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Since at least the thumbnail to this post will be shared where people who have not completed Ghost of Tsushima will see it, I headed this with a picture of Jin and Yuna limping together off the battlefield after the final battle with the Khan. But, it was clear from almost the beginning of Act II that this game would not have a happy ending. In history, the Mongols invaded Tsushima twice. The first time, they swept through the island (which is really quite small), moved on to Iki Island and on to the Japan mainland, where they were beaten back by hundreds of samurai. The second time, they were repelled in Tsushima, and Iki, and an unusual typhoon – the kaze-no-kami, would help the mainlanders drive the Mongols back to Korea. Since this was set during the first Mongol invasion, I fully accepted and expected that Sakai would fall to the Khan. ...

Trogdor! Trogdor! Trogdor was a man I mean, he was a dragon man Or maybe he was actually a board game But he was still TROGDOR! Burninating the countryside, Burninating the peasants, Burninating all the peoples And their thatched-roof cottages! THATCHED-ROOF COTTAGES! (Insert guitar solo) Trogdor the Board Game is based on the iconic . You, and up to five of your dragon-drawing friends play as Keepers of Trogdor, members of a group that help Trogdor… ...

Having now completed (I estimate) the first third of the game, I think I can talk a little more about how I feel about it. Ghost of Tsushima promotes itself as a Kurosawa samurai movie come to life, and it’s pretty explicit in its classic movie references. This, however, is just a skin over what turns out to be a fairly standard open world action adventure game. But, a really fun, standard, open world action adventure game. ...

Since finishing Chocobo Mystery Dungeon, I’ve been sorta casually playing some Tomb Raider; Rise of the Tomb Raider, one of this month’s free Playstation Plus offerings. And it’s been no small amount of fun to be the badass Lara Croft, able to take on – and crush – entire Siberian prison camps with a couple sticks and a bit of string. But the buzz surrounding today’s release of Ghost of Tsushima (a name I am training myself to pronounce correctly) was too much to ignore. Last night I left Lara at one of her innumerable base camps beneath the very noses of the enemy, and took up the *katana and bushido of Jin Satai, last of the Tsushima samurai, off to avenge his honor against Hans Gruber and the rest of the Mongol horde. ...

I finally succumbed to the advertising, and downloaded Raid: Shadow Legends. It couldn’t be as bad as everyone made it sound, could it? My Free Company on FFXIV is always making fun of it, and I can kinda see why? The advertising is pervasive (it kept being played during my German lessons in Duolingo). They paid Youtubers to promote the game, then denied they were paying them. But those advertisements… finally worked on me. ...

If you’ve ever healed a party in an MMO, you know the drill: the tank forgets their defense moves, the DPS wander into every well-telegraphed attack, the party rushes ahead while you’re still frantically trying to get mana back for the next encounter. Everyone else in the party is prone to random, unexpected suicidal thoughts and actions and it’s up to you, the cleric, druid, priest or whatever your official title, to see them safely through to the other side of the dungeon. Of course, the party is grateful… to the tank… ...

I’ve been buying a lot of casual games to pass the time when I don’t have a lot of time to play. Bunches of puzzle games. Some programming games. Some action games (and more on those later). But the one casual game that had that perfect blend of drop-in playability and finely tuned difficulty was one I didn’t even see coming: Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon: Every Buddy. CMDEB for the PS4 is a remake of an old Wii game called Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo’s Dungeon, itself an entry in a long line of entry level dungeon crawlers featuring Final Fantasy and Pokemon characters. ...

I’m printing all the scenarios in Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, in collaboration with my boyfriend, on a filament and a resin 3D printer. After the printing comes the painting. I know nothing about painting terrain or miniatures, but what better time to learn? This is all to make the best Gloomhaven, Jaws of the Lion and Frosthaven playing experience we can create. Every time we play, it will be epic. ...

Back in the Before Times, when we only had a small number of board games, Game Night would rotate between Magic the Gathering, Vast and Terraforming Mars. Now we have dozens of games to play, but Terraforming Mars is still on our rotation. When the local game store opened as part of Connecticut’s post-pandemic reopening, I went there (masked, of course) looking for the Colonies expansion for Terraforming Mars. (We’d heard there were spaceships. SPACE. SHIPS.) They didn’t have it, but they did have another expansion we’d missed, Turmoil. ...

June hasn’t been the best month for gaming. Tom and I are ramping up our 3D printing, and working on that sort of stuff is taking more and more of our time. I hope it’s worth it. I have a severe backlog of minis to paint – I have to finish the Gloomhaven PC minis, I have an army of vermlings and cultists to paint for the first few Jaws of the Lions scenarios, some snakes… Plus printing the terrain tiles. ...