2011 is over!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

2011 is over. Time to sum up.

It has been a pretty good year creatively wise. Of course, I entered 2011 with much more/bigger/cooler projects in mind, but with family (wife and two young daughters), house (did a complete renovation of our kitchen this year), full-time occupation (with some overtime here and there) and other real-life duties, I'm still satisfied how the year turned out with gaming and hobby related projects.

Below is an attempt to list what I have been up to this year, and my thoughts of 2012.


Tabletop board/card gaming
I'm pretty happy with the number of board/card gaming sessions I managed to squeeze into year 2011. A few years back I started to track all my playing at the BoardGameGeek site, so here's a summary of what I have played during 2011 (the number within the parenthesis represents the number of times that particular game was played):

Warhammer: Invasion (x9)
Frontline D-Day (x6)
Manoeuvre (x6)
Space Hulk: Death Angel - The Card Game (x6)
Forbidden Island (x4)
Small World (x4)
Field Commander: Rommel (x3)
Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game (x2)
The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game (x2)
Race for the Galaxy (x2)
The Rivals for Catan (x2)
Empires in America (x1)
Hive (x1)
Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game (x1)
Terra Nova (x1)

Of the above games I played during 2011, my favorites are Warhammer, Space Hulk and Small World. Hopefully I will return to all of these three games many times during 2012. Had a chance to play Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game twice the last week, and that is also a game that I will have to dig into a little deeper during 2012. It was fun, yet a little bit more complex than its LCG cousin Warhammer: Invasion.

Then I have a couple of pure solitaire games waiting on the shelf, that I really need to bring out to the table. The most itching ones being Field Commander: Napoleon from DVG (have only tested it a little, during reading the rules) and D-Day at Omaha Beach from Decision Games (looks really neat, and heard only good things about it).


Tabletop role-playing
I found the Mythic Game Master Emulator (Mythic GME) (from Word Mill Games) this year -- an amazing find! Have started a long-term (solitaire) fantasy writing exercise using the Mythic GME in conjunction with the Story Engine (from Precis Intermedia). Will submit posts and more details of this project during 2012.


Tabletop miniature wargaming
Found Song of Blades and Heroes (from Ganesha Games). Love this fast-playing, easy and fun set of fantasy skirmish miniature rules, yet with plenty of depth. In fact, I love it so much, that I created a module that enables solitaire play -- SBH-SOLO. This happened during the Solo Tabletop Gaming Appreciation Month (November 2011). SBH-SOLO is downloadable from Google Docs here.

I started painting two 15mm warbands to use with Song of Blades and Heroes - humans and orcs/goblins. Did not succeed in completing the painting of those, so that will be one of the high prio tasks for 2012 to finsih them.

I created my first piece of miniature terrain, and have four more pieces in the pipe (currently doing painting of those; will submit photos when they are ready).


Video gaming
Started the play-through of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on my Nintendo 3DS. Have not yet managed to get all the way through, but I'm very impressed with the story, the graphics and the music. Extremely atmospheric.

For the 3DS, I also played quite a lot of Mario Kart DS (i.e. not the new Mario Kart 7, that is newly released for 3DS only, but the old DS version) and Ridge Racer 3D (a lot of fun, really fast, arcade racing in 3D -- recommended!).

On my Android (smart phone) I mostly played Angry Birds and Shadow Era (that I mentioned here) during 2011. For 2012, I will play Carcasonne and Elder Sign: Omens, and Neuroshima Hex, when it is released (covered in this post).


Music production
This is an area that became somewhat neglected due to my main focus being in tabletop gaming. But I do have several musical pieces very close to being finished. Will submit those on SoundCloud as soon as they are ready, and link them from this blog.


Misc. projects
Created the Demonic Lyric Generator -- a crazy product that randomly creates song lyrics using cards.

Plus, a lot of other minor obscure products/drawings/paintings/whatever, that I cannot fully recall at the moment!