My December Gaming

 December ended up being a busy month for me in non-gaming ways. Apart from some play testing (thanks again, Butron Shy!), I didn’t really learn many new games and the ones I did learn were very light. 

I learned:

Paper Pinball - Little Ghost

Reawaken (play test)

Villainopolis (play test)

Coin Pusher: Galactic Surge

Orphan Source Detected!

The highlights were the playtests but that’s largely because of how slight the rest were. I try and learn at least one Roll and Write a month and they kept rolling this month.

Of them, the best was easily Coin Pusher: Galactic Surge. It is still a very light game but it has solid theming and the mechanics have enough to give you interesting choices.

Looking at the January calendar, I don’t see a lot of free time so I’ll be digging back into my R&W backlog.

My December PnP

On the one hand, I got a decent amount of PnP crafting done in December. On the other hand, I didn’t end up using as much of it as I hoped to.

I made:

iina

Paper Pinball: Little Ghost

Paper Pinball: Comb Clash

Paper Pinball: Escape the Vent

Coin Pusher: Galactic Surge

Villainopolis (play test)

Launchtime

Packing Party (basic version)

Astro ROVE - Hyperdrive Hops (play test)

Everything Machine (play test)

A Dragon’s Gift (demo)

Arcane Bakery Clash + expansions

Criss Cross

Dinks and Donkeys

Orphan Source Detected!

The Button Shy playtest forum had a busy month and I did my best to keep up. And I was able to do that from the printing and crafting side. However, I just didn’t have the time to play all of it. 

I had planned on the demo for A Dragon’s Gift to be my ‘big’ project for December. And I do quite like it. 

However, somehow, Arcane Bakery Clash ended up taking over a weekend of crafting. I had been interested in its use of timing but getting two-player PnP games played can be hard. Other people want quality components lol 

When I learned that it had not one but three expansions for solitaire play, three different AI opponents. And another expansion besides. I ended making all of them, even though all I needed one was solitaire module and the base set. Now I have to actually play the thing.

(Note the earlier comment about finding gaming time lol)

I also, among other things, decided to finish laminating all of the Paper Pinball games. I want to finish trying all of them so I can play any of them when I feel like it.

Not my strongest month for playing games for a good one for making them.

The required look back at 2025

 As is pretty much always the case, 2025 had positives and negatives for me as far as gaming experiences go. I think that’s pretty much just the human condition.

Easily the best gaming experience I had in 2025 was going to the first convention since 2019. (I think we still have no idea of the long term social and economic effects of the pandemic) I got to see old friends and play a lot of different games.

And the low point of the year was simply that the gaming time just wasn’t there. That’s just how life works. I usually like to play some journaling games for NaNoWriMo and it was December before I thought of doing that. I literally remembered Dicember on December 30. My time and my mental energy have have just had other focuses.

Buttonshy’s Playtesting continued to deliver for me. It has given me a community to interact with and a way to give back to the broader community. I’m really thankful and glad that I get to be a part of it.

Another highlight was Dr. Finn’s Book of Solo Strategy and Word Games. None of the eight games (plus the bonus game since I backed the Kickstarter) are perfect. However, collectively they are fun and accessible. They offer wide variety of accessible gaming experiences in a convenient way for both time and physicsl space.

And, oddly enough, my guilty pleasure of Metal Snail’s Paper Pinball series picked up. Any given game in the series is, honestly, a so so Roll and Write. But I found grabbing a few and playing them back-to-back really engaging. The whole is greater that the parts.

2025 wasn’t a bad gaming year for me. But I did have to focus on what really gave me joy.

The Judas Contract disturbed me. Which was almost assuredly the point

 I recently read The New Teen Titans - The Judas Contract for the first time. I went in knowing that it was a very important story in the run that defined the Teen Titans, even though the team had been around since 1964. I also I knew it was controversial. And I also knew the basic plot lol

It was like watching The Usual Suspects or Fight Club in 2025. The twists are well known, even if you haven’t seen them.

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The Teen Titans have brought the very young and very powerful (and very unstable) Terra onto the team. Unfortunately, she is the partner and lover of their nemesis Deathstroke the Terminator. She helps get them captured by an evil organization. When they inevitably break free, she completely loses it and accidentally kills herself in her meltdown.

Oh, where to start.

The storyline is where Dick Grayson, the original Robin transitions to Nightwing, which is a huge deal. It introduces Jericho, a mainstay of the Titans for a while.

But the real point is Terra.

I read the 2017 edition and Marv Wolfman wrote in the introduction that their goal was to make Terra the anti-Kitty Pryde, which is wild to me. That seems incredibly specific and potentially petty.

And the character is either clearly designed to be disturbing or Wolfman and Perez have some serious issues. Or both.

Terra has many child-like design elements. A page girl haircut, a slight overbite, a small frame. At the same time, she many troubling unchildlike behaviors. She smokes, which in 1984 meant you were either a bad guy or Wolverine. She’s a minor in a physical relationship with Deathstroke who is old enough to be her dad. And she’s really eager to kill people.

In fact, you can read Deathstroke as the victim in the relationship. Which is really problematic. Beast Boy/Changljng is also depicted as the victim in their interactions, even though he treats her terribly. (This is easily the nastiest version of Beast Boy I’ve read)

Most striking of all, in a series that had a lot of focus on character development, both Raven the empath and the literal narrator explicitly state there is no reason for her to be a bad guy. She’s just evil. Wow.

It’s easy to invoke misogyny but I think it’s appropriate In this case.

The Judas Contract is striking. If I’d have read it in 1984 when it came out, it would have knocked me off my feet. I can see why is still remembered forty years later. However, I cannot get over how… problematic it is. And how intentional that choice was. 

Games don’t have to be good to be educational

 When I looked at Orphan Source Detected!, it reminded me of the kind of Print and Plays I saw when I first started looking at PnPa back in the early 00s. Minimal graphics, basic mechanics but very grounded theme.

The idea is that you are a scientist with a Geiger counter trying to find six orphan sources in a rural area. An orphan source is a self-contained radioactive source that isn’t under proper control. Real thing, real problem. Historically, it looks like they have been caused by a combination of carelessness and stupidity.

The game itself consists of a seven-by-seven grid. You add a die and something to write with. Each turn, you pick an empty square, roll a die and write the number in. One through four gets you nothing. Five and six gives you out plus one and plus 2 in adjacent squares. Seven or more, you’ve found one of the orphans sources. After you’ve found a source, roll for casualties but you get to subtract the number of sources you’ve already found from that roll.

There is nothing in the rules about having to make a trail of spaces, that each one has to be adjacent. I also figure that the bonuses only get added to empty spaces. I mean, to already searched spaces that have a number in them.

So, the obvious strategy is trying to chain bonuses. My boards look like I’m making a checkerboard of numbers. You can’t find an orphan source without getting bonuses since you can’t roll a seven on a six-sided die without a sharpie.

There are variations but they are all different radioactive materials with slightly different modifiers.

Okay, there’s not much here, mechanically. The basic strategy is really obvious and the random number generating powers-that-be can wipe out your plans. A series of ones left one of my plays with missing sources and a decimated rural landscape. I found it amusing when my plan came together but there’s a lot of other light Roll and Writes that do that better.

The real value of Orphan Source Detected! for me was the rabbit hole it took me down researching real life orphan sources. And the game actually includes helpful links!

While the Goiania Incident that required over a 100,000 people to be screened for radiation contamination is mentioned in the rules, the Ciudad Juárez cobalt-60 contamination incident is the one that really blew my mind. An accident ended up contaminating 6000 tons of rebar, requiring the demolition of hundreds of buildings.

Orphan Source Detected isn’t a good game but it led to some good history lessons.

https://ellie-valkyrie.itch.io/orphan-source-detected-osd-solo-roll-and-write

I’d never played Point Salad yet it filled me with nostalgia

 Point Salad is a simple yet effective little game that made me feel like I was back when I first discovered the broader world of board games.

It consists of a deck of double-sided cards. One side shows a vegetable. The other side shows a scoring condition. Lay out three rows, one of scoring cards and the rest of veggies. On your turn, you take two cards from the common market for your personal tableau.  You can turn a scoring card over to be a veggie card but a veggie card can never flip to be a scoring card.

When the cards are gone, most points wins.

The scoring cards are, of course, the heart of the game. And they aren't just things like having X points for having sets of veggies. Some cards give you negative points for certain veggies as well as positive points or have the most of a given vegetable out of everyone. You can't get points if you don't have any point cards. And, while there isn't any direct interaction, indirect conflict quickly develops  as players try for similar goals or take cards to keep them out of other folk's hands.

Point Salad is simple and intuitive. Most of the rules are literally on the cards and none of them are hard to understand. And, while you don't get to directly do anything to another player, you get in each other's faces really quickly. It takes ideas that you've seen before and distills them down to about as simple as they going to go and still work. It isn't a complex game and it wouldn't be the center of a game night. But playing it made me happy.

When I first discovered games like Bohnanza or the Very Clever Pipe Game (both very early gaming experiences for me), I was impressed by both their simplicity and the amount of play that I could get out of them. As I mentioned, Point Salad had that kind of feel for me.

I understand that it has been revised and rethemed as Point Galaxy, including a solitaire option. I am seriously thinking of looking into that.

In the Tree of Azathoth, CT Phipps finds new levels of cosmic horror - it’s like Cthulhu Christmas!

 When I read Cthulhu Apocalypse by C. T. Phipps, I knew I wanted to read the rest of the series. And I didn't feel the need to write  about the second book, the Tower of Zhaal, because I figured it was a trilogy and that I could write a summary of my thoughts of the finished work, the full arc of the work.

… Yeah, it turns out that not the right way to approach the series.

What I realized while reading the third book, the Tree is Azathoth, is how much each book is its own beast, is a stand alone, complete thought.

John Henry Booth is a serial hero in the sense that he isn’t the hero of one story but of ongoing stories. Which isn’t a bad thing at all. King Arthur and Robin Hood are serial heroes, for crying out loud. And Phipps, as I later learned, used him in short stories as well.

At the same time, the John Henry Booth at the start of Cthulhu Apocalypse and the end of the Tree of Azathoth, they are not the same character. The later Booth is so much more messed up for one thing.

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The first two books in the series are Weird West works, set after the stars were right  and the Great Old Ones rise up. Heck, the Tower of Zhaal is a clear riff on The Magnificent Seven. (Which, to be fair, I have never seen. I have seen Seven Samurai though)

And the Tower of Zhaal is a rip roaring fun ride. It is a roller coaster of an adventure with the heroes (spoilers) summoning Cthulhu itself to save the day at the end. 

Then, in the Tree of Azathoth, Phipps completely changes gears and we go from Weird West to Film Noire. Booth ends up in a city in the dream lands and find the role of hard boiled detective coming over him. And the genre flip is acknowledged in context.

The books are a well balanced blend of Cthulhu Lite and Cosmic Horror. The heroes are able to defeat eldritch abominations. Beings like deep ones and ghouls are humanized. Booth has civil conversations with shogoths and Nyarlathotep and more. But, in the big picture, the Great Old Ones won, every victory is fleeting and hollow, and humanity is entirely meaningless.

And the Tree of Azathoth is the bleakest book, at least unless Phipps writes another one. The remnants of humanity are ghosts living in a dream world. That was a nightmarish outcome that Booth fought against in the first book and now that is as good as it gets. 

I was impressed by how bleak it got. By the end, it was full on cosmic horror while still giving Booth agency. It’s good enough I don’t want to spoil it beyond saying that.

Through out all the books, Phipps makes shoutouts to many authors but Brian Lumley get a lot of them. Lumley was important both as a proponent of Cthulhu Lite and keeping Lovecraft alive before his worked made the jump to pop culture. 

But I just keep thinking that Phipps does it so much better every time he references Lumley. Phipps normalizes the Mythos more effectively with making monsters normal people. But when he goes for abyssal horror, it hits hard.

Since Phipps makes several references to Howard, particularly in the third book, I’m expecting swords and sorcery if we get a fourth one.