Where to jump in on board games, anime, books, and movies as a Nerd
I was back last night with a live stream of Tainted Grail on Twitch. And now the video is also up on the Youtube channel. Thank you to those who checked out the stream. I don’t tend to announce too far ahead, but my plan…
There are some of these larger campaign games, Sword & Sorcery, Gloomhaven, and Tainted Grail, that can be hard to get a review done quickly. That’s simply because you need to play several chapters or scenarios to really get an idea of the game. So…
Tomorrow I’ll be doing an article looking forward to my 2020 resolutions, and I just wrapped up things that I’m looking forward to in 2020 for movies, games, and more. Today, I’m going to look back at 2019, it was a big year for nerdy things with Endgame toppling Avatar in the box office and more, but what are my highlights from my nerdy 2019?
Avengers: Endgame – This has been years in the making, but I have enjoyed every single Marvel film, and this was such a great culmination of the first three phases. But more than that, it was something that I had hyped up for a long time for myself. I loved Avengers: Infinity War, and I wanted it to end in an awesome way, especially since Captain Marvel fell a little flat for me. Endgame didn’t disappoint, and there was something so exciting about going to that movie, but something exciting about getting tickets for opening night and having it work and the buzz around that movie was just so much fun. I don’t know when there will be another movie with buzz like that or one previous really, but I’m so happy about it.
GenCon – Probably the biggest thing, though, for me was being able to go to GenCon this past year. I knew I was going to love it because I’m an extrovert and I’ve dived so far into board games so why wouldn’t I love a packed place where I can see all the new cool games. And it was amazing. The best experiences there were playing the games. The RPG’s were fine, but playing board games, just wandering around the dealer floor and finding a random game to try was amazing. There were so many demos that were great and meeting designers and developers of these games was a ton of fun. I remember playing Roll Player Adventure and just having such a grand time or trying to demo Deranged 3-4 times before we were able to actually do it. Not great for the wallet, but so amazing. And got to meet some people who were really cool, The Dice Tower folks were cool, running into Chris Renshaw was fun, and having someone recognize my brewery cap from Duluth was a blast.
Ice Cool – You might have noticed that I didn’t mention Ice Cool in my GenCon post, but that’s because it’s separate from the previous one. Ice Cool was an experience in and of itself. I didn’t know what to expect because Ice Cool is a silly little game, but I didn’t know what to expect. I thought people might be fairly serious about it, and a few were, but for the most part we had a ton of fun. I made it to the semi-finals and found out that Canadian money does indeed smell some like Maple Syrup. That was a surprise to them as well as me. There were some awesome shots I pulled off, and then I had one terrible round, otherwise might have made it to the final. And there was a fun age range of players as well. Definitely a unique experience and it made me love the game even more.
Reading All of The Dresden Files – Technically, I think I started this late in 2018 and I wrapped it up in the middle of 2019, but it’s been a series that I have loved, I would just always start it and get distracted, but I did it this year, and I’m super excited. Now I’m waiting for the next one to come out this year. The world building is just so great, and I like Harry a lot as a character. It’s definitely a massive story with a lot of twists and turns, but I feel like the characters are people and do a lot of things that people would do instead of just being more supernatural than they actually are.
Beating Gloomhaven – It took a long time, in fact almost two years, but we have bear the base game of Gloomhaven, just in time for Frosthaven to be announced. Gloomhaven has been a great experience and the group I’m playing with is a ton of fun. It’s been so much fun to try and figure out how to make our group of characters work together. And I really love the game, clearly, since it’s my #1. Overall, it’s been a long time in the making, and just when I thought I was ready for Gloomhaven to wrap up, Frosthaven made me excited about it all over again.
Playing Through Pandemic Legacy Season 1 on Malts and Meeples – Whoo that’s a long title, but it’s true. I had a lot of fun live streaming those. Even though I don’t know how many people have watched them off hand, I had a lot of fun with it and I’m looking forward to doing more streaming. Even knowing what was coming up, it felt like it took a few twists in different times on them than I thought they were. Hopefully in future streams I can interact more as I play some more campaign games solo.
I know I’m missing things from my list as well. Just the random board game nights were a lot of fun. Becoming more active in the Rolling Solo community was a blast and joining GloryHoundd for their weekly Kickstarter streams has been a good time. I feel like I’ve connected more to the board gaming community as well. It’s been a very nerdy year and I’m excited to see what nerdy things await me in 2020.
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For the past couple of years, I’ve gone through and talked about my top fives in a bunch of different categories at the end of the year. No different this year as I look back at what I’ve read/watched/played, and come up with my 2019…
New video up on the Malts and Meeples Youtube/Twitch channel. It is a bit shorter game than some, but it’s also not game play, it’s just an unboxing of Tainted Grail. Tainted Grail is a big story driven game from Awaken Realms who have done…
Last night I started in on some D&D Content on my Twitch Channel that is now up on Youtube as well. I meant for it to be a video about what D&D is, but I was a bit all over the place.
I think that when it comes down to it, the point that I hammer home about it being a fun collaborative storytelling game, that is at the heart of what good D&D, for me, can be. But that also doesn’t teach or explain some of the more mechanical aspects of Dungeons and Dragons. So that will be a future video that explains more of that.
My “malt” for the night was actually a hard cider from Sociable Cider Works out of Minneapolis, MN. It’s a solid cider with a rich flavor. However, I’m not a big fan of sweet ciders, and while Training Wheels is not the sweetest cider, it was a little bit sweet for my taste.
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Bottoms up!
We’re back again, now time for the disclaimer text. These rankings are the opinion of yours truly, and if you don’t like them, that’s okay. We all have different tastes in games and that is great. There are some games that I’ve only played as…
Back with another Kickstarted, so many different projects that I talked about and a ton of cool ones out there. In fact, there were enough that it took me an hour and 20 minutes to get through it all. That was almost enough time to…
No game tonight, but I open up my copy of Zombicide Green Horde from CMON. I won the game from All Systems Go in Minneapolis, Minnesota with their 1 year anniversary sale. I plan on playing through the intro scenario in an upcoming stream.
Tonight’s beer is from Founders, their Dark, Rich, and Sexy Porter. It has a good robust taste to it and isn’t too sweet, which too many porters are. I don’t know that it’s one of my favorite dark beers, but I an many ways really look for those high ABV or barrel aged dark beers that help you feel warm in the winter.
Bottoms up!
Join me as I take on the Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game. I take a crack at the first scenario, Storm Front, based off of the Dresden Files book by Jim Butcher of the same name. This game is a cooperative game that plays well…