Skyward Bound!

Of the "Forbidden" series of cooperative tile-based board games -- including the original, Forbidden Island, and its sequel, Forbidden Desert -- we find Forbidden Sky to be the most challenging. There are a lot of ways to lose, and the game feels more luck-driven than its two predecessors. In our house, only Nathaniel, playing solo, had ever beaten it -- and that was just once.

Today, with Matthew in San Francisco at a Pacific Swim all-star meet, Nathaniel and I sat down for a session of Sky, with he as the medic and I as the surveyor. Despite near-constant lightning strikes, we managed to get the components on the board quickly and into as tight a configuration as possible. We both made it to the landing pad with one tick left on the storm tracker. Laying the last piece of wire to complete the circuit and thereby trigger the lights and sounds of the rocket was, honestly, a lot more satisfying than I expected it to be!

Towns & Taverns

The Dungeon is one of my top two or three favorite Kickstarter projects of all time. Those maps are super-duper useful for any sort of fantasy gaming action. Now the same folks have unveiled their latest Kickstarter initiative, Towns & Taverns. Same ideas as the first one, but oriented around urban environments. First day and it's already funded!

Clinched!

It was a wild one, but the Vics came away with a 5-3 win over the Comets in their final meeting of the regular season and thereby clinched first place -- and, with it, home-ice advantage in the championship series. In his first game back from an injury scare, Cyclone Taylor tied a league record with five points (two goals, three assists) and helped his team withstand Frank McGee's second hat trick of the season. We still have a couple of games left to play before the championship, but I'm already salivating over the prospect of another Taylor/McGee showdown!

First Place on the Line

Each team has now played 10 out of 12 regular-season games, and what we know for sure is that the Victorias and Comets will meet in the championship series. We don't know yet which team will get home-ice advantage in that best-of-three series, as the teams are separated by only two points. This next game -- with the Vics hosting the Comets in their final head-to-head match-up -- will be critical. If the Vics win, they'll mathematically clinch first place; if the Comets win, it will all come down to everyone's final game in the regular season. So the Vics remain in the driver's seat, and they're very glad to have Cyclone Taylor back in the lineup. They fared well without him, though, notching a 4-2 win over the Bulldogs in a game in which four different Vics lit the lamp and captain Hobey Baker had three points. The Comets, however, will prove to be a much tougher test...

Breaking News!

Cyclone Taylor has gone down with an injury and has left the game! The all-star defenseman and overall best player in the league will miss the rest of tonight's game against the Thistles (a game that's well in hand for the Vics, who lead 4-1 midway through the second) as well as one more contest. Taylor has taken his bumps and bruises like any other player, but this is the first time he'll have to sit out a game. The Vics depend on his prodigious talents to drive their offense, and I have no doubt they'll struggle without him.

This injury couldn't come at a worse time for the defending champs, who are in a duel with the resurgent Comets for first place in the league. Next up, the Vics continue their road trip with a tilt against the Bulldogs, who will be licking their chops at the opportunity to defeat their hated rivals for the second time in a row. The Vics are also without the services of reserve player Fred Scanlan, who is also recovering from injury. That leaves the Vics without enough players to put a full team on the ice. They'll have to move Hobey Baker from center to defense and then rely on their remaining forwards to double shift as needed. It's going to be a real test of their mettle, and the likes of Frank Rankin and Marty Walsh are really going to need to step up.

Solo Madness

While I was on a business trip earlier this week, I enjoyed playing through Alone Against the Flames, a free solo adventure that teaches you how to play Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. This surprisingly robust adventure does a good job introducing newbies to the current (I assume) edition of the RPG rules, allowing you to create your character piecemeal over the first phase of the adventure. By the time you reach the (spoiler alert!) fiery conclusion, you're pretty well versed in skill checks, combat, and other basic facets of the game. I don't think I'd invest in the full game, but the experience of running around the cultist-infested streets of a sleepy New England town did give me a hankering to dust off Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu... 

Trade Deadline

The NHL trade deadline is fast approaching, and so too is the trade deadline in my Hall of Fame league. We're now two-thirds of the way through the regular season, and as of this writing the Vics are clinging to the top spot and would host the second-place Comets in the championship series. Unlike last year, in Season 2 there isn't much of a gap between the teams, so everyone is still in the hunt -- even the lowly Thistles. I've been looking for trades that would legitimately benefit both parties involved, but nothing is really jumping out at me. I expect we'll have a lot of movement after the season, as the entry draft will feature some intriguing new talent, but deadline deals just don't seem all that beneficial for anyone right now. The Comets swapping under-performing winger Scotty Davidson to the Bulldogs in exchange for snake-bitten sniper George Richardson is probably the only move that makes sense. 

Paint Pals

As I've been chipping away at the Adepta Sororitas painting in the afternoons when I get home from work, Nathaniel has taken to joining me. With Matthew at swim practice, it's a good opportunity for me and the little guy to bond over our shared love of 40k.

Nathaniel is proud of his improving skills, and it makes me smile to hear him chattering away about which color would look good for a particular part of the model, or how he might add a layer or wash to bring out more nuance to his work. We sit up there for hours together in the game room, plying our brushes and grooving to non-stop Fountains of Wayne. Life is good!

Victorious Over Victorias

One of the odd quirks of my Strat-O-Matic historical hockey league is that the Bulldogs had never beaten the Victorias. Counting regular-season and playoff games over our first season-and-a-half, the Bulldogs had a record of 0-8-0 against the Vics -- or 0-9-0 if you count the pre-season mini-tournament that I conducted before the first season of this league. That run of futility ended tonight when the Dogs eked out a 3-2 win on the road against their hated rivals. The win put them into a second-place tie with the Comets, leaving both teams just two points behind the Vics for first. With the Thistles buried in last place and unlikely to make a run, we'll have three teams vying for two spots in postseason play. Each team has only five games remaining before the season ends and the championship series begins!

Contemplating Convents

As I'm working diligently on painting on my small force of Adepta Sororitas troops, I got to thinking: They need a place to live, right...?

Birds of Prey

Birds of Prey (it has a much longer official title) opens this weekend, and I'm super excited to check it out. Huntress has always been one of my very favorite superheroes. Fingers crossed that this film continues the recent trend of top-notch DC superhero flicks!

Return to Mystara

It was just over a year ago that the boys and I played through the first of two '90s D&D arcade games that we'd downloaded for our Xbox. Yesterday we decided to kill some time before the Super Bowl by tackling the second game in the Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara series. This one provides several character class options beyond what was available in the original, so we all had fun trying out different classes whenever we got killed -- which was often. (And we were elated to learn that the cleric has the infamous Sticks to Snakes spell that provided so much entertainment in the original game!) The boys cycled through lots of characters, while I tended to stay with a human fighter named Devon. (And every time he would die and re-spawn, I invariably invoked one of our favorite recurring SNL gags: "Devon? Whaaaaat are you doing here?") We were deep into the game when my friend Kyle showed up to watch the Super Bowl with us, so we handed him our fourth controller and he joined in the action. We had to delay the final two boss fights until the break between the first and second quarters, but we beat the game and then enjoyed watching the Chiefs beat the Niners!