5. Bill And Ted Face The Music

I’m not going to lie, movie watching was done this year. If I didn’t have a lot of December year end and year beginning articles to write, I might not even have Bill and Ted Face the Music on the list. I fully expect that Spider-Man No Way Home will push this off the list. But I haven’t seen that yet.

Bill and Ted Face the Music is a fun film, it’s a good end to the Bill and Ted “trilogy” that didn’t need to be a trilogy. It follows their kids as they try and find the music again before the world ends. Because Bill and Ted haven’t written the song that is going to save the world as the first movie predicted.

In my review, and I still stand by this, I’d watch the original two over and over, but Bill and Ted Face the Music just is fine. You can see some brief thoughts on it here. The movie just seems to lose some of the heart that the other ones have, which makes sense because it’s a long time later. But the year has slim movie pickings for me.

4. Dune

Another one I’m not sure would make the list in a normal year. Granted, I think it would because it’s such a gorgeous movie. Dune is a movie a Dune fans in the best way possible. It’s also a movie for Dune fans in the worst way possible. It tells the story and stays true to the first book too a fault. I like the book, but the first part is extremely dry and it’s not even on Arrakis yet.

But they get the look right, the casting is solid, and the music is great. Once the action kicks in, the last 30 minutes of the movie, it’s really fun. I want to see the second part because even more happens there. But I’m not going to be jumping for joy for the first part. I think if I watch both together, it’ll be very long, but I’ll appreciate it a lot.

3. Black Widow

I won’t lie, it’s Marvel from here on out. Marvel is a soft spot for me, but they did a good job on all their movies this year. I don’t think they messed up any of them. Black Widow is the lowest just because it was a nice Black Widow story, but after Endgame, I don’t need more Black Widow story. And while it sets up some characters, I don’t think it sets up enough, but I do like Yelena a lot.

This is my favorite Marvel spy movie, it’s more Bond like and more my style as compared to something like Captain America: Winter Soldier. Some of that is that it has more humor in it. Some is that Winter Soldier tries to be Bourne, which I thought was just okay and isn’t my style and Black Widow tries to be classic Bond which I like more.

2. The Eternals

The Eternals might not make some people’s lists, but I really enjoyed it. You can hear my thoughts on it on the 10 Minute Marvel Podcast here. But this is a different type of Marvel film. It is building a new team. And it builds a team in a very different way. It also creates a much larger world/universe to be dealt with within the MCU.

I think that the story plays out well. While I kind of get why it can feel rushed, I think the character motivations all make sense. And when they divide as to who they stand with, it makes sense. The acting was very solid as well in this movie. Gemma Chan and Lia McHugh really steal the show, but so many of the roles are well done.

1. Shang Chi And the Legend of the Ten Rings

My Top Marvel film and top movie I saw in 2021 is Shang-Chi. Disclaimer, this is before seeing Spider-Man: No Way Home, and I don’t know what to expect from that. But Shang Chi blended so much together really well. It felt most like a Marvel film for the new character introduced. And the humor in the movie is a lot of fun. I think the humor is better than the Eternals.

Plus, the action in the film is so nice. Clearly taking inspiration from the style of other movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, it is some of the best action I’ve seen. There is such artistry in how it is done and there are also some nods to anime in the fighting style at times as well.

That’s my list for 2021. The only other movie I could even consider, that I remember is the Addams Family animated film, my wife and I rented and watched the first one of those. It is a perfectly fine movie. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but I’d also not tell people to skip it. It’s just a fun, pretty straightforward, movie without many twists are great jokes.

What are the best movies you saw for the first time this year?

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So, most people are going to be somewhat familiar with the idea of an escape room. They have been something very popular in the US at least over the last handful of years and have been a concept for longer than that starting in 2007. The idea of these are that you and a group get placed into a room with a time limit on how long you have to escape. You need to work together to find clues, solve, puzzles, and get out of the escape room. These are generally themed around something, maybe you are trying to get out of an asylum or you are doing a jail break.

They’ve taken this over to board games in a few different ways and series of games. Some of the games are intertwined stories that expand over time as you go. Others are one off games that pit you and a group against a certain amount of time or will give you a score based off of how long it takes and how many clues you use. In these games you have things like ciphers to break, numbers leading to the next thing hidden on cards, in images, and so many more different puzzles.

Players in these games work together to solve these puzzles, it might be somewhat on their own, but generally there is free communication and collaboration around the table as you try different solutions and race against the time. Fairly often that means that these games could play an infinite number of players, but since everyone needs to see what is on the cards, there is limited real estate to do that, so more than a handful starts to become a little bit cramped.

But let’s look at some games in this style:

Gateway Game

Unlock – This is a series of games that aren’t connected except around mechanics. In these games you are using cards to find items, figure out puzzles and get to the next room so that you can eventually escape. It might be something like escaping from Oz or a submerged submarine or a haunted house. What these games do different than some is that you buy them as a one off or in a set of three. And each is playable once by the same group, but they aren’t destructive in nature. What I mean by that is not pieces need to be modified to solve any of the puzzles. It also uses an app integration for the timer and for entering in codes to see if you can unlock some doors or open a safe. This allows them to create some nice thematic tension with a sound track for the game you are playing.

Medium Weight

Exit – Now, there isn’t a massive difference between Unlock and Exit, both of them are pretty light weight, Exit is just going to have you stretch your brain more because you have more puzzles and more almost disconnected puzzles in it. Along with that, Exit is a destructive game. That means that you might end up pulling apart some of the box to get something or cutting up a piece of paper in order to able to easily solve the puzzle. The reason I say that this is medium weight versus Unlock’s gateway level is because that you can’t just focus directly on the puzzle, you have to go over everything because you don’t know where a clue to solve the puzzle might be hidden so it stretches the brain more but can be more frustrating as well for that reason, but if Unlock seems to easy, Exit is a slight step up.

Heavy Weight

TIME Stories – Now, I actually, again, don’t think that TIME Stories is too heavy, and there might be some people who disagree with this being an escape room game, but it certainly has a lot of the elements of it. You’re trying to figure out what is going on in a timeline after you and your team are sent into the past, future, another dimension, to stop something that is about to royally mess up the timeline. Your memories and knowledge are put into a body there so you can blend in, You go on runs trying to solve the case, and if you run out of time with the event happening the TIME agency can send you back in again, equipped with the knowledge that you have to try and solve it again. For this reason TIME Stories, while once you complete the case is basically a one and done, has a longer playing time and more game that you can get out of it. It’s also is easier to play over multiple sessions because you can more easily save between the runs that you make. Overall, not an extremely complex game, but it has more moving parts than the others do.

There are a lot more Escape Room games out there or games that have a similar feel to them. I did a Board Game Battle recently between TIME Stories and Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game, and while there are similarities, TIME Stories has more of an escape room feel versus Detectives more deductive feel. What are some of your favorite escape room style board games? Do you like escape rooms in real life, if so, how do the games compare to the places?

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In a Halloween game, you’re obviously looking at a few basic ideas. You either are going with a monster situation, so something like a vampire, Frankenstein’s monster, werewolves, or zombies – the classics, or you might be looking at a cult, or you might be going with something more twisted and sinister, but it isn’t going to be a story about picking daisies in a meadow somewhere. The story ideas are going to be a bit more grim, a lot of the time. But before you go making the darkest D&D game possible for Halloween, we get to our first point.

If you think about D&D as a movie, what sort of Halloween movie do you want this to be like? Are you going to go with something dark and gritty like Repulsion, see my Halloween Movies Post for what it’s like, or something that’s a little bit more off the wall like Repo! The Genetic Opera or Cabin the Woods? Both of these are fun things, and you can go quite goofy with the latter. But it depends on the feel that you are going for. So, as you’re planning picking which type you’re going for will determine a lot of other things.

From here a lot of your game building is going to be fairly similar to a normal one shot. Think about what sort of encounters you want, keep them varied, do combat, social, investigative, even skill challenges. Try and focus the theme down more so onto the game that you are going for. Also, plan out some more description than you might normally. The more you can describe, the more you can set the theme for your game. If you’re going for something that’s more serious, set it with description that demonstrates how the world seems off.  Plan this out ahead of time, because it’ll be tricky to do it all on the fly and it’ll be one of your bigger tools to use.

When it comes to the actual session, there are things you can do to reinforce the scene. If you normally play in a well lit room or during daytime, move it to a darker location or at night. Running the game outside can even be fun. But, for example, if you are playing a Gothic style of vampire game, play at a table light in a room that is primarily lit by candle light. Just have enough light that you can see the player sheets. Music is also going to be nice and easy to create the feel that you are going for. It can either be ambient noises like a woods if you are hunting down werewolves in a dark forest or it can be be organ music for when you come to the vampires castle. It might be cheesy, but if that’s the type of game that you are going for, it’ll work out just fine.

That’s how I’d run a one shot for Halloween. I wouldn’t recommend doing it at a convention, unless you have your own room where you can control the atmosphere, a big convention hall just won’t work.

But what are some ideas, because that’s what I really like coming up with:

Dracula’s Lair

Your players are a team of vampire hunters who are pretty skilled at what they do. They’ve managed to figure out when the vampire lord Dracula lives. It’s a pretty straight forward murder Dracula game. What I’d do is create it into a house of horrors, the castle that Dracula lives in. Start with the players getting social interactions with some villagers who can help them find a “secret” entrance into Dracula’s lair. Then once in the lair, have Dracula show up and taunt them, throw Renfields at them, other vampire spawn they have to deal with, and traps and puzzles they have to figure out. None of the combats/challenges should be too hard, but the players shouldn’t have a chance to rest. Make it about resource management for them, and let them figure it out as they go along, and then allow creative solutions to problems.

The Last Night

A zombie outbreak has happened and only pockets of nomadic people are still around. The adventuring party has banded together and is being forced to defend a small tent town from a horde of zombies that is coming over the hill at them. Another game idea where you’re trying to keep enough resources in reserve in some ways, but I’d probably borrow from my Pride, PrejuDICE, and Zombies game where there is one head zombie. The players have to make rolls for the army of humans or for themselves to take out a large horde of zombies, but mainly, they are trying to take out the necromancer who is controlling the zombies. But if rolls are going poorly enough, have some way to track if the zombies are getting closer to the civilians or not. Lots of women and children in that group will probably mean that the players try and stop the attack. So dealing with the horde is a skill challenge whereas dealing with the necromancer or head zombie is going to be straight up combat. You could also make this on the road and the players being harried by zombie attacks as they try and keep the civilians safe and make it to a safe zone.

Love Bites

A werewolf is madly in love with a village boy and they enlist the adventuring parties help to get the boy to notice the werewolf and possibly agree to become a werewolf. This game is clearly on the sillier side of things, but it would be a number of quick quests that the players can do. Vary them up from collecting a certain flower or weapon that is lost deep in the woods, finding a master poet to write a poem for the werewolf to give to the boy, fight through a band of goblins to keep the boy safe while they are out hunting in the woods, etc. Find a few of those and make them fairly absurd how the players have to do it so that the game has more of a lighter feel to it.  Maybe even hold off on the werewolf reveal until a few minutes into the game when the players have already agreed to help. They shouldn’t attack the werewolf because the players have agreed to play in the game, and you can also create PC’s for them to play who aren’t going to be apt to kill the werewolf as a monster.

Have you ran a horror through D&D before? How did that work, would it work well for a Halloween game?

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This show lives up to its name, being a very dark show and very atmospheric. On their own, the shots of the forest surrounding Winden and the slow pacing give the viewer a feeling of always being on edge; this is then enhanced greatly by the soundtrack. Dark is a slow burn, but in the best way possible. Everything about it aesthetically builds into this, and you connect pieces and see how 2019 ties into 1986. You get to see characters as they were growing up, and then as they are now, and you see things in a different way than you often do for a TV show. There is also an idea in this show of not really knowing who people are, so as you explore more in 1986, you start to really see how the characters in 2019 became the way that they are.

Dark is a show that needs to be watched in German with subtitles though, in my opinion, in order to get the full feeling of the show. It’s too distracting when something that takes a couple of words to say in German takes five in English, or vice versa. I can watch dubbed anime most of the time because the mouths don’t really match up with the words anyway, but in this show, with the difference between German to English being more obvious, it was too jarring. And as it is a well paced show and a slow burner, there aren’t many moments that are just rushed through — because of that, you never feel like you’re rushing through reading the subtitles and missing what is happening on the screen, so I really would recommend using the subtitles.

Another thing that I’ve seen as a criticism of Dark is that it doesn’t wrap up more than a couple of the mysteries very satisfyingly. I liken this to a number of Brandon Sanderson books, in which one orverarching story is split into four or five parts. There’s almost always some payoff for each part of the story, and you feel like you’ve wrapped up that part, but it doesn’t wrap up the story as a whole. Dark is very much like that as well, and the only annoying thing about that is that I really want the next part of the story to be available now. For some, this might be annoying and might make it worth waiting for the second season to come out before watching the first (apparently, 2019 is when season two will reach Netflix, though I’m hoping it will sooner). However, if you’re looking for a new show that’s intense, creepy, and eerie, I wouldn’t bother waiting, as Dark is probably the best show I know of for that.

Overall, I loved this show. It hits the right notes for me — it’s a creepy show without being focused on jump scares or anything like that. It feels intense, it draws you in, and the characters are compelling. It’s a show where all the characters feel like they are some level of grey, where they aren’t bad, but aren’t entirely good. They also aren’t just grey for the sake of being grey, because that often just makes a character feel like a bad guy; they all have specific motivations that are tough, and they genuinely believe that they are doing the right thing or are doing something out of deep and strong emotions. Dark tugs at your heartstrings and keeps you wanting to know what will happen next.

I’d recommend Dark for most people. For some people it is going to be too intense; for some it is going to be too creepy. Kristen half-watched it because she thought it would be too creepy and scary, and I think with what it deals with, it might have been too much for her in some ways. It doesn’t go overboard on the scary or creepy aspects, but it also doesn’t let up on them. So watch the trailer before you watch the show if you are someone who isn’t sure about creepy shows, because this one is dark and intense.

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