Vesper Is Growing!

Back into the Funwhole! I picked up another big cyberpunk building set from Lumibricks. The mysterious city of Vesper is growing...

Gratitude

These days, I'm especially grateful for the opportunity to spend time with my family. We had a quiet weekend at home, and free time enough to play all three active campaigns: the revived Shattered Realm campaign with Matthew and Nathaniel, the Zoom-based Druid Cycle game with the boys and their cousins in Michigan, and finally the Vanguard Saga campaign with the boys and Amy. Any weekend we can get together around the ol' RPG table is a blessing.

MotU Trailer

HELL YES!

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

The latest GoT spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, premieres tonight on HBO!

MotU Madness

The boys got the core set for Masters of the Universe: Battleground for Christmas, and we finally made the time to try it out this afternoon. For a game based on a kids' show that features fast, crazy action, Battleground plays about as fast as Ram Man trying to solve calculus equations. There's a lot of tactical depth, however, and the game reminds me a lot of Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team. 

In today's smackdown, Matthew played as the good guys (He-Man, Man-at-Arms, and Stratos), while Nathaniel had the baddies (Skeletor, Mer-Man, and my all-time favorite MotU villain, Trapjaw). He-Man claimed an objective token in the first round to give the heroes an early lead, but Mer-Man and Skeletor focused fire on the big guy and brought him down shockingly quickly. That's right, folks -- He-Man was the first character to get knocked out! Trapjaw and Stratos had also fallen by the fourth and final round, leaving just Skeletor, Mer-Man, and Man-at-Arms on the battlefield. Matthew had a chance to win the game by knocking out Mer-Man, but the slippery villain somehow dodged the attack. As such, the game ended in a draw. 

I'm sure Battleground plays a lot faster once you master all the rules and options, but it felt painfully slow and fiddly. Nathaniel really liked it, so I'm sure we'll give it another whirl with other characters -- I mean, we've gotta see what Orko can do, right?!

2026!

I just can't even wrap my mind around the fact that it's 2026. It should be 1989 -- and 2026 is the year of a cyberpunk campaign I'm running on Sugar Mountain BBS. 

2026 is also the year I hit the half-century mark. Yikes...

Fun With Maps

We're all sick with the flu, but at least we got the opportunity to do a quiet, low-energy family project together -- a puzzle depicting a map of the Game of Thrones world. I'm falling in love with this world all over again as I listen to the series on Audible, so it's been great sharing little nuggets of story lore with Amy and the boys as we've built the map together. The first layer of the puzzle is a conventional jigsaw...

This set also includes an overlay with another (far less complex) puzzle of soft foam pieces into which you can insert three-dimensional plastic models of the world's most famous cities and castles. Here's a look at the puzzle with those elements included...

It's been a slow and kind of miserable week, but at least we did something, right?