Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con

@gil

He/him. JC/NYC. Tabletop games - now making games as Informal Ferret Games Robot fight facilitator at NHRL Fan of weird/noisy music Ferret nut Still not a negotiable Final Fantasy currency All my links:

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Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· 24d

Played Acquire with the special power rules only ever released in the 1993 Schmidt Spiele and 1995 Hasbro editions. Why has this version not caught on? It opens up so much more of the game, and helps players work around low liquidity and crummy tile draws.

A photo of an in-progress game of Acquire, using the 1999 Avalon Hill version of the game with fancy plastic bits. There are also homemade cards with plastic cubes showing a menu of 5 different powers a player can take during the game.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· Jul 12

omg, I guess I'm not the only one

Two other replies suggesting sin bins/penalty boxes for soccer, posted at roughly the same time as mine

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· Jul 9

Played Skymines tonight. Played Mombasa like 15 years ago. This was better; better theme, less restrictive discard rules. I won, which shocked me.

The board for Skymines. Wood and chipboard tokens on a board depicting the moon.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· Jul 8

Noticed the critters usually napping in a drawer next to my desk, so I put some bedding in there.

My ferret Freddie lying in cow-splotch fabric bedding inside one of my drawers.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· Jul 2

Played Falling (not the James Ernest game) again last night. Really enjoying it. I hope this doesn't sound too narcissistic, but Falling feels a lot like The Networks to me.

My personal player board for the game Falling. Wood tokens recessed into a 2-level player board.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· Jun 29

I inadvertently woke Freddie up from a nap today.

My ferret Freddie, his eyes barely open, looking like he needs some coffee.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· Jun 25

Played my new deluxe edition of Container tonight! I only played it once when the very first edition came out, and boy that economy was fragile. This is my first time playing with the Bank Island rules, which help the game tremendously.

The deluxe edition of Container, with a big play mat and big metal bits.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· Jun 20

Played Falling (not the James Ernest game). Bought Falling (not the James Ernest game). Cube grinder with some really interesting ideas and a wacko theme. Fun experience, unique despite the genre.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· Jun 20

It was my second play of Power Grid: Outpost. LOVED it. It's probably going to become my favorite version of the game. Loved the resource streamlining, the power plant discounts, the variety of buildings going out on the board… just a really lovely version of the game.

The board for Power Grid: Outpost. Wood buildings on a sci-fi board.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· Jun 20

SETI has a lot of good things going for it, and it was my second time playing. This play helped me realize an issue I had in both plays: there is not enough competition for scanning sectors, even with the last-player-in tiebreaker and the second-position VP bonus.

The board for SETI. An intricate model of the solar system in chipboard, with a yellow plastic hemisphere for the sun.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· Jun 19

I think I might like Age of Innovation better than Terra Mystica.

The board for Age of Innovation, which looks almost identical to the board for Terra Mystica.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· Jun 18

People have been sharing their favorite tweets from yesteryear. This is the apex, the zenith, the pinnacle of Weird Twitter for me.

Capitalization and punctuation optimized for screen reader, hopefully:

A tweet that reads:

Hello fellow human teens I heard the coolest place for us teens to hang out is The Colossal Pillar Of Wasp Eggs. Let’s go do not bring weapons.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· Jun 18

Hello, "with-it" #Origins attendees, I hear a lot of buzz that this will be the "hip" place to be all week, don't risk not being seen as "cool" by others

A photo of two convention demo tables for my board game The Networks at Origins Game Fair.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· Jun 17

If any of you Origins-goers want to see what I've been up to in my resurrected board game design life, I'm running Rough Roads in the Unpub area on Thursday and Sunday at 10 am. It's an economic game about trying to profit from building plank roads before they disintegrate.

The cover to my board game Rough Roads, written in an old-timey 1850’s style.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· Jun 13

My gf wanted to go to Waffle House on her birthday. We're in Jersey City; the closest Waffle House is 90 mins away, in Bethlehem, PA. But still. A chance to eat at Waffle House.

A napkin/condiment stand at a Waffle House, with a couple of their laminated menus in the background.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· Jun 3

Someone really needs to deal with that Shrink Beetle

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· Jun 2

Managed to pull this off for the first time in an Ascension: Legends game vs. the computer. Also had a 22% chance for an Emissary insta-win, but did not get lucky. Haven't won that way yet; hopefully someday!

A screenshot of a game of Ascension: Legends on mobile. I have reached Legendary in all 4 factions.

A close-up of the filled Legendary widget.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· May 30

And anyway, most icon/logo changes are met with anger and ridicule, because people aren't usually responding to the new design, they're responding to the idea of the change in the first place.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· May 30

The biggest miss is the Sheets icon. I understand that giving it a landscape aspect ratio makes it stand out, but the crossed lines are too far off-center, so it looks more like a partially-loaded favicon. I think the idea was sound, but the execution needed some more iteration.

The new Sheets icon. It’s asymmetric, and the aspect ratio makes it look short and wide. And it has a couple of crossed lines meant to be indicative of a spreadsheet, but they’re off-center, so the negative space is weird.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· May 30

From that perspective, these new icons walk an interesting line. They're visually distinct, but they have a common look, because they all share the same design language. This is the first of Google's icon sets that meets both of those requirements.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· May 30

As a reminder, here's how they looked like 2 iterations ago. These are nice-looking and easily distinguishable, but I understand why they changed it. They don't look related to each other. They don't look like they're part of the same suite.

Google’s icons from 2 iterations ago. They are distinguishable and attractive, but don’t look related to each other. They may as well each be from different companies.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· May 30

I have a few quibbles, especially with the new Sheets icon and what the gradient represents, but the previous icon set was so abysmal, almost anything would have been an improvement.

The previous Google icons. They all use the same colors. The only way to distinguish them is by shape.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· May 30

A rare hot take here: I think the new Google icons are an improvement over the old ones.

The new Google icons. They have a bubbly look to them, and each one has a color burst gradient. But unlike the previous set, they’re all visually distinctive in color, look, and feel.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· May 29

Forgive the chair squeaks in this video. If you listen close, you will hear the Northern Mockingbird that has been singing outside my living room window every night.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· May 28

Last time I was at Essen… 2019, I believe? I got the expansion modules to one of my favorite games, De Vulgari Eloquentia, along with the just-released deluxe edition.

A game of De Vulgari Eloquentia in progress. Beige Euro board. Expansion cards off to the side of the board.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· May 26

This is amazing, remarkable, and completely hilarious.

Screenshot text from SBNation article:

The marquee event was set to be the men's 100m, in which Frank Kerley, the bronze medal winner from the Paris Olympic Games boasted that Usain Bolt's world record of 9.58 would be"destroyed" by him running on performance-enhancing drugs. Instead, he ran a hilariously slow 9.97, slower than his time at the Olympic Games. After failing to "destroy" Bolt's record, Kerley turned on his fellow competitors, saying they needed to up their game.

"They gotta do better than that," Kerley said in a post-race interview. "They need to train a little harder, get on that s*** a little bit more, and go a little harder some more."

It wasn't just on the track where things were sad.
The pool saw Hunter Armstrong win the 50-meter backstroke as a non-enhanced athlete, tearing apart the entire premise for the games.

Then retired Australian swimmer James Magnussen, who came out of retirement for the event, promised he would be "juiced to the gills" and break his own 100m freestyle record. He finished two seconds slower than his record mark.
凸

Continued screenshot:

There was a pattern to the entire weekend. Time, and time, and time again, athletes who were on drugs either posted times far slower than anything that would be considered record-breaking, or got outright beaten by athletes who were not doping.

None of this should be a surprise for anyone who has followed the genesis of this farcical event. It was an idea incubated by tech bros and morons with no athletic background, working under the assumption that performance-enhancing drugs could turn any moderate athlete into a superhuman. Not only was there nothing compelling about the games, but nobody seemingly cared they were even happening - especially with competition taking place during the NBA and NHL Playoffs, the MLB season, and a stacked weekend of motosport with Indy 500, F1 GP from Canada, and the Coca-Cola 600 in NASCAR.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· May 24

I'm not a big TV watcher, so never really saw The Sopranos, despite living in the same town as the Bada Bing, and the Party City next door, for 5 years. My gf wanted to go to the diner featured in the finale. We went yesterday. It was really good.

A napkin holder and various condiments on a table in a diner named Holsten’s. The napkin holder features a sticker with the name of the diner written in the same font/style as the title of The Sopranos, with one of the vertical lines in the H fashioned as a pistol. Below the title, we see the subtitle “the last suppah”.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· May 24

iMac Pro M4, running Tahoe 26.5. I didn't get a pop-up prompting me to yesterday's game, though. Browser is Firefox 151.0.1.

Screenshot of Ordinal for troubleshooting.

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· May 19

Anyone who lives in or near NYC and is at least somewhat techie will know what this immediately:

Gil Hova 🔜 Gen Con@gil· May 17

When you just worked an 80-hour week to help pull off the first professional fighting robot event broadcast live worldwide on a massive sports channel, and now it's time to be a pile of goo for a week