And the words, they're everything and nothing

Today was supposed to be Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent, but I had an all-day meeting that left me quite short of spoons.

We wrapped up fantasy (and sci-fi) month with two new to us games. Leviathan Wilds came to us via trade after I foolishly (spoiler alert!) decided not to back it on crowdfunding. Storybook Saga I did back on crowdfunding. Both of these games came into the house this year so no lingering long on shelves for these titles!

Leviathan Wilds is Shadow of the Colossus the board game, except instead of destroying giant creatures, you're clearing corruption from them. The actual play is straightforward. You reveal the threat which you, hopefully, can then avoid. You select one of three action cards in your hand to use for its AP value. You then spend that AP on various actions to climb the chosen leviathan and clear the corruption. But card selection is where things get tactical. Every card has an AP value but also a skill. Skills can be played anytime for free and can be really pivotal when played smartly. However, using them burns through your deck and if your deck empties, you fall, potentially taking damage and losing progress toward a corruption node. After your turn, you resolve the threat and draw back up to three cards. This continues between players, with threats growing more hazardous, until all corruption nodes are cleared or every player is defeated. The real beauty of this game is in the combinations of heroes and classes you can play, and making good tactical choices with your cards. There's so much depth in those combinations and to your tactical choices. We had such a good time, even though I didn't come close to playing optimally. I picked hero and class on vibes and then proceeded not to play to my strengths, but we pulled out the win (mostly with my wife carrying).

Okay look, we may have gotten the Labyrinth Books sale catalog because of our prior purchases from other university presses and independent book stores. All we know is that it arrived offering deep discounts on some very cool Library of America titles.

A few small expansions for games we enjoy.

It's here and it's beautiful!

We moved Expeditions out of the garage today, in a trade for the Marvel United 2022 Kickstarter Promos box and Marvel United: Across the Spider-Verse.

Then I culled our entire Marvel United collection down to what you see above and my wife managed to pack it all back into the Marvel United: X-Men box.

Fantasy (and sci-fi) month continued with two new to us games, sort of. We're pretty familiar with head-to-head Dice Throne so this was just layering the co-op elements on top. Small Time Heroes was completely new to us.

So, honestly we were hoping not to like Dice Throne Adventures, at least not enough to keep it. Then we'd be able to cull the whole lot. We have almost all of the boxes Roxley's released and they take up a not insubstantial amount of shelf space. And, for a while, we did think that was going to be the case. We played with the Seraph and the Vampire Lord, characters we've played before in head-to-head. We did a portal crawl, which means you need to collect three portal shards, take them to the portal, then defeat the level IV minion to win. Dice Throne Adventures is just cooperative Dice Throne as dungeon crawl. You move through the dungeon encountering environments, fighting minions, and getting rewards. All of this is helping you build toward facing the level IV minion or the boss, depending on which crawl you're doing. Win or lose, you get the opportunity to permanently improve your deck with reward cards and a shopping opportunity. The minions are easy to manage. They rarely use CP. They don't have a deck. You just roll dice trying to get their specified pattern and do what their card says. You play out your turn exactly as in head-to-head Dice Throne, except you attack the minions instead of each other. And you can help each other fight the tougher minions. We love co-op games. We love rolling dice. We love the opportunity to permantly improve our characters. This is also a campaign that's pretty easy to get to the table and doesn't take all that long to play. So we're going to see it through with the Seraph and the Vampire Lord, then we'll reassess whether we think we'll have another go with different characters.

Small Time Heroes is from Best With 1 Games which, as the name implies, publishes solo games. Small Time Heroes can be played with two but we chose to play solo co-op, meaning we make decisions together. This feels like 20 Strong, just with deckbuilding instead of a dice pool. In a standard game, you pick a hero, a boss, and fight through three waves of increasingly difficult minions to reach and attempt to defeat the boss. Along the way you have opportunities to improve your deck and gain helpful potions. The card play from turn to turn offers nice combo opportunities. The deckbuilding isn't too involved but it's enough to keep things interesting over the course of the game. We had a fun time and the game didn't overstay its welcome. Also, the art is just on the right side of cartoonish, very Adventure Time in style.

We don't buy a lot of games anymore because we're almost at capacity.

That said, we really liked Captain's Chair so we were always going to get the new content. We love co-op games, I'm a big fan of Tales From The Loop, and this is my second attempt to acquire the board game (first copy was damaged). Spectacular is a flyer but we really enjoy these sorts of drafting and tile placement puzzle games.

It was very weird to come out of Flyleaf without any books because July is, in fact, a light month.

"Every song has an ending, every ending has a song."

We finally upgraded to a family plan with Deezer so my wife has access to a streaming service again. Of course she went to listen to Arcadia and, of course, I did as well.