Wait, is that sunshine I see?

The weather here is always such a mixed bag of insanity. One week it's freezing and we have snow. Two days later the temperature makes a massive 25 Celcius swing into the positive and we have blue sky and sunshine worthy of any mid-July summer day. Who needs to be schizophrenic when our local incarnation of Mother Nature is doing a fine job all by herself?

Over the past two weeks I haven't done much in the way of hobby work. The gestapo troopers are still sitting on my painting table, right next to my Empire of the Dead vampire starter box. I've done a little bit of work on the mad scientist and his blasphemous construct but they're still not done. I have touch ups to do on my human Dreadball team, and a 75% painted batch of Forge Fathers as well.

The 2013 Calgary Expo has come and gone and I spent a good portion of it volunteering. I picked up autographs from two members of the Stargate SG-1 series: Michael Shanks and Richard Dean Anderson. Both folks were very gracious, but sadly Michael was late...very late. A few of the panels that I wanted to see were missed due to my scheduling (namely the Terminator one), and so I didn't get a chance to see Michael Beihn or Linda Hamilton, which would have been really awesome. And Lexa Doig is super nice, in addition to being quite lovely in person.

I picked up several smaller games over the past few weeks and have actually been able to try them all out, which is quite a shock in itself. Three of them are from the Fluxx series of games: Space Fluxx, Cthulhu Fluxx and Pirate Fluxx. Ostensibly these are all the same game with a different skin on top of it. However, each one is a good time. They're super easy to teach, quick to play and very compact. I enjoyed each one of them for different reasons. The space one has some great references to various sci-fi franchises, Cthulhu was obviously developed by someone who loves the Mythos (and makes great use of the creepers), and the pirate one has tons of great ways to steal things from other players. Plus everyone had to call me "Captain" so that's definitely a winner.

The same company (Looney Labs) has also developed a game based on the Back to the Future movie series. The rule sheet initially looked extremely complicated. However, once we set the game up it turned out to be an easy and fun little game. I don't know that it would have a lot of appeal to people who aren't fans of the movies. I thoroughly enjoyed it though.

Another card game we grabbed was Cthulhu Gloom. I have only played the original game once and thought the engine suited the Mythos very well. While the rule sheet wasn't great (I'm still trying to figure out what one of the icons on a bunch of the cards means), the game itself is decent. Some folks won't like the storytelling aspect of the game, and being focused on the Mythos may make it difficult to gather the right group of players for.

Lastly was a first play of City of Remnants by Plaid Hat Games. I was extremely surprised at this one. Simply put it was great fun. We only had two players and made some early mistakes, but both of us agreed that a second play, hopefully with more players, would be even more entertaining. Speaking further to the quality of the publisher, there were som errata'd items included inside the box, as well as sufficient bags to separate all of the tokens after being punched out. Now that's just top notch customer care.

I'll have some more miniatures to show off later this month. Until then, get out and enjoy the spring weather if your area's weather will cooperate!