Blog Time.
I didn’t think I was going to be able to keep up my pace of two flashbacks in a weekend for the third time in a row. I had plans for Saturday and there was a LOT of wrestling to watch over the weekend. Somehow in the middle of it all, I got the work done. It helps that I’m really enjoying drawing these Masters of the Universe flashbacks. They’ll start going up next week.
One of the conversations I got into when I was out on Saturday was about passion vs. talent and whether one should give up on something when it’s obvious they’re no good at it and aren’t really getting any better. My opinion is that one should never have to give up on something they’re passionate or that brings them joy, but one still needs to be realistic. I don’t think it’s healthy to cling to the hope that you can make a living at something that you’re not very good at, no matter how much you love doing it. Of course, how good you are at something artistic can be pretty subjective, and it’s possible to hit a niche audience with work that the general public would consider subpar. Still, it can be tough to make a living as a musician or an artist. That’s why I’ve always kept what I’m doing on this site as a hobby and not pushed to pursue it as a career. I continue to see improvement and I’m still enjoying the process so that’s enough to keep on keeping on. If someday I can connect in some small positive way with an audience, small or otherwise, outside my immediate sphere of acquaintances, that’ll just make it all that much better.
I finally got to try Machi Koro on game night last week. The long and short of it is I liked it. The goal of the game is to be the first to build the six landmarks in your city. Each turn you roll one or two dice which will determine which buildings generate income during your turn. You can then either expand your city with a building or landmark with the income you’ve generated or save up to build something bigger on a future turn. The buildings come in four flavours. Blue buildings will generate money for you when their number is rolled, regardless of whose turn it is. Green buildings will generate money for you when you roll their number on your turn only. Red buildings will cause other players to pay you money if they roll the red building’s number on their turn. Finally, purple buildings will cause other players to pay you money if you roll the purple building’s number on your turn. The landmarks are designed to offset some of the luck involved in rolling the dice. Overall it’s a nice, light design and I very much enjoyed the game, even though I lost all three times we played. But if you don’t like games with a high luck factor, I’d say avoid this one. You can help yourself by diversifying your buildings so that you’ll make money on any die roll, but it’ll happen that your maximum payouts will be on a number that you just never seem to roll and inevitably you’ll keep rolling that number that matches another player’s red building and keep having to pay them money. It can be frustrating but funny at the same time. Of note, I bought the “Deluxe” Edition that came with the first two expansions. If playing with just the base game, I would still recommend using the setup from the expansions which will make things less predictable. I think it’d also help to offset the problem that the base game’s setup favors keeping to a one-die strategy which makes some buildings kind of useless.
That’s all for this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday.