Board Gaming

Games we own. These are all available for game night with the North Tahoe Tabletop Board Game Meetup group....

Art Projects

I have worked on various art projects over the years. This is a collection of some of those projects....

Programming Projects

I have worked on various personal and professional computer programming projects over the years. This is a collection of...
Games

What are “Points” in Board Games?

I have a collection of about 150 board games. There are many themes, mechanisms, and point styles in these games. This post is about the style or method of tracking points in games. What are “points?” They are the measurement of success in a game. In the game…

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Are Fewer Lines Better?

I work in Java and Swift very often. Swift lends itself to writing fewer lines of code, which appeals to me because maintaining fewer lines of code always seems easier. But more importantly, fewer lines of code to do the same thing is more elegant, in my humble…

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Computers & Programming

Twilio and A2P 10DLC

Many years ago, I created a messaging system for a puzzle hunt (AKA puzzle race) and I utilized Twilio for SMS text messages. Twilio provides a way for their customers to send SMS text messages through cell phone carriers to their devices. In other words, you can text…

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Thanos Was Dumb

Why did no one ever mention to Thanos that killing off half of everyone would just be a 60 to 70 year delay and after that time has passed, the world and the universe would be exactly where it was when he decided to snap his fingers? Was…

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Games

Undergrove First Impressions

Undergrove is a modern board game by Elizabeth Hargrave and Mark Wootton. Elizabeth Hargrave also designed Wingspan, a wildly popular game, so I had high expectations for Undergrove. After a single play with everyone at the table playing it for the first time, I saw that it has…

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Games

Theme in Board Game Action Selection

After playing the board game Arcs recently, I realized that no matter how well a game’s theme is developed, that theme can be weakened if the action selection mechanism feels unthematic. In board games, “action selection” refers to the process of choosing what to do on a turn….

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Computers & Programming

Working on Old Code

At work starting about 12 years ago, I was tasked with porting an old Android app to Windows phone. Then I ported that to Windows a year or two later. Many years after that, and after making many changes to those apps, I wrote an iOS app from…

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