Greetings. I am Stebloke, and I am a bit strange. This website contains my blog, where you can read about the things I create, the games I play, and any other things I get involved in.

I make this blog mostly because I like to look back on the things I do and feel nostalgic, but also because it motivates me to keep doing things outside of my otherwise boring and mundane existence.

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I'm finally done with my own printing of Crystallo. I've tinkered with the colours and creatures quite a bit, changing them up to suit my available plastic gems.
In the end, I elected not to use any of the wide array of pinks at my disposal. I just thought there were cooler creatures that suited the other colours.

I also changed the basic crystals on the cards to red, green and blue, again just going for something more standard.

And of course, creating my own version of the cards, rather than printing out the official ones, has saved me massive amounts of black ink.

So it was time to take this to the tabletop. Or not.

As the rules say this thing needs a large footprint, I was unsure that my desk space would handle it. So to try it out, I went to ground. And it's a good job I did.

My first two cards were the shield and the helm, and I thought I'd not shuffled correctly, but it seemed ok after this.
Speaking of the helm, I messed myself over by rescuing the Frostwolf so quickly, preventing me from being able to unlock that card later on. Stupid.

I thought I was doing pretty well for the first half of the game, but started to really struggle when I got down to the last few gems.

It all came down to the last card. In order to release the last bond, which was for the Dryad, I needed a red 1 or a green 2 with my last card, but it didn't happen. Oh well.

After the game, I though back a little, not even sure if I'd played correctly. The rulebook's a bit fuzzy on exactly where and how you can overlap other cards. But after checking the BGG forums I found some questions answered by the designer.
In the end, I think I did it right. Which is a good thing, as I would have failed even with the cheating, making me feel even more stupid.

So I failed to rescue all of the creatures, and I got 4 treasures, giving me the title of Prosperous Commoner for my first attempt.

A few days later, it was time for attempt number two. I got a little unlucky with the draw I thought, as many of my opening cards had only three of four icons, and the treasure cards that came up were much later into the game.

Still, I got to the same point as the last game. I needed a blue 3 or a red 2 to unlock the last Phoenix bond, but unfortunately the last card was a green 3. There actually was a green 3 option, but it was impossible to place as it would have covered an already complete set. Damn.

As I didn't even claim a single treasure during this run, I ended up as an Impoverished Commoner. Pretty much like in real life, then.

There is a maximum of 3000pts per game of this, but in my first two attempts I have scored a 100 and a 50. I'm awesome at games.

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After what feels like years of waiting, I finally found a proper copy of Whitehall Mystery for us to enjoy.

Jesus, this game has been harder to find than Jack. Of course, not Jack the way I play him. Then it would have been easy to find...

The list of games I need to tackle is so long, I realised most of them are probably never going to get a look in. To even the playing field a little, I made myself a little script.

This script contains a list of the games I still need to complete, and I have decided that I'm occasionally going to use it to help me decide the next game to give a proper, good faith, go at.
Each time I run it, I will receive three random games from the list, from which I will then have to make my selection.

For this first use of the game chooser, it gave me the choice of Overcooked, Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice, or Mad Max.

As I'd already tried Overcooked, and it feels more like a multiplayer game anyway, I decided not to choose that one. I probably should have gone Hellblade, for its shorter run time, but I was liking the look of Mad Max, especially as it would be the first game of my MAXimum random game efforts.

This is a massive open world game where you drive around taking on the worst scum that the wasteland has to offer. Your buddy, Chumbucket, helps you out by upgrading and repairing your car.

There's also plenty of 3rd person brawling going on, with a similar style of combat to the Arkham games, though stripped down and without all of the gadgets.

There's a lot of good stuff going on with the game, and the basic mechanics are solid. If you're into typical open world games, you'd probably like this. Everything is here, such as towers to scout the area (in this case balloons), camps to take over, scrap to loot, enemy convoys to track down and disable. You name it.

But it was all of this extra filler that started getting me a little bit annoyed with the game. Now, it's not that the extra side content exists, but the fact that at many points in the main story, the game will not let you progress unless you have tackled enough of the side content.
So for the people that just like to straight-line the main story, this game is not for you.

It was also a problem in that there was just so much of this side content. It just became so repetitive. In addition, as you go through the zones, it becomes more and more difficult. For example, I was having to tackle armoured enemy vehicles long before I'd got the means to actually deal with them properly. Every battle became an exercise in escape, fix car, go back do some more chip damage, escape, fix car, etc...

The constant holding down of the button to loot, and to do nearly any other command, quickly became grating as well. Just like in Witcher 3, and having to hold down the button to use witcher senses. Why can all of these commands not just be press the button once?

There were also a bunch of sporadic bugs, like enemy cars disappearing right as I was about to ram them, or me seemingly hitting nothing on the road and getting smashed up into the air.

The end for this game came when it started making me race. I'd avoided all of the optional death races up to this point because I knew, with the sluggish handling of the car, that I wouldn't do very well.
So you can imagine how I felt when the main story demanded two races on the trot.

It didn't go well.

The first race was easy enough, and I nailed it on my second go after figuring out what was going on. But there was very little violence in that race.

The second one was a full-on combat track, where you have to kill a target with a missile launcher, while driving a very tight and twisty course, while avoiding a million traps, while all of the other cars are out to smash you up.

As you can imagine, after a bunch of attempts at this, I was absolutely sick of it. There was no way I was ever going to get passed this with a car that is just so unresponsive. There's simply no way to dodge traps like mines or flamethrowers unless I just stopped dead and let the target car get away from me.

So sadly, this is another game for the incomplete pile. It's highly unlikely that I'll ever come back to it, as because there's no manual saves, my autosave is right at the start of this race. So it's not like I can even back out, go do some other quests and beef the car up a bit. I'm pretty sure I would have to start the game all over again.
And screw that.

It's been a long time since my copy of Pandemic got any use. In fact, my game was last used back in 2016, we've only played the game once using another copy. In that game, which happened around a year ago, I set the game up wrong with too many epidemic cards, so not only could we not remember what to do, we also got two epidemics on the trot which absolutely wrecked us.

This time, I set it up properly for an easy mode attempt. This was because two of the three of us were very out of practice, and the third player had not played before.

We lost our first effort through running out of cards, though we were not that far away from the final cure.

So we set it up again exactly the same, using the same roles, and we had achieved victory before even getting half way through the deck. This second run was notable for giving each of us almost exactly the city cards we needed to cure the diseases, and we didn't really have to struggle at all to try and pass them to each other like in our first run.

It's definitely still a fun game, and we need to find ways of getting it to the table more often.

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This next game has been available to us a very long time, but until recently it had never occurred to us to give it a go.

On my part, it's based on an IP that I have very little interest in, so I never really felt the urge to play it. And in recent years, from what I can gather, the TV show itself seems to have gone off the deep end.

The game is Doctor Who: Time Of The Daleks.

Before playing a new game, I will usually give the rules a read through, or at least watch a few Youtube videos to get an idea. But our decision to play this was random and unplanned. We grabbed it out of the cupboard, set it up and started to play. This probably wasn't the best idea.

The basic goal of the game is for at least one of the Doctors to reach Gallifrey before the Daleks do. This makes it kind-of co-operative, though the larger share of the spoils go to the Doctor that makes it there first, so it's also a little competitive.
I never really like games that have this mechanic. Just make it co-operative or make it competitive. This middle ground namby-pampy nonsense never does games any favour.

Now, I actually came to quite like the basic meat and potatoes of the game, how you have to roll these custom dice to match a certain amount of symbols in order to complete tasks or missions. Depending on which character and companions you have in play, you can modify, add and re-roll certain dice in order to give yourself the best chances of success.

But the main problem with the game is the rulebook. Outside of the dice mechanics, which themselves took a little bit of head scratching, the rest of the rules were awkward to follow to say the least.

But if I can find the time to sit down and read them properly, and maybe watch some vids, there might be some fun to be had here.

If we ever play it again, that is.

My paint range expanded again recently when I saw some Humbrol acrylics in a local hobby shop and picked some up on the spur of the moment. When I got home, and read some reviews, I was a little more comfortable with my purchase.

However, when I got around to using them a few weeks later, I had a very different experience to the other users online.

The two greenish paints are somewhat usable, but are very thin so will always need two coats to get nice coverage, and probably won't be ever used to drybrush. Still, I needed a military green style paint, so that one might get the most use out of these.

However, the two metallics are useless. The light silver has moderate coverage, but its consistency makes it horrible to try and paint with. It's similar to the gel paints I got from Vallejo a while back, in that it's really goopy, and not very smooth at all.

But the dark silver is a straight up waste of money. Even after shaking for ages, all I can get out of it is some very very thin liquid with barely any pigment, plus a load of bubbles.

What I would like to try is to pop the lid and give it a damn good stir, but the top section of the bottle is made out of some really flexible plastic, so I can't pry it open. What a stupid design.

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As is usual for me, I didn't do any painting all the way through the summer months.

But finally, over the last couple of months, I've been back with some sporadic attempts.

As the Evil Sunz still aren't finished, I've been painting some more of those little dudes. I shouldn't make any targets, as I don't keep them, but ideally I'd like to have them done by Christmas. That would be my largest Ork clan out of the way, with some much smaller and easier ones left to paint.

I've also randomly decided to work on some Blood Bowl star players, just to break up the constant red. I've painted my first Lizardman player in Hemlock, and am now onto the hulking brute that is Ramtut III.

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Though it would have been fun to see her frump some fools on the pitch, I no longer have plans to use my old Tifa keyring as Bertha Bigfist in Blood Bowl.

This is because I now have a 3D printer (if I ever manage to get it set up and usable), and a much more suitable model I've made on Heroforge.

So the question then became: what to do with that old keyring?

I've decided I am going to try and restore it back to how it was, with a little modification, and repaint it as a display piece.

So off came all that old dodgy green stuff from a decade ago. She'll also have to go into the dipping pot to get rid of the base paint I slapped on her back then.

Though I regret that earlier me ever dared to use any kind of modelling putty, I will still have to use some on this project, as I removed a lot of her hair to get the cloak to fit. And I can't have a Tifa figure without the hair now can I?

As I have so many little things going on right now, it might be another ten years before I get back to this. But she will not be forgotten.