Until recently, the closest we ever got to construction in a board game was Mousetrap, but this year Hasbro announced that it would be making LEGOized alternate versions of some of its biggest board game commodities (without, of course, real LEGOs). Wired's Geekdad blog has has the review of U-Build Battleship, which plays just like regular Battleship, albeit with a customizable twist.

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Until recently, the closest we ever got to construction in a board game was Mousetrap, but this year Hasbro announced that it would be making LEGOized alternate versions of some of its biggest board game commodities (without, of course, real LEGOs).  Wired’s Geekdad blog has has the review of U-Build Battleship, which plays just like regular Battleship, albeit with a customizable twist.

The individual ships (aircraft carrier, submarine, etc) are constructed by players out of some basic gray pegs indicating turrets, radar, and other bits of naval fortifications.  However, each turn you choose a ship to fire from, and each ship can fire as many shots as it has turrets.  Each time a ship is hit, it loses a weapon.

Geekdad explains the new options this opens up to would-be naval commanders:

There are extra weapons included, and you can rearrange them to change the number each ship has, up to 10 weapons on a single ship. The new rules state that a ship is sunk when it has been hit as many times as its length or its number of weapons, whichever is lower. So if you have a 3-length Destroyer with eight weapons on it, it only takes three hits to destroy; but a 5-length Battleship with one gun takes only one hit to sink. Still, it would be possible to load up the short boats with lots of guns, so that you can continue taking a whole bunch of shots with the boat that’s hard to find.

Interesting indeed. Geekdad’s review is middling, but also (understandably) written with the game’s suitability for a younger audience in mind.  And certainly, the all-cardboard construction of the game board doesn’t inspire confidence, at least in someone who played with clunky rough plastic cases as a child.

But who doesn’t like making LEGO ships?  And who wouldn’t be intrigued by modeling their construction for strategic purposes? It adds strategy to what used to be something of a guessing game punctuated by “Aha!  Gotcha!” moments of ship obliteration.

You can read the full review, with more pictures, here.

It was a dark and stormy night.

In anticipation of Australia's internet filter, the voluntary euthanasia organization Exit International has begun to take action.  After realizing that they were on a leaked list of sites that would be blacklisted when the great Australian firewall (not pictured above) goes into operation, Exit International needed to find a way to teach its Australian members how to access their site.

Fortunately, under Australian law it is still legal to circumvent the filter and to show others how to do so.  But how to introduce 70 year olds to proxy servers and VPN tunnels?  Talk to your local Pirate Party, of course.]]>

In anticipation of Australia’s internet filter, the voluntary euthanasia organization Exit International has begun to take action.  After realizing that they were on a leaked list of sites that would be blacklisted when the great Australian firewall (not pictured above) goes into operation, Exit International needed to find a way to teach its Australian members how to access their site.

Fortunately, under Australian law it is still legal to circumvent the filter and to show others how to do so.  But how to introduce 70 year olds to proxy servers and VPN tunnels?  Talk to your local Pirate Party, of course.

David Campbell, a member of Australia’s Pirate Party, worked up a presentation, and is now teaching eight masterclasses on bypassing the content filter.  According to Computerworld, about fifty elderly people attended the first.

Campbell’s presentation (which can be found here) works fine if you are already a basic internet user, I think.  However, if you have little to no experience with the internet I’m not sure that it would succeed.  For example, the presentation doesn’t point out firmly that the internet is simply a network of connections between computers, of which the “internet” as a conceptualized physical location is one product.

Given that, all I have to go on is his PowerPoint presentation, so I don’t really know how well he stressed these points in person — Hopefully quite well.  Consider this another step along the path to unfettered internet access becoming a right instead of a privilege.

Other subjects on the list of censored sites include gay rights, stem cell research, and online gambling.

(via /.)

Attention, Mad Men fans: Mattel has heard your prayers for $75 Barbie and Ken dolls in the style of your favorite characters from the show, and they have decided to answer them. Mad Men characters Joan Holloway, Roger Sterling, Betty Draper, and (of course) Don Draper are getting the Barbiefication treatment, although the stick-thin Joan doll certainly belies New York Magazine's recent cover story on Christina Hendricks and the rebirth of voluptuousness.]]>

Attention, Mad Men fans: Mattel has heard your prayers for $75 Barbie and Ken dolls in the style of your favorite characters from the show, and they have decided to answer them. Mad Men characters Joan Holloway, Roger Sterling, Betty Draper, and (of course) Don Draper are getting the Barbiefication treatment, although the stick-thin Joan doll certainly belies New York Magazine’s recent cover story on Christina Hendricks [who plays Joan on Mad Men] and the rebirth of voluptuousness.

The New York Times reports:

The dolls are part of a premium-price collectors’ series for adults that Mattel calls the Barbie Fashion Model Collection. Although there have been Barbies and Kens based on other TV series, among them “I Love Lucy” and “The X-Files,” the dolls will be the first licensed line for that collection, Mattel says, with a suggested retail price of $74.95 each.

…

That [the Roger and Joan] dolls represent a relationship outside wedlock, and Don Draper’s propensity for adultery, may be firsts for the Barbie world since the brand’s introduction five decades ago. But for the sake of the Barbie image, her immersion in the “Mad Men” era will go only so far: The dolls come with period accessories like hats, overcoats, pearls and padded undergarments, but no cigarettes, ashtrays, martini glasses or cocktail shakers.

The excellent Footnotes of Mad Men (foot)notes that in 1959, Mattel began producing “Career Girl” Barbie dolls.

(Non-)spoiler alert: Mad Men fans may recall that Betty Draper (icily, because she’s Nordic) bought her daughter Sally a Barbie doll of her own in Season 3, which Sally proceeded to throw out the window, so it’s awful magnanimous of Mattel to overlook this brutal rejection of their brand.

The dolls will be available for purchase on amctv.com and barbiecollector.com.

(NYT via ONTD)