The Cracked Mug v 2.0

[erikakaiser]

We played lots of Magic the Gathering, did a marathon round of a specific board game I'll likely do a longer post about later this week,

it is extremely beyond "later this week" but I did still want to talk about this!

So like a lot of nerds I enjoy board games, although I am not enough of an enthusiast (+have too many himbo wiggles) to play extremely in-depth ones where you have to sit for a PowerPoint presentation of rules.

(this is funny given that I play D&D, notorious especially in snooty indie circles for being clunky and rules-heavy)

ages ago I was looking for an interesting but more accessible game to play, kind of an "icebreaker" board game that isn't like........Clue (which, tbh, I tried to play a few years ago and found kinda boring or at least not what my childhood brain remembered it being) or Sorry or something like that. Not that there's anything wrong with those games, but I was seeking a step up from The Basic Childhood Spread without immediately super-graduating to Settlers of Catan &tc

I ended up finding Forbidden Desert!

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https://gamewright.com/product/Forbidden-Desert

Since that one's come out there's also a Forbidden Jungle and a Forbidden Island, both of which I own and have played. I'm not really enough of a review-wordsmith to give a succinct lowdown on the game but I do recommend it and you can play with just two people! It's extremely accessible, and notably when my friends and I got hooked onto these games we would spend a few minutes at the beginning Doing a Bit and making characters off whatever role we drew. So sometimes we were a rag-tag band of sci-fi space pirates, sometimes we were shipwrecked sailors, sometimes we were steampunk revolutionaries, etc. Depending on what happened in the game we'd tell a fun story, and during the marathon round I mentioned we played all three games back-to-back telling a continuous story.

It's not how the game was meant to be played but it's so much fun I think I'd have a hard time playing it without doing a bit lmao

[erikakaiser]

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[erikakaiser]

I was just talking with someone about this the other day re: I feel like I am going nuts, like literally I am crazy, when I see people (sometimes ones I thought would know better, be better!) using AI tools

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[erikakaiser]

It's adjacent to when Hogwarts Game came out and the amount of people I thought would care about not giving money to Literally the Devil from the Bible was shockingly low

[erikakaiser]

Some of it is just that everyone has a different boycott threshold; I won't eat at Chic-Fil-A, for instance, but I will fully admit I do not try to keep up with what is and isn't a Nestle product and I didn't stop using Amazon Prime until I moved to Chicago and, to be frank, it was easier to give up the convenience. I'm not perfect!

It's not reasonable under capitalism to only give every cent you make to Good People and to 100% boycott all goods and services from Bad People, I totally get and support that. You can't turn capitalism into a kindergarten morality issue when you still need to function day-to-day, and especially when some of these Umbrella Corporation equivalents have integrated themselves so deeply into American life.

but like ................ really??? you can't stop yourself from using ChatGPT?????

[erikakaiser]

It's adjacent to when Hogwarts Game came out and the amount of people I thought would care about not giving money to Literally the Devil from the Bible was shockingly low

(this one continues to be extra grit-fucking because the kneejerk response was "I don't support her but I want to support the game/I'll still play the game/etc" like okay!!! just say with your chest that four seconds of nostalgia is more important than trans women and queer rights, I'll wait)

[erikakaiser]

ahem apparently I woke up and chose violence today

[erikakaiser]

So far my only complaint about Animal Crossing is that the pathing/terraforming tools being locked behind a frankly tremendous amount of gameplay is silly

[erikakaiser]

Let me move a riverbank two tiles over damn you

[erikakaiser]

Remember when there was "wearing Astarion's scars (i.e. via tattoo, merchandise, etc) is glorifying abuse and you're wrong if you do it" discourse

Pepperidge Farm remembers