Hobby

This is a major learning process and I knew I didn’t have the skills required starting out to do this one justice, so I saved it for game number 4! Discworld Ankh-Morpork (unfortunately out of print since the death of Terry Pratchett, the author of the Discworld books) is one of my very favourite games (only one that gives it competition is Cosmic Encounter!) so I wanted to do right by it. After learning a bit about removable parts of inserts while doing my Codenames insert, and my Mysterium insert I decided I wanted to incorporate that idea into Ankh-Morpork too in order to speed up set-up and improve the use of table space. ...

This one turned out extremely well! I improved my cutting technique, so I don’t have the rough edges of my Mysterium insert and I made the angles a bit less of a headache than in my Avalon insert. The big strength about this insert is that it reduces setup time to…nearly zero. You take the card box and main insert out of the box, plonk them in front of the spymasters and lay out the cards. Makes for nice quick cleaning up too. ...

No in-progress shots of this one, unfortunately. I learned a lot of lessons from my Mysterium insert and I’m much happier with the finish on this one, though I do have some unfortunate glue spill-over around some of the joins. The big challenge with this insert was the angles for the separators for the big cards - major heartache getting those right! Inspiration from Mike Holzman over on Boardgamegeek, but I added the angled piece for the Lady of the Lake and Crown cards which allows them both to be seen at once. My core desire for this insert was that I wanted as many different components as possible to be visible at once to allow for easy grabbing. ...

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. ...

I recently upgraded my computer build, replacing the graphics card, CPU, CPU cooler, RAM, and motherboard (rig details at the bottom of the post). The goal is to be able to hit some high graphics settings in AAA games going forward. So far, it’s working very well, though I haven’t stretched it yet really. I’ve played Arkham Knight without any performance issues, but nothing more current. I’m looking into overclocking, since it’s apparently very feasible with this system. The Asus motherboard has a built-in utility for overclocking, but I’m scared of taking the plunge - I’ll do some more reading before risking exploding my shiny new computer parts. ...