Games April 2025

April 30, 2025 10:11 pm

Lost a game of Creature Comforts played with friends. Still enjoy playing. Made a cozy little house for my critters to spend the Winter.

Played Quest 11 of Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall. We were defeated, I think by some gargoyles if I remember correctly. We seem to be getting slapped around pretty good recently. I think we needed at least one of our characters to be much stronger on defense to absorb more damage. But we should be getting close to the end of the story now.

Played Harmonies at the board game meet up. It’s a game of stylized ecosystem building. You place tokens that describe terrain types and place animals in their habitats to gain points. I won.

After Harmonies, we played Hardback. It’s kind of a deck-building version of Scrabble. You start with a deck of cards with letters on them and on your turn you have to make a word and the letters used determine how many points or coins you get. You use coins to buy new letters to add to your deck. It was fun. It solves one of the biggest issues with Scrabble which is your turn is often highly impacted by the other players so you often need notable time to make a move during your turn which slows the whole game down. In Hardback you can figure out your word and then just play it when its your turn so everything goes pretty quick. I lost.

And after Hardback, we played Stockpile–a game about engaging in insider trading on the stock market. Not my typical choice of game concept, but the mechanics are well designed and I enjoyed playing. I lost.

Back at home we played a round of Kodama: The Tree Spirits with friends. Grow your tree and create cozy homes for the tree spirits. I lost.

Introduced the girls to Heat: Pedal to the Metal. I gave them a substantial advantage in having additional heat cards and fewer stress cards while giving myself a substantial handicap of fewer heat cards and more stress cards. I also handicapped the “computer” players. I put up a good fight, but Heather won in the end after I pushed too hard and spun out on the last lap. Corinne found the concept of intentionally using heat to push harder to be too stressful and chose to play it safe. She still came in second.

Books April 2025

6:59 pm

The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson

The 3rd book in what-is-apparently the first Mistborn trilogy.

The world continues to deteriorate after Vin assassinates the Lord Ruler. Things are looking bleak as forces they don’t understand ravage the countryside. Then, a hero arises.

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

I really liked Anathem and was hoping for something in a similar vein of uniqueness in terms of world building. However, Reamde takes place in a contemporary setting. Mostly an action-adventure story with some bits of spy novel mixed in.

It was fine, but not quite what I was looking for at the moment. And it’s very long. Spent most of the month reading it.

Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich

A hurricane ravages New York City. One guy predicted the cascading failures and follow-on disasters around the event. But then decides to live a life of isolation.

I’m still not really sure what the point of the story was. The writing was fine, but when I finished it was mostly, “okay, I guess were done now.” But maybe that had to do with being phenomenally distracted by other events while trying to finish the last ~15%.

Games March 2025

March 30, 2025 5:17 pm

Played another race in Heat: Pedal to the metal at the board game meetup. I lost. Still enjoying this game a lot each time though.

After the race we played a session of Unmatched. It’s a player-vs-player battle system made of up compatible, themed-boxes of characters. I played as Hamlet who on each turn had to decide whether “To Be” or “Not To Be.” With each option offering various tradeoffs. Hamlet faced off against Ms. Marvel, Dr. Strange, and someone else I’ve forgotten. I lost.

Played a couple of games of Creature Comforts during the month. Still enjoying the cozy art and chill gameplay. I lost one game and won one game.

At the next board game meetup we played another session of Marvel Dice Throne: X Men. This time we played 2v2 teams. I played as Psylocke. I rolled an Ultimate move which tipped things in my team’s favor and led to our scant victory.

With time for something short we played two rounds of Stool Pigeon. This is a silly game of memorization and deception. You each have cards with points on them face down in front of you. You get few opportunities to look at them and many opportunities to swap them around the table. Your goal is to have the fewest points on your cards at the end which occurs when someone uses their turn to trigger a final turn for the other players. I lost the first game, which I called (I managed to work myself down to only 2 cards, but other players swapped in high-value cards on their last turn). I won the second game when someone else called and I was able to keep a hold of only very-low value cards without anyone taking them off me. A silly game, but fun for killing 10-20 minutes at a time.

Jess and I finally got back around to moving our Kinfire Chronicle’s: Night’s Fall campaign forward. We picked up a side quest (Quest 21) and were doing quite well in the battle. But we lost control of our boat and capsized. So we weren’t defeated by the enemy, but neither did we defeat them. Tails tucked between our legs we limped back to town still dirt poor after several less-than-successful missions in a row.

Update:

Played a couple sessions of Keep the Heroes Out! with the family on the last day of the month. We played scenario 7 on “challenging” difficulty and were defeated fairly quickly. So we reset and played again on “family” difficulty. We were defeated again, but we survived a lot longer.

Books March 2025

4:57 pm

The Face of Battle by John Keegan

A British Academic’s attempt at understanding what the experience of “battle” is. He attempts to isolate variables by focusing on three battles for which considerable historical data exists, which all occurred in northern France, and which involved in the fighting the French, the English, and–in the Somme–the Germans.

I found Keegan’s prose to be challenging. Asides within asides made it difficult to parse sentences. Maybe this is a common style of British academia. But it made for difficult reading at times.

While his attempts to characterize “battle” are quite interesting the thing standing out to me most is the incredible scale through which battle has evolved over time. From low tens-of-thousands combatants at Agincourt fighting over the course of hours to more than 3 million combatants at the Somme fighting for over 4 months. It’s staggering how much energy humans will muster to annihilate each other.

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

This was someone’s pick for our book group at work. Extremely frustrating to read as we watch Republicans give Musk free reign to dismantle our government. The book lays out in excruciating detail how Musk has spent decades flat out lying about anything and everything and getting away with it. Promise after promise and hype after hype he has failed to deliver and simply pivots to a new, shinier, grander lie to distract from his previous failures. And now he’s doing the same thing while destroying our country.

Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson

Having played the recent board game of the same title a couple of times I figured I should read it. Jess has had the trilogy since before we got married, so they’ve just been sitting on the shelf waiting for me.

While I couldn’t put my finger on why, I feel like I can tell it’s one of Sanderson’s earlier works–that his writing has matured since then.

I still enjoyed it though.

The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson

So I went on and read the second book the trilogy too.

While some set up was done in the first book it was clear the first book could have been left to stand on its own if not received well. So it was kind of interesting to get a story that has to pick up from “we defeated the big bad guy and we’re in charge now!” and follow through on “yah, now you’re in charge, how does that work out for you?” It’s not rainbows and sunshine. And then it gets worse.

Looking forward to finishing the story with book three.

Corinne’s 10th Birthday

March 29, 2025 11:39 am

Corinne wanted more Minecraft adventuring for her Birthday. During the past year she was really excited about getting a bees add on so this year’s adventure was focused on bees.

Her adventure started with a return to Blockville from last year. The villagers welcomed her back and informed her of some exciting changes in town. First, the Ender Dragon she helped last year (whose name turned out to be Ethan) had taken a liking to humans and moved into town. Second, bees had appeared and everyone was having a blast raising them and eating honey. They suggested she try her hand at setting up a hive.

Her first task was to speak to farmer Peregrine who knew all about hives and how to craft them. But, alas, a zombie attack had left his hive recipe in tatters. She would need to repair the recipe before she could make a hive.

With the recipe repaired she determined she needed 8 pieces of wood and block of lemongrass to create the hive. So off to the Forest to find it.

With supplies in hand she used the crafting table in the Workshop to make the bee hive. Then she spoke to beekeeper Beatrice, who moved to Blockville to follow the bees, about how to attract bees to her hive. Beatrice told her that her best option was to talk to Ethan (the Ender Dragon). He always had great information about where to find bees. There would be a price to his information, but it would be worth it.

Ethan told her that he had developed quite a taste for honey. He’d tried many kinds, but had heard legend of a special “galactic honey” that he just needed to try. If she could collect the right kind of bees and the right kind of nectar the bees would turn it into galactic honey. He gave Corinne a list of bees and where to find them. (I 3D-printed a bunch of little Minecraft bees in various colors and hid them around the house and outside.)

With the proper bees collected she needed to collect nectar (from in jars with Minecraft flowers scattered about) and then test it for quality. Ethan provided a special testing powder that, when added to high-quality nectar, would cause it to bubble and fizz (I decided to capitalize on Corinne’s lack of a sense of smell; nectar was either vinegar or water, thus the special powder was baking soda).

I apparently didn’t take any pictures of the galactic honey, so we’ll have to make do with this screengrab from the video camera. It was corn syrup with some blue and purple food coloring and some sparkly sprinkles (which mostly sank to the bottom). I had tried to make “rainbow honey”, but the food coloring was far too effective at diffusing throughout the corn syrup even after trying to use corn starch to change the densities of the colors.

Ethan was ecstatic about the galactic honey. To show Corinne his appreciation he gave her a compass he’d received from a wandering trader. The trader had promised it would lead to treasure, so if she found something she could keep it.

The compass was a crowdfunding project I backed last year (Truest North Compass). It uses GPS and a magnetometer to show you the direction and distance to a programmable point on the Earth. Unfortunately, the rain seemed to be interfering with its accuracy. And the magnetometer was confused while inside the van. So it didn’t go quite how I had hoped it would, but we found the treasure box hidden in the hollow of a tree at a nearby park (a friend placed it and kept an eye on it while we made our way there).

Back home to open it up and find it full of coins. Minecraft Coins! (As described in the contained envelope.)

Then Corinne opened some presents. We went to dinner at the location of her choice (McDonald’s). Then back home for cake. Another successful birthday.