Week in review: Week to 25 October
Oct. 26th, 2025 09:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedantherI've been working on a system of noting down things for the blog post as I go through the week. I seem to be doing well at remembering to do it, and it makes the actual writing of the blog post less of a weight, because I already have the list of things to talk about ready and have spent at least a bit of time thinking about what to say about each thing.
...is what I wrote at the beginning of the week, and then I ended the week without much noted down to talk about. I think it's just been that kind of week: fairly quiet, and some of the things that did happen were family things that I don't want to talk about here. (Not bad things, necessarily, but things like "caught up with a relative I haven't seen in ages".)
At board game club, someone brought along a copy of Finspan, the fish-themed spin-off of the hit game Wingspan. I scored well in the early rounds of the game, but in later rounds I was overtaken by other players who had done better at planning ahead to get a big pay-off. I did at least avoid coming last, which I'm happy with for my first time playing something with this many moving parts.
While we were waiting for everyone to arrive, we also played a card game called Tacta. The aim of the game is to place your cards over your opponents' cards to prevent them scoring points from that card, but each card has a set of partial outlines on it (for example, a triangle the size of one corner of a card) and you can only place a card if it has a matching outline and there's room to place it so that the outlines coincide.
Since I've been playing a few logic puzzle games on the computer lately, Steam has started suggesting more that I might like. I've tried out a few demos, including:
* Alien Cartographer: Complete hex maps by identifying the colour and purpose of the marked hexes using an increasing set of rules (every blue house is directly adjacent to at least one other blue house, every red house is connected to at least one other red house by a line between corners, and so on). The one I came closest to being interested in, but the difficulty ramped up faster than my level of engagement.
* Animal Hearts: Casual game based on pyramid solitaire, with aggressively cute artwork and all the annoying gimmicks of a casual mobile game. It is not clear from the demo whether, in the full game, the gimmicks are associated with the extraction of additional money as they would be in a mobile game, but even if not they were enough to put me right off.
* Paint by Words: Fill in simple crossword puzzles by clicking and dragging the provided letters. The advertised mechanic where finishing the puzzle creates a picture is a superficial add-on that's not integrated with the gameplay (as you finish each puzzle, part of a picture is revealed, but there's no relation between the picture and the contents or shape of the puzzle). One of the first puzzles I tried had a spelling mistake ("Marocco"), which doesn't inspire confidence.
* Pixelogic: A nonogram game, according to the description, but the demo didn't work for me at all; I just got a blank grey screen with a cursor that I could move around but had nothing to click on.
* Take 7: Clear a grid of single-digit numbers by selecting rectangles containing a group of numbers that add up to 7. Very short demo, because the concept becomes clear very quickly and either you're interested in more of the same or you're not. (I wasn't.)
I mentioned last week that I'd signed up for a new service that sends notifications when an author has a new book out. I've received several notifications since then; none of them for the authors I'm really interested in, but the level of activity is promising.
Around the World in Eighty Emails continues. Phileas Fogg and his entourage have just set sail from India to Rangoon.
...is what I wrote at the beginning of the week, and then I ended the week without much noted down to talk about. I think it's just been that kind of week: fairly quiet, and some of the things that did happen were family things that I don't want to talk about here. (Not bad things, necessarily, but things like "caught up with a relative I haven't seen in ages".)
At board game club, someone brought along a copy of Finspan, the fish-themed spin-off of the hit game Wingspan. I scored well in the early rounds of the game, but in later rounds I was overtaken by other players who had done better at planning ahead to get a big pay-off. I did at least avoid coming last, which I'm happy with for my first time playing something with this many moving parts.
While we were waiting for everyone to arrive, we also played a card game called Tacta. The aim of the game is to place your cards over your opponents' cards to prevent them scoring points from that card, but each card has a set of partial outlines on it (for example, a triangle the size of one corner of a card) and you can only place a card if it has a matching outline and there's room to place it so that the outlines coincide.
Since I've been playing a few logic puzzle games on the computer lately, Steam has started suggesting more that I might like. I've tried out a few demos, including:
* Alien Cartographer: Complete hex maps by identifying the colour and purpose of the marked hexes using an increasing set of rules (every blue house is directly adjacent to at least one other blue house, every red house is connected to at least one other red house by a line between corners, and so on). The one I came closest to being interested in, but the difficulty ramped up faster than my level of engagement.
* Animal Hearts: Casual game based on pyramid solitaire, with aggressively cute artwork and all the annoying gimmicks of a casual mobile game. It is not clear from the demo whether, in the full game, the gimmicks are associated with the extraction of additional money as they would be in a mobile game, but even if not they were enough to put me right off.
* Paint by Words: Fill in simple crossword puzzles by clicking and dragging the provided letters. The advertised mechanic where finishing the puzzle creates a picture is a superficial add-on that's not integrated with the gameplay (as you finish each puzzle, part of a picture is revealed, but there's no relation between the picture and the contents or shape of the puzzle). One of the first puzzles I tried had a spelling mistake ("Marocco"), which doesn't inspire confidence.
* Pixelogic: A nonogram game, according to the description, but the demo didn't work for me at all; I just got a blank grey screen with a cursor that I could move around but had nothing to click on.
* Take 7: Clear a grid of single-digit numbers by selecting rectangles containing a group of numbers that add up to 7. Very short demo, because the concept becomes clear very quickly and either you're interested in more of the same or you're not. (I wasn't.)
I mentioned last week that I'd signed up for a new service that sends notifications when an author has a new book out. I've received several notifications since then; none of them for the authors I'm really interested in, but the level of activity is promising.
Around the World in Eighty Emails continues. Phileas Fogg and his entourage have just set sail from India to Rangoon.
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Date: 2025-10-26 12:01 pm (UTC)