The long weekend

Easter DIY, box inserts, expansion FOMO, and all things-new-to-me...

Easter weekend. The first holiday weekend of 2025 (which has been a very long time coming this year!), and the first opportunity to spend a long weekend kicking back, relaxing, and…

<sfx:record scratch>

…what? RELAXING?? Certainly not!! For some reason — a reason which I’ve never really fathomed — Easter weekend has become the traditional time for british people to start major DIY and home improvement projects. And this year, Mrs Shep has been dropping hints about a major book shelving / decorative project that she’s had in mind for quite a while now.

Let me explain…

A few years ago, we went to an exhibition in Gloucester, called: “The Wonderful Art of The Ladybird Artists”. It was all about the art used in Ladybird books.

Ladybird books — for anybody who isn’t a native brit — were a series of childrens books that were extremely popular throughout pretty much all of the 20th century. They covered all kinds of topics; childrens fiction, learn-to-read books, history, arts, hobbies… and they were all published in a very distinctive 11.5cm x 18cm hardback format, with an instantly-recognisable house style.

The exhibition had a particularly striking display of the books which looked like this:

It might not surprise you to learn that Mrs Shep collects Ladybird Books.

And Mrs Shep has decided that a display just like the one above would look perfect on one of the long walls in the upstairs corridor 😬

You can tell where this is going, can’t you?

Wish me luck 😵‍💫

---

Figuring out how to mount a couple of hundred tiny books onto a wall hasn’t been my only organisational challenge for the weekend. The ever-dwindling shelf-space in my games room inspired another big project this week: Bringing some organisation and rationalisation to my CliniC:Deluxe Edition collection!

Expansion FOMO, anyone?

That’s a lot of boxes. A lot of boxes which — for the most-part — contain a myriad of tiny expansion modules that I’ll likely never, ever play. In fact, at least a couple of those boxes —namely The 69th Extension, blue and pink editions — I’d hesitate to EVER pull out in polite company. Or even impolite company, for that matter. …And yet, I’ve felt an odd compulsion to collect them all. There’s something about the combination of the game’s dark humour, and the chronically-over-extended ridiculousness of the the thing, that has kept me reaching for my debit card again and again card over the years.

(And I guess it also helps that the base game is actually rather good!)

Perhaps I should be relieved that the 5th Extension, Covid-19 and Biohazard expansions came bagged, rather than in cardboard boxes … otherwise my shelves might be groaning even harder already? But… enough is enough. It’s time to reduce this monster’s tenancy a little!

---

I’ve spent the evenings of the last couple of weeks slowly 3d-printing a heap of Clinic box inserts. This set (for the core game and everything up to extension #6)… and this one (to get the two “69th extension” sets into a single box).

That first set is one of the very few “paid” files that I’ve ever bought from a 3d printables site …but I think it was worth the expense; it manages to fit everything except the 69th expansion material into the base box and a single expansion box. It’s a tight fit — and I threw away some of the less-necessary upper layers of the insert to get the box closed without any lid lift — but I am very happy with the result.

Just a few layers, containing 60+ expansion modules

Sorting all of the pieces out took HOURS (because yes, I still had a lot of never-used/never-punched components across all the sets). And the whole process brought me to the unfortunate realisation that one of the 69th Extensions (which I hadn’t really examined properly, despite receiving it 3 months ago) has been missing some wooden pieces since the day I got it 😱. Is it reasonable to go back to a small indie publisher — months after receiving the goods — and ask for some missing bits?

(EDIT: yes, it is. I dropped Alban Viard an email, and he promised to send them out to me immediately. ‘phew!)

…so now my Clinic collection now occupies THIS much space, instead of the previously-shown heap of cardboard shelf-hogs:

‘Phew.

Now, if only I could knock out a few square meters of 3d-printed Ladybird Book shelving quite as easly… 🐞

---

“New to Me” this week…

It’s been a pretty good week for games playing, including a soirée at Linsonix’s house with no fewer than FOUR board game geek bloggers present (or perhaps five if you count Mr Linsonix?)… and then the early-April meeting for Newcastle Gamers happened less than 24 hours later!

So here’s some quick takes on the things that I hadn’t played before:

Night of the Ninja

Mr Shep plays a social deduction game??!!? You probably think you know how this is going to turn out. But rest assured that the red stain on that cocktail stick is NOT due anybody getting stabbed in frustration (it’s strawberry juice. Honest!). Night of the Ninja was actually…. quite good fun, and seemed to sit more towards the “logically working things out” end of the social deduction-spectrum rather than the “lying and guessing” segment of the genre which I’m not particularly fond of.

(Though… having made a decent impression with the “deduction” part of the game … Night of the Ninja promptly spaffed away 90% of my goodwill by rewarding members of the winning side at the end of each round with: a random number of points drawn from a bag. Bah! Really??)

Age of Steam: Osaka

A particularly odd scenario in which players are tasked with delivering stand-up comedians to various comedy clubs around Osaka. Black cubes take on the role of promoters … and moving a comedian to a club that doesn’t have a promoter in it carries financial penalties. (Obviously, larks and hijinks abound due to the fact that you can “helpfully” ship a promoter out of a club at a critical-to-somebody-else point in the delivery phase…)

Crazy theming aside… this map seemed brutal. Absolutely brutal. One for AoS experts only?

(a good excuse to give my acrylic tiles an outing though!)

Flamecraft

I’m still not entirely sure how I ended up playing this. I left the building to grab a sandwich from the shop next door, came back, and found that we were now apparently playing Flamecraft! It’s a game in which players take on the role of “flamekeepers” … individuals who are “skilled in the art of conversing with dragons, placing them in their ideal homes and casting enchantments to entice them to produce wondrous things”.

Flamecraft is, quite possibly, everything that you could want from a board game.

That is: If you’re 12 years old, into my-little-pony knock-offs, and don’t mind a game that’s driven by super-swingy objective cards.

I am none of these things.

…but my score marker looked a bit rude from this angle. So at least there was that.

Tricky Time Crisis

On paper … this one looks VERY clever. It’s a must-not-follow trick-taker, with the same number of suits in the deck as there are players. Players are super-heroes and super-villains, engaged in some kind of time-travelling super-hero-super-villain-showdown shenannigans, and by nature of this being a must-not-follow game, one player will end up playing a purple-suited villain card to each trick, and everybody else will play the various super-hero suits. The value on the villain card (which all contain comparatively high numbers) will then be compared to the total value of all the hero cards, determining the winning “side”. And then — as with a lot of the more sophisticated trick-taking games — there’s some clever, twisty scoring involved to make you think twice about where and how you might actually want to win cards.

In practice… this one might be just a little bit too mathy and clever for it’s own good. Even though I can’t really pinpoint why, we just didn’t seem to get into a proper “flow” with Tricky Time Crisis… which was a bit disappointing. 🙁

---

Meanwhile, in other places…

My Board Game Geek blogging friends really are the best! Despite my attempts to quietly slip off to substack without a great deal of fuss, many threads and comments have appeared in my wake, including this one from Lindsey which prompted an apology from BGG Management and a promise of changes to the site’s content and moderation policies.

Blimey. 😲

So what happens next?

Well… right now… I’m kind of enjoying carving out something on substack. I’m not entirely sure what that “something” is going to become, but exploring a different format and pace of publishing is something that I’m finding very agreeable.

At the same time, the BGG blog no longer seems like quite as closed a door as it once did. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not rushing back there with open arms. It still all feels a little bit like returning to a home after the ruling party has been through all my stuff and smashed up all the things that they didn’t agree with. And I don’t particularly feel like setting myself up to feel that awful again.

But I’ll probably keep up some level of blogging presence there.

Because it’s Easter, right? And if there’s one thing that Easter has taught us … it’s… urm… something about not having all your eggs in one basket…?

Maybe…?