Hello and how are ya? Time to blog!

I’ve mentioned things have been crazy at work. We’ve been doing a lot of overtime to try to get things where we need to be before a big system change throws a potential monkey wrench into our activities. Saturday was the last scheduled day of overtime and I was there. I therefore had a shortened weekend. I’m still feeling a little tired. Fortunately, things should only get better from here on out.

I found out there’s a board game club in my own home town! A retired colleague texted me on Facebook to tell me all about it. They meet on Tuesdays at 6:30. There’s also a board game day scheduled this Thursday. Looks like a fun deal for a board game enthusiast such as myself. They’ll be supplying a lot of games themselves which is good because most of mine are English copies and I expect a large number of participants will be unilingual French-speakers (that’s the community I live in). This week’s theme is co-op play.

EDIT: My bad, the board game day was on DECEMBER 28th, not January. Oh well, there’s still Tuesdays!

I got back onto DDO over the weekend after a two-week hiatus. My wrists are feeling better and I played in bursts rather than for an extended period so it went well. I’m about halfway to Level 20. With shorter play times, I expect that my progress will be a little slower now. That’s all good. The goal is still to get to the cap some day.

So that’s the news as it were. Now for the Royal Rumble.

The Rumble is my favorite wrestling pay-per-view event (or whatever they’re now called on the WWE Network). I love battle royals and the added mystery of who’ll come out when is just a lot of fun. In past Rumbles, WWE has thrown in surprise appearances from past wrestlers which is also pretty nifty.

The downside to the Rumble is that the outcome is highly predictable. Because the winner of the Rumble is given a main event match at Wrestlemania, it guarantees that most of the participants have no chance of winning. Wrestlemania is the most important show of the year and ticket sales, PPV buys and Network subscriptions are built on the main event. That means WWE will only allow one of their biggest stars to win (which is why while having past superstars show up is fun as a surprise, it’s also a letdown because everybody knows they have little chance of winning unless they were main eventers to begin with).

This year, they decided that they wanted to have Roman Reigns defend the world title in the Rumble match. Given that they’ve spent the better part of the year building Roman Reigns as their big main event player and Triple H as his principal adversary, this meant that the most likely finishes for the Rumble were: Reigns wins while eliminating Triple H in the process, Triple H wins while eliminating Reigns in the process, neither wins but one or both of them are responsible for the other’s elimination since their feud is big enough that it doesn’t NEED to be for the title. Triple H hadn’t been seen on main roster television (he was at the NXT PPV) in over a month, and he’s mostly retired from in-ring competition so his participation in the Rumble should have been a surprise, but if you have even an inkling of how WWE sets up their angles, it was pretty much a given he was going to be involved in some capacity.

But just because the outcome is predictable, it doesn’t mean the match itself can’t be entertaining. The key is HOW they get to the outcome. And this is where I felt they sort of dropped the ball. In order to maximize the drama, they had Reigns enter the Rumble first meaning he’d have to be there for the entire match. The problem with that is that the fans as a whole are burnt out on superhero booking where the chosen one defies all odds to win all the time. The fans turned on Roman Reigns last year for that very reason and it took WWE all year to get them back on his side. Now, this setup was almost guaranteed to make them turn on him again. So what did they do? They had a run-in from the League of Nations take out Roman Reigns in the middle of the match (without eliminating him which was ridiculous) so he’d look vulnerable and then had him make a “miraculous” return near the end of the match so that it would look like he might just pull it off and then had Triple H, the final entrant, eliminate him. Despite all the effort to generate sympathy for him, the fans STILL turned on him, because really he got to sit out most of the Rumble and still be there at the end which just looked like a cheat. It was in part a case of darned if you and darned if you don’t. By being married to the idea that Reigns had to be there at the beginning to show the odds were stacked against him AND be there at the end so that it would be a more devastating loss, they put themselves in a no-win position. The best thing to do would have been to simply have Reigns get eliminated by Triple H (interfering as a non-participant) in the middle of the Rumble at the point where the League took him out and then have Triple H officially enter the match at the end and win.

But other than the Roman Reigns conundrum, the rest of the show was solid. Dean Ambrose and Kevin Owens had an incredibly brutal last-man standing match. The New Day were highly entertaining as always in putting away the Usos. Kallisto won back the US Title that he never should have lost in the first place. Despite the garbage finish, Charlotte and Becky Lynch put on a great match. Sasha Banks returned after a short absence to finally insert herself into the title picture. On top of all that, AJ Styles made his WWE debut in the Rumble match. That was the big planned surprise of the night although those who follow backstage news online were aware that he was about to get signed. There was still some doubt of whether he’d show up on the main roster or go to NXT first so it still was pretty phenomenal (see what I did there) to see him.

So that’s all for this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts on the Rumble, please share them in the comments or hit me up on Facebook. I’d love to hear what others thought of the show. Carja V.

Ahoyhoy! You know what this. I know what this is. Let’s just do this. Cool!

I mentioned in my last couple of blogs that I was pretty spoiled for Christmas. It turns out the spoilage wasn’t over yet. I was aware that one present was still in transit, but I know it’s on its way so I consider that I already own it. I did NOT know however, that there was a second present still in transit. When I got to my mom’s on Friday after work, another present was waiting for me: the Scoundrels of Skullport expansion for Lords of Waterdeep! Now what’s REALLY funny about that is that on Friday MORNING, I figured the gift receiving season was over so it was safe to buy myself things I had put on my wish list. Lords of Waterdeep is my current favorite board game so I really wanted to see the new expansion. I ordered it from L’Imaginaire before going to work. Doh right? Well, fortunately for me, L’Imaginaire asks that customers wait for a confirmation email from an employee before sending payment so I hadn’t paid for the order yet. When I got home I sent them an email apologizing for the crazy situation and asking them to cancel the order (which they did). To make up for it, I ordered Tail Feathers from them so they’re still getting money from me. Everybody’s happy (unless somebody didn’t tell me that there’s ANOTHER present still in transit which would be INSANE!)

So Scoundrels of Skullport! It adds two new modules, Skullport and Undermountain. Undermountain is a straightforward module that ups the quest costs and rewards. The new twist is in Skullport which adds corruption tokens to the mix. The Skullport locations offer more resources at the cost of taking a corruption token, which subtract from your score at the end of the game. The more corruption tokens that are taken, the bigger the penalty each token gives. There are quests and intrigue cards that can reduce the amount of corruption you have but not a whole lot of them. Players have to strike the right balance so that the short term gain of resources doesn’t bite them in the rear at the end of the game when it’s time to count the corruption penalties those gains incurred. I enjoyed both modules a good deal. My mom really didn’t like the corruption tokens though so we may only play with the Undermountain module going forward. I’ll keep the Skullport module for other play groups. The expansion also ups the number of players from 5 to 6 and allows for a longer game by giving each player an extra agent. Now, I’ve only played the game with two players so I can’t speak for higher player counts, but the game still moves fairly quickly. The new card effects take some getting used to so the game was a bit longer than usual, but I expect that to even out with more plays. Even with the longer gameplay we were able to fit in three games of Takenoko (with the Chibis expansion) before calling it a night.

I didn’t play a lot of DDO over the weekend. In fact, I only did one quest. As I mentioned in my last blog, I played a LOT over the Christmas break and I have a little carpal tunnel going on in my wrists. One quest was about all I could handle before my wrists asked me to stop. Level 20 will have to wait for another time.

Other than that, the Dice Tower had a live play marathon on YouTube to go with their Kickstarter to fund their year. They cut up the feed into six parts and I watched the whole thing over the course of the weekend. The real fun is watching their group dynamic. I find Zee Garcia hilarious. I got to see a few new games, though none that I’m clamoring to add to my collection. I haven’t had a real chance to play any social deduction games myself, but from watching I don’t see why people are going nuts over Spyfall.

With all this gaming content over the weekend, I was again lax in getting the rest of my drawing in. The inspiration for Bandit Baby is waning. I have two bits I want to do and then I think it’ll be time to move on to a new feature. I completed strip number 52 over the weekend and figure the bits I have left might get me to about 60 or so. I’ll revisit the Bandits if and when I come up with new gags for them. It still amazes me how the Bandits have grown into their own thing in my world. Have any of you have figured out the gag behind their names?

Well, that’s all for this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. Carja V.

Hello and good Monday to everybody, what’s left of it. I hope everybody who celebrates Christmas had a wonderful one. Also, a very special birthday shout-out to little Owen who just turned one today. Owen’s birth was the inspiration for the Bandit Baby storyline for those of you new to the site.

So last week I dropped the Peanuts theme of mash-ups. I hated to do it since Peanuts are such a huge influence on my life but the more I looked at the pictures the more I felt they just weren’t up to my standards (and that’s saying something). The Force Awakens mash-ups are much better. I’ve got some time off this week so I hope to build my mash-up buffer back up.

Christmas Day was reserved for family. We weren’t able to find a date that worked for everybody so Boxing Day was the first of two parties for friends. The second is tomorrow. We had a grand old time on Saturday night and I expect that we’ll have another great time tomorrow (OR ELSE!)

I was spoiled (just shy of rotten of course) this year as always. There were books, DVDs, pajamas, Bluetooth speakers, a foldout ottoman and of course board games! I got expansions to King of Tokyo (haven’t tried it yet) and Takenoko (which I DID try) and Star Wars Risk. It’s funny that they call it Risk because it’s nothing like traditional Risk. It’s more like a reimagining of The Queen’s Gambit game that came out for Episode I, themed to recreate the Battle of Endor. I look forward to trying it out. The expansion for Takenoko builds well on the base game as one would expect with new tiles that help out with some of those harder to achieve objective cards. As well, they added a Momma Panda and babies that round out the experience.

I hit level 16 in DDO yesterday. I also picked up the game expansions on heavy discount during the Steam Winter Sale. All three DLCs for twelve bucks. Now I can play all the Forgotten Realms content. I had my first meaningful encounter with Elminster yesterday. The DLC also unlocked one of the high end Iconic character classes, the Purple Dragon Knights. You can start them at level 15 so really I could have saved a whole lot of time getting to the point I’m at now (though of course I wouldn’t have had as much fun getting to this point). The Purple Dragon Knights are fighters so I tried my hand at being a tank for the first time. I didn’t have a hireling with me and made it through the adventure without dying so yay to that. My goal is to make at least level 17 by the end of my vacation.

So that’s about it for this week. Have a good seven and also a happy and safe new year’s eve and we’ll do this all again next Monday. Carja V.