Halifax Casual Gaming Federation Annual 2012-2013

By me! (And friends)

All year long I've been running board game nights at the Roberts Street Social Centre, Sad Rad, and several of the places I've lived. We had a bunch of people show up and it was really fun (I love playing games!).

As I have now made a tradition, I made a zine (with contributions from some friends) that talked about all the different games that we played this year, had spaces for the stickers that were given out after every game, photographs of some of the games, and had a ranking table that showed where everyone placed (people got points for winning games or showing up).

Despite making it all in a desperate, last minute panic (ie. I didn't finish it until about an hour into the launch party), I think it turned out pretty well, and the people who got copies seemed pretty happy with them. I'm going to miss playing games with my friends, but thankfully some of them are interested in taking over and the Halifax Casual Gaming Federation will continue! Maybe I can start something similar in Vancouver. Anybody interested?

Advanced Brains: Hardcore Punks Against Dead Guys The Role-Playing Game

By Jesse Harrington
brainszine@yahoo.com

We approach the building. It looks empty, though was that a light on inside? We'd heard this was a good place to put on shows, but I'd never been to one before.

We try the doors. Locked. I remember hearing something about a key hidden somewhere so we check the alley around back, but there doesn't seem to be anything there. We search more of the grounds and eventually find the hidden key holder.

It's also locked.

The lock on this one is a combination lock. We try a couple of variations, hoping to figure out what the right combination will be, but with no luck. Then I remember a friend! We give her a call and she tells us the combination. We're in!

We stumble around inside, before managing to get the lights on. Hey! This would be a good place to hold shows. We start setting up for playing music and scrounge up some cables and manage to hook up the ancient equipment we find. Success!

And then more people showed up and we were able to actually start playing Advanced Brains, a game where we broke into an abandoned building in order to put on a punk show.

This is a homebrew RPG that is pretty extensive in the rules it includes, and I have no idea how well it would work if you'd never played something like this before. I had to keep checking back and forth through the book to find out what the players should do when a security guard starting chasing them, or how being drunk would affect their combat against zombies.

However, everyone that played had a blast, and playing an RPG in which you go dumpster diving, shoplift alcohol, crash vans into zombies, and play punk shows (poorly) was really fun. After we finished the adventure included in the book, we started going through the rest of it and trying out various things we hadn't had a chance to do (dine and dash! smashing more things!).

The consensus seemed to be that it would be fun to just play the game without any plot ("Let's go dumpster diving!"), and see where it grew from there, instead of following a premade story. I can certainly see the appeal of that, and the number of actual RPG campaigns that have been sidetracked by any number of things is countless.

Ollyollyoxenfree! #3

Edited by Cheyenne Neckmonster and someone else

I really like games. I run a gaming club, play videogames, have made my own copies of various games, and play Magic the Gathering (yes, I am that big of a nerd, I don't buy the cards at least).

Based on all of this though, you can probably see that I'm more fond of games that involve sitting down, and not too much running around. (While this makes me sound incredibly lazy, I'm not! I've played soccer and ultimate frisbee fairly extensively, just not recently...)

I'm getting off topic. The games in this zine are very much the type I remember playing as a kid at summer camps and friends' houses. There are hide and seek variations, circle games, games were you have to jump on people's shadows, games about music, and more.

(As another aside, do you remember when you were a kid and would just make up games? Like Calvinball? I walk along a path behind some houses every day on my way to and from work and I think it's rad to see all the chalk games and pictures kids draw on the ground when it's nice out.)

I'm not sure if I'll ever actually play any of these, but some of them sound pretty neat. There's Electron, where the goal is to run around a player you've chosen as your nucleus, while they try to run around theirs. It sounds super chaotic, but also pretty fun.

The next is called Moose, and features players pretending to be moose by having full antlers (both hands held up above their heads), or half antlers (only one hand). I won't explain all the rules, but it sounds like it'd be pretty hilarious to play. Plus the winners get to "graze on snow or whatever it is moose do".

Even if you have no intention of playing any of these games it's neat to read about them. Maybe you'll be inspired to play them yourself, or even create your own. And at the very least you'll know what's going on when you see a bunch of punks in the New York subway pretending to have antlers.

Skillshot 16, 17, & 18

www.skill-shot.com

I recently (ie. about an hour ago) finished reading Yeti Researcher, a fake scholarly journal devoted to the study of crypto-hominids. Its humour lies in its combination of reality with fiction, and how you're never quite sure how seriously to take any of it. I really dug it, and it reminded me of a piece I once wrote in a zine for the (fictional) Canadian Journal of Kaiju Film Studies about the Very Hungry Caterpillar vs Godzilla film.

I bring this up, because if I didn't know any better I might think that Skill Shot was an equally fictitious zine, chronically events that never happened, and people that didn't exist.

Except that they do exist, despite the fact that I don't think I've ever met anyone who's (admitted to being) into pinball, and before I read this zine I didn't even know there was a pinball scene.

These zines cover events that have happened, news and gossip about what machines might be coming next and which are broken, techniques, question and answer sessions with pinball players ("Do you listen to music while playing Pinball?"), high score challenges, the locations of every pinball machine in Seattle, the Seattle Pinball Museum, and more.

Honestly, it still seems kind of like some elaborate scam, but since there's a website, and more than 18 issues I have to accept that it's a real subculture that I've just never encountered.

In one way Skill Shot really succeeds: every time I finish reading an issue I want to start playing pinball. Apparently there's a Halifax Pinball League, maybe I'll check it out next month.

The Roberts Street Casual Gaming Federation 2011-2012 Yearbook

This is my newest zine, it's all about the board game club that I organize.

There are writings about all the games we played last year, comics and drawings about games by my friends Jen DesRoche and Nik Hill, and some other stuff.

If you live in the Halifax area and are interested in playing board games with some people join our facebook group or get in touch with me. We play a couple of times a month and it's pretty low key and fun.

Olyollyoxenfree! A DIY Game Zine #1 and #2

Edited by Cheyenne Neckmonster and someone else

The zine world is small. A few months back I met a guy at Food Not Bombs. It turned out he'd lived on the West coast for a while and during this time (I think) he found a copy of Sugar and Snails/Slugs and Spice, an FNB cookbook I'd made while I lived in Vancouver. He'd liked some of the recipes so much he'd copied them down. Awesome!

(We'll get to the actual zine review soon, but first...)

A few years ago I picked up a zine called Best Zine Ever while at the Sticky Institute in Australia. I read all the reviews (of course!) and ended up ordering two different zines.

One of them was Sugar Needle, one of the creators of which ended up sitting at the table next to mine when I went to the Portland Zine Symposium in 2009.

The other was this one, and while I didn't stay in touch with either of its creators initially I later met, and became friends with, Cheyenne when she came to Halifax to do a residency at the Roberts Street Social Centre. Of course we didn't even realize this until she sent me copies in the mail after she left, and she realized that I was that boy from Canada who'd ordered a copy.

These two zines are filled with the rules to various games. Very few of them require any actual pieces of equipment, which is rad! However, at the same time most of them aren't really things that I'm that into. I guess I'd rather sit around a table and role dice instead of running around and hugging people. I'm not saying I'll never play any of these games, but apart from the Mafia/Werewolf/Batman one (invented in the Soviet Union!) I doubt I'd ever try to initiate any of them.

I do think they're neat and worth checking out, because even if you don't like any of the games included, maybe they'll inspire you to create your own.

I also seem to recall some sort of moose antler in the subway game, which doesn't seem to be included in either of these. Maybe it's from another issue?

(If you're in Halifax, check out my gaming group!)

Crazed Mazes Issue #1

By Myron Smith
$2
PO Box 354
Ridgeway, VA
24148
USA

When I made my last zine (Potato Maze) I was super stoked with the maze I made for the cover. I thought it was incredibly cool and I was really proud of it. After reading the first issue of Crazed Mazes I'm incredibly glad that I waited so long until I read it, because now all sense of pride has disappeared.

The mazes in here really are crazed! No basic rectangles here, rather the mazes form faces, symbols, trees, and pictures that I didn't even understand were mazes until I looked at them. The difficulty of the mazes differs from ones that looked too hard for me to even try to ones that are pretty simple (because all of the borders are cats or fish, adorable!), so there should be some for everyone to try.

If mazes aren't your thing there are also find the object drawings set at a circus and on the street, and a crossword! The answers to everything are also in the back, so if you're really not sure how to finish one of the activities you can always cheat (or "check your answers").

The only problems with this zine are some less than stellar reproduction on the cover, and that it's just on 8.5 x 11 paper and stapled in the upper left hand corner. Still, this was a preview issue and I hope that in the future Smith will be able to use 11 x 17 paper and make some awesome activity books.

Skillshot 13

By Chow Chow Productions
myspace.com/skillshott
PO Box 20204
Seattle, WA
98102
USA

(Moving countries caused me to miss a review the other day, be prepared for more missing days coming soon!)

I've read a couple of issues of this pinball zine, but it still blows me away every time I read it just because I have a hard time imagining a pinball scene. It's not something I've ever really played, yet these people organize monthly tournaments that have dozens of people showing up! It all seems kind of strange, but also makes me want to start playing pinball more (last time I played was at a new year's eve party, where I was completely terrible at it).

This zine includes news and rumours about the Seattle pinball scene, telling what happened at recent tournaments, who's setting records on the machines, where the new machines are, a complete (?) list of every pinball machine in Seattle, tips and strategies for specific machines, high score contests, rule variations, and more. It reminded me of the video game magazines I read when I was a kid, and while I barely understand a lot of the strategy in here I'm sure you could write the same sort of thing about Street Fighter or poker and I also wouldn't understand it (I might like it more if it was Street fighter because hurray punching people!).

If you're into pinball and live in the Seattle area you have probably already read this, but if you're into pinball anywhere else in the world it's worth giving a read because it's pretty interesting and fun.

Skill Shot #14

chickenwithpenis@yahoo.com
myspace.com/skillshott
PO Box 20204
Seattle, WA
98192, USA
$5 for a five issue subscription

Reading this zine is like looking through a window into a subculture I know nothing about: pinball. I honestly couldn’t even tell you the last time I played a pinball machine, but reading the “news and gossip” about Seattle pinball, finding out the different weird tournaments that are held (blindfolded?!), and discovering that not only is there a Vancouver Regional Pinball Association, but they have rules for their tournaments is all weirdly fascinating.

The zine is full of people talking about new machines, high scores to beat, old machines that people are trying to get better scores on, a massive list of every (?) pinball machine in Seattle, and descriptions of loads of different types of tournaments (one handed!).

I just realized something. The way that pinball is talked about here kind of makes me think about classic car aficionados or something. What techniques do you use to get more out of that machine (best score/top speed)? How can we fix this broken machine? It’s kind of bizarre when you look at it like that. But at the same time kind of sweet. I wish more subcultures made zines like this.

Growing Resistance #1

novafarm.rcg@gmail.com
novafarmrcg.wordpress.com
Nova Farm
2410 E. Cherry St.
Seattle, WA
USA

While this may be the worst folded zine I have ever seen, the contents are far more exciting. Guerrilla gardening! Everybody loves that right? I do at least.

The contents cover information about the Nova Farm, general info on gardening, poetry, and hand drawn maps (I could read a zine entirely about those I think). I will say that I think this zine is more “inspiring” than “useful” (at least to me). The information on composting seems to need some sort of previous knowledge of that sort of thing, and while I love that they list several secret gardens in Seattle, they’re not really places I’ll be checking out any time soon.

Still, some of the general guerrilla gardening stuff is good, and they do give a list of books to check out if you’re interested in gardening, food sourcing, and permaculture. Hopefully some day I’ll have a garden of my own to try some of those things out, or at least the desire to do it in someone else’s garden.

Skill Shot 12

Seattle’s Pinball Zine
PO Box 20204
Seattle, WA
98192, USA
$5 for a five issue subscription
chickenwithpenis@yahoo.com
myspace.com/skillshott

Sometimes I feel as though I either lived in the lamest city in Cascadia or that there was clearly a super awesome secret city that I just never managed to discover while I was there.

This is because every time I’ve gone to Seattle or Portland I’ve had an awesome time, and even now that I live thousands of kilometres away from those places I am still discovering amazing things going on there. If I was willing to live in the USA* I would move to one of those cities in a second.

Anyway, this is a zine about pinball. It lists a top 12 favourite pinball machines of the moment, pinball news and gossip (tournaments, where new pinball locations are, custom machines people have made), strategies for specific games, challenges, and a list of every (?) pinball machine in Seattle, broken down by region.

It’s so neat to see that there’s still an active fan base for something that I generally think of as a dead form of entertainment. But as long as people keep playing, other people are going to keep making pinball machines (that must be such a weird job).

I’ve never really had any interest in pinball before, and I’ve barely ever played, but now I want to. I want to find the most fun machines. I want to maybe get good at them. I feel like I spent too many of my early years reading books instead of going out and playing in arcades. Drat.

*I’m not. I would get shot. Also: the politics are super fucked.

Larry #1

By Lee
myspace.com/the_screever_lee

This is the other zine I got at the recent Midlands zinester meetup in Nottingham, and it totally helped me pass the time on my train ride home. I was a little worried when I first opened it, as it stated that it was made to fulfil the ideas of “anti-perfect” and that spelling and grammar mistakes had been intentionally retained. This kind of drove my inner editor insane, and I worried that it’d be almost unreadable.

Thankfully, Lee seems to be able to spell and put together a sentence, so any errors that existed were ones I didn’t notice. Larry is sort of like a personal magazine, filled with loads of different content. There are little essays about his social anxiety (which I can totally relate to, having gone through pretty much the exact same things, though I’m sure he won’t believe me based on how I acted in Nottingham), why he’s straight edge, a piece on his university, and a completely valid complaint about the bus system near where he lives (“We’ve subcontracted the buses on that route, so your bus pass is no longer valid.”).

There’s also instructions on how to emulsion transfer (which were a little hard to read as they were hand written, but which I think I might try), a piece on single player rpg books (like choose your own adventure I think?), photographs (which generally didn’t reproduce that well), reviews, an activity page (!!!), a picture of dinosaur (!!!), and a piece on why you should turn your cellphone off at night if you’re not in the habit of getting emergency phone calls in the middle of the night. Holy shit, that’s right! I will be saving electricity by turning off my phone. Thank you Lee! I feel really dumb now. I hope issue two will have similarly life changing information.

Kame Hame Ha!!

Kame Hame Ha!!
By Celso and Crosses

Energize! Psi Blast! Eye blast! No, it’s not a Dragonball Z fanzine (or at least not directly, though that would be awesome), it’s a zine explaining the rules to what is basically an insanely complicated rock-paper-scissors variant.

Directions on how to perform each move, of varying levels and complexity, are accompanied by illustrations of school girls, business men, policewomen, hobos, and construction workers (anybody can learn how to play!) executing them, and advice on the type of noises you should make when doing so ("Gzzaa!"). For the really complicated super moves there are photos showing you step by step how to complete them.

Even if you have no intention of playing the game (I, sadly, probably never will) this zine is still worth picking up just because of how awesome/ridiculous everything is, and how enthusiastic the authors are. There’s also a super sweet fold out. I love fold outs in zines.

I only wish the guy I’d gotten this from at the Portland Zine Symposium last year had done a workshop teaching people how to play this game. Then maybe I would have gotten to play.