Comic Con 2011

Man! It’s been almost 20 days!

I’ve had a pretty busy last few weeks. As I write this I’m in Coos Bay en route to Vanouver (more on this later).

Thought I share a few Comic Con highlights:

This is a tote bag embroidered with  my face that a fan brought to a signing I did at Nerd HQ.

At the same signing I saw a dude with this shirt on. Whoever drew this really didn’t have much perspective. I mean I’m shorter than Claire in this picture.

I got a kick out of this reminder printed on the back of our name cards at the TV Guide panel. “Keep it clean folks!”

Something you may not know about a life in Showbiz: You see a lot of loading docks and smell a lot of garbage. Pretty glamorous huh?

But the best part of weekend was seeing a tuckered out Batman catching a ride on a rickshaw. Followed by Robin and Harley Quinn on foot.

Could not have made that up.

 

We Have A New Favorite Game At The House

The game is Telestrations. In simplest terms it the classic game of Telephone meets Pictionary.

Everyone gets a notebook and a dry erase marker. They draw a card and roll the die. Everyone writes the word down that corresponds to the number on the die and passes their books to the right. Then they look at the word on the book that was just passed to them and draw it on the next page and pass the books again. Then they try to guess what the previous player drew and write down their guess and pass the book. The next player draws a picture of their guess.

This continues until the books make their way around the circle. (Although we started playing until we filled the books.)

Then everybody shares the pages of their books and the hilarity ensues.

We laugh so hard playing this game that we have yet to read the rest of the rules where they explain a way to score the game. It’s just more fun to play this way.

I also got a game that is similar in some ways called Scribblish! But Telestrations is just a better design. For one thing, the Telestrations flip notebook trumps long pad that Scribblish requires you to scroll up into the plastic holder. Flipping pages is just easier than pushing paper up the scroll. And the flip book gives you a bigger drawing space.

The premise of Scribblish! is that after a round you try to guess which drawing is your original clue. This can get difficult because the cards in Scribbilish! are more complex making them so much easier to distort. Another interesting feature is instead of passing the scroll in one direction you roll a die that tells you where to pass it, making it more random. 

So what I ended up doing was keeping the cards and movement die from the Sribblish! board and putting them in the Telestrations box. As we keep playing Telestrations and want to mix things up we’ll start using them. But the scroll pad we’ll just keep for shopping lists.

This is Weird

One morning I woke up with two missed calls on my phone.

That came from my same phone. 

The calls are coming from inside the phone!

iDixit Needs Players

If you’ve ever had the opportunity to play the party game Dixit you know how great it is. If you haven’t it’s kind of like Apples to Apples only a lot more abstract and imaginative. 

Now there is an app available to play the game online with people all over the world with a wifi connection. It’s called iDixit (note the “i” in front of the name). And the coolest part is the storytellers record their stories in their own voices so you can hear the different accents when you play with people from other countries. 

But this game does not have a lot of players. I log in sometimes and wait for a long time only to connect with one other player. The minimum is three. So far I’ve only had the chance to play one full three-person game. But the ideal number of players would be 5 or 6.

So I’m plugging this game because it is available for free until the end of the month. Download it. Every now and again login and see if there’s a game to join. I think you’ll dig it.