Virtual Boardgames

Something that struck me as I browsed Google Play Store's recommended apps for my tablet. Among a myriad of copies of Angry Birds and various skill calculators for Blizzard's games, a shining gem named The Elder Sign: Omens appeared, fittingly named. In that app I saw an omen of board games leaving the tops of tables and settling on our screens - be it a desktop, tablet, phone or a console.

Some games tend to go the opposite way - first there is a video game and then they make a board game based on it (World of Warcraft, Doom 3, Civilization) but I think we are going to see more of "board game-turned-computer game" games soon.

Autumn Muffins

Yesterday was the first snow of the season day in Prague.

It means that the winter is coming and that the autumn is gonna turn soggy and crappy and all unpleasant and everything. I liked it so far - the colors, the weather, the smell of fallen leaves... I really wanted to preserve this autumn-y feeling for at least couple more moments and muffins seemed to me like the best way to do it. They are easy to share with others, they are easy to make and they are extremely customizable in terms of ingredients.

A quick search for autumn muffins yielded a great recipe - cranberries, figs, apples and hazelnuts work great as autumn fruit. I added a bit of rum to it for extra flavor and it really pushed the whole comfy feeling of a still warm muffin to another level. I was thinking about adding raisins too but when I saw how much there was of the fruit in the end I decided not to. The muffins are already chewy enough... Perhaps if the amount of  cranberries was halved and raisins filled the other half... Hmm.

Postcard from Quicksilver: The Great Airship Race

Today I got a postcard from Split Second Games as a thank you for helping to fund their board game called Quicksilver: The Great Airship Race. I didn't cover the game here in my blog in my summer post about the then-current games of Kickstarter but I did send them a small amount of money since the concept seemed cool and it would be a pity if such a nice game didn't get made.

As the name suggests, the game is an airship/blimp race set in a steampunk-ish world. You can check out its Kickstarter page here. The players have several waypoints they must pass on their way to the finish line and during the play they adjust speed of their aircraft and customize it to their own play style, sabotage other players's blimps, resolve conflicts with the use of various action cards and generally try to stay in the air... and win of course, because Queen Victoria is watching.

If you are interested in an unusual race game and missed the opportunity to pre-order (and help fund) the game on Kickstarter, you can definitely contact the designers on their webpage or just wait until spring 2013 and get it online.

PS: They wrote "Děkujeme" - a thank you in Czech on the back of the postcard... Aww!

Peach Triangles

It's been my father's nameday recently and I wanted to bake him something different instead of a traditional bábovka. At the same time I didn't really want to bake a cake since nameday doesn't carry the same weight as birthday does and looking back at the things I baked in the past month, I saw that all of them were pretty big projects. I was deciding between muffins or cupcakes but I eventually decided to go for something with fruit as the season is almost over (and it's still not time for plums, or is it?) and it would be a pity to pass up on the last fruit baked thing.

When I was looking into small fruit pastry recipes, there was this option to make couple of tarts but I didn't want to make a small pie so soon after the very successful berry pie from couple weeks back. I decided to go for Peach Triangles.