Mulling over Dark Imp’s PnP catalog

Over the last couple years, I’ve been playing the PnP offerings of The Dark Imp. The fact that I keep going back to them says that at least I think they’re pretty good. So I decided to summarize my thoughts about the games.

The Dark Imp has two lines of Print and Play games, notepad and placemats. They are all Roll and Writes and designed by Ellie Dix. The notepad games are black and white, smaller (four game sheets to a page) and simpler. Placemat games are color, take up two pages and, while not complex, they are more complex than the notepad games.

Because I am stingy on ink, I played through the notepad games first. That said, I think the placemat games are the real hidden gems. That said, part of the mission statement is to design games for classrooms and other group areas and the notepad games definitely nail that objective.

NOTEPAD GAMES

Mini Town 

I have to admit, I find Mini Town to be the least interesting game in both sets. It’s a draw-a-map on a grid game, which is a pretty common format for R&Ws. And games like 30 Rails and Welcome to Dino World were big parts of me embracing R&Ws so I do like them.

I just felt like it didn’t do enough to stand out.

Lingo Land

As much as I love language, word games are a hard sell for me. There are some like Buy Word or Flipword I really like. But it’s not a genre I go for. So I’m not really into playing Lingo Land.

BUT, objectively, I think it is the best designed word R&W I have played. It is the Dark Imp game I would recommend the most for classroom use. Sometimes, you don’t have to be into a game to appreciate that it is good.

Bank or Bust

The elevator pitch is that it is Can’t Stop with special powers. It’s a Push Your Luck game where you can spend banked points for different abilities.

But here’s the thing. You roll one die and you bust on a six. The odds never change so you can’t gauge if it’s better or worse to stay in. I don’t like that. But I do like the idea and the application of special powers so I do have a fascination for the game.

Palatial 

Draw Tetris-style shapes in a grid. Honestly, I think this is an even more common format than drawing a map on a grid. Roll two dice and pick one for the zoje on the grid and one for the shape.

While there are some solid flourishes, like asymmetrical zones and the two-block shape being only one that can cross zones, it’s nothing new. Which is what I said about Mini Town. And yet, I keep on pulling Palatial out and sometimes even bingeing it.

The conclusion I came to is that Palatial is just so intuitive. It’s easy to understand how it works so you can just skip to trying to play well.

PLACEMAT GAMES

Castaway

The placemat games all have a lot more theme than the notepad games and Castaway is about being stranded on a deserted island.

Which is actually one of the biggest drawbacks of the game. That is a very well traveled theme so you have a lot of choices. And I would play Island Alone over Castaway.

Castaway also had a mechanic that I liked, replanting trees. Cool idea and cool theme. However, when playing it solitaire, it let me control the tempo of the game enough that there was no tension.

I am sure multiplayer would really bump up the experience but I would still pick Island Alone for that.

The Grand Opeining

Running a restaurant on its first day, this game really leans into its theme. There are three actions. Seating guests, making food and serving guests.

The Grand Opening feels like the decision tree is simpler than the other placemat games. However, it all slots together so well. The Grand Opening has tight, enjoyable play.

Beach Life

This was the first placemat game I tried and it was a revelation for me. The artwork looked like Highlights for Children (no offense to that august publication) but the decision tree is surprisingly robust.

It’s a collection of mini-games themed around shore life like crabs and clams. Roll two dice. You use one to pick a mini-game and use the other in the mini-game. This creates a lot of interesting, sometimes painful choices.

Restaurantrepreneur

Other than being a pain to type, Restaurantrepreneur is, in my arrogant opinion, Ellie Dix’s masterpiece.

It’s themed around setting up a restaurant (clearly a theme dear to her heart) and, like Beach Life, it’s a set of mini-games. However, honestly, the mini-games are more complex and interesting. (Not rocket science but more complicated)

But the real kicker is the bank. You roll three dice each turn. One is used to pick the mini-game and one in that game. The last die, that goes to borrowing money from the bank. Which is three separate tracks: 1/2,3/4,5/6. When one ends, the game ends. That makes the end game really tense and forces you to make choices you don’t want to make. It’s awesome.

Honestly, even the weakest Dark Imp game is worth playing. But Restaurantrepreneur is a game I’d take to a game night and I think would do well.

Saying Goodbye

Yesterday, an old gaming friend passed away. I hadn’t seen him in years, not since I moved out of Chicago in 2014. I knew he hadn’t been in the best of health but it was still a shock. I think it was a shock to everyone.

I met George in 1999 when I joined a D&D group. I’d met some of the members at my first GenCon and I accepted their invitation to join the group. That was the start of a lot of friendships and I’ve kept in touch with many of them, even after moving away. They were an eccentric bunch (and to be fair, I fit in just fine) George wasn’t the craziest person there but he had his moments.

And, of course now, so many memories come back. I remember him insisting on pretending to be George iII when he took the king role in Citadels. I remember a game of We Didn’t Playtest This at All where he got a banana from the kitchen when the Bananas Repel Zombies card got played. And used said banana to repel zombies. I remember him not being interested in Memoir 44 because he wanted a war-game that would last a lot longer than an hour or so.

But most of all, I remember all the many hours of Dungeons and Dragons.

My longest running character in those campaigns ended up becoming the sidekick to his character. A large part of that was because I felt that, with everyone wanting to be the hero, being a supporting character was the real way to shine. And I still hold out that its better the be a good ensemble player in any RPG than trying to be _the_ protagonist. But my down-to-earth rogue played off well with his pompous noble fighter. And there were other campaigns and other characters We started off in second edition and converted character to third edition and then refused to convert to fourth edition. (I have good memories of fourth edition but with other groups)

And I remember how he lived on the far west side, on the other side of the city, when I first met him. And how I would give him a lift at weird o’clock in the morning after the games, in the complete opposite direction from where I lived. I don’t remember a lot of the hours of conversations we got in during those drives but I do remember enjoying them. If they weren’t about D&D, they were about fantasy literature or movies.

I remember his solemnity at a mutual friend’s funeral. I remember his wedding where Halloween dress was encouraged. I remember his advice, which wasn’t always good, and his jokes were usually were. 

And now he’s no longer with us. He was part of a group of friends that helped make Chicago a home for me. My life is richer for having known him and the world is a little sadder without him.

Measuring cards can be fun

 It Was This Big feels like it is as much a thought experiment as a game. It’s definitely a game but it’s also as much about its restraints as anything else.

My understanding is that it was an entry of a design contest where the game had to consist of eighteen identical cards. Drive Like Hell was also from the same contest, which packed a crazy amount of content into that limitation. It Was This Big goes the other way, being minimalist.

The card consists of a black fish head and tail on either side of a white fish body going portrait and a white fish head and tail with a black fish body going landscape. So you can use the two sides to either build a black fish or a white fish.

 It Was at This Big comes with four different rule sets, including a solitaire one, but they all come down to placing a head and a tail and then filling  in the space in between with _non-overlapping_ body cards.

If that sounds confusing, one look at the actual cards and it will all click. 

One nice touch is that the gap between cards cannot be bigger than the fish’s eyeball. So the game comes with its own, built-in ruler.

I have to admit that, when I first heard of It Was This Big, it sounded like a non-starter. However, earlier this year, I tried FlipTricks which I also thought was a simple, silly idea. Which it is but I ended having fun with it.

Short version: It Was This Big isn’t as fun as FlipTricks but it is better than I feared.

Here’s the thing: when making a fish that is more than two cards long (particularly the longer black fish), it becomes tricky. At least for me. I’m sure some people estimate measures accurately at the drop of a hat. Which means It Was This Big requires some real skill. Just not the kind of skill you find in any other card game.

At the same time, you can teach the game to just about anyone just by showing them the cards. It is easy to understand and simple to play without actually being that easy. 

It Was This Big is not an All-The-Time game for me. I really don’t know how often I’ll pull it out. At the same time, there is actually something to it and that something isn’t something you find in many other games. It might even make one of my travel kits.

Games vanishing in the internet

I recently pulled out of my files a Roll & Write game called Rake and Roll. It was from a Global Jam from a few years ago and I was just looking for an autumn-themed game to learn. 

It was a peasant little game, a collection of mini-games/scoring areas whose most noteworthy element was using multi-colored dice to fit the theme of fall leaves. I felt the rules could use some clarity and I was meh about the game timer (A die roll determined that which meant a game could last between seven and forty turns, which I felt was too swingy)

But when I decided to write it up for this blog, I tried to actually find it online. I mean, it’s a waste of time to write about a game people don’t have any change of playing. And I couldn’t find it.

I don’t know if the Global Jam erases games after a certain amount of time. Although I do think a lot of the games end up on itch.io The designer may have just taken it down. Or maybe I’m just really bad at searching the web.

Now, I make it a point to save games from design contests because I don’t know if I’ll be able to download them in the future. Usually, it’s because the designers are working on getting the game published. I do get some poser joy from knowing and playing a game before it got cool lol Tussie Mussie, which started out as a winner in a GenCan’t design contest, is an example of that.

But some games just vanish.

Now, there are two lessons that I take from this.

One, there is some value to my digital hoarding.

Two, if I didn’t do this digital hoarding, I wouldn’t be missing that many diamonds in the rough. Rake & Roll is an okay game but, earlier this year, I learned a mechanically similar game, Greatest Beach Vacation. In addition to being readily available and currently free, I think it’s just a better game. If I never tried Rake & Roll, it wouldn’t have been a big, gaping hole in my gaming experience.

While I enjoy combing through contests and the like, the cream of the crop tends to get published. And yes, you have to pay for it but you generally get more played tested and higher produced versions.

Converge, Fluxx and design structure

 I’ve been teaching myself Converge via the Aspects of Vision solo module, a process that has been both simpler and weirder than I expected. I don’t know if two-player or one-player is better but I am sure two-player is more intuitive.

So the cards are multi-use. Basically, you can play cards in front of a player as part of a tableau, in the middle as a goal and discard cards to do an action. And it felt so familiar, like a framework I knew well, but I couldn’t figure out why.

Then I realized that that Converge follows a very similar structure to Looney Labs’ Fluxx! You lay out keepers like you add to tableaus. Action cards are the same as  discarding for an effect. And goals are, well, goals.

There are clearly significant differences. There is no equivalent to New Rule cards in Converge, which is honestly the distinct element of Fluxx. The goals of Converge are much more structured. Converge is its own beast, not a reskin of Fluxx, obviously. But it did give me a hook to understanding the structure of Converge.

(I do think Fluxx is underestimated. There is a tight structure to that chaos. Then again, it’s remained in print for over twenty years and has more versions than Baskin Robins has flavors so it’s doing pretty well)

It will take a while for me to process Converge, largely due to its publication structure. There are three sets, each with three factions. (Every card in a faction has the same discard power) A game uses three factions but it can be a mix of any three factions.

Are the factions bundled together in preferred combinations? With only three actions in a specific game, are there going to be combinations that are particularly strong or even unbalanced? Will I play it enough to find out?

I backed the Kickstarter so I have all three sets, plus the solo module. I made a copy of Catalysts of Change since it seemed to be the base set to try the system out. After that, I have decided to make the other two sets. Even though I haven’t decided if I like it or not lol.

Converge is an interesting enough idea that I want to see how much long term value it has. I’ve gotten close to twenty years out of Fluxx.

Some spoiler free of Farmer Giles of Ham

 I’m pretty sure I read Farmer Giles of Ham before I actually read the Lord of the Rings. It’s one of Tolkien's lesser works but it may be his most plain fun work. 

Written in 1937 and published in 1949, Farmer Giles of Ham is a sendup of both fairy tales and epic literature. It tells the story of how the titular Farmer Giles gains both wealth and prestige through judicious use of luck and wits.

Which honestly sounds like any number of fairy tales like Puss in Boots.

One of the things that makes Farmer Giles of Ham such a hoot is the title character. He is a hard drinking, blustery, stubborn guy who still has the gumption to deal with a giant and a dragon. Oh, he doesn’t want to but he also sees the job through. He is a realistic character stuck putting with fairy tale stuff. And while he does change due to his adventures, he still keeps his feet of clay.

The book is also chock full of academic jokes, many of which I’m sure went over my head. I did like that Giles’ dog can talk but isn’t educated so he can’t even talk in Dog Latin. Tolkien was clearly have fun when he was writing this.

The setting is also silly fun, with plenty of anachronisms. Farmer Giles has a blunderbuss, despite the vague date of the setting is centuries before blunderbusses were developed. But who cares? Tolkien gets to have fun with the Oxford English Dictionary definition of blunderbuss. 

The closest thing I have read to Farmer Giles of 

Ham by Tolkien is the Hobbit. Which is by far the greater work and one of cornerstones of modern fantasy. I don’t think I’d have heard of Farmer Giles of Ham if it wasn’t for the Lord of the Rings.

Farmer Giles of Ham is a tiny footnote in a much bigger picture. But it is an entertaining bit of fun.

We don’t actually live in a digital world

 While playing board game digitally is an amazing resource, I also like playing games analog as well. Actually playing with physical components definitely affects the experience. Literally, adding the tactile means an additional sense is involved. 

When I moved away from my gaming groups, I focused on digital gaming but slowly but surely, Print and Play snuck in, giving me an easy way to explore solitaire gaming. And a way to keep analog gaming in my life.

Two that I keep coming back to over the years are Elevens for One and Criss Cross. That’s because I feel like they are as little as you can get and still feel like you’re really playing a game. 

 

I’ve written about the idea brain fog games. Those are games I can play without actually thinking. In this case, I’m not talking about that. In this case, I am looking at games with minimal prep and play time that still actually make me think.

And there are plenty of games like that, thanks to  games like Love Letter, Qwixx and Palm Island increasing an interested in the development of micro games, Roll and Writes and In Hand games. Elevens for One and Criss Cross have just become two of my fall back ones. On any given month, they both see play.

I will admit that Elevens for One is grandfathered in a bit. It was one of my first serious PnP steps and was the gold standard for me for a bit. That said, there are a limited number of card interactions so plays can be formulaic. 

Criss Cross, though, is a tiny Knizia gem, giving me tough choices in twelve moves. It’s not his simplest game (Catego is currently holding that place for me) but it’s the simplest I want to play lol

When I started writing this, my focus was on those two games. However, what I’ve found is that it’s really why playing physical copies of games is still important. 

Playing games is mostly mental (pun intended) but analog gameplay has value. You are actively doing, which uses other parts of your brain. Part of why PnP R&Ws is because they gave me a production-light way to explore a bunch of different ideas.

We don’t live in a digital world, as hard as that is to believe sometimes. Having a non-digital way to game can make a big difference.

Alexander Shen’s Race Day is a pleasant little journey

 Alexander Shen has described their puzzles and games as maybe not the best sandwich but still a sandwich and one you wouldn’t give a one-star review of. I think that explains the appeal of their work very well.

Seriously, Shen is like that hole-in-the-wall diner that you go to regularly. It may not be an event to go there but you eat more burgers there than you go out for steak. It’s comfort food gaming and I feel like if PnP were more mainstream, Shen would be a go-to designer 

Race Day is a pretty good example of this. It doesn’t do anything that will surprise you. Instead, you look at it, know where you stand and you’re good to go.

Race Day is an 18-card PnP solitaire game. Each card shows Sadie Cat (reoccurring character in Shen games) along with two of her friends with a winding path leading from each of them. 

Shuffle up the deck. Lay down three cards so that each character is at the start of their path. It’s a tile-laying game and you now have three rows you can build off of.

On each round, you will draw five cards and play three of them. They go opposite end to the start cards so the paths end on the characters. You play three rounds, going through the entire deck.

At the end of the game, only the rows where all three paths begin and end on the same character score points. A nice touch is that you don’t have to play a card on each row each round. In fact, the highest scoring combination is to successfully use all nine cards on one row.

Race Day is kind of solveable. Each card shows up three times in the deck. Since you get to discard two cards each turn, you get to filter through the deck. The biggest random factor is what the three starting cards will be. 

Instead of bothering me, this turns Race Day into more of a puzzle that I can noodle around with. Putting patterns together and adjusting to the random elements. To be fair, a lot of solitaire games have puzzle elements. (Shen has also created just straight puzzles as well as games) In fact, I more often play with personal victory conditions, like making one long row or having every row be scoreable.

Race Day isn’t a challenging work. Instead, it’s a relaxing one that’s using ideas that are familiar. It has become a game I’ll pull out so I can chill out. That’s the case for me with many Shen games and puzzles.

I can’t do justice to Jujutsu Kaisen

 Over the last couple of years, I have been occasionally reading Jujutsu Kaisen. Frankly, it’s enough in demand at the library that I can’t binge it lol However, I do understand that it is currently one of the best selling manga in the world and I can see why.

After high school student Yuji accidentally eats the finger of a super evil and kind of dead sorcerer during a supernatural encounter. As you can well imagine, this gives him super powers. He is then thrust into the shadow war of cursed spirits and cursed spirit users.  To make things worse for him, the powers-rhat-be want to execute him because he could be possessed by the evil dude whose finger he are.

And… the powers-that-be are very justified in their fear.

According to people who know how to categorize manga better than I do, Jukutsu Kaisen is primarily a battle manga but it also has strong elements of urban fantasy and horror. Oh so much horror. Recoccuring antagonist Mahito is essentially body horror as a character. 

Every single cursed spirit and cursed spirit user has different and distinct abilities. It’s not quite as varied as My Hero Academia but it is light years past hitting each other harder. This nuance turns fights into chess matches. Kind of reminds me of stand battles from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and, yes, that’s a good thing.

And if that’s not a thing you like, the strong personalities of the characters (cursed spirit energy apparently comes from emotional damage so plenty of room for character) and the horror that sometimes require reading Attack on Titan for a breather are there too.

All and all, it’s buck wild. Over the top visuals, damaged but interesting characters and even the flashbacks have a fever pace. Jujutsu Kaisen just keeps delivering.

Why I keep going back to Ambagibus

 I first came across Ambagibus in 2018, which is the year when Print and Play became one of my major gaming focuses. It’s a solitaire tile-laying game where you are trying to complete closed paths.

At the time, I felt that Ambagibus was a very simple game and I even questioned the value of the game. The decisions in the game are fairly obvious so why play it?

However, I kept on going back to Ambagibus. For three years, it was one of my Go To games and I think it was how many PnP games came out during 2020 that distracted me from it. It did make the cut when a cross-country move had me purge a lot of PnP games along with a lot of published games.

However, exploring A Gentle Rain reminded me of Ambagibus. I dug it up and got it back on the table.

And it was better than I remembered.

Part of that is that I acknowledged that I wasn’t interested in keeping score. I wasn’t playing Ambagibus to win. I was playing it because I enjoyed the process. The process of Ambagibus decompresses me.

Ambagibus isn’t a brain fog game. I want to play attention to the calming little maze that I’m building. I enjoy making the little decisions and seeing how the maze grows.

I’m still following the rules and I am trying to complete a closed network passages. I’m still treating it as a game and I do want to win. 

I’m just winning for different reasons.

Hazy memories of Vegas Showdown

 It has been a long time since I’ve played Vegas Showdown. That said, I remember it fondly and it is probably my favorite Las Vegas themed game. (In case you are curious, Cheapass’s Vegas (also known as James Ernest Writes Off Another Trip to Vegas) is my least favorite)

It was part of what I was told was initial games that Wizards of the Coast put out under the Avalon Hill imprint after they got the legal rights to the name. Which was a really weird thing to experience. Avalon Hill was an august institution that has helped shape the United States’ hobby gamer culture. Having games that weren’t high concept war games under Avalon Hill felt strange, particularly for people like myself who were too young to have actually experienced the Avalon Hill of old and just had the stories grognards told us.

Which in retrospect is actually pretty hilarious. Avalon Hill actually published a much wider variety of games, including reprinting Sid Sackson’s games from 3M. In fact, Monsters Menace America was a revision of Monsters Ravage America, the last game old Avalon Hill put out. More than that, the company had been sold almost eight years before Vegas Showdown and had plenty of products come out in that time.

So much of my understanding of how Vegas Showdown came into the world turned out to be complete balderdash and in fact gamer folklore. Vegas Showdown would have been perfectly at home with the older Avalon Hill’s catalog.

Still, Vegas Showdown represents an early point in my boars gaming life. A time when I realized that that GenCon wasn’t just for RPGs. (A lesson that would completely fill a walk-in closet with board games)

Vegas Showdown is about elements of a casino getting auctioned off and then putting them together in your own board to create your own personal casino. And it’s been well more than ten years since I last played so I’m blurry on some details. 

But what I do remember is that the satisfaction when you ended the game with a casino that filled your board and brought in both money and people. When you managed to bid for the right pieces and make them work.

And, since then, I have played a lot of games that are engine builders. And, yeah, when you make the engine purr like a kitten, it is serious happy. But Vegas Showdown was an early experience like that.

And I suspect it holds up. A casino is a small enough and concrete enough idea to be easy to immersed in.

When I signed up to playtest Casinopolis, I wondered if it would be an experience like Vegas Showdown. Of course it is completely different name but it was nice to have those memories come back.

Approaching Superman as a character, not an icon

 Enough folks told me that My Adventures with Superman was good that I eventually checked it out. And it is good, good enough for me to finish the first season and plan on watching more at some point.

Superman is a fascinating phenomenon. So

much of the superhero genre as we know is because of Superman. The character was a global icon decades before the internet made it lazy to be known worldwide.

And yet, because the character is kind of all powerful and unflinchingly benevolent, he is allegedly really hard to write. 

Honestly, I think that’s hyperbole. He hasn’t been out of print since 1938 and has held down multiple titles and that’s not counting other media. Every other media. That’s a lot for a character who creators aren’t supposed to be able to write.

I think it’s more honest to say that you can’t write Superman like Batman. (Except that that has been done. More than once)

That said, My Adventures with Superman does a good job. It’s Superman is just starting out and is still figuring out his powers, making him less all mighty. But more than that, he is always struggling to do the right thing. And that’s where the hook is.

This Clark Kent doesn’t struggle because he has some flavor of inner dark side. He struggles because he is inexperienced. Because he is dealing a world with a gray morality. And because he has the baggage of a more complicated Krypton. But that doesn’t change the fact that his end goal is to save everyone.

The drama isn’t how will Superman stop supervillains. It is how Clark will keep on making the good choice, no matter what it costs him. I mean, we all know he’s going to do both. The character stuff is just more engaging.

That said, that makes  My Adventures With Superman sound all serious. It’s not. It’s also actually funny and sweet without going overboard. My favorite characters are its interpretation of the Brain and Monsieur Mallah. They are a caring couple who also happen to be mad scientists who would be at home in Girl Genius. Man, I hope they show up in the second season.

My Adventures With Superman is sweet, uplifting fun. It doesn’t ask what does Superman do. It asks who is he in a way that makes us invested.

My August Gaming

 I didn’t learn that many games in August. In particular, I didn’t learn any remotely heavy games. 

I learned:

Greatest Beach Vacation

Evil Lab Biohazard Zone

Spooky Forest

Evil Lab Bio Split

Fliptricks

Scribbly Gum

I almost feel that the two Evil Lab games deserve an asterisk because they are just variations on the original Evil Lab game. They use the same rules, just with a little tweaking. However, they aren’t expansions but actual standalone games so they squeaked in. (I wouldn’t consider Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers an expansion, although knowing how to play Carcassonne will really help the learning curve)

I did not count some expansions I was part of the play test pool for. However, those really were expansions, no use without the base game.

I realized, looking over the list, that everything I learned was a Roll and Write, except for Fliptricks. Not that I have a problem with that. As someone who has been doing a lot of solitaire PnP, R&Ws have been a huge gift.

The highlight of the month was Scribbly Gum. I went in with relatively low expectations but it proved to be quite fun. It is the weakest R&W I’ve played from Postmark Games but Voyages, Aquamarine and Waypoints are some of the strongest R&Ws I’ve played so that leaves plenty of room beneath them for quality.

I am hoping to get at least one ‘heavier’ game in September but we will just see what life has in store.

My August PnP

 I really thought that August would be a month of slowing down my PnP crafting. However, demos and playtests helped bill it up. Plus, there were times when I crafted just to decompress.

I made:

Battle Card - maps 2-5

Drakard

Agropolis

Rallytaire Sheet #1

Solo Dice/Can’t Stop Express

Lingo Land

Criss Cross

Dragon Hero

Fire Brigade Mages

Spooky Forest

Fearsome Fog (Last Lighthouse expansion playtest)

Fliptricks

Scribbly Gum (maps 1-3)

Terrible Tides (Last Lighthouse expansion playtest)

Micromend  

Jose Garcia Saves the Alhambra (Postcard from the Front contest)

Astrology

Christmas on Track

Evil Lab: Tetra Terror

Evil Lab: Monstrous Monster Mixer

Evil Lab: Color Rampage

A Nice Cuppa (demo version)

Casinapolis (playtest version 2(?) )

Mind you, a lot of these are just laminating Roll and Write sheets. (And many were replacing ones I misplaced lol) But I went into the month thinking Agropolis would be my big project. 

My rough and ready method is print, cut, laminate and trim. I find finishing projects to be very decompressing and satisfying so I actually have a folder of laminated card sheets that just need to be trimmed. 

I also don’t want to get too much of a PnP folder of shame so I try not to make stuff I don’t see myself playing on the foreseeable future. That said, a number of my August projects still haven’t seen play.

I don’t know what September will be like. A balance of crafting for decompression balanced by how much time I have to learn to play new games.