About Me My name is Daniel M. Perez and I am an avid gamer and traveler. Join me on this journey to unite my two passions.
Be sure to follow me on Twitter: @GamerTraveler
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 Days of Wonder wants to celebrate the fifth anniversary of their train travel boardgame by hosting a Ticket to Ride World Championship in Paris, France on June of 2010. There will be eight National Championships (North America, France, Germany, UK, Benelux, Spain and Poland), yielding the top eight players in the world, plus two alternates per region in case the National champion cannot make it.
Each National champion will receive air/train fare to and hotel accommodations in Paris, a National Champion trophy and a set of gold-plated Ticket to Ride train game pieces with a matching score marker. The World Championship winner will receive a trip for two on the legendary and luxurious Orient-Express Train, from London, England to Venice, Italy, including a two-night stay at both ends of the journey. If that prize alone is not reason enough to play in this tournament, I don’t know what is!
Check out the Days of Wonder site for full rules and Regional Championship information and bust out those Ticket to Ride boardgames and start practicing!
 I was watching a show on castles on History Channel, and they said something that really stuck with me: “Castles were some of the most imposing structures ever built and they inspired awe in the population.” I was immediately transported back to York, England, back in 2001.
We’d been in England for four days, spending three of them in London. I’d seen Westminster Cathedral, Buckminster Palace, the Tower of London, Tower Bridge – all of them structures of impressive grandeur full of history. But I had taken them all in stride, something I attribute to the general “wow-I’m-in-Europe” factor. Then we took a train ride north to York, and the moment I entered the city through its medieval gate, something shifted. As we later walked up the main street and York Minster Cathedral came into view, I had to stop; I couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, couldn’t do anything but stare. I was in awe.
Awe is a feeling of wonder, reverence, amazement and/or dread (or more accurately, all those at the same time) experienced when in the presence of something that transcends us. In looking at York Minster, I suddenly realized I was standing in front of a 500-year old structure (and that’s only in its finalized form; parts of it date back another 200 to 300 years), in a town that is still surrounded by its original medieval gate, in York, in Europe. I saw York Minster not as a tourist, but for a fleeting moment, as one of the lowly residents of the city must have back in the 1400’s, imagining this imposing structure rising into the heavens, one of the largest buildings I would ever seen in my toil-heavy life. It inspired awe, in all its connotations, and I was so thankful for that wonderful moment that lasted maybe a couple of minutes yet remains one of my most treasured memories of all my travels.
Awe is not something we get to experience a lot on our daily lives, but I have found that travel comes with a healthy supply of it. I experienced it various times after than in Europe; later in Ireland looking over the Cliffs of Moher and the Giant’s Causeway; in Paris, the Netherlands and Belgium; and even in Seattle, especially in the Olympic Peninsula, at the top of Hurricane Ridge. Pure awe, the kind that shuts down your conscious mind and simply lets you absorb the grandness of what you’re witnessing. When we travel we are removed from our familiar surroundings, out of our element; this lowers the barriers and makes us vulnerable to moments of wonder. Be on the lookout for such moments and when they happen, surrender to them.
I have managed to bring that ability back home with me as well. It doesn’t happen all the time, but I am open to it and have experienced it in the form of a beautiful sunrise glimpsed while riding my bike or when contemplating the city skyline from afar. When you travel, leave your jadedness at home and be open to awe, and when you get home, do your best to retain that ability. You will see your home in a whole new way.
In Your Games
There is nothing that annoys me more than having a fantastic description of a site, like a castle or a large cathedral or a majestic spaceship, to be brushed aside by jaded gamers. These characters you are playing are seeing something that may be of an unique nature, I try to remind them. Even characters that are exposed to certain situations on a daily basis–nobles that know a castle inside and out, a spaceship captain that has seen dozens of different ships of all shapes and sizes–experience moments of awe. Perhaps the noble has never seen this side of the castle, or precisely because she knows them so well, this new one they are visiting impresses her so much. The starship captain may have seen a lot, but that new prototype spaceship makes him look out the transport window, completely ignoring his officers.
Bring awe back into your character’s portrayal. If playing a fantasy game, unless you are a world-weary adventurer, monsters, magic and imposing structures will have an effect on you! It doesn’t mean your character stands catatonic like I did in York when he sees an orc for the first time, but a dragon? You bet. A wizard casting a gigantic fireball spell? Yup. The king’s three-times-as-big-as-those-in-the-real-world castle with towers rising a mile into the air and squads of griffin riders patrolling? If you don’t roleplay the awe, you are doing a disservice to yourself, your Game Master and the game.
Folks following me on Twitter (@GamerTraveler) over the last few days got to experience my frustration as I redesigned the TGT website. I was looking to apply a magazine-style theme to WordPress, but those suckers have so many fiddly bits that they were just not working here for whatever reason. I liked the previous look just fine, and maybe one day I’ll go back to it, but it was time for a change, and thus I went with my second theme choice, Atahualpa. Take a look:
I finally did a new header banner based on the pre-installed one my previous theme had, as well as custom favicon based on the “world d20″ logo. This theme’s structure allows me to spread out information much better along two sidebars and leaves a lot of space for possible future use. The central story area is spacious so articles, most of which I publish with images, do not seem cramped, a pet-peeve of mine. The theme’s width is fluid so hopefully that means people with smaller screens than mine (1680×1050) won’t have a problem with the site either.
FYI, when I was doing the last few tweaks today, it was found that there were some suspicious iframes hiding in the code of highmoonmedia.com, the parent site for this website, and that was giving some people a warning notice. Thanks to Stuart Robertson (@RobertsonGames) I was able to find all the annoying instances and delete them. The site is working fine now, and you can confirm it via Google Safe Browser.
Even though I will probably continue to tweak it here and there, all in all I’m very happy with the new look, and I hope you like it as well.
 Once upon a time, I wanted to write a roleplaying game about the experience and act of traveling (the truth is that for years I have wanted such a game, and since I could not find one to fill that gap, I decided I would write it myself). I even had the name picked: Grand Tour. Problem was I didn’t really have a solid idea of how to structure it and I found myself floundering too much. I decided to shelve it for a while and look at it at some other point to see if things had improved. That was 2 years ago and I haven’t looked at that file since. Today, while browsing the Story Games forum, I came across a thread on games to be released at Gen Con, and this one gem caught my eye almost immediately:
Posted By: joepub
At the Design Matters booth, I’ll be releasing Ribbon Drive. It’s a game about road trips, and letting go on the open road. Mix CDs are an integral and driving part of the game. It’s diceless, GMless and easy for new gamers to pick up. It’s an intense game, but a slow-burning and soft one, too.
It’s sold with a mix CD (featuring some really cool artists).
Wow. I immediately checked out the website and boy, have I found a new game to fall in love with. Check out the full description:
In Ribbon Drive, we collectively create a story about a road trip. We do this in the comfort of a living room, over the course of 3-5 hours. We each create a character, one of the people going on this road trip. These characters are our individual jobs; each of us will roleplay one character’s decisions and actions. We’ll share the responsibility of narrating the obstacles and scenery that comes up all around us. Ribbon Drive creates stories about letting go on the open road, and we all work to both further and complicate this agenda during the game. It draws inspirations from road movies like Wristcutters, Everything Is Illuminated, y tu Mama Tambien, Little Miss Sunshine, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things and Thelma & Louise (and, to a lesser extent, Two Lane Blacktop, The Doom Generation and Wild At Heart). Our ultimate goal is to create a thought-provoking, meaningful experience. We let the music guide us. We let the road throw us curves. As our characters, we rethink our attachment to the future.
That description fills me with excitement, and if the game performs as billed, it seems I may not have to write Grand Tour after all, Joe McDonald may have written it for me already! Since I won’t be going to Gen Con, I will be ordering this game as soon as I am able and putting together a session a minute after that. Expect a full review sometime in the near future. In the meantime, check out the Ribbon Drive webpage (in case you also want to order it now) and the playlist of the Mix CD that comes with it.
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