I spent Sunday last weekend installing new shelves in the garage and then reorganizing our storage.
Before:
The new shelves (Everbilt heavy-duty, steel, shelving system):
I didn’t even reach the point of wanting to throw stuff out a window. And I only missed the stud once out of 33 screws.
Now all the Christmas stuff can be in one location instead of scattered all over the garage:
And the final state:
I got even less game playing in this month than last month. Hopefully I’ll be able to turn that around next month.
Jess and I completed Quest 10 in Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall. We didn’t manage to destroy the giant moth monster, but we escaped without dying and reached our objective. So kind of a draw.
At the board-game meetup I played Creature Comforts. A very cozy game about collecting little luxuries and comforts to prepare your woodland-creature home for the long winter. Make the coziest home to win. I lost.
Had a friend over and played Wyrmspan with Jess. Jess won handily.
The Circuit: Executor Rising by Rhett C. Bruno
Humanity is clinging on throughout the solar system after a cataclysmic collapse of Earth. But the story has little to do with humanity’s fragility. Instead we’re focused on one man’s vendetta against humanity’s continued existence.
He’s kind of a mustache-twirling cartoon villain.
The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells
The classic science fiction story of a man who finds a way to turn himself invisible through a series of bio-chemical reactions. Unfortunately, it also drives him mad.
The Curiosity Cycle by Jonathan Mugan
Theoretically a discussion about how to inspire curiosity in your children. But it feels mostly like a bunch of blog posts smashed into a book. A disappointing lack of serious research analysis and more of “here are ideas I like.”
Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka
This was a book group pick for work. Was not originally expecting to see Mike show up so much in it.
Long story short, government bodies fail at technological implementation because they’re structured to operate in a 19th century world and actual implementation of policy is considered an annoying detail that politicians don’t want to be bothered with worrying about.
It doesn’t have to be this way. But it currently is. I see a lot of the same organizational faults at the Lab and it’s supremely frustrating.
Whiteout by Ken Follett
It’s Christmas and trouble is brewing for a BSL-4 laboratory in Scotland housing some of the world’s most dangerous pathogens.
Meanwhile a monster of a snowstorm descends upon the region and everything gets more complicated.
Also didn’t get much designing and printing done this month.
I did make an updated light-switch plate for the living room with fall leaves. Yellow seemed like a nice contrast to the red, but it’s basically impossible to see from a few feet away. Orange would have been a better choice.
And I printed a bunch of things for Heather’s parties. A spider to dangle from the chandelier, the cats and mice for the adventure, and the party-favor pumpkins.
Pretty cool to be able to decide, “I want a big spider to dangle over the table.” Then click some buttons and in a couple of hours and for less than a dollar you’ve got one.
Didn’t get much game playing done this month. Too much going on with birthday preparations and Halloween I guess.
I made it out to one game night and one afternoon of games at a friend’s house.
At the game night I first played Flamecraft. I’d played once before when the owner first got it and brought it to a game night–which was probably at least a year ago. It’s got really cute artwork about dragons and the town they inhabit. I had thought the girls would like it, but the gameplay can be a little challenging and I deferred adding it to my collection.
On each turn you choose from a variety of actions to collect resources or help grow the town. It’s competitive, but not adversarial. There are several actions you engage in which require you to give other players resources or points and it’s not a zero-sum game.
I had a difficult start, but had two turns where I was able to really capitalize on fortuitous situations on the board and pulled out a sound win at the end.
After Flamecraft I played Zoo Vadis. I knew I wasn’t going to care for this game from the beginning as it’s a wheeling/dealing negotiation/backstabbing game which just isn’t my jam. But I go to play and this is what people wanted to play. Unsurprisingly I lost.
You play as a group of animals in a zoo and your goal is to negotiate with the other animals to get your group promoted up to the premiere animal enclosure.
At the afternoon of games we started by playing Apiary. I played part of a game previously to take over for someone leaving, so this time I got to play through from the beginning. It’s a bit of an odd game–sentient space bees building out spaceships–but, it has solid mechanics (as can usually be expected from Stonemaier Games).
I made a run for points via the “Queen’s Favor” track and chalked up another sound win for the month.
After Apiary I convinced a group to play The Stifling Dark. I got this from a crowdfunding campaign in December 2023, but hadn’t gotten around to playing it yet. It being October it seemed like a good time to give it a go.
I originally backed it because it’s a bit of a table-top incarnation of an online game I’d been playing with friends for a while called Phasmophobia. Team of investigators need to go into a haunted location and avoid being killed by the ghost while completing some objective. So same concept, but here someone has to play the ghost.
Having not played before (which I warned everyone about) it was a learning experience and the game ran quite long. I played as the ghost stalking and attacking the investigators who were trying to escape the abandoned sawmill. The team managed to get the gate powered up and one of them made it out alive, but I got the rest–which counts as a win for me.
I think the game could easily be shortened by skipping the “Act 1” evidence-collection phase and instead dropping the characters in the map and randomly drawing an objective for them (with some balance adjustments to the ghost as well). That would probably get a game down to under 1.5 hours. Our game, with learning, making mistakes, looking things up, and trying to make sense of it all, ran for ~4 hours–which was a bit much.