My interest in the Dark Souls video game franchise is well documented on this blog - I once even was interviewed for a leading Dutch newspaper about it. So of course I have an interest in replicating that kind of feel in a tabletop RPG. When I wrote an RPG in 24 hours, I produced Miasma, a Japanese-themed take on the concept of undead traveling ( Read more... )

I don’t recall who wrote it, but a quote I read on Twitter said that every game is like a spreadsheet: there’s numbers and relationships between those numbers. And the goal of any game is to get certain numbers high (score, HPs, XPs) while keeping other numbers low (damage, etc). To do this, you have a few number cells you can manipulate that then ( Read more... )

One year ago, when the COVID-19 restrictions had just started, Animal Crossing:New Horizons was released. I had pre-ordered and pre-downloaded it for our Switch, and it was the evening of March 20th when I stepped into that sea airplane to go on the ‘uninhabited island package’. Lots of people have written about how people visited each others’ ( Read more... )

A power interruption. We had gotten a letter from the company that manages the power lines that they’d be working on the infrastructure on Monday, from 08:00 to 12:00. That’s quite a long time, and no power means no heating, no hot water and no internet. I had reserved a spot at the office, but on Sunday I really didn’t feel like going - who would ( Read more... )

Remember when Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out just as we went into the first lockdown, and it turned into a bit of a lifeline for many people? You could visit other islands and keep in touch with friends. People celebrated birthdays and weddings in-game, and there was a regular iftar on an island too. In my mind, it’s really intertwined with ( Read more... )

I’ve been trawling through the “free to play” category on the Switch e-shop, just to try some things out.
I started out with Spellbreak, in which you play a wizard running through an arena where you need to find equipment that will make you more powerful. With that equipment you can attack other players (or bots) to ‘banish’ them and take their loot ( Read more... )

It’s been quite a while since I posted here. But I don’t really have much to say, because not much has been happening.
We’ve started to relax our strict distancing a bit with our respective families. Klik has resumed her visits with her mother, but she does keep her distance (no hugs etc). And yesterday we visited my parents for a ‘garden date’: we ( Read more... )

The release of Animal Crossing:New Horizons could not have been timed better. Well, it would have been timed better if it had released a few days early since people are spending more time indoors. (And that was in fact what happened for people who had preordered from a store here in the Netherlands: they were shutting down all their stores, so ( Read more... )

With a month to go to the release of the new Animal Crossing game for the Switch, the hype is certainly building up - at least, I see a lot of people being excited over on Twitter. I’ve never really played any ‘tend & befriend’ games, and I am wary of the time-bound aspects: I do not want a game to dictate my schedule, I’ll play when I feel like it ( Read more... )

Yesterday, we visited Essen for the annual Spiel tabletop gaming exhibition. My purchase list was empty, but as usual we didn’t return empty-handed… We left a bit after 9 am, and went straight to P10, the off-site parking with lots of capacity, as the parking near the Messe itself fills up almost immediately. We were not going to make the same ( Read more... )