Browsing Instagram, looking at #boardgames, for example, can be very nice and inspiring but also slightly addicting – so it’s important to keep in mind that it’s also fun to actually play games. Don’t fall for the infinite scrolling trap! 😉

Last week, we finally revealed what we’ve made and send to our $10 patrons – and it was… a pocket dice tower! Most dice towers we see are quite large and we liked the idea of making a Semi Co-op dice tower, so Heinze put on his inventor’s hat and designed a dice tower that fits in a deck box, it weighs only 40 grams and can it can also be used to transport/store up to fourteen dice! We engraved them with some fun illustrations and personalized them with the patron’s names.
Everybody we’ve sent it to really liked it and we really enjoyed getting creative so we’re already brainstorming about what to make for the December surprise of 2019!

Also last week, we finally, finally started our Charterstone campaign! Hurray! Our BGG Secret Santa gifted us Charterstone more than a year ago, but at that time we were playing three or four other campaign games. We’ve finished two of those now, andnow felt like we were ready for Charterstone! The first game took a little long, but that was due to the tutorial, the actual player turns were really quick and we all excited to play it again. We’re playing the game with four players and probably won’t add any automas.

Last week we received a copy of Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth from Osprey Games! We’ve played it once so far and noticed that we find it way harder than The Lost Expedition, the game on which this game is based. We’ll certainly play it some more to form a good opinion about it, maybe we did something wrong or maybe it really just is that hard! 😀

I’m sure there are a lot of people that are ok with staring at pretty gift-wrapped gifts under the Christmas tree, patiently waiting until Christmas night to open them op. But I assume there also are a lot of people who find it quite a challenge trying not to somehow find out what’s in it. 😉

The last two weeks of 2018 are a go! It’s such a weird idea that it’s almost 2019 already. Last week we’ve been busy rounding up the last things we needed to send out to our Patreon backers and we hope everything gets delivered swiftly. There was a little delay due to a semi-broken laser cutter at our local fablab, but in the end: all is well! And we can’t wait to hear what our patrons think of the surprise that we made for our $10 tier patrons. 😀 We’re really happy with the results and we’ll be sure to share them here once we know they have received it. 🙂

Speaking about Patreon. This coming Friday, it’s December 21th and that means it’s time for our Winter season raffle! If you support us on Patreon, you automatically have a chance of winning one of the following things:
– A cameo in one of our comics
– A winter themed sketch (and we encourage you to think along with how it should look like)
– A t-shirt or tote bag from our Threadless store

We’re really thankful for all the support we get and would like to give a little something back to you in this way. 🙂 If you can spare a buck a month to support our contribution to the board gaming community, we would be very grateful (and you might even win something cool!): https://www.patreon.com/semicoop

We’ve had little time to play games last week, so we only played another scenario of Gloomhaven (my character is now level 7, whoooh!) and we played Wildlands. Wildlands really is a game that keeps surprising us and we’re slowly learning the important strategic differences between the different factions.

ICYMI, these are the extra comics that we published on social media, sponsored by CoolStuffInc.com:

Extra comic #007 – Surprise!
Extra comic #008 – Rookie Mistake

I think this has happened multiple times in the last few years. 😉

Last week, we received another package of our Secret Santa! It was Dinosaur Tea Party! Yeaaaah… I mean: “Oh jolly, I was anticipating on adding that fabulous looking game to our collection ever since I first laid eyes on it!” The game itself basically is a fancy version of Who is it?, only this is way more fun in my opinion. The game works best if everybody at the table wants to go along with the theme and speak with an accent and behave like posh dinosaurs. If you just want to play the game for what it is and don’t want to play along “in character”, the game might be a bit dull. But for most of our playing groups, this will work just fine as a nice opening or closure game on game nights.

So this year’s BGG Secret Santa was another success! Now we just have to give our target a good experience as well. Looking forward to that!

Last week we played fewer games than the week before, also due to a busy weekend. We played Ruthless, Cerberus and Dinosaur Tea Party. And that’s it! Hopefully, we’ll have a bit more time this coming week.

We also did a test run of the kids RPG system we’ve been working on since this Summer, it’s not finished yet, but if you’re interested, we’ve posted a small report on Twitter – click here to read it.

ICYMI, these are the extra comics that we published, sponsored by CoolStuffInc.com:

Extra comic #005 – Werewolves
Extra comic #006 – Rainy Day

This week’s comic features one of our Patrons: DiceSpire! 😀 He won an appearance in a comic in our Autumn Raffle on Patreon. You can also win an appearance in one of our comics in our upcoming Winter raffle on December 21st. Interested? https://www.patreon.com/semicoop

So last week we were already surprised by our Secret Santa! That was way earlier than we expected! We received a package with Dragon Castle in it! After playing it at Spiel this year, this game ended up high on our list, so we’re super happy with the gift. Thank you so so much! And our Santa even hinted that this is not the only package. We feel spoiled to bits. <3 This week, we’ll get busy with taunting our target and hopefully, we manage to give him or her an awesome BGG Secret Santa experience this year. 🙂

We also continued our Gloomhaven campaign and we were doing ok in a rather difficult scenario until we triggered something. We didn’t see that coming and deemed it impossible and we were already discussing what we would do differently in our second try. Just for fun and to prove that this really was an impossible situation, we did continue playing the scenario. And no way, but yes, we actually did it. We won the scenario we had already given up on. That was simply amazing and we will have more faith in our own characters next time. 😉

And underestimating ourselves might have been a theme. We participated in a team bouldering competition on Saturday with four friends and we were able to do way more boulders than we had anticipated. Ok ok, lesson learned, we can do way more than we sometimes think.

Yesterday we’ve played… Dungeons & Dragons! It’s been over six or seven years since we last played a session, so that was really exciting! All the players had either played DnD a few times a looonggg time ago, or had never played it before. Luckily, our DM did a fantastic job. It was supposed to be a one-shot, but everybody was eager for more in the end. So who knows, maybe that giant stash of dice in our house might one day be used for roleplaying games.

In case you missed them, these are the extra comics that we published, sponsored by CoolStuffInc.com:

Extra comic #003 – Tempting
Extra comic #004 – Third Time’s a Charm

Oh, and it’s Heinze’s birthday today – hurray! 😀