Games June 2025

June 30, 2025 10:28 pm

Started the month by dipping back into Mechs vs. Minions. We’re on to mission 5. We lost almost immediately and then restarted for another try. After an extended slog we successfully pushed the bomb onto each of the repair pads.

On my birthday I took the day off of work and we spent the afternoon starting Tales from the Red Dragon Inn (which I got for my birthday last year; too many games to play, too little time; though I was waiting for a 2nd-edition update kit which got released in the interim). We played scenario 1.1 and successfully defended the inn from the out-of-control training automata. It’s a fairly simple dungeon-crawling game with a campy atmosphere. So the emphasis is on fun rather than deep tactical analysis. I appreciate that the characters give a complexity rating to enable effective selection by family members of varying skill levels.

A couple days later we played scenario 1.2 and were victorious in fighting our way through the inn’s cellar to the intrusion site and defeating the giant gelatinous blob.

At the board game meetup I played a couple of ecological games. First was Undergrove in which you manage supplies of nitrogen, potassium, phosphorous, and carbon to grow mushrooms in the shared forest and then grow trees within the forest to enable end-game points.

It’s a clever game inspired by real growth networks of fungi. However, a design issue in which accuracy harms playability is that you manage both potassium and phosphorous and the tokens are denoted by chemical symbol. So potassium, is ‘K’ and phosphorous is ‘P’. Really easy to reach for the ‘P’ when you’re looking for potassium if you’re not already comfortable with potassium being ‘K’ (as occurred regularly by players in my game).

Overall I enjoyed the game, though I did not win. Lots of variety and opportunities for varying strategies, however it did seem like some locations were substantially more beneficial than others. Maybe there are strategies to balance that which I couldn’t see in a single play through.

The second ecological game of the night was Petrichor. It’s a game of clouds, rain, and crops. You add clouds to the grid of crops, move those clouds around, increase the water in them, and try to strategically rain on the crops. Each round you get a hand of cards which determine which actions you can take.

Whenever I learn a new game at an event my focus is on understanding the rules well enough to make valid moves on my turn that are not obviously bad and keep the game moving. Sometimes I “get” a game and can try to apply intentional strategies after a couple of turns. This was not one of those games. My moves were intended only to be shallowly useful to me based on the objectives I was able to easily understand with no grand strategy behind them. But sometimes that’s enough and I won this game. I think it’s much more strategically challenging than the fairly simple table presence would suggest.

A friend hosted a game day which I was able to stop by at for a few hours. Started by playing Explorers of Navoria. Each player has an expedition team on each of 3 continents. Nominally your task is to explore these continents and settle villages, however it turns out you can more or less ignore that aspect entirely and earn plenty of points doing other things. So from that perspective I think the designers missed something. I won, but I also felt like I didn’t play the game the way it was intended. There’s a too-powerful shortcut to points by focusing on a single tribe and grabbing a couple of cards that gives you points for each person in the tribe (which is what I did).

Explorers of Navoria was a little bit longer of a game and most of us were looking for something light and short to play next. That turned out to be Animals Gathering.

In Animals Gathering you are a mage gathering magical stones to restore lost animals from extinction. What that looks like in practice is rolling dice with shapes on the faces, those shapes determine which tangrams you can pick up and use to fill in the tangram-silhouettes of the animals on the cards you collect. But any shapes from your roll that you can’t use your opponents get to use. The dice have different shape distributions and you get to choose which dice you’ll roll. So there’s a little bit of strategy and tactics involved, but overall it’s light and easy to play. I won this but, if I recall correctly, the points were something like 26, 25, 25, 24. So extremely close.

After Animals Gathering we were waiting for another group to finish their game so we played a few rounds of Stool Pigeon. That went: loss, loss, loss, win. At no point did the person who “called” the round end up winning. Which makes sense given the mechanics of the game and makes me wonder about use a reverse psychology approach to the game–“calling” the round with a poor hand on the expectation that people will swap your cards out assuming they’re better than they are. Could be interesting to try.

Jess and I took an overnight trip to the coast for our anniversary and I gave her A Gentle Rain as an anniversary gift. We had both seen it online somewhere and thought she’d like it. It’s a calm, contemplative, solitaire game (you can play in groups by just taking turns). The theme of this game is that the lilies on the lake only bloom in the rain. Today a gentle rain is falling and your task is to lay out the lake tiles to create places where the eight lilies can bloom. There is no winning or losing though you can calculate a score for how well you did if you want. The point of the game is to be relaxing, quiet, and meditative. We played a few times. I don’t remember how many lilies we were able to place in any of the games though. Jess has been able to place all eight a few times playing solo.

At another board game meetup I was able to play a few games starting with Faraway, which I’ve played before. I got trounced in this game. I was unable to realize the main gambit I aimed for to boost my score, so I was quite thoroughly in last place. Still an interesting game in that it’s kind of upside-down engine building. You can only score points on a card based on the cards you play later.

Someone dug up an old kids game from 1988 called Up the River (which was apparently published under several names with the same mechanics and different themes–BoardGameGeek groups them together under the name Race Through Space). It is a deceptively simple game though. You each have three boats and the goal is to sail them to the harbor. The harbor has twelve docks numbered 1 to 12 (which are points) with each boat reaching the harbor claiming the highest available dock. At the end of each round the river flows downstream and if you have a boat at the bottom of the river it’s lost forever. On your turn you roll a die and decide which of your boats to move that amount.

Initially we all tried to save all three of our boats, but by the end we had all lost one. We suspect the better strategy is to strategically abandon one to begin with as gaining docks, say, 12 and 9 will handily win over someone straggling along all 3 boats claiming docks 7, 5, and 3.

Afterwards I was planning to head home, but someone wanted to play Shamans which they said was fairly short. So I let them convince me to join in. It was not particularly short however.

Shamans is a hidden role / defector game, but what I liked about it is that it’s played over several rounds and the defectors are random each round. So getting caught early on doesn’t eliminate you or make it impossible to do anything effective. Bluffing games are not generally my cup of tea–I like to play the games not the people at the table, but this was the most enjoyable one I’ve played because of that resetting that occurs each round removing some of the pressure. I was a defector for 2 of the 3 rounds in the game. I got caught once. The game is a little odd in that you have loyalists and defectors, but it’s still an individual that wins. So you’re operating in an environment of nominal cooperation of all players, but some players are cooperating against the others and everyone is trying to figure out who the teams are each round while also trying to position themselves to earn victory points. I did not win.

Jess and I played a game of Wyrmspan. I won with my strategy of prioritizing the Guild track. Neither of us managed to fill our caves with dragons this time.

And to finish off the month we played Creature Comforts as a family. Jess’ family of squirrels made the coziest home and won.

Books June 2025

5:54 pm

Edgedancer by Brandon Sanderson

A novella set in the Stormlight Archive universe.

I guess it’s a credit to Sanderson’s writing ability that I find the main character of this story so annoying. Immature, rash, flippant, lucky. But I suppose the point of the story was the character realizing many of these things by the end and begins to understand she’s going to have to take life more seriously in the future.

Perhaps the next time she shows up I’ll like her more.

Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder

The non-fiction, biographical narrative of Dr. Paul Farmer. Farmer came from poverty and dedicated his life to providing medical care for the impoverished–not just individually but at the public-health level too. Though “impoverished” isn’t quite the right word. The poor, the abandoned, the abused–les misérables. Those in the worst imaginable conditions throughout the world.

Fascinating story. Inspiring and humbling to consider how Farmer spent his life compared to what pretty much any the rest of us are doing to help our fellow beings.

Then I got bogged down starting Neal Stephenson’s massive Baroque Cycle. I might finish the first book in the trilogy within another week or two.

Kyle’s Birthday 2025

June 10, 2025 5:23 pm

I had been trying to come up with something to do for my birthday, but not finding anything exciting when Jess discovered there was a circus in town–Venardos Circus! They weren’t performing on my actual birthday, so we went to see it the day before. It was just down the street from us–couldn’t have been any more convenient. We drove over and ate lunch and then got in when they opened the doors so we could get pretty-much-perfect seats.

It was a small circus, which I think I liked better than a big production. No matter where you sat you were no more than ~30 feet from the stage so you got to see everything really up close. You could see the performers’ muscles shaking and watch the expressions on their faces showing how difficult the acts were. It felt more personal than a big production with hundreds of seats where everything is perfectly polished. I think the group perfectly embodied the concept of the traveling circus spectacle.

They had a juggler, a modern concept of a clown, acrobats, trampolines, lots of energy, and lots of fun. I highly recommend it and would be happy to go again if they come through town in the future.

The next day, I took the day off of work to enjoy my birthday. Had a lazy start to the day and did some reading. For lunch I wanted to sit somewhere quiet, so we took some sandwiches out to Brushy Peak Regional Preserve and sat at a shaded picnic table. Watched some rabbits or hares hopping around the landscape. It was nice.

There’s a rabbit in the shade under this picnic table:

After lunch we played the first scenario in Tales from the Red Dragon Inn. A game which I got for my birthday last year. I have too many campaign games waiting to be played. No buying more campaign games until I’ve played the ones I have. We were victorious (it’s intended to be a casual, light-hearted dungeon crawl, so winning should be pretty easy).

After getting the game cleaned up it was time for a surprise from the girls–my very own treasure hunt! I started by visiting the Library of Secrets and receiving a clue from the librarian. And from there I was sent all about the house until I had assembled the components of a computer and typed in the password I obtained along the way.

Completing the treasure hunt naturally unlocked my presents as the prize, which I opened next.

And from there it was dinner time. We went to BJ’s and it was decidedly disappointing. But there was a delicious cake waiting when we got back to make up for it.

After eating cake we went up the hill at Cayetano Park and watched the sun set. There was a cloud bank over the western hills, so it was a bit anti-climactic.

Demolitionist

June 3, 2025 8:50 pm

On Saturday I finally got around to painting the 4th miniature from “Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion.” Only 4 years and 2 months after I painted the first one!

This one is the Demolitionist. Smallest of the four with lots of detail. I spent a little over 3 hours on it. I’m extremely pleased with the painting, but then fumbled the finish by spraying on too much top coat. Now the surface has a goopy appearance and much of the fine detail was lost. So that’s annoying. I even managed to write “BYE” on the left gauntlet! I used the end of the eye on a needle to do that as I need something that, when it touched, wouldn’t bend and smear the paint. Even so it took a few tries.

And the whole gang! In order of when I painted them: Voidwarden, April 2021; Hatchet, November 2022; Red Guard, January 2025; Demolitionist, June 2025.

I guess now I can finally play the game.

3D Prints May 2025

May 31, 2025 4:40 pm

Jess started a new medication which only comes in liquid form, in fact it’s a cough syrup that enhances another medication she takes. To help her remember to take it I designed and printed little bottles to put in her pill case so she sees them when she takes her regular pills.

I modeled it using SolveSpace in like 30 minutes. Pretty happy with how it came out. Here are some of them with the original bottle:


I gave Jess the game Hardback for Mother’s Day. It’s a small box with a bunch of cards in it and some bits and pieces. I found someone designed an organizer for the bits and pieces that looks like a hardcover book. So I printed one of those. However, when I printed it I found it didn’t fit aligned in the box with the cards. It was too wide by ~2-3mm and would bow the box. Rather than try to adjust the model and reprint it I decided to augment what I had with an organizer for the cards so they don’t slide to the bottom when you take some of them out.

So now the bits-organizer sits perpendicular to the cards with room next to it for the game-modifier cards (Fanfiction Cards) with dividers for the other cards to keep everything in place. I’m quite happy with it. Also designed in SolveSpace. I spent a few hours on it partly because I made one design and then decided to scrap it and start over with a different approach.