Organising my boardgames: Bora Bora

Starting off my segment of showing off my organising solution for various games is probably one of my more interesting solutions. When I kicked off this thing, my intention was to mainly box up the resources that you needed in the game and not really anything that was key to the game's set-up. With Bora Bora this originally meant only a few components initially made it into a box, but then I started rethinking the system a bit to see if there wasn't one more way to tweak it. Turns out there is.

Organising my boardgames

Over a year ago I posted about how I had made my own big box solution for Catan. Since then (in fact in the past week or so) I've gotten into somewhat of an organising craze. I've been going through most of the games in my collection and figured out ways to not only keep the components separate and tidy, but also significantly reducing set-up and clean-up time needed for the games in question.

My Top Ten Favourite Legend of Zelda Games

Recently I've been watching a ton of countdown videos on people's favourite Legend of Zelda games. It's just fun to see how people's opinions differ, and how things that turned me off about a game were the exact same things that made others love it, and vice versa. I decided to try and compile my own list and see how it compares to the many, many video countdowns I've now seen. Now, I would have loved to make this into a video, but I'm afraid I'm better at writing my thoughts and opinions than I am at voicing it into a microphone. Also, I don't own any capturing devices or software, so any video would just be me talking, and that's not really interesting. The best video countdowns I came across were the ones that really showed off the gameplay of the individual games. So I'm afraid that my thoughts will just be expressed in writing here on my blog.

Doing Minecraft Survival for the First Time

I tend to be very specific when it comes to games and gaming experience. I detest gaming in first person, I don't like gaming on the computer, especially with the mouse and keyboard controls. I've tried it several times, and each time the gaming experience was more enjoyable for me when I switched over to the console version of the game instead. However, there is one game that kind of breaks most of my main rules of gaming, and I actually love it; Minecraft.

Why I think Global streaming should become reality

I've kind of already touched on this subject in a blog I wrote nearly a year and a half ago, where I lamented the use of region-locking in the entertainment industry, but now that Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix has begun arguing for a global streaming service rather than sticking to today's formula of region-releases for content, I thought it was time to write about it once again.

Like a Phoenix rising from the flames...

Hi, I'm back, and I'm breathing life back into this blog. I know it's been ages, and who knows, maybe nobody missed it when it originally died its slow and quiet death. Nobody except me, at least. I can't promise that something like it won't happen again, but I plan to try my best to keep it alive.

To explain how I plan to avoid it, I need to clear up why I ended up with this year-long absence (almost to the day it seems) in the first place. When I started blogging, I loved doing it. I wrote about the things that interested me, and it was a nice way to just air my thoughts and share my passions. Then I got the [insert sarcastic voice] brilliant idea of making weekly columns as a way to keep at it. And I enjoyed them at first, writing recommendations for my favourite fan works out there and writing about the games I was discovering, but then it kind of piled up and it began to feel like work than a hobby and I started to resent it, especially my own insistence to do weekly updates.

Another issue was how I blocked off other topics that might have interested me to write about because it didn't really fit the "theme" of my blog, which is just silly, as this is my blog, so why shouldn't I get to write about whatever I want, whether it actually fits into the geek category or not. So, no more of that, I will write about the things that interest me, and knowing myself, I will probably only stray away from the geek-side once in a blue moon anyway, so what was the problem, again?

If for any reason you read my blog back then, maybe you've noticed that I've now taken down all the old weekly recommendations posts. It's part of my plan to "take back" the blog, I've decided to start fresh and only do recommendation blogs for fan works and creators I truly feel ought to be discovered and appreciated, I haven't decided on the format yet, but I will figure it out. I also intend to rework my table top blogs, as another problem was that I was forcing myself to write about every game I was introduced to rather than the ones that actually made me want to write about them. So I will keep some pieces and rework them, removing others, and of course write new ones.

In general, I just want to get back to writing about the things I care about, avoid forcing a schedule on myself. Sure, a schedule helps with the predictability, but it also has a tendency to favour quantity over quality, and I'd much rather stick to properly written pieces than throwing something together last minute because it's [insert weekday] and it's time to post a [insert column]. So, here's to hoping that some random people out there will appreciate what I have to say. It's good to be back.

... oh, and I just noticed the date, completely not an April fools joke, just a random coincidence.

First Time Playing: Suburbia

This is a game where each player work to build a city. You construct buildings of different types trying to balance out population growth and income in order to stay afloat. Suburbia was described to me as the board game version of Sim City, which I found to be a very fitting description. The main goal is to construct the city which ends up with the largest population, but in order to get population you need to stay on top of both population and income growth as they will decrease as your city expands.

First Time Playing: Dos Rios

This is another one of the games I bought off another member of my gaming group, this one I hadn't even heard of before, but I looked it up on the web to see what kind of mechanics it had, and since it was worker placement, I decided to get it. Thankfully, when this one came up at a game night, one of the other people already knew it, so it wasn't up to me to teach them. In Dos Rios you are manipulating two rivers by building dams, so that the water will flow to areas occupied by your player pieces or houses in an attempt to get money and/or wood.

Settlers of Catan: My own big box solution

I love Settlers of Catan, and especially its many brilliant expansions. But with a game that you can mix and match bits and pieces, playing a ton of different scenarios, storage can become a bit of a hassle, especially if you want to keep your options open, but don't fancy having a major clean-up involving multiple boxes every time you play a game (or taking lots of time to set a game up). I've trialed and error'd my way, using utility boxes, labelled zip-lock bags, all of it to simplify setting up and clearing away the game, as well as making the game easier to bring along with me. And I can now proudly say that I've found a way to put the game and all its expansions into one single box (or, well... case).

First Time Playing: Witch of Salem

Not that long before Christmas, someone in my gaming group was selling off a bunch of games, so I ended up buying six of them, all of which I hadn't played before, and most of them I hadn't even heard of. Witch of Salem was one of the games I bought, and apart from hearing the title in passing, I really didn't know anything about it, except it sounded interesting. When I opened the box and looked through the components, I was convinced this had to be the first game I tried. The artwork was absolutely stunning, the theme was right up my alley, and I'm also a person who enjoys co-operative gameplay.