Yeah, I don’t know if that tracks. Wingspan has sold more than 1.3 million copies (as of September 2021) which is way way way more than the average board game sells.

I’d far more believe that they couldn’t keep up with production than they were intentionally limiting supply.

Ooo, fantastic. I’ve been doing sugar extractions of lemon zest for a mead recently, and we tried drying and blitzing the zests after filtering.

For us the powder was nice (partly because it got a bit candied during the process) but fairly mild in taste. I think it could still absolutely be fun to use to sprinkle on desserts of drinks, for visuals if nothing else.

Rather than a specific system or style, I think the important thing is what gets you and your players excited. Pick a genre or theme that you are your players are into, then find a system that matches that. Once you get into it a bit more you can start digging into different styles of RPGs because you’ll have more context for what it all means and some idea of what you all like.

I like rules light systems because they’ve got a shorter “time to table”, but if everyone is very excited to play DnD, then DnD works because it’ll keep everyone motivated and engaged.

Some ideas:

Sci fi horror game along the lines of Alien: Mothership

Hardscrabble, fools forced to delve into dangerous dungeons and weird woods to make a living: Cairn

Grannies solving murder mysteries a la Miss Marple: Brindlewood Bay

A gang of thieves in a Dishonored-esque whale oil powered city: Blades in the Dark.

A gang of thieves flying a space ship in a star wars or firefly styled galaxy: Scum and Villainy

A doomed world undergoing heavy metal apocalypses: MÖRK BORG, or CY_BORG for the cyberpunk version of that.

Buffy and friends taking down vampire threats, or Mulder trying to find the truth that’s out there: Monster of the Week

Personally I’ve had really good luck introducing new players with Mausritter. The physical version is gives people a tactile card based inventory, the digital version is totally free. It’s super easy for people to get into the head space of tiny mice! There are also tons of fantastic modules to run which makes your job as a DM a lot easier.

This comment got a bit away from me, but I’ve run and played a ton of different systems, so if you have some idea of what you think you and your players will be into I can maybe point you in a more specific direction.

Mausritter is also great at getting people into the “old school” adventuring mindset. It’s easy for people to get that they’re a tiny moues, so they need to be careful, be clever, and run away from dangerous situations.

Plus it’s got fantastic first and third party adventures to run.

Might not be sufficiently fantasy magic for the brief though?

Pepcorn is actually and unironically very good.

That looks great! We actually don’t add any flavorings into the mix outside of the salt + sugar, we did originally but found out we really liked the very smokey without anything added. I should really go back and try out some different options to see what’s out there though.

We also usually smoke with “neighbor maple”. Which is to say anytime a storm comes through a branches fall out of the big maple tree in our neighbor’s lawn, we take it, chop it up, and smoke stuff with it.

Slicing is both the easiest and most annoying part of the process for me. A few years ago we managed to get a hold of a second hand commercial deli slicer. It works incredibly well, as you might imagine, but then I discovered why you usually don’t have commercial equipment in your home. I use it maybe once every couple months, and it takes about as long to clean the dang thing as it does to actually slice something on it. I’m sure it makes sense in an actual butcher or deli where you’re using it all day, but for me I do 15 minutes of slicing and then have 15 minutes of cleaning off pork fat. It sure does make nice even slices of bacon though.

They go in the freezer, and when we want to use a pack we just toss it into the fridge the day before.

The stars are because I ran out of the good plastic wrap (each has a layer of cling film then layer of freezer paper), and had to do the final two with the bad plastic wrap. I’m less confident about how air tight they are so they’re starred so we eat them first.

Here’s my lovely girl Desdemona taking a nap on my leg (bonus selfie shot of myself):

And my strange gremlin of a son, Darien:

Maybe not as zoomed in as requested, but I can’t get new ones as they’re both currently hiding under a bed due to the contractors in the house.

I played Earth for the second time Sunday night (after my usual RPG night was cancelled/postponed), this time with 4 rather than my first game with 2.

It’s a really interesting game, but I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it yet. I originally took a look because it kept coming up in discussions around Ark Nova (which I tried and disliked), Wingspan, Terraforming Mars, etc.

I can see why people say Ark Nova is a bad comparison (I agree, very little overlap) but absolutely see why people compare it to Wingspan so often. So many of the mechanics in Earth seem to be directly pulled from Wingspan and then vaguely re-themed to be plant based. It really feels like they started with Wingspan as a base design, and then reworked it into their own concept.

Pros:

• Simultaneous/shared turns a la Race for the Galaxy work super well in a wingspan-like game. Getting to run your engine on other people’s turns is so much nicer than sitting and waiting for them to deliberate over choices.
• The flexibility of getting to build your own tableau with almost no limitations is a lot of fun, as opposed to building off of an existing engine framework.
• The shared turns have made it (so far) so I never felt like I was truly pinched for resources. I wasn’t taking actions out of desperation to catch up, I was picking what I felt would get me closer to my actual goals.
• Despite the singleton deck, it never felt like I was unable to find cards with the synergies or qualities I needed.
• There were a good number of high payoff “build around” cards that came up, which is something I always enjoy in a board game.

Cons:

• The iconography could use some work, especially considering how heavily the game relies on it. I mean, the “cold climate” symbol is a five pointed snowflake?! The object that is famously six sided?! I understand having a learning curve, but having a player ask, “what the hell does this symbol mean?” and hour into a game isn’t great.
• Flavor is tenuous, in Wingspan I get that predators hunt smaller birds, that birds which lay lots of eggs and store lots of eggs, etc. In Earth, I have no idea why a given plant has 5 sprouts but only 2 growth, or another one has 2 sprouts and 4 growth. The event cards are even more incomprehensible.
• It’s got a bit of the “egg rush” end game from Wingspan (sprout rush here) but it’s mitigated by shared actions, and having more flexibility in how you build things up (this could have also been placed in Pros, tbh).
• I would never ever want to play this in person. So many fiddly bits interacting that I’m happy to allow BGA to handle for me. Especially considering the scoring, which (again) mirrors Wingspan but has significantly higher totals and would presumably take proportionally longer to count up.
• I understand why a game like this uses photos as card art, but I do really wish they had nice Wingspan-like illustrations instead.

Overall, very interesting game. I had fun, and I’m looking forwarding to digging into it more on future plays.

It’s fantastic, as simple as just chucking some garlic into a jar with honey. Wait long enough and you get a really nice almost balsamic-y garlicy liquid to drizzle on stuff (I love it on pizza). I’ve also done it with some chopped up habanero included to make it spicy.

Insert usual caveats about being careful with fermenting food at home and doing your own research, and there being a small risk of botulism.

My favorite, and most played game is absolutely Arboretum.

It plays quick, it’s small enough to stash in a bag, it’s easy to teach, and it feels like it has endless play and variation. The game also lets me do one of my favorite things in a board game, which is let me go for high risk high reward “shoot the moon” strategies. Absolutely lovely bit of tension and backstabbing fun, but concentrated all into the reveals right at the end so it doesn’t drag the entire experience. Great at every player count, especially at 2 players which is important given that most of my board gaming is just with my wife.

Plus you get to look at lovely art of trees while you playing (with the original edition at least, the newer one has worse art IMHO).