The Father's Day Escape (Bandido)

Father's Day comes at a strange time because it comes right around the same weekend as my anniversary (June 18 - nine glorious years!) and my daughter's birthday (June 20 - seven years old this year!). It feels relatively unimportant compared to these days. This year it was even more so because we had my parents and grandparents over Sunday morning for donuts and coffee to celebrate Ardyn's birthday (we had my wife's family over on her actual birthday).

Well, all of this build up to say that my wife did not forget about me! I got some basketball socks, french fry seasoning, chocolate, a key chain made by my kids, and a pocket-sized gem of a game - Bandido! It was only two days before when we were walking around Indigo and I pointed out this game to her saying that it would be the perfect little stocking stuffer or something. She told me later that she had needed one more little thing for my gifts and was going to give up on finding something and just give me some cash to buy what I wanted. When I told her about this game, she went back and picked it up the next day!

Focused Attack (Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated)

Another night of a Clank! Legacy and another wild and unique experience! We played the same strategy we've been playing for quite a while, but again, things did not turn out the way we expected! We're nearing the end of our campaign (I'm trying not to give away exactly how many games there are) and so the steaks are high. Brennan has won like 60% of the games thus far, so Stirling and I are playing catch up. Or, at least, we're playing to try and stop Brennan from winning. Here is the aftermath of our garage gaming session. If you don't want spoilers, don't zoom in, but I doubt you'd see anything anyway. Except maybe you could count how many chips were left in the bottom of Brennan and Stirling's bowls. As much fun as it is to be in charge of shuffling every deck, moving every piece, adding in every secret, it'll be nice to not have to do EVERYTHING anymore. Brennan is an ER nurse, so he's playing it pretty safe in terms of contact with others, so it could be a little while still. So what happened to make this session so wild and unique? Well, let me tell you!

Playtesting Makes Perfect (Donisi)

After a bit of a break from Donisi, the last few weeks have seen Aaron and I getting back to the grindstone. Aaron is doing his part, working on card and character art (see one pictured here) as well as a teaser trailer that will be coming out soon (keep your eyes open for that!). My main job has been the same as it has been for most of the last few months: playtest, playtest, and playtest. Here's a little rundown of my process lately.

Play through a mission with only one character. See how it feels. Too hard? Too easy? Do certain parts of the mission seem too hard or too easy? If something feels off, I'll make an adjustment. The adjustments I go to first are (1) number of enemies spawned and (2) location of spawn points. I'm not going to be changing the maps much at this point and the cards are pretty set, so this is the best place to do the tweaking. With this current mission, I actually tried completely changing the types of enemies that you'd face. It was a fail, so I went back to my original plan and tweaked the story instead.