2025, a Year in Pictures

It’s easy to see what I played through the year, since I tried to blog, at least a little, about anything I played. My blogging fervor comes and goes, and there might be gaps. I thought it might be fun to go through the folder of pictures I had saved for Blaugust 2025 and see what happened with my favorite games of 2025 — video games, miniatures games, and board games together. And some other stuff.

The header collage was made by the best JPEG editor ever cancelled by Google, Picasa. That program will continue to be one of the first programs I install on any new computer.

We opened the year still working on the 2024 Steam Winter Fest. I was a big fan of the Starvaders demo, and bought it when it eventually released, but I got bored with it before I finished. It was a unique blend of Into the Breach and Slay the Spire, but in the end, both of those other games were more fun. It isn’t a bad game; there’s a lot of humor, and the puzzles are fun. I just… got bored.

We’re gonna see a lot of Malifaux. I’d just put together my second team, after Mei Feng’s Foundry, Rasputina’s December. Not even painted, yet. CaptainCon was coming up and I didn’t want to go with just one crew.

I thought I could combine AI, my 3D printer, PyGame, Malifaux, and my own insane ideas of circle packing to make custom display trays for my Malifaux teams. It totally did work, but without some method of ensuring the minis stay in the tray, it wasn’t much use. Plus, it provides no protection for the minis, so it wasn’t much use for transporting them. Still, I had fun, and for an experiment in “vibe coding”, I think it came out pretty well.

I had fun tracking down an elusive NPC in Palworld that can upgrade… MAYBE upgrade… your Pals. But it won’t be easy, cheap, painless, or non-disfiguring.

My first professional Malifaux tournament! Foundry was still my main crew at the time, and I scored an easy win with the team. I played the next two games with my new December crew and lost them both. This was just the warm-up tournament; I didn’t play in the five game, two day tournament. I instead went and played a bunch of other games and had a lot of fun.

This year, I think I will spend more time looking into the other miniatures games going on. Not that I have the time, interest or money to play another one, but it’s a whole world of gaming of which I know very little.

I discovered Hueforge, a program that lets you make full color 3D prints of pretty much anything, exploiting the translucency of thin layers of PLA filament. It’s weird that it works, but it does work.

I think it came out pretty well. I keep it displayed at work. I also use it to decorate storage boxes and stuff.

Can’t forget our biweekly game nights. We played Canvas a couple of times; lots of fun. I thought the game came with plastic easels, but I guess that was a deluxe Kickstarter version and not the version I bought. Well, I have a 3D printer, and now we have a lot of plastic easels.

I’d been following the development of Erenshor, the single player simulated MMORPG, since Splattercat did a feature on it some time ago. I’d loved the demo, played through it with a few different character classes, and was looking forward to playing on release for reals. Brian of Burgee Media was trying to get everything ready for the release during the Steam Next Fest.

Erenshor wasn’t the only MMO I tried around then. I played the Stars Reach playtest, then backed it on Kickstarter. I find if I play games before they release, I don’t tend to want to play them when they are released, so I’m just watching the developer videos and waiting for it to release before playing more. Besides, I still have Dune: Awakening for survival crafting games, and I think it’s going to be hard to devote more time to another such game while we’re still playing that one.

Kasul and I were at a small used bookstore which is kind of hard to get to; we don’t go there often. In one of the rooms a guy was sitting at a table with a pile of books next to him — a local author hawking his latest book. I talked with him awhile, bought his book that he signed. The book was… not good.

That same trip, I saw some old Tunnels & Trolls solo play books. Tunnels & Trolls was a TTRPG that passed me by, back in the day. I was much more into D&D — AD&D at the time. I bought a couple of books, and thought they’d be MUCH MORE FUN if they were text adventures I could play. So I gave it a shot. AND I AM STILL WORKING ON IT. Wasn’t as easy as it looked.

Some post CaptainCon Malifaux saw December painted and me in a long spiral of not winning 🙂 But having fun! Pretty soon, the world would be overturned when Wyrd Games wiped away the third edition and revealed the fourth edition where Everything Changed.

Erenshor finally officially released! And so I immediately dove right into Monster Hunter Wilds. I had an excuse; both my partner and my son were also playing, and we had some cool family times.

My expertise at ignoring Erenshor continued to grow as I was consumed for a time in turning a laundromat into a video arcade, while trying to convince my dad that no, I wasn’t making a video arcade, and yes, I was putting 100% of my time into a laundromat.

I’ll finish up with my completion of the easy Skyscale quest in Guild Wars 2. This took a lot of time and a lot of help from my GW2 guild, Mutant Death Kittens, and of course Team Spode. Afterward, I completed the Path of Fire quests for a bunch of other mounts, which are coming in handy now in Visions of Eternity.

Well, I feel I am missing a lot of things and am only halfway through. I think I will make this Part 1, and do a Part 2 later with the second half of the year.