My friend and I embarked upon a journey over the past few months to create a tabletop board game. The interesting part is that we were motivated by the emergence of generative AI and the capabilities it had in rapid prototyping concepts. On a whim we said, let's see how far we can push making a board game. We pushed Midjourney, ChatGPT, and a variety of creative tools to help build the foundation for our game. We both have design chops and are into diy, creative design, and 3d printing, and technology to help get this thing past the finish line.

We are now at the point were after many iterative sessions, we have a functional and fun to play game! Our intention is to give it away as a free downloadable that folks can 3d print and paper print all the parts so they can play too! Huzzah! We are balancing the rules and creating the instructions which is not something we are relying on AI aside sticking to the theme. We are in search of inspirato on what makes gameplay fun for folks today.

Question What are the most fun, exciting, or challenging aspects of any tabletop or board games you play? What keeps you engaged?

EDIT
I didn't give many specifics on the game itself, and figured it might help. Remember we used AI to come up with this storyline. The prompt was to write a story for a "Sci-fi Christmas Horror" board game...

The basic premise is that you are attending a party at the North pole celebrating the research of Dr. Frost on ancient Christmas magic. Predictably things go bad, and you have to find your way out before it's too late and you are killed by a troop of Christmas themed monsters.

The games objective is to work together to escape the facility by collecting sleigh parts, fighting monsters, navigating a maze in dark hallways, and visiting special rooms to solve puzzles. It's all kinds of ridiculous but fun it its own way.

So from earliest childhood, I have experienced that from time to time the electrical grid becomes unavailable for use and it can take days or even weeks to restore service. I'm having trouble comprehending the scope, scale and plausibility of what changes would need to be made to increase the electrification of everything in the way that is being pushed by policy advisors.

Everyone is pushing electric cars. I think it's a great idea, but I have questions about how the grid can support it.

People tell me that the next big advancement in the workplace is going to be the incorporation of artificial intelligence. Doesn't AI require servers on a massive scale? How plausible is it for AI to reach all corners of society and economy on our existing grid or reasonable expectations for plausible improvement of the grid?

The banks seem to be lobbying for the substitution of electronic accounts for cash. Again, electric power is not always available. Also some people who need to use money don't have homes and can't reliably charge electronics. If I remember correctly the payment system went down in Canada a while ago and people without cash were out of luck.

What insight can you share with me?

I have been making a game with Rpg maker MZ in my free time. It is a slow process, but it is coming along. With no background or experience with coding, I had attempted to jump into Unity a while ago, but quickly became overwhelmed and gave up. Rpg Maker has felt like a great onboarding for learning game design. The simplicity of making events, adding in sprites, sound effects, dialog and anything else you want is amazing. I've gone from googling how to do the simplest of things, and now have a full town with npcs, a dungeon with puzzles and a few quests, and usually able to figure out any problems on my own. It feels like my own little world. I even have a small discord that I post updates to and get suggestions/comments from friends and family.

I think when I am done with this demo, I may give Unity another shot. I feel like I have a much better understanding of how to think when designing a game. I know Unity is a much bigger step, but I feel like I can at least see the staircase now.

So I guess my question for you is, what other programs have been instrumental to your game design journey? Have you used Rpg Maker and what are your thoughts on it?

Since the minimum and recommended specs for Starfield have come out, I've been budgeting to do a big upgrade on my PC with an AMD 6800 xt and a fancy new 1 TB SSD (which is the first game I've ever seen that requires an SSD) just so I can run the game in all it's space epicness.

What was the game that you were so excited for that you made the jump to upgrade your PC to the next gen of hardware? New or old!

Recently Lockheed Martin put out a post on social media [1] where they showed a silhouette of a yet-to-be-revealed aircraft. Most people seem to believe it will be the reveal of their entry to the NGAD program [2] (Next Generation Air Dominance).

While not much is publically known one interesting tidbit is how much it looks like the silhouette of the Testor Corp [3] F-19 [4] model that was released back in the mid 80s. Testor said at the time that the model was based on intelligence (aka leaks) of what would eventually become the F-117.

Aviation forums in the past have said F-19 model is what they WANTED the F-117 and it does look quite a bit like the Have Blue [5] test craft they built, however, the legend is that they couldn't get the math to work for radar deflection properly at that time due to lack of computational power and ended up with the geometrically simpler F117 design we got.

[1] Lockheed Martin Teaser: https://theaviationist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/LM-NGAD-story.jpg
[2] NGAD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Air_Dominance
[3] Testor F19: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testor_Corporation#F-19
[4] Testor F19 Image: https://test803.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/img_6712-1.jpg
[5] Have Blue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Have_Blue

Yeah that's the question. I was thinking of the possibility of posting deals here. But it might just eat up the other tech content here. That's not my goal, but I'd like to start a PC building\support\tech deals tilde.

I have lost my r/finch community, and am feeling curious to see if there are any folks here who also find apps can be helpful for their mental health.

I struggle with anxiety and am processing a lot of grief, and may or may not have ADHD (I am in the process of getting tested, but it takes a while). My experiences with therapy are a bit mixed, so I am currently going down the route of trying to DIY my wellness a little. Starting simple with things like, sleep more, try to focus on drinking enough, go out in nature, switching off podcasts and phones and reading more. It's actually helped me, bit by bit.

One of my 'tools' is an app called finch, a virtual pet that encourages you to set goals, check in how you are feeling, journal, do mindful breathing and such. I tried many things and this app is the one that stuck and actually works.

Just wanted to ask, do any others here use wellness apps? And have they worked for you? Which do you recommend?

Just to be clear, I mean apps that work as a stand alone solution, rather than apps like 'better help' which ultimately just connect you to a therapist. Although Better Help has its uses too!

I've been idly browsing for a home weather station for a while, hoping to contribute to the local sensor network for a region that's got lots of microclimate variation. I saw this one from Seeed Studio today, and was hoping for some reviews and advice. Seeed Studio devices are known for open source software, and I wouldn't mind playing with writing a tie-in for sprinkler system automation so we're not irrigating when it's about to rain. It wouldn't be situated so far from the house that we'd need to use the LoRaWAN feature, though.

Concurrently, we just had an inch of rain dropped on our house in the space of 15 minutes, with winds that were taking down tree branches. The weather report says "light rain", weather stations a mile away continue to indicate that everything is bone dry with quiet air. This rainstorm breaks a nearly month-long drought. I'm finding it nerve-wracking that climate change makes it impossible to use past local weather as a predictor of what to expect for gardening, home maintenance, and outdoor activities, and local weather reports are so inaccurate. So that's (hopefully) where the weather station might come into play.

That being said, any chat about your local conditions and reporting from your station is welcome.