The only thing I actually know about Stellar Blade is that it is a Site of Conflict. I didn't have a PS5 and continue to not have one, so it wasn't especially actionable at the time. Well, I guess I know one more thing about it - that there is almost certainly a Federal Bureau dedicated to apprehending the wicked men who… do what, exactly? Look at a picture?

The cat knight collecting gatcha game "Kätzen Knights" from yesterday's comic is not a real video game. I am sorry. 

Hey Jerry!

Yo.

I just wanted to say thank you for talking up Sunderfolk. My girlfriend is not into video games AT ALL, but she likes boardgames. She was willing to give Sunderfolk a shot and has fallen completely in love with it, to the point that she asks me if we can play when I get home. I love that I can share something I have always enjoyed with her now. I hope we get more games like this in the future. Thanks again.  -Erik

I love Secret Door, I love Dreamhaven, and I love Sunderfolk.  I did a sponsored panel for Sunderfolk at PAX with a bunch of other cool people and I charged zero dollars.  That's how cool I think it is.  There are quite a few gamers on PC that don't really understand "Jackbox Gloomhaven," the phone as a controller for a co-op tactics feast is either alien or distasteful, like trying to play the game with a dead rat.  I wonder sometimes if it could have a different life with a PC specific UI, but that's neither here nor there - I'm glad you two are having fun with it.  If you need naming suggestions for any of the things you discover obviously we're here to help.

(CW)TB

If you watched my Super Wizard Kart game from yesterday and you’d like to try running it yourself at home, I’ve collected all my rules into a PDF file you can download right here. 

A new gacha has its teeth in Gorbiriel - or perhaps its claws, canonically - and he is as powerless to resist it as a level one Kätzenlandsknecht.

I was asked to run a game of Acquisitions Incorporated and decided to dust off some ideas I had after running Wizard Kart for the C Team about a million years ago. While Wizard Kart was a sort of goofy way to play D&D, its sequel Super Wizard Kart is a fully self-contained board game. The players did not even need to bring their character sheets to the session. I’d like to thank my incredible players Jerry Holkins, Jasmine Bhullar, Kate Welch and Trystan Falcone for agreeing to sit down and play the results of my mad tinkering. You can watch the results right here!

It's true, though. Sorry. We made another Jump Ship comic. Which is also a strategy guide…? I'm told such guides are a hot commodity.

I realized now that I should have put the name of the game in the strip title, maybe. If you got super cranked up looking at the power board in the comic, and you were like "surely they aren't doing a Tetris-inspired block puzzle to manage their ship, just like I saw in that dream I had. A dream I've held so close" well I got real good news for you, space cowboy. The game is called Jump Ship and that's exactly how it fucking works.

Today marks the 16 year anniversary of the very first Lookouts  comic strip. Created during the original “Pitch Week” in which we present to you the reader three new comic ideas presented as a single page pitch. This particular week saw us pitch the ideas for Lookouts, Automata and Jim Darkmagic. Lookouts won the voting but we ended up making a bunch more Automata as well.

The reek - the stench - of dreaded continuity can be whiffed from nearly a mile away, like a distended whale carcass reaching critical mass. It took more than twenty years, but finally conditions in the retail space aligned with an ancient character's… well, let's not say predilections, They are now more in line with his lived experience.

I had put up a preview of the first panel, and Best Buy stalwarts swooped in from their blue and gold aerie to let me know that Best Buy doesn't have jungle plants growing inside - nor does it have a gouge taken out of the roof, where warm Summer rains might dance and drip down the gnawed-out scaffolds and steel bones of the retail pit. I don't think I've stepped foot in one for coming up on a decade, and it had been a site of last resort for a while - the third or fourth choice. Choices one through three are all websites. The last time I was there I think it was literally to buy the original Switch.

As part of a demo for the newest version of the Unreal Engine, CD Projekt RED showed off some Witcher 4 shit that is, just… I mean, look at it.

I posted a few photos from my huge binder of original Penny Arcade art over on my Bluesky account and it turned into a fun thread where I ended up redrawing some of that old artwork in my current style. For those of you consuming media of the social variety I’ll post it here:

Gabe doesn't even watch trailers, so some attempt to lure him with grainy cell phone shots ain't gon' work. I watch trailers all the time just to find something I missed! We are up to our asses in information, and I usually feel like I'm seeing the parts of it that I need to see, but then I find out there's some kind of Scottish samurai movie or some shit. I feel very strongly that they have enough psychometric data on me to have shown me this one, but I had to dig around in the dirt for it like a marmot.

Occasionally at the Child's Play Charity Dinner & Auction Mork will put a custom strip on the block. Just as frequently, the request will get lost for a very long time, only to sheepishly surface much later. Thanks so much to this mysterious donor man, who had a couple suggestions and a heroic self insert as his wish. We are only too happy to oblige! Child's Play's mission continues apace, after an explosive PAX East and the placement of our very first Game Specialist in Scotland. It's all made possible by your donations, and we're inspired by your faith.

There was always a lot of "boy stuff" I was never particularly good at, or interested in - and there's an important nexus between those two concepts. Also, like… my dad woke up at three in the morning to go fishing, according to some Naiad Lore whose provenance was never fully explained to me. Also, you had to be quiet in a boat for about a thousand years. Reader, let me tell you: it was a task at which I did not excel. Gabriel was a disappointment also but time heals all wounds.