In these complicated times sometimes you just need a simple fourth-wall-breaking joke. We haven’t actually gotten, or played Quirky Circuits even though it’s designed by Nikki Valens, my favorite designer, and published by Plaid Hat who are always releasing games with great themes. I should probably get it as a surprise for Rachel at some point in the future. 😉 UPDATE: While making the comic and writing the blog post a friend came by the house and gave Rachel Quirky Circuits as a thank you for designing their wedding invitation! 😆

Speaking of Nikki Valens, we had a blast playing the Shattered Bonds scenario in Mansions of Madness on Saturday and making Instagram Stories about it over on our Instagram. We highlighted them on our profile page so you can still see them. The scenario’s difficulty rating is five which made us doubt trying it after Escape from Innsmouth seems pretty unbeatable while having only a difficulty rating of four. Shattered Bonds seems a lot easier to get a somewhat good ending and it does some really fun things with NPC’s. We have now tried four different scenarios, three from the base game and one DLC, so far and they were all a greatly pulpy horror GM-less RPG that I would recommend at least trying it once.

Another one of our favorite designers is Gil Hova and we had the chance to sit down and play a game of High Rise, which he designed, on the Tabletopia stream. Gil is actually the first designer we talked to at our first Spiel and it was nice to be able to talk to them in a year in which there are no gaming cons. While I didn’t score a ton of points and came in last, we did have a great time and the stream does give a good impression of what High Rise is like and how you can play it (for free!) on Tabletopia. We also used the Check-in Cards for which Rachel did the art and is a short and fun way to make sure everybody is on board playing a game and checking to see if people want to play a game to win or just having a social time.

Another game that is proving to be quite an experience is the Wilson Wolfe Affair. This was the first time since the COVID outbreak we were able to spend more time with this box full of cool goodies filled with maps, pins, booklets, posters, and papercraft models that all contain secret messages and puzzles. This was our third session, we’re now at least sixteen hours in, and we finally feel like we’re starting to understand how to solve these puzzles and might see some contours on how we can use the answers of the smaller puzzles to solve the final one. I don’t want to spoil too much so I leave it at that.

This week we’ll be playing some Quirky Circuits (all of the sudden) and I hope to get Undaunted: North Africa to the table.