Featured

Rosethorn’s Ramblings: Site Update

Welcome back again.  As you can see, we are starting to populate the site with new content.  There are few new writers and contributors waiting in the wings with new content.  If you are interested

Read More
Rosethorn’s Ramblings: Site Update, GaMExpo, Nerdvana Con, Life Updates

What to Watch: You Tube

Top 5 YouTube video’s of the past week (with one blast from the past). Each week, on Tuesday, I am going to post 5 videos I think are worth watching on YouTube.  I’d love to hear what you

Read More
What to Watch: You Tube

Rosethorn’s Ramblings: Welcome Bac

Welcome back to Killer Betties! It’s been over three years since I’ve made a post, but I am back. Before I get to what I’ve been doing for three years, I want to talk first about The

Read More
Rosethorn’s Ramblings: Welcome Back, TWD, The Bar, and Other Random Thoughts

Football Manager 2017 Review

Football Manager 2017 is a football management simulation video game for the PC developed by Sports Interactive and published by Sega. Gameplay: In terms of gameplay, it is really fun. You can create

Read More
Football Manager 2017 Review

Volunteers Wanted

Killer Betties is going through some growing pains and we need more bodies (and pens) to keep up with it. If you have any interest in writing video game reviews, previews, interviews or editorials, p

Read More
Volunteers Wanted

Rosethorn’s Ramblings: Site Update, GaMExpo, Nerdvana Con, Life Updates

0
by on October 29, 2017 at 10:12 pm

Welcome back again.  As you can see, we are starting to populate the site with new content.  There are few new writers and contributors waiting in the wings with new content.  If you are interested in contributing, just contact me using the contact form.

As for what’s going on around here, I’ve got a couple of interesting conventions to tell you about.

First, GaMExpo is coming up next week.  That’s November 3-5, 2017.  It’s going to be at the Hilton on Westover Hills here in San Antonio.  I’m working the convention, so if you are attending, please track me down or drop me a line.  GaMExpo is a board, RPG, and video gaming convention.  It is partnering with another convention this year, so the attendance should be interesting, and if you also enjoy Anime, you should not miss it.  I’m excited to be involved again with one of my hobbies (board gaming).  While in law school, it took a way way way back burner, so I’m happy to have the time again to devote to the convention.

I also took my son, known on this site as Nick the Gamer, last weekend to a local convention put on by his school district (NISD) called Nerdvana Con.  He had a blast.  We listened to some young adult authors talk about their journeys.  We also went to a talk by one of my friends who also organizes the above mentioned GaMExpo about creating You Tube shows (he co-hosts Geek Out SA with his wife, which you can check out here).  Finally, he got to play Dungeons and Dragons for the first time, which he loved.  I’m really impressed with the school district for putting something like this together.  The only complaint I had was that there was too much going on during each time slot and choices were hard to make at times.  That might have been avoided by making the convention a few hours longer (it ended at 3 PM).

As for me, besides plugging away at this site, I’m prepping for what might actually be my first trial.  I can’t talk about details of my work much, but I can say I am very much enjoying the work and learning a great deal.  I’m also doing decent with my Fantasy Football league for the first time ever, which is a new feeling.  Let’s hope it keeps up!

Rosethorn’s Ramblings: Welcome Back, TWD, The Bar, and Other Random Thoughts

0
by on October 22, 2017 at 10:06 pm

Welcome back to Killer Betties! It’s been over three years since I’ve made a post, but I am back. Before I get to what I’ve been doing for three years, I want to talk first about The Walking Dead’s season premiere.

I’m excited The Walking Dead is back. I was a tad bit disappointed in tonight. Sure, there were a lot of explosions and people dying. It’s great the gang’s all back together and we got to see our leaders lead and our killers kill. Negan also didn’t disappoint. His amusement at seeing Rick and the gang was worth the episode. But I didn’t really care for how the episode ended. I was hoping for a bit more closure. And the previews for the coming season make me think the entire seasons is going to involve the next few days IRL for the characters. I’m thinking we aren’t going to get to the next step of ‘what happens now that Negan’s gone’ until the seasons is over. I’m sure it will be a great journey, but I’m ready for the next thing and a whole season more of this conflict of Negan and only days passing may frustrate me. Check back as I post these blog posts to find out if that changes. Also … did anyone else catch the time trouble of Rick’s daughter? Maggie is not even showing in her pregnancy yet, but Rick’s daughter has gone from infant to toddler overnight. WTH?

Now that that’s out of my system 🙂 Where have I been? Well, I decided to pursue yet another career and went to law school. 3 years of law school took every spare moment of my life that wasn’t devoted to my children and husband. It even took some of those devoted moments too. Law school was a lot, but I did well and succeeded. I took the bar in February, a little early but there was no reason for me not to. I got my results on May 1 (spoiler: I passed) and graduated from law school on May 20. I became a licensed attorney on June 1. I was hired by the DA’s office here a week later. And I’ve been working as a juvenile prosecutor since. I love it, and one of the things I love is that I’m finally adjusting to the fact that I have free time again! Which is why I’m back to writing and getting this site going again.

Over the coming months, I hope to have regular features and content posted. My youngest, who is 11, wrote the review for Football Manager 2017 and I couldn’t be prouder. He’s also going to have a regular feature where he lists his five favorite You Tube videos of the last week, since he’s an avid lover of You Tube. I have some writers expressing interest and will hopefully be posting content on the regular.

If you are interested in contributing to the rebirth of the site, please contact me.

And I’ve rambled on enough for tonight. Have a good week everyone!

, ,

Weekly Quickfire - Board Games Played

0
by on March 14, 2013 at 3:27 pm

Every Thursday night, I go to Gamelot in San Antonio and play board games with some of the coolest cats around. This article will give a quick update on the games I played and what I thought of them. They are ranked in the order of enjoyment with #1 being my favorite from that night.

2013-01-10 20.32.301. Among the Stars Among the Stars is a relatively new game that was released in 2012. It’s a ship building card game in which players earn victory points by placing cards in front of them. Each card does something different and some have requirements or victory point bonuses if certain conditions are met. All cards have a cost requirement and money is not unlimited, so there’s a strategy in how to spend and when to discard for extra money. It’s a very fun game and I’m not just saying that because I smoked everyone else. My strategy involved trying to get as many of the objective bonus cards as possible and taking very high point cards that gave immediate points. I also chose a character that allowed me to replace special cards with the unused special cards, in order to maximize my points or remove a card my hand if I thought it would benefit someone else too much. I didn’t go for many of the cards that gave points at the end. In fact, I only got 10 bonus points, where as the person who came in second had 22 at the end, and he still couldn’t catch me. Take the lead early and build on it as quickly as possible was my strategy and it paid off well. It was my favorite game of the night.

2013-01-10 18.58.152. Elder Sign Elder Sign is a cooperative dice rolling game in which players work together to defeat a big, bad, evil monster that is dead set on devouring the world. Players have to defeat the monster by collecting a certain number of Elder Signs, awarded as rewards for completing quests, before the monster reaches the end of their Doom Track. Each player chooses a character with a special ability. I chose Amanda Sharpe. Her ability involves being able to complete as many tasks as she wants without having to reroll the dice. This is a useful ability when quests come up that have a lot of separate tasks but not many dice are needed for each task. In our play through of the game, though, I didn’t get to use it that much. We played a three player game and drew Azazoth as our big baddie. Early on, he got a lot of doom tokens and we had very few Elder Signs, so it didn’t look good for us, but then we had Rlyeh come out (which is worth a lot of Elder signs), and we ended up defeating the beast. Elder Sign was released in 2011, so it has some age on it, but still feels fresh and new for anyone who hasn’t played it much. I really love this game and the only reason it wasn’t my favorite play of the night was because I have some familiarity with it and Among the Stars was brand new to me (and I won Among the Stars…)

2013-01-10 21.31.143. Fire & Axe: A Viking Saga Fire & Axe, released in 2004, allows players to become vikings in a quest for victory points. Players do this by trading, placing settlers, and raiding cities throughout Europe. The whole objective of the game is to complete Saga cards. These randomly come out of a Saga card deck (split into three eras) and have some kind of goal on them, such as settling certain groups of cities (or a lone distant city) or trading with a city. The game ends when all the Saga cards are drawn (after three rounds) or all the Saga cards are claimed (thus immediately ending the game.) The interesting thing with these goals is that only the last goal in a group counts, so a player can be working on a goal, such as settling three cities, and get two settled with their pieces only to have another player swoop in and settle the last city, claiming the Saga. Some of the Saga cards had bonus points, but most of the victory points come from points immediately earned for trading with a city, points gained by raiding towns (with tokens on them), and points accumulated for settling. There were some interesting bonus point rules that made the game more complicated and was often hard to keep track of. In the end, I came in third, and that was only because I managed to steal a couple of Sagas with high bonus points on them out from under the leader, who really killed the rest of us at the end. Of course, he was also the only one who had played before. I didn’t really enjoy this game as much as the other two and given the choice, there are a lot of other games I’d rather play.

Do you agree or disagree with my opinions of these games? Please leave comments and let me know your thoughts! Do you have a game you would like me to play and give my thoughts on? Please let me know that as well. Thanks for reading!

, , , ,

Killer Bits Episode 2 is Up! Weekly Quickfire Countdown

0
by on February 12, 2013 at 11:58 am

Our 2nd episode of Killer Bits is live. In this episode, Staci counts down 5 games that she’s recently played, from worst to best. Be sure to like, subscribe, and comment!

, , , , , , , , ,

Killer Bits Launches on YouTube! Check Out the First Episode

0
by on January 30, 2013 at 12:57 pm

Today, we officially launched our YouTube channel with the release of the first Killer Bits episode. Killer Bits will be short videos that talk about some aspect of the board gaming space, covering everything from news, reviews, and previews, to opinions and recaps. There is much more planned for the YouTube channel, so be sure to subscribe after you watch this video! Can you guess the card game before we tell you what it is?

, , , , ,

Minecraft Servers List - Playing Minecraft!

0
by on January 28, 2013 at 4:21 pm

LNWpdX5

Written By: John

Minecraft is a very popular game today with more than 20 million registered users. Everyday that number grows by about ten thousand. The most likely reason the game has grown big so quickly is that it pretty much breaks every “rule” a normal game has. There are no missions. You are set in a world where you can do whatever you like. Climb hilltops, dig tunnels underground, or build a nice house by the water.  Everything is up to you - the player.

One thing that also sets Minecraft apart from other new games is its graphics. Some would say they are terrible while others would say it’s terrific because of its nostalgic old school look. Each and every texture in the game has a pixeled surface to it which really brings back memories of games like Super Mario and so forth. In case you are not that fond of this old school graphics, there are texture packages that will modify the way the game looks to your liking.

Minecraft can be played in single player mode or together with others online. Today, there are thousands of different Minecraft servers to choose from and sometimes it can be hard to figure out which to pick. A solution for that would be visiting MinePick Servers List. There you can find many different servers to choose from and each server has a description you can read to get a better understanding of what it is about. All servers in the server list are ranked based on how many votes they have. This is to make sure only the most popular ones are listed in the top and are the ones you will notice at first.

This is a great game to play together with your friends. Everything really comes down to teamwork while playing and it’s very rare to feel any anger or frustration, as you may feel in other games, because in Minecraft there’s usually no hurry to achieve something or get to some place. Everything can be done at your own pace.

All you need to be able to play on different Minecraft servers is a copy of the game. It’s purchased over at Minecraft’s own official website. It costs as little as 19.95 euro or $26.95 US and all updates are free. There is no monthly fee. There will most likely be no sequels of the game, meaning for that little money you will have a Minecraft account for all eternity.

, ,

Blast From the Past - NKOTB

0
by on April 10, 2012 at 4:55 pm

The year was 1989. I was just entering tenth grade. Most of my friends were boys. They made relentless fun of the New Kids on the Block and listened to hair metal. As a result, I completely missed out on crushing on Jordan or Donnie (were those the ones people crushed on?) Instead, I wanted to have babies with Joe Perry (of Aerosmith) and my room was littered with pictures of Lita Ford and Jon Bon Jovi. I honestly don’t feel like I missed out on much.

Flash forward twenty-three years. I went to the Half-Price Books down the street and picked up a grab bag of comic books for three bucks for my boys. I’m trying to get them started right. The front showed an old Batman comic and the back revealed Ninja High School, which sounds like an awesome comic. And school. I picked the boys (who are six and nine) up from their own school and showed them the treasure. There were ten comics just waiting to be discovered inside this beautiful, and cheap, grab bag. So we cracked it open and started divvying the comics up.

Stuck between two copies of X Factor, I found this:

My kids said things like “what’s this?” and “is it cool?”

The first I could answer. New Kids on the Block were a popular boy band from the late eighties and early nineties. Mark Wahlberg’s older brother was in the band. This must have been a comic that banked on the popularity of the band.

The second question was harder. Was this a cool comic? I started thumbing threw it, trying to remember what I could about the band I barely paid any attention to. They had some songs I thought I knew and a quick google search turned up gems like Hangin’ Tough and The Right Stuff. Seriously, go watch that video, especially if you loved them when you were a kid, and tell me it’s not one of the funniest things you’ve seen today.

The comic itself has gems like “Yeah! Hang tough, and as long as you love us … We’ll be loving you forever!” and a section called “New Kids on the Rag.” I’m just not sure what they meant by that, but in that section, it says “Hey Look! It’s the new fags on the block. What a bunch of poseurs!” The comic seems to outline their rise to fame, but there’s a mocking undertone to it, so I’m not sure if it’s cool or not.

I’m putting the comic in my own collection. Even though I wasn’t a fan of the group and I can’t figure out the point of the comic, it’s still something that does make me remember my childhood. The part where I made fun of anything that was cool and popular and mainstream. Funny how things don’t change.

 
 Were you a fan of NKotB? Were you like me, and too cool for them? Or are you eighteen years old and have no idea who New Kids on the Block are. Oh God, I’m old.

,

Zynga Slingo

1
by on April 10, 2012 at 1:57 pm

Okay, I admit it. I’m a Facebook game snob. I look down on most Facebook games. The few in the past that have captured my attention, like Packrat or The Sims Social, were the exceptions to Facebook games, not the rule.

The times, they are a-changing.

Facebook games are, more and more, stepping out of the Mafia Wars and Farmville mold. It’s getting to the point that if it’s a game, it CAN be on Facebook. Nothing is proving this fact more than traditional casual games, with titles like AdventureWorld or Hidden Chronicles being very popular. Zynga Slingo is another of those games.

For those not familiar with Slingo, it essentially combines Bingo (which I do play IRL) and Slots (which I do play IRL.) There’s a limited number of spins and players have to fill up a card of numbers by spinning slot reels for those numbers. There’s a variety of power-ups that will help fill the board, like one that marks everything in a line or wild jokers that will allow the marking of anything in a line (or my favorite one, anywhere on the board.) Objectives include completing a pattern, achieving certain high scores and filling a complete card.

Zynga Slingo takes all the best parts of Slingo and puts them on Facebook. It adds in help from friends and a limiting element. And all that comes together into a very addictive game. I feel like I can never get enough. I bought a full day’s worth of energy (something you can do with Slingo Cash, which you can purchase with real life money or earn by completing various offers) and thought by the time that day was over, I’d be done with my addiction and be able to move onto something else. I was wrong. If anything, I’m more addicted now.

Players start out with basic boards and a small amount of energy, and as they complete objectives, they will gain medals. These medals are essentially the leveling system. I currently have 226 and am number one on my friends list! *gloat off* To play a board, it requires energy and energy replenishes automatically, one every three and a half minutes. Energy can also be purchased in small increments or unlimited supplies for a limited time.

There’s a certain number of free balls a player gets when they purchase the board (using energy) and when those balls are gone, four extra balls that can be bought for two energy each. After that, players may have free balls they can use or they can purchase additional balls, either by spending coins, which are gained by filling up the coin bar, or by spending Slingo Cash. They can also spam all their friends and ask them to send additional balls (sorry friends!) and that’s where the social aspect comes in. Friends can help out by sending coins or balls or energy and players can return the favor.  There’s also something called Play With Friends, which is ‘coming soon’ and I can’t wait to see what that ends up being.

Zynga has separated the game into stages, with each stage having nine cards. These stages have unique and interesting artwork. The higher a player goes in stages, the more complicated the cards and patterns get, and the more energy it requires to start the game. Right now, I have six stages unlocked, with titles like Sugar Rush and Shooting Stars. I thought there were only five stages, but when I got to a certain point in the game, Shooting Stars just appeared.

I played the heck out of the Slingo games on the PC, although by the time I got to the last few, they had become tired and worn out. The developers tried to change things up by adding in an adventure element, but it ended up just annoying me. Zynga Slingo takes the Slingo format and puts it on a friendly platform. It hasn’t gotten tired yet, probably because I can only play it a limited number of times before I have to stop and wait for my energy to replenish, or choose to spend some money on it.

I need more Zynga Slingo friends. My current friends are great at sending me balls, but in this game, there’s no such thing as too many balls. So feel free to friend me for Slingo purposes.

Do you play Zynga Slingo or other Facebook casual games? What keeps you going back to a specific game day after day?

,

Zombies or Why I Love Tabletop Gaming

0
by on April 10, 2012 at 11:24 am

Over this past weekend, I volunteered at ChimaeraCon, a local convention that focused on tabletop gaming. There were some other fun things to do, like LARPing (Live Action Roleplaying), and there were some Cosplayers, but the conference really focused on tabletop gaming. I spent most of the weekend chatting up the special guests and doing my volunteer gig, but in my free time, I played some games. When I went to write down the list of games I played over the weekend, I noticed a distinct pattern in the games I chose to play and/or watch. See if you can spot it:

The Walking Dead
Zombie Dice
Zombie Fluxx
Munchkin Zombies

There were a couple of other games I popped into, like Frag and Blood Bowl, but I didn’t so much choose to play those as that’s what was available to play while I was free.

The funny part is, I don’t think I like Zombie stuff all that much! I don’t watch The Walking Dead (although that’s more of a ‘when the heck can I find the time to catch up on Season 1’ rather than a choice to not watch it). In most of my fiction reading, Zombies play a small role, if they are in the books at all. But when it comes to gaming, I adore ones where I can kill Zombies. My favorite arcade game of all time is The House of the Dead. I played Typing of the Dead and loved it (plus I’m a super fast and accurate typer so that helped.) Plants vs. Zombies-yes, please. I even like the shooter maps where someone gets to be a zombie (if I’m the one who gets to kill them.) Apparently, this love for killing  game zombies translates into tabletop gaming too.

After this weekend, my favorite Zombie tabletop game is Zombie Fluxx. If you’ve never played Fluxx-shame on you! Of course, I hadn’t played a Fluxx game until this past weekend, so it’s forgivable. I even got the game and brought it home to my kids. It’s easy enough that I can play it with a nine and six year old. The game begins with two rules. Draw one card and play one card. But the cards drawn will change the rules, like requiring that  more cards be drawn or played. Some rules are really crazy, like having to groan like a zombie every time a player draws a zombie creeper. The object is to collect the keepers (like a shotgun or lumber) and have those keepers match the goal cards (which will be ever changing). Most goals require the players to not have any zombies in front of them, so there’s ways to kill and get rid of zombies-my favorite part! There’s also some special cards that allow a player to ignore any zombies in front of them and still achieve the goal.

I wonder what the objective is in Stoner Fluxx...

For Fluxx, there’s also Pirate Fluxx (Arrr matey!), Monty Python Fluxx (which everyone would not stop talking about over the weekend, apparently if you are a Monty Python fan, this is a must have) and Eco Fluxx (which may or may not teach people about the environment…not sure.) It’s a great game and I’m looking forward to my next gaming event so I can get some adults to play more Fluxx with me.

My kids have been wanting to do Thrill the World, so perhaps I’ll get us Zombie costumes this year and dress as a Zombie. Maybe after I pretend to be a Zombie, I’ll have a better appreciation for the Zombies and won’t want to kill them quite so much. Or maybe I’ll just want to play more Zombie games, but instead want to be the Zombie.

Thrill the World is where people dress like Zombies and dance to Thriller.

Probably not.

So I’m wondering if I’m the only one who has a love for a particular theme in gaming. Does anyone else have a theme they just MUST play if the game has it?

, , , , , , , , , ,

Tiny Tower - The Tower Sim That Sucks Your Life Away

1
by on April 10, 2012 at 1:17 am

I’ve been playing Tiny Tower, a Tower Sim I’ve downloaded on the iPad. It’s available for Android as well. It’s one of many apps from developer Nimblebit, one that I keep logging into day after day.

Let me make a few confessions before I talk anymore about this game. First, I hate Farmville and all the other ‘sim’ style games on Facebook. I did play The Sims Social for a while, but even that got boring pretty quickly for me. Second, I have a short attention span with games in general and once I step away from one for a couple of days, that’s it. It would be a rare thing for me to go back to a game I’ve stopped playing. Third, I played Sim Tower like a mad woman when I was in my twenties and I still think it’s the best Sim game ever. EVER.

The first few floors are built pretty quickly.

I downloaded Tiny Tower on a whim, because I was applying for jobs in casual games and, truth be told, the iPad was new to me and I hadn’t played too many of the games on it yet. On all the sites I applied to, every single one of them was raving about Tiny Tower, so I figured …

Sorry for the interruption, I had a VIP sitting there waiting for me. It was a realtor and I had some open spots in one apartment, so I wanted to get her to that floor. What was I saying? Oh, right.

I downloaded the game, and like most of the downloads on the iPad, it was quick. In seconds, I was up and running. I walked through the basic tutorial and it explained the elements of Tiny Tower. There are essentially four: build floors, construct businesses, stock inventory and move people (Bitizens) up the elevator. There’s some extra features that are fluff, like the Bitbook that is essentially Facebook for the Bitizens, and missions, which reward Bux, one of the two currencies in the game. Bux are used to upgrade systems in the game or take quick shortcuts, such as immediately stocking inventory or moving someone into an apartment. Bux are pretty easy to obtain by keeping shops stocked and by working the elevator. The entire point of the game is to build the next floor and the next floor and the next floor and … you get the point. If there’s an endgame, it’s not obvious.

As the Tiny Tower gets built up, and becomes not so tiny, everything starts to cost more coins (the other currency). But coins also become easier to earn and it evens out. My tower is currently at forty-nine levels and I’m itching for my fiftieth. I think there’s an achievement at fifty. I currently have eighty-nine Bitizens (I keep evicting anyone who doesn’t have at least one nine in their stats-I know, I’m terribly mean!) and twenty-nine businesses. I check my stock first thing in the morning, then periodically throughout the day, then make sure everything is as stocked as I can make it before I go to bed. I’ll also sit here while watching TV or even writing (this article) and pop people up to the floors they want to go to intermittently. I’m definitely hooked.

Keep at it and eventually, you'll be as big as me!

When playing Sim Tower, I wanted to build the biggest and broadest tower I could manage. That level one hundred tower was a thing of beauty. A part of me is hoping that when I get to one hundred, there’s some big fireworks show and then I can move on with my life. Another part of me hopes it’s the tower that never ends. It will just go on and on my friends. Some people started playing it not knowing what it was. And they’ll continue playing it forever just because this is the tower that never ends…

It’s also interesting to note that I spent the weekend at a convention (ChimaeraCon, which you can read about my weekend on my other blog) and didn’t have much time to just chill at home with my iPad and yet, I am still playing it. Meaning I put it down for a few days and came back, just as hooked.

If you are an overachiever who likes to take people up and down elevators all day long, then check out Tiny Tower. Huh. Maybe I missed my calling. Instead of a writer, I should have been an elevator person…what are they called anyway?

You can see my Tiny Tower at this link. Feel free to add me as a friend on Gamecenter on the iPad as well! I’m rosethornii.

Killer Ads

Killer Books

Staci's bookshelf: currently-reading

HauntedGrave WitchThe ReckoningThe AwakeningThe SummoningSister of the Dead

More of Staci's books »
Book recommendations, book reviews, quotes, book clubs, book trivia, book lists

Registration

If you don't have an account yet, you can register below.

With just one click.