Category: Uncategorized

With spring come the cherry blossoms! Our orchard looks stunning right now.

After last year’s disastrous non-harvest, we’re taking some precautions this year. On the top of the list: an electric fence to keep the bears out. And now that the blossoms are here, it’s reminding me I need to get cracking on that project…

The problem: we have some cobwebs in our skylights. They keep growing, because the spiders are hard at work, and they catch the light on a sunny day. I’d love to remove them, and generally you’d think taking down some cobwebs would be easy. But when the skylight is forty feet above the floor, things get a little more tricky.

I thought about PVC tubing, metal pipes, even those cleaning tools with “extensions”. But even from the upstairs, it would take about thirty feet of some kind of rod to reach that high. No dice. I threw socks and towels at the cobwebs, but that didn’t work very well.

Then Pepper suggested a solution: buy a drone and fly it up to the skylight, then buzz around the cobwebs for a bit. Brilliant! So I bought a cheap drone, and this afternoon it took its maiden flight.

You get what you pay for, of course, so it wasn’t entirely surprising when the drone kind of drifted and wobbled. Eventually, though, I was able to maneuver it into the skylight and sweep through the cobwebs. Mission accomplished!

I commissioned a piece of art from my friend Addi, who does oil painting. I think it looks pretty awesome.

Spring is here, which means the trees are budding and the flowers are blooming. And the dang dandelions are sprouting everywhere.

For some reason I’m passionate about destroying every one of those yellow flowers. So I spent an hour wandering the yard, pulling all of them. (At least it’s a nice day!) And yet… and yet… I know in two days there will be another batch popping up. Grrrrrr…

We’ve finally topped 70 degrees around here! Time to get some yardwork done…

Starting with nothing more than a half-joke around the table, I’ve been thinking about this next game. I did some “homework”, which basically consisted of poking around Wikipedia looking at various dinosaurs. Then I had lunch with my friend Nate, and after we finished playing a few board games, I brought up my idea. He was really excited and enthusiastic, and the two of us started throwing ideas around. “What if the game has three phases, since there were three periods in the Mesozoic Era?” and “How would the cards interact with one another?” and even “How can the game be made simple, while still involving good strategy?”

A few days later, and I’m printing a first round of cards!

I feel like this is the first draft of a first draft. It could be an absolute disaster. But you never know until you start shuffling the cards and dealing them out, right?…

At latest count, I own 83 board games. But I’m always in the market to add more, and I just bought one called Survive: Escape from Atlantis. It sounds cheesy, although that might be because it’s from the 1980’s. But it’s actually a pretty cool game. It’s one of those that takes about 3 minutes to learn and 20 minutes to play, but is still a good time.

So Pepper and Kyra and I gave it a go.

The first few games, we all played “nicely”, not throwing the others into the ocean where all the sharks and sea monsters live, or floating away on a boat while laughing and waving at the hapless swimmers. But after a few more times, things got a little more cutthroat and we were abandoning one another… leading to new strategies like jumping on shared boats and teleporting whales around.

I won’t go so far as saying Survive is my new favorite game, but it’s definitely a novelty and one that’s going to see a lot more play in our house.

When we lived in Colorado, I had a small group of friends with whom I played board games. We’d get together every few weeks on a Friday or Saturday night to eat Cheetos and M&M’s while talking smack over a handful of games. It was a blast, and I really enjoyed the opportunity not only to learn and get better at games, but just hang out with good friends.

When we moved to Montana, I immediately started looking for a similar outlet. Many big cities have game shops and even groups who meet regularly, but in rural Montana that’s not so much a thing. I managed to stumble across a store up in Kalispell (45 minutes north) that had sort-of-regular game nights. I joined them on many occasions, but honestly it was kind of a drag to drive an hour and a half to play games for maybe two hours at most.

Then the ‘rona hit, and everyone was suddenly having video chats. I called my Colorado friends, and we started having remote game nights. We’d have a video call going while we played our favorite games on various web sites. It was a ton of fun. I talked to the Magnificent Seven (my high-school friends) and we ended up doing the same thing. Suddenly I could play the board games I’d been missing, and talk to the people I’d also been missing!

Over the past year, I’ve met some other people in the area who enjoy games, and we get together now and then. A favorite haunt is Rosa’s Pizza, which is sort of central to all of us and has the added benefit of great pizza. The Mahjongg Gang does the same thing.

A few weeks ago I met another new friend, and he happens to like games even more than I do. Actually, a lot more than I do. He has hundreds of board games in his collection, and has a dedicated gaming room in his house. We started getting together for game nights, usually with a few others, and I was thrilled to expand my circle of (1) friends and (2) gamers. A few days ago, he asked if I’d be interested in co-founding a gaming club with him. We’d have regular game nights in town (at the church, actually, which we can use for free) and invite anyone in the area who wants to play. Sure, why not?

Of course the first order of business was coming up with a great name. He did some brainstorming, and then asked what I thought. I told him we shouldn’t use terms like “Flathead” or “Glacier” or even “Big Sky”… all of those are really overused by local businesses. They feel like “Mile High” or “Flatiron” or “Rocky Mountain” did back in Colorado. His face fell, and then he showed me his list. Most of the names he’d come up with had those forbidden terms. We laughed a bit, and then continued thinking of names. In the end, we decided on Moose Meeples. Original, catchy, easy to remember. I even sketched a little meeple to use on flyers.

Next week is our inaugural game night. I’m hopeful we’ll get a good crowd, and enough people will enjoy it that it becomes a stable weekly event. Coupled with the Colorado group, the Magnificent Seven, and a few other local friends, I think I’ll be set for board games for a while!

Hexteria has been a rousing success thus far… people who have played it have generally enjoyed it. (Granted, those people are my family and friends, so maybe they’re just being nice.) Although there’s still a lot of work to be done to market and sell it, that’s a process that’s going to take months. In the meantime, I feel like it’s time to start designing my next game.

One of the challenges Hexteria continues to face is a lack of a theme. Although I throw around some medieval terms, at its heart the game is very abstract. Several people have commented on that, but at this point in the development it’s going to be tricky to layer a theme atop it without changing some of the fundamental mechanics. So, as I consider the next game, I feel like a good starting point will be a theme, rather than mechanics. Also, I’d like to make a card game this time. They’re (generally) simpler, and far easier to build, playtest, and publish.

I sat down with Kyra and Pepper today and asked them what theme they’d like to see in a card game. “If you were at a game store looking at a bunch of unknown games on the shelf, what would catch your eye?” They both agreed that dinosaurs would be the bomb. We spent a few minutes brainstorming what a dinosaur card game might look like. Fortunately Kyra just finished a paleontology class at BYU, so she actually knows quite a bit about the subject.

We chatted about mechanics and agreed this will need to be a “simple” game… one that takes a few minutes to explain, and maybe 20 minutes to play. It won’t have nearly the complexity of Hexteria, but that’s intentional.

As for the artwork, I decided to see how well I can draw dinosaurs. Here’s my first effort.

Yes, I know triceratops wasn’t blue. But hey, not bad for five minutes of sketching, right? (Kyra insisted on the smile… otherwise “she looks all grumpy”).

Stay tuned for updates on whatever the heck this turns out to be…

If there’s one thing people say when they see our house, it’s “Wow, this place has a lot of switches!“

I’m kidding– people don’t really say that. But I’ve said it many times. After moving in and noticing the great proliferation of switches, I finally had to put labels on them because there are many sets of three, four, or even (in one instance) ten switches in a row. I couldn’t remember what turned on what. I spent the better part of an afternoon going around slapping switches and figuring out what to put on the labels.

The kicker? Some of the switches literally do nothing. Flip them on and off, slide the dimmer, whatever… nothing happens. And yes, I’ve checked plugs on the wall in case some of them are controlled by switches. At one point Thom and I pulled off a switch plate on a particularly mystifying one, to find that it wasn’t actually connected to wires! Umm, what?

Anyway, after things like that, I felt like a few of the non-functional switches deserved clever labels. Here are a couple:

We don’t have a drawbridge (yet) but if we ever install one, the wiring and switch are in place.

I bring this up because today on the internet I saw a photo that proved I’m not alone.

Thank you, internet stranger! I’m not the only person who has to label my switches, and also not the only one who moved into a house with switches that simply don’t do anything.