Minimum Age ratings on games and why they’re terrible I came across this Reddit comment today and it explains so much: I used to work in the toy industry - there is A LOT hidden behind age ranges on a box. Those are less about what age the game is for (except for development focused games, like HABA), and more about regulations around what age can legally be printed on the box.| www.emoses.org
I watched Tabletop’s playthrough, and decided to pick it up at my local FLGS , Gamescape. I don’t have many of this sort of heavily-thematic, strategy-light game in my collection, and it’s good to mix it up a bit. Turns out it was a good decision. Sus, A.C., and I had a ton of fun, ended up playing two games in a row, and I’m looking forward to playing another haunt sometime soon.| www.emoses.org
To start out, I’ve got a confession to make: I’m a pretty big nerd. I know, I know, it’s hard to believe, but it’s true. I also like games, which might be a little easier to swallow. Beyond the tabletop board and card games I’ve been writing about here, I’m also a fan of video games, and in particular adventure and RPG games. Which leads me to a more legitimately shocking confession: I have never in my life played a Dungeons and Dragons style pen-and-paper role-playing game.| www.emoses.org
Last game night we sat down for a 4-way game of Power Grid, with me, Sus, A.C., and L.S., an old friend who moved to town relatively recently. We had all played the game before (some of us more recently than others), but this was the first time we played on Italy, one of the expansion maps. Power Grid is the epitome of the loose genre known as Eurogames. There’s very little luck involved: the only random factor is the order in which the new power plants come out, and they come out in such a...| www.emoses.org
Last week A.C., Sus and I got together for a game of Agricola. In Agricola, you play a peasant couple starting out in a small hut on an empty farmyard, and your goal is to grow into a prosperous family with crops, animals, and a big house. It’s a worker-placement game, where players take turns choosing which actions they’ll play on each round, and more actions become available as the game progresses.| www.emoses.org
Unfortunately, A.C. and I didn’t have a chance to get together again before I had to clean up the games table, so there is no conclusion for our Twilight Struggle game. However, unbeknownst to him, I had the Middle East Scoring Card in hand, and was only one or two influence points away from having Control of the region. If I had manged to score while I had control, or if I had managed to Dominate and gotten one more Battleground country, I would have won the game.| www.emoses.org
I played the first half of a game of Twilight Struggle with A.C. tonight, and it’s definitely one of my favorite games. The geeks over at Board Game Geek agree with me, as it’s consistenly the highest rated game on the site. And before you ask, it doesn’t have anything to do with sparkly vampires and tween girls. Twilight Struggle is a two-player strategic game where two players take on the roles of the US and the USSR during the Cold War.| www.emoses.org
My employer, Okta, has recently been making security improvements to how we access all sorts of internal systems. As part of that hardening, we’ve been disallowed from using SSH keys and long-lived GitHub tokens to access our code on GitHub. In place of that, we’ve now got an internal tool that grants us short-lived tokens on demand, after SSOing (through Okta of course). This is a good idea even if it adds a little friction, and means that if you gain access to my machine somehow you won...| www.emoses.org