the dice it matters. I've never, not even once, seen a dead turn, where not a thing happens.

Of note are the myriad conditions that are part of every character. Some of them are extremely simple, and some are incredibly complex, requiring a good and solid reading. The designers were extremely good at ensuring that conditions of similar complexity are grouped appropriately with characters. None of the conditions are useless, and none of them are too powerful. All of them require some skill to use, even if the character is simple enough. It's all in the Goldilocks zone, folks: just right. 

The last bits are the cards.The cards cost Combat Points (CP), usually up to 4 at a time. The effects are appropriately grouped to the complexity of the character, with very few of them being actually expensive. There's four  types of cards: main phase, upgrades, roll phase cards, and instants. Main phase cards have all kinds of different effects, grouped around the theme of the character. Upgrades let you shift up the abilities on your board, and can even add new abilities for you to roll. Roll phase cards let you muck about with your dice rolls, and this is honestly where some of the biggest "Oohs!" and "Ahs!" of the game really come about; there's nothing like mucking about the with the dice and they still freaking get their roll. Instants can be played at any time, and can turn the game on its head. All of this is clearly explained by the rules and expertly laid out: I handed this to my “I can’t play games like that” mom, and she had it within moments, nevermind enjoying herself as she began cooking up strategies on her own!

None of this would make a difference if the character design wasn't any good. I'd have chucked the box, gift or not, if the character theming wasn't good. This kind of game needs strong vision for all the characters, as well as allowing the characters to be played in a myriad of ways. It is not an easy thing to design for. The character is where all the previous parts are assembled together, and either are more than the sum of said parts or far less. And the game really delivers here! Everyone, and I do mean everyone, plays differently and well. I’ve got my favorite (paladin, to the shock of no one), but I enjoy all the others and can win with them, should someone take my vengefully armored baby. They all come in a range of complication levels, from the “I hit you and you can’t hit me back” barbarian to the treant, who commands a small army of spirits, all of whom require a great deal of finesse to use correctly. None of them feel unbalanced against each other: if two players of equal skill did a barbarian (the simplest) vs treant (the most complex) battle it would be a damn close game. 

The only real issue with this box is its price, but only in the abstract. 99 bucks plus shipping sounds expensive, but I’ve put the hours in on this game, folks. I can tell you that I got way more than a 99 buck value for this game. If this sounds like fun to you, I can promise that actually investing in this particular box is more than worth the effort and cash. But if you're wanting to get something a bit more casual, something that you wouldn't actually use all that often, I wouldn't recommend something of this scope. Maybe I'm wrong, but I certainly wouldn't buy this box if I wasn't going to use it as often as I do. If someone really got through my prejudices hard enough to get me to consider trying it, but I wasn't sold, I would get me the "little" two character packs and give it a shot first. And then, if I liked it, I'd save up.

It's hard to say "Yeah, sure, get this!" when a box like this is so much, up front. That's a thing I don't think is ethical to say. I will, however, say that I have gotten alot more joy, drama, and outright surprises out of this one box than anything with this level of difficulty has any right to provide. I am getting another box, I am putting more money into this. It's worth my time. It might be worth your time as well. 

Destruction Will Not Heal You

  "For it is better to preserve the just with the evil than to subvert the just for the good"

Anynomous, Commentary on Matthew

Over the years I've come to know many a disgruntled formerly homeschooled Catholic or Protestant Christian. Some of you will be reading this going "HOW DARE YOU AIR MY DIRTY LAUNDRY." Here's the sad part.

I'm not.

Y'all are all saying the same words, in the same tone of voice, with the same sad eyes that scream disillusionment.

And it breaks my heart.

Frankly, I'm there too. Still.

My father, while I was growing up, told me two things that have never not served me well. I added a third precept, because he implied it with the first two but never thought to say it: 

1. All of life is grieving.
2. If you could be in someone's body like it was your own you'd go catatonic from the pain they've been passively holding onto.
3. By grieving, you become open to others and can help them with their pain.

All of life is grieving. I'm sorry, folks, there is no avoiding this one. You can't not grieve. Life hurts, it just does. Anyone who says differently is lying, and that's all there is to it. Or, worse, they're selling you something to where you're distracted from your pain. You can piss and moan and bitch about how life shouldn't be painful, but honestly what's that going to get you? You're just wasting energy on pissing and moaning and bitching. Now, granted, if you don't actually want to live I suppose that's okay. But fucking hell, if you're reading this blog it's because you actually want to live. And live well. Somehow. Somewhere. You want to live. And in order to live you must grieve. You must be able to look at the world and say "THIS HURTS LIKE FUCKING HELL" and you must be uncomfortable, you must be pained, you must sorrow and shed tears over it, because the world is worth grieving over. You are worth too much to waste in refusing to do it. It is not that the pain makes you better, it is what you do because you are in pain that makes you better. You are meant to face the dragon that is the world with the sword of grief in hand, with the shield of rational thought in the other, clad from head to toe with the conviction that your life means something and is worth defending. And make no mistake, your life, the real one, is a fragile thing. It needs defending. So grieve!

Unlike many a disillusioned post-Christian, I actually saw shit go down in the Catholic Church as a teen. I was there, behind the closed doors, watching many a critical fumble or outright malfeasance occur. I got to see these politics happen, in real time. And yeah, at the time it about broke me to witness them. The road to hell is paved with the skulls of bishops and there is no sight better than the back of a bishop as he leaves. But most people, when they think of these bishops, of these malefactors who honestly need to be forcibly removed from their posts (and if they get banged up in the process c'est la vie it's better than what most of you deserve) do not have a specific picture of what these blasphemers of the Law of God are actually like. It's not that they can't get a good picture, or if they have enough empathy that they can't develop a good one, but the mind is open to fantasize about anything it wants in relation to these people.

Let me blow that up. Right now.

Those bishops, who did so much harm to the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, are not mustache-twirling meglomaniacs. Oh no. We would be lucky to have that kind of evil, because that kind of evil engenders righteous anger, which summons holy fire to burn the motherfuckers out. Holy anger requires specificity, intimacy, love, to be effective. And evil meglomaniacs love, in some way, and thus the blasphemy is easy to spot, easy to get worked up over, and easy to treat.

No, we have something much worse. We don't get big bad guys, but small, mean, cowardly, fuck ups. They dissemble and hide because they know they are small. They remain nondescript, milqetoast, tepid, thoroughly mediocre men so that way you can't do more than summon a mild disgust and try to ignore them as fast as possible. They're not a virus, they're a cancer.

I saw all this going into adulthood. After a few years of witnessing it I went  to the Orthodox Church in a rage. That was not the right thing to do. After barely a year I returned to the Catholic Church where my family was, confused and hurt, and finally began to grieve. When I finally opened up to my dad about what I had seen, and how the evils I had seen were worse than anything I could have imagined at the time, my dad sadly told me to remember that all burdens are in physical pain too, not just spiritual. The way a person holds their soul is the way they hold their body. If anyone could be in another's body as it was their own for even a second they'd double over from the horrific pain the other person was in, and they'd probably die from the shock of just how vicious, how truly horrific, the other person's universe was.

When I asked what the point was, my father told me that what I was witnessing that was draining my soul so was that I had seen what happened when someone let that pain get the better of them, at the large scale. The bishops weren't bad, they were simply ignoring their own pain and thus ignoring everyone's pain. And we were doing the same thing back. The key was to accept that you were already in horrific agony, had blocked almost all of it out, and needed to get to where you could feel the pain and process it.

The third point is mine own. My father was not at a point where he could teach me this one, but I learned it from repeated experience and confirmed it with my parents later, after more than a decade of slogging away at the garbage the world had handed me. Many of you will read the above and go "That's nice, but the world is a horrible place and I need to fix it now. I must help take control over the systems of control and reform them" and other Marxist platitudes that are just such utter bullshit. 

Systems cannot enable justice. 

Only people can. 

And they need systems in place to be able to do that. But in order to be a person who can take advantage of the dark and terrible sword known as System you must have conquered your own darkness first. You must be worthy, and it is not impossible that you be in such a state.

Don't roll your eyes. I mean it.

Look, the years from 2016-2022, six years, were spent suffering from horrifying flashbacks. Almost hallucinatory level memories of rape, torture, and other things that are so fucking bad I'd rather write about my rapes than write about them went through my head. I'd wake up, go to work, do my best to not wreck my family, and then spend the evenings they went to bed suffering. Years of nights spent practically pulling my own hair out, sobbing until I was hoarse, almost checking myself into a mental ward multiple times because I just didn't want to be a human anymore, and almost throwing up sponatenously because I'd had a flashback and the pure disgust of what I was feeling were normal occurences. I hated every moment of it. But my wife told me it was worth going through. She never wavered on this one fact:it was all worth grieving over. I was not wasting my time by using it to grieve. I was not abandoning them by being in pain. Without her support and constant reminder that I was not a waste of a human being for sitting alone at night and crying my eyes out while I tried to keep my dinner down I wouldn't be here.  As far as I was concerned that was my real job.

Because of this, I 've never really done anything about my professional life, nor do I really care to. I work at a government helpdesk. It's not my favorite job, and frankly there's months I dearly wish I had something a bit more fulfilling to do than arguing with end users about their tier ones screwing them over, but it's a job. Money comes in. The fact that I am making money from an entity that I regard as a globalist empire is very secondary to the fact that it's feeding my wife and kids. I don't have the luxury of being idealistic about it, because of that whole recovery thing we were talking about above. I just don't. I go to work, do the job to the best of my cantankerous ability, and go home. Hi, I'm the government, and I'm here to help.

I wrote about my experience of the evacuation of Afghanistan on this blog before, practically while it was happening. But I left something out. While I was in the backrooms, watching things going down y'all simply couldn't freaking comprehend because you're just not here to see it, I was involved in the saving of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of lives. Yeah, I failed to do more. That legit haunts me. But I was in the right place, at the right time, and said a few words to the right ears... and more than a few people made it out that otherwise wouldn't have. I didn't even do that much. But simply by being available and open to helping and paying attention, no matter what it cost me, paid off.  I really hope I get to meet these people at the Last Judgment and find out what happened to them afterwards. I hope to meet the people I couldn't get out and beg their forgiveness for not being able to do more.

Anyone here sitting around just bitching about the state of the world or yourself able to claim that?

No?

It's not like I went out to look for that. It fell right into my lap, I chose to pay attention, and that was that. It was a small, quiet, very quick moment. If I hadn't been so focused on healing, on restoring, and doing only what I could do for years before I couldn't have done it then. And y'know what? I've been able to do it more often since then. There's more than a few people out there who are alive because of my direct action. It's a good feeling.

But they weren't something I chased.

I focused on cultivating life, starting with mine, and found that it inevitably spilled over to others.

Now we're here, to my point. Yup, took awhile, but without the previous context it's hard to comprehend exactly what I'm saying. But now you have the context. Now, most formerly homeschooled adults are (at best if they're honest) heavily disillusioned about what they were taught as kids. That's normal, as befits those who were (at best) misled. They're more than vaguely aware that what they were taught wasn't actually Christianity, but some Satanist faux-Christian parody that should, in fact, make them sick. But they're stuck in a conundrum: they know there's a God; they've felt the Light, they know He's real, even if they'd quibble over my use of the word know, since they haven't caught on that knowing something very rarely involves that fallible thing called the mind. But the things that have been taught to them are clearly cruel, clearly awful, and don't add up with this experience. But now these well-meaning folks are in a damned if you do, damned if you don't, situation. They either choose to stay loyal to the light they know to be real, or they accept the doctrine they were only half-taught as true.

It's an awful choice. No one can make it and feel good about themselves, forevever.

But there is a third path. It's not as painful in the long run, but it is more complicated, and it is, in some ways, much harder than sticking to the two choices above: to take seriously the following words of the Master Himself:

2 The scribes and Pharisees, he said, have established themselves in the place from which Moses used to teach;

3 do what they tell you, then, continue to observe what they tell you, but do not imitate their actions, for they tell you one thing and do another.

4 They fasten up packs too heavy to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; they themselves will not stir a finger to lift them.

5 They act, always, so as to be a mark for men’s eyes. Boldly written are the texts they carry, and deep is the hem of their garments;

6 their heart is set on taking the chief places at table and the first seats in the synagogue,

7 and having their hands kissed in the market-place, and being called Rabbi among their fellow men.

8 You are not to claim the title of Rabbi; you have but one Master, and you are all brethren alike.

9 Nor are you to call any man on earth your father; you have but one Father, and he is in heaven.

10 Nor are you to be called teachers; you have one teacher, Christ.

11 Among you, the greatest of all is to be the servant of all;

12 the man who exalts himself will be humbled, and the man who humbles himself will be exalted.

13 Woe upon you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites that shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces; you will neither enter yourselves, nor let others enter when they would.

14 Woe upon you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites that swallow up the property of widows, under cover of your long prayers; your sentence will be all the heavier for that.

15 Woe upon you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites that encompass sea and land to gain a single proselyte, and then make the proselyte twice as worthy of damnation as yourselves.

Matthew 28: 2-15

Most of the New Testament is the apostles writing letters to the churches and telling them how they'd fucked this up. Out of the 27 books in the New Testament, TWENTY-TWO directly address heresies and frankly really scandalous sexual shit going on in the Early Church. The New Testament is not some lovey-dovey "Oh God is love" namby pamby horseshit, it's the apostles, who had met Christ and been total idiots while they were with him (or in the case of Paul after actively killing Christians for years) going "YOU IDIOTS NEED TO STOP BEING IDIOTS KTHX"... which is exactly in line with how the prophets talked to Israel in the Old Testament. And how we view the churches now.

An objective reading of the Bible, where you go along with the assumption that God is the good guy as the texts intend, show a humanity that is almost irrevocably broken. Virtues turn to stumbling blocks in the blink of an eye, the evil always seem to win out, and if the just live too long they become the bad guys.There's only one this didn't happen to, and He was killed because the rest of us couldn't stand to have something that good and pure live.

But for, whatever reason, God chose to give direct life, life itself, through very broken and stained hands. Sometimes He even uses their otherwise irredeemably awful words too. But He didn't leave. Now, either He is actively going through those stained channels (and dont' think you're less stained than them) or He isn't. Either we accept what the text says, which is that God openly allows the unworthy access to His life and you're one of them, or we don't. And if you don't you have to somehow come up with how you're better than the assholes you don't like.

Good luck with that one.

I'd prefer to just forgive them and myself for not being good enough to fail at their level. That actually has seemed to do some good for me and those around me.

And that is a lot better than most. I mean, we're wanting cold hard results here, right?

Alphacore #1

Many have accused the Rippaverse of being a stunt. They have gotten at July’s writing with a level of bad faith that isn’t surprising, but still annoying. And frankly there’s some basis for this: July’s dialogue is awful and he chose to start the Rippaverse with a slow burn world-building arc. July has said repeatedly that he did this on purpose. After all these repetitions you can either believe him or be an idiot. But with the hiring of Chuck Dixon to write Alphacore, the Soska Sisters hired full-time, and Mike Barron to write Goodying, the picture changed. July backed up his declaration that he was in for the long haul.

Welp, here’s the first non-July project, Alphacore #1! It’s next to me as I write. It’s quite pretty, as per the Rippaverse standards. This is a premium product. It’s pretty obvious where a lot of the money went. I could go on, but it’s repetitive at this point. Point is: this is a really well put together book, especially for 28 bucks.

The pencilling by Joe Bennett is amazing, front to back. There's a reason why he was a front-line penciller before being blacklisted for not being on the side of the cancel pigs. His storytelling particulary is on point, something that has been pretty standard for the Rippaverse so far. But there are not one, not two, not three, but FIVE fucking inkers on this book. FIVE. What the hell is this? Why are there five inkers on the project? There is no way they can maintain visual continuity with five of them, no matter how much they may talk, email, or cuddle after their orgy. And it shows in the product, trust me. There's moments where characters radically change appearance and you can tell it's coz that inker didn't stick to the other four freaking inker's styles hard enough. One of the characters, a cop called Wilkins, suffers more than any of the others, in some spots looking like something out of a redneck satire. I would have been okay with waiting a bit longer for the book, even swapping its debut out with Yaira #1 if that was a thing that needed to happen. But it wasn't, and that leads me to believe that we may see more crap like this. It is because Joe Bennett is so good that the book doesn't look like a total travesty, as opposed to just janky. The instant you hand a lesser penciller to five inkers there are gonna be problems.

Oh, and there's two colorists, and they really didn't freak talking to each other. They clearly didn't even try. One of the strongest moments in the whole book almost falls part coz I can't tell if the guy is supposed to be a red-head or a fucking blonde.

The fact that all of this adds up to "okay" art is a miracle. It's just janky at times. This could have gone a hell of a lot worse. Hand this to any lesser artists and it would have been a complete laughingstock.

Fortunately the story is awesome. Oh my God I love the story in this issue. Chuck takes the 96 page format and makes it sing. The beleagured and harrassed Alphacore, comprising the idealistic-but-dumb Bryan Solari, smart-but-temperamental Ingrid Valdez, and the silent cypher Braxten, stumble acrost the machinations of the shadowy Michael Copper and Lilian Ronashi. The book opens with Solari stopping a bombing attempt at a bank... only for the bomber to be legitimately surprised when his bomb goes off. It's one hell of an opening. And it just rolls from here. The story builds and builds and builds and then doesn't explode (literally), in the best way possible. The Alphacore are beautifully rendered in their frustrated-and-flawed glory. See, they want to be "regular" cops, but they're not regular, they're Excepts, and they're only wanted for whenever other Excepts are screwing around! This isn't a totally unreasonable request. Alphacore are justifiably frustrated, coz they want to be cops. And they can't just be cops. So they get more and more frustrated and start making mistakes. These are people just being people, with the epic consequences of their mistakes and frustrations being front and center. It's to the credit of Chuck that every beat of the way makes sense, but isn't defended or glorified. I love that every single second of these flawed characters is fun. Heck, my pulse started going up! It was fun! I had a great time! And the ending felt so damn good to read. I mean it. This is why I buy superhero comics. This. Right here.

I'm going to address Chuck Dixon's ending note now. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the mainstream U.S. comic book industry is falling apart at the seams. Sales are horrible, the books are worse, and frankly if I was an artist having to draw one of these new books I'd cry, coz they're so boring. Dixon's ending note, and the fact that 1 million bucks (so far) has been spent to glory in this end note, not to mention the incredible comic book before it... that should be very disconcerting. Change is here. If change keeps looking like stories like this the mainstream needs to get with the program, and quickly. But they won't. The note will go unheeded.

Alphacore has a lot of problems, and I spent most of the review bitching about them. All the things I said are true, but they are potentionally misleading. 

This book is so much more than the sum of its parts.

A lot more.

And it is a failure of me, as a writer, that I cannot adequately explain that. This comic builds on itself in a way that very few outside of Chuck Dixon can adequately do these days, nevermind hit it out the part like he does. The ending of this comic feels good. This comic feels amazing to read. There are so many problems with it, but everything clicks together so fucking well that it's honestly a bit breathtaking to witness. This is a great comic. Buy it. Yeah, there's problems, but man that last double page spread is so fucking cool. 

I love it.

It really is that simple.