Review of Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age by Gryphon Games

Roll through the Ages by Matt Leacock and Gryphon Games is a dice game themed to match Through the Ages, a fairly more complex civilization game by CBG and Eagle Games.   Roll Through the Ages is a part of the bookshelf collection and from all the talk it is also one of the better ones.  I have an extensive collection of board games and lately I have turned my eyes to trying to acquire said 'bookshelf" games.  Also I wanted a DICE game that had some meat to it, assuming that was even possible.  

Play:  Each player starts off with 3 dice, a score sheet, 6 pegs and a peg board.  Each player will roll dice in order to

A:) Build up food for their workers

B:) Get more goods to trade in for coin to spend on developments

C:)  Add more workers, for your cities (which increases the number of dice you roll) or for your monuments 

D:)  Coin, which can be spent that turn for developments like irrigation and agriculture, which help you with future rolls etc.

E:)  Skulls, which are paired with 2 goods as well.  Skulls you have to keep every time you roll.  A build up of skulls cause a list of disasters that effect you or all of your opponents in a generally negative way.

You roll the dice keeping what you want or what you have to, three times re-rolling unwanted dice. You use the final results to develop your score sheet in the way you want to attempt to score points.  Each of the developments are worth points and each of the monuments are worth points, as long as you are first to build them or the second to build them.  The game ends when all the monuments are built or any one players gets 5 developments.

Components:  The components are great.  There are wooden dice and peg boards which are very pleasing to look at.  The score pad comes with like a billion (estimated) sheets in it, I'd imagine that you would have a very hard time running out of them unless of course this was the only game you EVER played and you played it all the time.  My one complaint is that the pegs don't set into the peg board perfectly even but that is just a picky thing that I assume normal people wouldn't pay all that much attention to it.

Finale:  I enjoyed my 1 play of this quite a bit.  There seems to be quite a bit more depth than say the CATAN dice game that I also like very much.  You have alternate routes to victory, some player interaction, and really nice looking components.  There really isn't much more you could ask for out of a dice game let's be honest.  I highly recommend even the most casual gamers to pick this up, I plan on using it as a gateway game as I tend to have a lot of friends that haven't delve to far into the gaming world.

Provisional Score while awaiting more games:  9/10

Lost Boys Star Corey Haim Dead at 38

The LAPD is reporting that actor Corey Haim has been found dead of an accidental overdose.  Haim was very familiar to genre fans, having starred in the popular vampire film The Lost Boys.  Haim's struggles with substance abuse were well chronicled over the past decade and it is sad to hear he has lost his battle.  Here is a brief look at his genre work over the years.

We first got to know Haim in Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys.  Haim played Sam, younger brother of Jason Patrick's Mike.  After Mike gets himself involved with a local vampire "gang", Sam and a couple of young classmates turn themselves into vampire hunters complete with water guns filled with holy water.  One of the actors playing his buddy was Corey Feldman who would become linked with Haim throughout their careers.

 Haim also starred in two horror films based on works by two legends of the field.  First, Silver Bullet, an adaptation of Stephen King's Cycle of the Werewolf.  This is a highly underrated horror film that you should really check out if you haven't seen it.  The film shares some similarities with The Lost Boys as Haim once again plays a young boy who feels like something supernatural is going on and has to fight to be believed.  In this case, a small town is home to a number of unsolved killings.  Haim, playing the paraplegic Marty, believes a werewolf is responsible.  He is, of course, correct.

Haim continued his horror work in a less successful adaptation of Dean Koontz's Watchers.  He plays a young boy who finds a genetically modified, super intelligent dog.  It also isn't long before he discovers that the dog isn't the only genetically modified creature that is on the loose as they begin to be stalked by a fearsome (and cheesy) beast.  It isn't the best horror film, but it is watchable and not in a so-bad-it-is-good way.  It is actually a solid low budget horror film. 

Haim had some other genre work that I'm not familiar with including a upcoming zombie movie called The Dead Sea.  At first, I thought that The Dead Sea might be an adaptation of Brian Keene's Dead Sea which is also a zombie film set on a boat, but apparently it is a separate project.  The Dead Sea had finished primary filming and was in post-production, so I expect we will get a chance to see it despite Haim's death.  

It is always sad to lose someone who enriched our lives with their creative work.  Our thoughts are with Haim's friends and family in this sad moment.

Nerdiest.Oscars.Ever.

...and that is a good thing.

One would be forgiven for thinking the Academy Awards could not get any nerdier than they did in 2004 when Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King one eleven Oscars.  And, yes, that was a nerdtastic year.  Last night, however, trumped it in a number of ways.  Other than some technical nominations for Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, LOTR:ROTK stood alone as the only nominated genre fiction that year.  This year, genre fiction and its creators abounded.  Here is a nerd's eye look at the 2010 Academy Awards:

The Producer of A Bucket of Blood clearly has made a great contribution to the Arts and Sciences.

Roger Corman received the Honorary Award at the Governors Awards for exceptional contribution to motion picture arts and sciences.  Feel free to read that again.  He also got some recognition in the horror tribute (I'll get to that) and got named checked by the Best Editing winner later in the night.  Check out this amazing tribute to the legend on The Academy website.   

Speaking of the horror tribute--hey, there was a tribute to the horror film.  The montage of great horror moments was actually pretty darn good.  They worked some connections to the night's festivities (Corman's Little Shop of Horrors was clipped and was the musical re-make which featured the night's co-host Steve Martin).  The montage ran the gamut from Nosferatu through the Universal monsters era and all the way to the slasher era.  Good stuff.  It is interesting that they introduced the clips by saying no horror film had won an Oscar since The Exorcist took home two in the 70's but included The Silence of the Lambs in the montage.  If I recall correctly, that baby took home a few awards, including the rare sweep of the big four--Best Director, Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Actress.  

Forgot my Oscar, did you? Prepare to served up with some Fava beans.

Speaking of Best Film Editing, the winner was none other than Bob Murawski and Chris Innis.  Murawski is Sam Raimi's go to editor and editied the Spider-man movies, Army of Darkness, and The Gift.  Good to see the guy that got his start editing direct-to-video Skinemax fair like Animal Instincts 2 work his way to the top of his profession.

The expansion of Best Picture nominees to 73 meant that two science fiction films joined the small list of sci-fi Best Picture candidates.  Of course, like Star Wars, A Clockwork Orange and E.T. before them, Avatar and District 9 both failed to take home the big prize.

But, genre people still did well.  Best Director Kathryn Bigelow is well known to genre fans as the director of the wonderful horror film Near Dark and a pretty good sci-fi movie Strange Days.  

Revisionist vampire fiction at its best.

Best Director and Best Picture are big deals in the industry and it is great to see a horror veteran pulling down those huge awards.  Genre films are usually relegated to the technical awards (which happened again this year to Avatar.  Cameron will just have to lick his wounds with the nearly 3 Billion dollars the film has pulled in to date.  On a happier note, even the Best Acting awards had genre connections this year.  Best Actor winner Jeff Bridges has a huge genre role in his past...

No...wait.  Wrong guy.  Here we go...

and...

Oooh! Where'd you find that lens flare?

Bridges also has been cast in the re-launch of the Tron franchise, so he has genre work in his past and future.  And, finally, how cool is it that the cute young cop from Demolition Man just won a Best Actress Oscar?

Looks like there's a new shepherd in town.

Neil Patrick Harris as Gargamel?

Deadline is reporting the Neil Patrick Harris has signed on for The Smurfs and will be playing "the lead live action character."  I've not read the script and news on the project hasn't been to detailed, but I can only imagine the "lead live action character" to be the evil sorcerer Gargamel.  If this turns out to be the case, it is the best casting of all time.  I can't think of anyone I'd rather watch try to capture and eat smurfs while throwing out curmudgeonly one-liners.  And, please, let's all hope they don't wimp out and change Gargamel's goal.  If it goes from eating the tasty blue smurfs to just, say, world domination, I'll be greatly disappointed.   

HBO greenlights "The Game of Thrones"!!!

Well, nuff said, Hollywood reporter is reporting it, so it MUST be true...

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3i8844357cb3f6881609f2ea5856ec6bf9