How am I doing? How are y'all doing?
Cue the Barenaked Ladies
It's been…4 weeks since we started this </Barenaked ladies>. Like most of you, I've been locked up in the house, only going out for the essentials. First of all, if you work in any of the fields keeping us afloat during this time, thank you so much! Also, my heart goes out to everyone who's having trouble during this time, whether it be loss of job, dealing with family issues, etc. I've been lucky in that my job situation is fairly stable, but I know that is not the case for a large portion of the world right now.
Most of the past month has been spent watching TV with the family and playing various video games. Overall, I've been wanting to do more creative endeavors, but finding it hard to actually get myself to do anything. Some of it has been lack of energy to focus on anything, and some of it has been not knowing what to write about. I mean, I could do a blog post about "What are the best games to play online?", but that's being done by so many people in much better ways. I'm more likely to do a "what are the best blogs/articles suggesting games to play online" (Let me know if you'd read that, btw).
In the interest of getting myself back into the habit of writing, I thought that I'd start out by letting you all know what I've been up to, and what the status is of all the creative endeavors that I'm apart of. This will probably be more for me than any of you, so apologies if you were looking for something more substantial. Also, let me know if you have any questions/topics/ideas that you'd like to hear me talk/write about.
Bored Gaming
If you listen to the podcast, you know that I don't get a *ton* of games played during the weeks normally. On a good social week, I usually get 1-2 game days in. At home, my family is not really super big into board games. My wife will entertain me and play a board game every now and then, but her various health issues mean that she has to be in the right place energy-wise to be able to devote the "spell slots" towards playing a board game.
Right before the lockdown happened, I managed to be in Target and see that Ravensburger's Minecraft: Builders and Biomes game was in stock, so I IMMEDIATELY picked that up. Ashley and I are both huge Minecraft fans, so I was curious to see if she liked this game. When she has been in the mood to play board games, we've been playing that quite a bit. We both really like that game and it definitely brings the feel of the video game to a board game.
When it comes to playing games remotely, I have my hits and misses though. For instance, last Friday our Star Wars RPG group got together to continue our campaign. I was all psyched to play, but when Friday came I found myself really drained and not in a mood to socialize so I had to back out. The next night, however, I was able to get on Tabletop Simulator (TTS) with Shaun from All the Bits podcast and we played some Gloomhaven. I've also managed to transition our Arkham Horror LCG night to playing online every week on TTS. We're almost done with the Path to Carcosa! I'm so excited to see what the end of this campaign brings.
Listing lazily to the left
When it comes to the Boards & Swords podcast, we took one episode off as we worked on our mobile setups and making sure that everything worked. We were able (more or less) to get everyone sounding as good as we could get given money and network limitations, and streamed episode 147 of the podcast live last Wednesday. On the podcast, we announced the 2020 version of our Top 10 board games of all time lists. The podcast version of the episode should come out next week. There's a couple of shockers on those lists, so you should definitely check it out!
We'll record the next episode a week from this Wednesday (see our schedule on the live page). In the meantime, we are working on getting more content recorded for our Patreon backers, like the Top 11-50 games. If you want to hear any of those episodes, you'll need to head over to our patreon page and even at just $1/month you'll get access to those episodes.
Dirtbags of Holding in place
There's not much to say here. We've done some remote tests, but no new recordings/streams as of yet. Which is also why you haven't seen any episodes come out of the podcast as well - I don't like to put out episodes if I'm not actively recording new ones. This keeps the buffer that I have in place. At this time, I'm a bit hesitant to continue our campaign given all the uncertainties we have right now. I think one shot type adventures are probably better for us in the time being until we are certain of everyone's capabilities. However, most everyone is out of ideas right now for running one shots. Once we get everyone's creative juices going again, you'll start seeing this podcast come back.
Tangled in the playbooks
In case you missed it, at the beginning of this whole quarantine I announced that I was working with some talented people to make a new RPG called Tangled in the Slipstring! Well, what little creative work I've been doing I've been putting into the game. I have a first draft of the character playbooks outlined, so I can at least start playtesting the game. Lots of things will change about them, but I need to try out the ideas I have so I can see which way I want the mechanics to go. Plus, playing some games will help us with the world building as well by getting some new ideas. Remember, if you want to see more Tangled stuff, again you are going to want to go back our Patreon.
How are you?
I know I shouldn't be so hard on myself to push out content, but at the same time the main reason I create content is to connect and engage with people. By not creating content, I almost make my situation worse by not getting that energy from talking with fellow gamers. How have all of y'all been? What games have you been playing the most? What types of content would you be interested in? I'm curious about any or all comments that you have, so leave them here or on Twitter or Facebook.