Mysterium is a very enjoyable cooperative game that combines Cluedo with…Pictionary? One player is the ghost and gives clues to the other players about each player’s unique combination of murderer, location, and weapon to solve the crime. The ghost player cannot speak though - they must give their clues by presenting the other players with “vision” cards. These cards are super trippy and oblique. It’s a fun game and always great to get to the table. ...
Some boardgames are a pain to set up with multiple bags of tokens to hand out to players, draw decks to separate out and place around the board, or pieces to assemble - all of this slows down the amount of time it takes for the game to get from the box to the table (and vice versa when clearing up). As a means of speeding up game setup, I’ve been looking into making custom inserts for board games. ...
This game is beautiful. I could leave the review at that and it would almost be enough - the star player is the environment (of course, as you barely see another human for the duration of the game) with its crisp colours, sunset-illuminated vistas, and its unforgiving paths. That said, there’s beauty in the script too, with an introduction that crushes your feelings to a pulp before you do anything but click a few times and a constant warm dialogue between the protaganist and the co-worker in the neighbouring tower. ...
After two weeks in the fermenter, it was time to bottle the Irish Red Ale. My checklist is below. Bottling Workflow Wash the following with standard detergent: Bottling bucket Siphon tube Filling tube Bottlecaps Spigot Paddle Thermometer 500ml bottles (31) Wash the following using VWP: Filling tube Siphon tube Bottlecaps Spigot Paddle Trial jar (tall pint glass in this case) Hydrometer Thermometer Bottling bucket 500ml bottles (31) Assemble bottling bucket Attach tubing to fermenter spigot ...
The ingredients from my ingredient shopping arrived really quickly - I placed the order on Thursday at 17:30 and they arrived on Saturday. Impressive work from The Homebrew Company! I put together the workflow below and printed it out so I’d have something to follow along with on brew day. It really helped pinpoint things to focus on and times when I’d be able to prepare the next step while waiting for target temperatures. ...
Brewing beer is a hobby of mine. I haven’t done very many beers so far, but I find it very satisfying and rewarding. I’ve done a few kit brews with dry malt extract and one extract brew so far. I haven’t had any input into the ingredients I brew with before now - time for a change! I picked a recipe from Brewing Classic Styles, by Jamil Zainasheff & John J. Palmer, for an Irish Red Ale (It’s called Ruabeoir in their book, which smacks of putting “red beer” into Google Translate, but I digress…). ...
Since the last entry on the backlog, I’ve sunk a few more hours into Sheltered. It grew on me after a while, with the slog of getting resources being quite gripping. I accidentally overcrowded my shelter and killed half the posse through suffocation though - didn’t realise the oxygen filtration system wouldn’t keep up! An enjoyable game, but think I’ve had my fill of it. Onto the next game… Deponia Doomsday ...
Niamh and I had a boardgame night with six people as a sort of housewarming! With six players we were limited in what games we could play, so we played two games suited for the big group. In the recent Reddit Gifts Boardgames Exchange, I received a game called Codenames. It’s a team-based game, so I’ve had to wait until we had a reasonably large group to break it out. Each team has a “Spymaster” who gives one word clues so that their team picks the correct cards on the table. The trick to the game is linking multiple cards with a single clue, which I had great satisfaction doing - e.g. my team’s cards were “Telescope”, “Airplane”, and “Parachute”, so I gave the clue “Sky 3”. It was very good fun and very funny to see the wrong trains of thought that people went on for clues that seemed foolproof! Very fast turnaround for each round too - there were six of us, so we did three rounds, taking turns to be the spymaster and that took us around an hour in total. ...
I settled in for a wet Friday evening at home alone and cleared a few games from the list…with mixed results. Some miscellaneous items were on the list that I had actually played, but missed with my initial categorisation - an easy few points gained! Action Henk This was surprisingly fun. I honestly thought it would be awful, going by first impressions from the store page. It’s a pleasantly challenging racing game involving a corpulent action figure who can slide on his bum. You see what I mean about the first impressions now, I hope. The online multiplayer didn’t work so well - I think it has a limited player base - but the single player mode was engaging enough that my 67 minutes in game went by without me noticing it. I didn’t finish the single-player mode, but enjoyed what I played of it. ...
I have quite a large Steam game collection. 231 games. A ludicrous amount of games. As well as the games I’ve anticipated and obsessed over, I have random one-offs that were on sale, games that were included in various bundles, and freebies. Some of the ones I got on sale have been played less than the ones I got for free. I’d go so far as to say that most of the games in my Steam library are unplayed (I then went and checked - not the majority, but a pretty hefty sum: 92 out of 231). This really only hit home recently, as I decided to reorganise the categories in the game library and found myself completely at a loss about certain games. ...