It's been a long time since I really knuckled down and painted something, but just before Christmas, Scoob's enthusiasm for his new Nid army started to stir the desire in me again.

I first painted some more of the Epic Evil Sunz. Those poor Orks. I just keep teasing them with the possibility of finally being finished, and then move on to something else.

Case in point, rather than carry on with the little Orks, I instead switched my attention to the Callidus Assassin that I'd stripped of paint and shoddy green stuff a few years ago.

To make up for my horrendous first effort at painting this model, I thought I should really try this time, and painted her up about as good as I am capable. It doesn't really mean much, as it's still not great, but I'm happy enough with the end result.

After painting that model, which was my first 40K model in some years, I moved on to something entirely different. For some reason, I felt like painting the character figures from my old copy of Cluedo: Super Sleuth, which is a game I've owned since the 1990s and have never played. At the same time as painting those, I thought I may as well paint the four detectives from the City Of Angels game as well.

All I want for Christmas is the love of painting

It's spraying time

Here's my Callidus Assassin, Xenia Koza, back and ready for action.

I've only managed a gloss varnish so far, which is why she's so shiny. I'll get around to the matt at some point.

Probably.

Not Lady Deadpool. Honest.

Still not sure why I felt such an urge to paint these, as I've never used them and maybe never will.

But I used to really love Cluedo as a kid, and they will be ready on the very small chance that they will ever be needed again.

Which one is the murderer?

What a bunch of dicks!

Still can't wait to get this game to the tabletop and use the full rules. Hopefully, the other players will be as interested in it as I was.

Can't believe it's been three years already since I played through the solo variant. Holy shit.

Alright, pay attention, you dicks

Not long ago, I had a look online if there were any good print & play games available. One that popped up on a few people's lists was a little game called Sprawlopolis.

For some weird reason, I thought print & play games were all free, but it turns out I was very mistaken. Still, this one was only £3, and looked interesting, so I picked it up.

The game has you placing cards to form a city, and then see how well you did depending on three randomly selected scoring conditions.

In my first game, I needed to get a total of 31 points in order to win, and I managed a very comfortable 38.

Thinking I'd already cracked the game, I had a second attempt. The scoring conditions were Master Planned, Concrete Jungle, and The Outskirts, meaning I needed just 16 points to win this time.

In a polar opposite outcome to the first game, I only managed a measly 7 points, leading to complete failure.

With one win and one loss under my belt, I then played a 3 player game where we had to get 25pts in order to win. We only got 3 combined points from two of our scoring conditions, but the third one, called Looping Lanes, allowed us to score a whopping 30 points, and brought our total to 37.

It's a fun, quick little game that really makes you think. Not sure how much play it will get in group situations, but there's always the option for more solo play.

Strange that Master Planned has rocked up as one of my scoring conditions in all three of my games. I wonder if I'll ever get to see the city blocks on the other side of that card.

Fabricating my city blocks

My city sprawls far and wide

We create quite a racing circuit

Just yesterday I got to play my first ever game of 7 Wonders, the card-drafting, civilisation-building classic, that seems very well regarded amongst board gamers.

The basics of the game were easy to pick up, and though we realised later that we'd made a simple rules error, we were soon quite into it.

What was quite interesting to note is that we all went with very different tactics in order to try and win. I went a very science route, while my bro-in-law went very trade-heavy, building up his treasure, and my sister went almost full military.

While I came last, we were all within 5 points of each other, which we were quite impressed by.

I'm looking forward to playing it with a couple more players, so that everyone can't interact with everyone else.

I Wonder why I keep losing

Not sure if I'm too paranoid or not, but I really prefer to sleeve all my cards in the board games I own. The problem is, many games come in boxes, or with box inserts, that just do not support the size of card sleeves. For example, look at what happened when I sleeved Viking Raiders:

I don't think these cards fit in this box

Not only does the box not close properly any more, I had to take the insert out just to get the cards to even fit in the box at all. Daft.

But if that wasn't bad enough, I next decided to have a go at Godfather: Last Family Standing. Not only was this insert not big enough, but it was also glued into the box.

To get it out, I had to cut and tear at it, until it came free. This had the unwanted effect of damaging the inside of the box, so I had to fix some card to the bottom using double-sided tape. After this was done, I glued in some foam core to the right height, so that there was plenty of room for the cards and the boards.

Get off my land, you stupid insert

Much better

My next little box improvement session came when I had to have a wrestling match with King Of New York. I've owned the Power Up! expansion for this for years, but never used it, so I wanted it to be in the box. After sleeving those cards, I also downloaded and prepared the print'n'play Power Up! cards for the monsters that come in King Of Tokyo, so also needed a place for those.

My original insert for this game had already been sliced and diced to fit the sleeved main card deck, but it was not going to be possible to use it at all with the Power Up! cards.

So I've made some little trays to fit several of the components in, which should support the board on top, and leave room for all the other components, which I have bagged.

Power Up! print proceedings

Making it fit

There have been a few game sessions over the past couple of months, mostly consisting of Codenames and Secret Hitler. The one stand out was when we got to play Whitehall Mystery for the first time, a game I have wanted to play for years.

In this one, I took on the role of Jack The Ripper, and tried to dump my murder victim's body in 4 pieces around the city.

However, as I made my way to the last dumping point, the three cops managed to catch up with me and slap on those handcuffs. These hidden movement games really are quite difficult for the villains.

On the run from the rozzers

<Old Stuff>

Here's part two of the story of this site's evolution. Just like part 1, this is long and pointless, so is hidden by default. Just click the button if you want to read it, for some weird reason.

Show / hide site evolution part 2

Stebloke's: May 2008-Nov 2009

May 2008 saw the end of Steveo's Website, with the very first Stebloke's Website rising from the ashes. As you may guess, this was a very important name change indeed. After all, there are many Steveos in this world, but only one Stebloke.

For the first time, I made sure the site was using valid HTML, which was version 4 at this stage. In the redesign, I finally managed to get rid of tables and frames, and the entire site was layed out using CSS, which was a big step forward for my tiny brain.

Where things went backwards was in its structure, as each page once again became its own HTML file, which each loaded in the menu using PHP. The previous Steveo site had used a single index file which loaded in information depending on which menu item was clicked. I think that was the better way, which is why I'm currently back to using it.

I had clearly not yet learned the CSS push technique, as the content area did not stretch to the bottom of the page, and looks weird.

During this time, the wargaming articles became a thing, which were a precursor to the blog entries that arrived later. And on the main page, probably to fill up some space, I added random links and random quotes, which lasted all the way to Stebloke's V6.

I have a valid site at last

Stebloke's V2: Nov 2009-Dec 2010

Immediately visible is the regression in this site's design, in that it is fixed width for some reason. I'd honestly like to go back and ask myself what I was thinking.

The behind the scenes structure was much the same, with lots of independent pages loading in a main menu, though the menu would now be formatted differently depending on where on the site you were.

Forward momentum came when I added filters to the wargame articles, so you could search by game.

Urgh, fixed width weirdness

Stebloke's V3: Dec 2010-Apr 2011

This site was pretty much a V2.5 rather than a V3, as it was just a streamlined version of V2. Lots of worthless info was stripped out of the site, and many pages consolidated, making it easier to navigate.

Stebloke's V2 gets stripped

Stebloke's V4: Apr 2011-Jul 2012

I wanted to use this new site to force myself into learning MySQL. It all went quite well at first, and the site was designed so that people could register, login, and choose preferences in the form of different appearances.

One appearance was made in the style of Steveo's V2 for its 10th anniversary.

For the first time, I also made available one of my games, which was a redesign of an old text adventure game I'd made in the 1990s using DOS batch files. Once you were logged in, the database would act as a save game state, remembering location and inventory and so on.

However, very soon, in July 2011, my web host disabled the mail() PHP function so I could no longer send emails so that people could register or reset their password.
This meant that the preferences and the game had to be remade so they used cookies instead, and I pretty much abandoned MySQL from then on.

That game actually doesn't work at all any more due to more PHP changes, and would need another massive redesign if I were to ever bring it back.

Both the computer game and wargame blogs started near the end of this site's run.

The biggest negative was that the site was still fixed width, though for the first time I made a little floating button so it was always possible to scroll back to the top, something that was very missing before.

MySQL came and went in a flash

Steveo's V2 returns from the dead

Going green

Stebloke's V5: Jul 2012-Jan 2017

I'd not upgraded my web server for some years until I started to develop this version of the site. Now I'd got a more up to date version of PHP, it finally became evident to me how many things were wrong with my current code, and how many errors were getting kicked out. So while I was mucking around fixing the PHP, I also decided to upgrade to HTML 5.

Originally, this had a very similar look to the previous Stebloke's sites, except I finally got rid of fixed width. But then in April 2013 the site got a new default look, with a completely different blue to before. At first, I had to take a step back and use a table to get the look I wanted, but this was later removed when I got my shit together in April 2014.

Like the previous site, there were other appearances you could select, including the Star Trek layout, which I think is the best CSS style I've ever made.

In Dec 2015, I finally let the llap-goch.co.uk domain expire, and laid the memory of the LLAP-Goch Master and his Productioneers to rest.

This site lasted 4 and a half years, which was the longest yet. By far the biggest step forward, I think you'll agree, is that I finally figured out that website is supposed to be all one word.

Original V5 look

Updated V5 look

A bit of a bland alternate appearance

Site trekkin', across the universe

Stebloke's V6: Jan 2017-Sep 2019

This site was designed as the first one to be even slightly mobile friendly, using media queries for the first time. On smaller screens, a different menu bar would load which was far more digestible. And on larger screens, a sidebar would load to take up some of the space.

After the last site's colour experiment, I went back to a more typical dark blue, but kept the light grey as the secondary colour instead of the black. All of the alternate appearances were removed, as I found they really gummed things up behind the scenes.

So much editing of pages and blog posts was needed to fit this new style that I wrote a script to analyse all of the pages and make the changes. All of this mucking about convinced me something needed to change for the future...

The good old dark blue returns

Stebloke's V7: Sep 2019-?

You are here, right now.

The site looks much the same, in terms of the blue and grey. But there's been the biggest change ever in terms of structure. The site has changed from static pages to one big blog with multiple filter options.

It's also more naturally mobile friendly in the terms that it doesn't need different CSS for smaller screens. The only thing that changes is the default image size, which shrinks slightly if the screen is a smaller one.

In its development, content and style were completely separated from one another (finally!), with all of the info in simple text files, and the image information stored in a PHP array. This means further changes to the look of the site will be much easier.

Not that I'm planning any changes any time soon. Far from it. And as this is already well over 4 years old, it's certainly going to beat the record set by Stebloke's V5...

Well, here I am again with a look back at my yearly hobby-related failures.

Never before have I started a year so strong, only to fall off so hard after a few months. It's disappointing, but as it's me, ultimately not surprising. I just can not keep up momentum for long.

Computer Games

Early in the year, I was rattling through computer games as I worked hard on getting my PS4 games all wrapped up. By June, I'd got five all done with three to go, and things were looking good. But unfortunately, I've not finished a full game since then.

Concerning those other three, I've been playing Dragon's Crown with Scoob since back in June, but we've not managed enough time on it to get over the finish line. We are right near the end though, so when we meet up next hopefully we can get that one done.
I also started playing Resident Evil 0, before fairly quickly deciding I wanted to do a map of it. Of course, this multiplies the required time by a large degree, so it won't be done any time soon.
That will leave Ghost Of Tsushima as the final game on that system, which should be a fitting send off for it.

My PC gaming has pretty much been dead all year. After finishing Resident Evil 4 on the Windows 10 partition of my new computer, I installed Shadow Of Mordor on my Windows 7 partition, just to make sure the graphics card installation was solid on that OS as well. However, that game still sits there, and I've never even booted it up. My Windows 7 partition finally got a work out in September, when I started a very casual playthrough of Terraria. Though I am in the end game sections, I haven't gone back to it now for quite a while, and really don't feel like doing so. Spent quite a few weeks playing that, too. Damn my scatter brain.

So I only finished 6 games, plus the FF7 Remake DLC, all year. Not quite my worst year for completions, but pretty close. The only positive is that I hardly picked up any other games to play, as I only got 10 more plus the FF7 Remake DLC.
Of those 10, 3 were freebies from Epic, and one was bundled with the PS5. All of the others, except Stray, were on deep, deep sales, so it's been the easiest year on my wallet for a while. Except the actual PS5 console, that is.

Going into 2024, I've got some serious Final Fantasy shaped assignments to tackle. Primarily, and by far most importantly, is FF7 Rebirth. I'm seriously hoping work is a bit thin in March so I can give this thing all the attention it deserves. I've also got Crisis Core and Ever Crisis as options, if I can ever find the motivation. But I think after Rebirth, it's actually FF8 I'd like to revisit. 2024 is quite an important year for that game, as it will be the 25th anniversary of its release, as well as the 20th anniversary of the last time I played it.

Tabletop Games

2023 was fairly light on tabletop action, though there were a few moments of awesome scattered throughout.

My painting efforts went well for a couple of months, then fell off a cliff until recently. That's one of the longest painting droughts I can remember. If it hadn't been for Scoob inspiring me with his effort on his new Nid army, the drought would probably continue.

Only once were we able to break out the wargame boards, where unfortunately for me, most of our time was spent dicking around with 40K 10th edition. Just one game of the new Epic rules was attempted, which I would much rather have been playing. But oh well.

On the board game front, I finally got to try Whitehall Mystery and Resident Evil 2, both of which I enjoyed. It was also nice to rediscover the love of Secret Hitler.
The other thing that happened which was wild was another game of Game Of Thrones Risk, which unfortunately wasn't documented. In this one, new player Craig absolutely smashed everyone else off the map, with 41 points. That was 2 points more than the other 3 players combined. It was a bloodbath.

I'm really not sure what 2024 has in store. It seems pretty obvious that I can't keep to any goals I set, not while I'm working this exhausting job. I guess the 6mm Evil Sunz are nearly done, so it would be good to get those finished. All those MDF terrain pieces still need work as well. And I've still got to get a 3D printer.

It would also be cool if we could try out a game or two of my new Super Dungeon rules, which I spent most of last year working on and still haven't been touched.
It'll happen at some point no doubt.

Music, Art & Stories

There's been absolutely nothing to report on any of these topics. There's still a simmering desire hidden deep within me to try and find the time for some music or art, but it's unlikely to happen. And as far as writing any stories, I think I can scratch this one off the list of my hobbies at this point.