Games on Jamie Thingelstad

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 21:30:00 -0500

We went to BRKTHROUGH tonight and tried out their various games. We’ve been to Activate many times. BRKTHROUGH seems like a good place for a larger group and adds food and beer options. We found Activate’s games better though.

Sat, 26 Sep 2026 20:48:39 -0500

Happy Clash Royale cake day to me! 🎉

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:24:52 -0500

I had an idea to “flip” Elixir, the Clash Royale agent I created, upside-down and open up MCP use — Elixir MCP! Every single part of this I’ve created in other solutions. Claude (Fable 5.0) and I spec’d it out and I put Claude Code in a /loop and six hours later we had a working system.

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 15:46:21 -0500

I made this fun slab as a commemoration of the POAP KINGS, our Clash Royale clan, reaching 50 members for the first time recently. I love how well it turned out!

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 15:01:26 -0500

Turns out ChatGPT is a fan of POAP KINGS! Wonder if our agent optimized interface is helping?

Thu, 14 May 2026 17:30:00 -0500

A fun thing about having a 3D printer is being able to take something that appears only “on screen” and make it exist “in real life”. I printed some of these Clash Royale Crowns for Tyler and I, as well as some for friends that play the game.

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 19:47:45 -0500

Tyler and I are going to do a Minnebar session this year — Elixir: Creating An Ai Agent For Our Clash Royale Clan. This will be a lot of fun to share with everyone and tell some of the POAP KINGS and Elixir story.

Automatic Programming Speed

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 07:55:00 -0500

This morning with my morning coffee (skipped meditation, intermingled with getting ready) I shipped three new features in Elixir.

Stronger memory for clan continuity (diff)
Track fresh ladder and Path of Legend momentum to celebrate hot streaks (feature Codex suggested from cr-api-docs, commit)
A weekly clan recap (commit) next week to highlight our ongoing story and progress.

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 07:43:40 -0500

POAP 7572781 at Vijay 10,000 Battles Won | POAP KINGS.

Making Elixir Smarter

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 10:49:00 -0500

Elixir has come a super long way and is very agentic. In usage though its intelligence was really limited due to the data layer. In the midst of a total refactoring of the data and tools with Codex using GPT-5.4 and it is pretty amazing.

I asked Codex to do an analysis of the current data and tools and provide me an ERD to see as well as an assessment of shortcomings and gaps. It found so much that was problematic.
I asked it to do a full reconnaissance of the Clash Royale API to get a better understanding of what was available.
We redesigned the entire tool set to represent state better.
Claude and I developed a list of 50 test questions that we used 10 at a time to test the new data model and tools.
Codex finalized the new design and data model and is now refactoring.

Pretty amazing for 45 minutes.

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:38:00 -0500

POAP 7571531 at Elixir | POAP KINGS.

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 22:39:15 -0500

POAP 7568495 at raquaza 12k | POAP KINGS.

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 10:50:00 -0500

POAP 7568455 at Chanco 10k | POAP KINGS.

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 21:22:15 -0500

We had a great time at Activate today playing all the various rooms. The new puzzle mode in the Mega Grid was pretty cool.

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 15:09:55 -0500

POAP 7565311 at POAP KINGS Sunday Scrimmage 1.

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 09:39:45 -0500

POAP 7565227 at King Thing 10k | POAP KINGS.

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 22:11:34 -0500

I hit 10k in Clash Royale! Go POAP KINGS!

Here is the battle for posterity.

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 19:25:30 -0500

POAP 7562293 at POAP KINGS Founder.

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:35:12 -0500

Excited to see that Perrserker has arrived in Pokemon TCG Pocket! The full art featuring a Viking Ship is incredible. Looking forward to collecting these digital ones along with my complete set.

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 18:02:04 -0500

I’ve been having fun playing Clash Royale with Tyler — he’s my coach and is really good at the game! The game had some big changes recently that are not being well received by the community. He wrote up where he thinks Supercell is going wrong. Spot on! 🎯

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 20:30:00 -0500

I made it to Arena 23 Valkalla in Clash Royale! 🙌

Pokémon Pocket Collection at 100 Days

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 09:08:36 -0500

In September I started playing with Pokémon Pocket as the First Anniversary celebration was coming up. Tyler had been collecting on Pocket since launch day. The anniversary celebration had a ton of promotions associated as well as the limited edition Deluxe Pack ex. I did some in-app purchasing to get Poke Gold and help catch up a bit, I’ve also subscribed to the Premium Pass. I’ve created a pretty complete collection in the first 100 days.

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 14:37:11 -0500

Family game time with Skittles.

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 20:46:01 -0500

Starting on my Christmas LEGO project: the Ferrari SF-24. 1,361 pieces in 455 steps.

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 23:43:27 -0500

Clash Royale milestone — first card to level 16, Witch!

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 13:17:23 -0500

Clash Royale check-in:

Just got my first card to Level 15 — Witch!
Heroic Mini P.E.K.K.A. is incredible.
Currently playing a “Hog Deck”, I guess?

Stats: 71 days; 7,271 trophies; level 39; arena 19; In-app purchases: 😬. Connect.

Coach: Tyler

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 21:00:00 -0500

I’ve had a blast learning Clash Royale with Tyler. They just announced a bunch of changes to “the economy” which meant I needed to use my Book of Cards. I decided to “pay to win” and level up my Witch and Cannon to get maximum benefit from the books. Play Clash Royale? Let’s connect.

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 21:47:22 -0500

Got a 5-star chest in Clash Royale!

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 21:07:34 -0500

Chromatic firmware upgrade to 4.0! I love the retro vibe of the updater app. 🤩

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 23:05:38 -0500

Got my first immersive card in Pokémon TCG Pocket tonight — Pikachu ex. The videos for these are pretty cool.

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 09:33:43 -0500

After following Tyler to Pokémon TCG Pocket I decided to also try one of his favorite games — Clash Royale. I’m a total newbie. If you play let’s connect!

Trying out Pokémon TCG Pocket

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 07:49:22 -0500

I saw that Pokémon TCG Pocket has a special event coming up and Tyler has been collecting on this app for a long-time so I decided to join in as well.

If you want to connect with me my friend code is 2059-0580-7070-6014.

An observation on TCG Pocket — if you owned Pokémon and had a huge market of collectible cards and believed there was a future for digital collectibles, like NFTs, this app is exactly what you would create. You have a brand new ecosystem of digital only cards to get people used to all the typical things you do with the current physical cards and create a whole additional digital ecosystem. It isn’t blockchain based today, but the consumer behavior is the thing to focus on now how it is done.

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 17:26:46 -0500

Tetris on the ModRetro Chromatic is my favorite implementation ever. So good.

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 19:02:25 -0500

It always makes me smile when we get a new sign for Road Sign Math. 🤓

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 18:11:23 -0500

Very cool that ModRetro games can be updated via MRUpdater. I just updated my Tetris cartridge to the newest bits.

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 21:53:27 -0500

Summer is starting to wind down — Tyler finished his summer project — upgraded to the Nintendo Switch 2! 🎮

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 22:18:11 -0500

I got my ModRetro Chromatic today! Delightful so far.

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 17:50:00 -0500

Loved this find in downtown Fargo — #FARGOMARIOWALL.

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 13:11:03 -0500

I love Tetris. This is a whole different take — Tetris Tumble XL.

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 21:43:20 -0500

Posted a new @roadsignmath winner for first time in a couple years and it’s a good one. Found by @tthing!

Sat, 03 May 2025 15:00:00 -0500

I love the passion and excitement that people bring to the Mega-Minne-Multi-Indie-Mini Arcade at Minnebar.

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 11:33:06 -0500

Schooling the next generation on Air Hockey.

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 16:38:16 -0500

Dan Kelly’s Pub. 📍

First time ever trying pull tabs. All losers.

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 14:51:04 -0500

LEGO and Pokémon announced that they are launching a multi-year partnership in 2026. This is going to mint an incredible amount of revenue for both companies. 💰 Consider how many of these sets will be bought and never even opened for collectors. 😲

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 08:22:36 -0500

Today I Learned: LLM’s are exceptional at making custom word lists for Pictionary-style games. Just added a couple new word lists to SketchParty TV!

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 23:25:39 -0500

We had another super fun evening at Activate in Roseville playing fun games! Highly recommend checking this place out.

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 17:09:32 -0500

Chicago Coin’s Basketball Champ. 🏀🕹️

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 21:47:31 -0500

What you do when you’re Up North and it feels like -24 °F.

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 22:23:40 -0500

We had a nice afternoon bowling at Elsie’s in Northeast. We got almost 19 frames in for a total of Tyler 161, Tammy 119, and me at 228. 🎳

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 22:14:32 -0500

It was Mr. Green with the Revolver in the Hall. Tammy won!

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 17:47:01 -0500

One of the most impressive Christmas miracles is that LEGO sets miraculously are never missing pieces. 🤔

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 14:35:27 -0500

Tyler completed his Great Deku Tree LEGO from The Legend of Zelda. He enjoyed the build. It has two different looks to pick from — he picked the Breath of the Wild one.

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 12:32:02 -0500

Mazie completed her Christmas LEGO of Macaw Parrots this morning. They are designed to be hung on the wall and look great!

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 12:31:03 -0500

Completed my Super Mario World: Mario & Yoshi LEGO this morning. This was a very fun build and the movement is really fun! The surprise movement is Yoshi shooting a fireball out of his mouth.

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 13:50:13 -0500

Through bag 4 of Super Mario World: Mario & Yoshi LEGO. Movement is very smooth and base is stable.

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:43:56 -0500

Getting started on my Christmas LEGO Super Mario World: Mario & Yoshi. Looks like a fun build!

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 22:30:00 -0500

Tyler has a good start on his Christmas LEGO of the Great Deku Tree from The Legend of Zelda!

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 23:13:18 -0500

We played Escape the Room: Secret of Dr. Gravely’s Retreat tonight and had a lot of fun solving the various puzzles. We successfully escaped with 7 minutes remaining on the 120 minute timer! Fun time! 🔓

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 22:16:02 -0500

Wait a second… Connections can use pictures? 🤯

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 22:51:52 -0500

First time playing Upwords. Sort of like Scrabble with stacking tiles. Fun but got hard and took a long time to play. Tammy was the winner by a long ways. Mazie and I traded places due to unplayed tiles.

Tammy: 235 → 225
Jamie: 141 → 136
Mazie: 147 → 132
Tyler: 130 → 120

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 22:15:29 -0500

Solved today’s NY Times Mini crossword in under 1 minute. 🤩

Flying a 737

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 21:53:59 -0500

Tyler and I had a blast at Extreme Flight Simulation flying a 737. Tyler got the pilot chair and I took the co-pilot spot. We did a full pre-flight routine making sure everything was good to go. We then took off, did a quick fly around 5,000 feet, followed with a landing. We got to pick our airports:

MSP: Our home airport. I wanted to see if the terrain was familiar. The lakes and most roads were where they should be, but the buildings and downtown wasn’t very current.
CDG: We thought it would be fun to see the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe — which we did!
HHX: Tyler picked this as he knew it had a particularly difficult landing. You have to come in from a totally different heading and right at the end do about a 30° turn at 500 feet or so to land. We landed it but it wasn’t pretty.
LGA: Our last airport and we started in the air for this one and then landed. I wanted to land here since I’ve landed at this airport for sure over 50 times and it was very realistic. This was our best landing by a ways.

We got to finish by doing a full shut down of the 737. It was a great time.

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 21:52:52 -0500

We watched Tetris and it was great. Tetris is my favorite game ever. I can still get completely lost playing Tetris. We even had a Tetris shower! The movie tells the story of getting the right to distribute the game and is filled with suspense and intrigue.

Tyler's Gaming PC: GPU Unlocked!

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 18:31:58 -0500

Tyler hit his savings milestone yesterday so today we went to Microcenter to get the GPU for his gaming rig. A short while later he was carrying out a PURE AMD Radeon™ RX 7800 XT 16GB eager to get it setup.

This is another one of those moments where I realize so much has changed in the last 20+ years since I built my own PCs. These graphics cards or more appropriately classified as a whole computer on a PCI-E card. Three fans, massive heatsink, and its own power connections.

He got it in mostly on his own and got the drivers installed. Minutes later he was getting high 200 frames per second on some test games, even hitting over 300 fps at some times. The quality of the graphics is amazing. 🤩

Tyler's Playdate Game: The 5 Piece Sword

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 11:41:23 -0500

The most open of the Summer Challenges I gave Tyler was to create a Playdate Experience. No requirements other than something that could be played on the Playdate and created in Pulp. Tyler really got into this and created a full interactive game experience — The 5 Piece Sword. 🗡️

He wrote additional blog posts on the simple enemies in the game, how the heart system for health works, and the spikes and spike balls in the game.

The game is fun to play and has a lot of challenging levels. He’s still crafting the final boss stage and at that point he may publish the file so others could load it. Nicely done! 👏

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 23:17:53 -0500

Tyler got his gaming PC assembled and running tonight! It was super fun to help him out with this. So many LEDs! 🤩

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 14:08:55 -0500

First time I’ve gotten a perfect in Strands!

Strands #146
“Bedtime story”
🟡🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 13:23:11 -0500

Strands, the new daily word game on the New York Times, is pretty fun.

Strands #132
“Hello kitty”
🔵💡🔵💡
🔵🔵🟡🔵
💡💡🔵

Summer Challenge: Create a Playdate Experience

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 20:35:10 -0500

This post is part of the Summer Challenge Collection, a collection of tasks or projects for our kids to do over the summer.

This is a very open ended challenge to use the Playdate Pulp web-based game editor to create some kind of experience for the Playdate. This could be a game, something educational, or just silly. There is no complexity requirement but it should have some goal that it is designed for.

Summer Challenge: Write about a video game

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 20:24:02 -0500

This post is part of the Summer Challenge Collection, a collection of tasks or projects for our kids to do over the summer.

For this challenge write about a video game that you have played. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a review of the game. It could be about how you approached the game or any other aspect of it. The post should include screenshots to help share your message.

You can redeem this challenge up to three times.

Summer Challenge: Embed and Comment on Chess Game

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 21:31:18 -0500

This post is part of the Summer Challenge Collection, a collection of tasks or projects for our kids to do over the summer.

Fairly simple challenge — embed a chess game that you played on lichess.org into a blog post on your site. It should be fully embedded, not just a link. Add a brief commentary on the game and where you felt the critical points were. Would be great to include the PGN and reference the moves where it makes sense.

Completed! ✅

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 20:32:38 -0500

I dig Tetris and Tetromino things (proof? Tetris Shower), so this Tetris Font of course caught my attention. 🤩

Sat, 04 May 2024 22:35:19 -0500

Finished game of Five Crowns — Mazie was the winner!

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 22:30:00 -0500

We wrapped the day with 2 hours of tactical laser tag at Battle House Laser Combat tonight. We were split up on different teams. Tammy was excited to get into battle!

Part of the Milwaukee Spring Break collection.

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 16:00:00 -0500

It was cool and rainy so a trip to Big Putts Mini Golf was perfect. We arrived and the place was packed, but after the first few holes things moved along well. We loved the course — declared it probably our favorite mini golf ever. And I crushed it with a 35 along with four hole-in-ones! ⛳️🔥

Part of the Milwaukee Spring Break collection.

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 21:15:00 -0500

We went Duckpin Bowling tonight at Koz’s Mini Bowl. Koz’s has the oldest original Duck Pin bowling lanes with manual pin setters that sit behind the pins while you bowl.

Tammy won with 198, Mazie second at 194, Tyler third at 177, and I came in last at 140.

Part of the Milwaukee Spring Break collection.

Tyler in Flight Simulator

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 16:00:00 -0500

While on Milwaukee Spring Break we took a short drive 40 miles south to Gurnee, Illinois to visit Extreme Flight Simulation. Tyler wanted to try a real flight simulator and EFS has a 737-800 simulator that you can do a “no experience” session with a co-pilot. Tyler had a blast. I was a little jealous that I didn’t get to fly it myself. Below are some videos of the experience.

Tyler landing at Chicago O’Hare

Tyler taking off from Tokyo Narita

Here is a photo of him taking the pilot seat right before starting the simulation.

Part of the Milwaukee Spring Break collection.

Game Store Tour

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 18:00:00 -0500

Tyler and I had the day to ourselves and we decided to start with a trip to Tower Games to look around a bit, which then extended, and ultimately turned into an ad hoc visit to five gaming stores in town with recommendations from my brother-in-law Dylan.

Tower Games: Nice store, conveniently located for us. Great selection of board games and a lot of RPG stuff, including miniatures. Wide selection of Magic cards.
Level Up Games: We missed this place the first time as we were looking for it because it is in the basement, so you have to walk down to get in. Great selection of video games, board games, and much more. One of the few that sold single Pokemon cards, but focused on higher end cards. Great selection of used video game gear.
Gamezenter (formally Fantasy Flight): This place is huge and was very busy! Huge variety of board games, and a ton of Magic stuff. They also sell beer, wine, and some snacks. They have a large area with tables for gaming and there were a bunch of people there. Parking lot was very full.
Source Comics & Games: By far the largest selection of comic books of any of the stores. Also general selection of books and anime stuff. Wide array of RPG items. Overall the broadest selection of any of the stores.
Dreamers Vault: Wide variety of games. They sold single Pokemon cards and also had books of cards.

Tyler said Level Up and Source were his favorites of the day. I would agree with an emphasis on Level Up. However, Gamezenter seems to be the place to go if you want to actually game with other people.

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 17:56:52 -0500

Very fun time playing in virtual reality at REM5VR today. Space Pirate and Elven Assassin still favorites.

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 14:32:20 -0500

Put together this fun Tribute to Galileo Galilei LEGO this morning. Reminded me of our bike tour in Tuscany when we stopped at Villa Galileo (building on the left in the street photo).

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 23:56:52 -0500

It turns out it was Mrs. Peacock with the Candlestick in the Conservatory!

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 22:31:20 -0500

First time playing the Tetris Tabletop Game and it is pretty good. I’m a big Tetris fan, and this doesn’t have the zombie speed that the video game does, but it brings good strategy and is a fun time. Tyler won with 38 points.

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 19:43:59 -0500

Tyler completed the Great Wave LEGO kit today. This is his favorite artwork and a very cool LEGO.

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 13:24:52 -0500

Mazie finished this amazing Typewriter LEGO. The movement is impressive and it makes a “clacking” sound that is reminiscent of the real thing. She finished exactly one year after starting it!

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 20:36:01 -0500

First time playing Tsuro. Super interesting strategy requiring an indirect approach to attacking other players.

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 23:40:57 -0500

Played a round of Skittles tonight. Mazie scored 540 points on the last round to leap into first and win the game.

Mazie 1,315
Jamie 1,040
Tammy 890
Tyler 830

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 17:43:10 -0500

Tyler completed this fabulous Starry Night LEGO kit. It looks amazing. 🎨🤩

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 12:35:10 -0500

Finished my Piranha Plant LEGO Super Mario build. Fun and unique build with many special pieces. I like how the mouth and leaves move. The hidden gold coin feature is a bonus. Will pair well with the Question Mark Block!

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 11:19:07 -0500

Christmas LEGO project for 2023: Piranha Plant from Super Mario collection. Progress after bag 2.

Sun, 17 Dec 2023 22:36:54 -0500

We had friends over and played SHEEPLE: The Best Game in the Ewe-niverse for the first time. It was a fun game to play in a group with a lot of laughs. Recommended.

Road Sign Math Rebooted

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 08:30:29 -0500

As you drive on I-94 East toward the Twin Cities there is a wonderful road sign that always made me smile. I saw it regularly when I would return from visiting family in North Dakota. The sign had this wonderful mathematical significance to it. 3 times 33 equals 99.

After seeing this sign for a while I kept wondering how many other mathematically significant road signs are there? And just like that the idea for Road Sign Math was born.

History

Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine I can see the history. I launched the website in February 2005 with a simple post. Initially it was a blog that I posted my signs on, but people were also welcome to send photos of their own mathematically significant signs as well. Since multiple people were playing, there needed to be some rules on how to play.

We had multiple people playing and I thought it would be fun to have a scoring system and a scoreboard for players as well as states!

I believe we got signs from all 50 states. We had a sign from the Serengeti. We had signs from most continents. In 2011 I moved the site from a blog to a wiki with the idea that folks could submit and maintain their own signs. This was all before the rise of mobile phones. When the iPhone arrived I thought it would be amazing to make an iOS app to capture road signs, but that never happened.

In 2016, after 11 years of running this site and several others, I made the decision to do some technical downsizing and turned off a number of hobby projects I had been running.

Road Sign Math was one of the sites shut down. I let the domain name expire and squatters have had the domain ever since, and still do. But the idea of Road Sign Math has never left completely…

Reboot!

In 2021 I registered the domain roadsignmath.xyz. That is an even better domain name for Road Sign Math!

I’ve had multiple sessions looking through various backups thinking about relaunching Road Sign Math in all its wonder, but I’ve got gaps in my archives. Also, the transition from blog to wiki made the archive hard to track.

On some recent road trips we’ve been grabbing some signs. And earlier this year I captured anew the Genesis (2023) sign.

I decided it was time to reboot it, not relaunch it. Start back as a simple blog with the awesome MathJax library. Just my signs. No scoring system or leaderboards. Just a fun place to share mathematically significant road signs.

Consider it my little contribution to keeping the Web weird. 😎

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 15:59:05 -0500

Afternoon shuffleboard and pickleball!

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 14:18:19 -0500

We had a fun round of mini golf this morning at Big Cedar. Great course and the large bass was a nice signature hole! 🕳️

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 14:58:07 -0500

Found some mathematically significant road signs on our drive for Road Sign Math! 🤓 There were a few good ones I wasn’t able to get a photo for too. 😔

(On micro.blog @roadsignmath and note the MathJax doesn’t render on the timeline.)

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 21:56:55 -0500

I’m digging this new Alabaster Chess Set from Scali Alabastro that I got for Father’s Day. Tyler and I have already played a game on it. I’ve always wanted a more substantial chess set and this is it.

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 22:50:15 -0500

Chess game with Tyler tonight. We both made a couple of major blunders, but he forced me to resign (I was black) and won the match. ♟️

Mon, 15 May 2023 21:29:19 -0500

Tyler started playing Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom tonight and the intro was great. I’m not a gamer, but the story and world of Zelda is great.

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 19:25:00 -0500

Ran into the Incredible Hulk at the LEGO Store on 5th Avenue. This place was great. We wanted to do more stuff than we had time.

Nintendo NY

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 13:48:00 -0500

One of our must stop places for Tyler and I in New York was Nintendo New York! We got here on Sunday right at 11a when they opened. The store is filled with cool Nintendo history, characters, games, and of course plenty of gear to buy. We shopped and roamed around for 90 minutes taking it all in, including selfies with Link and Bowser.

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 21:35:00 -0500

Family game of Five Crowns tonight. Tyler won with just 66 points! Tammy had 86, Jamie with 108, and Mazie with 178.

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 22:33:00 -0500

Florida Man may be the strangest board game I’ve ever played. With that said, a large group of adults having a few beverages would have a lot of fun with this somewhat silly game.

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 17:55:56 -0500

Tyler is learning to play chess. ♟️

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 13:32:12 -0500

Morning bowling at Tuttle’s with niece Nora. Mazie won. Let’s ignore the rest of the scores.

Holiday Week List

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 11:36:29 -0500

During the week between Christmas and New Years I like to focus on some different things.

Write a meaningful blog post each day ✅

What, Why, and How to Improve Your Security and Privacy (Monday)
Polarizing Technology: Encryption and Crypto (Tuesday)
On Audience Capture (Wednesday)
Having a Style Coach (Thursday) and Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego?
Organizational Dissonance (Friday)

Focus on Meditation

Meditate 20 minutes each day, double my usual. ✅
Take “The Stoic Path” by William B. Irvine in Waking Up. 30% complete

Read “The Bed of Procrustes” by Taleb ✅

Finished reading this, but read it like a book so I could read it all. I will plan to come back to this and reflect on select aphorisms from time to time.

Complete Christmas LEGO ✅

Each Christmas Tammy surprises us each with a Holiday LEGO project. I got the Super Mario 64™ Question Mark Block this year.

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 11:29:29 -0500

Mazie got started on her LEGO Typewriter! Through bag 3 building the keys. I’m excited to see this finished.

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 12:30:35 -0500

Music Box for Playdate is a great example of simple, fun innovation on this unique platform. I love that you can create your own songs as well. Delightful. 🎶

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 16:33:25 -0500

I finished the the Super Mario 64™ Question Mark Block LEGO build! There were a lot of little hidden details. The transformation from block to show the scenes on top is great. Mario, Princess Peach, and Bowser are all there.

Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego?

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 10:57:31 -0500

When I was in high school in Minot, ND I used to volunteer for Craig Nansen, the Technical Coordinator for the Minot Public School District. I got connected to Nansen when I got my Apple //c for Christmas and wrote a letter to the Apple User Group of Minot, which was organized by Craig and was defunct. If I remember right I had also written to Apple to get the name of the local user group.

That connection turned into an opportunity to work with him after school which I leapt after to get access to the labs of Apple and Macintosh computers. A lot of what I remember doing was using the special software from MECC to make hundreds and hundreds of copies of 5.25" floppy disks for the various labs.

When I was volunteering Craig was deeply involved in a cool project with Brøderbund to create a new game in the Carmen Sandiego franchise, Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego?.

I knew of the Carmen Sandiego games and had played a couple of them myself. It was really cool to think that the storyline could extend to North Dakota.

I didn’t know however how rare the game was. All of the other Carmen Sandiego titles were well known, but this specific title was even missing from the founder of Brøderbund’s collection.

While examining Carlston’s donations at The Strong, Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi noted that Where in North Dakota was missing. Cifaldi tweeted about the game, explaining that he’d only recently heard about it and requested information from anyone who had more details.

That tweet initiated a domino effect. Former Minot school district administrator Craig Nansen noticed Cifaldi’s tweet, wrote him back, and arranged a sit-down conversation with as many of his ex-design colleagues as he could locate.

Craig’s reply to that tweet was the genesis of what eventually turned into a hunt to fully document this rare title. The journey is chronicled in this Screenland S1 E6: Eight-bit archaeologists episode with Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation. The segments are 5:46 - 10:41, 15:09 - 19:06, and 21:34 - 24:02.

At 18:00 into the Screenland episode you get a great overview of the history of the game. Craig as well as other contributors to the game are there. Craig was a master archivist and had a tremendous amount of material to share about the game.

Carmen North Dakota was a little unique because in addition to being a game for consumer sale, it was intended to be used in North Dakota classrooms to teach kids about the state. To go with it, there was this blue covered Carmen’s North Dakota Almanac.

The Carmen’s North Dakota Almanac was my very small part in this project. Noted from the cover sheet of the almanac:

I have the full Almanac and the ND Database Project with the cover sheet that included all of the committee members names.

Here they are:

Mary Littler

Bonny Berryman (she, I believe spearheaded the project and gave in-services at NDEA about the program)

Phyllis Landsiedel

Lola Geffner

Kathy Froeber

Gloria Lokken (former President of NDEA)

Jane Ormiston

Geraldeen Rude

Shawneen Voiles

Kathy Feist

Brenda Burtness

Pauline Wahl

Craig Nansen (Project Director)

Jamie Thingelstad (Page Layout)

Back then I had gotten pretty good at QuarkXPress and did some page layout assistance for the Yearbook committee and used it for some personal projects too. I don’t recall very well, but I’m guessing that is where the “Page Layout” part came in.

Additional References

You can play Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego? on Internet Archive in an emulator.

I’ve independently archived the ROM (disk) files for the game. You need to download the disk images and then load them in an Apple II Emulator.

There is a full and super detailed writeup on the game by David Craddock at The Video Game History Foundation.

Also see Why in the world was Carmen Sandiego in North Dakota? from July 2016 in the Fargo Forum.

The Carmen North Dakota committee turned over some disks and other resources to Frank Cifaldi to be housed in the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY as a donation of materials. They also have Doug Carlston’s personal archive from Brøderbund.

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 19:58:36 -0500

Tyler’s LEGO Loop Coaster is really tall! The structure alone is very impressive. I can’t wait to see it go!!!

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 15:28:02 -0500

Through bag 9 of the Super Mario 64™ Question Mark Block LEGO. The inside contraption I believe will pop out when done. A lot of fussy small pieces. A very fun build.

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 14:53:28 -0500

Tyler is making great progress on the LEGO Loop Coaster, already done through bag 7!

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 14:51:35 -0500

Just finished bag 3 on the Super Mario 64™ Question Mark Block LEGO. This is a very fun build full of surprises already.

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 21:44:35 -0500

Ticket to Ride tonight. Tammy won by just 2 points. Mazie in 2nd. Then a big gap with me and Tyler bringing up the caboose.

Thu, 16 Jun 2022 12:55:16 -0500

The Playdate arrived! Preordered this about a year ago. Initial impression is great. Adorable device. And the crank is just so cranky! Can’t wait to play with this and maybe create something for it. 🤩

LEGO World Map

Sun, 29 May 2022 19:28:23 -0500

The LEGO World Map is complete!

There are two very notable things about the LEGO World Map.

I think this is the ideal LEGO for someone that is really into jigsaw puzzles. The build of this LEGO is not like any other that I’ve done.
I found this LEGO an overwhelming build. I would typically want to do a LEGO on my own, so I experience it all. This one I needed help, and it really got done because a few others got involved and it was very easy to do each tile in parallel.

At 11,695 pieces this is a big project. I started this project right after Christmas!

Once we got about 80% done with the tiles we could see the end and and there was a strong desire to get it all together. The last half of the build was more fun than the first half for sure.

Thanks to help from Tammy, the kids, and two of their cousins!

Kentucky Derby Bets

Sat, 07 May 2022 17:32:21 -0500

Race 6

Gun It (5) to Place

Race 7

Doppelgänger (10) to Show

Race 8

Bells the One (6) to Win
Kimini (4) to Win

Race 11

Public Sector (3) to Show
Kentucky Ghost (9) to Show

Race 12 — 148th Kentucky Derby

Zandon (10) to Show 💰
Zandon (10) to Win
Cyberknife (16) to Show
Smile Happy (5) to Show
Simplification (13) to Show

Sat, 05 Mar 2022 11:41:11 -0500

Someday the Wordle will be STEAM.

And on that day, I will win.

Quordle

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 19:42:57 -0500

Tried Quordle for the first time today. This may be my favorite Wordle variant.

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 23:09:55 -0500

I find Nerdle much harder than Wordle. 😬

nerdlegame 19 5/6

⬛🟪🟩🟪⬛🟩🟩⬛
⬛🟪🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩🟪
🟩⬛🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟪🟩🟩🟪🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

nerdlegame 20 6/6

⬛⬛🟪⬛⬛🟩🟪⬛
🟩🟩⬛⬛⬛🟩⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Sun, 16 Jan 2022 11:41:49 -0500

Instead of posting Wordle games regularly I made a collection of Wordle games. 🤔

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 19:04:00 -0500

I got really lucky on my first Wordle.

Wordle 200 2/6

🟩⬜🟨⬜🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

See collection of Wordle game.

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 23:38:38 -0500

Blokus is another New Years Eve tradition. Tyler (Blue) won this year with just 4 points left. Tammy (Green) with 8, Jamie (Red) with 11, and Mazie (Yellow) at 21.

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 23:35:41 -0500

Every New Years Eve we play Clue and for the first time in memory I won! On my very first turn I guessed Mustard, Knife, Lounge and randomly hit both the weapon and room. I got it down to two people and then had to guess because I thought someone else would get it. 🏆

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 18:18:04 -0500

Today’s board game was Settlers of Catan! We messed up the rules more than a few times, and the game took a long time to wrap up, but still liked it. Tyler’s pick. Mazie won.

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 22:42:14 -0500

Tonight’s board game was Photosynthesis. Mazie’s pick, and she won with a good lead! 🌳

Angry Bunny Club Jigsaw Puzzle

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 13:14:40 -0500

We make a custom jigsaw puzzle each Christmas. This year I also took my collection of Angry Bunny Club NFT’s and created a custom puzzle from it. I created a collage of the various images and ordered both of the puzzles.

I love how it came out! The Bunny images are all 3,000 x 3,000 pixels so there was plenty of resolution to work with. I wasn’t sure how difficult the puzzle would be but it turned out relatively quick to solve. All four of us did it together and finished in about 90 minutes.

I decided to make this puzzle with no specific up or down. This was partially due to the design of the Bunnies, which are all clipped at the chest. By having them go all the way around I could more easily align them all on the outer edge of the puzzle, and then have some in the middle behind the bigger ones.

This puzzle features 18 Angry Bunny Club NFTs, all are ones I hold in my wallet right now. The bunnies included are, in ascending order by ID:

Bunny #338, Bunny #393, Bunny #501, Bunny #519, Bunny #1308, Bunny #1626, Bunny #1688, Bunny #2076, Bunny #2465, Bunny #3069, Bunny #3337, Bunny #3678, Bunny #3680, Bunny #4598, Bunny #4801, Bunny #4926, Bunny #5011, and Bunny #5128.

I’m pretty sure this is the world’s first Angry Bunny Club jigsaw puzzle. 🤩

Mon, 27 Dec 2021 20:51:02 -0500

Blokus tonight. Tammy and I tied at 15. Tyler at 18. Mazie at 19.

Mon, 27 Dec 2021 18:43:43 -0500

Tammy finished another puzzle today. The 1,000 piece “The Lion Is Awake” by Souther Salazar. 🧩

Sun, 26 Dec 2021 20:20:11 -0500

Tyler got started on his Christmas LEGO, building Old Trafford - Manchester United stadium! ⚽️ This is going to be amazing to see finished!

Sun, 26 Dec 2021 20:18:02 -0500

Mazie started her Christmas LEGO today too, the Roller Coaster! 🎢 She has already complete the Carousel 🎠 and Ferris Wheel 🎡 and this will complete that set. We may need to create a motorized display for these.

Sun, 26 Dec 2021 20:13:54 -0500

I got Trekking the National Parks Trivia for Christmas this year. It is a fun and fast game to play. You get to learn things too. I got Trekking the National Parks in 2019 by the same company. Great gifts for fans of the National Parks.

Land of Things Christmas Puzzle

Sun, 26 Dec 2021 20:02:48 -0500

Today Tammy put together this years custom Christmas Puzzle that we made for her and it came out really well. It was definitely the hardest puzzle we have created yet. We titled it “Land of Things”.

And here it is put together in 18x24" 500 piece jigsaw puzzle.

We took a unique approach this year. Tyler and I have been having fun with Townscaper so I asked Tyler to create the overall base of the puzzle using Townscaper. He used the iPad and spent a while creating various islands and buildings. We thematically tied each location to houses and neighborhoods we have lived in. We also included our cabin as an island that you had to get to by boat.

After we had the scene in Townscaper I loaded the city on the desktop version of Townscaper in Steam because it could render it larger and export a higher quality image. Using a screenshot on the iPad wasn’t high enough resolution.

I took that image and then we loaded it into Procreate and Mazie went to work drawing on top of it. We added grass, various scenes, decorated some things, a big sea dragon, etc. The details were really great.

Notice the GEM Tomatoes stand that was so awesome in our old neighborhood.

Our old neighborhood in Minnetonka with the Rock’s next door having rocks in their yard.

Lucky is hanging out in the back yard playing with a tennis ball.

I love the lighthouse with people hanging out on it, and the ice cream shop with people waiting in line.

We could have spent so much more time adding special details but we had to finish, we took well over our deadline as it is. It is incredible how much time a good jigsaw puzzle takes to design!

We are already thinking about 2022’s Christmas Puzzle! 🧩

LEGO World Map

Sun, 26 Dec 2021 13:30:43 -0500

Starting in on my Christmas LEGO project: World Map! Item 31203, 11,695 pieces. Unlike any other LEGO project I’ve ever done. 🤩

Painting with LEGO?

World Map LEGO is a giant pixel art project. Each tile is 16 x 16, 256 pixels each.

Completed first tile of LEGO World Map. Thirty nine tiles to go. 10,240 pixels in total. 😮

Sat, 25 Dec 2021 14:55:43 -0500

I thought I knew all the esoteric strategy lawn games, and then Tammy surprised me with Kingdom! I’m intrigued! May this usurp Kubb?

Sat, 11 Dec 2021 00:49:00 -0500

8-Bit Christmas was a fun holiday movie, especially if you loved your Nintendo when you were a kid! 🎄

Sat, 20 Nov 2021 22:53:13 -0500

Tyler and I played as a team and came in 2nd in Ticket to Ride Japan. It is a fun variant with the community bullet train encouraging some cooperative play.

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 20:01:08 -0500

Nobody does project updates like Paul Boswell does. I love how he goes into details and pulls you along in the story. I’m looking forward to getting my Spintronics!

Custom Puzzle Box

Sun, 24 Oct 2021 20:28:55 -0500

Our upcoming Things 4 Good Fall Fundraiser is going to have a lot of our Things 4 Good Candles, but we are also introducing a new custom product that our family created — the first Jiggy Thing Puzzle! We received the order today and I was very anxious to see how the box art came out. We’ve done puzzles before so I wasn’t worried about that, but we had never done a custom box design. I love how it turned out!

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 21:26:48 -0500

We tried Duckpin Bowling for the first time today at Pins Mechanical. It was a lot of fun and more relaxed than normal bowling. Recommended!

Sun, 10 Oct 2021 22:05:15 -0500

Tyler introduced the family to Machi Koro tonight and we had a great time playing it. Easy to learn, fast to play, and fun strategy options.

Wed, 06 Oct 2021 22:04:25 -0500

Our family created an all original custom jigsaw puzzle together! 🧩 We finished the box design and ordered 50 puzzles tonight. Celebration City is the first Jiggy Thing Puzzle! Zoomed in view of Ant Hotel shown here. 🤩

Sat, 04 Sep 2021 11:19:41 -0500

Tammy made a themed scavenger hunt / puzzle for Olson Family Vacation 18. One clue for each year. Everyone had to think hard. Each family won a custom Things 4 Good candle when they discovered the answer, and presents for the kids.

Pastime Pinball

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 18:30:57 -0500

If you are any kind of a fan of pinball, Pastime Pinball would be your heaven. There is an amazing collection of pinball machines over the years, and they are all maintained perfectly. Everything works, and the game play is just as it was meant to be. They even had one of my favorite machines from my youth, Cyclone. And my favorite one that I played there was the Metallica Pro machine.

*Tyler playing one of the older pinball machines..* *Historical pinball section, all in great working condition.* *Royal Flush pinball machine with clear acrylic case.* *Modern pinball section.*

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 20:15:37 -0500

We are on a road trip and are playing Road Sign Math! Today we found a winner outside of Wurtsboro!

Sat, 24 Jul 2021 21:12:08 -0500

I’ve been following the development of the Playdate for a while. I love all the innovation — including games by season and the crank! The games look like they will be fun to pick up and play. I’ll be pre-ordering on Thursday!

Sat, 26 Jun 2021 19:31:45 -0500

Rained most of the day today so I was able to finish the Saturn V LEGO build. For sure my favorite LEGO I have done. The size is impressive! 🚀

Sat, 26 Jun 2021 11:11:39 -0500

The Saturn V LEGO build might be my favorite LEGO yet. The way that it comes together is delightful.

Thu, 20 May 2021 06:54:14 -0500

Paul Boswell, creator of the Turing Tumble, just launched Spintronics on Kickstarter. I’m in! Turing Tumble was brilliant, and this looks equally great! I love how he turns digital concepts and logic into something physical to interact with.

Sat, 08 May 2021 16:34:54 -0500

Tammy put together her 50 Puzzle today. It was so rewarding seeing the final puzzle at full size. The images came out great. The little details all hit the right spots. The kids and I are proud of this one! Create Jigsaw Puzzles.com did a great job with it.

Sat, 01 May 2021 09:21:21 -0500

Making progress on the LEGO® NASA Apollo Saturn V build.

Fifty Puzzle

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 19:48:07 -0500

Tammy enjoys doing puzzles. The kids and I have started a tradition of making her a custom Christmas puzzle each year. This year we decided to do one for her “big birthday” and we decided to take a completely new approach.

Here is the final version and I’ll share with you how we got here.

To make this we started with a hand drawn image that Mazie framed out and then her and Tyler filled in. This allowed them to work with pencil and paper and the clear borders for the initial idea. Puzzles are pretty close to 8.5x11 ratio, but not exactly. After scanning I do a stretch on the size to get it just right.

Now that we scanned the original pencil drawing, we needed to recreate the entire image in digital format. We loaded up Procreate and put the original scan on a layer and made it 50% transparent, and then used the iPad Pro with Apple Pencil to trace a copy of the image on a fresh layer above. This made a perfectly clean digital version, and allowed us to clean up the image a bit. There were detail areas that were too small to do with the pencil but by zooming into the canvas on the iPad Pro they were able to get it just right.

After the image was traced we created two layers for coloring. One layer was “under the lines” and is where most of the coloring was done. We had another “over the lines” layer for select sections. We also segmented off the backgrounds and the “50” numbers into their own layer.

One of the super cool features of Procreate is the ability to share a video fo the drawing being created. Here you can see the entire process unfolding, as well as the couple of versions we tried for the “50” colors before we landed on the rainbow. Our creative process took 3-4 weeks and here you get it in 9 minutes.

The project took a while but the finished product worked out great. Plus the kids got to learn how to create digital art and got really adept at working with multiple layers and understanding how to use them to create different effects. Mazie got into the various brushes as well.

The only mistake we made was mine. I forgot that I needed to create a margin on the edge for the printer. We didn’t factor that in, so the finished puzzle lost about 1/4" of the image on all sides. On the top we had sky so that was fine, but on the bottom we had this cool seascape and a lot of that got trimmed off. Next time I’ll remember to mark a “safe zone” there so nothing critical is in that area.

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 19:08:00 -0500

Mazie finished her LEGO Grand Piano build today. It is one of the most intricate LEGO I have ever seen.

You can connect it to your phone and it will respond to, or move, the piano keys.

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 10:43:03 -0500

I started building the LEGO® NASA Apollo Saturn V this morning. I’ve wanted to build this for a long time. 🚀

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 19:34:24 -0500

Tyler got Mario Kart Live for his birthday and we’ve already had a ton of fun playing it. We setup a couple of quick tracks and it is really fun to have a game that is played both in front of you and on the Nintendo Switch.

Thu, 28 Jan 2021 21:12:10 -0500

We played Exploding Kittens for first time tonight. Silly game but quick and fun.

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 10:33:00 -0500

Tyler completed his LEGO® Nintendo Entertainment System™ project in just three days! He got very focused on it and worked through all 2,646 pieces. The finished project is very cool. The cartridge slides into the console and presses down just like an original Nintendo does. The controller feels normal sized in your hand and the cable disconnects.

The TV was a big part of the project and it operates like a track that you turn a handle and it moves. Mario is on a slide and bounces around on the course as you move it.

Here is the scene before going into the TV.

See console done and beginning.

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 13:59:03 -0500

I finished my LEGO® International Space Station Christmas project. This was a fun LEGO to assemble. 🛰

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 13:52:28 -0500

Tyler is making great progress on his “biggest ever” LEGO® project. The Nintendo Console, Super Mario Bros cartridge and the Game Controller are assembled and look cool!

I took the top off to show how the cartridge action works.

Sun, 27 Dec 2020 13:46:20 -0500

The kids are starting their biggest LEGO® projects ever. Mazie is building the IDEAS Grand Piano with 3,662 pieces and Tyler the Nintendo Entertainment System™ with 2,646 pieces. These will be awesome when finished! 😲

Sat, 26 Dec 2020 17:38:20 -0500

We’ve made a tradition of making Tammy a custom puzzle for Christmas. With some help from her sister Michelle, they put it together. It is built off of our Yellowstone trip.

Sun, 15 Nov 2020 23:47:34 -0500

Family game time this afternoon. First Five Crowns which Tyler won. Then a game of Blokus that Mazie won (Yellow) and for the first time played all of her pieces, with bonus for the single piece last!

Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:15:06 -0500

Family time with Monopoly: Yellowstone edition.

Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:07:24 -0500

Tyler and I have been playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons and we roped Tammy and Mazie in with us. Today all four of us played at the same time and we got an Animal Crossing family photo around the fire! Left to right: Tyler, Tammy, me, Mazie. 📸

Sun, 08 Nov 2020 14:24:05 -0500

Just tried Buildzi for the first time. This is a great, fast family game. You can give the younger ones a head start too. A lot of family fun.

Sat, 31 Oct 2020 23:08:36 -0500

First time playing Trekking the World. Game setup took a bit to figure out but we got the hang of it fast enough. Was cool to learn about the world and enjoy a game at the same time.

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 20:55:36 -0500

Tyler and I are playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons together and we are using ACNH Exchange to get good prices for Turnips. I’m using it as an opportunity to introduce him to spreadsheets and basic financial concepts. 😊💰

Sat, 24 Oct 2020 14:13:48 -0500

Won afternoon game of Trekking the National Parks. Me 47, Tyler 42, Mazie 36, and Tammy 33.

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 20:32:13 -0500

Tyler defeated Monk Maz Koshia and got the Master Cycle Zero in Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It is amazing to me how far the story goes in this game.

Sat, 19 Sep 2020 19:40:13 -0500

Updating firmware is one of my favorite things. 🤓 Updating the new IntelliConnect.

Ride the Dakota Rail Regional Trail

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 16:31:15 -0500

With the kids away with their cousin for a couple of days, I cleared my calendar and Tammy and I took a day to ourselves. We got started early with a big bike ride. We drove out to Wayzata and had a delicious breakfast outside at The Grocer’s Table. Then we went to the start of the start of the Dakota Rail Regional Trail and took off. The trail was great with wonderful views in all directions. When we got to Lake Waconia we turned around. We put 33 miles in on the out and back.

In addition to breakfast we stopped on our ride back for a fun round of mini golf at Big Stone Mini Golf. This is the best mini golf place that I’ve been. You are surrounded by stone sculpture too. After we finished golfing we wandered through the sculpture garden. After the round of mini golf we stopped for lunch at Dakota Junction in Mound and then finished the last few miles back to Wayzata. What a great way to spend a morning!

After our great bike ride, we went for an afternoon kayak!

Sun, 26 Jul 2020 14:07:58 -0500

Tyler got the Collectors Edition Yellowstone Monopoly while in Yellowstone, and then played it a bit in the RV while driving in Yellowstone! Very meta!

Sun, 26 Jul 2020 13:54:22 -0500

We played the Camp board game last night for the first time. Fun RV game. Good game that can be played with multiple ages at the same time. Tammy won!

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 19:01:00 -0500

Our whole family was excited to hear that Arcade1Up is coming out with Ms. PAC-MAN! We will be swapping our PAC-MAN machine out as soon as we can. The cabinet looks great! 🕹

Sun, 21 Jun 2020 22:24:29 -0500

Galaga was one of my favorite arcade games back in the day. I got this awesome Quarter Arcade Galaga Cabinet for Father’s Day this year. The game play is a perfect replica! 🕹

Sun, 21 Jun 2020 07:51:30 -0500

We had a great day yesterday with my stepdad Bruce, sister Alona, and nephew Garrett! The kids had a great time in the pool! 🏊‍♂️

Break for video games. 🕹

And a fabulous boat ride around the lake! 🛥

Wed, 17 Jun 2020 21:39:52 -0500

Game of Life with the kids tonight. 🎲

Dad: $2,710,100
Tyler: $5,000,000
Mazie: $3,300,000

Fri, 22 May 2020 20:24:52 -0500

Tyler has gotten to Calamity Ganon in Legend of Zelda. Super difficult stage. He’s not going to finish him tonight.

Numskull Ms. PAC-MAN

Thu, 30 Apr 2020 22:07:20 -0500

Tammy loves Ms. PAC-MAN so we got her this Quarter Arcade version for her birthday. It is a perfect replica, small and light but very well built. It even has a battery so you can play it anywhere. The joystick is surprisingly good with solid feedback. The whole family has been having fun playing a quick game. 🕹

Osmo Coding Duo

Wed, 15 Apr 2020 19:58:39 -0500

Osmo was running a sale recently and I decided to fill out our collection. We got the Hot Wheels™ MindRacers which I didn’t think was going to be that fun, but surprised me by being super fun to play together. I also ordered Coding Duo, in part because we already had Coding Awbie and Coding Jam, so Coding Duo was just another $15 to get two pieces to put it all together. Tyler fired up Coding Duo and has been having a lot of fun with it, and I am very impressed with what a learning experience this is.

Coding Duo uses all of the control pieces of both Coding Awbie and Coding Jam, and introduces the idea of having two characters that you write sequences of code for independently. To play the game, you have to write a distinct sequence of actions for each character, and to make it even more interesting each character has unique capabilities. To complete the levels, Tyler learned a bunch about debugging, getting the programs to interact with each other, and building complex sequences that interact with each other. You can also have two people play together by each writing a program of their own.

It is a very impressive learning environment. I would highly recommend it for any kids that want to explore logic and coding concepts.

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 18:26:56 -0500

We have most of the Osmo games, and today we got Osmo Hot Wheels™ MindRacers. Kids and adults are having fun!

Sat, 04 Apr 2020 13:27:55 -0500

We are in the middle of doing Get Knit’s “Stay at home Scavenger Hunt” today! The whole family is having a lot of fun!

Sat, 07 Mar 2020 16:52:24 -0500

Rummikub!

Ticket to Ride Japan

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 20:48:00 -0500

Our family enjoys playing Ticket to Ride and we have some of the expansion packs. When I saw the new Japan expansion pack I knew that was something we would like. We’ve now played both the Japan and Italy (the flip side) versions.

Japan

The Japan expansion pack is interesting because it introduces a new cooperative element to the game in the form of the bullet train. All players work together to build the bullet train, and in fact you are rewarded and penalized for how much or little you work on it. It’s like a game in a game. The bullet train can then be used by all players. It changes the game a lot and is a really fun way to play. I think this version of the game will reward players that draw a large number of tickets.

Italy

Italy is more traditional. There is no communal play like the bullet train. It introduces Fairies to the game to build water routes. It also has a bonus concept of connecting a large number of regions. It is fun, and if you enjoy Italy it’s fun to play with all of those cities. Gameplay is pretty standard.

Sun, 23 Feb 2020 09:25:08 -0500

Playing some Skittles this morning.

Sat, 15 Feb 2020 17:29:50 -0500

Finished my LEGO Yoda!

Sun, 02 Feb 2020 20:07:48 -0500

LEGO Masters could be a really fun show.

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 15:38:11 -0500

Put together one of the boards on the Pinbox 3000 the kids got for me. The action is surprisingly good for cardboard and rubber bands!

Fri, 27 Dec 2019 16:10:17 -0500

Enjoying Trekking The National Parks, new board game! Great for family and very fun that it is about the National Parks! 🥾🌲

Sun, 22 Dec 2019 00:17:12 -0500

We had fun doing a few rounds of lawn bowling inside at Pinstripes today. The lanes are too fast though, needs new turf.

Sun, 15 Dec 2019 11:25:12 -0500

How is it possible that LEGO and Pokémon haven’t created a collection of kits? People would buy them like crazy, and both companies would make a bunch of revenue. 🤷🏼‍♂️💸

Sat, 30 Nov 2019 23:51:30 -0500

Tammy gave the kids a lesson on crushing it in Ms. Pac-Man. 🎮🏆

Sat, 30 Nov 2019 23:49:44 -0500

Went to Victoria Burrow for some mini-golf and arcade games. The mini-golf is really nice, but not kitschy. The games were all in great shape. The pizza is also really good.

Thu, 24 Oct 2019 22:27:21 -0500

Tammy and I enjoyed Cabal tonight, from the Walking Shadow Theatre Company. Billed as a “Play with Puzzles”, it mixed actors, puzzle room concepts and an elaborate story. If you like puzzle rooms at all, this is highly recommended. 🎭🧩

Sat, 19 Oct 2019 13:17:00 -0500

Some bowling today at Thunder Alley XL in Grand Rapids! I struggled more than I would like to admit to get over 100. 😬🎳

Fri, 06 Sep 2019 19:46:59 -0500

Legend of Zelda: Links Awakening looks like a fun game. It should expand the Zelda universe to more casual players.

Sat, 20 Jul 2019 18:18:29 -0500

Embarrassingly, for over three years our foosball table was setup totally wrong! I fixed it today, and now it makes sense. That’s what I get for having some random dude set it up via Amazon installation. 😬

Mon, 01 Jul 2019 19:41:46 -0500

Rainy day at the lake so playing Rummikub. I won on the next turn. 😁

Sun, 05 May 2019 21:38:58 -0500

Had fun playing board games with friends today: Carcassonne and Betrayal at House on the Hill. 🎲

Wed, 20 Mar 2019 06:01:19 -0500

Joined #TeamSPS Melbourne for game night this evening. They even had a brand new copy of Ticket to Ride. Came in 2nd this time. Also had some Exploding Kittens going. 🎲🎮

Mon, 04 Mar 2019 22:49:04 -0500

I had a fun evening joining #TeamSPS Toronto for some board games! I came in a distant 4th in Ticket to Ride. 😢

Sun, 03 Mar 2019 00:15:22 -0500

Went axe throwing for the first time tonight and did this!

Sat, 02 Mar 2019 09:17:05 -0500

We had a fun time playing the Primetime Showdown at Game Show Battle Rooms last night! Lots of laughs! 🤣 Why couldn’t I think of a vegetable that starts with a “B”? 🙄

Sat, 16 Feb 2019 23:26:33 -0500

Tyler and I played in our first Pokémon friendly tournament today. I’m glad he knows what he’s doing!

Fri, 15 Feb 2019 19:53:04 -0500

Tetris 99 on the Switch is amazing! 🤩 So far my highest ranking is #4. I’ve never gotten into Battle Royale games, but I love Tetris, and this is crazy fun. 🎮

UGears Locomotive

Wed, 09 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0500

Over the holidays I assembled the UGears Steam Locomotive moving model. It was my second UGears project. I assembled the Chronograph a couple years ago. UGears models are very intricate and the working gears, mostly driven my rubber bands, add a fun aspect to them.

The Chronograph was 107 parts and the Locomotive is four times more at 443. I found the Chronograph directions confusing numerous times. The Locomotive was much more complex, but UGears has vastly improved their manuals.

I made one mistake with the side panels, putting them on the wrong side and reversing the text. I realized too late and didn’t want to try and disassemble it to fix it.

The Locomotive has an impressive set of gears. I haven’t had great luck getting the rubber bad “engine” to smoothly move the gears. You use a lot of candle wax as lubricant for the wooden gears, but mine catches too much to work reliably.

The coal car has doors that rise up when you move the lever on the side.

The doors that open and even a retractable ladder are nice details.

Here is the Locomotive sitting next to the Chronograph.

Sun, 06 Jan 2019 21:12:16 -0500

My daughter made me the most amazing birthday card! She made a broken laptop out of cardboard and I had to fix it by connecting cables and putting In the “backup email” to unlock her message! It was a puzzle on its own! So fabulous! 🧩🥳

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:26:00 -0500

Our family plays Clue every year on New Year’s Eve while we await the new year, and this year I actually won! 🧐😊

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 15:42:35 -0500

Played the last of our new Christmas board games, Azul. Fun hidden strategies. Didn’t make sense at first a lot of fun after we figured it out.

Sat, 29 Dec 2018 21:40:49 -0500

Tyler and I are having a great time with FIFA 19 on the Switch! This is the first sports game that I’ve enjoyed more than a couple times. 🕹

Wed, 26 Dec 2018 15:05:41 -0500

We played Photosynthesis for the first time and had a great time. Recommended game with a lot of strategy, but still playable by younger kids. 👍🏻

Sun, 23 Dec 2018 12:54:32 -0500

Tyler’s teaching me to play Pokémon and we figured poker chips work to track damage.

Sat, 17 Nov 2018 13:31:45 -0500

Monopoly “The .com Edition” can provide hours of entertainment just by looking at all the companies on the board.

Sat, 10 Nov 2018 14:15:28 -0500

Carcassonne is such a great game. Introduced the kids to it today.

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 20:42:01 -0500

The PIXL Magnetic Building System looks really cool. Backed it! Fun to see the Fidget Cube team back at it.

Sat, 20 Oct 2018 21:22:46 -0500

Settlers of Catan!

Sat, 20 Oct 2018 16:54:00 -0500

Fun (and chilly!) day playing Kubb and Mölkky at the Olson Family Weekend!

Kubb, king of lawn games. Still love this painted set I won at the US National Kubb Championship!

Tue, 18 Sep 2018 20:32:29 -0500

Upgraded Nintendo Switch to 6.0 and Tyler and I are trying out Switch Online. It’s fun to play Donkey Kong on yet another modern game platform. 🤓🕹

Sun, 09 Sep 2018 17:04:52 -0500

Bingo at Stanley’s!

Quest for Bingo Blackout victory thwarted again! ☹️

Sun, 02 Sep 2018 11:59:16 -0500

Rainy morning of Snap Circuits (#562 Solar Space War) and Turing Tumble (#18 Entanglement).

Sun, 12 Aug 2018 20:27:42 -0500

One of the best games for time on an airplane? Tetris! But it requires an Internet connection — for royalty payments! 😡

Sat, 04 Aug 2018 20:25:49 -0500

The kids had fun racing at RPM Raceway in Syracuse. I was impressed with their electric karts. Very cool! 🏎

Sat, 04 Aug 2018 12:33:20 -0500

Tyler and I still have fun with Pokémon GO! My Trainer Code is 9399 2668 4290 if you want to friend us. 🙌🏻

Thu, 19 Jul 2018 09:17:37 -0500

Backed Stages Card Game on Kickstarter, a grand tour bicycle race themed card game! 🚲

Sun, 15 Jul 2018 18:01:06 -0500

Just two numbers from the blackout Grand Prize on the bottom right sheet. Someone else won on the 54th number.

Sun, 15 Jul 2018 17:24:49 -0500

Bingo at Stanley’s!

Sun, 15 Jul 2018 08:14:44 -0500

We are having a lot of fun with our Turing Tumble, and the maker extensions of printing your own custom parts are very cool! 👏

Sun, 08 Jul 2018 17:26:46 -0500

My Turing Tumble games arrived! I’m looking forward to making some mechanical computers 👍🏻, maybe even with the kids! 😊

Mon, 02 Jul 2018 21:56:49 -0500

5-player Ticket to Ride tonight! Tyler and I were Blue Team. We played aggressively, but finished tied for 3rd. 🚂🚂🚂🚂🚂

Sun, 01 Jul 2018 09:18:03 -0500

Rainy morning 🌧, playing The Magic Labyrinth. 🎲 Fun game.

Sun, 17 Jun 2018 21:32:10 -0500

Mazie got Nintendo Labo for the Switch, and has been busy building her piano kit for hours and is having a blast. Labo is such a unique game experience. 👍🏻

Sun, 17 Jun 2018 20:58:45 -0500

The kids got me The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for Father’s day, so we are exploring tonight. 🤗

Sat, 02 Jun 2018 21:28:11 -0500

Introduced a bunch of new people to Skittles today. 👍🏻

Sun, 22 Apr 2018 20:05:18 -0500

Kids are all of a sudden into Beanie Boos. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Sun, 22 Apr 2018 08:20:54 -0500

The bishops on the “summer” side of our custom Chess set are Kubb players, of course.

Sun, 15 Apr 2018 12:01:05 -0500

Snow day seems like a good day to get the Z-Scale train out.

Model trains are always fun. Tyler and I are running the train yard today. Z-Scale is hard though.

Thu, 12 Apr 2018 23:07:41 -0500

First game of Tetris in years. Not bad! 🤗

Wed, 11 Apr 2018 20:02:13 -0500

Not entirely sure what friending on Nintendo Switch does, but if you do that sort of thing, I’m at SW-3175-6148-7804.

Sun, 18 Mar 2018 08:39:33 -0500

Getting crushed in UNO this morning. 🤪

Sat, 17 Mar 2018 23:24:29 -0500

Unlocked Izel in Alto’s Odyssey and set a new record run. 👍🏻

Thu, 08 Mar 2018 12:41:24 -0500

I got schooled today in ping pong 🏓 . Next time I need to practice up before I come to visit.

Tue, 27 Feb 2018 22:12:16 -0500

Still finding Alto’s Odyssey very fun. Great game! 👍🏻

Thu, 22 Feb 2018 22:05:18 -0500

Alto’s Odyssey is a beautiful game experience.

Sat, 27 Jan 2018 19:33:07 -0500

Ticket to Ride!

I win! 😊

Thu, 25 Jan 2018 22:00:06 -0500

Trying Dropmix for first time! Pretty cool — a musical trip!

Sun, 31 Dec 2017 22:43:29 -0500

Humbling game of Blokus! 😬

Sun, 31 Dec 2017 21:09:00 -0500

Time for family New Year’s Eve. Game of Clue is first up! 🎲

It was Mrs. Peacock in the Hall with a Wrench! 🔧

Sat, 30 Dec 2017 23:40:03 -0500

Tyler and I played Super Mario Odyssey through a few levels today and had a blast. The game is filled with little hidden gems. And playing as other characters with the hat is amazing. 👍🏻💯

Sat, 30 Dec 2017 14:41:32 -0500

First time playing Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries and liked it a lot. Limiting to only have 3 players, but fun routes and tunnels add challenges. Pairs well with snow and hot cocoa. 😊

Thu, 28 Dec 2017 11:09:46 -0500

Tyler and I did this LEGO Technic RC Tracked Racer. Very fun! One of the most impressive LEGO kits we’ve done.

Tue, 26 Dec 2017 22:11:48 -0500

Playing Prime Climb with the family. Interesting game. Sort of like Sorry. Lots of math!

Tue, 26 Dec 2017 21:05:24 -0500

Playing Maze Racers with the kids. Fun game.

Fri, 24 Nov 2017 17:18:31 -0500

Playing The .com Edition of Monopoly, of course. 😜 Hilarious tiles. Game starts with $1.5 billion per player. 💸 CBS MarketWatch has a tile, right next to Sun Microsystems!

Google and Amazon are not on The .com Edition Monopoly board. 🤷‍♂️

I had to buy Sun Microsystems in .com Monopoly. 💙

56k modem for the win! .com Monopoly. 😊

Mon, 06 Nov 2017 21:00:12 -0500

Tyler and I playing some Five Crowns.

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 19:54:17 -0500

Scenes from tonights #TeamSPS game night! I ran the Super Mario Kart tournament! Very competitive! 🏎🏆👍🏻

Sat, 23 Sep 2017 22:01:52 -0500

At cabin, kids in bed, Vodskey Moscow Mules, cribbage, tunes. 👍🏻

Sun, 17 Sep 2017 11:18:03 -0500

Learning how to play cribbage so I don’t lose my Minnesota cabin license. 😊

Sun, 17 Sep 2017 11:09:08 -0500

Mazie beat me at checkers with a passive aggressive strategy making it impossible for me to move. 😂

Sat, 12 Aug 2017 14:06:51 -0500

Tyler and I took the Pokemon Go Plus for a spin today and it definitely levels up your play.

Sat, 15 Jul 2017 13:52:58 -0500

So close! Shut the box.

Mon, 03 Jul 2017 20:44:06 -0500

Pickleball setup! Great fun. Still learning rules. 👍🏻

Sun, 02 Jul 2017 20:34:40 -0500

Ringer!

Sun, 02 Jul 2017 07:47:47 -0500

Big congratulations to Turing Tumble! Backer 369 of 4,198 and they overfunded the Kickstarter finishing at $404,071!

Fri, 30 Jun 2017 08:42:10 -0500

Ordering a Pickleball kit to try over the 4th of July at the cabin!

Thu, 29 Jun 2017 12:32:00 -0500

Trying Mölkky for the first time today. Fun alternative to Kubb. Everything is fun on the beach. 🏖

Mölkky requires counting skills.

Tue, 20 Jun 2017 19:29:28 -0500

Genius design for Pokémon themed bags boards.

Tue, 20 Jun 2017 19:21:09 -0500

Giant lawn dominoes? Haven’t seen this before. 🤔

Fri, 09 Jun 2017 21:02:47 -0500

Monument Valley 2 is really nice. High quality puzzle game.

Maker Faire 2017

Sat, 03 Jun 2017 12:00:00 -0500

Found a TARDIS at Maker Faire!

USS Missouri in Legos from Brickmania!

Got to congratulate Paul Boswell in person on his successful Kickstarter for Turing Tumble! Looking forward to getting mine!

Hanging with R2-D2 at Maker Faire.

Wed, 31 May 2017 20:11:22 -0500

Fidget spinner thing happened.

Sun, 28 May 2017 16:09:20 -0500

Trying to figure out how to throw a horseshoe. Still more work to do.

Sat, 27 May 2017 17:26:06 -0500

Got the bags out too. Quest to have all the yard games! 👍🏻😊

Sat, 27 May 2017 11:10:54 -0500

Horseshoes. Ringer!

Sat, 20 May 2017 17:49:54 -0500

Mazie and Tammy playing some Scrabble at Black Eye Coffee.

Horseshoe Pits Completed!

Wed, 17 May 2017 21:30:04 -0500

Last weekend we finished putting in the horseshoe pits at the cabin and I’m very pleased with the result!

We have a lot of yard games at the cabin and I though it would be a lot of fun to add horseshoes to the mix. I honestly didn’t think that much about it and put a horseshoe set on my wishlist for Christmas. After getting the set I realized I had bit off more than I realized.

I found a great site for horseshoe plans. My brother-in-law helped me get the wood and cutting done and unfortunately the winter came before I got it all done. We finished digging the pits into the ground this spring after the ground thawed.

I really like the throwing platforms and the backboard. This is a more complex pit than you absolutely have to have, but it’s really nice to play on. Now I just have to work on my game!

Sat, 13 May 2017 14:34:42 -0500

Got both horseshoe pits in!

Thu, 04 May 2017 06:03:30 -0500

This weekend I resumed my horseshoe project and got the platform dug in for one end. Looks great. I’m glad I went with the backboard and throwing platforms. Still need to do the other end and get the sand in.

Sun, 25 Dec 2016 23:46:27 -0500

Playing Super Mario Run? Friend me so I can see how poorly I’m doing. 😊

Sun, 25 Dec 2016 19:53:12 -0500

LEGO® Creator Winter Holiday Train assembled!

Sun, 13 Nov 2016 16:15:48 -0500

Just discovered lichess.org and am impressed. Analyzed game Isaiah and I played and learned a few things.

Thu, 03 Nov 2016 14:23:00 -0500

This digital pinball machine is so great. Would be fun to have one.

Sat, 03 Sep 2016 17:41:25 -0500

Progress on horseshoe pits! Still to do: putting them in the ground, sand, and throwing platform decks on.

Sun, 14 Aug 2016 13:04:47 -0500

Horseshoe pit backboards built!

Sat, 06 Aug 2016 10:17:02 -0500

Very impressed with Osmo! Having fun solving puzzles and the mix of real objects and game is really cool!

Sat, 21 May 2016 22:06:00 -0500

Ticket to Ride with Tammy, Isaiah, and Tiffany!

Sat, 02 Apr 2016 19:50:12 -0500

We’ve got a LEGO ringer on #TeamSPS!

Found one of my old models yesterday and got to work the old job for a day pic.twitter.com/vXWbwIQpL7
— John Kelly (@jkelly3) April 2, 2016

Sat, 12 Mar 2016 11:56:07 -0500

Trying different spots to put in horseshoe pits.

Mon, 07 Mar 2016 21:43:28 -0500

This summer I’ll have Basketball, Kubb, Horseshoes, Bags, Ladder Golf and “home” disc golf course at the cabin. Outside all day! 👍🏻😀

Mon, 07 Mar 2016 21:21:48 -0500

How to Build Backyard Horseshoe Pits ← “First rule of building backyard horseshoe pits — they are backyard horseshoe pits, chill out.” Ha! 😆

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 22:11:02 -0500

Most amazing slot car tracks I’ve ever seen! 8 lanes!

Great day for slots at Scale Model Supply pic.twitter.com/eOuIX51omX
— TK (@tkeekley) February 27, 2016

Sun, 14 Feb 2016 13:27:48 -0500

Model rockets were a blast yesterday!

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 16:59:01 -0500

Remembering how much fun Letterpress is! 🙂

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 07:16:39 -0500

I hope Hans Pinckaers will continue developing En Passant. One of few clean, non-adware chess app for iOS.

Pro RC Racing

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 01:00:00 -0500

Some friends sent me this video from a European Pro RC Race. It’s the most amazing thing ever! Worth a watch. Check out the speed, the passes and the jumps!

So much more they could be doing!

Where is the real-time telemetry for each car? I want to see scaled MPH for each car.
I’d love to see the G’s that they are taking on the turns. It seems like a guarantee that these cars are taking turns in a way that no human could actually do.
Where is the POV video from each car?! Must have streaming video from each car, imagine the POV shot when the aerial pass happens?

This would be even more fun, and those are just the immediate ideas that come to mind!

Sat, 30 Jan 2016 22:14:04 -0500

Fun, I didn’t realize the Mac version of Carcassonne for iOS was out. Playing a game in a background window sounds fun. Would be cool if when you comment/chat in Carcassonne you could specify a tile that the comment is about.

Sat, 23 Jan 2016 23:11:36 -0500

Ticket to Ride!

Sun, 17 Jan 2016 10:45:19 -0500

Don’t judge gaming on Apple TV until you try with a good controller like the Nimbus. Pretty impressive gameplay with it.

Sat, 02 Jan 2016 14:24:33 -0500

Cleared the back room in Skittles. 400+!

Skittles 575!

Thu, 31 Dec 2015 22:11:18 -0500

Blokus is a great game. I win on green.

Mon, 28 Dec 2015 22:05:05 -0500

Having a good amount of fun with the Wii U. This platform is a late bloomer.

Mon, 28 Dec 2015 20:44:00 -0500

LEGO® Creator MINI Cooper (1,077 pieces) done. Lots of moving pieces.

Sun, 27 Dec 2015 19:43:39 -0500

Playing Skittles and letting it rip. Fun!

Sun, 27 Dec 2015 11:03:46 -0500

About 50% done with LEGO® Mini Cooper.

Fri, 25 Dec 2015 13:26:00 -0500

Skittles and Mini Shuffle Board!

Thu, 24 Dec 2015 19:41:00 -0500

Horseshoes coming to the cabin this spring! National Horseshoe Players Association approved!

Sun, 01 Nov 2015 07:51:34 -0500

Playing Alto on Apple TV with the kids this morning. This is obviously a winner. Need more multiplayer stuff!

Sat, 31 Oct 2015 14:15:36 -0500

Impressed with new Apple TV.
Hmm, so which MFi controllers are good?
Seems crazy that you can’t see TV apps in AppStore on phone.
Playing Alto on TV is fun. Gaming has big potential on new Apple TV.
Side benefit of new Apple TV? Doesn’t come with tons of silly “channels” I didn’t want or even know what they were.
A graphic novel delivered via an Apple TV app could be pretty cool.

Sat, 23 May 2015 23:50:00 -0500

Alto’s Adventure. Awesome game. Great recommendation from MacSparky.

Sat, 16 May 2015 22:49:00 -0500

9-point turn in ladder golf against Jim Bernard today. 🏆

Fri, 24 Apr 2015 20:34:45 -0500

Tammy chipping away at this 5,000 piece puzzle. Looks crazy to me.

Sat, 28 Mar 2015 22:10:02 -0500

Wish these Dirt Quads were available when I was a kid! Super cool.

Blokus

Wed, 24 Dec 2014 01:00:00 -0500

I got Blokus for Christmas in the brother-in-law swap on the Olson side (thanks Max!). It’s a really fun game. Ultimately best suited for 4 players with a graceful way to play with 2 players. 3 players works but its not a great fit. The strategy of the game is to block other opponents off as they try to lay tiles down on the board. While Go players would probably cringe at the comparison it seems loosely related.

Lego Firetruck

Wed, 24 Dec 2014 01:00:00 -0500

Modern Legos seem so very different than the generic shapes I remember when I was a kid. Did Legos take over the plastic model scene from my childhood? These pieces are so specific to each solution. Very proprietary, in software terms. 😀

Sun, 16 Nov 2014 17:05:00 -0500

Model train clearing snow. Surprisingly awesome.

Classic Football

Fri, 03 Oct 2014 00:00:00 -0500

The kids are having a hard time considering this a game. I remember loving this the year I got it for Christmas!

Sun, 24 Aug 2014 09:08:00 -0500

Had no idea Raiden was available for iPad! Favorite arcade game ever!

Tue, 24 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0500

Having fun teaching Mazie and Tyler how to use a YoYo on vacation. Got myself a nice heavy one with low resistance and tons of spin.

Sat, 17 May 2014 17:25:00 -0500

At Nomad Pub Minneapolis for Burroughs Bocce Cup! Bocce is no Kubb, but still lots of fun. I wonder if PlanetBocce.com is available. 🙂

Tue, 06 May 2014 20:43:00 -0500

Playing Can’t Stop with Mazie and Tammy.

Sun, 09 Feb 2014 16:01:00 -0500

Z-Scale model train awesomeness with Tyler.

Sat, 25 Jan 2014 15:52:00 -0500

Z-Scale train.

Sat, 25 Jan 2014 09:27:00 -0500

Model train. Legos. Fun.

Wed, 22 Jan 2014 22:00:00 -0500

OMG yes! Miss Bolo!

@iandees: Someone please write a browser-based massively multiplayer Bolo game.

Sun, 12 Jan 2014 19:37:49 -0500

I just assume Amazon has everything. Then I search for Z-Scale model train stuff and nothing. 😒

Related: Seven years earlier.

Fri, 10 Jan 2014 23:16:52 -0500

I scored 318 points with “GOOBER” in SpellTower!

Thu, 02 Jan 2014 21:16:57 -0500

Kinetic Sand is weird and really cool.

Tue, 31 Dec 2013 22:38:00 -0500

Playing Clue with Mazie and Tammy. It’s about to get wild here on New Year’s Eve!

Tue, 24 Dec 2013 10:09:00 -0500

Hoping to get a multiplayer Carcassonne for iOS game “in person” at Christmas Eve.

Sun, 22 Dec 2013 20:05:11 -0500

Just reset a Furby Boom from a gross, farty “boy” to a new girl and got “joy to the world!” from Mazie’s friend. 😀

Sat, 23 Nov 2013 18:04:26 -0500

Remembering how epic the Green Machine was as a kid.

Sun, 17 Nov 2013 16:56:40 -0500

Resuming my Marklin Z-Scale model train layout project with the kids.

Fri, 08 Nov 2013 07:12:00 -0500

Fun to see some new Road Sign Math geeks after #TeamSPS meeting yesterday. 😀

Tue, 14 May 2013 19:35:00 -0500

Mazie and I just beat Super Mario World! Take that Bowser!

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 16:33:45 -0500

Played “labyrinthian” in my Letterpress game. Rest of the day will be easy.

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 12:34:00 -0500

Santa brought me a kickin’ Letterpress shirt! Nice!

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 22:42:44 -0500

A ridiculously long Letterpress battle with Tammy.

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 00:02:00 -0500

Played synchronicity in Letterpress. BAM! 😊

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 21:49:15 -0500

I wish there was a Mac version of Letterpress where I could have multiple games open at the same time.

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 23:49:00 -0500

I won a nice game of Lost Cities against Tom Keekley.

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 23:34:26 -0500

It would be nice if you could stash words in Letterpress that you want to remember for a future move.

It would be a lot of fun if you could “react” to the word your opponent played in Letterpress. Like the faces in Lost Cities.

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 09:08:49 -0500

There should be an Emoji version of Letterpress.

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 15:09:10 -0500

Surprised that Letterpress doesn’t have achievements.

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 21:38:00 -0500

Playing Lost Cities this way.

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 14:26:23 -0500

I win!

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 22:18:34 -0500

Please convince me I don’t need to try Minecraft.

Super Fort

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 01:00:00 -0500

This morning Mazie, Tyler and I built a super fort in the living room! Here is the view from inside!

It was awesome!

We anchored it on the couch and then built support structures with OGOBILD Kit Pod sets. For Christmas Mazie got one of these sets from Grandma and Grandpa Olson. These things were as much a toy for me as them it seemed. The only problem with the kit? There was only 30 poles and 10 connectors. We couldn’t build big enough.

So, on my 40th birthday I decided the kids each needed a present from me. Two OGOBILD Kit Pods later (Amazon) and we were ready to build! We made some pretty big structures but always wanted to turn them into forts. Sheets weren’t big enough, and they weighed too much. What to do?

Parachute!

Not just any parachute. A 20 foot parachute! I thought about getting the 12 foot one but it seemed like it could be too small. A few days later and we got to build some huge stuff and wrap it in an awesome parachute. More fun than you can shake a stick at!

Honestly the parachute is too big for inside use, but it has plenty of room to make forts out of. Plus it is pretty light so it hangs way better than a sheet. It’s still plenty durable for the kids and even Chase the dog. We had a great morning hanging out in the Super Fort.

Now we just need even more OGOBILD’s to make bigger stuff! Just kidding!

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:38:00 -0500

Awesome

@zacharyjohnson I made a video game for you. Play it now! Happy Halloween!

Sat, 14 May 2011 11:35:00 -0500

Just won the Change Game on 48¢!

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 21:21:51 -0500

I really wish there was a Tiny Wings version for the iPad.

Learning Carcassonne

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 01:00:00 -0500

I’ve been learning how to play Carcassonne with some friends. I had the fun experience tonight of playing Aaron, a buddy in Singapore. He took a break during lunch on the other side of the world. I stayed up later than planned.

I lost badly. It all turned when this city blew apart on me. Note the X on the board. Ugh!

Game Center First Impressions

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:53:16 -0500

I’m all setup on game center. Find me as “thingles”.

I’m curious to see what non-game things Game Center enables. What could Reeder do with it? Multiuser mind mapping with MindNode?

Very impressed with Game Center. And I’m not much of a gamer!

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 01:00:00 -0500

Five years ago today Road Sign Math launched. Someday I’ll get to rebuild it.

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 12:15:59 -0500

If you like fast word games you really need to play Word Crasher for the iPhone. It’s awesome!

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:57:48 -0500

Word Crasher is a great iPhone word game. Awesome game play!

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 20:48:16 -0500

In a room with not one, but two, people who have been on Jeopardy.

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Isn’t Hüsker Dü a band? What’s with the Hūsker Dū board game? I guess it’s all in the ū versus the ü.

Tetris Shower

Sun, 03 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500

A couple of months ago we decided to re-tile our downstairs bathroom shower. After 20 years the house had settled enough that there were notable cracks that we didn’t feel we could just caulk over. We pondered what to do with the tiling and considered a number of designs. Our friend that was helping Tammy with the design did a Tetris® concept and I loved it right away!

Making the pattern was both harder and easier than you would think. It was critical to me that the tile pattern be correct. I wanted all the game tiles in their normal, whole, shape. This meant that no line in the pattern could be completed, since it would be removed in the game. Making sure the tiles were logically correct was causing some challenges until I just decided to play several games of Quinn, a tetromino game for the Mac, and capture a number of boards. After I adjusted my head to playing Tetris specifically to not complete rows we got a few screenshots and put them together.

The completed bathroom tiles are logically correct. If you look closely you can see that there are empty tiles in all the rows. The top rows are all empty since the game is in progress, and there is a single tile in the process of falling.

The tiling was done by Terry Owens of Como Lake Carpentry, who also did our new garage shelves and a bunch of other projects for us. He’s awesome. We really dig the look of it, and it’s fun to have a colorful tile pattern that appears fairly random but is really a game.

PS: See the dust speck on my DSLR sensor? 😬

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Flight Control for the iPhone is still fun. And addictive!

Flight Control - Great iPhone Game

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500

This last weekend I grabbed a copy of Flight Control for my iPhone. It looked like the kind of game that I can get into. I like puzzle style games and have an affinity to 2D-gaming over 3D-gaming. I was pretty much immediately hooked.

The premise of Flight Control is simple. You have a top-down perspective of a landing field and you have to draw flight paths with your finger for each plane to land. There are different types of planes that fly at different speeds. Over time, the planes come faster and faster.

The game is addictive. I’ve now got a high score of 57 but am stumped how you get much past that.

View-Master

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500

I was flipping through the March 14th copy of The Economist and ran across “The final reel” story. Fisher-Price is no longer going to make the View-Master. It was an odd article. I felt rather sad. I think because I distinctly remember as a little boy looking through my own View-Master and being amazed at the images and also completely obsessed trying to figure out how it worked. The experience continued this summer as Mazie enjoyed looking at her very own View-Master.

Going forward kids will only be able to get reels of animated characters and other licensed, copyrighted characters for the View-Master.

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:00:00 -0500

Tetris Tiles ← Very cool tiles to do Tetris inspired layouts in your home!

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:02:00 -0500

Frenzic may be the best iPhone game yet. I liked it on the Mac too, but the touch interface is perfect.

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:47:00 -0500

Just won the Change Game on 36¢. Dime, 4 nickels, 6 pennies!

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:17:38 -0500

You now have to pay sales tax when you buy Wii Points? Huh…

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:42:34 -0500

Spore sounds so laborious I have a hard time reading all about it, much less even considering playing it.

Quordy - Awesome Game

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

I have been really impressed with the games landing on the iPhone AppStore recently. I’m hopeful that Apple is looking at the top selling applications and taking some notes. It is obvious that gaming is a big opportunity on the iPhone, and I think it should be a bigger one on the Mac desktop as well.

Tammy and I have been addicted to this newest game, Quordy (iTunes Link). Quordy is really similar to an existing game that I’m not going to name, but has letters on dice that you shake up and then make words by connecting letters. You figure it out. I like the game a lot, and Quordy is a great implementation on the iPhone. The touch interface is perfect for the game and its fun to shake the phone to start the board.

The best part of Quordy though is challenging your friends. It’s simple and easy to make your online profile in the game and then you can simply browse your address book and pick friends to play. The play is asynchronous which is key. You can check for challenges from friends, or make challenges and they can play when they have free time. There is a running tally of wins for each friend and you can see what words they guessed that you didn’t.

If you grab the game, send me a challenge!

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:46:00 -0500

Whoa – totally digging Quordy on AppStore. Would like to see some games coming out with network play.

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:30:36 -0500

I really wish that Quinn would come out for the iPhone. I don’t want to buy one of the lame Tetris apps out now.

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:21:16 -0500

Impressed with Trism. Nice game for iPhone!

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:42:35 -0500

I’m surprised Frenzic isn’t out for iPhone 2.0 yet. Would love to play it with a touch interface.

Sat, 03 May 2008 16:10:49 -0500

Sitting down for a game of Risk. I’ve only played this on the computer so far. “You don’t know real risk!”

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 11:11:14 -0500

Just got Mario Kart for the Wii!

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:00:00 -0500

Playing Magnetix with Mazie.

Wii Suggestion, Flickr!

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

One of the great things about the Wii is the built in support for the Internet. The freely available Opera browser for the Wii is perhaps one of the most usable “couch browsers” I’ve worked with (although, still not great to use).

Apple TV Take 2 added a really great Flickr channel so you can see your friends photos on Apple TV. It’s a lot of fun. This seems like a total layup for the Wii. The Wii already has an imminently useless Photo Channel that requires cards and such. How about a Flickr channel to gather friends around in the living room? Or even just a great screen saver for the Wii!

Looks great to me, how about it Nintendo?

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 19:00:00 -0500

Why isn’t there a Flickr channel on the Wii? This seems like such an obvious and easy thing. Please Yahoo and Nintendo, do this!

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 19:00:00 -0500

Just won the Change Game on $5.67!

It's a Wii Christmas

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 01:00:00 -0500

It’s very possible that my friends and family think I need to have more fun. There must have been a vast conspiracy to hit me with a bunch of new games for my Wii this year. And how completely great! Here are the additions to my Wii gaming library from this Christmas. These games are all new, so I haven’t played them extensively yet (unlike Guitar Hero III.

Super Mario Galaxy

How can you not like the Mario series, and with a game that is rated 5 stars by all the major publications (IGN: “The greatest Nintendo platformer ever?”) Super Mario Galaxy is a must have. Mario continues his never ending mission of saving Princess Peach from Bowser. Galaxy is set in space and you leap from various planets. It’s Mario in 3D which I’m usually not a huge fan of, but this is done really well. After about 10 minutes of setup you are into the game and having a great time. The integration with the Wii controls is intuitive and really nice, which you would expect from Nintendo anyway. Must have for any Wii owner.

Wii Zapper with Link’s Crossbow Training

This combo pack is really cool. The Wii Zapper is a plastic mold that you place the Wiimote and the Nunchuck into and in concert they make a gun. A really nice gun too. It’s a little small for a big guy like myself, but still really playable. I’d possibly actually enjoy a first-person shooter with this setup. The included game, Link’s Crossbow Training, is light on any story and really just filled with action for you to learn how to use the crossbow. I need to do some research on any other games that use the “zapper”, but it’s a very fun play. The lack of story insures that this will be a favorite when friends come over and just want to play the Wii for a little while.

Zack & Wiki Quest for Barbaros’ Treasure

Zack & Wiki is a ridiculous name for this game. It’s as if they went out of their way to find something that would discourage you from buying it. I didn’t even know about it until a friend of mine IM’d me a link to a review (IGN: “Buy it. Now.”) that was off the charts. After playing it for even a short while, I concur with the review. This is a great, fun game. The characters are well done, the game play is superb and you could easily see getting lost in it for hours. The game is setup sort of like a movie, so it has a decent amount of setup time and getting to know the plot. But even that is enjoyable. I highly recommend this game.

Super Paper Mario

As I said above about Galaxy, I’m not a huge fan of Mario in 3D. I still think of Mario in my old platform 2D world. Always going from left to right (always!). Paper was really interesting to me because it has much of that classic 2D platform experience. Again, there is a decent amount of setup in this game like Galaxy and Zack & Wiki. In fact, there is a lot of setup. I think it was 20 minutes before I was actually playing. The cool thing about paper is that the entire game world is both 2D and 3D. Early in the game you earn the ability to “flip” into 3D, but you can only do it for a little while at a time (like holding your breath underwater). The result is a game with puzzles that require you to flip and explore in order to proceed. Way cool! Plus, for some reason, to me the graphics look stellar in the 2D mode. I love the crisp and vibrant colors.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08

I’ve been a long-time fan of the Tiger Woods series. I’ve played the games on a couple of different consoles as well as versions for the PC and Mac. This is a great continuation of the series with wonderful adoption of the Wii control system. I can see this game being very playable right away, and in fact the intro sequence you run through to get familiar with the swing gets you almost all the way there. I don’t groove on the funky character customizations all that much, like different shirts and setting how long my facial hair is. I sort of yearn for integration with the Wii’s Mii system, but that doesn’t make sense since they are far too cartoon-like to appear at Augusta. I’m looking forward to playing this some more and if you are a fan of the series it’s worth it. (Note, I borrowed Tiger Woods PGA Tour ‘07 from a friend before and I would be hard pressed to tell the difference between ‘07 and ‘08. It’s likely not worth the cost if you already have last years edition.)

Beat Guitar Hero III on Medium

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 01:00:00 -0500

Big day today! I beat Guitar Hero III on medium. Wahoo!

I don’t think I’m even going to attempt hard. It just seems rather insane. I’ll be happy with this milestone and enjoy my medium fame.

If you want to play some time, my friend code is 5026 3031 4382.

Guitar Hero III - 497 Note Streak

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 01:00:00 -0500

I’m still having a blast on Guitar Hero III. I played for a while yesterday trying to clear some levels before the big Christmas Day extravaganza with my brother-in-laws where I expect much GH3 action. While playing I saw the notice for a 200 note streak pop up and freaked out. I knew I was hitting the song, but when it was all over…

497 note streak! That is on the medium difficulty in the 4th “level”. Unfortunately the Guitar Hero site doesn’t rank streaks so I have no idea how big of a number that is, but I thought it was pretty impressive! Check out my profile page if you want to prove this isn’t rigged. 🙂

Guitar Hero III Rocks the Wii

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 01:00:00 -0500

I’m totally obsessed with my Wii all over again and it’s because of Guitar Hero III - Legends of Rock. In between attempts to update my Wii software, I’ve been rocking out with Guitar Hero III. I can’t remember the last time I played a single game for over an hour – until now.

This is a seriously fun game. Think of Dance Dance Revolution, but without a silly dance pad and way better music. Oh, and I can actually play Guitar Hero, unlike DDR. It comes with a plastic “guitar controller” that you mount the Wiimote in and you start playing away. I was hooked pretty much instantly. It’s a must have Wii game, particularly for the air guitar sort.

If you are playing Guitar Hero already connect with my profile and let’s shred!

Nintendo Wii Servers Overloaded

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 01:00:00 -0500

It seems that delivering Wii’s to stores isn’t the only supply problem Nintendo has. Every time they release new versions of the software for the Wii, and even some of the pay titles available in the Wii Store, their servers get overloaded for days.

I tried updating my system a dozen times and it finally just worked today, a few days after the update went out. I still can’t get some of the titles in the Wii Store to successfully download. I’m trying to get Check Mii Out now and that fails on every attempt. It spits out these errors about your network setup, but it’s really just that their servers are totally overloaded.

Somebody at Nintendo needs to wake up and sign a deal with a content distribution network.

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 19:00:00 -0500

Just finished a night of Wii gaming and Apple geekery with my friend Chad.

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 19:00:00 -0500

Just ordered a Ball of Whacks.

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:00:00 -0500

Missed a Change Game win by 1¢!

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 19:00:00 -0500

Just edited and posted the first-ever player written post on Road Sign Math.

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 19:00:00 -0500

Just played a bit of network Battle Tetris. Wow!

Mario Strikers Charged for Wii

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

I just got this game. I'm a total "noob" and am horrible, but if you want a laugh my friend code is 232036 674634. We'll see how I do with this, I'm not great at the Madden games and this is a sports game, but it's got a lot of play in it.

I’m not really understanding why Strikers doesn’t just use whatever existing friend connections I’ve established on my Wii. I’m excited about Super Mario Kart coming to the Wii later this year, and am now wondering if it to will have a 12 digit friend code. We’re going to drowned in ridiculously long strings of numbers on the Wii!

By the way, my Wii system code is 4563 6523 0984 7710. That’s really easy to remember too right? It feels like I have a bunch of old Compuserve email addresses. :-)

Sun, 05 Aug 2007 19:00:00 -0500

Tammy is getting addicted to Frenzic.

Frenzic and Quinn

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

I’m not a big gamer — and I’m really not a FPS (first person shooter) gamer. I’ll pass on Quake and all of its descendants. But, I do like puzzle games a lot. Here are two must have high-brain-function games for the Mac. Go grab these games and make sure you’ve got a bit of time to spare.

Quinn

I’ve loved Tetris® ever since I first played it in junior high! The game is simplicity at it’s finest, and presents the impossible challenge of infinitely fast tiles dropping down on you. Quinn is a stellar game that is not Tetris, but is a game where tiles drop down. It’s awesome. I find that I enter a near trance-like state while playing Quinn. Quinn is even free, and comes with a standalone server that you can start on your local network and play multi-player games with your friends and family! Or, hop onto some of the public Quinn servers and play people around the world.

Frenzic

Frenzic is a new game where you place slices of pies together and try to complete them to score points. It’s very similar in game play to Quinn. The game speeds up as you play, and placement can be very difficult. I’m new to this game but am already getting pretty addicted to it. It’s very hard, and has a bit more strategy to it then Tetris. Frenzic isn’t free, but the cost is pretty low and comes with an online ranking system.

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:00:00 -0500

Playing Tetris over the network with Tammy.

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 19:00:00 -0500

Game Over: 65,265 points – 226 lines.

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 19:00:00 -0500

Tiger Woods for Wii rocks!

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 19:00:00 -0500

just installed the newly released Opera Browser on the Nintendo Wii and twittering from it!

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 19:00:00 -0500

Won the Change Game!

Everyone Votes on Wii

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 01:00:00 -0500

Can I just take a moment to say that I’m hugely impressed with what Nintendo is doing with the Wii. I fired up my Wii tonight just to play for a bit and decided to do a system update. I wasn’t expecting one, but found 2.0U was available. I then stumbled into the Shopping Channel and found a new free download in Wii Ware called Everyone Votes. Today was the first day it was available, and I hadn’t heard anything about this.

There is nothing amazing about this new game, but I think it flexes the muscle of the Wii so well. The premise is simple, you answer either/or questions and then predict what everyone else will answer. You play with your Mii. Questions are bounded in regions (states for the US). There are also international questions and you can even suggest questions.

I answered the launch questions and suggested another question. I just love that Nintendo is really thinking “outside the box” as it were with the Wii. No other game manufacturer would think of something like Everyone Votes.

Links to more about Everyone Votes: Wii Nation, Wii Nintendo, Go Nintendo.

Note, you have to do a system update to 2.0U in order to install this. Make sure to do an update before going to the shopping channel.

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 19:00:00 -0500

Realizing it is almost impossible to find Z-scale model train stuff locally.

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 19:00:00 -0500

Looking at Z-Scale trains at Hub Hobby.

We Love the Wii

Tue, 26 Dec 2006 01:00:00 -0500

I’ve been wanting to use that headline for a while now. ;-) The Wii made the trip to North Dakota for Christmas. I wasn’t planning on taking it but then some of my cousins got wind that I had one of these prized units and suggested I bring it. It was a huge hit. The little Wii served over 9 hours of playtime on December 25th – by far the longest workout it has ever gotten.

It’s really amazing to watch people that never have any interest in video games playing a Wii and liking it so much. Wii Sports, the free “in box” game was the biggest hit of the day. The fact that it requires no experience to play, you just pick it up and go, makes it a big winner with people that are just getting acquainted with the Wii and it’s free motion controls. We even made a number of Mii’s for some of my relatives and everyone had a blast making them look as close to the person as they could.

I also scored two new games for my Wii: Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz and Red Steel. I only played a few minutes of Super Monkey Ball myself hitting a few of the party games. The game has a lot of promise. i played Red Steel for about 20 minutes and it was pretty good. I’m not a fan of most first-person shooters, but this was actually controllable and again the free motion controls made it easy to work with.

In other Wii related news I grabbed the preview of the Internet Channel for it. I was really impressed with it. First off, Nintendo did the right thing by not making their own and getting Opera to build a Wii version. Secondly, the speed is much better than I expected. I’ve always felt the “Internet” features on the Wii were really slow, but it must be something on the Nintendo side since the browser itself was very usable. It even plays flash video, making it a great YouTube surfing station.

Wii Component Cables

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 01:00:00 -0500

My component cables arrived for the Wii today. I finally was able to move off the incredibly lame composite connection and 480i to a nice crisp component connection and 480p. I know that this is a much better setup, and I eagerly plugged it in and decided to get my camera out and do some before/after comparisons. While I can tell the difference, it’s not as striking as I expected. These shots are all taken from the Wii menu screen. I took photos of the “disc” channel and of the Mii channel. I also took a photo of the Wii settings button on the lower left corner of the screen. See what you think.

480i composite of Wii logo in the Disc Channel

480p component of Wii logo in the Disc Channel

You can tell that the progressive scan smooths out the fonts a bit.

480i composite of Mii Channel

480p component of Mii Channel

Great example that when you are not “super-zoomed” into the image, you can’t really tell much of a difference.

480i composite of lower-left Wii settings button

480p component of lower-left Wii settings button

This extreme zoom shows the best the differences between the two settings.

There are other write-ups about the component cables that show the differences.

Wii Meets the Family

Sat, 25 Nov 2006 01:00:00 -0500

Releasing the Wii shortly before Thanksgiving was a brilliant move by Nintendo. I’m sure thousands of Wii’s accompanied their proud owners on Thanksgiving trips to relatives houses where they were quickly added to the wishlists of others.

I brought mine to the Olson family thanksgiving morning and 3 hours of game play quickly swept by. Kudos to Nintendo for making a game that people in their early 20s enjoy, as well as those in their early 60s. The Wii was a huge hit with everyone taking turns playing Wii Sports.

Prediction: The Wii is going to dominate the console market in units sold by a factor of 2 on it’s nearest rival.

The Kindness of Strangers

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 01:00:00 -0500

So, you don’t just walk into a store and get a Wii on the very day it comes out. This morning just before 8am Tammy suggested we should run to Target and check things out. We got there just after 8 and there was clearly a crowd present. Upon entering the store our hopes were dashed. There were well over 100 people in line and they had given out tickets to those that had been camped out all night.

No ticket, no Wii. There were 80 tickets, plus more people that didn’t have tickets and a miserly 60 Wii’s in stock to sell.

As we were standing at the end of the line, my hopes dashed, this scruffy dude said “You need a ticket?” “Yeah,” Tammy quickly replied. He handed over one of the tickets, and not just any ticket, it was ticket #9!

Moral Dilema

Now, here we are with Ticket #9. We didn’t do much of anything for this other than respond to a guy that obviously looked like he had spent the whole night outside. Dozens of people further ahead in line had just watched this guy walk buy and not responded to his query. He wasn’t being shy that he had an extra one. Do we take it and get a Wii?

You bet we do. :-) Wasn’t that hard to get over. We went right up to the front of the line and they were taking anyone with tickets less than 17. We inserted at the front with our stuff and were on our way, Wii in hand.

Thank you kind anonymous dude with an extra ticket. Wish I could have given him something, some cash or anything. I have no idea how he had an extra ticket. Perhaps a friend of his camped in line just for fun? Or maybe they forgot to take it from him? Who knows…

I’m curious – would you have done the same? Or would the boy scout in you kept you from getting such unearned gains?

Wii In The House!

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 01:00:00 -0500

Wii is in the house! Yeah!

Okay, so it only took about a week for me to turn into a total fanboy in regards to the Wii. Really, I became a bit obsessed with it. (This is when the folks that know me pretty good shake their heads back and forth.) Alright, enough about me, how about the Wii?

I played with it for a little bit today and the most impressive thing is the controller. The “free motion” moves are pretty amazing and bring you into the gameplay in a way that no other game system ever has. Tammy and I spent the first hour with the game just playing the included Wii Sports. Tennis, boxing, even bowling are pretty fun and the motions are life like.

Tonight I spent a bit of time with Madden 07 and again the motions of the controller made the gameplay so much cooler. To pass the ball, you throw your hand. To kick, you swing your arm. Very nice.

I got Zelda, Madden and Rayman with the unit. Haven’t played Zelda yet, saving that for when there is more time. First impression of the Wii – it’s a winner.

PS: The order that Tammy placed got canceled. They apparently didn’t have enough units.

PS3 and Wii Bananza

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 01:00:00 -0500

My friend Chad brought over his brand new Playstation 3 today and I got my first taste of the hardcore gamer dream machine. The graphics are stunning, particularly when paired with a nice high-end HDTV. The games were obviously first generation and I’m sure they will get progressively better over the coming months. However, not my kind of gaming system. Very focused on first-person shooter type games.

On the Wii front, Tammy decided that I had become enough of a “fanboy” over the Wii lately that she ordered me one. I’m hoping it will be here before Thanksgiving for some family fun waving the Wii controller around in the air.

Wii Obsession?

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 01:00:00 -0500

I’m not a gamer.

Starting a post titled “Wii Obsession?” with a statement like “I’m not a gamer” may seem like denial, but it really isn’t. If I’m looking for a fun time at my computer I’m most likely going to play around with some new software, do something on one of my websites, or blather on my blog. I don’t even follow the console gaming world with the exception of information that I get just by being around people I know.

However, I’m really fascinated with the soon to be released Nintendo Wii. I love that Nintendo is zigging, while Sony and Microsoft zag. Instead of going for more, bigger, faster, better Nintendo is focusing on game play and quality entertainment. The crazy remote that the Wii comes with is a big departure, and I think it will pay off. I read about the radical departure of the Wii in the Economist of all places.

Tammy and I got a Nintendo DS a number of months ago and we have had a lot of fun with it. A big part of the fun is different games enabled by a stylus and built-in mic. The Wii’s controllers enable tennis and boxing games where you actually swing your arms around. How fun! The Wii will also pair wireless with the existing DS which could create some interesting gaming options as well.

I’ve made it clear that a Wii would be a welcome Christmas present, however they will not be trivial to get. Who knows, I may yet go back on the promise I made myself years ago – no more consoles!

Brain Games

Sun, 30 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0500

We got the Nintendo DS because we liked these brain games. We bought both Brain Age and Big Brain Academy. As if you care , here are my comments on the games.

Brain Age

Brain Age is slow to impress, but opens up a lot as you start to play it more and more. The game feels well grounded in research, and in general the puzzles get plenty hard fast enough. The game does a very good job of introducing random elements into it, and even though multiple people don’t play it at the same time, it brings data from other people playing Brain Age into the sessions. For example, when I finished the math quiz today it told me that Tammy did a better job than I did. This resulted in me doing the quiz over and over until I beat her of course. Great encouragement.

One of the really fun things about Brain Age is it’s use of voice recognition. Some of the puzzles require you to speak to identify things and it does a good job of interpreting you. Last, the included Sudoku game is very well done. All in, this is a lot of fun.

Big Brain Academy

Big Brain Academy is more game-like than Brain Age. The characters are almost goofy looking, and the games seem more like parlour tricks than well researched logic tests. However, it is a lot of fun as well. It allows multiple player profiles, but doesn’t tie them together in anyway to create competition. It doesn’t use handwriting recognition or speech. The puzzles do get very difficult and it is certainly taxing, but not as well executed as Brain Age.

The winner is…

Honestly, if you like puzzles, get both. They are different enough that they are both worth having. However, Brain Age is definitely superior in almost all dimensions – even without the Sudoku game.

Nintendo DS Lite

Sun, 30 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Yesterday we were at Best Buy on my occassional visit to wonder around the store and just check stuff out. Tammy finds these trips annoying since I rarely buy anything, and after 5 minutes decide to leave. Yesterday though I decided to check out the gaming aisles and stumbled on the Nintendo DS. I had read about these “brain games” for the DS in Scientific American Mind magazine and was intrigued. They had one of these on the demo unit so we played it, and it was pretty fun. 10 minutes later we walked out of the store with a DS Lite and three games.

I decided that my ban on ever buying a gaming console again (at least until Mazie is old enough to find it fun) was not applicable since this is a portable unit. So far, it’s a lot of fun and the portability makes a great for flights. The initial set of games we got were Brain Age, Big Brain Academy and Super Mario Bros. Now it’s time to start looking up information on hacking the DS! 🙂

Wordplay

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Last night Mazie’s aunt came over and babysat while Tammy and I went out for a “classic” date – dinner and a movie. We went to Wordplay at the Edina Theater. It was a fun movie all about the world of crossword puzzles. Sound like a topic that doesn’t really deserve a movie? Well, that just means you aren’t aware of the annual crossword puzzle tournament and the ridiculous speed at which some people solve a crossword puzzle (just over 2 minutes!).

The movie was great, and particularly fun for me since I have so many geeky hobbies: rc helicopter? rc cars? telescopes? home network? solar power? Watching Wordplay is like getting a 90 minute pass into this world of crossword puzzles. To an extent, you could envision a movie about one of your geeky hobbies with you in the hotel convention center talking to the guy about how amazing your telescope, helicopter, car is.

Fun, lighthearted movie.

T-Rex Flying

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 20:32:00 -0500

This last weekend I finally said “uncle” and took my T-Rex to Hobby Warehouse in Richfield to get some help from the experts there and get my helicopter flying. There was a guy there, Rudy, who was awesome. He’s been flying RC helicopters for 12 years and has a T-Rex as well. He spent about 2 hours on my machine and got it working great!

The picture above is the helicopter I have. The picture doesn’t have the electronics on it, just the base frame and mechanical parts. After two hours with the pros it was going and I headed home to try on my own. The first encounter was not very successful – I never got off the ground but also didn’t have any major crashes.

The next day, Sunday, I took it to my father-in-laws for Easter. He’s been obsessed with heli’s as well. He emptied the garage so I we could play without the wind. After about a minute I took a hard landing and broke the base plate where the battery was connected. After we rigged a clothes hangar so I could strap the battery on we were flying again. After a while I got to the point where I could fly outside with a decent amount of wind. Until I had a decent crash at the end.

I ended up with a hard crash and a slew of parts needed. I broke the gears in two of my servos (Hitec HS-65HB), bent the tail, cracked the bottom plate, shredded the canopy. I got parts and spent last night fixing.

Tonight I went out and I was flying great! Hovering like a pro, things were really in control, until the very end. I was running low on battery and I came down too hard. The blades came down too far and one of the blades sheared right through my new carbon tail! Ouch!

The damage looks worse than from the weekend, but it’s all in the tail. I’m still in the phase where every trip off the ground with the heli is followed by a trip to the hobby shop. I’ll have to replace the tail, stabilizer bars and a couple other things. I should be flying again this weekend.

T-Rex Assembled

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 01:00:00 -0500

I just spent the last 4 hours assembling my Align T-Rex 450SE. Luckily I got the high-end one that comes 80% pre-assembled. That is why it was 4 hours rather than 40. Man are the parts small. Physically this helicopter is all together, and I’ve even slapped the electronics on it, but now I need to wire it all up. Time to break out the soldering iron and then start getting it all “setup”. That means getting everything just so and finally able to fly with the thing. I expect this process to take close to infinite time. 🙂

I’ll get another update when I have some breakthrough. I got the Reflex XTR training software for my PC and I’m hoping the actual helicopter is a bit easier to fly than the trainer, or that I had the trainer setup wrong. I crashed over and over and over.

Oh, and I got a new video solution for the remote control stuff. I’ll see if I can get a test video out sometime soon.

First Attempt at RC Camera

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 01:00:00 -0500

Yesterday I received my recent order from Helidirect, a wireless video camera. This little toy is to be put on-board of various radio control things to record video from the car, helicopter or whatever. I gave it a run for the money today, the results weren’t great, but I’m encouraged that it can get much better. Feel free to jump to the videos right away.

Find video `heli-20060212`.

Find video `car-20060212`.

I have to figure some things out. First of all, the E-Sky Llama was almost impossible to fly with the 27g of the video camera and the 9v battery strapped to it. It did get off the ground, but it took a lot of force. The T-Rex I just ordered wont suffer this problem, but as it is, not really flyable to any extent. The other issue was my mount on both helicopter and my nitro car. I just slapped it on there which didn’t work so hot. First of all, the car throws a lot of force around and the 9v battery flew off the car. On the heli, there is a lot of vibration that messes with the picture. I also think I need to deal with interference off of the electric motor.

I plan on working on this a bit. Need to develop a real mount that attaches to the car/heli for real, along with a battery carrier. I’m hopeful that will get rid of a lot of the video noise.

Sudoku

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 01:00:00 -0500

Have you played Sudoku (Wikipedia: Sudoku) yet? My mother turned me onto it. She figured I would like it in part because I like math. Turns out there really isn’t any math to Sudoku, but there are a lot of numbers and that can be fun. Sudoku reminds me a lot of Minesweeper, but it’s a lot more fun, and you get several “A-ha” moments while playing.

I would play it more, but it just burns time in a big way (hint: great for flights!) and I’ve already got a huge backlog of stuff I need/want to do.

RC Helicopter

Thu, 29 Dec 2005 01:00:00 -0500

My friend Chris, who is constantly finding new things to get into and get everyone he knows excited in, recently decided to turn his OCD towards RC helicopters.

In recent years helicopters have gotten much more approachable. Battery technology has evolved and you can now get a simple, ready-to-fly electric helicopter for a reasonable price. I picked up a E-Sky Lama 2 just like his from eBay a couple of weeks ago and have been having a blast!

First off, this helicopter is a toy more than a true RC helicopter. It’s small, about a foot long, and isn’t strong enough to fly outside unless it’s absolutely still. It is best suited for a large open-area in your house. It also can only carry it’s own weight. The first question most people have asked is “Can you strap a camera on it?” It’s surprising to me how many people ask this. Secondly, no, you need a bigger bird to do that with. (Chris just ordered a T-Rex, which can carry cargo and so much more. We’ll see how long I can hold out before upgrading.)

Even though it is a toy, it is a tremendous amount of fun after you learn to fly it. It took me about three 10 minute sessions before I could really hover with stability and not run into a variety of stuff. Now, after a few more sessions I have good control and am starting to make some maneuvers. My hope is to get to the point where I can race my father-in-law (he got one of these for Christmas from yours truly).

Change Game Setback

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0500

A friend and I got coffee today and the total came to $4.58.

I gave the person at the register a $10 bill and three pennies.

Expecting that I would then get a $5 bill, a quarter and two dimes.

Instead of the quarter and two dimes she gave me nine nickels! This sets me back in a huge way with the change game.

And you thought doing math on road signs was geeky? Ha!

RC Cars Live!

Sun, 17 Jul 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Some would say that I have too many hobbies. I can’t help it! Ifind most things (particularly things with gear) to be amazingly interesting. It’s just part of my personality. Ever since I was a kid I wanted to figure out how things work, and hobbies are great for exercising that desire.

About 5 years ago (really, 5 years) I got into remote control cars in a big way. I think another guy at the office (can’t remember who to blame offhand!) got one and then a few of us decided we all had to have one as well. We all got the HPI Racing RS4 MT with electric motor. The electric motor made these a lot easier to build and operate than the gas cars. We all got them running and had a few days of fun racing them around, jumping them and of course breaking them.

A subset of us thought this was all fun but wanted to get into the real thing, gas cars! I bought the HPI RTR Nitro RS4 and started to put it together. This all happened in about 2 months. I’m a little obsessive and when I focus on something, it’s all mine.

Then it stopped.

We didn’t get together to race them. One of the guys with a gas car got his working but then we all just kind of forgot this obsession and moved on to other things to assimilate. That was over four years ago. My gas car was only half put together.

One of the things about me and hobbies (err, obsessions) is that I may give them a break, but I rarely just leave them forever. A few weeks ago we were driving out of a grocery store by our house and there was a race track setup where guys were racing their RC cars. I announced to Tammy “I should get my cars going!”. A few shipments from RCHobbies.org later and I got everything going – including finishing and getting my gas car going – 5 years after I bought it! (It is now a discontinued model!)

I finished the gas one this weekend and primed the motor up. I’ve ran a few tanks of gas through it to break in the engine and tuned it up a bit, it’s working great. The electric car needed a new chassis plate so I replaced that and also took an opportunity to finish routing cables on it and re-tensioning the cable.

They are both a lot of fun to drive. I need to tune the gas one further, the steering isn’t quite in alignment and the clutch doesn’t release soon enough. I’ll get to that later, maybe four years from now. 🙂

Haiku

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 01:00:00 -0500

Driving with numbers
Patterns surround us, flowing
Enjoy Road Sign Math

Road Sign Math Launched!

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 02:00:00 -0500

I’ve been dreaming up this driving game for a long time and I finally decided to launch the website! This is pure geek joy. :-) Check out Road Sign Math! It will soon be sweeping the country from coast-to-coast…

Change Game

Thu, 25 Nov 2004 01:00:00 -0500

Introduction

When my wife and I decided to get married and start living together she found one of my habits to be a little annoying. It’s a habit that most guys have regarding change. Most guys probably have a jar, shoebox, or some other type of container that is filled with spare change. At the end of the day, you simply empty your pockets of change and put it in there. I had, over the years filled various containers full of change and every few years would lug it to the bank to be counted.

She didn’t think much of the boxes of change sitting around, so she tried to convince me to make a game out of using my change. Instead of thinking of all that spare change as a nuisance, it was a challenge to figure out how to use it in the right combinations. The goal of the game? To complete a cash transaction and have no change left in your pocket.

My slightly obsessive nature took this game and just ran with it of course! If you wish to play along, continue reading.

Recommended Equipment

The change game requires no equipment at all, but even intermediate players will find that their game play is improved with a simple coin purse. Here is an example of a leather coin purse that is ideal for the change game. Buy one here!

Coin purses can also be found in plastic, however they do not wear as well as the genuine leather type. This coin purse will allow you to keep your change organized, and by simply squeezing it’s sides the change game enthusiast can determine their change situation.

Rules

There are only a few rules to the change game.

The ‘Give a penny, take a penny’ tray is completely out-of-bounds for the change game. You may not deposit a penny, or any other coin, into it or use a coin from it in your transaction. Ever!
You cannot tip your way to a win. Simply taking the change you have and putting it in a tip jar disqualifies a win.
The value of the coin is irrelevent for the change game, you only care about the number of coins. Having three quarters is as close to winning as three pennies.
You win when you have no coins left!

Basic Strategy

When playing the change game you need to keep an eye on your current status. Strategically, certain combinations of coins are more likely to yield a win or be used quickly. Also, remember that small coins can be moved quickly.

For example, while 5 pennies are a lot of coins, you can use them very quickly as a nickel substitute.

A great tip while playing the change game is to combine nickels and dimes in place of quarters.

Advanced Strategy

To the uninitiated the change game can be a simple game of luck. It seems straightforward that you will have a set amount of change, hopefully less than $0.99, and the transaction will require change between $0.01 and $0.99. You have a 1 in 99 chance of winning. However, this assumes that the change required for transactions is evenly distributed.

To test wether this is indeed the case we analyzed 2,886 transactions over a 7 year period. These 2,886 transactions excluded restuarant bills (since they are typically rounded with a tip) and recurring payments or utility bills that would bias a specific cent value. We also excluded all transactions over $1,000 since it would be unlikely that cash would be used in such a transaction. The average transaction was $61.15 and the median was $35.29, with 1,850 of the samples being below $50, a very reasonable amount for a cash transaction. We then plotted the distribution of the change required for these transactions.

The distribution is not even. Nine values appear over 40 times in this analysis: $0.02, 0.04, 0.50, 0.80, 0.90, 0.94, 0.95, 0.98 and 0.99. While these 9 numbers only represent 9.1% of the possible winners, they are 15.8% of the transactions. In fact, if you just focus on the values above $0.90, those four values which only represent 4.0% of the possible outcomes are 7.8% of the actuals.

It is also clear that certain ranges or values should be avoided. There are nine more values that appear fewer than 20 times: $0.12, 0.27, 0.31, 0.33, 0.41, 0.58, 0.62, 0.66 and 0.74. While these should represent 9.1% of the winners, they actually are only 5.3%. Clearly combinations that should be avoided.

In general you can observe in the pattern that the range above $0.50 has a slightly higher likelihood of winning than the range below it.

Winning

You win the change game when you have depleted all of your coins. The coin purse on the left is an example of an ‘in play’ player and the coin purse on the right is after winning (the safety pin is not relevant to the change game).

Xbox Mod Night

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 01:00:00 -0500

Circuit boards, chinese takeout and ultrageek action. What can be more fun!? Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. 🙂

Operation was successful on the first try. Now it’s time to play with the software side of things. Big thanks to Chris and Chad! That nice soldering work is all Chris, can’t take any of the credit for that.

Got The Xbox

Wed, 27 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0500

After vowing to never buy another video game system ever again after dumping more money than I care to even think about into the Dreamcast a few years ago and before that into the cutting edge 3DO I finally broke down and bought an Xbox.

Why did I buy an Xbox then?

Mod Chips. The Xbox has proven to be one of the most modifiable consoles out there. For not a lot of money I can get a mod chip that snaps onto the board and replace the hard drive with a whopper 200G drive and instantly I’ve got a really fun, media center type PC.

You can FTP files to it, it can play music, photos, videos off of your network. You can copy entire movies to it, even entire Xbox games. How cool!

I just got the unit last night and am getting myself a mod chip now so I can rig it up with everything that I want. Out of the box it’s not all that exciting. Homebrew apps on your Xbox – very fun!

Paintball

Sat, 19 Jun 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Tammy and I went and played paintball today. It was pretty fun. Neither of us had done this before. Tammy actually brought the flag home for the victory in two different games. We played about 7 or 8 games throughout the day. My first game I played defense and didn’t even fire a shot. That was no fun. I also learned on the other side that Rambo tactics only work in the movies. Running and jumping over barriers with two guns blazing is just a quick way to get yourself out of the game.

Paintballs do sting a bit when they hit, but no welts to speak of. Quite a bit of fun. We played at Combat Zone which is about 90 minutes out of the cities up by St. Croix State Park (we were just there last weekend. It was a really well ran place and the people who ran it were good folks.

Huge thanks to Kristina Mauersberger for coordinating and herding all the cats to actually get this setup!