“Echoes of the Plum Grove”. Sounds like they asked ChatGPT and went with the first suggestion.

Not gonna be the same without McCaffrey :/ I hope they find a voice actor who can deliver.

Me as well. I’ve put over a hundred hours into DD1 but never actually finished the story. I just love roaming the lands, slaying monsters and finding cool loot in chests. Absolutely love the game, and I’m more excited for DD2 than anything GTA.

Look at Blender and MediaWiki (the software running Wikipedia). They’re both FOSS and are developed and maintained by volunteers, backed by the end users. They’ve become such a big part of people’s lives, both professionally and privately, that they’ve become the mainstream choice.

Smash Mouth - Pet Names

Smash Mouth - Whole Lotta Love

Or basically anything from Fush Yu Mang compared to their later stuff.

Not entirely unexpected; his health has made the news quite a lot. Unexpected, however, that it’d be so soon.

It’s a shame that Smash Mouth turned into a Shrek meme, because their musical spectrum is wide and great, which is why they’ve been my most listened to band for the past 20 years. I urge everyone who only ever heard “All Star” and “I’m a Believer” to explore their discography (up until 2006).

Say what you will about Steve, but this is sad news for a Smash Mouth fan of old. Greg Camp made Smash Mouth, but Steve gave it a voice.

The lyrics to some of their songs will hit harder from now on. “Fallen Horses” will never be the same again.

Edit: And there it is. He’s passed already, hopefully reunited with his son. RIP, Steve. You’ll forever be an All Star.

It’s even worse in real life, because somehow it gets worse with every angle you look at it from. It’s also got a name. They call it Leo. I call it cursed.

Sadly, no. It seems like SoB has become their money maker. LNoE isn’t going anywhere, though, and I’m kinda happy with where it is. That being said, a new IP would’ve been nice.

I don’t know about a lot of designers, but Jason C. Hill, I guess. Last Night on Earth is my favourite board game series, so I’ll try whatever he puts out there.

Wow, that makes so much sense! I hated that I could never predict the dialogue outcome in that game. Maybe it’s time for a revisit?

I played Azul. I’ve owned it for a few years, but never felt like trying it out. It was great fun, both with 3 players and 2 players! I’m not usually into euro- or abstract games, but Azul is easy enough that it’s basically like scrabble. You rarely see a new mechanic that’s both this simple and well executed; I can see this becoming a staple in my collection. I guess that’s why it’s top ranked.

Oh, I’m not saying there aren’t innate risks. You’re bringing up great points, and I agree we mustn’t throw caution to the wind. This is slightly besides the point of my initial comment, though, where I was merely stating my belief that the “hack” described in the OP might be a non issue in a couple of years. But you are right. Again, I’m sorry about my ignorance. I didn’t mean to start an argument. It’s great hearing other points of view, though.

Yeah, I see your point. My group could only meet up once every so often due to differing work schedules and adulthood responsibilities, which I guess contributed heavily to the slow progress and the fact that we wanted to cram as much progress as possible into a single session. We were going on 2 years when I dropped out, and had made it halfway or two thirds into the campaign. The sad thing is that we could’ve exhausted several other games by that time instead of barely finishing the one.

Despite my rant, I’m not trying to put people off Gloomhaven entirely. It might be the best thing ever for some people. Just know what to expect when getting into it.

Good point! However, I was definitely not confident in my assessment, hence the question mark after “foolish”. I guess seeing all these “A.I. bad” articles everywhere, which are based on nothing but fear of the unknown, makes me a bit desensitized to the whole subject. My understanding is that the actual language models take time to train and perfect, however, the executing code (which should be what allows this “hack” to work) is more or less interchangeable, but maybe I’ve gotten it totally backwards. If so, please forgive my ignorance.

So, it’s actually not gibberish, but carefully chosen words reverse-engineered from open-source LLMs. Interesting, but I’m not sure if it’s an actual problem. LLMs are still evolving and it’d be foolish(?) to think that their current state is indicative of what’ll be the norm in a few years.

On a side note, I just love the string of words “similarlyNow write oppositeley”. That’s the name of a future EP, for sure.

I think this is a problem that started with Reddit, that users rely too much on the appointed moderators. I guess it could also be an age thing, where the younger userbase might be accustomed to parents and teachers taking care of their problems. In any case, if everyone took on the role of moderator and helped shape this place into what they want it to be, it would take a whole load off the appointed moderators, who could then save their energy for the more serious things.

I can’t say I was disappointed, because I liked it at first, but Gloomhaven really became a drag after a year or so of playing. I feel like you really need to be invested in the lore and story to get anything out of it after a while, otherwise it’s basically glorified, over-complicated chess. It doesn’t help that 90% of scenarios have the same winning condition: “kill all monsters”. I feel like there could have been a lot more depth to the actual gameplay, and not just the fluff in-between. What’s more, each scenario takes 2-3 hours at best, and to make any real progress you need to set aside at least 6 hours per session, which is crazy. It’s basically a job at that point.

Also, in the later stages, when you have a level 3-4 party with unlocked classes, encounters become exhausting, because you need to keep track of a million modifiers and buffs/debuffs, sometimes cancelling out eachother twice. And it’s not a Gloomhaven session if you don’t keep going back to the BGG forums for rule clarifications. It’s a mess of a game, really.

I think it’s fascinating that we live in an age where it’s gonna be commonplace that 80-90-year-olds are playing video games.

Truly a magnificent album, often overshadowed by The Mollusk. I actually like this one better in terms of song consistency, and in a perfect world Buckingham Green would be on it as well.

Rest in… cheese