Grid spaces.

I HATE that Mission Control was linear, as it took too long to switch to a space I needed when I could have simply “dropped down.”

Total Spaces fixes that, and brings back the option to have rows and columns for your virtual desktop.

It’s only $18, and totally worth it if you’re like me and switch between virtual desktops in the blink of an eye.

Starting the Game

Separate the cards into their respective piles (Weather, Disaster, Prestige). Create individual stacks for each weather type and place them face up on the table. Separate out the Prestige cards by value and place them face up on the table. Shuffle the Disaster cards and put the stack face down on the table.

Each player gets 3 “Cloudy Day” cards.

Each player will roll the standard die. Whoever rolls the highest is the starting player.
Ties are settled with re-rolls. Play continues clockwise around the table.

Playing the Game

Drawing Cards

Draw 3 cards and place them face up in front of you at the start of your turn. Resolve any special effect of these cards. If you have no cards left to draw, shuffle your discard pile and create a new draw deck. If all 3 cards drawn have a skull icon, draw and a resolve a disaster card.

Rolling the dice

Each turn the active player will roll the 5 ElemenT Dice, and may make 2 additional rerolls with any, or all, of the dice. Once the dice have been rolled, the player will then calculate the amount of Elemental Power they’ve earned for the round and take the appropriate tokens. Keep in mind that elemental trumps cancel out dice. Every Ether rolled is wild, and can be banked for future turns. Your personal Ether bank may not exceed 10. If the Sun is rolled on the yellow die, all dice are ignored, you stop rolling, and you’re given 3 wild Elemental Power to spend.

Buying Cards

After you’ve rolled the dice and calculated your Elemental Power for the round, you may purchase any weather cards with the power you’ve obtained. These cards are placed into your discard pile, and any unused Elemental Tokens are discarded.

Earning Prestige

Taking the value of the 3 Weather cards face up in front of you, you can now purchase Prestige cards. All purchased Prestige cards, and the Weather cards are now placed in the discard pile.

First player to 20 Prestige wins.

These rules are at their roughest draft right now. They need to be cleaned up, proofread, clarified, tested, etc… Think of them more as a brain dump for now while I work on the card deck for the game.

There’s not too much in the software library yet, but I’m guessing that’ll change closer to the “official” launch of the system.

More later once I dig into things.

UPDATE: My Gamestop Xbox 360 controller works great with the OUYA!

I hope to have the rules finished up for initial play testing by the end of the week, and then I’ll post them here so everyone can play and give me feedback.

If you don’t have a set of ElemenT Dice, you can snag them inexpensively right here.

This time I’m holding a Zero-G format tournament, which uses the rocking stadium released in Japan. It looks like that I’ll be holding regular tournaments from now on, though not as close together as my first and this one.

I’m hoping to hold another in July either at Connecticon, or at a local park again. More info once I know what’s going on.

We have an area of our yard totally shaded by tall trees that doesn’t grow much grass. I figured that’d be a good spot for a small pit, so over the weekend I ringed it out in stone, dug it down a bit, and lit our first fire.

The kids love it, and it’ll be nice to sit outside on cool, spring nights and have a toasty fire to roast marshmallows over.

Why, you may ask, would I do such a thing after working on it for a good amount of time? Well we decided that space would be better used as a reading nook for the kids, so everything has been removed from the space to get it ready for painting.

The plan now is to move my office space to the basement, and use the rest of the basement as a rec room for company. We’ll be donating a lot of old toys the kids don’t play with anymore, and moving what they do play with upstairs. While the initial idea of using the basement as a play room for the kids seemed good at the time, they just don’t really go down there that much.

Another thing the WBO does is allow volunteers to host tournaments all over the world. A quick search showed that there haven’t been any tournaments in Connecticut, so I put things in motion to set one up.

Now, I’ll be hosting the first ever Connecticut WBO Beyblade tournament. Information about it is here (registration required.)

I’m hoping that not only will my kids get a kick out of it, but other local kids will too!

Once that’s set, I should have enough room to continue work on the table. It’s OK, though, I’ve had plenty of time to come up with new ideas for how to build it while I haven’t been working on it.