Gaming at Dice Fest 2025

 Dice Fest 2025 wrapped up yesterday.  Over the weekend, I ran 9 sessions of a custom Shadows of Brimstone mission on a fancy 3D Board. I also played two games of 1,000 Blank White Cards while I was there, and one game of the The Score (a micro-RPG that takes about 20 minutes to play). 

And I also I helped create, organize, host and judge a miniatures event called the "Bitz Box Brawl" where 20 people received a box of random miniature parts and one hour to design and glue together their own chimeric monster. 

I taught all those games above to new players while I was at it.  I really enjoy sharing my favorite games with people I'm just getting to know, and conventions are great for that. It was all immense fun, but I am truly exhausted today.

Some random Andor thoughts

If you haven't seen it yet, Andor is well worth the watch. It's a little slow at the beginning of the first season, but builds into something amazing, and is one of the best TV shows of all time (not just Star Wars TV shows). It's also the most relevant Star Wars has ever been to our real world.  Every time I re-watch Andor, it makes me want to go to a protest rally and speak truth to power, then come home and play a Star Wars game. Great show.

I was watching a youtube video today about Andor, where someone was talking about not liking that one particular Andor story arc never really reaches a conclusion. But I feel that this particular story line needs to NOT have a clean answer, as that unresolved emotional tension is critical to the main character's journey and development. So I wrote:

Cassian's character arc requires him to not find his sister. He starts out only caring about his people, his family, and will do anything for them. He fights the empire because of the horrible things they've done to his family, and he's trying to prevent more awfulness from happening to them. But with every story arc and time jump, his "family" gets larger and larger. First Maarva. Then his adopted hometown, and that circle of friends. The Aldani Heist gives him a choice of how large his "family" is going to be. That's why Skeeve's false backstory is about a lie about family. Cassian's not quite ready to admit that the whole universe is made up of families that are actually as important as his own, but he glimpses it in Nemik's words, and steps away from that realization despite protecting Val and the Rebellion in the crucial moment. Then the Narkina prison solidifies it, as his fellow convicts become his family. He returns home to his first familial extensions, and in that aftermath is when he really embraces that the galaxy deserves the same protection he wants to give his family. But he's still struggling with it, often (understandably) prioritizing his own family over the big picture. That's why Bix leaves him, so he can choose "all the people" over "his people" and stay on task. And that's why he can't find his sister. The family-shaped hole at the center of his being is less important than his mission to save all the families everywhere from tyranny. If the story had involved him finding his sister, Bix's sacrifice might have been undone, and Cassian's development might well have reverted to just focusing on those closest to him, undoing his growth from "looking out for me and my own" to "fighting to protect everyone, at great personal cost". She could be out there anywhere, so even in the moments when he'd rather just help his in-group, he has to operate from the assumption it's better and smarter to help everyone everywhere.