" He came dancing across the water With his galleons and guns Looking for the New World And that palace in the sun..." - Neil Young, "Corte z the Killer" (1975) I'm aware that I bring up Ozark Softscape's 1984 game The Seven Cities of Gold rather frequently for a title that's mostly remembered today for its influence later series like Civilization . But it's a very significant game for me personally, not only because it was, for me,  an early demonstration of the medium's potential richness and depth, but because some thirty-six years later, I keep coming back to it. There's the cartographical indulgence Seven Cities foregrounds, of course, and an appreciation of the game's mechanics I wouldn't have had at seven years old, especially since so many are hidden, left for the players themselves to deduce. But there's a reason I kept going back, both as a kid and as an emulator-savvy adult, every Columbus Day: a longing for repai

By now, my love of older electronic games should be well-established. Indeed, over the time we've been doing this blog, I've only delved deeper and deeper, more than tripling the number of vintage consoles I have on-hand, hooked up, and ready to go. And while we can look to the pandemic and the money saved by not having to regularly commute lifestyle changes that came with it, the fact is, the propensity was always there - I have always loved older technology, especially if it operates in ways fundamentally different than modern equivalents. And compared to, say, vintage guitar and bass amplifiers (something else I have in... "generous" quantities), consoles are relatively cheap, don't take up much space, and can be used late into the night without risk of noise complaints (provided I'm using headphones). They all have their own quirks, their own histories and unique libraries, and, since they were all released in my lifetime, personal connotations. Each cons

How did we get by so long without the term “retcon?” As a phrase, “retroactive continuity” goes back to at least 1973, with our current definition appearing a decade later to describe some of the way DC comics was engaging contemporary storylines with characters and plots from decades prior. Even without a name, the concept is about as old as storytelling itself, with some retcons becoming such a significant part of their respective narratives that they’d be unthinkable without them - no one involved in the creation of the 1977 film considered Vader to be Luke’s father, but inserting that retcon into The Empire Strikes Back has defined every iteration of Star Wars ever since. But “retcon” is a term that carries as many connotations as it has applications, with plenty of room for interpretation as to what exactly counts as a retcon, what it effect retconning has on a work, and how that in turn affects an audience’s relationship with that work and its creators. So this week, let’s take a

Quick, what’s your favorite tabletop RPG and why? What led you to deciding that was your favorite? Is it the first game you ever played, and if so, how have your opinions about it developed since your first experience? If not, what was the sequence of events between playing your first and playing your favorite? We may not be thinking of it when we’re playing or planning the games we choose to put time into, but there have been a myriad of decisions and experiences going all the way back to our first exposure to TTRPGs. Last week, we talked about using a quick, generic pitch to introduce potential new players to the concept of roleplaying. This time, let’s discuss how to get more specific in teasing apart your gaming lives and loves, and how you can take what you’ve found on your own journey to help someone who’s just starting theirs. - B B : With the way that games model a person’s entire life, or at least a significant part of it, it’s a wonder we don’t get metaphysical with it all th

How do you teach a person gaming? Back when I was in high school, it's no surprise I was a bit of a nerdy outcast. Lunchtime was a big concern, even more so than in middle school. The mix of kids there was different, and many of my friends from former years had gone to different high schools - even the two of us at Never Say Dice, were split up. However, this time I was fortunate: a group of card players sat next to me. As creatures of habit, we pretty much stuck to those same seats throughout the year. Every day while they ate, they’d play round after round of Spades. Occasionally they might mix it up with poker, hearts, or some other game, but Spades was the go-to. After a month or two, one of them was out sick and the rest were bummed that they wouldn't be able to pursue their favorite pastime. Showing unusual courage and social acuity, I piped up and offered to play a hand. I’d never played before, but had picked it up by watching them. From then on, I was always an alterna

It's come a few times, but we here at Never Say Dice have a somewhat unique generational viewpoint as "cuspers" or X-lennials or whatever they're calling us this week. We were the very last students to have our primary schooling take place in entirely the twentieth century, and while they were on their way out, we still received a fair amount of Cold War rhetoric and American Exceptionalism, especially in the earlier years of elementary school. Notably, we got some of the final vestiges of the kind of " Great Man theory " our parents also received, curricula full of flawless figures, sanitized into simple stories for easy digestion by attention-deficient pupils: founding fathers, war hero presidents, tireless inventors... In our region, at least we were lucky enough to cover Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman, their fascinating lives stripped down to a few selflessly heroic actions that helped solve the crises of their day. They were special, unique peopl

As we've discussed here before, electronic games have a fascinating relationship to “player characters,” with a number of evolutionary paths developing ever since players were first asked to identity as the captain of a spaceship, the spaceship itself, or a nondescript adventurer about to descend into a colossal cave. The only thing that defined characters was their role within the game and the means through which the player interacted to fulfill that role. Anything beyond that was, to borrow a phrase, an exercise for the player’s imagination. It's easy to assume that most people approached these stories as shapes to move around a screen or math problems to systematically solved, but there's also no reason not to think players might have filled out these scenarios with elaborate backstories of their own or (in the case of Star Trek ) connecting them to an established setting, characters, and storyline. Either way, creators had little to work with, given their limitations b

Electronic gaming has changed a lot over the years, and we at Never Say Dice have been lucky enough to experience these changes first-hand. As the scope and potential of games has grown, so too have distribution networks, allowing us to find and buy games that physical stores might not have thought worthy to stock. The shift to digital distribution has brought countless benefits (and, we must acknowledge, a fair number of drawbacks), but it’s completely removed one element that seemed an integral part of electronic gaming in our youths: the printed manual. This week, we thought we’d take a moment to appreciate this now-lost aspect of physical gaming media and how it helped define the gaming experience of its era. - B B : The shift away from manuals predates the rise of the digital storefront, of course. As storage media developed and games were able to integrate more and more of the material that had to be offloaded into a physical manual, packaging got smaller and smaller. In the cart

Like it or not, the electronic gaming landscape is dominated by long-running series, and has been since its early days . No matter when you read this, if you take a look at the current best–selling games, you’ll see a list that’s almost entirely sequels, off-shoots, reboots, or remakes of any of the above. This is something the medium inherited largely from the comic and cinematic industries it’s modeled after, but also reflects a certain risk-aversion as development costs skyrocket and mere success is insufficient to keep a studio afloat : name recognition is a safe bet. Publishers can assume some baseline of sales from dedicated fans who will always buy the latest installment of their favorite series. We at Never Say Dice can’t say that we’re totally immune to established gaming franchises , but for the most part we don’t stay on top of series with numerous installments like Assassin’s Creed , Final Fantasy , or Call of Duty . (Not that this will keep these games from filling out