Kempeth

• Light: Scout
• Medium: Terraforming Mars and Mystic Vale
• Heavy: Spirit Island
• GOAT: Spirit Island with TFM and Mystic Vale as close seconds
• Most played: probably Monopoly Deal

Indeed. ~250 would have been a much harder sell for what was effectively a "new designer". Going for mostly standees allowed them to have a much more approachable price point. GH might not have become the breakout hit without them.

Android, because a) I planned to do some app programming and b) I didn't want to step into Apple's walled garden and Microsoft couldn't be relied upon to stick with it (and didn't).

Samsung because it's pretty much the only player that isn't a Chinese company.

Same here in Switzerland. After university I moved to my new job and for a good while I basically had no friends here. The vast majority of the people I hang out with are either family, are from a club I joined, from the club I started or came "attached" to someone from those categories.

I'm getting flashbacks to our family skiing vacations...

Parents: Kempeth, come spend time with the family.

Me: alright, we doing something? playing a game? watching tv?

Everyone: *opens a book and sits quietly in a corner*

Me: *goes to do something else*

Repeat from the top

Oof. I feel this one. I spent most of my childhood in - what we consider - a small city (10k people). My school class was like 20 kids with a few different ethnic backgrounds. Then we moved to a mountain town where the elevation (in meters) was a multiple of the population count, my class (including the neighboring villages) was 4 and there was exactly one family who didn't look like they were at least 20 generations Swiss.

My dad is a very outgoing person, passionate volunteer firemen (most towns here have their fire department on a volunteer basis), contributed to the town council, was pretty religious (BIG up there, when there was a mass during the day then all the classes from school attended) - but they literally were just happy to take his work but not give anything back. The protestant priest from the neighboring village checked in on our family (protestant) and him (catholic) more often than our "our" priest. My mom befriended another "immigrant" family who had been there for 10-20 years and basically had NO connections in town. My father made 1 good friend and 1 good acquaintance at work.

For us kids it was a lot easier. The other kids were welcoming and friendly and even the adults were somewhat accomodating to us. But I was approaching adulthood and started to experience this myself. Town tradition was that for christmas the oldest kids in primary school would dress up as the 3 magi and lead the younger ones around town to sing christmas songs. And they would also participate in the christmas mass. They were in a pickle that year as from a class of 4, half were protestant heathens. I was still expected to stand in the front of the church as ornament but when the edible paper was distributed I was rudely shoved away.

Switzerland imports so much of it's energy I don't think it matters much yet. When it starts to matter we have huge hydro dams we can use for that.

Paper is definitely an upgrade over something that is coarse and gritty and gets everywhere...

I got Imperium Legends for christmas and have to manage getting it to the table with a group. The rules are such a beast.

Quaterbacking is extremely difficult because each spirit works completely different from each other.

• every ability card in the game is unique and while in the beginner setup each spirit has their fixed selection even that is too much for me to remember. If you go full rules. Every spirit play with different cards each game.
• every spirit has their own set of innate abilities that tweak their gameplay and uses different growth options that influence the pace and rythm at which they grow in power. One of may faves for example is Ocean's Hungry Grasp where one option is to flow into the land and have powerful turns but are ultimately forced into an ebb cycle where you pull back to the sea to recharge
• at higher player counts there's simply too much going on on the island to fully discuss every little bit. The game runs far better for everyone if each player takes charge of the problems they can handle and calls out the one's they can't. This leaves a small subset to cooperate on.

This is probably the most truly cooperative game I've ever played.

Because our DnD session last Sunday ended a bit in limbo we decided to continue it on Tuesday which quickly let to another almost TPK. I've grown pretty frustrated with my character and vented my dissatisfaction with the class online and was quickly schooled on my mistakes. I'm now looking forward to our next session and playing it differently.

Friday one of our group had his birthday and an impromptu get together with beer and cake turned into a round of Spirit Island with spirits and cake. Heart of the Wildfire, Shifting Memory of Ages and Stone's Unyielding Defiance played on the sunset layout with events. Said events hammered us hard early on with destroying presence and adding blight which given Wildfire's playstyle was a problematic combo. But we turned it around and managed to remove all the towns and cities by roughly the second level 3 card. I liked playing Stone's Unyielding Defiance. The amount of "defense" and retribution you can apply even pretty early on is just mindboggling. The spirit does take a good long while before you can do much more than that but being able to sit in a sprawling urban landscape looking at whatever damage they do on ravage and just say "That's nice, honey, but the Dahan all stay and fight back, oh and half your damage goes right back atcha" is simply delicious.

I'm one of those guys. I voted to ban nuclear here in 2017.

I absolutely would love to put 0% fossil before 100% renewable. But as long as nuclear was a choice little more than token efforts were made to expand renewable capacity. Then we banned it and suddenly solar installations are sprouting like mushrooms. Before the ban we put in 330MW per year. The increase in the increase in solar was this much last year (670->1000MW)!

This month we had another vote in a climate bill and as soon as that was accepted the regressives came out and called for more nuclear and complained how all that solar and wind is going to ruin ~~christmas~~ the landscape. I'd love to have renewables AND nuclear but somehow it always ends up being an OR...

Just to be clear: This isn't an attack on pro-nuclear folks. I get your point and in theory you're right. I just never seen it put into practice...