Quests Over Coffee is worth a second cup of coffee

Alexander Shen really got on my radar with Quests Over Coffee. Certainly, it’s the game that has gotten the most exposure at PnP Arcade, thanks to all the expansions. I’d made a copy earlier this year and I’ve finally tried it out.

Short version, Quests Over Coffee is the best game that I’ve played by Alexander Shen.

Longer version: Quests Over Coffee consists of a deck of quest and a deck of item cards. You have to add dice and some way of tracing health, money and luck. The game structure is resolve five quest cards, get a chance to buy items and then resolve another five quest cards.

Quest cards are obviously where all the real game play happens. Each one has a cartoon that gives you some narrative, a failure condition, a success condition and a special condition. Essentially, how high you have to roll to succeed and a combination of dice you need to roll to get a bonus. 

I went in expecting a total luck fest. But you actually have a number of choices. You can buy more dice for a quest with money. You can use luck for rerolls. Items, which you can buy at the shop or earn through quests, give you special abilities (almost always one-shot) And, perhaps most importantly, you deal out five quests at a time and you decide what order to tackle them.

I was expecting roll the dice and hope for the best and found instead a surprising number of options. Quests Over Coffee has proven amusing, fun and interesting. That’s a good combination.

When I made a copy, I also made the first expansion. I was very glad that I did that because that meant I wasn’t playing with the exact same cards over and over again. When I have the time (which might not be until next year), I’d like to make all the expansions. Because Quest Over Coffee is clearly at its best when you have a stack of cards at add more of variety.

I have tried at least seven or eight of Alexander Shen’a puzzles and games. I found them enjoyable but unpolished. Quests Over Coffee, with its charming art and interesting decision tree, I can see succeeding with wider publication. 

Why isn’t there a Song of the Lioness movie?

Last year, I discovered Tamora Pierce and read her Protector of the Small quartet, the third of her series set in Tortall. I really enjoyed it so I made it a lot t to read Song of the Lioness, the first series in that setting.

Not only is Song of the Lioness is the first Tortall series, it is also the first young adult work by Pierce. It was originally written as a single volume for adult readers and ended up being revised into four books for young adults. It is also considered a milestone for young adult fantasy and feminist fantasy. 

And, yeah, I liked Protector of the Small better. Which I think is a good thing. An author should get better as they go along. The pacing and the character development were better in the Protector of the Small, although character development in the Song of the Lioness is a strong point.

The Song of the Lioness is about Alanna, a girl who disguises herself as a boy to become a knight. Along the way, she also becomes a sorceress, a shaman and an all around hero. It’s also so high fantasy that having a room that basically a benign eldritch abomination in the capital castle is considered normal.

I don’t want to spoil the plot of the stories but I went in expecting a coming-of-age story and got much more of straight adventure stories. Three of the four books lead up to her fighting some kind of big bad.

My favorite book was the third one, The Woman Who Rides Like A Man. It’s the Taran Wanderer of the series.

Okay. Some spoilers.

Having earned her knighthood (and had her gender revealed) at the end of the second book, as well as resolved a major ongoing conflict, Alanna now has to figure out what to do with herself after achieving her life’s goal.  Honestly, it’s the only book where I didn’t see the plot coming.

Which comes back to my comments about character development. While I don’t think the Song of the Lioness is a coming of age story, it is about Alanna figuring out how she relates to a world that doesn’t have a place for her. She is flawed but determined. 

While they aren’t perfect, the books in the Song of Lioness are strong. I can see how they had an impact on young adult fantasy (and a reminder that that existed before Harry Potter) and feminist fantasy. I am sad that, to the best of my knowledge, there hasn’t been any plan to adapt them to other media and a wider audience.

After packing most of my remaining games…

I have three or four weeks between packing up my game collection and unpacking it. So, I have put together a tiny s library for that time. More than that, it has to take up minimal space the car is gojng to be packed.

Number one item for the library. A deck of playing cards. Honestly, if i had to drop it down to one item, it would have to be a deck of cards. You have a vast library of games at your fingertips with just a deck of cards. Not only are there are tons of classic games, folks have made games with more ‘modern’ aesthetics for playing cards. 

https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/264858/modern-solitairesolo-games-using-only-52-card-stan

https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/301657/my-big-book-solo-traditional-deck-card-games

Seriously, a deck of cards is amazing.

I have also rearranged my fidget box of In Hand games. (In case you’re curious, it’s one of those plastic Extra gum cases. They are great for micro card games) It now has Palm Island, Labyrinth Runner, Flip Word, Elevens for One and Murderers Row. 

I have dozens of plays under my belt for each of these games and they can all be played without a surface. For some of them, that’s the only way to play them. They are prefect for travel or when all your tables are packed up.

Frankly, I usually have a deck of cards or my fidget box with me if I leave the house, particularly if it’s some kind of overnight trip. However, for this length of time, I’m adding a clip board and a folder of laminated Roll and Write games. I double-sided the one-page games, which I thought was just me being silly but laminated sheets actually bulk up a folder fast.

I have some old standbys, 30 Rails and Yard Builder, as well as 13 Sheep and Criss Cross to make sure there’s some extra ligjt fare. I think 30 Rails helped define what a PnP R&W could really be. It was a great PnP R&W before it was cool.

I decided to include all four games in Dark Imp’s playmat line (Beach Life, Opeing Night, Castaway and Restaurantrepreneur) , even though they’re two pages each. (Hadn’t thought of using double-siding so I’d have two games on two sheets until I had packed up everything) I think they are solid casual weight games that would get a lot more attention if PnP was more mainstream. 

Radoslaw Ignatow is heavily represented in the folder. I honestly feel he has a real knack for pushing the boundaries for what you can do with Roll and Write format. From his Lot of Games collection, I have Pointree, Alpakaland, Time Machine, Mixture, Roll Pirates and Jurassic Hunt. Some of those games are in the folder as an excuse to explore than more. I also have the basic solitaire map and the first four scenario cards for Island Alone. I’ve been wanting to try it out and this might be that time.

Honestly, in the kind of space that takes up no room in a backpack, I feel like I’ve packed a lot of experiences.

I’ve purged about 80% of my game collection

I have written that I need to do a heavy purge of my game collection because we will be moving across the country. At this point, I have done most (but not all) of my purging.

There is a definite value to mental house cleaning, getting rid of stuff I am not using and don’t realistically see myself really using in the future. But the real goal here is space. Shipping a household has gotten more expensive and space is precious.  

Now, going from a bachelor to a family with a kid, I have already heavily purged my collection over the last ten years. I used to be a game hoarder and picked up tons of random games just because I could. And I have already gotten rid of the vast majority of what I once owned. I’d honestly say I was down to just good stuff. It was time to go scorched earth.

My goal was to get rid of at least 80% of the physical space. And I’m pretty sure I have done that.

Which means I have had to really ask myself if I needed a game. I bought Settlers of the Stone Age in 2004 ... and I’ve played it once. I love Reef Encounter… and my copy is still in shrink wrap. Games I’d said I won’t get rid of, I asked ‘will I really ever play it?’

And, this time, even though they don’t take up space individually, I have started really looking at cards games. And donated or sold close to two bins worth.

If I find a gaming group on the other side of the country, other people will have collections too. I have, in the past, been groups’ collection. That doesn’t have to always be the case.

As I was doing this, I kept thing of a Martin Wallace game called Toledo that I picked up near the end of my game binging. Allegedly about making swords, you fill in the spaces of a track with cards to give spaces effects. And I remember thinking both that it was a decent game and that it wouldn’t get played again. Toledo was a milestone for me realizing that collection has ceased to be functional.

I don’t know how many games I’ve owned I’ve gotten real use out of. And I’m at a point where that is the highest priority.

Rediscovering the pure silliness of Rave Master

When I saw that Humble Bundle was offering a Hiro Mashima bundle, my first thought was that it would be a way to get the rest of Fairy Tail (a manga I quite like, in no small part because of the ways it gently subverts some of the tropes of Shonen) Then I saw it also had the complete Rave Master. Which whole heartedly embraces all of those tropes lol 

Many years ago, I picked up the first few volumes of Rave Master at a flea market. My first reactions: One, that it was fun. And, two, it felt like it was Hiro Mashima was trying to distill the essence of what was going on in Shonen manga at the time into one cliche storm.

Haru is a spiky-haired badass with a heart as big as the world and whose brain is slightly less rational than Pinkie Pie. He’s prone to finding or coming up with new techniques and powers and his determination has no limits. He’s also much nicer than Son Goku. (Seriously, Goku is a sociopath) 

The fact that the manga begins with Haru fishing  as snowman/dog hybrid out of the ocean on his home of Garage Island announces that we don’t have to take things too serious. Yes, there will be life-and-death battles and the fate of the world will be at stake and angsty revelations will happen.  But Rave Master assured us it will be goofier than One Piece.

Rave Master isn’t the best Shonen manga I’ve ever read. Nor is it my favorite. However, it has the joy of a ten-year-old who gets to create their own manga but with the art and writing skills of a twenty one-year old. It’s clear that Mashima had a blast making it.

Castaway: dice and desert islands

For the last couple years, I’ve tried to learn at least one Roll and Write game a month. And we are moving across the country this summer so both my game playing time and my game thinking power has been limited.

Enter Dark Imp’s playmat line.

I had already tried out Beach Life last year and found it better than I expected. Beneath artwork that looked like it had been designed for High Lights and the simple rules were some tight choices. I blocked out the rest of the line for May, June and July.

June was Castaway.

The title tells you everything you need to know to know about the theme. You are stranded on a desert island and trying to escape and survive.

The actual gameplay is roll two dice and then everyone gets to do something with the roll. The two basic actions are gather resources and use those resources to build stuff.

Let’s get a little more detailed. The play area is a five by five grid. Each square has four squares in it. The little squares either have a shipwreck, empty water, a tree or empty land in each little square.  You use the two dice to determine which set of four squares you’re working with that round.

Two details: when you harvest materials, you immediately assign it to a specific building project. To be fair, that does simplify the book keeping. Second, another action you can take is planting trees. Since wood is the most heavily used resource, that’s an interesting way of resource management.

The game ends when someone build the right combination of stuff for either self sufficiency or rescue or someone has three turns where they can’t do anything. There’s a variety of ways of getting points that all come down to how well you’ve developed your island.

Okay. I’ve been playing Castaway solitaire and I’ve been enjoying it. The game offers simple mechanics that let you build up your island in different ways.

Two mechanics I like in particular: the subdivision of the squares into four smaller squares and replanting trees. The first one gives you more choices and the second one gives you a way to manage resources.

I also think that playing it solitaire, I am missing out on the potential of Castaway. Playing alone, you can control when the game ends. Losing that would add a lot to the experience.

Ultimately, Castaway is a lowkey, enjoyable game that I think works well with a casual audience. It’s not innovative but it is accessible. It’s aimed at a family audience and I think it works for that. 

(I haven’t played Island Alone, another PnP R&W about being stranded on a desert island but it is high on my list to try. I think I will find it more engaging and fun. However, I think Castaway will do better for times when my brain is worn out :) )

River Wild: Build valleys for fantastic beasts

When I first looked at River Wild, the first game I thought of Dos Rios. Which is completely silly because, apart from being themed around rivers, the two games have nothing in common. That said, I think Dos Rios is a lost gem so good for River Wild for making me think of it.

The game that it should remind me of is an earlier Button Shy game, Insurmountable. Both are 18-card tile-laying game that don’t use any other components. However, one is about building a mountain up with special powers while the other is building down a river with special scoring. 

As I already mentioned, River Wild is a tile-laying game. Cards are placed landscape-style. While you have to respect orientation, the flip side of each card is a mirror so it’s not that big a restriction. You have a hand of thre cards and you are building a river system that is flowing downstream from the source. The river can (and must if you want to form valleys) fork but it can never flow upstream.

The goal of the game is to form valleys, which are also the only thing that gives you any points. I honestly think they look more like islands but the rules call them valleys.  Valley cards have ore of two different things on them: either mythical animals or scoring conditions. Scoring conditions are sets of mythical animals that have to be in that valley to count. More than that, you will get fewer points if it’s your biggest valley so building a giant valley isn’t an automatic strategy.

Okay. Because it’s an 18-card solitaire game with no other components from Button Shy, I can’t help but compare te River Wild to both Scott Almes Simply Solo series and Aramini’s own Sprawlopolis series. (Yes, Sprawlopolis and it’s many kin can be played multi-player but they work solitaire very well as well)  And honestly, I’d say it isn’t as strong as most of those games. (Sorry Ugly Gryphon Inn)

But that’s comparing it to what I feel is the cream of the crop. Sprawlopolis is largely considered one of the best micro games and the reason most people have even heard of Button Shy. It’s like saying someone isn’t LeBron James. It still leaves room for a game to be excellent.

One of River Wild’s greatest strengths is how tight the margins are. Aramini helpfully supplies a scoring chart and it takes some careful planning to do well by its standards. It is mechanically simple but still requires some real thinking.

If you want to only have one game by Steven Aramini, you got to go with Sprawlopolis (which is really three games and a bunch of expansions lol) But if you’re willing to have more than one, River Wild is a good game to get.

Puzzles and Alexander Shen

When looking for a demo of Alexander Shen’s Crumbling Dungeon, I found out that there was a Memorial Day sale on their games and puzzles. Which was a way of getting Crumbling Dungeon and a bunch of other stuff for a darn fine price. I had a couple items already but it was still a real bargain.

While I initially tried out Crumbling Dungeon, I decided that I wanted to next try out three different puzzle collections: Circuit Board Square, Galactic Diplomacy Corps, and  ‘I Have to Retrieve 5 Gems from a Dungeon That is Falling Apart and I Have Leas Than 30 Seconds to Do It’ The last makes me want to reread Chip Delany’s science fiction (We In Some Strange Power’s Enploy Move On a Rigorous Line and Time Considered As A Helix of Seni-Precious Stones arw great works as well as insane tities) and I will call it 5Gems from here on out.

Circuit Board Square is a flat-out puzzle with no random elements or theme. You have to fill out a three by three grid with the numbers one to nine. The edges and the corners have sums and you have to fill out the grid to make all the sums work. (And, yea, that means the center square isn’t part of any of the sums)

I described it as Sudoko for people with very short attention spans to my wife. She said ‘So, children?’ I said ‘No, me’ There are some simple strategies to filling out a grid and I find, once I do one, I end up doing a couple. And, if I end up in a classroom again, I’d think of using Circuit Board Square.

Galactic Diplomacy Corps is a grid where each square has a number and symbol. You draw a line that connects like number or symbol to like symbol or number. The twists are you can’t land on a square that the line has passed through or stopped at and you start to lose points if you get too many of the same symbol.

Honestly, GDC is the least engaging Shen puzzle/game I’ve tried. It doesn’t have the quirky charm that permeates a lot of their games. Nor does it razor-sharp simplicity of Circuit Board Square. Honestly, if it was broken or bad, I’d honestly find it more memorable.

Speaking of quirky charm, 5Gems has got it. You navigate a maze to collect five gems in a limited number of turns. Traps randomly block spaces, switches let you knock down walls and you have three one-time special powers.

Honestly, it makes me think of a game you’d have programmed in basic on an Apple ][e in the early 80s. And I mean that in a compliment. I can’t say 5Gems is a good puzzle but it’s got character. I have had fun with it.

Since I started exploring PnP and indie games, I’ve found a world that’s both unpolished and flavorful. You aren’t going to find designers who are undiscovered Reiner Knizias or Richard Garfields. But you will find neat little things you’d never find anywhere else.

And while a lot of Shen’s work feels like it could use some more workshopping (I’ll cover Quests Over Coffee at some point and it’s an exceptions. It rocks) but they definitely show persistence. And, when I think about other indie designers I’ve looked through, their charming and solid body of work stands out. It’s not perfect but it’s good stuff.

Look, Light Speed is fun. Period.

I hadn’t planned on writing about Light Speed but it came up when I was talking about Cheapass Games. And I realized that I’ve been occasionally playing that game for almost twenty years. There’s not a lot of games that I can say that.

Light Speed, originally part of Cheapass Games Hip Pocket line, is one of the only Cheapass games not designed by James Ernest.  (It’s by Tom Jolly) It is said that James Ernest will be sad if you tell him it’s your favorite Cheapass game. It’s pretty damn good, though. (I do like Button Men more, James)

Light Speed is a real time game where everyone gets their own  deck of ten spaceship cards in their own color. Each one has one to four hit points and one to four lasers shooting out and some shields to block lasers.

Gameplay is dead simple. It’s a real time so no turns. You are slapping cards down and that part of the game is over when someone runs out of cards. Then you need to see what the lasers hit. Get out a piece of floss or a retractable ID holders and follow each laser’s path to see if it hits anything.

The cards are numbered and they go in order. The Moth is fragile with one of the weakest lasers but it also shoots first. The Destroyer has lots of hit points and a whopping four lasers but it goes last.

You score points by destroying other folks’ space ships. You can also mine an asteroid for minerals but, I’ll be honest, half the time we don’t play with the asteroid and just focus of blasting away at each other.

When I first played Light Speed, all those many years ago, it confused me. Was a game allowed to be this simple? Did it count? When I first tried it, I was primarily a RPG player and I was used to needing several books to play a game.

Since then, I’ve played hundreds of games, including very simple RPGs. The whole complexity equals value is a false paradigm as far as I’m concerned. I mean, since then, I’ve learned how to play Go and that can be broken down to less than ten rules. And one of those rules is you use a board to play! 

(Then, we start arguing about depth versus complexity. Go is not complex, folks. It _is_ deeper than the Mariana Trench.)

Yes, Light Speed is very, very simple. Yes. Scoring with a retractable ID badge you stole out of your WH40K box takes longer than actual game play. But it is also very clever and unbelievably intuitive and a lot of fun. You can explain it to anyone with half the explanation just showing them the cards. And they will love it.

Light Speed gives you a chance to set aside being a game snob and just have a good time. And I spend plenty of time being a game snob.  

A non-wargamer reads Battletech Quick Start

As promised, I downloaded and read the quick start rules for Battletech.

I’ve read a lot of quick start rules over the years, admittedly for RPGs, not for war games. I feel like a quick start should try and do three things: give you the flavor of the system, give you enough to be able to play the basics of the system and make you want to play the system more.

And, I think the Battletech quick start rules gets 1.5 of those goals right.

Its biggest failure is not goving you a sense of the flavor of the game or its setting. It’s the future and people fight in giant robots. End of story.  Since I started looking into Battletech, I’ve found a surprisingly rich setting and timeline. I don’t expect to get all that from what is effectively a brochure. However, at least identifying the sides and emphasizing the ‘real robot’ aspect of the system would have been good.

The actual rules were pretty good. I particularly appreciated that it includes a small map, two standers and the stats for two standees. More importantly, the rules do their fundamental job very well. They lay out how the game works step by step. If I had seen these quick start rules back in the 80s, I’d have eaten them up.

The actual rules themselves didn’t excite me that much but I am pretty sure that’s ‘Seinfeld isn’t Funny’ trope at work. Battletech helped define giant robot gaming and science fiction war gaming. Of course it’s going to have an old hat feel. I’m sure the rules have been refined a lot over the decades but I’m also sure they didn’t fix what wasn’t broken.

So, really, what I want, what I think is painfully missing, is two paragraphs of fluff to make me care about Battletech’s world.

There are Battletech novels? Tons of them?

Ah, Battletech.

While I have been aware of Battletech since the 80s because I saw ads for it in Dragon Magazine, I have never been interested in it.

I’ve been aware of the giant robot genre since I was knee high to a grasshopper but I’ve never been really grabbed by it. Maybe it’s due to being exposed to Tranzor Z, a really bad dub of Mazinger Z, at too young an age. Put me off of Voltron without even trying to giving it a chance. The only cartoon with giant robots I really got into was Robotech and that was more because it was a soap opera like the X-Men.

(Incidentally, I know that many anime fans hate Robotech because of the massive editing that had to happen to scrunch Macross-Southern Cross-MOSPEADA into enough episodes that it could be syndicated on American television. I am not one of them because, dude, I was there. 

It’s hard to believe now, when manga and anime has become a mainstream mainstay, but when Robotech came out, there was no market for it. It was unlike anything we had ever seen before. As a cynical grownup, looking back, I’m amazed it worked. And it helped create an environment where authentic anime could flourish in a western market.

On the other hand, I completely support hating Harmony Gold for being a bunch of litigious jerks who sued anything that remotely resembled Robotech and locked Macross out of the western market. Which brings me back to Battletech, which got sued multiple times by Harmony Gold)

When Humble Bundle released a bundle Battletech fiction, I was completely non-interested. Until I saw that Michael Stackpole had written a bunch of them. Then I became very interested.

And I’ve begun to actually look into Battletech.

I’ve learned that, along with WH40K, it’s one of the OG science fiction warfare franchises. Neither of them started the genre but they both helped boost it. 

I’ve already read Warrior: En Garde, Stackpole’s first book. I was confused about how the clans didn’t get a mention in the book. Then I learned the clans hasn’t been introduced when the book had been written lol

Entirely new, setting altering factions getting added in? Damn, that is like WH40K!

I doubt I’ll ever play the actual game (just like Death Angel or Space Hilk are the only WH40K games I’m in any danger of trying) but I’ve downloaded the quick start rules to learn more about Battletech. 

However, like WH40K, I sure will read the fiction.

Cheapass Games as games, not artifacts

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been purging my game as part of a big move. This is far from the first time I’ve had big purges but this will end up being a big one. 

And, originally unrelated to game purging, I was cleaning out a closet and I found a box of Cheapass games. A big chunk of their catalog from the days when the games were in envelopes.

And I had to ask myself: do I need these? Not only had I clearly not played them in over a decade, virtually all of them are available as PDFs. Seriously, not only can I make my own copies, thanks to the laminator, I can copies with better component quality. 

They don’t exist for me as games. They exist as artifacts. And I don’t need to keep them since I have almost all of them as PnP projects if I want them as games.

I did keep the absolute worst of them, Las Vegas, since Cheapass never posted that one (and I think the master copies have been lost. Probably intentionally and with a match and lighter fluid) If I ever want to play it again, I actually need to keep it.

Incidentally, none of the Hip Pocket line were in that box. Because those were the Cheapass games I played the most lol. And if I am purging with an eye for storage space, they get more forgiveness.

My May Gaming

As actual life stuff gets more busy, learning new games is going to be a lower and lower priority. In May I learned four games that were new to me and half of them were pretty much fluff.

I learned:

Battle Card: Market Garden

The Grand Opening

River Wild

Crumbling Dungeon

Battle Card: Market Garden feels less like a game and more like a lesson of how hard it would have been to actually pull Operation Market Garden off. (Which is actually kind of cool and I know some history teachers that might like to use it) Crumbling Dungeon is just a quirky maze puzzle that you could do over your cornflakes.

The Grand Opening fulfilled ny goal of learning at least one  Roll and Write a month. A two-page spread about seating and serving guests at a restaurant, I found it a pleasant, casual-weight game. Dark Imp Games continues to deliver a happy game experience.

River Wild is a 18-card solitaire game by Steve Aramini from ButtonShy. I’d say it resembles Scott Almes Sinply Solo series from BurtonShy more than Aramini’s own Sprawlopolis seres. And, to be honest, River Wild falls short of either of those two series. Two series that I think are the cream of the crop as far as solitaire-optional micro games so it’s an unfair bar. River Wild is still good with very tight decisions.

One game I decided to revisit was Bank or Bust from Dark Imp Games. The elevator pitch is Can’t Stop with special powers. I felt like it was the weakest game I tried from the company and multiple plays just reinforced that. Having only one die and busting on sixes just took away too much control, even with speciall powers. I still like the concept.

I have a small stack of three or four games I’m hoping to learn in June. We will see if life has other plans.

My May PnP

 May.

This was the first of what promise to be very busy months. School has wrapped up and we are getting ready for our move across the country.

This is what I made:

Restaurantrepreneur

Castaway 

Beach Life

Qwinto

River Wild (demo)

30 Rails w/Yard Builder

Pointree w/Alpakaland 

Mixture w/Time Machine

Roll Pirates w/Jurassic Hunt

River Wild was my ‘big’ project for the month. It’s an eighteen card game by Steven Aramini that’s very much in spirit of Scott Almes Simply Solo series. I honestly don’t think it’s as good as most of Almes’ designs but that’s still room to be very good.

However, most of my crafting in May was laminating Roll and Writes to make a travel folder. There’s going to be a stretch (admittedly, probably a month tops) where almost all my games will be packed away so I want a library that takes up minimal space for that time. I’ve made laminated copies of many of the games but this time I double-sided a lot of them to cut back even further on space.

Probably won’t make a real difference but it did make a psychological difference lol. And while we are only starting to get packing into high gear, getting the folder done ‘early’ is also good for my head.

June and July are going all about the move and settling in. I actually have project laminated that just need to be trimmed so I can finish some projects when everything but a pair of scissors is packed away.