Month: August 2025

As I was thinking about designing a new board game, I decided it would be interesting to create a game for kids. Specifically my grandson Ollie. He’s four now, so he’s not going to be thrilled about whatever resource-management game I devise, but he’ll probably like a fun card game.

I did a bit of design work, sent the files to my favorite card-printing company, and today my new deck arrived.

This is Ofrendas, based on the Mexican traditions of Dia de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. It’s actually a beautiful celebration of family, remembering those who have passed on. I created cards with cartoon grandparents, aunts, and uncles.

The game is basically Go Fish, but the objective is to collect matching ancestors to complete your ofrenda, the display where family photos are placed along with candles, candy skulls, and favorite foods. I threw in a few primo locos (crazy cousins) to spice up the game a bit.

I haven’t actually playtested it– I mean, it’s Go Fish— but I’m hoping Ollie enjoys it when we visit him in a few weeks…

It’s been a few months since we shopped for a new hot tub, and today was the delivery. A team of four guys manhandled the old tub off our pad and brought in the new one. They made short work of positioning it, connecting all the wiring, and testing the various buttons. Now it’s ready to go!

Of course it’ll take a solid day to bring it up to temperature, and it’s still pretty warm outside, so we might not actually use our latest addition for a while yet…

Every summer we zip across the lake on our jet skis to visit Wild Horse Island, the largest island on Flathead Lake and the home of four wild horses and a network of hiking trails. Today we decided to go to the highest point on the island, and set out on the trail. It wound through the trees and climbed up a long hill before going up a steep rocky incline to the summit. Pepper and Kyra decided they’d gained enough altitude, and stopped at a small outcropping.

Undeterred, I continued on. It was hard going because the grade was very steep, and there were a lot of loose rocks that slid underfoot. But I finally made it to the top and snapped a celebratory selfie.

The view from the peak is spectacular, encompassing much of the lake.

I made my way (carefully) back down to the ladies and we hiked back to our jet skis. It was a beautiful day to be out, and definitely a spot I plan to return to in the future.

My new toy arrived today.

This is an nVidia graphics card that takes up about half of my desktop computer case.

Now that I’m easing back into board game design, and considering a foray into large language model computing, I thought it made sense to get a better graphics card. This particular one is the largest one that still fit inside my computer case (barely!) and it packs a wallop. I’m excited to see how it does as I generate artwork for my games. It should be almost two orders of magnitude faster than my old card. Off to the races!