3D Printing

Townscaper has left early access and hit app stores all around the world with the peaceful grooves of Swedish seaside villages. It also is released for 3D printers. I have taken the 3D printing for a spin… and the results are pretty cool! A really simple Townscape For those who haven’t had their lives touched by Townscaper, it’s a simple little game, originally out for Steam but now also out for the Nintendo Switch, where you paint a town onto a placid sea. As you build further, landscaping, beaches, even little birds pop into existence. At some point, you have created something with adventure around every corner, or a comfy bench when you just want to appreciate all the choices in life that led you to this paradise. ...

I’m kind of worried about the next time when we play “Jaws of the Lion”, as we’ll be confronting cultists again. I don’t really know if I’ll be able to fight against the Blue Oyster Cult… I do try to print as much of the game as I can. I really have been slacking off, lately. I started out wanting to print all the hex tiles for all the dungeons, but the scenario book is so much more detailed… ...

I really want to apologize for the gaps in game blogging. I’m still gaming, as much as ever. I have a lot to write about with EverQuest II, the PlayStation 5, and especially Assassins Creed: Valhalla, and I will try to get to these things :-) As well as streaming again. But for now, here’s our latest adventures in Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion. When the pandemic hit, we stopped having game nights. When Connecticut flattened the curve in the summer and things eased up again, we started meeting and playing the new Gloomhaven game, Jaws of the Lion, every other Game Night, which we hold every other week. It used to be weekly before the pandemic, but we want to space them two weeks in case anyone is sick without knowing it. ...

I chose my first 3D printer carefully. I lurked on r/3dprinting for months, reading all their guides, looking at what they were printing, finding people who were doing the sorts of things with their printer that I wanted to do, and finally ordered the best of the bunch: The Creality Ender 3 Pro. There was a lot of help for it and a lot of support, and I was so excited by it, that I ordered it the moment I had a couple hundred bucks I didn’t need. Because it was affordable, too. Budget printing for amazing results. ...

This is the fourth scenario of Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion. We’re still in the tutorial for the game – this scenario introduced scenario goals and city events. I’m not sure how fast people play through this game, but we’re going super slow. With COVID, we only meet every two weeks, and if something comes up on that day, we skip additional weeks. If we used Tabletop Simulator or something similar, I suppose we could meet – whenever, but we love seeing each other, eating pizza, and being together. ...

Quick recap: Terraforming Mars is one of the most popular board games in the world right now, and has been for years. It’s a game not just about about terraforming Mars, but eventually exploring and colonizing our Moon, Venus, Mercury, and the outer planets’ larger moons through several expansions. The game play remains mostly the same, though, through expansions – you research activities to help with the terraforming (or to hinder your opponents) by buying cards; you play those cards in the action phase; you then receive a payment from the faceless Terraforming Council based on your contribution to the terraforming, plus whatever income your research projects provide. ...

I more or less love my 3D printer. More or less. I can make physical stuff out of bits – that’s pretty cool. But for every print I make, I have to go through the same long, tedious process of leveling the print bed. I don’t know why it goes out of adjustment every single print. Sometimes on longer prints, it can go out of adjustment while I am printing, ruining the print. ...

Since school has started up, we’ve been hesitant to continue with the family game night. But you just can’t keep us down. We’ve decided to alternate Jaws of the Lion, a campaign game, with other games. Last time we met it was for mahjong. Tonight, we’re back in Gloomhaven. My goal with Jaws of the Lion was to completely 3D print the terrain, the miniatures, the furniture – everything. Unfortunately, I’ve been having a lot of trouble with the 3D printer, but that’s really a story for another post. Because of the problems, I haven’t been able to finish printing the wooden floors for this scenario, or the stone floors for the next one. I have a barrel full of failed prints. Something about the floor tiles for wood and stone really seems to kill my printer. ...

I’m not really sure how interested people will be, but I took some pictures and want to write about them and I have a blog and… well… here we go. My sister sent me an empty envelope to show her support for the US Post Service, which our government is trying to kill, for some reason, ahead of the elections in November. The envelope wasn’t actually as empty as I’d thought… it was full of glitter… that got all over my kalimba. I had to dump it all into the sink, and now it’s all over the sink and I can’t get it all in the trash. It just… sticks there… ...

Sorry, I just spent the last half hour looking for exactly the best song I remembered from Martin Mull which was… perfect for this writing prompt. And that took me down a rabbit hole with Martin jamming with Glen Campbell (awesome!), and then I got to watching more YouTube and now it’s forty minutes until work and I have a blog post to write. I get distracted easily, and today’s prompt, from Nogamara of Battle Stance, is all about that: ...