UPDATE 25 January

Is it really the last week of January already?! Man this month flew by lightning fast for me.

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Played:

• Conan Exiles
  

  179.5 hours playtime

  21 of 25 achievements

• Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You
  

  5.3 hours playtime

  14 of 27 achievements

As far as Conan, we’re in the process of moving our base into the northern highlands and out of the desert area finally. My partner is far better at the building nice looking houses thing than me, so mostly I’ve just run around harvesting and killing things while she gets her decorating on. I did hit max level on my character and crafted epic armor and weapons for us. With my build and gear set up as of right now I’m sitting at 730 armor, but I’m not ready to try my hand at dragon slaying yet because shields are currently bugged so I can’t block damage until it’s patched. There’s only two of us so we both need to be at our peak for that kind of battle - my friend is an archer/dagger damage build so that makes me the meatshield heh.

Halfway into Orwell for both the Monthly Theme here and my own book-game challenge. I got involved in the story last night and probably would have stayed playing it if I hadn’t been pinged by the Conan buddy into Hyboria (not that I mind of course.) Will post a write up as soon as I finish it up!

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Got to play another offline game this past weekend:

Escape room set up with actual plastic puzzle props. The gist of the game is that one person is literally strapped to a chair with an audibly ticking bomb to their chest while the rest of the players work quickly to defeat the three puzzles containing keys to disarm the bomb. The box says the game is for 2-6 players but I honestly would not attempt to play this with more than 4 people (one bombee and three puzzle solvers) or some are going to sit around bored.

It was interesting to work with actual physical pieces from a boxed game this time, but as you can probably surmise from looking at the product packaging, this game was designed more for children/families than for seasoned adult board game enthusiasts. I think the only slightly challenging part for us was the key cage puzzle, where you had to remove the key using two thin sticks and a fair amount of manual dexterity. So despite the novelty factor the puzzles themselves skewed too easy for us in particular and we were done with it by two playthroughs. Still, probably a fun game for a mixed-age crowd or players who are first-time room escapers.

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That’s all for now.

Have a great week, my friends!