Welcome to 2025 and my wrap-up of 2024 along with my favorite things I experienced last year and a few other things that I liked a bit less. :)
2024 was a fairly typical year and I'm so happy for that. A lot happened, but very little in the way of major upheavals or changes. No major illnesses occurred, though I did start the year off with a spinal injection procedure to help with some back pain I was having the prior two years. It has helped quite a lot, but not completely cured it.
I got to go to Utah a couple of times this year for work and then to Las Vegas for a quick trip that allowed me to go see Meow Wolf's "Omega Mart" installation there. I had a blast! Then a new location opened in Houston and we took a trip to there the weekend before Thanksgiving to tour the site called "Radio Tave." In the summer we took a trip to Seattle with Jaden and Spencer. We go to see a lot of friends in the area, explore Pike's Market, take really fun boating day-trip, explore the MoPop museum, and visit the Funko headquarters.
Maria continues editing and reading in her spare time. She got to go to Ohio to meet a book/editing friend and attend an Anime Convention there. She liked it so much that she found one that was happening in Fort Worth on her birthday and we all went together to a surprisingly crowded and hugely attended show for something that I know almost nothing about. It was fun to people-watch with all the costumed cosplayers. Colin moved to his own apartment in Lewisville (about 30 minutes away from us) to be closer to his work in Grapevine. That allowed us to restructure their old bedroom into a new office/den/project/book repository/man-cave. We've had a lot of fun making over that room and Spencer helped quite a lot in painting and helping us organize while he has been in between work. Spencer soon after graduating university this year got in a wreck, broke his wrist, totaled his car and required some life directional changes. We let him borrow our car when this happened early summer while he recovered and until he could get a job and get back on his feet. Unfortunately for both of us, as of January, he still has my car. He's all healed up, but still looking for a job. We're hoping he can find something soon. Jaden started high school and is our sole child at home.
We maybe made a mistake and got talked into buying solar panels, it led to us replacing our roof, getting a new A/C unit, getting new gutters, and several other home replacements. Despite the promises, they do not work well enough that we are independent of the energy grid, even after we complained and they came out and added a couple more panels to our roof.
Anyway, here's the stuff I read/watched/played/listened to in 2024:
MUSIC
One of my biggest new obsessions that started this year came as a birthday present: a record player. Early this year we were cleaning out our garage and looking to pare down on all the boxes and storage containers. I decided it was time to sacrifice my CD collection. They've been gathering dust for years as we've moved entirely to mp3s and Spotify. So I made the hard call and packed most of them up (keeping the hard-to-find, rare, and sentimental favorites) to give away. Now after doing that, I suddenly find myself with an equal or greater collection of vinyl records. Other than a few records as a kid, I have never owned vinyl, nor ever considered it. It was a dead medium in the late 80s when I started collecting music on cassette tapes and then CDs. After Spencer expressed interest and getting him a player and some records a year before, I started to consider records. Especially since there are still certain albums and songs that I have never been able to get in CD or even on mp3 that still exist on vinyl. At first I figured I'd just get a few select albums and leave it as a novelty collection, but then my obsession began and now at the end of the year, my collection is approaching 400 albums and I have upgraded by record player 3 times, outgrown my record collection containers 4-5 times, and have built a fantastic listening station in our new office. I've had a lot of fun visiting antique stores, used book and media stores, and record shops along with scouring eBay, Discogs, and Facebook Marketplace looking for records and finding treasures. I even went to a Vinyl collector's convention this fall.
All that to say, this was not a typical year for me in finding *new* artists and music to listen to. It was very much a year looking back and finding not just records I knew I liked, but records that I didn't know about because they never quite migrated to cassette or CD when I was collecting music in the 90s. Or albums that I never owned before but maybe had collected on mp3 or added to my Spotify collection. I've also found a lot that aren't on any streaming platform and a few rarities that I've always wanted but have never been available in other forms like Freur's "Get Us Out of Here."
So here are a few of my favorite artists/songs/albums I listened to this year. Not all will be from 2024 because I spent much more time listening to older records.
- Jeffrey Whitehead - "Comfort & Joy"
Usually in my music list, I like to highlight any of my own songs that came out. Unfortunately it did not work out to finishing a Christmas song this year, so instead here's my brother Jeffrey's Christmas song that works as an excellent alternative.
- Flamingods - "Tall Glass"
Technically this album, "Head of Pomegranate" came out in 2023, but I re-discovered it when the band put out a deluxe version of the album in 2024 with a few extra songs. This album is amazing and has 9 full tracks of amazing killer songs in a row before the first "just okay" song finally arrives. Highly recommended! The only issue I have with the band is if you put "Flamingods" in any search engine it will just assume you mis-typed and actually meant Flamingos.
- I Don't Know How But They Found Me - "Gloomtown Brats"
This was from the album I was most looking forward to in 2024 and sadly I was mostly disappointed. While I liked this and a couple other songs from the album, there were too many songs I really did not care for and a lot that were just okay.
- Wooze - "Weapons of Mass Seduction"
- Circles Around the Sun with Mikaela Davis - "After Sunrise"
I thought I'd included this band before on a prior list, but I don't immediately see it. This is a self-described retro 70s "disco cosmonauts" instrumental band. The song here is a collaboration with a harpist Mikaela Davis and one of the first songs of theirs to feature vocals -- though no actual lyrics. They released this EP collaboration "After Sunrise" this past year, but I also highly recommend their albums including "Language" from 2023 and self-title "Circles Around the Sun" in 2020. I haven't made it to their other albums yet, but can recommend those above for sure. Imagine a band who took the disco version of the theme to "2001: A Space Odyssey" as their guiding light.
- My Life Story - "Running Out of Heartbeats"
My Life Story is a slightly obscure 90s BritPop band (at least to me in America). This song feels like it wouldn't be out of place from anything similar released between 1995-2000. Really good song.
- The Feeling - "War's Not Won"
- The Darkness - "The Longest Kiss"
I'd mostly given up on The Darkness. Their last couple albums passed by with only a couple of listens but nothing that interested me. Now they've released a couple singles leading up to their next album and I'm definitely interested. This definitely has some Queen "Seaside Rendezvous" influence.
- Mayo Shono - "Ai Ai Ai"
This is my greatest find of the year. It turns out that the full band of Oingo Boingo got hired by a Japanese artist to write and produce songs for one side of her record in 1982. So there is a secret Oingo Boingo album that I never knew about until I found it this year during my vinyl hunt scouring on eBay. Side A of this album is all Oingo Boingo with a different singer (though Danny Elfman does provide harmony and background vocals.) The video here is the entire Side A of the album.
- Martin Ansell - "Shine"
This is British artist from the 80s and this song appeared on the "Better Off Dead" soundtrack but also on an album that was never widely released called "The Englishman Abroad." I was able to track down the vinyl this year and enjoyed the album. It's one of the Rupert Hine produced artists that sounds like a spin-off of The Fixx like the band Eight Seconds that I recommended last year.
- Boys Wonder - "Come On Love"
This is a real interesting oddity. This was a random Spotify recommendation. As the song started playing blindly, I heard a throwback to Queen's "Hammer to Fall" and then some very retro BritPop verse and chorus. I looked at the album and it said it was from 2024. I thought it was amazing how well this band recaptured the 90s sound. Then looking into it further, it turns out this is a band from the 80s and this is a lost album that never got released until this year. Which means it's not retro BritPop, but proto BritPop. This band and music existed 5-10 years before Blur and other similar bands and it was being performed amid 80s synthpop. It's crazy that it both existed ahead of its time and way-way-way after!
Looking ahead to 2025, I mentioned in the songs above, but I'm looking forward to the first full album from Wooze, and the new album from The Darkness. And continuing to hunt for gems in my vinyl record collection. Just for future reference, I have 388 albums as of January 9th 2025. I'll compare that number next year though I don't think it will be a huge leap since I've got most of what I want already.
MOVIES
I watched a total of 228.5* movies in 2024, an increase from last year (206) which surprises me a bit. I watched 45.5* in theaters, a few more than last year's 40. Though I'm surprised it wasn't higher, but that was mostly because I skipped a lot of the big holiday moves this year that I wasn't interested in ("Red One," "Lion King:Mufasa," "Sonic 3", "Moana 2", and others.) I watched 51 newer movies at home, watched 63 new-to-me older movies, and re-watched 69 other movies.
(*The 1/2 movie is because I went to a secret movie screening, part of AMC's Screen Unseen that they were doing this year several times. One of those secret movies was a film called "Origin." After suffering through this annoying, directionless drama for over a half-hour, I abandoned the film and went to watch "Night Swim" instead. "Night Swim" was terrible, but it was a masterpiece in comparison to the other film.)
Here are some of my favorite movies last year:
- Hundreds of Beavers - This was by far my most favorite film last year. I watched it, then I set up a special viewing party and invited my older boys to come over for a movie night to watch it again. Then I showed it again to my sister in Utah when I visited. This movie only had a limited run in theaters but I don't think it ever played here. I had to find it online. I can't remember where it was first mentioned, but I really knew nothing about it when I started watching it other than it was almost like someone's home-made movie but with special effects and very silly. It took me a while to figure out what I was watching (as well as for the film to get going) but when it does, it is one of the most creative, original, hilariously funny, and imaginative films I've seen in years. The best I can describe it is someone has made a live-action classic Loony Tunes with all the gags from the best Road Runner or Tom and Jerry cartoons.
- The Beekeeper - Another one that I missed from the theaters. It looked like just another dumb Jason Statham action movie. And that's probably slightly accurate. But the "you've messed with the wrong man" premise and watching him beat up bad guys who deserved their beatings was a lot of fun. After watching this, I had to show it to Maria and then we followed it up with a multi-night movie marathon of other similar movies such as "Mr. Nobody," "Jack Reacher", "Deadpool", "Taken", "The Equalizer", and several others. Of them all, Maria liked "The Beekeeper" the best by far
- Road House - Speaking of messing with the wrong man. I really like this remake-that-didn't-need-to-be-made better than the original Patrick Swayze movie. There's always something enjoyable about a bunch of bullies taunting someone who, instead of getting angry, remains calm and even concerned about the health of the people he's punching while making sure he doesn't hurt them so much that they can't make it to the nearest hospital in time. The main character reminded me of Tom Cruise's character in "Knight and Day" who stayed up-beat and kept looking after the welfare of Cameron Diaz and others while dealing with intense shoot-outs and wild chases. Anyway, I had fun with this.
- Alien: Romulus - There've been a lot of films in the Alien universe. "Aliens" is one of my favorite films of all time. "Alien" itself is an all-time classic horror movie. I hate "Alien 3" and "Alien Resurrection." "AvP" was dumb and "AvP2" is mean-spirited and awful. "Prometheus" and "Alien: Covenant" had some interesting ideas and some great individual scenes, but overall didn't work for me--mostly because of how stupid the characters were in each of the movies. So where does "Romulus" sit? On first watch, it's better then everything since "Aliens." I'm not sure if it can stand with the first two, but it really wants to. Perhaps it's biggest issue is that it doesn't have its own identity, but tries its best to emulate the first two successful movies. Overall I enjoyed it, but I'm unsure if it will have a lasting impact on the Alien universe.
- Beetlejuice Beetlejuice - Speaking of sequels to old movies from the 80s. This was an unexpected and yet long-awaited sequel to Tim Burton's Beetlejuice, starring and made by most of the same people as the original film (minus Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis). It made me laugh a lot and it strongly invoked the feeling of the oddball Tim Burton of the 80s that I've missed since his original trifecta of "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure", "Beetlejuice", and "Edward Scissorhands." It has a lot of story problems, but I enjoyed the ride.
- Late Night With The Devil - A fun film with a unique premise of a live late night talk show in the 80s that is being held on Halloween night with several guests including a girl who is supposedly possessed. Needless to say, things go wrong. I loved the live-feel of the entire movie up until the very end where it deviates from its own premise.
- Argylle - This spy movie seemed to be universally hated this year and I'm not sure why. I quite enjoyed it. It was silly and dumb and over-the-top. There were some good twists and some dumb twists, but overall I liked it enough to watch it a second time with Maria later on streaming.
- Terrifier 3 - I can't recommend this movie. This is a horrible movie. Horrible, unwatchable things happen to a great many people in these films. And yet, as a horror movie, this did what horror films are supposed to do, make me scared. I was scared to watch this movie, yet somehow I survived. Art the Clown now stands next to Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers as the newest horror icon and deservedly so. At times he is laugh-out-loud funny and silly in his silent antics like a comedy mime or Mr. Bean, but then he quickly turns and the laughs turn to gasps. The most standout moment in my movie-going adventures this year was somebody laughing and giving a little clap at a moment when a bunch of greedy kids in a mall start ripping through Santa's sack only for one to find a booby-trapped present that turns out to be a bomb. Yes, it's horrifying but the explosion occurs off-screen. And it was also very funny in a dark, black comedy sort of way. Regardless, a man next to the guy who clapped got up and started yelling at the clapper, appalled that he would find the horrible death of children amusing in any way. (In his defense, it was presented as a gag.) I was in turn shocked that a guy sitting in a movie about a clown who tortures and mutilates people would be upset if someone enjoyed the movie! After the man tried to rile up the clapper several times, eventually he gave up and took his wife and walked out of the movie. I enjoyed that live interplay more than quite a few other movies I watched this year.
- Dune Part 2 - I enjoyed the spectacle of this film and that it concluded the first film which was never promoted as "Part 1" and so annoyed me when we were several hours in and I realized there was no way we'd get to the end of this in one movie. I need to go back and rewatch the two as a single film someday and see how it all holds together as a unit. It still takes a lot of work in figuring out what is actually happening in these films.
- The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare - This was an odd film. Sort of a World War II war movie mixed with an Ocean's 11 heist movie and with some James Bond spy thriller elements to boot. As long as you can accept that all Nazi's are bad and deserve to be killed in every way possible, this movie should be very enjoyable.
In 2025 I'm looking forward to the new "Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl" movie (spoiler, I already watched it and loved it! It should be near the top of my list for 2025.) I'm also most looking forward to "Paddington in Peru", "Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning", and the new "Fantastic Four" movie.
TV/STREAMING
It's getting more difficult to keep this category separate from Online Media and Podcasts. For this I usually keep to network and formal streaming sites such as NBC and ABC and Netflix and Disney+ vs free streaming sites like YouTube. For example, DropOut shows such as "Make Some Noise" and "Um, Actually" I've watched in the past on YouTube, but now I watch on their paid streaming service. Which category does that fit under? I'm putting it in the other category this year, but I may change or merge in the future.
Anyway, here's what I watched on my TV (+ laptop) this year:
- Taskmaster - Another year with Taskmaster being my favorite show. I did watch some other stuff, but this still is far and away my favorite show/property/universe. This year I watched 2 main UK series (S17 & S18), two New Years Treat specials (2024, 2025), Champion of Champions 3 (UK), 2 seasons of Taskmaster Australia (S2 & S3), and 2 of Taskmaster New Zealand (rewatched S1, and new S5). And I'm looking forward to even more in 2025.
- Guy Montgomery's Guy MontSpelling Bee - Guy Montgomery is a New Zealand comedian that I was introduced to as a contestant on S2 of New Zealand Taskmaster. He hosts a comedy panel Spelling Bee competition which sounds dumb, and it is, but in a very hilariously funny way. This is my new favorite comedy panel show. There've been two seasons in New Zealand and one in Australia.
- What We Do In The Shadows - The final season aired at the end of the year and it's sad to see it go. I never thought a TV version of the original film could work, but just like the US Office to the UK Office, the premise started the same but they went in their own directions which allowed them both to be their own unique thing. I really love them both.
- Avatar: The Last Airbender S1 - This live action version of the animated series replaces the terrible M Night Shyamalan attempt. I still prefer the cartoon, but I had fun seeing this series more successfully replicate the original source.
- High Potential - A pretty standard TV detective procedural series, but sometimes a mystery of the week is very appealing. I enjoyed the setup of a harried working single-mother who just happens to have a critical detailed eye for trivia a la Sherlock Holmes. She starts as an after-hours janitor at a police station, but notices details on a murder-board that are wrong and can't help but fix it and in so doing tampers with police work, but is soon discovered to be a very helpful critical eye the police can use in solving cases.
- Ludwig - Similar to High Potential, another mystery of the week. In this UK series, the twin brother of a missing police detective has to infiltrate the police department to try and figure where his brother disappeared to. The problem is he is normally a reclusive shut-in who prefers spending his days solving or making difficult sudokus, logic puzzles, and cryptic crosswords rather than interacting with the real world. So he uses his logic problem solving skills to solve mysteries he keeps getting called in for despite not being the real police detective.
- Comedy Panel Shows: Aside from Taskmaster, I still enjoy watching "Would I Lie To You", "8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown", "Rhod Gilbert's Growing Pains", "Big Fat Quiz of the Year" and others. I also watched and enjoyed a lot of the new revival "After Midnight" show in the US.
- Disney Plus Marvel and Star Wars: I continue to watch all the Disney+ Marvel and Star Wars series, but did not really enjoy any of them. This year I watched "Echo" (yuck) "Star Wars: The Acolyte" (interesting idea, but failed to connect with me.) "Agatha All Along" (ok, but a step down from the series she spun off from), " "Star Wars: Skeleton Crew" (still playing but slightly more enjoyable than the other series), and "What If..? Season 3" (not great.) For some reason all these shows are very, very dark and I'm not sure what it is with my computer or TV, but I have a hard time seeing what is going on a lot of the time. It's a problem with both the Marvel and Star Wars shows but I don't see anyone else complaining.
For 2025, I'm just looking forward to more Taskmaster. There's nothing else on my radar at the moment.
ONLINE MEDIA/PODCASTS
- Dropout Shows (formerly CollegeHumor) - "Game Changer", "Make Some Noise", "Um, Actually" and others. Jaden has really taken to these shows and so this is the one thing that I still watch with another person.
- RedLetterMedia/How Did This Get Made/With Gourley and Rust/We Hate Movies/Filmcast - These are all my movie-themed podcasts and shows. Both for current movies and older, usually bad films. These often dictate what movies I watch over the year.
- Ryan George/Pitch Meeting/Honest Trailers/Corridor Crew/Jet Lag/Geowizard - These are all YouTube channels with regularly released and well-produced content that I enjoyed watching.
- The George Lucas Talk Show/Star Wars Live Readings - It's not hard to explain the George Lucas Talk Show (comedy talk show with a George Lucas impersonator and a comedian playing a live version of Watto from "The Phantom Menace" talking to celebrity guests), but it is very hard to explain why this exists and is what it is. The show is nonsense and hilarious at the same time.
- One Stop Co-Op Shop/Waris Ali/CeePhour/Karl Jobst/Wakasm/Bageltop - These were all channels I regularly watch(ed) for board game plays and other related content.
No prediction for 2025, other than I've been shifting away from board games, so we'll see if I watch as much next year from that last sub-category.
VIDEO GAMES
I played on a variety of machines this year, though nothing new from last year: my phone, my laptop, my Steam Deck, Meta Quest VR, and the Switch. My Steam Deck was giving me a lot of problems this year and I had to send it in to get worked on. It kept me from playing very much on it especially as I was worried something I did would break it. Seems like a dumb Catch-22: If I play it I might break it and then I couldn't play it. But if I don't play it, then it's as good as broken anyway. At least it appears to be working better by year's end. Our Meta Quest had some problems too, which I'll talk about later. Steam introduced family sharing in the past year which allows full access to everyone's library in your family. With Colin, Spencer, and Jaden (and newly digitally-adopted cousin Richard) all avid Steam game collectors, I now have access to a giant library of games that I'll never exhaust playing if I never bought another game.
Phone/Online:
- Cracking the Cryptic - A series of Sudoku puzzles with different mechanical gimmicks that are a lot of fun and very challenging. This year I was introduced to "Fog Sudoku" where you can't see the entire board and have to use very minimal information to create paths by filling in correct digits to remove the fog and see more of the board. I actually Kickstarted a short digital novella with integrated Fog Sudoku puzzles and loved playing them this year.
- Earn to Die Rogue - This rogue-lite platformer is my biggest daily-grind time-waster this year. I can't really recommend it, but somehow it held my attention for months now.
- PuzzleTeam online puzzles - I've been visiting this puzzle collection site on and off for years now. This year I really got back into solving daily puzzles on this site. Specifically: Yin-Yang, Thermometers, Tents, Logic Minesweeper, Slant and Pipes. https://www.puzzle-pipes.com/
PC/Switch/Steam Deck
- Powerwash Simulator - The greatest game to just zone out to. Listen to a record, audio-book, or podcast, watch a TV show, pretend you are working. This game can accompany all those activities. It'd probably even make Sunday School go faster if I dared bring my Steam Deck to church. Maria introduced me to this as it is her biggest game obsession at the moment. I got my own copy and for Christmas got all the DLCs and it kept me company while I was sick all Christmas week. Looking forward to the upcoming Wallace & Gromit DLC.
- Tabletop Simulator - Once again the game with the most hours for the year, but much less so around the end of the year when my attention moved to other things.
- Balatro/Slay the Spire - I enjoyed both of these Rogue-style games this year. I'd played Slay the Spire before, but Balatro is brand new. Balatro was really interesting and a surprise in that it was almost entirely poker gameplay mechanics with very little outside of just playing the game. I didn't spend as much time as Colin did on either of these, but I had a lot of fun with them.
- Hogwarts Legacy - I played quite a few hours of this game and mildly enjoyed it, but am only midway through. It was interrupted by my Steam Deck issues and I haven't picked it back up in quite a few months to continue.
- Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown - I enjoyed playing this Metroidvania game but couldn't be bothered with the story. I had no idea what was happening in the game when the cutscenes occurred and the bits of lore and story and here that came in here and there just went over my head. It was fun enough to finish, but not enough to 100%.
VR
- Supernatural - This is a musical exercise game that I played very regularly until early summer when our Meta Quest 2 started dying. I eventually gathered up the nerve surgically replace the joysticks in both controllers and they seem to work much better now. I switched my off-running exercises to outdoor yard work over the summer, but restarted our subscription in December in anticipation of getting our new Meta Quest 3 which I'm really enjoying.
- Walkabout Mini Golf - I didn't play a lot of this game this year, but I have built up a back log of a lot of fun DLC. In December I played Wallace & Gromit and a Christmas themed course. With our new second VR headset, I was able to play simultaneously with Maria which we both really enjoyed.
- Taskmaster VR - Because of course I had to have this. This game was actually the main impetus on fixing our VR because I couldn't get past the opening training portion of the game due to our controllers not working correctly.
For 2025 I'm intrigued by the Switch 2 coming out and hope we finally get the new Metroid game.
BOARD GAMES
2024 was an interesting year in my board game journey. The explosion into this hobby started in 2019 and seemed to finally abate in 2024. It's not that I don't enjoy games any more, but that I have found that I have a really hard time getting people to want to play with me. There are still plenty of gatherings for board gamers, but they don't tend to play the games that I enjoy and I have never fully returned since COVID. I went to the spring BGGCon this year with Jaden and found that I barely played any games. On the other hand, Jaden found a group that they were able to run around and play with but that left me without a default gaming partner. There are still a lot of games that I love and a lot that I really enjoyed playing this year, but my game playing really tapered off by the end of the year.
I started the year getting into Print and Play solo games and put together my own little P&P binder game collection and Kickstarted a lot of cheaper make-at-home games. I prefer single print game-on-a-page style games that don't have a lot of extra components (I won't print/make any P&P card games.) Otherwise, most of what I played were solo games with a few exceptions.
Here's the favorites of what I played in 2024:
- Slay the Spire - This was my biggest game of the year and my game of the year. It is a beautiful translation of the video game into tabletop form. The game is a deck builder with unique characters that have their own decks and styles of play. A lot of reviews called it unnecessary and expensive when you can just play the video game for 1/20th the price. I can't argue with that point of view, but what it does offer that the digital version doesn't is multiplayer. Jaden, Colin and I played this many, many times and we enjoyed it every time. It is a 10 out of 10 masterpiece of a game for me. I played it solo dozens of times both on my table and on Tabletop Simulator. Then went back and started replaying the video game as well. It has a compelling unlock system that gets you to play it over and over again with each character along with increasing difficulty-level modifications to extend gameplay. I am not as masterful a player as Colin is, but I still have a lot of fun with it.
- Legendary: James Bond - No Time To Die, Marvel 2099, Marvel Weapon X, Marvel What If..?, Marvel Studios - Ant-Man and the Wasp, The Matrix - The Legendary Deck Building system is still one of my favorites and I enjoyed every new and old version of the game I played this year. I played all the James Bond variations multiple times in anticipation of the "No Time To Die" expansion so that was probably my most played single game of the year even excluding all Marvel or other themed Legendary sets.
- Frosthaven/Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs - The one regular game that I play with other people outside of my home is Frosthaven. Our campaign is extending into its third calendar year in 2025 and we are still just in the early part of the game. "Buttons and Bugs" was a new miniature solo version of Gloomhaven. I played quite a few times, but kept getting stuck in a mid-level scenario and having to start over as I realized I was playing the game wrong somewhere several times. I want to play more, and I really enjoy the game. There are quite a few characters and I've only played with one so far.
- Dangerous Space/Dungeon Pages - These are two print & play games that have new levels released regularly that I subscribed to. I really enjoyed the puzzle aspect where you roll dice and figure out what spaces to fit in as you wander around a Dungeon or Space Station to accomplish your various missions. I was a big enough fan that I actually became a play-tester. However, as my attention got pushed to other things this year, I silently let that drop. There's a new survival/zombie-themed game in the series for 2025, and hopefully I'll get back into it because they really are quite fun and probably the best Print & Play games I've experienced. I actually played many of them on my laptop using a PDF mark-up tool and a dice rolling app.
- Dorfromantik - This is a tile laying game where you are creating a beautiful little town and landscape by connecting hexagon tiles together. You build your landscape while accomplishing various random goals that pop up along the way. The game is relatively simple and easy to play, but gets very complicated quickly with all the things you have to juggle by the end. It's presented in a campaign format with boxes that you unlock and achievements that you stive for in a quest to get a higher and higher score. I also got "Dorfromantik: The Duel" and "Dorfromantik: Sakura" which play very similarly. I've just started playing Sakura with Jaden and Maria, while I played the original solo.
- Worms: The Board Game / Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game - Along with "Slay The Spire" these were two other Kickstarter board game recreations of popular video games. I've enjoyed playing both of them though not as much as I would like, and spent quite a lot of time painting dozens of really amazing Worms miniatures.
- 2024 Quest Calendar An Adventure-A-Day RPG - I had a lot of fun almost every morning going through this RPG a page at a time. I modified and developed a 3D printed base to hold the calendar, dice, booklet and pens along with an extendable drawer to roll dice in. Overall it was a fairly basic adventure that was mostly on rails with only little that I did to directly impact the story, but it was a fun morning activity which I am missing in 2025 as they were not ready in time to release a new calendar this year.
Anyway, 2025 I'm looking most forward to Final Girl Series 3, a new version of the Marvel Legendary Deck Building Game core set, Flash Point Legacy, and two Dice Throne games (X Men with Marvel Missions and Outcasts, at least one of which should be arriving soon.)
BOOKS
This year I read books! That's books with an 's' at the end, as in plural! I found a great new(ish) series that I devoured and then kept that momentum going for a few months afterwards. Here's what I read in 2024:
- Dungeon Crawler Carl (Books 1-6, started 7) - This is my new favorite book series. It's a silly premise but a lot of fun. One night the entire world is instantly flattened by an alien force and only people who were randomly outside of any structure at that moment survived. They were given the option to enter gates that go into a world-wide underground dungeon and then compete for an inter-galactic gameshow. Our hero, who was chasing a cat in the middle of the night in his boxer shorts, bare feet, and a jacket, enters the game not knowing what's going on and begins rising the ranks along with his now talking cat, who gains sentience in the dungeon, to become one of the highest ranked players. Each book follows them down one or two levels of the dungeon where the players can level up, choose things like their race, skills, abilities, and magic. I zipped through all six books in the early summer and then waited until fall when book 7 was released. I've been very slowly reading it knowing I've got another year or two before book 8.
- Fog of War (Sudoku Novella from Cracking the Cryptic) - I talked about this in my Games section above, but this was a really cool electronic novel with integrated Sudoku puzzles. I thoroughly enjoyed the games. The story itself was just okay.
- Murderbot Diaries - I read five of these books (1-4 and 6) waiting for these to get good after Maria and others had raved about them. I mostly read them on the extended momentum from finishing the Dungeon Crawler series. I just didn't like them at all. The first 4 were almost too short where a single thing happens in each book. The last was a full-sized novel, but I just never could get into it. I finally abandoned the series as not for me.
- Joyful Recollections of Trauma - Paul Scheer - I listen to Paul Scheer regularly on the "How Did This Get Made" podcast and enjoyed his shows like "Human Giant", "NTSF:SD:SUV::' This was a fun little collection of personal stories inspired from things he shared on his podcast.
Wrap up and 2025
So I guess that is it for 2024. My biggest hope for 2025 is another boring, uneventful year. I have some strong doubts but I would love to be wrong.
See you next year if we're all still here.
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