Daniel J Isom

In the Minimalist Gamers guild on BGG, somebody created a thread called the 10 Games Exercise . The idea is that you only get to keep 10 games. There are no rules outside of that, they could be your 10 favorite games, 10 games you play with your group, 10 games your family enjoys, etc. You get to choose whatever criteria you want to follow. Maybe you want to build a list that hits ten different main mechanics. Or perhaps you pick games that cover specific player counts.  The possibilities are endless. It's an interesting exercise that I wanted to take a crack at to see what my 10 games would be and why. To help shape my list, I set two rules that I'd follow. First, I have to currently own the game and any expansions. There are games I previously owned or have played but don't own that might have made this list. Second, I won't include games for the kids. Our kids are a little young yet, so for now I chose not to include games specifically for them. In fact, they ha

Just before the chaos that is Coronavirus shut everything down, I stumbled upon marble racing. I've always been a fan of oddball sports, so it was no surprise when I immediately took to it. At first, I though it was just videos people had done where a handful of marbles raced down these elaborate sand courses (Marble Rally). Little did I know, it was so much more. Sure, there are some one off races, but there are seasons where marbles qualify to get into them. Then the same marbles compete in race after race, gaining points depending on how they finished. At the end of the season, a champion is crowned. I would have been all in for just the sand courses, but then I found the youtube channel of the people who runs these races. On top of all of the one off races on sand and other elaborate outdoor courses, there are also marble Olympics (now named Marble League). They adapted various Olympic events where both individual and teams of marbles compete for medals. Points are tracke

As you can see, I've changed the layout once again. It's been a few years since the last layout change, and if you know me, I like switching things around. This change isn't that dramatic compared to previous ones. If you've already forgotten what the old version looked like, here's a screenshot: I no longer liked the giant black box with the snippet of text from each post. Now you just get the thumbnail and title. I also never enjoyed how stretched or zoomed in each image was as you scrolled down and looked at previous posts. Speaking of previous posts, now you can see more of them in a single screen on the homepage. I think it looks infinitely cleaner than before. I didn't want to completely abandon the things I did like from the previous layout, so I kept the color scheme and font the same throughout. The minimalist black and white with red accents just looks good, so I didn't want to mess with that. One of the added bonuses of this new theme is th

The second month of the year was mixed bag, but mostly good. Like January, I feel like February flew right by. Our schedules have been hectic both during the week and on the weekends, but that didn't stop me from getting some of things I wanted to accomplish done. 1)  Write at least 2 blog posts each month I wrote more in February than I have in quite some time, with 4 posts on top of the January update. I didn't mean to post something each Tuesday, until I noticed the first three were posted that day. Not wanting to break the streak, I made the last post available early to keep it going. I wrote about my  favorite kind of potato chips . I shared the story of how I acquired one of my new favorite games . I covered how I'm decluttering my digital life . I did an update on our board game collection . 2)  Complete the 10 x 2 Board Game Challenge We weren't successful at all with our challenge this month. There wasn't a lot of free time for us at home, but