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For the first time, all of our kids were able to come up to Montana for Christmas. What’s more, they were all able to take off a full week from work and other responsibilities, so we had a nice long time together. It was wonderful.

Rather than write a single monumental blog post about our Christmas adventures, I think I’ll break it up into chunks. This first chunk is entitled “The Gifts”. It’s really just about our Christmas Day together.

Well, technically I’ll start with Christmas Eve. In keeping with Kaitlyn’s family tradition– now a favorite tradition of ours as well– we had a “Bethlehem Dinner” of simple foods. Our table was adorned with chicken, cheeses, fruits, vegetables, unleavened bread, and some sparkling cider. We sat on pillows and used candles and the fireplace for light. Kaitlyn did the bulk of the preparation; here she shows off the meal.

It’s a nice way to leave behind our first-world foods and modern conveniences for a little while, and reflect on the food and setting of the time of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem.

Our tree– transported all the way from Utah by Kyra– illuminated the corner of the room and the piles of presents (about a third of which were for Ollie, I think).

We still have a dearth of tree ornaments, so as we did last year, we hung a single ornament on the tree: Sefton’s little hand-painted wooden egg.

Christmas Day dawned, and we gathered at about 9am to open gifts. Ollie isn’t quite old enough yet to insist that everyone be up by 7am (although he is anyway, every day), so we had a chance to sleep in a bit.

The unwrapping commenced. Ollie didn’t usually wait for his turn, but that was okay.

There was much happiness as people revealed things they’d asked for…

… like board games they’d had on their list for a while.

Zack was shocked at this one:

But it turned out to be a jacket he’d bought for himself. And wrapped for himself.

What he didn’t expect was the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos Snuggie, a man-sized blanket you wear.

When the wrapping paper was gone and the boxes emptied, Ollie had a huge pile of toys to entertain him for the rest of the week.

Grandma helped him set up blocks and train tracks and marble slides. It seemed like she was having more fun than him!

Alex and Zack went to work on a Lego set that depicted a character in one of Alex’s favorite video games.

Pepper found a fun little child-sized backpack for Ollie, and we included a couple of half-size water bottles (vacuum lined, as all good water bottles are). He absolutely loved the pack, and wore it around all day. He’d take it off, stuff some toys into it, play for a while, then take it off again to exchange the toys. Eventually he insisted on going for a hike… after all, that’s what backpacks are for, right? We didn’t have much snow on the ground, but we sure have plenty of hiking land around our house!

Later in the day, the hot tub beckoned. Ollie insisted on bringing his new toy boat.

Although it’s always nice to receive a few things I’ve asked for, I think the most fun at any Christmas present-opening event is watching the surprise and joy of little kids as they unwrap things they don’t expect. Merry Christmas, Ollie!

Using the AI art I created a few weeks ago, I sent off my designs for Utu. Today I received the printed pieces, and I’m thrilled.

But there was work to be done. One of the things I wanted to test with this printing was a “dual-layer mat”, which is a fancy board-gaming term for a two-part chipboard mat where pieces are placed. The top layer has punch-outs where the pieces go, and the bottom layer is solid. In this way, the pieces can be placed in the punch-outs and don’t slide around if you accidentally bump the mat.

The first step was to order a leather punch kit. These are shaped metal, sort of like cookie cutters, used to punch through leather for things like belt holes. The kit I bought had a variety of pieces and shapes, which was important because I needed punch-outs of several different sizes.

Using a rubber mallet and a plastic cutting board, I pounded the punch kit pieces through the chipboard. It was pretty tedious.

Then I glued the backing onto each mat, and the result was exactly what I wanted.

Here are the pieces for the fully printed game, ready to be played!

It’s a big step up from the secondhand hex tiles and cardstock I ran through my trusty old Brother laser printer:

This project has been a ton of work, and it’s stretched me in some new creative directions. But that’s one of my goals with board game design, so I’m happy with it. Although I don’t think this will be the “final” printing of Utu, it’s a great start and a way I can introduce the game to more people and get feedback on it. Onward and upward!

This is a composite photograph of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) by a group of amateur astronomers. Beautiful.

About once a year, Donald X Vaccarino, the designer of the card game Dominion, releases a new expansion. The game first came out in 2008, and the current count of cards exceeds 6,200. And I have them all.

Yeah, it’s one of my favorite games, and for some reason every time a new expansion is released I feel compelled to buy it. A few years ago I spent some time organizing my collection, and it worked great. Everything– about 4,000 cards at the time– fit nicely in a single box. But since then, my collection has grown by about 50%, and cards were spilling out into other makeshift boxes. They weren’t organized, making it difficult to use the new expansions.

I decided to buy another box and reorganize the whole thing. Today I went to work. The first step was buying some nice thick cardstock in a myriad of colors.

Next, I built a massive set of documents with the card names on them, and printed them. Each expansion had its own color.

Then it was time to cut them. Our trusty twenty-year-old paper cutter made the job easy, although it was terribly tedious.

After about two hours, I had stacks of colorful, neatly-cut dividers.

The final step was alphabetizing the cards, inserting the dividers between them (there are ten copies of each card), and fitting the expansions into the box. It worked really well.

Now, when someone asks if I’d like to play Dominion, I can grab my box… or both boxes, depending on how serious they want to get. The kids are planning to visit for Christmas, and they all love the game, so I’m excited to pull it out.

My friend Richard wore an amazing suit to the Christmas party tonight. He even let me try it on!

Although I wore a boring grey shirt to the party, it’s worth mentioning I was the only adult in the room wearing a Santa hat. Next year I hope to have a suit like his.

Back in September, I started working on my latest board game, Utu. Since then I’ve had the opportunity to playtest it with several groups of friends and family. Their feedback has been positive and helpful, and the game’s development continues apace. It’s reached the point where I’m no longer satisfied with printed cardstock and handwritten sticky notes on the backs of old Hexteria hexes. It’s time to print this thing!

In any relatively complicated game, it’s surprising how much design is involved. I needed hexes with oceans and islands, and artwork for the player mats and action boards and decks of cards. I’m not really very good at that sort of thing, so my past game designs have been a bit hit-or-miss. For Indio, I engaged my nephew Tim to design the hexes, and he did a great job with the abstract artwork I envisioned. It was much better than the heavily-modified internet photos I’d downloaded and edited. For Onward, I just found artwork on the internet and used it, because I knew I wasn’t going to be publishing the game (hence copyright wasn’t at stake). I think the results were quite good, but it felt a little like cheating to just grab other artists’ work.

Last week I spent long hours working on designs. I came up with color schemes and drew islands and oceans and underwater creatures. I copied some Polynesian tattoo patterns for the card decks. I hadn’t yet figured out what to do about the player mats and action boards. I felt kind of stuck.

Then I struck on an idea: could I generate the artwork using AI? Specifically, could I use Stable Diffusion, which I’d installed on my computer after scoring a high-end graphics card? I’d done a few experiments with it, but until now hadn’t found an opportunity to really put it to use. I updated some software and went to work.

The results were astonishing.

With prompts like “Polynesian boats on an ocean, with islands and palm trees”, it created artwork like this in about 60 seconds:

I continued modifying the prompts, dialing in the look I was going for, and was repeatedly amazed by what the software did. How about some stormy seas?

Or a sunset scene?

The hours passed quickly. I was having a ton of fun coming up with this artwork! The power of AI art was taking me in directions I hadn’t planned. Instead of having three or four island drawings, as I’d done last week, I could create a whole set of unique island art like this:

After a full day of creating artwork (it’s a time-consuming process, and sometimes results in less-than-useful results), I had the graphics I needed. I could transform my original drawn designs into these new AI-based ones. For example, here’s how an island hex changed:

Here’s a player mat, from concept to finished art:

I could even design people, so I’d have a Polynesian chief and a princess.

AI art generation is notoriously poor at rendering people (particularly eyes and fingers, for some reason) so this took some experimentation and a lot of refinement. But the final result is a thousand times better than what I could’ve done unaided.

This morning I spent a few hours compiling the cards and hexes, doing the template layouts, and finally sending all of it to the print company. In a few weeks I should have a fully designed, fully playable version of Utu to enjoy with the kids during our Christmas gathering. Woo hoo!

I saw this little exchange on the internet somewhere…

… and it reminded me that I have to keep working at being Ollie’s Cool Grandpa.

That’s not to say Brett isn’t also his Cool Grandpa; Brett is indeed pretty cool, and I think it’s perfectly legitimate to have two Cool Grandpas. As Ollie keeps growing, he also keeps getting to be more fun and interactive. Gotta stay cool.

To those who say everything is going horribly, and things are getting worse, I present Exhibit A.

I always enjoy a good white elephant Christmas party, when you never know if you’ll go home with something awesome or something completely lame. I still think the monster hat scored (which I gave to Kyra) was my favorite.

I have a long tradition of white-elephant gifts, such as three amazing vinyl LPs, five dollars in pennies, potato cookies, $2,000 in gift cards, and even last year’s Feliz Navidoug pillow. I’m also remembered for a massive CRT computer monitor that weighed around thirty pounds (rookie mistake: open the big heavy box), a puzzle featuring my friend dressed as a sexy firefighter, a Jesus Christ Atonement board game (!), and a lobster-topped serving bowl that seems to come back to our party each year.

And it’s that time again, so I was thinking of clever ideas. The best white-elephant gift is one that’s funny and somewhat useful, but not too nice or useful. After a few aborted directions, I settled on a custom-printed shower curtain. It arrived today.

This thing is so big. Six by six feet doesn’t seem that large until you unfold all of it and realize your face is a good three feet high. Pepper and I were laughing pretty hard.

In a couple of days I’m excited to see who takes this little gem home…

Little kids are entertained by just about anything. It’s so fun to watch them giggle and laugh at dumb stuff. And of course that means you’re always doing dumb stuff in an effort to make them laugh.

Take today, for example, when Ollie and I were eating crayons.

He thought it was hilarious. And of course it was way more fun than just coloring on the little kids’ menu at the restaurant!

I suppose a bit of a waxy aftertaste in my mouth as I ate my pizza was a small price to pay for a little bit of joy in my grandson’s day.