Review: The Noteboard

So these things were apparently quite the hit at GenCon, and were nominated for an Ennie and stuff, but I had not heard of them until last week. When I was in London, friend of the blog Steve gave me one, so in this video I demonstrate it for your edification:

These would be pretty great for LARP events, too; you could bring a whiteboard for the GM room at a hostel-type event, and it wouldn't weigh the earth and be big and inflexible; you could just tack it to a noticeboard or tape it to the door. In fact, you could use it to make signs, same principle. And for field-LARPers I imagine it would be equally handy.

Useful for games like Fiasco, too, that have a shared world-building element; you could just stick it in the middle and everyone could write on it at once?

The company that makes these is now one of the family of companies that includes Pelgrane, Stoneskin, ProFantasy and so on, so apparently there are going to be Pelgrane-game-specific ones for games like 13th Age or whatever. That's pretty cool.

You can buy your Noteboards directly from the company or get 'em on Amazon. Prices are about the same, but I dunno, maybe you have some credit or something.

Trip report: UK Games Expo!

Today a crony and I went to UK Games Expo in Birmingham. It was very good; I bought all kinds of stuff. But the most historically-relevant thing I bought was a deck of replica 16th-century German playing cards from The Historic Games Shop. These things are pretty cool: they are replicas of a deck from 1588, and they have four German suits: cups, vases, ink stamps and books. 

Note that the four of vases is an illustrated card: even the number cards are illustrated in this deck, like in a Tarot deck. 

The cards are a little bit flimsier than your modern deck, which apparently is more or less how they would be. I really like these and I need to incorporate them into a game in some way. I even spent an hour or so trying to figure out how they should be used in my history class, but nothing comes to mind just yet. 

The guy I spoke to at the company's stall was a cool dude, very friendly. I'm going to have to get some more of their stuff at some point.