#oneaday Day 591: Joyless healthiness

One of the reasons a lot of people — including myself — find it difficult to stick to a diet is because so much "healthy eating" advice out there is seemingly designed to suck all of the joy out of anything to do with food.

I read a particularly good (bad?) example of this on BBC Food earlier, after it was linked to from the front page of BBC News. "Are we getting breakfast all wrong?" the headline asked. "How much does it matter what we eat in the morning and when we eat it?"

Having read the article a few times, I'm not entirely sure what its actual point is, because there seem to be multiple threads running at once. Firstly is the fact that here in the UK, we tend to be quite set in our ways when it comes to breakfast, while in other cultures they tend to eat "leftovers or [food] similar to [that which] you would have for lunch and dinner", according to NHS GP and chef Rupy Aujla. Then there's the question of when you should eat breakfast, for which the advice seems to be "whenever the fuck you want, or miss it completely and have a decent lunch if you feel like it".

Then there's the usual health scares — people who eat breakfast are "also found to be likely to smoke more, drink more alcohol and exercise less", while there is apparently "convincing evidence that consuming breakfast, compared to skipping breakfast, has positive impacts on short-term cognition and memory". So if you have breakfast, you'll spark up a fag and get pissed while lounging on the sofa, but at least you'll remember all of it the next day.

At one point the piece attempts to convince us that "a breakfast of tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans and a glass of juice" is a "fry-up" and repeats the bizarre advice that "no matter how much [juice] you drink it will still only count as one portion", then goes on to shame the juice-drinkers because "fruit juice is basically as sugary as a typical candy bar". The piece then advises that we should "use an (environmentally friendly) straw to bypass your teeth" if you are drinking juice, but, of course, says that we should all just drink water because it's "a healthy and cheap choice" that "has no calories and contains no sugars that can damage teeth".

I get why all these things are said. We do all eat too much and do terrible things to our health, but the solution to having issues with food is not to make eating a joyless chore, because in my experience all that does to you is increase cravings for things you "shouldn't" have. And in the worst cases, that can lead to bingeing way more than you would have under normal circumstances.

As with anything, the real answer seems to be moderation. It is difficult to keep cravings under control, particularly if your brain chemistry is particularly prone to taking things to excess, but so far as I'm concerned, far better to have a good, solid breakfast that fills you up and makes you feel good first thing in the morning than a handful of nuts, berries and wood chippings that will have you reaching for the crisps and Penguin bars by 10am.

As for me, today I've eaten pretty much what I want and I still have a bunch of calories left over if I fancy something a little later in the evening. And that has happened because I have taken care with moderation in what I've eaten so far today. I don't feel deprived of anything and I don't feel like I "need" to demolish a packet of biscuits, say — but at the same time, I also know that if I do fancy a biscuit or a cake or something, I have enough calories left in the budget that I can have one if I want.

So you know what? I might just do that. I might just do that.

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#oneaday Day 590: Noodle Report: Shin Ramyun Spicy Chicken and Toomba Flavours

I love a good noodle, at least partly due to my enjoyment of Paul Gannon and Eli Silverman's CheapShow podcast. And in recent times, it seems to have become much easier to find interesting noodles — not only via online ordering and specialist "Asian supermarkets", but also in regular old Sainsbury's, Morrisons and the like.

On my most recent trip to Sainsbury's, I picked up a few unfamiliar packets of noodles to give them a try — specifically, two from the Nongshim "Shin Ramyun" range. I've never tried the basic Shin Ramyun flavour that appears to have become quite widespread and accepted as yet, but these two looked intriguing, so I thought I'd give them a go. Shin Ramyun, if you're unfamiliar is just the Korean term for "spicy noodles", so most varieties of the range have a certain degree of zinginess to them.

The first one I tried was the "Toomba" variant. This didn't offer any real indication of what it was supposed to taste of other than that it was "Spicy & Creamy". Thus I had no idea what to expect — I didn't even really know if it was going to be a soup-style or stir fry-style noodle until I actually started preparing them.

As it happens, the Toomba variant is quite similar to Samyang's Carbonara-style Buldak noodles, which are a stir-fry type: you boil the noodles for about 4-5 minutes, drain them, then add a packet of sauce and a packet of powder and stir vigorously while still applying a bit of heat until the noodles turn an angry red colour. The result is a glossy noodle with a pleasantly sticky sauce, but no soup.

The flavour profile is similar to the Carbonara Buldak, also, only the spice level is somewhat milder. There's still a bit of a kick, but it's much less in-your-face than the Buldak ones, making these a much easier recommend to someone who doesn't mind a bit of spice, but doesn't want their head blowing off and their lips to be numb for several hours afterwards. I actually overall liked the flavour a lot more than the Carbonara Buldak, too — although that is a popular Buldak variant, it's one of my least favourite from the range — and can give these an easy recommend. There's a nice blend of spice, cheese and garlic, and they both smell and taste pretty great.

Why Toomba, though? Well, apparently it's a tad convoluted, but as Sporked reports, it is apparently down to a common method of customising standard Shin Ramyun noodles with milk, American cheese, sauteed onions and garlic, which is supposed to make them taste like a pasta dish served at South Korean branches of Outback Steakhouse. The dish itself is called Toowoomba Pasta after a city of the same name in Australia; it actually has no connection whatsoever to the city, as apparently South Korean Outback Steakhouses just like naming things after Australian cities for some reason. These noodles, whose packet of powder basically takes care of the "customising" for you, are called "Toomba" as a contraction that draws the mind to "Toowoomba" without running any obvious risk of upsetting Outback Steakhouses' lawyers. Clear? Not really? Don't worry. All you need to know is that they're pretty tasty.

The Spicy Chicken Shin Ramyun, meanwhile, are a soup-type noodle that come with a packet of powder and a packet of dried vegetable flakes. The result of cooking up a packet of these is a generous bowl of noodle soup that is, once again, an angry red colour. The flavour is quite nice, blending a bit of chicken, a bit of herbiness and a kick of spice. Again, like the Toomba noodles, they aren't overwhelmingly spicy to the same degree as Buldak noodles, but they have a pleasantly warming kick to them, and they'll make your lips tingle a bit.

I didn't mind these. They didn't wow me in the same way as some other noodles that I've had, but they're a perfectly acceptable bowl of noodle soup — a nice winter warmer, and I can imagine them being very pleasant if you're fending off a mild cold. I wasn't overly enamoured by the herbiness of the flavour, though; it overwhelmed the chickeniness of the broth somewhat in a way that I didn't completely love.

In summary then, these were both good bowls of noodles, but in future I'd feel a lot more inclined to go for the "Toomba" ones again; the Spicy Chicken ones were all right, but I don't feel immediately inclined to rush out and buy more of them. They do make me curious to try the regular ol' Shin Ramyun flavour, though, as apparently a lot of people rate those quite highly. I will be sure to report back on my findings when I've given them a go.

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#oneaday Day 589: HeroQuest First Light, First Session

I've done it! I've finally played a game of HeroQuest with actual real human people. And we had a really good time! We got through the first two quests in the First Light campaign — I've bought both First Light and the big-box core set, but I wanted to give First Light a go because it's a completely different campaign to the big-box core set, and the big-box core set campaign is largely based on the 1989 original, which I was already familiar with.

Both sets stand by themselves, and both are a good means of getting into HeroQuest as a hobby; the main difference is that First Light is a lot cheaper and comes in a smaller box, because it lacks the big collection of plastic miniatures included in the big-box core set. And, having played the game with those big-box core set miniatures today, I'm glad I picked it up; making the whole game a lot more "3D" really adds to the atmosphere and makes it look great on the table. (For the budget-conscious, the cardboard standees for monsters in First Light have some great artwork on them — and you do still get miniatures for the heroes and a recurring dragon boss — but all the furniture items are flat cardboard tiles that just show a plan view of the furniture. They serve their purpose, but it's hard to deny that the 3D furniture is just better.)

Playing Zargon (known as Morcar in the European '80s version) is an interesting experience. One thing you have to remember while playing is that although you are technically an "adversary" for the Hero players, you are not necessarily trying to defeat them. You are, instead, attempting to facilitate a fun session of storytelling, using the game mechanics as a framework, and that sometimes means quietly fudging things a bit, rebalancing the difficulty on the fly and responding to things that happen in a way that isn't necessarily laid down for you in the Quest Book in black-and-white.

Some people turn their nose up at HeroQuest because of its simplistic mechanics, and I can totally understand that; there are games with similar theming that go much harder on strategy and tactics, with each encounter feeling a lot more like a tabletop wargaming skirmish than a dungeon crawl. For some, that's what they want; for me, though, I've always been very fond of HeroQuest's straightforward mechanics, because not only do they keep the game pacy and help emphasise the collective, emergent narrative of the players' quest, they also make it very easy for newcomers to pick up. There's very little trawling through an epic rulebook once you have the basic rules sorted, which means there's very little downtime, and a lot more time for moving, fighting and searching things — because those are the three main things you do in HeroQuest.

The two quests we played today were enjoyably different from one another. The first was a relatively open-plan dungeon in which the Heroes, by chance, picked the "correct" way to go at the beginning and ended up at the concluding encounter relatively quickly, but in the process they also missed out on potentially collecting a bit more treasure. The second quest had an interesting series of magic portals that could send the Heroes to different parts of the dungeon, some of which connected with one another and some of which did not.

The second quest was noticeably harder than the first. The Heroes did have a bit of a run of bad luck with dice rolls — particularly once they opened up a secret room and found a pair of Mummies, which are surprisingly tough enemies to beat — but that made their eventual victory over the quest's "boss" feel hard-earned and definitely worthwhile. And relatively little Zargon fudging was required to keep everyone alive!

The cool thing is that I think the Hero players learned something from how these two quests went down — notably, that it is helpful to stay together, but in a tactically advantageous formation so, for example, the Wizard doesn't get twatted in the face, so the Barbarian doesn't block doorways and so everyone is able to get a chance to line up and punch something. The Wizard got equipped with a staff after the first quest, which allows him to attack diagonally, so that helped inform some tactics, and the Heroes have also determined that getting themselves some better equipment probably wouldn't be a terrible idea, either.

Lots of scope for growth, and the players enjoyed themselves enough to want to play it again! So with any luck, in a couple of weeks' time, it'll be hitting the table again and the campaign can continue.

I'm really very happy about this. I've been wanting to run a proper game of HeroQuest since I was, like, ten, and now I am. And I'm having fun! Sometimes you just need patience. And to buy the game multiple times in the intervening years.

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#oneaday Day 588: Two-day report

As promised the other day, I have been following the diet and exercise plan for the last two days. It has been going well so far! I've been under my calorie budget both days (there is still some of today left, but I have enough calories left that if I want a little snack later, I can have one) and I've done 30 minutes on the under-desk elliptical trainer on both days.

Unsurprisingly, I don't feel any different and/or better as yet, but I am feeling quite positive about this particular attempt. I have some healthy and low-calorie snacks (that don't suck) in the house, and interestingly enough I haven't really been feeling "cravings" during the day — it's those cravings that inevitably do me in on other occasions, so it's a positive sign that I haven't particularly been feeling them over the last couple of days.

I even have some recommendations! Ryvita Snack-It Thins. These come in crisp-like flavours and are like 30 calories each. They're a nice crunchy snack by themselves, or you can put some cheese or something on them, or dip them in something. And unlike a lot of "flavoured" crispbreads and suchlike, these actually have a good amount of flavour to them. I got the prawn cocktail and salt and vinegar flavours, and they're both excellent. Better 30-60 calories for one or two of those than 100 calories or more for a bag of crisps. Although I'm not feeling guilty if I do fancy a bag of crisps at any point.

I also got a bunch of yogurts because I really like yogurt. I was never a big fan of it when I was a kid — particularly if it had "bits" in — and would never, ever pick yogurt from the daily dessert options of "fruit, cheese, yogurt, ice-cream" when offered by my mother. But these days I can happily enjoy even a tub of plain yogurt without anything in it — there's something about it I just find nice and refreshing, plus, again, it's probably better to pick a yogurt than a chocolate pudding. Yes, I know some yogurts have a shitload of sugar, fat and calories in them, but you have to allow yourself some pleasures if you don't want to go mad.

I bought a hazelnut yogurt from Sainsbury's yesterday. I wasn't sure what to expect — on one previous occasion when I've had a "hazelnut" yogurt it actually ended up being more "chocolate", but in this case, it actually was a regular yogurt with little bits of real hazelnut in it. I'm not sure it's something I'll buy again, but it was certainly interesting — and pretty low on the calories, too, since it was a low-fat yogurt.

For breakfast I've got myself some Weetabix and Sultana Bran because I'm a weirdo who unironically likes both of those things, and both of them go just as well with yogurt as they do with milk. Frustratingly, the bowl of Sultana Bran I poured myself this morning had I think one solitary sultana in it, but fortunately I like just plain ol' Bran Flakes too, so it wasn't a huge loss. The bag will be getting a good shake tomorrow.

The one thing I haven't done yet is reach out to seek some help from the psychotherapeutic angle. There's a big form I have to fill out and then I have to have a phone call with someone, and both of those things are daunting tasks that I don't want to face just yet. I'll see how I feel about tackling them over the weekend — before that, though, I have a nice relaxing Friday night to enjoy, and some HeroQuest to play tomorrow!

So there's your update. I know two days isn't long, but I wanted to acknowledge, as much to myself as anything, that I've made a solid start. Now to keep it up!

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#oneaday Day 587: Why are you doing that?

One thing I find quite interesting when looking at games from over the years is contemplating how, as time has gone on, we have become a lot more preoccupied with the "why" of what we are doing in a game than in the past. And, as part of these contemplations, I've come to realise that games which don't really give you much of a "why" beyond "this is what the game is" actually have their own very distinct appeal.

As a case in point, I've been playing some Nintendo 64 "collectathon" platformers recently. This is a type of game that very much fell out of favour at some point between the PlayStation/Saturn/Nintendo 64 era and the PlayStation 2/Xbox/Gamecube age. There are still some folks making games like that — most notably Nintendo — but they are by no means as common as they used to be. And a lot of it, I think, comes down to the apparent expectation that everything must have some sort of narrative context or justification.

Now, I'll hold my hands up here and say that, in the past, I have been guilty of thinking that pretty much every game would be better if it had some sort of narrative context. In the earliest days of this blog, back when the people behind WordPress gave a shit about their community rather than going all-in on AI or whatever shit they're up to at the minute, I even had a post featured for making this very argument specifically about racing games — blissfully unaware, as I was at that point, of Namco's PC Engine conversion of their arcade game Final Lap Twin and the fact they added a Pokémon-ass RPG to it. I do actually still think there's scope for racing games with stories, but I also don't think all racing games need stories — and those which do have stories had better have bloody good ones if they expect me to sit through them rather than skipping right to the racing.

Err, what was I saying? Oh, right. Games didn't always feel the need to justify the things you were doing in the game in terms of narrative. Collectathon platformers are, in many ways, the quintessential example of this: they have characters, a world and indeed a plot, but none of those get in the way of the core "point" of the game: solving puzzles and overcoming challenges to acquire shiny things that let you access more of the game. No-one ever gave a shit about why Mario was collecting Power Stars in Super Mario 64, they just knew that he had to collect Power Stars, and that was enough.

This is one of the things I found quite refreshing about Donkey Kong Bananza recently. That's a game that strikes a very good balance between having an unfolding story and just giving you a basic objective to complete before getting out of your way and letting you accomplish it. For the vast majority of your time in Donkey Kong Bananza, you are looking for Banandium Gems. It doesn't matter why. Donkey Kong wants them, and that means you want them. That's all that matters. That's all that needs to matter.

I'm not saying that games with plots have no place. Hell, you know me, I'll gladly bury my head in a 100+ hour RPG, particularly if it makes me cry at least once along the way. But sometimes it's nice to play a game that is less concerned with wanting to be taken seriously as a great work of art or a masterpiece of characterisation and worldbuilding, and more with being a fun toy that just feels good to fiddle with.

I could have probably phrased that better. But I'm leaving it like that now, deliberately. And I'm off to go and acquire some more shiny things.

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#oneaday Day 586: Commitment

I'm back from The Day At The Office. I haven't set my office PC back up again yet though, so no tablet drawings for now. I'm tired and can't be arsed to faff around with wires right now, so it's plain text for today I'm afraid.

Anyway, as I said yesterday, I'm pretty determined to make 2026 the Year I Beat My Weight. Not, as in previous years, the year I beat my previous record for "highest weight Pete can be", but rather, the year I figure out exactly how to get on top of losing it.

I have a several-step plan that I will begin pursuing from tomorrow. (Today is a write-off due to all the travelling and the Wingstop we just had for dinner. We had the Wingstop with the full knowledge that we're both going to be Eating Healthy from tomorrow.) Here are the several steps:

I will use the Lose It! app to track my daily calorie intake, and keep below the daily recommended number of calories that will supposedly allow me to lose weight. In doing so, I will continue to enjoy the things I enjoy, but in better moderation. I will not be switching to a "half a banana and a handful of chia seeds for breakfast"-style diet, because that will probably make me want to kill myself.
I will count calories even if I go "off-plan" and have myself a "treat", to better educate myself in potentially how much damage I can do to my efforts if I "treat" myself too often.
I will do at least 30 minutes of exercise per day, on some combination of my under-desk elliptical machine and/or the treadmill that we have now set up in the spare room.
I will not use the calories burned during exercise as "bonus calories" to have additional Nice Things.
I will research and reach out to some form of psychotherapeutic support to help with my efforts.

That last one, I think, is going to be the big "different thing" I try this time, and I suspect it will be helpful. As I mentioned yesterday, while I mostly found my referral to the weight loss programme via the NHS to be unhelpful, the one aspect I really did feel like I was getting something from was the counselling aspect. Through talking therapy, I felt like I was able to start looking at my behaviours (conscious and unconscious) that have led me to this point, and to figure out ways I might be able to modify them. Unfortunately I had so few sessions that I don't feel like I really got anywhere — but I feel like if I had been able to spend more time with the therapist in question, we could have made some progress.

One thing that came out of those few conversations, and something that I find my thoughts returning to, is that some of my behaviours are consistent with a pattern of addiction. Anecdotally, having had experience with other people dealing with addiction, I would be inclined to agree. I recognise this. I recognise patterns in myself that I have seen in other people who were struggling with addiction. And I feel that is an important starting point. As with any addiction, though, the struggle will always be in breaking it, little by little. Because you can't really go "cold turkey" (so to speak) with food — unlike various forms of chemical abuse, you still need food to operate normally, and thus breaking any sort of food-related addiction is more about developing a healthier relationship with food rather than completely breaking your "attachment" to it.

But I'm probably getting ahead of myself there. Fact is, I think having some sort of Professional Help would be… well, helpful. Up until now, I've been hesitant, because Professional Help is 1) relatively expensive and 2) daunting to find your way into. 2) applies doubly in my case, because my social anxiety makes it a huge effort to be able to make contact with a stranger, but also it's overwhelming to see the sheer number of therapists that are out there, and having absolutely no idea who might be "right" for me.

Thus I think rather than taking the "roll of the dice" approach and just stabbing randomly at a huge list of therapists in my area, I'm going to try making use of an organisation known as The Empathy Project that operates in my area. This is a small, non-profit organisation based in the town I call home, and I can't remember how I stumbled across them, but I seem to have added myself to their mailing list at some point. What I have read about them online seems positive, however, and thus referring myself to them seems like it would be a solid starting point, if nothing else.

So, tomorrow, I am kicking all this off. I will be counting calories, I will be exercising, and I will be referring myself to someone who might be able to help me through this. I'm feeling oddly positive about this right now, so let's just hope I can keep this mental momentum.

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#oneaday Day 585: Hotels and their unflattering mirrors

It's that time of the month again, when I haul myself down to sunny Letchworth in preparation for A Day In The Office. And as such, I am coming atcha from my usual hotel, typing on my phone.

This hotel is, as I've alluded to in the past, All Right. It's reasonably comfortable, but its rooms vary quite a lot in quality, so it's always a bit of a roll of the dice when you get here as to whether or not you, for example, have a bath or not. This time I have been unlucky — no bath, plus a bedside table that looks like it last saw a lick of paint at some point in the 1970s.

I don't mind these little idiosyncrasies, though. They add character, and this place has become quite familiar to me from my numerous visits. Not quite enough that I know from my room number whether or not I have a "good" room, but enough that it is comfortably familiar here.

One thing I do dislike, though, is that pretty much every room seems to have mirrors, like, fucking everywhere. And there's something about hotel mirrors that always seems infinitely more unflattering that the ones you have at home.

I never feel more disgusted with my own body than when I see it in a hotel mirror. I think part of it may be the knowledge that I am away from home and thus not able to "do anything" about the way I look — not that I can really do anything at home, either, but I always feel just a bit more… grounded and in control when I'm at home.

I can't continue like this. This year has to be the year that I beat this problem. It's not going to be an easy process, and there are going to be times that I want more than anything to give up, but there is nothing I want more for 2026 than to be able to look at myself in the mirror and say "good work — you still have a way to go, but you're doing good". (I am a realist about this stuff if nothing else.)

That hard work has to come from me, though. I have to want it. Seeking external help has only worked on one previous occasion, and I never recovered from my relapse. Granted, there were external factors beyond my complete control that caused said relapse, but the approach I took back then — Slimming World — is clearly not quite right for me now.

I've been to the doctor about this, too. I was referred to an organisation who offered nutrition advice and counselling, but I found most of the course to be useless. The nutritional advice came once a fortnight and amounted to "eat less" (no, really?) and the counselling was even less frequent — though I did find the couple of sessions I had in that regard to be quite helpful, so that might be something I pursue independently and privately. It costs money, yes, but if investing in yourself isn't a good use of your funds, what is?

I'm keen to avoid drug-based approaches as although I'm sure they work, I am exceedingly squeamish about poking myself with needles and am not sure I would be able to do it — and I don't want to force Andie to have to do that, either.

During my time with the nutritionist and the counsellor, I was also continually asked if I wanted bariatric surgery, and while I have seen people get great results with that, that is not something I want for myself.

Besides being scared shitless of surgery in general — something I will have to confront when I do eventually manage to lose some weight, in order to get my long-standing hernia fixed — I also worry that the surgery won't fix the main problems, which I have pretty strong suspicions are as much psychological as physiological.

To put it another way, I'm worried that even if they remove the use of part of my stomach or whatever it is they do, I still wouldn't be able to control myself. And if you overeat when you've had that treatment, you can really fuck yourself up.

So that leaves me with good old-fashioned willpower, which hasn't done me too proud up until this point. But I really do want this. I want this to be the year I can look at myself and say yes, I am on the road to recovery.

Sorry for the rather TMI post, but sometimes it helps to just express these things and get them out in the open, as much for your own benefit as anyone else. I don't need anyone's help, I don't want advice — all I do need is some understanding and quiet support. And thankfully, that is something that I do have already.

#oneaday Day 584: Paint chase

"Are you going to paint them?" Andie asked, looking at the wealth of miniatures in the big-box HeroQuest set that arrived today.

"Probably not," I said. "I don't know how."

This probably isn't quite accurate — as Andie pointed out, the how of painting something is pretty bloody obvious. But what I meant by that was I have no idea how to do it in such a way that it doesn't look absolute shite.

Now, granted, I am basing this on my previous attempts to do this, some 30+ years ago, when I had a Citadel Miniatures starter paint set and a single brush that was, frankly, woefully inaccurate for the job at hand. The results were, as you might expect, Not Very Good — not least because I only ever really got as far as doing base colours, and never got into doing highlights and shadows. I always got hung up on the how of those bits — how do you know which bits need highlights and shadows? (Obviously, you shine a light on it, and put shadows in the bits that have shadows in them, and lighter bits on the bits that have light on them — I realise that now.)

With this in mind, I've been pondering whether I should try again. And I was surprised and pleased to discover that miniature painting technology has, unsurprisingly, moved on quite considerably in the intervening 30+ years since I last attempted it.

I'm especially interested in some curious little gizmos called Speedpaint Markers by a company called The Army Painter. This is, in turn, a spinoff of a type of paint this company creates called Speedpaint, which purports to do all the highlighting and shadowing for you to a certain extent. It does this through a particularly blended paint, whose properties mean that when it gets into cavities it takes on a darker tone, while on flatter, more raised areas it has a lighter tone, and on everything in between it has a… well, kind of "normal" tone, whatever that means for the specific colour you're using. It's a different sort of idea to acrylic-based paint, which is what I had previously experimented with, and looks like being a very beginner-friendly approach to painting minis.

The Markers take things a step further. Rather than requiring a specialist brush, palette and other equipment, they're a little brush-pen hybrid that delivers the paint right onto the miniature without any other equipment required. Obviously you still need to prime them beforehand, but that's simple enough that even I can do it.

I'm tempted to give them a try. It's a bit of money to get a decent starter set of colours (and, annoyingly, the one thing the "starter set" of markers lacks is a regular flesh tone) but if it really is as easy as it looks to use these things, I might finally be able to enjoy something that has, to date, eluded me.

I dunno. I'll think about it. But it would be cool to have painted minis for HeroQuest.

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#oneaday Day 583: Heroic leap

(Experimenting with some different techniques today. The above isn't what I'd call a "finished" image but I feel like I can probably build that into something.)

We were originally supposed to be having some friends over to play HeroQuest today, but the collective illness of me, Andie and at least one of the friends in question over the course of the last week caused us to postpone to next weekend. So I can't really offer a recap of what occurred in our first session, but I can take a moment to ponder exactly why I'm looking forward to jumping into this.

HeroQuest was an important part of my childhood. I was introduced to it through my brother's girlfriend at the time, who was big into heavy metal, fantasy role-playing and suchlike. Her Dad was into miniature wargaming, also, so I wonder how much that was an influence on her — though, of course, Warhammer and its ilk was always a lot cooler than the sort of "historical re-enactment" miniatures her father collected. Perhaps it was a case of "oh, I kind of like those, but I don't want my Dad to think he's cool, so I'll get into something tangentially related".

Anyway, fact is, I was introduced to HeroQuest by my brother's girlfriend, who did an admirable job of putting up with her boyfriend's annoying younger brother by letting me look at her stuff. I don't think I ever actually played HeroQuest with her, but I was so enamoured with it that I asked my parents to get me a copy of Advanced Heroquest one birthday or Christmas, and I got it. Still have it, in fact.

To my frustration over the years, I've actually had relatively few opportunities to play either the original HeroQuest or Advanced Heroquest with real people. Fortunately, Advanced Heroquest includes some very robust solo play rules, so it wasn't a complete waste, and I did manage to play it a few times with people over the years. But the original HeroQuest was always something I really wanted to play with other people over the long term — ideally with me in the role of the games master, taking the players through a full campaign of adventures.

HeroQuest, for the unfamiliar, is a fairly straightforward dungeon-crawling board game. The original MB Games version from the late '80s was developed in conjunction with Games Workshop's Citadel Miniatures brand, and thus was regarded as part of the Warhammer universe; Advanced Heroquest made this much more explicit. A few years back, however, Hasbro and its Avalon Hill brand, now rights holders for the HeroQuest license, decided to resurrect the game with a crowdfunding campaign.

The new HeroQuest has had a few changes since its late '80s release. The new version is now universal worldwide, being based on the previous incarnation's North American rules, rather than having European and North American variants. This means a few things. Firstly, the games master player is now called Zargon instead of Morcar, which to my mind is an infinitely worse name, but it seems "Morcar" is being reintroduced to New HeroQuest with an upcoming expansion, so I'm not too mad about it. Secondly, the game is a tad more difficult — in the European original, all monsters had just one Body Point, so you just had to hit them in order to kill them, even in the case of "bosses". Thirdly, there are some differences and variations in how the quests are composed.

I initially bought the First Light standalone "starter" set for HeroQuest but, having seen a good price on the full-size core set, I've splurged on that too. (Christmas money!) It's actually worth having both, though, because First Light has a completely different campaign of quests to take on as well as a double-sided board with a new map layout that isn't in the original. The downside of First Light is that as a lower-cost starter set, it only has five miniatures: the four Heroes and a dragon boss that recurs throughout the First Light campaign; the remainder of the Stuff is implemented either as flat cardboard tiles, or cardboard standees. Conversely, the full core set has miniatures for all the main monster types in both the First Light and original core quests, plus plastic 3D furniture to put in the rooms.

I'm really looking forward to getting into playing this, because as much as I have had fun with some subsequently release dungeon crawler games such as Descent: Journeys in the Dark, The Legend of Drizzt, Gloomhaven and another one I've completely forgotten the name of, a lot of those feel like they get a bit bogged down in being tactical wargames rather than exploration-focused dungeon crawlers — and it's the exploration and storytelling that has always attracted me to HeroQuest and its surrounding works.

Hopefully at this point next week I'll be able to provide a report on how our first session went. I'm looking forward to it a lot, and hope it will be able to become a semi-regular activity. We shall see!

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#oneaday Day 582: Getting some mojo back

No drawing today as I've been doing other creative things, as I shall talk about in a moment.

I have not felt at all like making any videos for a while, which is a little bit frustrating to me, because the first two episodes of my Space Rogue playthrough actually did surprisingly decent (for my channel) numbers, and I reckon there's just one or two episodes more of The Granstream Saga to do before that's all finished. I just haven't quite been able to summon up the energy to continue those recently, not helped by a week of feeling ill that I'm just getting over.

However, with a soft embargo date approaching for Super Woden Rally Edge, a game I wanted to cover — the video I made on this game's previous installment is the best-performing video on my channel by a long shot — I felt a bit more inspired to actually do something today. So I recorded a bunch of voiceovers: both for this, and for some other things that I've previously written articles for, but wanted to turn them into videos. All in all, I've recorded voiceovers for Super Woden Rally Edge, Old Skies, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein 2009 and Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, which should result in a nice spread of 15-20 minute videos for each. I've even edited the Super Woden Rally Edge and Old Skies ones already, but I'm going to leave the Wolfenstein ones to another time — maybe tomorrow, maybe later in the week, depending on how I'm feeling.

I continue to go back and forth on what is "best" to do for my YouTube channel. Up until now, I've built it on Let's Play-style playthroughs of games, and I think a lot of my viewers like that sort of thing, particularly as I make an effort to explain how to play the game, why it's interesting, why it's still relevant (if it's an old game, which it usually is) and what I, personally, think of it. These are fairly easy to record and edit, but they are time- and energy-consuming to produce, since they do involve me sitting and playing a game, often for quite a long time, and attempting to find meaningful things to say for the duration.

At the same time, the pre-scripted videos tend to overall do better, particularly over the long term. I think I'm probably more "proud" of those overall, too, since they involve more in the way of editing, and delivering a voiceover is a different skill overall to off-the-cuff, unprepared commentary while playing "live". However, they take a lot more time to both prepare and edit, since there is often a lot of miscellaneous footage required to capture along with the footage of the main thing I'm covering, and the editing process involves a lot more in creatively finding ways to visually represent the things I'm talking about.

Part of me wants to commit to one or the other of these approaches, because I feel it would probably be a good idea to. At the same time, I think there's value in both approaches; you can show things in "live gameplay" that you can't show in a "video essay"-style production, and vice versa.

I do, however, think that kicking off long playthroughs again might have been a mistake. The videos for The Granstream Saga have performed more poorly than anything I've done for a long time, although, as I say, the first couple of episodes of Space Rogue did surprisingly well. So I'm inching towards abandoning those, though I feel like at this point I probably should finish The Granstream Saga at the very least.

Anyway, that's something to think about another day. I have enough on my plate with these new videos for now, so watch for them coming soon to my channel!

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