Our group has a long history of playing board games, and an equally long history of saying we need to play more of them. Unfortunately, for one reason or another, our Board Game Night seems to fall through the crack after a few months of Risk 2210, Settlers of Catan or some new game. This Friday we aimed to get things back on schedule with two new games, the zombie survival game Mall of Horror and transcontinental railroad-traveling Ticket to Ride.

Toybox Wars is a table-top miniatures game in which the inhabitants of your toybox rise up to fight each other to the death. The core mechanic is simple. Each toy -- be it a miniature car, squad of army men, teddybear -- is represented by 10 six-sided dice divided into one of three pools: Dodge Dice, Attack Dice, Floating Dice. At the start of every turn, players allocate their dice between the pools, depending on whether they want to focus on offense or defense, or hedge their bets with the floating dice, which can be used for both.

The Dark City A Team campaign (and we really do need to come up with a better designation for the upper level characters) resumes tonight after the unexpected death of the entire B Team at the hands of the Kobold King last week. Before we do so though, we'll be running through a playtest of Berin Kinsman's lightweight tabletop miniatures game Toybox Wars.

I've installed a new comment system on Nuketown. It used to be you needed an account on Nuketown to post a comment; now anyone can. What stops the site from becoming a spam-infested hell is a module called Askimet, which checks the messages against a central spam catching server. It flags the incoming spam, and prevents it from being posted.

There's still an advantage to being a registered user -- you can post without having your comments moderated. Also, the site will automatically sign any of your posts for you. Anonymous users can post comments without an account, but I need to approve anything before it goes live.

I'd appreciate it if folks could post a few comments replying to this post so I can see how well works.

Friday's game day was supposed to see our lower-level Dark City campaign characters' wrap up Paizo's Crown of the Kobold King module and then return to our home city of Obsidian Bay for some much needed down time.

And then ... Total Party Kill.

It was our own fault. We went up against a dozen or so kobolds, and while we were able to defeat them, they depleted all of our magical resources, and greatly weakened all of the characters save my swordsage, Zilanderan (Zil having the unique Book of Nine Swords ability to heal damage whenever he recovers maneuvers). Immediatey after that fight, we found the kobold king, his bodyguards, and a kobold sorcerer. Instead of falling back to rest and recover (and knowing that a young child might be sacrificed to the kobold's god if we didn't act) we charged in.

In this show I talk about my trip to the DrupalCon Boston geekfest, spend a few days playing in the snowy wilds of New Hampshire, my wife Sue starts a blog of her own for Red-Tail Designs. Meanwhile, in Netheads, I find out what it takes to survive Giant Robot attacks and live with a Pokeman addiction by listening to the Geek Survival Guide, and meet some fellow gamers who have similar apprehensions about D&D 4th edition with the 3.5 Private Sanctuary podcast. Finally, I find out how to get some great new gamer bling thanks to the blog of the same name.

The Elucidator is a quarterly print magazine published in Easton, Pa. It's the sort of thing that people outside of the town might never expect to be here: a magazine reviewing local culture, life, and arts. It's "Chew" and "Imbibe" columns check out the Lehigh Valley's bars and restaurants, while "Listen" reviews a variety of music, and regular photo essays explore life in and around Easton.

Like I said, it's nothing you'd expect to find here. Unless, of course, you actually lived here.

Easton's changed a lot over the years, in some ways for the bad (gangs) and many ways for the good (the arts). There's an established arts community, multiple art galleries, some cool downtown events -- including beer, garlic and shad (yes, shad) festivals.

Gary Gygax passed away this week, shocking the geek world and sending a cascade of remembrances surging across the web. My gaming group is no less saddened by this, and in honor of Gygax, we took a one-week break from our campaign to run the classic 1st edition module, White Plume Mountain.

Technically, we’re not running that exact module. Instead, I’m going to use the 3rd edition conversion that Wizards of the Coast posted to their web site a while back. We'd originally thought of doing it using 1st edition rules, but with me at DrupalCon all week I didn't have time to re-read the 1st edition ruleset and prep the dungeon.

I'll be at DrupalCon Boston from March 3 through March 6, which I'm attending for the day job. While I'm keeping an eye out for stuff related to higher education, most of the sessions deal with developing Drupal for any environment, be it a campus blogging platform or a science fiction webzine. If you're curious about DrupalCon, or just want to follow along at home, check out it's Twitterfeed Here's what I've got lined up so far.