Early in the year, Wednesday night was Campaign Night at home, so it ended up tied with Monday for most plays. (Monday is the easiest day to get people together at work; they are slower b/c much of our work relies on temperature sensitive mail). 92% of plays were at home or work.

Solo play drove the numbers up this year, particularly after my Gen Con purchases. My most common gaming partners were my daughter and wife, with members of my game group 40-60 plays behind each of them. I topped 100 plays with 7 people, all told.

Additionally, the author had a fun way with words, including this delightful comparison of 16th century church indulgences to modern crowdfunding, and I had to do a double take at the appearance of Crystal Mines, as I am currently borrowing the DS version from @jgkspsx.bsky.social.

That was just wild to me. DCS is the poster child for high stress, high turnover. Always seems like they’re short of people. I’ve known people in that line of work from Ontario, Michigan, and Indiana, and all have mountains of stories.

But DCS was *preferable* to fighting elder care violations.

Yeah… I work for a gov’t health department. In mid-‘25 I found out that one of our lawyers, whom I knew, transferred to Dept. of Child Services. I asked her why.

“I fought nursing homes in court for not meeting standards. It was too stressful.”

She *chose DCS because it was less stressful*.

Moments of the year:

- Hanging around while my wife played FFTIC, chatting, watching for differences/updates, and cheering on the lovable goofball generics she had

- The first time we unlocked Rainbow Road in Mario Kart World - that song is great www.youtube.com/watch?v=RakZ...

Bounced off despite everyone else seeming to love it: Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake

Replayed it and still loved it: FFTIC, Super Mario Galaxy, Ys Oath in Felghana

Replayed it and remembered why I didn't like it: Castlevania Portrait of Ruin

Zwei Memorial award for "gave it a fair shake, but I can't finish this": Kirby Mass Attack

Star Ocean Memorial "why can't I turn the battle voices off" award: Donkey Kong Bananza (the transformation songs universally bug me)

Returned and powered through a terrible RNG event flag: Backpack Hero

I do not intend to play DQ2 remake. It sounds too long and I have too much else to play. Glad the library bookmobile got hold of this one and delivered it to my neighborhood, it was the best possible way for me to get what I wanted from the DQ1-2 package.

I will say that I enjoyed this one a lot more than the remake of DQ3, whose early stages were so irritatingly slow compared to the iOS and GBC versions that I gave up after it took hours to get a basic-pants set of equipment for a starting party. This game didn’t mess with the formula in that way.

My wife just bought this on Steam yesterday! She’s been enjoying it.

Yeah… my daughter said yesterday, this year went so fast, it feels like it was just January, and I definitely did not share the sentiment.

I think it does an interesting job of depicting a brain that gets overwhelmed, especially during the train trip. (Which… the audiobook is unabridged. How?? There’s a lot of imagery and drawings, I kinda want to find out how they handled that.) The family situation though 😬😬

#52: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Reread after ~10 years, I remembered broad strokes. Lots of overwhelmed people making tough and/or poor and/or VERY poor decisions. I found the book exhausting despite its relatively short length, which is likely the point.

*stares blankly into the distance* maybe if Sega ever released/refreshed Saturn content, I could actually try some of these

I wish I’d known NiGHTS was going to get delisted from Steam before it happened

She does cover ACNH for a decent chunk of the final chapter, noting her initial skepticism and being put off at seismic changes to the core of the game, but also expressed understanding that ACNH came out at basically the perfect time, and it’s what a lot of people needed.