AFNB

It seems like there have been several recent times that Dan's delayed the comic for health reasons. Is anyone else becoming concerned?

Seems like Owl-Griffin agrees with me - Elliot calling this a "villain" form is a huge exaggeration. Dude sees things in black and white, and that's a very bad thing.

Elliot sees things far too polarized - this form seems more anti-hero than villain to me. Willing to cross the line for the right reasons.

Fit Grace looks goooood (and not just because I like abs on a girl).

I don't think there has been a GIRL named Spike.

"Is she a ninja?" Only when she's sleepy.

It is Hasbro, and there have always been cards as part of it - spells, treasures, and artifacts mostly. This new release also uses the Equipment deck from the Euro release rather than a big cardboard sheet, in addition to equipment from said Euro release. And yes, Hasbro is publishing it now.

In 1989, Milton Bradley worked with Games Workshop to produce a fantasy adventure board game called Hero Quest. It was, I believe, the first of it's kind, a simple dungeon crawl - go in, fight the monsters, find the treasure, and make it out alive. A board provides the basic framework, and a quest map tells how each individual adventure is set up. Four heroes - a fighting barbarian, a spell-slinging wizard, an elf who does a little of both, and a dwarven warrior-rogue good at disarming traps. Several expansions came out, the last one in the mid-90s. MB eventually let their trademark lapse, but a fan following has endured, making new quests, new tiles, and new adventures. A year or two ago, someone at Hasbro (which has apparently bought Milton Bradley) apparently looked through the game, and discovered that Games Workshop's contribution included very little of the lore that came from Warhammer, and decided to re-release the game. It's been sized up a bit, and received a cosmetic upgrade. Cardboard furniture and brittle plastic hero/monster pieces were replaced with sturdier plastic. The result looks glorious, and I got a copy of it for Christmas - including the first two original expansions, three completely new quest books, and three new playable options for heroes. Does anyone else have any fond memories of this game?

At least you survived.

I was always planning on sharing the official NASA rankings and reasons behind them. That's the last part of the exercise - scoring, seeing how well you did.

Okay, since people seem to be about done with the exercise, here's the link to the actual thing: https://www.csuchico.edu/anthmuseum/_assets/documents/nasa-exercise-survival-on-the-moon.pdf

The NASA rankings also give the reasoning behind them, and while not necessarily innovative, some of them do have some good ingenuity behind them. Others rely more on actual knowledge of how such things work. I also mainly gave the clarification of the points system because Darth Fluffy was the only one to assign any numbers, and even then only went to 10.

It's apparently from 1999.

I'll let you guys keep discussing it, but I want to point out that the rankings are a part of the puzzle - the exercise also comes with a list of how NASA ranks each item. You score points based on how far your ranks differ, and this is one where you want a 'LOW score - it means you got close to the correct ratings for everything.

I actually know the survival puzzle that Dan is referencing. The original was actually about ranking the 15 items in order of importance. For anyone that wants to play: You are a member of a space crew originally scheduled to rendezvous with a mother ship on the lighted surface of the moon. However, due to mechanical difficulties, your ship was forced to land at a spot some 200 miles from the rendezvous point. During reentry and landing, much of the equipment aboard was damaged and, since survival depends on reaching the mother ship, the most critical items available must be chosen for the 200-mile trip. Below are listed the 15 items left intact and undamaged after landing. Your task is to rank order them in terms of their importance for your crew in allowing them to reach the rendezvous point. Place the number 1 by the most important item, the number 2 by the second most important, and so on through number 15 for the least important. A box of matches Food concentrate 50ft of nylon rope Parachute silk Portable heating unit Two .45 caliber pistols One case of dehydrated milk Two 100lb tanks of oxygen A stellar map A self-inflating life raft A magnetic compass 20L of water Signal flares A first aid kit, including an injection needle A solar-powered FM receiver-transmitter.