Does your organization know how to measure and verify pavement surface condition data based on mapping sensor technologies? TRB will conduct a webinar on Wednesday, June 10, 2020, from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM Eastern to discuss the challenges and solutions from experience on actual projects. In pavement management systems, accurate and precise condition data are essential for making data-driven decisions about maintenance and rehabilitation projects. Some condition data, including surface cracking and other d...

Most nuclear data measurements are performed at accelerators large enough to occupy a geologic formation a kilometer wide. But a portable device that can reveal the composition of materials quickly on-site would greatly benefit cases such as in archaeology and nuclear arms treaty verification. Research published this week in AIP Advances used computational simulations to show that with the right geometric adjustments, it is possible to perform accurate neutron resonance transmission analysis in a device just 5 meters long.

I have been playing board games since I was a kid. Chinese Checkers, Chess, Monopoly, Clue, Skipbo, Taboo, and Pictionary  were in regular rotation on our table when my parents and I or my friends and I sat down to play. Into my adulthood, and over the years since, I have continued to enjoy these games. And then, about ten years ago, I was introduced to "serious" board gaming. I began to play board games from small publishers where the designer and artist are a topic of discussion, as are game mechanisms (e.g. worker placement, area control, etc.), weight of the board game, replayability, and other concerns. I started with Settlers of Catan and then fell for PowerGrid, Puerto Rico, and Robinson Crusoe. Then I joined a few board game meetup groups in my community and my passion for the hobby really bloomed. 900+ games in my collection later, I've come to understand there's a bit of snobbery in board gaming circles. The games I knew and loved as a child are lumped into a category referred to as mass market games and sneered at by the board game elite. What defines a mass market game?  Typically published by a major toy company (vs a dedicated board gaming publisher), it has a lower price point, cheaper components, uncredited or corporate designers and artists, weak narrative, and is light to medium weight in complexity. I have several mass market games from yesteryear in my existing collection and am happy to play them with anyone who asks, so I don’t consider myself a board game snob. On the other hand, I don’t purchase new releases in this category anymore so maybe I’ve got one foot in the elite circle?

Recently, Ravensburger sent me Horrified . Released in 2019,  the game garnered high praise from Tom Vasel, who raved about it on Dice Tower. That piqued my husband’s interest, and he asked me to request it for review. Horrified  is easily classified as a mass market board game but since I’m no board game snob, I looked forward to playing it.

Spoiler: turns out I am becoming a little bit of a board game snob.

If you’ve read my reviews before, you know that theming and narrative backstory are important to me. Why has my character come together with others in the story setting laid out in the game? Do the game objectives make sense in the context of the story? What drives the behavior of the bad vs good guys in the game? What era in time do we exist in? Where are we geographically? None of this is explained in Horrified . In this cooperative game, players just find themselves dropped into a nameless town, fighting a hoard of monsters and escorting villagers to safety. How did we get to this town? Where is this town? When is this happening? Why this particular grouping of monsters? Turns out the answer to the last question is: because it’s a bunch of Universal Studios IP mashed together (but that doesn’t provide an in-game narrative explanation).  “Universal Classic Monsters is a name given to the horror, fantasy, thriller and science fiction films made by Universal Pictures during the decades of the 1920s through the 1950s. They were the first shared universe in the entire movie industry in Hollywood and around the world” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Classic_Monsters). The monsters include Dracula, The Mummy, Frankenstein’s Monster and his Bride, Wolf Man, Creature From the Black Lagoon, and The Invisible Man.

I had additional questions on why our characters would be in this cookie cutter town (I played the archaeologist, whose picture clearly indicates he belongs on a dig somewhere in Egypt) but my husband was able to explain that the characters are straight out of the Universal Studios movies (mine is from The Mummy)  and it only made sense they would be in town if the monsters were also in town.

Setting my problem with the narrative aside, let’s talk about the components. A portion of them are poorly constructed - there are flimsy cards and monster mats that bend easily and there are cheap plastic figurines without much detail – but most of the components are just fine. The cardboard player tokens are well made, there are custom dice (nice touch), and the central game board is easy to read, well laid out, and features bright colors. The rulebook is orderly and sensible and player aid cards are included (always a plus – I get irritated when publishers leave these out). And good news, there’s a fix for shoddy figurines. Someone came up with the brilliant idea to use Funko Pop! Universal Monsters Series mini figures in place of the included figurines and it really elevates the game. Unfortunately, there’s no fix for the flimsiness of the cards, so if you want to play regularly, you’re going to need to sleeve them.

The artwork is simple and cartoonish. I wouldn’t describe it as beautiful, realistic, or haunting; more like family friendly and what you’d expect from a mass market game.

What about the gameplay? I’d sum it up like this – it’s a lot like Pandemic but here we are dealing with monsters instead of ambiguous diseases and the gameplay is less complex. It’s engaging and fun. At the beginning of the game 2, 3, or 4 monsters are selected and placed on the board. On each player’s turn, after the player completes their actions, new items are spawned in various locations on the board (items are gathered by players and used to defend against and defeat the monsters), a special action occurs, and then the monsters move and attack. One of the special actions that can occur is to place a named villager in an assigned location. These villagers add additional depth to the game – players must escort them safely to their designated destination location and then are rewarded with perk cards that offer special abilities. If villagers are left to fend for themselves and are attacked by one of the monsters, they die, and our terror level goes up (terror level also goes up if any character is attacked and doesn’t have enough items to discard to fend off the attack). If the players defeat all the monsters, they win. If the terror level gets to the farthest point on the terror track, or if the monster deck runs out, the players lose. The whole game plays in less than an hour, it’s simple enough for kids to understand, and it plays up to five. The player count is a big plus for us as we have five family members once you count the three kids and so any four player games force us to leave a kid out. Because there isn’t a lot of complexity in Horrified , there isn’t much of a problem with analysis paralysis. Turns flow smoothly and quickly. There are several monsters to choose from when setting up monster combinations at the start of the game and each monster must be defeated in a unique way (thematic to the movie plot from which the monster is borrowed), so there is a good degree of replayability inherent in the box.

Providing a review rating for Horrified  is proving difficult. I’m realizing now that I have become a bit of a board game snob and so the flimsy cards and cheap plastic figurines really turn me off (the Funko Pop! minis fix the figurine problem but I resent having to go track them down at extra expense). And the lack of narrative really irritates me. So for my readers who are serious board gamers and only play with other serious gamers, I think a single Oui! is fair. On the other hand, the gameplay in Horrified  is much better than in your average mass market game. Its monster theme is different from all the other monster themes in the board gaming community (which mostly trend toward Cthulhu or space aliens). The gameplay is engaging – especially for my kids – and so it makes me happy to play it again with the family or with casual gamer friends. For those audiences (families and casual gamers), I’d give it a Oui! Oui!

-------------------------------------------------

Publisher: Ravensburger
Players: 1-5
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): about 45 minutes per game
Game type: dice rolling, cooperative, pick-up and deliver, mass market

Veteran Board Gamer Rating:                                          

Casual Gamer and Family Gaming Rating:

Rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

Posted by: tripodeca113



"After I signed on to do these comics, Toph quickly became my favourite character to write. Mike, Bryan, and their writing team made her so vibrant. I can close my eyes and hear her voice. We didn't include her in The Search for narrative reasons, but I really missed her. I'm glad we got to throw the spotlight on everybody's favourite blind Earthbending master here."

Gene Yang

(24 pages out of 72)
( Read more... )

Continued from Day Four. (From the beginning.) On Friday we packed all of our stuff back up and headed out.  We were barely out of the resort when: This tire is flat. Apparently all that gravel out to Horne Lake Caves the day before also included a small screw.  We limped around the corner to … Continue reading Summer Horrification — Day Five — Englishman River and Rathtrevor

1. 173 gestrande Belgen eindelijk thuis na quarantaine in Tenerife: “Regering liet ons aan ons lot over. We hebben twee maanden op ons terras moeten doorbrengen”  Het Laatste Nieuws
2. 173 gestrande Belgen eindelijk thuis na quarantaine in Tenerife: “Regering heeft te weinig gedaan!”  Het Laatste Nieuws
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4. Belgen die vastzaten op Tenerife charterden zelf vliegtuig naar huis  De Standaard
5. West-Vlaming regelt repatriëring gestrande Belgen  Focus en WTV
6. Hele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws

In an emergency having clean drinking water is vital to your survival. If your emergency supply runs out you need to know how to purify water. To do that you have three options 1. Boiling 2. Distillation 3. Chlorination

1. „Mit Totschlägern auf das Team los“ (zdf.de) Am vergangenen Freitag wurde ein Kamerateam der ZDF-Satiresendung „heute-show“ bei Dreharbeiten in Berlin-Mitte von Unbekannten angegriffen. Mehrere Teammitglieder, darunter auch drei Security-Mitarbeiter, mussten ins Krankenhaus, wurden jedoch nach der Behandlung am selben Abend wieder entlassen. Die Motive der Täter seien noch unklar, so die Berliner Polizeipräsidentin Barbara […]

1. ZAPP spezial: Medien in der Corona-Krise (ndr.de, Annette Leiterer & Gudrun Kirfel & Daniel Bouhs & Tim Kukral & Caroline Schmidt & Sebastian Asmus & Andrea Brack Peña) Das NDR-Medienmagazin „Zapp“ widmet sich in einer halbstündigen Sendung den verschiedenen Auswirkungen der Corona-Krise auf die Medienbranche. Es geht unter anderem um Rekordreichweiten durch Corona, um Rettungspakete […]

The entire BlueGriffon Tutorial has been updated for the version 3 series of BlueGriffon. Those thinking of using it to create a website can find the complete series online.

I was asked by a visitor how he could move his website from Dreamweaver to the free BlueGriffon web editor. This article answers that question.

This article describes how you can add Google Fonts and other web fonts to BlueGriffon for use with your website.

This article deals with how you can use BlueGriffon to stretch a picture that is used as the backdrop of a web page, so that it fills the entire page, column or section.

This article shows you how to add a list to your web page that automatically numbers itself. This way, you don't have to go through the whole list to renumber everything when you add to the middle of the list or when you delete items from it.

This article shows you how to insert a bullet point list (where each item on the list is marked with a solid black circle rather than numbered) into a web page using the BlueGriffon web editor.

L'Europa è più di una mera alleanza di egocentrici. Non esistono alternative agli Eurobond in una crisi come questa.

Broward County Sheriff Gregory Tony is getting a political baptism by fire in an election that reads like a Hollywood screenplay with racy photos, a secret decades-old killing and a bitter union fight.

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More scandal in the Orange County Sheriff's Department shows the department — like all sheriff's departments — should have independent civilian oversight.

The last thing L.A. County needs during a coronavirus pandemic is a turf battle between the sheriff and the Board of Supervisors.

The pandemic-related social media posts are crude. They are youthful. They mock the joys of family togetherness. Yet, they are a balm just when we need it most.

Since being drafted by the Angels in the second round out of UCLA in 2017, Griffin Canning has been viewed as a potential front-line starter for his hometown team.

The Angels lost 9-4 to the Dodgers on Wednesday at Camelback Ranch in Phoenix.

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The Angels announced starting pitcher Griffin Canning's MRI revealed "chronic changes to the UCL and acute joint irritation" in his right elbow.

Angels pitcher Griffin Canning will begin the season on the disabled list after experiencing elbow soreness following his first spring start.

Broward County Sheriff Gregory Tony is getting a political baptism by fire in an election that reads like a Hollywood screenplay with racy photos, a secret decades-old killing and a bitter union fight.

Public officials press for more social distancing as many beaches and public spaces close amid the coronavirus outbreak.

After he retired, Tidwell pleaded guilty to taking hundreds of guns from evidence lockers

San Francisco has emerged something of a bright spot in California's battle against COVID-19, but it's too early to relax, officials say.

Celtic boss Neil Lennon has issued a stern warning to Leigh Griffiths about his behaviour after a ‘stamp' incident overshadowed their win over Hamilton.

KIM JONG-UN is building a massive facility outside the capital Pyongyang, satellite images have shown, suggesting he is planning to beef up his stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Clarification - Removal of Three Articles - 07 January 2019

On 23 September 2019, we published an article headlined 'Labour's tax bombshell: Corbyn's benefits splurge plot would cost taxpayers £520 billion' the article focused on Labour's potential objective of introducing a universal basic income and its associated costs.