Last week, we saved the forest with apple pies in My Little Scythe. Now we have to save the world – or at least 1920s Eastern Europe – in Scythe. Both “My Little Scythe” and “Scythe” have similar game play. In both, you choose from among a certain amount of actions, that are upgraded as the game progresses, in order to boost your faction and reach a set number of goals. Scythe takes that basic template and bolts on asymmetric gameplay, where each faction plays a little differently from the others, with different advantages. I played Crimea, which also grabs parts of both what would be Ukraine and Russia in today’s world, and utterly controls access to the Black Sea. Crimea’s special ability is built around farming combat cards and using them to make itself a more formidable opponent, as well as one that is deadly in a fight. ...

I’m not one to jump on bandwagons, but with approximately 150% of the people I follow on Twitter jumping into the New World, I really just had to find out what all the fuss was about. Character Creation I was very much impressed with New World’s character creation. While the look of your character doesn’t have the fine tuning one has come to expect from triple-A titles, the large number of classes (called “Backgrounds” in New World) available is fairly impressive. Combined with the significant number of “Starsigns” that grant additional abilities or boost those of your class, there’s 108 different background/starsign combinations available. You will likely never meet someone with an identical build to your own. ...

City of Heroes INNN SPAAAAAAACE MMO Ship of Heroes posted an update on this summer’s “MIssion Beta”, in which I and apparently many, many others participated… Just boppin’ along… One item that came up again and again in their post was the lack of difficult content. Now, I played through the showcase mission arc solo, and didn’t have a lot of trouble. I did pick up on the consumable boosters, which weren’t clearly explained, and that helped me get through some of the tougher fights. Carefully splitting groups using the terrain to block NPCs or just sending in a ranged attack from maximum range meant I never felt overwhelmed, when the superhero ethos is all about barreling in and making a big splash. ...

In yesterday’s Game Night, we eased my sister deeper into the world of board gaming with “My Little Scythe”, and tested out Game Toppers’ “Watson” gaming surface and mat. One of the first things my sister Vallerie showed me when I first visited her in her new home nearby was a battered copy of “Settlers of Catan” she’d picked up second hand. “I’ve been seeing your posts about your game nights on Instagram,” she said, “and I want in.” ...

I drive a VW GTI. My son drives a VW GTI. I have owned many VWs over the years. I bought GTI Racer for the PC. The box is in good condition. The disk is in good condition. But even though I have a physical copy of the game with all the bits, I don’t actually have the game. GTI Racer outsmarted me good. GTI Racer, complete in the original packaging ...

Valheim’s first content expansion brings a little adventure together with a lot of new things to make and build. Is it going to be enough to bring the magic back? It’s not hard to tame a lox – the large, yak-like creatures that congregate in the Valheim plains biomes. All you really need is a few stacks of barley or cloudberries, and a place to hide nearby while they eat and gradually come to love you. This also works for wolves (who enjoy meat) and boars (who love mushrooms and berries). ...

I didn’t know what to expect when I logged into EverQuest Online Adventures for the first time. When a dark elf cleric named Skandalf started following me around, healing me when I fought anything, I thought she was a bot. But now, I’m not so sure. **Update: **Apparently Skandalf was the name of a mage pet in the live version of EQOA, sort of like any EQ player would know who you were talking about if you mentioned “Jabober”. How I got a healing mage pet for awhile is something I don’t know. Thanks to the folks on the EQOA Revival Discord for setting me straight :-) ...

Spoiler alert: They’re in China. Last week, game developer Todd Walsh and publisher Mike Gnade held a live preview of their new game expansion, “Set a Watch: Swords of the Coin”. During the Q&A session afterward, they expanded on how difficult it is to print games with lower print runs or custom components in the US or the EU. So, everyone goes to China. But with world shipping in upheaval, getting the games from China… that’s an issue. Rock Manor Games had to do a Go Fund Me (it was some other fundraising site, but same diff) to raise money to get the games out of China. ...

Persona 5, Persona 5 Royal, Persona 5 Dancing in Starlight, and now Persona 5 Strikers. The Persona 5 legacy lives on in this new, action-oriented chapter in the story of Joker & Friends as they seek to save the innocent people of Shibuya, once again. Futaba warns us about Shadows I have not yet finished Persona 5 Strikers, so this is more of a quick look than a full review. ...

I was playing around and wrote a script last week that took an old backup of my previous blog, West Karana, and brought it to life as a GitHub repository. A friend on Twitter challenged me to do even better. Yesterday, I found a more recent backup – posts up to 2016, that I wrote for Google+, and used that as a source to finally get everything merged to this blog. It’s an exciting DevOps adventure. ...