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Allessandro the Protector in Icewind Dale

Allessandro the Protector Our adventure began on May 8, 2024 and ended one year later on May 28, 2025. It was a great year of gaming once a week on Wednesday nights. Allessandro, aka Alice is a Goliath from Bryn Shander, but he travelled to Waterdeep, Baldur’s Gate, and other places along the Sword Coast where his religious studies led him to becoming a Paladin of Helm with the ambition to be a member of the order of the Vigilant Eyes of the God. ...

June 3, 2025 · 102 min · 21440 words · Dave Nelson

Dice Throne

I discovered Dice Throne through their Marvel Kickstarter and after backing it decided to get the other Dice Throne games to go along with it. The big pitch for Dice Throne and the mechanic that makes it a bit different from other games is that there are characters to play that are very simple and ones that are very complex with a nice mixture in between. Between Season One and Season Two there are 16 characters to choose from with a complexity rating between 1 and 6. But don’t be fooled, complexity does not translate to simple and hard to play, with some combinations of characters the simple characters are a lot harder to play well and win with than the more complex characters. ...

December 13, 2021 · 2 min · 347 words · Dave Nelson

Sleeving Gaming Cards

I have recently gotten deep into card games, not collectable card games like Magic the Gathering, although I have done that in the past, but games like Legendary and Munchkin, and Dresden Files where there are a lot of cards, a lot of shuffling, and generally the potential for rough handling. With my Legendary game there are a handful of cards that get used at the beginning of every game, so they see a lot more use than any other cards in the game. After just 5 solo games I could already see those cards taking a beating and showing signs of wear. A big part of the fun of these card games is not knowing what card is coming up next, so having cards that stand out is not a good thing. ...

August 21, 2020 · 3 min · 478 words · Dave Nelson

Legendary Leagues

I have really gotten into Upper Deck’s Legendary Marvel card game, as previous posts have shown, and a big part of that are the challenges provided by Legendary Leagues. Here is the description from their website: “The Legendary League Series are unofficial leagues for competitive solo play of Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game and Legendary: Villains. It was started on BoardGameGeek.com with the Marvel Legendary base set by Jesse Olivier in 2013, DarthEd has run the hero league since season 2, and Travelsized has run the leagues that feature the Villains sets as well as the Starter Leagues. In each league, individuals will be competing against each other in solo play in multiple scoring categories in order to see who is the most Legendary!” ...

August 20, 2020 · 2 min · 261 words · Dave Nelson
Legendary Cases

A Legendary Storage Solution

Hobby Lobby Art Cases full of Legendary Marvel cards Storing around 5000 sleeved cards that you want to be able to easily get at and play with is a bigger problem than I thought it would be. I found some people using the medium size expansion boxes and some cutting and gluing to make some really cool cases, but I don’t want to cut up my boxes. I found a 3d-printed storage solution, but it added a lot of weight to the original box and didn’t come close to holding all of the cards. ...

May 1, 2020 · 2 min · 303 words · Dave Nelson
Legendary Marvel Boxes

Legendary®: A Marvel Deck Building Game

Legendary Marvel Boxes Legendary is a card game from Upper Deck that came out in 2015. I first got the Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game (not a Legendary game), then Legendary Encounters Firefly game which I liked a lot, Legendary Big Trouble in Little China, then the Legendary Buffy the Vampire Slayer game. I am primarily a solo player of these games, but the first time I played the Buffy game was with my wife and some friends in a 4-player game. It took us a bit to understand the instructions, but it wasn’t too hard. That convinced me that I really wanted the original Legendary game, the Marvel version of the game. ...

February 28, 2020 · 2 min · 387 words · Dave Nelson
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Playing Dungeons and Dragons at DragonCon 2016

Before DragonCon 2016 I had decided that I wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons at the convention. Even though I played D&D in high school and went to a lot of conventions where it was played, I had never actually played at a convention before. In the early 80’s I played Dungeons and Dragons with my friends at lunch and on the weekends along with a bunch of other role playing games (RPG). Most of those games are not played very much anymore, but D&D is now on its 5th iteration which has apparently brought it closer to the first version which is what I remember. ...

August 1, 2017 · 2 min · 373 words · Dave Nelson

Make an Icon for Mac Yosemite

How to make a new folder icon for your MAME games is pretty easy with a handful of steps. This is the process I followed; there are other ways to do it using other tools. I used Preview, Adobe Photoshop, and Xcode’s Icon Utility. Step 1: Get the Icons I like JohanChalibert’s OS X Yosemite Icon set that he has posted on Deviant Art, but you could search around a bit and find many different icon sets that would be a great place to start. ...

January 13, 2015 · 5 min · 1010 words · Dave Nelson

Easy Launching of MAME Games in Mac OSX Yosemite

Sometimes you want to be able to launch a game by double-clicking an icon rather than going through MAME’s interface or using the Terminal. This method has the added benefit of letting you easily launch MAME with various options. We are going to write a small shell script, save it as a command file, and make it executable. If you have followed the directions in my previous post “MAME on Mac OSX Yosemite” you can follow these instructions exactly, if you have made changes or modified any steps, keep that in mind while working through these steps. ...

January 6, 2015 · 3 min · 601 words · Dave Nelson

MAME on Mac OSX Yosemite

Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) is a free and open source application used as a reference of the inner workings of arcade gaming systems. A side effect of this is that MAME can be used to play old arcade games if you can find the games. MAME uses data dumps from the Read Only Memory chips (ROMs) that were used in the original arcade games. You can download the ROMs of some games from the mamedev.org website. I am going to use Robot Bowl as an example. ...

December 30, 2014 · 5 min · 944 words · Dave Nelson