From Boops to Books

A few more quick finds:



We stopped at B&N last weekend with some leftover birthday gift cards and found a few small games that looked like they were worth trying.  We also made mental notes on a few larger games, only to watch videos and find they were way more complex than we wanted.  I'm not going to stand there in the store and look for reasons not to buy, or pester them with second-hand tales of sales from halfway around the country.  If I can't remember the game by the time I get home, then it didn't make much of an impression.

These days, to trigger the "buy" impulse, a game needs to sound like it has a quick setup, only a few pages of rules, and hopefully some new game mechanic that hasn't been done to death, although cute cats and dogs will score big points.

Anyway, we found Boop Shuffle and Diced Veggie.  Boop Shuffle was obviously a card game version of Boop, which we already reviewed and found both cute and perplexing.

Diced Veggies boasted a game mechanic of cutting groups of dice from a grid of 35 using a cardboard cleaver.  Not THAT is something I have definitely never seen before.


... and it turned out we would not be seeing it that day, either, because the game box was missing all the cardboard parts, cleaver and all.  Anne took it back, and they shipped us a replacement, which arrived by Wednesday.  But more on that soon.

Yesterday, we were doing a weekend drive through the Twin Oaks area and I remembered the many times I drove home right past the San Marcos City Library and wondered if their little bookstore had any games.  So we looped around and checked it out.

What is it with EVERY "Friends of the Library" bookstore we ever visit have a shelf of jigsaw puzzles but never any board games.  Not even a deck of Uno.  The two things seem closely related to us, and fasn of one usually also enjoy the other, and it they're worried about missing pieces, both games and puzzles have that issue to contend with.

Anyway, while I was asking the volunteer exactly that, Anne said there was a D&D book.  A pristine copy of the 2024 5E Players Handbook.  Even though I have no time to invest in year-long campaigns, and the rules have gotten so complex I don't even care anymore, I knew this was a steal for $3.

Comically, as I went to grab that, I saw a pristine Pathfinder Bestiary, and as I said "Ooh, a book of monsters," a book fell off the shelf above me and hit me in the head.  That was another win for $3.



I always enjoy reading campaign books and bestiaries and adventures in any gaming system.  That is a whole fresh genre ... and I can always play the scenarios in my head.

Those were our finds for June.  We have definitely cut back the budget, got tired of getting expensive pretty games that we end up not enjoying, and I'm trying to replace gaming/youtube time with some time for my own creative work. 

But we still have a bunch we have not tested yet, so more on those soon...

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