REVISED DEEP SEA ADVENTURE RULES: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Here are revised rules for DEEP SEA ADVENTURE, the game of undersea treasure-hunting for 2-6 players. The game was designed by Jun and Goro Sasaki, and is published by Oink Games.

DEEP SEA ADVENTURE. REVISED RULES.

The map hints at buried treasure. There’s just one problem: that map is nautical. All the loot lies at the bottom of the sea. Now you sit in the rented submarine, ready to go, though you are not alone. Join the other divers in rescuing the long-lost loot from Neptune’s clutches.

   Sharing the submarine’s rental cost seemed like a good idea at the time. But everyone else aboard is dreaming of hoarding gold, to make it all worthwhile. Sneaky. It’s okay. You are sneaky, too.

   Beware. The submarine’s battery is severely limited. Spend too long away from the submarine, and you’ll have to drop your loot to save your skin. There’s enough energy to attempt three dives. Now it’s time. See who’ll scoop up the greatest haul on this Deep Sea Adventure… 

PREPARING THE GAME.

Place the cardboard submarine at the top of your playing-area. Take the circular red marker and sit that on the number 25 aboard the submarine. This shows the battery power remaining. The submarine must surface when that last flicker of battery power fades.

Turn all the treasure chips face-down, hiding the numbered values and showing only the dots. Keep the groups separate so you can shuffle them as clusters of ones, twos, and so on.

After shuffling all that treasure, create a trail of chips underneath the submarine. Place all the chips with one dot first, followed by the twos, threes, and fours, until the last chip completes the trail. Make the trail as straight or winding as you care to, as long as the chips form a single line.

Set the round counters aside in a general supply pile. These X-marked counters replace treasure chips picked up along the trail as play unfolds.

Players take one diver piece each and enter the submarine. The first player is the person who was in the ocean or sea most recently. Otherwise, roll dice to choose the first player. High-roller starts first. Ties roll again.

OBJECT OF THE GAME.

Leave the submarine and scour the sea for treasure. Scurry back to the submarine before the batteries run dry. Salvage the most treasure to win.

   There’s enough submarine battery power for three deep dives. The game is broken up into three diving rounds. Each round, players score points for treasure hauled back aboard the submarine. The diver with the most treasure at the end of round three is the winner.

   In the event of a tie, the player with the most chips from the highest level of treasure chips is the winner. If players score the same points and the same number of chips, they share the victory.

   Daisy Diver and Dan Diver both score the same points at the end of the third dive. It's a tie. Dan picked up two treasure chips from level three – the chips with three dots on them. Daisy dived deeper, and scooped up one treasure chip from level four. Her exploits, being more daring, win the day.

DIVING ROUND.

A diving round is made up of many turns.

   Players take turns in a clockwise direction, starting with the first player. (The first player may change in diving round two and round three.) A diving round ends once all divers return to the submarine, or when the battery power aboard the submarine runs out at the very start of a player’s turn.

   Only score treasure at the end of each diving round.

   Each diving round starts afresh with all divers aboard the submarine.

   Submarine battery power refreshes at the start of a new diving round.

GAME TURN.

On each player’s turn, run through the following steps…

1. REDUCE BATTERY POWER.

2. DECLARE WHETHER YOU WILL TURN BACK OR KEEP GOING.

3. ROLL DICE AND MOVE.

4. TIME TO SEARCH FOR TREASURE.
5. ARE THE BATTERIES DEAD?

EXPLANATION OF TURN STEPS.

1. REDUCE BATTERY POWER.

On your turn, count the number of treasure chips your diver is carrying while swimming. Reduce the battery power aboard the submarine by that number of chips. If battery power drops to zero now, you still get to finish your turn.

   Battery power is only reduced by divers who are swimming with treasure chips. Empty-handed divers, and divers inside the submarine, don’t lower battery power.

2. DECLARE WHETHER YOU WILL TURN BACK OR KEEP GOING.

A diver only changes direction once in an entire diving round, so this is a big decision. Divers cannot turn back on their first turn out of the submarine. The order of play prevents this.

   Place your diver piece facing down, deeper, until you declare a turnaround – then switch the piece the other way, to make it quite clear to everyone.

   Once you’ve decided on direction, roll the dice and make your move. If a player moves without declaring a turnaround, the diver must keep moving further away from the submarine.

3. ROLL DICE AND MOVE.

Throw both dice, and move once on the trail per point. You must move your diver the full value of the roll, unless you reach the end of the trail. If that happens, you stop on the last part of the trail and lose any excess movement points.

   When returning to the submarine, you cannot enter the submarine without treasure. You’ll be forced to wait on the trail, just outside the submarine, until that whole diving round ends. So plan your return carefully.

   Divers who return to the submarine stay there for the rest of the diving round. They don’t cost the team any battery power, however.

   All divers must reduce their movement by one point for every treasure chip carried, to a minimum of zero movement.

   When you pass over another diver, ignore the cost in movement to pass that point on the trail. If your move ends on another diver, scoot past that diver to the next spot on the trail. This costs no extra movement. Divers never share spots on the trail with other divers.

   With movement resolved, search for treasure…

   Unless…all divers returned to the submarine. End the diving round, in that case. If this is round three, the game ends.

4. TIME TO SEARCH FOR TREASURE.

DO NOTHING. When you end your move on a treasure chip, your diver has the option of picking that chip up. But you don’t have to pick up a chip. If you choose to do nothing, your turn is over.

GRAB TREASURE. If you decide to take the treasure chip, remove it from the trail. Keep it near you, away from the trail. DO NOT TURN TREASURE OVER. Fill the gap in the trail with one of the round chips marked X, and place your diver on that spot.

   Divers can carry several treasure chips. Remember that each heavy treasure chip costs one movement point, down to a minimum of zero movement.

   Carried chips force the battery power down, representing the passage of time looking for treasure as well as carrying that treasure carefully. Time spent = drained batteries.

DROP TREASURE. If you end your move on a round chip, you may drop one treasure chip on that space. Move the round chip back into the general supply.

With treasure ignored, grabbed, or dropped, your turn is over and play passes to the next diver if the batteries are still working. Repeat the turn steps for each player until the diving round ends.

5. ARE THE BATTERIES DEAD?

If the battery indicator shows no battery power, the submarine is forced to surface on the very last glimmer of energy. End the diving round. If this is round three, the game ends.

ENDING THE DIVING ROUND.

A round ends once all divers are back inside the submarine, or when there’s no battery power left when checking to see if the batteries are dead. Make the following adjustments…

Divers who made it back to the submarine flip their hoarded treasure chips over to reveal the loot they’ll take to the bank. This loot is claimed from the sea, and doesn’t return to the trail.

The divers who failed to return to the submarine must drop all the treasure chips they gathered. Start with the diver nearest the end of the trail. That diver drops treasure chips past the very end of the trail, in stacks of three, until all chips are dropped.

   Then the next player nearest the end of the trail repeats the process, adding to the piles so that each pile has three chips at most.

   In later rounds, stacks of chips count as one chip for carrying purposes, one chip for battery drainage while carried, and as individual chips when counting up treasure points at the end of a diving round.

   It’s possible to add dropped chips to piles that settled in earlier diving rounds. Keep adding chips to those piles, so that all treasure piles past the trail’s end are topped up to three chips apiece.

   (Dan Diver drops one treasure chip at the end of diving round one. Then Dan drops another chip on round two, and it settles on top of the lone chip from round one.)

All X-marked chips are removed from the trail. Return them to the general supply. Move treasure chips up, to fill in gaps and tidy the trail.

STARTING A NEW DIVING ROUND.

It’s time for another expedition in the deep sea. Reset the battery indicator to 25. Determine a new first player. If all divers returned to the submarine, the first player is the diver who was last in through the hatch. But if some divers didn’t make it back, the diver nearest the end of the trail becomes the new first player.

   All divers now scurry back at the very last moment, and prepare to hunt for treasure until the game ends.

   Place all divers in the submarine if they aren’t already there, and begin round two or round three.

ENDING THE GAME.

The game ends with the close of the third diving round – when all divers return to the submarine, or once the battery power runs out when checking to see if the batteries are dead.

   Add up the treasure chips.

   The player with the highest score wins, and takes the most loot back to the bank. In the event of a tie, the tied player with the greater number of high-level treasure chips will win the game. If that check results in a tie, players share victory.

   A level four chip, with four dots, is worth more than multiple treasure chips with three dots, and so on, when determining tiebreakers.

*

After seeing an ocean swirling with confusion online, I took a stab at clearing up the rules. The main thing I killed off was the idea that oxygen dwindled as the game went on.
   It was easier to say the submarine’s batteries were fading. No one quite bought into the idea that the divers somehow shared a communal air-supply, whether inside or outside the submarine, in the original rules.
   With the power gone, players check to see who becomes the new first player, and then all divers scramble back aboard and surface. Divers send treasure ashore. Batteries recharge. Everyone dives again. No one dies.
   Online, there was an argument that players caught outside the submarine stayed out for the start of the next diving round.
   That idea generates many problems. For example, a diver outside the submarine, sitting on a round X-marked counter, suddenly has that counter whisked away at the conclusion of a diving round. Where to place the diver, then? No...
   For smooth easy game-flow, all divers start a new round inside the submarine, with the batteries recharged.
   In reworking an original ruleset, I endeavoured to stick as closely to the spirit of the game as possible. It isn't easy, writing rulebooks for games - especially short ones. I hope I managed to stick to that original spirit by using a slight electrical tweak, without breaking the game.

EDITING STOLE MY TIME: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

After two years of sound and video editing on a weekly basis, I thought I knew my way around editing. I’d learned the basics the hard way, as usual. No surprises there. I’d set up my boardgame/roleplaying YouTube channel to handle gameplay videos. But I had to learn basic video editing before I combined that skill with table management.

   Table management is the big thing in running boardgames with many moving parts, especially when the management is on behalf of players on other continents. And so…

Four-part scan of the game board, achieved at great risk. I do all my own publicity stunts.

   Week in, week out, I stuck to my cardboard guns and made videos about whatever the hell I wanted to say that week. I stole that idea from this blog. No one is coming to arrest me for stealing from myself.

   The virus is here. And it’s the worst time for a lot of things. Where’s the positivity? For a boardgamer, it’s the best time to game online. I’ve been gaming online with people for weeks on end. And I filmed most of those games, just to pick up hints and tips from myself on how the hell not to do things.

   It’s not all technical. Just feels that way. Finally, press-ganging Canadian author K. Woodward into proceedings, I embarked on an epic saga into the depths of madness. We filmed a game for general consumption.

   Then I edited the hell out of it. Editing stole my time. We played PANDEMIC HOT ZONE: NORTH AMERICA. This is a short experience. It’s a smaller version of the main PANDEMIC game.

   Why choose that smaller one? It arrived on my doorstep and demanded to be played. A smaller shorter game generates computer files that aren’t mega-bulky when that game is filmed. (No, come on, stop laughing. If you aren’t laughing, I have shares in a paperless office to sell you.)

   The mystic calculation involves the square root of the R in the month, but I use a machine for that. Take a short game. Add two authors. Play game with many a diversion into non-game topics: boozy tea, hamster equipment, supervillains…

   You know the drill.

   We came for the banter and banter ate all the cake. More to the point, we enjoyed our daft musings. Well, someone has to enjoy daft musings by law. We had permission, written in crayon on toilet roll.

   Seemed legit.

   It’s a half-hour game. We spent two hours on that. Then editing stole my time. I broke the video into eight sections, and edited one slice each day. After a shade over a week, I’d cut roughly fifteen minutes from the movie.

   What went?

Example of reference cards scanned and beamed to intergalactic players.

   There are things I shouldn’t do when making videos. If I gesture without talking, and delay speaking my thoughts on the original footage until my hand leaves the screen, do I leave the isolated gesture in…or cut it completely?

   It doesn’t matter which version of STAR WARS is out there. I don’t think George Lucas ever fixed a sonic blooper involving Vader and Tarkin. We discover that the Princess lied about the location of the rebel base.

   Pay close attention to Vader’s speech and his gestures in that scene. We’re an hour and three minutes in on the COMPLETE SAGA Blu-ray. Vader’s hand should accompany his speech – very useful when there’s no expression coming at you from the mask. But the movement goes nowhere and achieves nothing.

   It’s tricky to shift the audio around. But I found new ways to do that. Hand gesture and spoken thoughts go together, and you wouldn’t know any different.

   This is about boardgames. If I get a rule wrong and spot it, I leave that in. When two collaborators talk over each other…

   You go first.

   No, you go first.

   I insist.

   No, I insist.

   In the space of no time at all, serving no end, cross-talk dies a death on the editing sword’s keen blade. If I mess up badly and don’t spot a blunder, I am required (by Canadian law) to add a video explanation long after the event.

   What else did I learn? Don’t bump into the camera while talking. If I bump into the camera while making a silent move, I can cut that bump out and delete the silence along with it. There were so many cheeky and tricky sound/vision edits that I lost count.

I count at least 40 editing moves in this small section of gameplay footage. Something tells me there are a few more.

   Part six dragged on in editing. This is after most of a week spent creating an editing machine that moved at a fair clip. I learned lots of new ways to edit. Sometimes I created a blurry transition and just left it in for the hell of it.

   I kept one comedy pause in place for the effect…

   She and I both listened to radio programmes and learned the golden rule. Thirty seconds of silence on radio is punishable by removal from radio. I softened a lot of sharp visual cuts, and that led to snipping away at the silence.

   Rarely, I cut audio altogether and left a blank space for a tiny amount of time, letting microphone-generated sound drop away completely. This is an editing sin if performed to excess.

   I explained in the blurb what was going on, but not too spoilery. Episode seven was particularly annoying to watch, as I burbled nonsense the whole time. I thought I was playing the full game of PANDEMIC and not the shorter version. Basic gaming rule: apply the rules of the game you are playing. It’s easier on all parties concerned.

   Yes, lots of room for improvement in managing the table and the camera. At least future sessions will have better film quality. Zoom is not the great fix for our time. It is simply there. And it records a meeting in audio-visual, with an extra separate audio track. I find that useful, true.

   But the video size shrinks on Zoom. You’d think with a name like that, you’d see more and not less. But I had to zoom in on the footage when editing, to make it fit a YouTube video format. Ah, so that’s why it’s called Zoom.

   The answer, in future, is to film locally and share my screen intergalactically.

   Editing took up my time, and then some. I dropped loads of extra snippets in there to liven up the awkward visuals, and to improve the quality of footage.

   There was no point trying to make it perfect. I stumbled over a few difficult editing moments, but mostly I just rattled through in an effort to get the job done. I’d say we’re on the right track. We go in thinking it’ll be smooth sailing. Look at the pretty storm clouds.

   As I built up to a finished series, the Canadian dropped in to remind me that perfect is the enemy of finished. We’d created a sloppy mess of gameplay that made us laugh, and that was enough…

   My great enemy is autofocus.

   We meet again, at last. When I left, I was but the learner. Now, I just ignore you and get on with it.

   The camera resets focus after every move. Oh, yes, the camera moves. It’s on a rail system that allows it to move forward and back, left and right, up and down…with some adjustment I’ll set the camera to film a few of those rare portrait game boards sideways when needed.

   Game designers. Landscape boards only. See to it.

   That gripe’s not just about the awkwardness of filming portrait boards. When introducing a game to new players, it’s customary for the introducer to sit on one side of the table with the board upside-down. (And if it's a really tedious game, face-down.) When you know the game front to back and back again, you put up with the inconvenience and make the board as easy to understand as possible for the new players on the other side of the board.

   This method is far easier to employ with landscape game boards than it is when using portrait ones. My gaming gripes are always the same. Don’t put your game in a tin. Use black text in your rulebooks, and not white. Put a reference guide on the last page of the rules for ease of use. No portrait game boards. Never get them wet. Don’t feed them after midnight.

   Banter intrudes. Let it leap in.

   I could switch autofocus off, but that leads to other difficulties and it’s easier to put up with the beastie as is. It’s easy enough to edit static autofocus glitches away. Trickier to do that if the camera is on the move. It can be done. Or, at least, the glitch may be lessened.

   Why move the camera at all? For variety. A change of scenery every once in a while does the video some good. I scanned all the game cards and dropped those scans into static shots to waylay the monotony of a static camera.

Infection cards. Coded symbolically, to reduce difficulties with colour blindness.

   Also, I had to keep moving the camera over to the side to show off other areas away from the game board. I could do that with multiple cameras trained on various locations around the table, but the camera is on a rail and I use the rail.

   Game board. Cards on card holders. A display for keeping track of just who the hell goes next. It pays to move the camera selectively. For games behind the scenes, not filmed, I found throwing the camera around offered seasickness to the audience.

   What did I learn from the gameplay video? That I over-corrected the seasickness issue. Here and there, I should’ve moved the camera over to the cards more often, especially when talking about the cards.

   I’d have noticed a massive game blunder in episode seven. Despite my participation, we won the game anyway. Fun was the thing, and the thing was fun. As far as filming gameplay goes, I hope I learned enough filming the first one to make filming and editing the second one far less painful.

   No. Stop laughing. Come on.

PANDEMIC HOT ZONE: NORTH AMERICA PLAYLIST.

NO CALL FOR A NEW BOARDGAMING BLOG: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

For a minute I considered setting up another blog, to handle boardgame content. Then I reconsidered. With boardgame-themed videos going up regularly, my video outlet is the gaming outlet.
   This is my blog, and I'll talk about whatever I want to. And if I want to, I'll mention gaming here as well. No call for a whole new blog, to handle gaming articles.
   I'll let the blog post titles take care of all that. You'll know from the title if there's gaming in the air.
   Somewhen in the history of the universe, before our planet blows away into the cosmos, I'll post revised rules for a tiny game. And you'll know this from the blog title.
   Frantically checks unpublished blog post.
   Yes, the title is game-related.
   (Discovers there are eighteen unpublished blog posts. Hardly any of those seem remotely publishable. Must work on this problem over coffee. Lots of coffee.)

*

An extra blog, devoted to gaming, is an extra headache in terms of admin. Too much admin. I chant this by the light of a misty full moon, razorwire cobwebs clinging to doorways, as autumn crystallises into winter.

   A lot of coffee fuels the effort that goes into scripting, filming, editing, and sound editing those gaming videos. Mostly, if I want to say anything about gaming...I'll say what I must in videos.

   All that content goes to YouTube, and I can't justify the admin on creating a gaming blog that I won't post to frequently enough. Game stuff is welcome here. It's simpler to make this simple. Keeping things simple is the complex part.

*

How are things in gaming-land, and is there honey still for tea? The last two videos (checking game components, and The Raven by Poe) were heavy on sound editing.

   It's possible to script, record, film, edit and sound edit, and publish a video in one day. But I'm taking two to three days to nail the jelly to the wall each time.

   Filming game components took over an hour to furnish the raw camera footage. The rule is brutal: film more stuff than you need, and chop that shit down to fit the audio.

   As much as possible, I script what I want to say. That noble endeavour throws itself on spiked railings after two minutes...

   I'm often forced to go in and paraphrase, drop a forgotten point in, or just damn well scrap the audio and start over, ad-libbing like a maniac let loose in the Louvre with an open pot of purple emulsion.

*

Now I must away to clear the gaming table for another video. Off goes the giant plastic skull. Farewell, I say, to the more accurate life-size skull. Goodbye to the statues and cheerio to the restaurant frames that hold murder-themed posters.

   It's time to set up the next miniature movie. Lights, camera, action, camera glitch, inaction, darkness...

CONTENT CREATION. YOUTUBE PROGRESS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

The thing about posting your first YouTube video is that you should post a second one.
   When you post a second one, YouTube sends congratulations on creating a proper channel, doing responsible things, and saving the day. You aren't a one-video wonder.
   That's YouTube progress.
   I went through this before, publishing on Amazon. With my first book published, I closed in on a deadline to put out a second work, and had a deadline beyond that to publish the third one. These deadlines were measured in weeks.
   On YouTube, I had a deadline for my first video, based on a competition. Publish and be damned. I could put out a video more-or-less every week, right?
   These videos are meant to run around ten minutes. Okay, the second one turned into an epic more than double that limit. I'm all for experimentation.
   Learned that from a nutritionist named Frankenstein.

How are things going so far?   
   Chaotically.
   And that's good.

  
This first video was cut down to fit inside fifteen minutes. I spent a week navigating my way through, on and off - and that was with a load of equipment to hand. With the unboxing video out of the way, I turned to gaming equipment...

I tightened the scripting process and made my dice tower video in a day. Boom. I felt it important to tell beginners what a dice tower is and why you might want to use one in boardgaming.
   Why not start with a video on dice before discussing dice towers? Well, m'lud, y' see, it's like this...

How to get into this dicey subject? I knew any talk on dice would end up as a long talk on dice. This video turned into a week of effort down in the lab, and couldn't be scripted, filmed, and edited inside a day.
   The battle was to create a video out of the clean-up from the video before. And I struggled to keep that down to half an hour. Editing the hell out of sound as well as vision, the best I managed was dropping the finished product as close to twenty minutes as I could.

You'd think a ten-minute video on content creation would be a quickie, done in a day. But I had to fix a few bits and pieces with a second run of filming.
   These ten-minute videos are all longer than ten minutes. Raggy? Ruh-oh.
   If I can script, film, and edit in one day, then I always have the option of a second stab at filming extra scenes to emphasise a point or to address pacing issues...
   And I'd like to do that second run on the same day. It isn't always possible to stick to the plan. But it's no great failure to return to a project a day later and see what sort of glorious mess you've almost come up with.
   There'll be more videos. Longer videos. Not just game equipment movies or unboxing sagas. There'll be no more unboxing sagas, though. This, I vow.
   Just as I vowed there'd be no unboxing videos on my YouTube channel...
   That went well. What's the first video on there? Sensitive readers, look away now.
   The inevitable Patreon, and Patreon video, must follow. But I've decided I need a good ten videos out there, trying to be helpful to gaming beginners, before I wave the monetary flag.
   And then we'll run into the technical difficulties of actual gameplay. The plan is to run games internationally, from my Top Secret Volcano Base, without being jammed by the Soviets.
   Did I just say Soviets? Must be thinking of a spy boardgame with a Cold War theme to it. Koff koff.

I am dropping hints about future videos in the mini-movies I'm making now. Where is it all leading? That's obvious.
   The channel will play Dungeons & Dragons with Vin Diesel on the Orient Express and then alight for a game of Istanbul in Istanbul, followed by a chilly game of K2...at the foot of K2. Not climbing that one.
   We'll top it off with a quick trip to Mars for a game of Mission: Red Planet. These goals are all easily attainable. Diesel on the Orient Express.

Though we may have to curb Mr Diesel's dice-rolling techniques., to avoid shattering the crockery...

Attainable goals. Turkish coffee in tiny cups. The game has nothing to do with coffee - it's all about rubies. Unless you play the game with the expansion that's all about coffee...

Mountaineering in a game without doing any real mountaineering. Hell, we can throw in caving without going to any caves. Call it a two-for-one deal...

The mission to Mars I am not sure about...that may mean having to travel with Elon Musk. Always a risky proposition. A good anti-fungal cream should see us all through.

Image of Vin Diesel taken from D&Diesel with Vin Diesel, and used here under the copyright doctrines of Fair Dealing and Fair use for purposes of illustration. Click on Vin Diesel to go to that video.

For my video channel, click here...

RISE OF TRIBES UNBOXING: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Alchemical procedures concluded, I posted a video on YouTube. That post saw the start of my YouTube channel, featuring videos on tabletop games: equipment, gameplay, random thoughts, and, yes, an unboxing.

RISE OF TRIBES, by Breaking Games, may be the only game to feature in an unboxing video on the channel. We'll call it a first and a last.
   The channel isn't about producing unboxing videos. It's all about telling stories based around games, whether those are boardgames, card games, or roleplaying games.

Still, you must start somewhere. There's a competition to win loot, and a deadline hovers. If you wait around for the perfect moment, you'll never create content. But if you have the rocket of a deadline up your arse, that tends to focus your concentration.

I'll continue with a few game equipment videos after the unboxing. Soon enough, I'll tackle a gameplay video.
   If all goes loosely according to my non-plans, the first game video will be an international event of a piratical nature with Melissa C. Water. We'll play a game in the face of her Tourette-related issues...

*

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder might be the trickiest thing to deal with, but I will steer Melissa through a few games in which the problem is lessened.
   Her swearing, from the Coprolalia, shouldn't cause us too much difficulty. YouTube videos are routinely demonetised based on changes in the weather and the letter R in the month.
   Or the word DAY in the day of the week.
   You'd think a video highlighting the difficulties of dealing with Coprolalia wouldn't be demonetised thanks to the swearing, but Melissa has experienced flagging for that.

Filters that flag the word breast affect articles on breast cancer. Think before you blink.
   Tourette is called the Swearing Disease, but it's not true - for 90% of the people with that particular neurological condition.
   We are going to swear in the Tourette videos. Melissa belongs to the glorious 10% of people with Tourette who have the sweary aspect to the condition.
   And I'm Scottish. You can't step outside your door without batting swearwords away with a shitty stick, in Old Scotlandia.

*

Will Melissa fuckshitbuggerhellyeahsuckitPluto her way through boardgames? Yes. She may end up ruling the Coprolalia Clan in RISE OF TRIBES. And there's nothing wrong in that.

Here's the full video of Melissa on flagging videos...

For the RISE OF TRIBES unboxing video, click the picture below. This takes you to my YouTube channel, which is named after this blog: REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE. (Though, officially, YouTube forced me to name it after myself in the small print.)

BOARDGAMING WITH TOURETTE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Melissa C. Water is helping me gradually close in on the target. There'll be piracy on the high seas in low company. And a good time had by all.
   You can lay to that, shipmates.

*

My first YouTube video won't be a gameplay example, though. We're still sailing into port across choppy waters on that score. However, the video introduction is done...
   What to expect, in a video dealing with games? Dice, of course. 

There'll be several piratical games in time, so anticipate the arrival of treasure chests. I decided YouTube videos on tabletop games needed a sense of the theatrical. That's when I opted for the use of many props.
   What else to expect, in videos dealing with games? Cards, of course...

I'll make videos on gaming equipment. Cards. Dice. The table. A much-needed cloth. Daggers. Gunpowder. Small quantities of uranium. The usual stuff.
   There'll be games, too. Shocking, I know...

I determined, quite early, that gloves make great props for introducing games thematically. Piratical gloves go well with tales of larceny upon the seven seas, and so on.
   But, as handy tools, gloves are effing useless when it comes to moving game components around. Luckily, I only bought a few different pairs of gloves for the channel.
   They'll be used for effect here and there. No need to stuff a wardrobe full of them. Practicality outbids theatricality in this game, every single time.

Pictured: a still from the unboxing video I am planning to open my channel with. This is a shot of RISE OF TRIBES, by Breaking Games.
   I had a terrible time great fun lifting components out of the box with my awkward cumbersome begloved fingers wonderful atmospheric gloves. Would rather eat glass than attempt that again. Fun times.

Running a game internationally brings a whole host of problems to the gaming table. Fiddling around with counters on the end of gloved hands...isn't going to be one of those problems.

   I will face Tourette-based issues with Melissa C. Water, joining the game all the way from French Canada. We might be interrupted by full-on body tics. Convulsions. They appear epileptic in nature.

   We won't feature in the games as visual players ourselves. The emphasis is on telling a story and capturing game board imagery. The privacy issue, therefore, doesn't come up.

   I wouldn't be publishing footage of Melissa in convulsions anyway. What kind of Sick Space Muppet do you take me for? That leads to another point, though. How much of the audio do we use in the videos?

In my dealings with Melissa (editing her Kindle book), I found that she remained relatively calm when she latched onto a subject of interest to her. Tourette-based behaviour rose in frequency the more she talked about Tourette itself.
   Discussing audio tics, generated by Coprolalia, draws attention to the audio tics and increases the frequency of those sounds.
   I feel we face a vicious downward spiral and a virtuous upward spiral when we speak privately, depending entirely on the topics covered.
   It's my hope that gameplay will be of benefit to Melissa. We'll see. The channel is here to tell stories based around games. Winning and losing are of far less importance. The old adage applies.
   Did you have fun? Then you won.
   As far as audio is concerned, the videos are all going to be edited anyway. This is a real problem with gameplay videos online - lack of editing.
   I'm not going to name names here, or point fingers, and the people involved weren't famous YouTubers or big names in the boardgame side of things anyway.
   But I watched this video waiting for a game to start, and the people concerned were more interested in consuming meals. If I ever make game videos, I vowed, then I am not going to start game set-up with an introductory preamble that involves baking an effing cake.
   (Veering off, I must add this. There's a team out there on YouTube called Sugar High Score. If anyone could do a fascinating gameplay video about baking a cake, they'd take the biscuit.)
   My Bad Pun Detector is broken. Where was I?
   Yes, back to what I was saying about dusty desert-blown game videos. I was stuck with the charge of the pizza brigade. Well, I think it was pizza. Frankly, I'd lost the will to care by that point.
   Edit your nineteen-hour videos, folks.
   I'll do my best to edit out the faffing about. That means the Tourette-based videos face the same treatment. We might be forced to edit the worst tics out. But I might just as easily be forced to edit away the worst fumblings over intransigent game counters. Note to self: gloves are problematic.
   Luckily, Melissa is keen to see where this takes us, and she's game. You kinda have to be game, to game.
   Also, Melissa has a cool piratical gaming bonus...

Melissa C. Water's photos appear by kind permission.