Usurpers

Season 3 of my nineteenth-century Strat-O-Matic baseball league is going along very well, and an interesting race is starting to shape up.

Back in Season 1, the Blue Legs' starting catcher, Mike "King" Kelly, won the MVP award after crushing four home runs (for context, that was more than the Haymakers hit as a team, and the same number that the Canaries hit). All the more remarkable was the fact that he did it in only 16 games. (Starting with Season 2, I expanded to 20 games per season.) After Season 1, however, Kelly's performance fell off sharply. Since that magical run, he's hit only one more bomb. Still, he's the all-time leader through 2.5 seasons of play with five career homers.

Slowly, other players have been catching up. Honus Wagner, George Davis, and Buck Ewing -- all currently teammates on the Canaries -- are all now up to four homers apiece. Will Kelly regain his power to put some distance between himself and these potential usurpers, or will another player claim his throne as the home run king?

Quarantine Fun

We're trying to do our part with social distancing during these challenging times, and fortunately we have plenty of options. Over the weekend, the boys and I made more progress on our sci-fi Shattered Realm campaign, continued painting 40k models (some of which will be repurposed for the aforementioned campaign), and even got to jump back into our transcontinental, Skye-based Saltmarsh campaign with Matt's family!

Now that all the boys' extracurricular activities have been cancelled, we're been looking around for fun, educational stuff that they can do at home during the week. I have a fiendishly awesome idea...more to come in a future post...

Pitchers & Parity

It's been a bit of an odd start for my nineteenth-century baseball league. We've had only one home run through six games (Frank Chance, first baseman of the Canaries, who's better known for his contact than his power) and we've also seen the league's first-ever triple play (the Canaries' catcher, Buck Ewing, had the dubious honor of hitting into that one). All three teams are tied at 2-2, with a +3 run differential for the Canaries, a +4 for the Haymakers, and an eyebrow-raising -7 for the Blue Legs.

What's the story with that -7 run differential? It all comes down to one man: John Clarkson. Last year's Pitching MVP has allowed 13 runs over his two starts. The rest of the Legs' staff has allowed a total of six. Moreover, Clarkson alone has surrendered 34% (!!!) of all the runs scored in the league thus far.

Aside from Clarkson, great pitching has been the story of the season. Among the other top starters in the league, Cy Young (Haymakers) is sporting a 1.89 ERA and Tim Keefe (Canaries) is even better at 1.80. Old Hoss Radbourn (Blue Legs), Mickey Welch (Haymakers), and Pud Galvin (Canaries) have only started one game each, but all three hurled complete-game masterpieces, allowing two runs or less. This year's race for Pitching MVP is going to be an exciting one, and I guess the only guy who's out of the running is the guy who won it last year!

Plaaaaay Ball!

Season 3 is underway! On Opening Day, the defending champion Haymakers hosted the Blue Legs, with Cy Young and John Clarkson toeing the rubber in a marquee pitching matchup. Young held up his end of the bargain, but Clarkson -- last year's Pitching MVP -- labored through four ineffective innings. He left with the score 7-1 in favor of the home team, and although Kid Nichols pitched four scoreless frames in relief for the Legs, the Haymakers emerged with a 7-3 triumph. Newly acquired slugger Sam Thompson went 3-5 with 3 RBI to help defeat his former team. Next up, the Blue Legs will hold their home opener against Tim Keefe and the Canaries.

MLB may be on hiatus, but it's great to have baseball in some form this spring!

Pre-Season Deals

My three old-timey baseball teams -- the Blue Legs, the Canaries, and the Haymakers -- are gearing up for their third season of play. Based on the experiences of last year, I worked out a couple of trades to address areas of need.

Blue Legs trade Sam Thompson to the Haymakers for Wee Willie Keeler
In this blockbuster deal, both teams are trying to shore up some of their weaknesses. The Blue Legs hit for tremendous power (their 19 home runs in two seasons is exactly the same as the number of home runs hit by the Canaries and Haymakers combined over that time period), but last season they scored the fewest runs in the league. The Legs need to get more men on base to take full advantage of their power. They're also a relatively slow team, by the standards of nineteenth-century baseball, so they can use a bit more speed on the basepaths. Enter Wee Willie Keeler! Keeler, who's spent the past two seasons as the Haymakers' leadoff man, is an on-base machine, boasts superior defensive skills in the outfield, and has outrageous speed. On the Legs, he'll slot into the two-hole behind fellow burner Billy Hamilton (not to be confused with a current MLB star of the same name!). In return for this great all-around player, the Haymakers get Sam Thompson, who has neither speed nor defensive skills, but he can absolutely crush the ball. Thompson, who won the Playoff MVP award two seasons ago with the Legs, immediately becomes the top power threat on the Haymakers, who have hit the fewest home runs in the brief history of this league.

Blue Legs trade Joe McGinnity to the Canaries for Vic Willis
This trade is less exciting, as it's a swap of relief pitchers. For the purposes of parity (see my last baseball post), this trade helps to eliminate some of the pitching imbalance between these teams, as McGinnity is superior to Willis in game stats. How, then, to justify this trade from the Legs' perspective? McGinnity -- the Legs' erstwhile closer -- blew some save opportunities in the second half of the season. I can easily envision the Blue Legs losing confidence in him and seeking out the services of another proven closer in Vic Willis. 

Spring Training

What to do when there's a pandemic raging outside? Well, I guess we could play Pandemic, but that seems rather on the nose.

At the moment, I'm gearing up for the third season of my nineteenth-century Strat-O-Matic baseball league. And unlike modern baseball, these hardy, mustachioed lads aren't suspending their spring training because of a stupid virus. It takes more than that to bring down the likes of King Kelly! Wait, didn't he die of pneumonia at the age of 36?

I digress.

I have a couple of trades in mind, but first I decided to take a look at the pitching. I admit that I didn't do a very rigorous analysis of the game cards before my first season. Compared to the ginormous spreadsheet I put together to analyze every aspect of my hockey players' Strat stats, my approach to baseball was primitive indeed. Pitching was the biggest area of uncertainty. I have only 15 pitchers in this league (five per team), so I thought it wouldn't be too onerous a task to dig into the numbers and try to rank them with a bit more confidence.

It turns out that the Blue Legs have best collection of pitching talent -- not surprising, as they surrendered the fewest runs in the league last year. The Canaries have two elite hurlers (Tim Keefe and Al Spalding) and three lousy arms behind them, and they ended up allowing the most runs in the league. Cy Young's Haymakers, the defending champs, were smack-dab in the middle. I need to see if I can swing a couple of trades that will be mutually beneficial for each team, but also balance out the pitching staffs a bit. Time to get to work!

Season 2 Awards

It was another dominant season by the Vics, and they cleaned up once again in the individual player awards. Dealing with this seemingly overpowered team will be the subject of a future post, but for now, let's see who won the trophies!

Scoring Title: Cyclone Taylor (Victorias)
Although Frank McGee scored a record 18 goals during the regular season, he nevertheless finished five points behind Taylor (16 G, 16 A) in the scoring race. Taylor's 32 points were a single-season record and seven more than his league-leading total from Season 1.

Forward MVP: Frank McGee (Comets)
McGee racked up 18 goals and 27 points; to put those numbers in perspective, he had five more points than the next-highest forward (Bruce Stuart of the Bulldogs) and eight more goals than the next-highest forward (Alf Smith of the Thistles). The dude was dominant. This one-eyed wonder carried the Comets on his back and led them to their first playoff series.

Defenseman MVP: Cyclone Taylor (Victorias)
Taylor led the league in points (32) and plus/minus (+13), despite missing a game-and-a-half to injury. Mike Grant of the Comets had a very strong season -- his 19 points (4 G, 15 A) put him in a tie for fifth in the scoring race -- but Taylor is hands-down the best defenseman and best overall player in the league.

Goaltender MVP: Bowse Hutton (Victorias)
Offense was way up this year, with teams averaging 3.27 goals per game compared to 2.84 last season. As a result, goalies really took it on the chin. In Season 1, all four goaltenders had a save percentage of .900 or better, but this season only Hutton (.923) managed that feat. His 2.50 GAA (goals against average) was also best in the league.

Rookie of the Year: Moose Goheen (Thistles)
In an admittedly weak year for rookies, Goheen was the clear choice. Though he mustered only four points (2 G, 2 A) in nine games, he led all rookies in scoring and his +4 rating was the highest on the Thistles (no small accomplishment on a team with a dismal -14 goal differential); his plus/minus, in fact, was in the top ten in the entire league.

Playoff MVP: Cyclone Taylor (Victorias)
I was tempted to give this award to a Comet, even though they lost the series. Taylor was the only Vic who distinguished himself. He had a league-high seven points (4 G, 3 A) over the three games, and the next three players behind him were all Comets: Mike Grant (1 G, 5 A), Frank McGee (3 G, 2 A), and Billy Gilmour (3 G, 2 A). Moreover, the Comets' Percy LeSueur (.907 save percentage) outplayed Bowse Hutton (.898). There's no way the Vics win this championship without Taylor.

So, that makes four out six trophies for the Vics. The Comets and the Thistles each claimed one, and the Bulldogs were shut out of the festivities. Gord Roberts's magical season seems like a very long time ago indeed!

On second thought...

The conclusion of that game just didn't sit well with me. It wasn't the right ending. Even though I said I wouldn't replay it, I did. I replayed the entire third period.

So, let's try this again!

Heading into the third, it was (still) 3-2 in favor of the Vics. Now, in this alternate timeline, Frank Rankin scored his second of the game to push the home team's edge to a pair of goals. Compared to the original third period, the pace of play this time around was slow and choppy, with lots of turnovers and fewer scoring chances. Bowse Hutton wasn't called upon to make tons of tough saves, mainly because the Vics didn't hand the Comets a couple of gift-wrapped power plays late in the game. The score remained 4-2 until the final minute, when Mike Grant's shot from the point gave Billy Gilmour a juicy rebound that he buried in the back of the net. Though it was Gilmour's second tally of the game, it was too little, too late, as the Vics held on for a 4-3 triumph and claimed (again) their second consecutive Strat Cup championship.

Strat Cup, Game 3 (Part 2)

I won't bury the lede: The Victorias are Strat Cup champions for the second year in a row.

The full story is a bit more complicated. Before the second period closed out, Blair Russell scored to pull the Comets within one. In the third, both goaltenders were tested but did not yield another goal; Bowse Hutton in particular was outstanding, finishing with 40 saves on 42 shots. His performance was overshadowed by a couple of penalty calls late in the game. With the Vics clinging to a 3-2 lead and the clock ticking away, Marty Walsh was called for a penalty. Then, with less than a minute to go in regulation, Taylor was sent to the box. The game mechanics don't account for context, so these penalties -- incurred in the waning moments of the game with the offending team maintaining a one-goal lead and on the verge of winning a championship -- strike me as a bit unrealistic. Walsh and Taylor are not, in game terms, penalty-prone players, and one would think they'd be on their best behavior in that situation anyway. No one wants to be the guy who cost his team the title because he took a bone-headed penalty at the end of the game. 

As such, the last few minutes were kind of unsatisfying in how they turned out. I don't think it's worth winding back the clock to replay the second half of the third period in the hope of obtaining a more realistic outcome, however, so I'll just imagine the home team's fans raining boos and insults upon the referees and then erupting in exultation when their team kills off back-to-back penalties to seal the win.

I'll have more to say about Season 2 after I digest the stats. For now, congrats to the Victorias -- the first dynasty of my little historical hockey league!

Strat Cup, Game 3 (Part 1)

One way or another, this is the last tilt of the season. At the end of the game, either the Comets or the Victorias will hoist the Strat Cup!

The Comets came out shooting, peppering Bowse Hutton with an astounding 17 shots in the first period alone. The Vics' netminder was equal to the task, preserving a scoreless tie until, late in the frame, Cyclone Taylor scored to put the Vics on top. And then, less than a minute later, he scored again. In the veritable blink of an eye -- in Strat-O-Matic terms, it was on consecutive cards from the Action Deck -- Taylor had given his team a two-goal lead.

Reeling from this sudden onslaught, the Comets came out flat in the second. Vics winger Frank Rankin tallied to make it 3-0, and then several crucial plays unfolded in a matter of minutes. First, Frank McGee missed a wide-open net (the game mechanic in that situation gave him a 90% chance of scoring with no opportunity for the goalie to make a save), choking in a crucial moment that could have put his team back in the game. At the other end of the ice, Fred "Steamer" Maxwell of the Vics had a breakaway but failed to score on Percy LeSueur. After these two close calls, Taylor took a penalty. On the ensuing power play, Billy Gilmour scored to breathe some life into a dejected Comets team. (As an interesting side-note, both of these teams feature potent power plays, but this was the first goal in the entire series that either team had scored with a man advantage.)

Tomorrow night I'll play through the second half of the game...and a champion will be crowned!

Strat Cup, Game 2 (Part 2)

The teams traded chances for the remainder of the second period. Early in the third, McGee scored to knot the game at three goals apiece. Each team failed to score during a third-period power-play opportunity, and the clock expired with the score tied.

Overtime!

This was the first-ever overtime game in the two-season history of this league. Since this is old-timey hockey, we allow ties. When a regular-season game ends with a tie, each team earns a point in the standings. There's none of that modern shootout crap! But when it comes to playoff games, there has to be a winner and a loser. Tonight, for the first time, we went into an extra time.

And it was decided very quickly. Less than two minutes into the overtime period, McGee scored to clinch the come-from-behind victory for the Comets. Now the championship series is tied at one game each, with the third and final game to be hosted by the Victorias. 

Strat Cup, Game 2 (Part 1)

Now skating on friendly ice, the Comets were hoping for a better start than they had in Game 1. It didn't materialize. The Vics came out shooting, holding a 14-8 advantage after the first frame; they also led 2-0 on goals from Hobey Baker and Dubbie Bowie. Early in the second, Frank McGee feathered a perfect pass to linemate Billy Gilmour, who buried the shot to cut the home team's deficit in half. As we approached the middle of the period, Comets captain Harry Trihey struck to tie the game; hobbled defenseman Jack Marshall even notched an assist on the play. The tie was short-lived, however, as less than a minute later, Cyclone Taylor -- who else? -- beat Percy LeSueur to give the Vics a 3-2 advantage. With thirty minutes still remaining, I expect to see a fair bit more scoring before it's all said and done! Will the Comets come back to force a winner-take-all Game 3, or will the Vics hoist their second Strat Cup in as many seasons?

Strat Cup, Game 1 (Part 2)

The Comets picked up their game toward the end of the second period. Frank McGee scored at the buzzer to get his team on the board. In the third, the teams traded chances until Mike Grant beat Bowse Hutton for the Comets' second goal of the game. From there, it was a mad dash to the finish, with Hutton denying McGee in the final minute to seal the win for the Victorias. The final score was 3-2.

Game 2 shifts the action to the Comets' home, where they'll be joined by a recovering Jack Marshall. According to the injury line on the card I had pulled, Marshall should miss another full game -- but it's the championship series, damn it, and hockey players are tough! In a must-win game, Marshall is going to play hurt and try to give his teammates an emotional lift. They'll need a victory on home ice
to force a decisive Game 3.

Strat Cup, Game 1 (Part 1)

The Comets are making their first postseason appearance, and it has not been an auspicious debut thus far. Disaster struck early in the first period when stud defender Jack Marshall went down with an injury and had to leave the game. During the regular season, Marshall played the second-most minutes on the club, trailing only Mike Grant, and his absence rips a gaping hole in the Comets' blueline. To make matters worse for the challengers, Cyclone Taylor scored on the very play when Marshall was injured, putting the Comets in an early hole. The team was forced to move versatile forward Blair Russell -- their third-leading scorer -- back to defense, while double-shifting forwards Jimmy Gardner and George Richardson. The Vics did not fail to take advantage of the Comets' woes, as Dubbie Bowie scored later in the first to give the defending champs a 2-0 edge. Comets sniper Frank McGee, meanwhile, was held in check throughout the period by Hobey Baker and registered only a single shot on goal. Midway through the second, Billy McGimsie scored to give the Vics a commanding three-goal lead at the halfway point of the game.

Playoff Matchups

So, yeah, I'm having way too much fun with Season 2 of my Strat-O-Matic hockey league. The regular season has now concluded, and we're moving on to the championship series between the first-place Victorias and the second-place Comets! In answer to the question no one asked, here's a position-by-position breakdown of the two teams before they start to duke it out...

Forwards

• Comets: It all starts with Frank McGee; the Comets' dynamic sniper tallied an astounding 18 goals in 12 games this year. (For the sake of comparison, last year Cyclone Taylor led the league with 11 goals in 12 games.) McGee is an unstoppable scoring machine, notching 44% of the Comets' goals this season. He's received valuable support on the top line from defensively adept winger Blair Russell and crafty playmaker Billy Gilmour. Captain Harry Trihey, power forward Jimmy Gardner, and the newly acquired George Richardson give the Comets some secondary scoring, but can they carry load the if McGee is contained or -- hockey gods forbid! -- injured?
• Victorias: The Vics spread out their attack among a variety of skilled players, with no forward scoring more than 8 goals this year. Top offensive threats include Hobey Baker, Frank Rankin, Marty Walsh, and Billy McGimsie. Dubbie Bowie and the aforementioned Baker remain two of the best defensive forwards in the business, as well. It's a great mix of quantity and quality. 
• Advantage: Even

Defensemen

• Comets: If it weren't for Cyclone Taylor, the Comets' Mike Grant would be winning all the awards for defensemen; he is unequivocally the best two-way blueliner in the league, and also finished comfortably among the top ten players in points scored (racking up more points than star forwards like Alf Smith and Tommy Dunderdale). The steady Jack Marshall gives the Comets another elite shutdown defender, while Graham Drinkwater and rookie Phat Wilson give them added depth.
• Victorias: The Vics have Cyclone Taylor and...some other guys! The league's most dynamic playmaker patrols the blueline alongside the likes of George McNamara and Art Farrell. When Taylor went down with an injury, the Vics shifted captain Hobey Baker back to defense and he outplayed the everyday defensemen. 'Nuff said.
• Advantage: Comets

Goaltending

• Comets: According to the Strat-O-Matic game stats, Percy LeSueur is the worst goaltender in the league. In terms of actual performance, he was the third-best (out of four) goalie in Season 1 and the second-best in Season 2. He can absolutely steal a game on occasion. However...
• Victorias: Bowse Hutton is hands-down the best goalie in the game, both in terms of game stats and actual performance over the past two seasons. He won last year's Playoff MVP award, and may well be the most important player in this postseason as well.
• Advantage: Victorias 

Special Teams

• Comets: After leading the league in both power play percentage and penalty killing percentage for most of the season, the Comets slipped to second in power play. Even so, they're very dangerous, with McGee, Grant, Russell, etc., making for a dynamic group that can seemingly score at will when they're firing on all cylinders. Their penalty kill -- led by Russell, Grant, and Marshall -- got smoked in their final regular-season game, but they maintained their status as the top unit.
• Victorias: The Vics languished at the bottom of the league in penalty killing for much of the campaign, but climbed into second place by the season's end. Baker and Bowie make a great tandem, but the team is thin on defensive defensemen. Their power play, meanwhile, was consistently in second place until overtaking the Comets toward the end of the year. Taylor and Walsh absolutely feast on goaltenders during power plays.
• Advantage: Even 

My prediction? I'm thinking the Vics will win in three games, with each team victorious at home. If the Vics win, the most likely MVP is Taylor, and if it's the Comets, then McGee would be the obvious choice. Watch out for Mike Grant as the dark horse.

It all starts tonight!

Cheated By the Old Ones!

Still waiting for Matthew's return from his swim meet, Nathaniel and I played Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu, and, sadly, failed to save the world from the eldritch evil of the Old Ones. It was, nevertheless, a fun and memorable session.

Having elected to play roles that we had never tried before, Nathaniel was the magician (an "inventory management" type of character) and I was the occultist (a character who uses telekinetic powers to move cultists and monsters around the map). We started out auspiciously enough, arriving in Arkham and then making our way to Dunwich to close the Old Ones' portal there in short order. Next, I traveled to Kingsport (side note: I re-read all the Lovecraft stories not long ago, and I really don't recall this town figuring into any of the Cthulhu Mythos tales) while Nathaniel returned to Arkham. We spent several turns trying to amass enough clues to close another gate -- work that was interrupted by the devastatingly bad luck of getting two "Evil Stirs" cards on consecutive draws in the same turn -- all the while keeping the local cultist populations in check. Meanwhile, cultists were massing in Innsmouth, as neither of us had yet visited that accursed town. I managed to close the gate in Kingsport and met Nathaniel in Innsmouth, where we had to fumble a bit with our inventories to arrange clue cards so that I could close the gate there and he could go back to Arkham to deal with the final portal. Nathaniel took off for Arkham as I stayed behind in Innsmouth just long enough to close the portal. It was three down and one to go, but the Old Ones had another trick up their sleeves. Just as Nathaniel was reaching the outskirts of Arkham, we pulled the last two "Evil Stirs" cards on two consecutive turns; as a result of the ensuing dice rolls from the second card, we ended up with a flood of cultists appearing out of nowhere to enact more of their nefarious rituals. The odds of that happening were less than 3%, but the chain reaction of consequences set off by those roles ended the game before we could take another turn. We needed perhaps one more turn apiece to win the game, but the Old Ones certainly have a way of twisting fate to serve their evil designs!

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!

At the Quarter Mark

My pre-NHL hockey league currently has a twelve-game regular season, with each team playing four games (two home, two away) against the other three teams. At this point, I've played through three full games for each team. As we're now at the one-quarter mark of the regular season, I thought it would be interesting to take stock of how things are shaping up.

The standings look much like last season. The Vics are on top at 2-0-1, the Bulldogs are next at 1-1-1, and the Comets and Thistles are both at 0-1-2. Although the average number of goals per game is up by only fifteen-hundreds of a goal, it feels like there's more scoring this time around. To wit, we saw only two regular-season hat tricks all of last year (Cyclone Taylor and Harry Trihey), but we've already matched that number (Frank Rankin and Gord Roberts) after just a handful of games. Taylor laps the field in scoring with a ridiculous 12 points (4 goals, 8 assists), which is double the number of the three men who are tied for second place with 6 apiece. The other remarkable individual performance in the early going of Season 2 is the goaltending of the Comets' Percy LeSueur; despite playing on a vastly inferior team, he's putting up numbers that rival the Vics' Bowse Hutton. If he keeps it up and the Comets find their scoring touch, they could really surprise us as we get deeper into the season.

Season 2 Begins!

Being sick sucks, especially since I can't play with the boys or do any transcontinental D&D with our Toronto crew, but one thing I can do -- even with a wretchedly sore throat and hacking cough -- is play Strat-O-Matic hockey!

We opened the new season with the Vics at home to raise their Season 1 championship banner. Their opponents? The Bulldogs, the very team they defeated to win that championship. The Bulldogs, meanwhile, were looking for payback. Early in the first, the Dogs jumped out in front when Tom Hooper beat Bowse Hutton. It took the Vics a moment to find their footing, but they tied the game shortly thereafter on a Billy McGimsie strike. Frank Rankin then scored twice in the first half of the second period to give the Vics a 3-1 lead, with Cyclone Taylor assisting on all three tallies. Defenseman-turned-forward Harry Watson scored for the Dogs to pull within one, but Taylor picked up two quick goals late in the second. Going into the third, it was 5-2 in favor of the Vics, but the Dogs came out shooting in the third. Their lousy luck continued, however, when winger George Richardson was injured in the opening moments of the period. He's likely going to miss several games, so the Dogs' depth will be tested early in the season. With Hooper and star winger Gord Roberts double-shifting for the rest of the game, the Dogs tried in vain to get back into this one. Rankin completed his hat trick late in the third, and the Vics skated away with a 6-2 triumph.

The Last God

DC and D&D -- together again! I have no idea what this is, but I will probably check it out.

KOTOR on TV?

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool DC guy, so I have to admit that Disney+, with its upcoming slate of Marvel series, doesn't hold much appeal for me. Thus far, I've considered myself happy to wait for whatever streaming service Warner Brothers ultimately rolls out, but if rumors are true that Disney+ is developing a Knights of the Old Republic television series, I might need to rethink my streaming strategy. Then again, rumors of a KOTOR feature film didn't exactly pan out...

Handy-Dandy Dungeon Maps

Speaking of Kickstarter, we received our copy of The Dungeon today!

It's a two-volume set, and each book is chock-full of maps for use with D&D or any sort of game involving miniatures that fit on a one-inch grid. Shown below are two examples of individual pages, but you can also lay the book open for a double-sized map.

Additionally, by laying the two volumes next to each other, you can create larger maps in a square shape, or in other configurations. Great stuff!

So beautiful...

...but so expensive! Return to Dark Tower looks magnificent, but hard to justify even at the base pledge level ($125) that gets you a copy of the game. And with delivery more than a year away, I think I'll probably sit this one out.

Adepta Sororitas

I think I need to start working on a new army...

Return to Dark Tower

I missed out on their Fireball Island Kickstarter, but now Restoration Games is working on Return to Dark Tower, and I'm already drooling. I haven't seen anything about pricing yet, but damn, I really need to back this project!

(Side note: If you look back four years on this very blog, you'll find a post where I referenced the original Dark Tower board game and its classic Orson Welles television commercial, and how the game was in need of a comeback!)

Player Eligibility Revisited

After further reflection, I'm sticking with my original player eligibility parameters for the time being. This is a league for pre-modern, non-NHL Hall of Famers. For the upcoming second season, we'll keep the same set of players that we had in Season 1, but we'll introduce a couple of new free agents, Moose Goheen and Phat Wilson -- two guys I had, at first, deemed too recent to include. Goheen and Wilson project as solid regulars and not fringe players like the other free agents, so I think I'll need turn back the clock and redo the transactions that the teams completed after the conclusion of Season 1. With Goheen and Wilson in the mix, teams like the Thistles and Comets have an opportunity to add impact players to their talent pool and not settle for marginal upgrades. Later, perhaps after the conclusion of Season 2, I'll consider adding early NHL-era players like Art Ross and Joe Hall, especially if it seems like an expansion team would be a fun twist for the league. Okay, enough second-guessing and hand-wringing!

Player Eligibility

Over the holidays, I've enjoyed reading Bob Duff's The First Season, a comprehensive account of the very first NHL season, conducted in the winter of 1917-18. It got me thinking about the player eligibility rules I set up for my Strat-O-Matic hockey league. At the present time, I'm using only players who did not play in the NHL and whose careers were, essentially, pre-NHL. (As such, I'm not including players like Vladislav Tretiak -- those who did not play in the NHL but played concurrently with that league.) Given the complexity of amateur and professional options for elite hockey players in that formative era of the 1900s and 1910s, I've had to make some judgment calls on which players are part of my pool. Rightly or wrongly, Harry Watson (the first one) is in and Moose Goheen is out, but I could go either way on some of those borderline cases. In reading The First Season, however, I've realized that quite a few legendary hockey players finished out their storied careers during that inaugural season. Should I really be excluding the likes of Art Ross, Harry Hyland, and Jack Laviolette just because they played out the string in the NHL's first season? Or what about Russell "Barney" Stanley, who suited up for just one NHL game in his entire career? I'll need to ruminate further prior to the start of Season 2.

2020!

Happy New Year, folks! It's 2020 already. Can you believe it?

Everyone is already talking about "20/20 vision" and "20/20 hindsight" and all that, but when I see this year written out, what I see is two rolls of 20 on a D20. With a 1-in-400 chance of occurring, two 20s is a rare and often game-changing event. In the annals of Druid Cycle lore, for instance, I still recall those epic moments when Jason -- the mighty Sir Roberts -- would roll critical hits on two straight attacks and turn the tide of battle. These days, it seems to be Nathaniel who's been blessed by the dice gods with a knack of rolling 20s, as his Shattered Realm hero Demorus is known for coming through in the clutch.

Here's to a great 2020, and I hope this is a year of double crits for you and yours!

More Holiday Game Action!

I got up to get some coffee a little while ago, and when I got back to my office, I had a surprise waiting for me...

Gifts from my team! They're spread out all over the country, but they coordinated with my team member here in Nevada to give me the gift of game this Christmas. I'm so fortunate to work with amazing people -- people who really get me!

Holiday Game Action

The boys and I wrapped up another thoroughly entertaining adventure with our Toronto crew yesterday, but it was the only D&D we've played in quite a while (aside from a brief Shattered Realm episode that I managed to shoehorn into one weekend morning). With all the kids' activities, it seems to be getting harder to find the time to roll dice. Progress on our main Shattered Realm campaign is pretty damn slow, and other D&D stuff we'd like to do -- an Eberron mini-campaign is probably at the top of the list -- seems like it will be tough to pull off.

I'm looking forward to the holidays, as it will give us an opportunity to spend time together and have fun. When the kids aren't playing Xbox with their cousins, we'll dig into some of their gaming-related Christmas stuff. I'll have numerous units to assemble for the Tanks miniatures game, as both boys are now quite interested in twentieth-century military history. On that score, Nathaniel will also be getting a couple of Axis & Allies games. (I only remember the classic -- apparently now there's a whole slew of related titles.) It wouldn't be Christmas for Nathaniel without something 40k, however, so he's also getting the Space Marines codex and the Ultramarines codex supplement. We aren't playing 40k very much these days -- it's hard to find time to play anything -- but he enjoys poring over game rules, coming up with optimized units, playing through solo games, etc. Matthew, meanwhile, is more interested in Xbox than tabletop stuff, but he did ask for a 40k model in addition to the aforementioned tanks. He's going to use the model as a vehicle for his futuristic Shattered Realm hero, so it will be fun to build and paint it together.

Speaking of painting, one of the coolest gifts the kids are getting are their own customized miniatures from Hero Forge. Matthew designed Kai, his sniper from the sci-fi Shattered Realm (and the one who will be riding around in the 40k vehicle), and Nathaniel opted for Demorus, his original Shattered Realm ranger. I'm looking forward to painting the minis and helping bring those characters to life!

Off-Season Transactions, Part 2

The off-season activity continues for my Strat-O-Matic hockey league! Teams have moved on to trades, and now that the dust has settled, four more players have new homes. Playoff hero Steamer Maxwell is now with the Thistles to give that team a bit more offensive upside on the second line. Defenseman Harvey Pulford, recently acquired as a free agent by the Thistles, ended up with the Bulldogs, who also converted Harry Watson from defense to his natural position of left wing. Tom Hooper, an unheralded but versatile forward, landed on the Comets. Finally, the Vics obtained left wing Jimmy Gardner to add a more physical presence to what is otherwise a fairly "soft" team. I may reflect a bit more on these transactions, as I don't anticipate starting the new season any time soon, but this is the state of the team rosters as of today.

Starfinder on Alexa

This is kinda cool...

Off-Season Transactions

The initial off-season transactions for my pre-NHL hockey league involve roster cuts and free-agent signings. Teams have the option to cut one or more players and bring in replacements as they see fit, but they must begin the new season with an active roster of no more or less than 10 players. To promote competitive balance, I decided that teams get the opportunity to sign a given unaffiliated player in the opposite order in which they finished in the standings. 

In this case, the last-place Thistles had the first crack at free agents, followed by the Comets, Bulldogs, and finally the league-leading Victorias. The Thistles decided to jettison forward Jack Ruttan and sign defenseman Harvey Pulford. The Thistles need help everywhere, but bringing in Pulford gives them an embarrassment of riches on the blueline -- superstar Hod Stuart, underrated Dickie Boon, and stay-at-home stalwarts Moose Johson and new arrival Pulford. Now the Thistles can deal from a position of strength and make trades to address other needs, such as secondary scoring. 

As for the now-homeless Jack Ruttan, it's an ignominious end to his tenure with the Thistles, who had traded for him immediately after the preseason tournament. Over the 12-game regular season, he managed a single goal, no assists, and a -3 rating; meanwhile, the man the Thistles gave up to get him -- Gord Roberts! -- finished second in the league in scoring, won the award for MVP of all forwards, and led the Bulldogs to the championship series. It was a transaction that changed the fortunes of two franchises and will probably go down as the biggest steal ever for this fledgling league. 

What's next for Ruttan? The Comets, Bulldogs, and Vics all elected not to cut players, so he remains a free agent.

Awards

Last thing for Season 1 -- the awards! As I noted in the last post, Vics goaltender Bowse Hutton won the Playoff MVP award. He also took home the Goaltender MVP for his excellent netminding during the regular season. Cyclone Taylor of the Vics won the Defenseman MVP and edged out Gord Roberts by one point for the scoring title. Roberts, however, didn't go away empty handed, as the Bulldogs star won the trophy for Forward MVP. No one from the Comets or Thistles won an award, but there's always next season, boys!

Strat Cup, Game 2

I made a couple of lineup adjustments prior to Game 2. For the Bulldogs, defenseman Fred Whitcroft was dropped down the depth chart due to his ugly -4 rating in Game 1, whereas slick-skating Harry Watson would be asked to pick up Whitcroft's minutes. On the other side, I swapped right wingers Frank Rankin and Dubbie Bowie so that Bowie could play alongside top-line center and captain Hobey Baker. Baker and Bowie are the Vics' best two defensive forwards, and also the best match-ups against the Dogs' high-scoring duo of Bruce Stuart and Gord Roberts.

Game 2 started off much like the first game, with Cyclone Taylor scoring to give the Vics an early edge. Rankin tallied on the power play midway through the first period, which ended with the Vics up 2-0. History repeated itself once again in the second, when the Bulldogs closed to 2-1 on a rebound shot by Tom Hooper. Despite this blemish, goaltender Bowse Hutton was unbelievable, making huge saves left and right to rob the hungry Bulldog shooters. Taylor then scored a power-play goal for his second of the game, and completed our young league's first-ever playoff hat trick a few moments later at even strength. Down by three heading into the third, the Dogs threw everything they had at Hutton, including chances on two power plays, but they couldn't get anything past him. At the final horn, it was another 4-1 win for the Vics and the distinction of winning the league's first championship. Although Taylor had 4 goals and 2 assists in the brief best-of-three series, I had to give the playoff MVP award to Hutton, who sported a 1.00 goals-against average and a stupefying .970 save percentage.

With Season 1 complete, I think I'll take a break from Strat-O-Matic for a while, but I'm already thinking about trades and free-agent signings in preparation for Season 2!

Strat Cup, Game 1

Game 1 of our best-of-three Strat Cup championship started off with the Bulldogs' George Richardson recording three shots on Bowse Hutton in the opening two minutes. Shortly thereafter, Cyclone Taylor scored the first goal in playoff history -- just as he had scored the first regular-season goal at the beginning of the season -- to give the Vics a 1-0 lead. Later in the first, Fred "Steamer" Maxwell found the puck on his stick and buried it past Riley Hern to make it 2-0. It was a great moment for Maxwell, who was snakebitten during the regular season and failed to score a goal despite numerous quality chances. Early in the second, the Bulldogs closed to within a goal when Bruce Stuart beat Hutton. The Vics then hunkered down amidst a flurry of Bulldog shots, with Oliver Seibert and Tom Hooper in particular giving Hutton tough tests. By the third period, both teams had come up empty on multiple power plays, and the game seemed like it would go right down to the wire until Hobey Baker scored to make it 3-1 in favor of the Vics. That goal was the backbreaker, and even the continued strong play of Bruce Stuart failed to get the Dogs any closer. Marty Walsh scored a garbage goal late in the third to make it 4-1, and the Vics walked away with a Game 1 win. Next up, they'll travel to the Dogs' home to try to secure the championship.

Regular Season Wrap-Up

The first season is in the books! Below is a table showing (from left to right) the team name, number of games played, wins, losses, ties, points (2 points for a win, 1 point for a tie), goals for, goals against, goal differential, goals for per game, goals against per game, power play goals, power play opportunities, power play percentage, power play goals against, times shorthanded, penalty killing percentage, and shorthanded goals scored. Whew! As you can see, the Vics dominated during the regular season, but the slate is wiped clean for the championship series!

And now for some of the basic player stats. Again, from left to right, we have the player name, team, position, games played, goals, assists, points (goals plus assists), plus/minus, and penalty minutes. The table below shows the top fifteen skating players, ranked by points. The scoring race came down to the final game, when Cyclone Taylor notched his eleventh goal of the season to pull ahead of Gord Roberts for the title.

Next up, Game 1 of the best-of-three Strat Cup series!

Ticket Punched

As noted in my last post, the Vics had locked up home-ice advantage a while back, leaving the remaining three teams to duke it out for the second spot in the championship series. Last night, the Bulldogs punched their ticket with a thrilling 4-3 win over the Thistles. The first two periods featured back-and-forth scoring, leaving us with a 2-2 deadlock going into the final frame. Then, Dogs center Bruce Stuart scored on a breakaway, and winger George Richardson tallied only seconds later on the very next shot. Both strikes were assisted by -- who else? -- the boy nobody wanted, Gord Roberts. The Dogs' 4-2 lead seemed impregnable until Alf Smith notched a goal with just a few minutes to spare, leading to a crazy, sloppy scramble to the buzzer. A couple of regular-season games remain, but we know what's happening in the playoffs: the Bulldogs will face the Victorias in the quest for the Strat Cup!

Streak Struck

I'm nearing the end of my first 12-game pre-NHL hockey season, and one of the most interesting questions was whether the Victorias would lose a game this year. They started the season on a 10-game unbeaten streak (8-0-2), and rolled into the Comets' stadium for their penultimate game of the regular season. With home-ice advantage in the championship series already secured, and spark plug Frank "Steamer" Maxwell out with an injury, the Vics laid an egg and fell 2-0 to the Comets. Percy LaSueur became the second goaltender this season to post a shutout (after the Vics' Hutton), stymieing the first-place team as he turned away all 32 shots he faced. Today's outcome also means that the Comets, Thistles, and Bulldogs are all still alive in the race for second place and a spot in the championship series against the Vics. The Bulldogs have the inside track, but it will certainly be an exciting few games to end the season!

Deadline Deal

My first pre-NHL hockey season is two-thirds complete, so this seems as good a time as any to impose a transaction deadline. After this point, the teams will not be able to make any personnel changes (unless a player is injured) until the league has crowned its first champion.

The Vics and Bulldogs appear to be in good shape, so I focused instead on the Comets and Thistles. They had the option to cut players and sign free agents (after creating four full teams, I had a few players left over who can fill in as needed) and/or make trades. As it turned out, no free agents could provide any sort of meaningful upgrade, so instead I thought about trade opportunities to address the needs of both teams. The Comets, despite having solid offensive talent, have struggled mightily on the power play; through eight games, they're sitting dead last at 9.52% (the Vics are tops at an astounding 33.33% success rate with the man advantage). The Thistles, meanwhile, have an atrocious penalty kill -- at 59.09%, they're more than 20 percentage points lower than the next-lowest team (the Bulldogs at 80%). For both teams, their critical flaw may be bad luck that would resolve itself through simple regression to the mean, but...why not a trade to shake things up?!

Our deadline deal here in Season 1 involved the Thistles sending talented but underperforming winger Billy Gilmour to the Comets in exchange for defensive forward Harry Westwick. I had reservations about the fairness of the trade -- Westwick has way better numbers than Gilmour so far this season -- but the underlying game stats suggest that Gilmour has a lot of untapped potential. He didn't have a good niche in the Thistles' lineup, but on the Comets he'll slot in nicely on the wing alongside offensive stud Frank McGee and two-way winger Blair Russell, and his solid shooting percentages will make him a huge asset on the power play. The Thistles, in turn, are getting one of the league's top defensive forwards -- a guy who can provide an immediate impact on the penalty kill. Westwick is also a puck-possession demon who can jump-start the team's moribund second line.

Who wins this trade? Only time will tell!

The Race Is On!

My hockey league is shaping up to have quite the scoring race. Through eight games, Cyclone Taylor of the Vics has 8 goals and 11 assists, for 19 points. Gord Roberts was a distant second with 13 points. Roberts, however, just had a league-record five-point game (1 G, 4 A) and now sits just a single point back from Taylor after an equal number of games played. With four games to go, this race is going down to the wire!

Unstable Unicorns

I've been looking for a couple of light, fun games to bring into the office and play with my (decidedly non-gamer) coworkers over lunchtime -- stuff like Exploding Kittens and Bears vs. Babies. The boys and I tried out Unstable Unicorns today and it was pretty enjoyable. Check it out of you enjoy the aforementioned card games.

Hats Fly Again

Right on the heels of Cyclone Taylor's hat trick, Harry Trihey posted a hat trick of his own today in a 4-4 tie between his Comets and Taylor's Vics. Ironically, Trihey (the Comets' captain) had only one goal on the season until today's scoring explosion.

Hat Trick

In Friday night's game between the Comets and the Thistles, Comets star Frank McGee scored twice in the first period, and I thought we might get our first-ever hat trick. The hockey gods were against him, however, as he missed the entire third period with an injury.

In the very next game, Cyclone Taylor of the Vics scored twice in the first against the Bulldogs, so there was another great chance for a hat trick. By the late second period, the Vics were cruising at 4-0, until the Dogs' George Richardson buried a goal at the buzzer to make it 4-1. The third period featured an insane barrage against Vics' goaltender Bowse Hutton. Taylor netted his third goal of the game -- making history with the league's first hat trick -- and that tally stood up as the game-winner in a wild 5-4 finish.

Taylor is now tied with McGee and the Bulldogs' Gord Roberts for the league lead with 6 goals, and he leads all skaters in points with 16. Remarkably, he has yet to take even a single minor penalty! 

Midseason Report

We've reached the season's halfway point with my little four-team pre-NHL hockey league. The Victorias are the class of the league at 5-0-1 and a +8 goal differential. The Bulldogs and Comets have identical 2-3-1 records and goal differentials of -1 and -2, respectively. The Thistles are last at 1-4-1 and a -5 differential, but are 1-0-1 since the big Alf Smith trade changed the entire dynamic of the team.

Among individual performers, the Vics' Bowse Hutton has paced all goaltenders with a 1.50 goals against average and an otherworldly .951 save percentage. His teammate Cyclone Taylor is tops in the league in points (3 G, 9 A), with the Bulldogs' Gord Roberts leading in goals (6) and sitting second in points (11). You know what? I should just show the damn spreadsheet!

Above we have the top 15 skating players, sorted in order of total points. The chart indicates their name (with "(C)" after the name indicating a team captain), team name, position, games played, goals, assists, points, plus/minus, and penalty minutes. I'm also tracking power play goals, shorthanded goals, and a bunch of other stuff, but these are the "classic" hockey stats that most people are familiar with.

The Wedding Episode

In today's Shattered Realm adventure, Matthew's rogue Sisen married his longtime love, Dara, with Nathaniel's druid Vabaran performing the ceremony in the chapel of Marcher Keep. The wedding was attended by the lord of Marcher Keep and his court, along with some of Sisen's closest NPC friends.

Eagle-eyed Druid Cycle players might spot the white-haired knight Sir John Mandeville in the back row. He certainly gets around!

Alf's Revenge

My Strat-O-Matic hockey season continues apace. The Thistles have languished in the basement from the beginning, mainly due to bad luck in goalie Paddy Moran's rolls on high-risk shots and a general inability to put the puck in the net. The former would be addressed simply by waiting for regression to the mean, while the latter required a trade. I scoured the rosters for a swap that would benefit both teams.

I quickly zeroed in on Alf Smith, a second-line winger on the Bulldogs who had put up one measly assist in four games along with a league-worst -6 rating. Yikes! But looking at the game stats, though, Smith reminded me of Gord Roberts. They're very different players in many respects, but they both have an Offense of 4 and a Penetration of 4, meaning that they're at the top of the heap in terms of generating good scoring opportunities despite their middling shooting percentages. I sent Smith from the Bulldogs to the Thistles in exchange for Ernie Russell, another under-performing winger. It was a classic "challenge" trade.

With Smith now on the Thistles, I inserted him on the Tommy Gun line with Tommy Dunderdale and Tommy Phillips. Their next game, as luck would have it, was against the Bulldogs. Facing his former team, Alf Smith promptly tallied his first goal of the season and racked up two assists, not to mention an eye-popping +4 rating. The Tommy Gun line ran roughshod over Gord Roberts and the Bulldogs, giving Smith a bit of vindication. The Thistles picked up their first win of the year, but they're still in the cellar and have a long way to go. A resurgent Alf Smith, however, would definitely speed things up.

Painted Planes

I haven't forgotten about Aeronautica Imperialis. One of these days, Nathaniel and I are going to have dive back into the rules and learn how to play. In the meantime, I finally got around to taking photos of the planes that I painted a few weeks ago. They turned out...okay. The Imperial planes look way better than the Ork planes, but maybe that's in part because I chose some, well, loud colors for the Ork fleet.

First up, the Dakkajets...

And now the Fighta Bommers...

Now we have the planes for the Imperial Navy, starting with the Marauder bombers...

My favorites are the Thunderbolt fighters, built as Fury variants...

The Ballad of Gord Roberts

I'm no balladeer, but if I were, I'd compose a ballad to tell the tale of the also-ran who became an all-star: Gord Roberts -- no, not this Gord Roberts, but rather this Gord Roberts. In my Strat-O-Matic league of pre-NHL Hall of Famers, Roberts is by far the most interesting narrative here in the early part of our first season.

In my initial assessment of the players, Roberts rated highly as a forward with a well-rounded game. When I looked deeper into the numbers, however, I was surprised by his rather pedestrian shooting percentages. He got bumped back to the pack and ended up as a second-line winger with the Thistles. He played pretty well in the pre-season mini-tournament, scoring a goal in the Thistles' 7-3 thumping of the Comets in the championship game.

Despite their win, however, the hard-hitting, hard-shooting Thistles had a problem: their lineup was full of guys who were very likely to take penalties. Given that the Bulldogs seemed to need offensive support, I thought a trade was in order. I sent Jack Ruttan from the Bulldogs to the Thistles in exchange for Roberts. Ruttan and Roberts have very similar shooting percentages, and while Ruttan is less likely to take penalties, Roberts has a higher raw score in the Offense category, which is something akin to hockey sense -- guys with higher scores in this stat tend to find the puck on their stick more often. The trade seemed like a good deal for both sides, and it turned out to be the only player transaction that I made between the pre-season and the regular season.

Fast-forward three games. Jack Ruttan is, well, I don't remember if he has even a single assist yet. Gord Roberts, meanwhile, is now leading the league in scoring with seven points (3 G, 4 A) after three games played. Last night, he even scored a breakaway shorthanded goal against the Thistles, the very team that traded him away. This is starting to look like the most lopsided hockey trade since the Oilers swapped Gretzky for a bag of pucks.

So how did the Thistles -- okay, how did John -- miss the boat so badly on Roberts? I leaned too hard on the shooting percentages. That Offense stat comes into play quite often, and various game situations result in the puck ending up with the guy who has his team's highest Offense score. Roberts has a 4 in that category (among just a handful of players, including Cyclone Taylor, to have that score) and plays on a line with teammates who both have a score of 3. That means Roberts is going to get the puck a lot, and that possession translates into tons of scoring opportunities. So although his shooting percentages are nothing to write home about, the sheer volume of chances is going to result in a lot of goals -- goals for the Bulldogs, that is. The Thistles are dead last in the league and could really use his help right about now!

Two Games In

The season is underway, and each team has now played two games. The Victorias are 2-0 with a +3 goal differential on the strength of Cyclone Taylor's league-leading five points (3 G, 2 A). The Comets and Bulldogs are each 1-1 with a +1 differential, while the Thistles -- the champs of the pre-season mini-tournament -- are languishing at 0-2 with a -5 differential. Goaltender Paddy Moran has been nothing short of dreadful. Their next game will be against the first-place Vics, so that will be a major test for the Thistles here in the early part of the season.

Game On!

It's finally here -- the start of my pre-NHL Hall of Fame League! The first official game featured the Bulldogs hosting the Victorias. On a power play early in the first period, Cyclone Taylor of the Vics scored the first goal in league history. He tacked on another goal and an assist for a three-point night as the Vics cruised to a 3-1 win. Bowse Hutton was incredible in goal, stopping 32 of 33 shots, while Riley Hern stopped 36 of 39 in the losing effort. There was a bit of a scary moment late in the third when Taylor went down with an injury and didn't return, but he'll be back in the lineup for the Vics' next contest. Tomorrow night, however, it will be the Comets hosting the Thistles in a rematch of the pre-season tournament finale.

Pre-Season Tourney

With my four pre-NHL Hall of Fame teams -- the Bulldogs, Comets, Thistles, and Victorias -- set with their initial rosters, I wanted to get a few games under my belt before I started keeping track of stats. As such, I ran a mini tournament, and the Thistles came out as the winners. Top-line center Tommy Dunderdale tied the Vics' Marty Walsh with a tournament-leading three goals and earned MVP honors. In all, the Thistles scored 11 and surrendered only 5; despite having just the third-ranked goalie (Paddy Moran), they seemed a lot more powerful than the other teams. Granted, it's a very small sample size (each team played only two games), but I'll probably dig into the numbers a bit and see if it makes sense to transfer a good player from the Thistles to the lowly Bulldogs, who scored 3 and gave up 8 in losing both of their games. 

My Brain Hurts

Now I've re-balanced the teams to account for the differences in goaltending. Here's a look at the final table, minus the goalies and the free agents.

Am I close? Did I nerf Bowse Hutton's team enough to compensate for his superior skillset? I won't know until I actually play some sample games. But if Hutton turns into Patrick Roy and the other three guys are clones of Peter Sidorkiewicz, I'm really going to have to rethink how I'm approaching this mini-league.

Goalie Woes

So...I balanced the teams. I balanced them really well. The parity among these four teams of pre-NHL Hockey Hall of Famers was remarkable.

But then I added in the goalies.

I absolutely cannot believe I failed to take the goaltenders into account when I was balancing the teams. Of the four pre-NHL goalies, there's a clear statistical hierarchy -- Bowse Hutton is far and away the best, followed by Riley Hern, Paddy Moran, and Percy LeSueur in that order. Now I need to go back and redistribute the players so that Hutton gets the worst group, Hern gets the second-worst, and so forth, in order to cancel out the goalies' lopsided influence on the outcome of games.

Argh.

Numbers Game

With old-timey baseball behind me, I'm now moving on to old-timey hockey. I've spent the last couple of nights analyzing the pre-NHL Hall of Famers in my Strat-O-Matic set to gain a better understanding of their relative strengths and weaknesses. My first look at the game stats on the cards was flawed because the box I received didn't include the rulebook (they have since mailed me a copy). Now that I understand the rules, I'm taking a fresh look at the players and realizing that some of my initial thoughts were inaccurate. With a spreadsheet that now has twice as many columns as the first iteration, I'm well on my way to assessing and ranking the players. Although it may sound tedious -- Amy certainly thinks it is -- I actually find this part to be rather enjoyable. I love crunching the numbers and really digging in to the underlying math of the game system. Still, it will be even more fun when I get to play the game!

Stats

When I started my Strat-O-Matic mini-league, I intentionally chose not to record much in the way of data. More tracking -- every at-bat, every defensive play -- equals more time spent. Instead, I opted for fast and fun games that I can get through in a half-hour or less. I'm recording only the data that takes absolutely no effort to record, so that amounts of things like home runs (relatively rare for players of this era) and a few junk stats (errors, wins, saves, etc.).

With two seasons now in the books, I can take a look at the career leaders in these meager categories.  (For context, Season 1 was 16 games per team, and Season 2 was 20 games per team.) Below, I've listed all-time (again, it's only two seasons so far!) records for a few stats...

Home Runs

1. King Kelly - 5
2. Jesse Burkett, George Davis, Ed Delahanty, Hugh Duffy, Honus Wagner - 3
3. (Many tied) - 2

Wins

1. John Clarkson, Cy Young - 8
2. Tim Keefe - 7
3. Pud Galvin - 5

Saves

1. Amos Rusie - 5
2. Joe McGinnity, Vic Willis - 4
3. Rube Waddell - 2

The numbers above reflect only regular-season totals, as we don't really have enough playoff data yet to share anything meaningful. I could also list the career leaders for fielding errors, losses, etc., but we'll stick with the positive stuff!

Haymakers Win It All

The second season of my nineteenth-century Strat-O-Matic baseball league came to a thrilling end last night with the championship game between the Canaries and the Haymakers. Pud Galvin and Cy Young started for their respective teams. The host Haymakers wasted little time in getting on the board when Jesse Burkett hit a two-run shot off of Galvin in the bottom of the first. Galvin surrendered another run in the third on a sacrifice fly. All throughout, the Canaries managed to get men on base, but Young induced enough weak contact to keep the ball in the infield. In the fourth, with two on and two out, Wee Willie Keeler smacked a two-run single to extend the Haymakers' lead to 5-0. Al Spalding took over for the Canaries in the fifth, and he ended up pitching four innings of scoreless relief. Young, meanwhile, was cruising until the seventh, when Monte Ward -- the light-hitting middle infielder and Canaries' captain -- crushed a two-run homer to cut into the Haymakers' lead. The score remained 5-2 into the top of the ninth, when Rube Waddell relieved Young. The hard-throwing lefty tossed a scoreless inning to seal the deal, giving the Haymakers their first championship! The Playoff MVP award went to Jesse Burkett, who went 2-4 with the big first-inning homer; the iron-gloved corner outfielder also made a spectacular catch in the ninth to help preserve the win.

Canaries Take Flight

After the Haymakers earned home field advantage in the championship game, the Canaries and Blue Legs squared off for the right to face them. In a battle of aces, Tim Keefe of the Canaries and the Blue Legs' John Clarkson --this year's pitching MVP -- were evenly matched through six innings, having surrendered two runs apiece. When Clarkson's spot came up with two on and two out in the top of the seventh, I elected to pinch hit, but the Legs failed to score. Now the ball passed to Kid Nichols, who promptly gave up a run in the bottom of the frame. Nichols surrendered three more in the eighth, and the Legs headed into the top of the ninth trailing 6-2. On the other side, Keefe had pitched eight strong innings before giving way to Canary closer Vic Willis. Willis worked in and out of trouble in the ninth and gave up a run before it was all over, but the Birds held on for a 6-3 triumph and a date with the Haymakers for the league championship!

Playoffs Set

We've reached the end of the regular season for my baseball old-timers. The Haymakers locked up first place with a 12-8 record and +4 run differential. The Blue Legs and Canaries tied at 9-11. Since the second-place team hosts the play-in game to determine who faces the first-place team for the championship, we needed a tiebreaker game. When the Blue Legs and Canaries faced off for one final regular-season game, the Canaries came out on top 3-1 behind a complete-game effort from Pud Galvin. As such, the Canaries locked up second place with a 10-11 record, but a lousy -3 run differential. The Blue Legs had a better differential at -1, but finished 9-12 and in last place. Next up, the Canaries will host the Blue Legs in the play-in game, while the Haymakers await the winner!

As far as individual awards go, this season we didn't have a clear-cut MVP among the position players. Numerous players distinguished themselves, but I ended up giving the nod to Honus Wagner of the Canaries; he played great defense at short and provided tremendous offense all season in the middle of the order. For the pitchers, John Clarkson of the Blue Legs was the obvious choice, as he went 6-2 and led a Legs staff that allowed the fewest runs in the league. The final award, for playoff MVP, will be determined after the championship game. I can't wait to see how it all turns out!

The fight against frozen beef!

Okaaaaaay...

A New Chapter

The boys are at a crossroads with both of their Shattered Realm campaigns. Last spring, in the main storyline, they wrapped up the Emerald Tablet saga. Just this past weekend, in the futuristic version (where they're playing descendants of their original characters), they reached the end of a major chapter.

Next up, we'll return to their original characters. I've been trying to scope out a story arc that will be even more epic than the Emerald Tablet, but aside from some cool character development ideas for their heroes, I hadn't really made much progress. Inspiration struck when I returned to a work of literature that has always spurred my imagination: John Milton's Paradise Lost. The new foe who will drive the plot in the next Shattered Realm phase is based heavily on Milton's most dynamic and charismatic character, Satan.

I'm also hoping to use this storyline as a way to ease Matthew and Nathaniel into the vast Druid Cycle campaign world, with its hundreds of NPCs and over a quarter-century of past adventures. As such, I've selected a powerful but minor Druid Cycle character -- an angel -- who will rebel against his god and therefore be exiled across the multiverse to the Shattered Realm, where he'll cause all sorts of mayhem. No doubt I'll find a spot to work in one of Satan's most famous lines from Paradise Lost: "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."