This is a reprint of the second-edition paperback, the so-called ‘Wives and Servants’ edition originally released in 2008, with a couple of typos fixed and a new ISBN. Copies of that and the first edition were selling for ludicrous prices on Amazon (seriously, $300+ wtf) and when an international media figure told me he couldn’t afford to buy the book I figured it was time to do something. The reprint is on sale at many online bookshops but I recommend the Book Depository: the price is decent, they ship all over the world, and I make slightly more per sale there than from Amazon and elsewhere. Cover price is £11.99/€13.99/$17.99.

(The 2008 edition was released in three versions: the limited-edition hardback Gentleman’s Edition; the softcover Wives’ and Servants’ Edition; and the Difference Engine number 3 digital edition. They are almost identical, except for a salacious illustration in the hardback which does not appear in the cheaper versions, lest it corrupt and deprave any of the more sensitive genders or the lower orders who might glimpse it.)

Because it’s print on demand I’m not offering this to regular games distributors: the margins don’t make it possible. However if you’re a retailer who’d like to order some copies then get in touch and we’ll work something out.

Work continues on the third edition of Baron Munchausen’s immortal game, with new material co-written with Alexandr Munchausen, a descendent of the Baron who by an extraordinary coincidence I met at Spiel 2012—a story which you will doubtless hear more in the coming months. Publication: sometime after Alas Vegas. Which I haven’t forgotten.

For some reason Kickstarter isn’t letting me insert images directly into my update posts, so I’m posting these here mostly so I can embed a link to them.

They’re all still works in progress. In particular we’re still discussing borders and typography. But this gives you a good idea of how the end results will look. I am a very pleased and excited man.

The Magician:

The High Priestess: 

The Empress:

The Wheel of Fortune:

If you’re interested in getting the latest updates about Alas Vegas but you didn’t subscribe to the Kickstarter, there’s a mailing list you can subscribe to by sending an email to alas-vegas+subscribe@googlegroups.com.

Needless to say, I love it. It’s like a fine watch mechanism: intricate, mysterious and beautiful. A jewelled movement of a game.

And it plays into my fondness for miniaturisation in game design. I like small games. I design small games. Smallness doesn’t have to mean simplicity. Baron Munchausen is a half-page of rules with a great deal of embroidery. There was that Cadbury Pocket Game thing a while ago, for which I took one of the heaviest games of recent years and condensed it into six counters and a stick of chalk. And of course I’ve been putting games on the back of my business cards since the late 2000s; every time I do a new business card I design a new game for it.

So it’s nice that my former office-mates Hide & Seek have picked up the whole idea of tiny games and have run with it. They did a whole campaign of excellent tiny location-based games around London last summer, and now they’re building on that with a Kickstarter to create an iPhone app filled with amazing tiny games and a very cool system for deciding which one you should play next.

And they’ve tapped a number of games figures and designers to create additional material and new games for them. I am happy to report that these worthies will include Eric Zimmerman, Jane McGonigal, Doug Wilson, Bernie DeKoven and me.

The Kickstarter has a week to run as I write this, and deserves your support. Plus if you pledge £40 you can get a beta-release copy of Hide & Seek’s epic Drunk Dungeon game. A bargain… though at 500 cards it hardly counts as tiny. Shame.

Putting that aside, it’s a worthy idea and a great way of publicising the new generation of games and gaming to a wider audience.

I’ll be starting the day at Leisure Games in Finchley, north London, where I’ll be joined by Quintin Smith, noted games journalist and host of the Shut Up and Sit Down podcast, and my fellow Black Library author Richard Williams. After a couple of hours of that I will be hot-footing it westwards, to spend the rest of the day chez Eclectic Games in Reading, where there will be playing of games and chatting of chats. It will be good. Come up and accost me and ask me to play something or explain something—the question of 2013 appears to be why the last two books of the Marks of Chaos series never came out, if you’re looking for inspiration. I’m the tall one wearing the headphones.

Headphones! For anyone who’s been following my quest for the ideal sub-£100 headphone—which I’m pretty sure is none of you—you’ll remember the saga began when someone nicked the pair of Plantronics gamer phones from my desk at work. They weren’t great but the boom mike made them useful for Skype calls and they’d survived having my old study ceiling fall on them, so there was a certain sentimental attachment there. From there I went to a pair of Audio Technica ATH-ES55s (really lovely full sound, comfy and aesthetically pleasing, broke two pairs in eighteen months), and from there to a pair of Phillips Downtowns (amazingly comfortable, good sound but quite bass-light, only available in white, purple or brown, look like they should be really long-lasting but broke in four months), and thence to Sennheiser HD202s which should have been a triumphant homecoming because I’ve liked Sennheisers since the late 80s when I took a pair round the world but they were just… they were what I expected a pair of no-brand £25 headphones to sound like, a bit muted, a bit dull, not special at any particular frequency range and not terribly comfortable, and the heavy 2m cord they come with is simply awkward, particularly on the move. Really, when the cable wrap is larger than the music player, something is wrong with your design.

So I ended up borrowing back the Sennheiser PX100-iis that I’d passed on to my wife when I bought the Audio Technicas, and that was a little revelation. A revision of a classic design, it’s a really small, light headset that folds up nicely to fit in a pocket but delivers an awful lot of sound for that. And I thought this was probably it, and I’d stick with them, even if they didn’t do a great job of keeping my ears warm in the recent inclemency. And then someone on a mailing list mentioned Koss PortaPros.

The PortaPro has been around since the eighties, and if you had to choose one word to sum them up it would have to be ‘ugly’. Ugly, ugly, ugly, even though I’m a fan of what we shall call alternative aesthetics. Plus really, how well can a pair of £25 headphones with a design unchanged since 1984 really stand up to modern music through modern technology?

Oh my lord.

I am aware that at the moment I look like a bit-player from an early cyberpunk movie, but I don’t care. Subtle when it counts but full of big sound when it matters, it’s like these things have a mind of their own—a mind that really loves music. They have a reputation for a lot of bass but I like that, and it’s not a big flat bass either, there’s a deftness in the response here that’s simply a joy to listen to. Twenty-five quid. Extraordinary. I am a man converted.

Just had to tell someone. I trust you understand.

Anyway, Tabletop Day. If you’re going to be in London or Reading then come along; if you’re going to be somewhere else then head to your local games store, or grab a box of something and a couple of mates and head to your local coffee shop or pub. Evangelise a little, maybe meet some new people. You’ll be glad you did.

While I’m writing, how’s this blog theme working out for you? I’m in two minds about it, to be honest. Let me know.

1. Kickstarter is as addictive as meth, and possibly as bad for your teeth. Certainly for your fingernails.

2. Alas Vegas hit its funding goal in seven and three-quarter hours. Before the campaign started I was honestly wondering if £3000 was ambitious for a first Kickstarter. We hit that target in a third of a day. Then we blew through the first two stretch goals in the rest of that day, and knocked down the third—Yet Already, a fantastic fractured-time setting for the game’s Fugue mechanics, designed by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, in a couple of days more.

If you’re one of the people who has pledged money to Alas Vegas, thank you. Thank you more than I can say. If not, then…

3. Things have slowed down a bit now, which is a shame as we’re just getting to the really interesting stretch goals—Allen Varney, Robin D. Laws and others have offered material, but progress has got bogged down in some additional-artwork funding. Which brings me to:

4. Keep your campaign focused, don’t let it pull in two directions. Alas Vegas has a lot of people asking for an official Tarot deck. Well, that would be great, but it’s equally clear that there are a lot of people who don’t care a sou for Tarot decks one way or another, and who won’t back the Kickstarter while we’re asking for money for Tarot art. I have got a solution for the Tarot fans, conditional on sign-off from a couple of people, but as soon as we’ve cleared this stretch goal (it’s to commission the rest of the Major Arcana from the amazing John Coulthart) then the Alas Vegas campaign will be back to cool new stuff for the game.

5. Seriously, Allen Varney’s pitch for his new Fugue mechanics setting made me spit assorted foodstuffs across my laptop. It’s genius. And before that we have John Tynes promising to write a selection of Vegas-style cocktail recipes for Alas Vegas, suitable for drinking while playing the game.

6. Did I mention that this is the most fun I’ve had in the games industry for a long time? Not counting Warpcon, of course.

7. Which leads me to a future post, which I will write when I have time, about gamification. It’s been fermenting for a long time, and I think you’ll enjoy it. But it won’t happen until you have pledged more of your money. Go on! You could get the game dedicated to you.