Back To Life

The Wife and The Daughter have been back for a whole week now and life is returning to a very welcome normality. Memories of my three week exile are fading as the house returns to normal levels of light, warmth and laughter.

I've spent most of the evenings hanging out with the girls, so I've not made much progress on my games designs, but I did get a bit done on Wednesday and some more on Saturday while The Wife was out for dinner with friends.

I've been concentrating on Codename: Vacuum since Christmas, which also feels like a return to normality too. I started work on Vacuum over two years ago, and it's now been strongly in development for a year and a half with frequent playtests and almost monthly versions. All that was put aside for NaGa DeMon in November, and then pretty much nothing happened in December from a games design point of view as Christmas took over.

But since I got back from our Christmas trip to Bristol I've been making progress on Vacuum again. Dave and I have been playing once a week at lunchtime, I took it to Newcastle Playtest at the beginning of the month and I tweaked a few of the cards before that - the first new version since October!

This week I've been working on another new version, incorporating a lot of the ideas I've had over the last few weeks and updating some of the advanced decks to better support the changes I've made to the basic ones. It'll be good to get the new version to the table when it's finished, it feels like Vacuum has come on leaps and bounds over the last four or five months, despite (or possibly because of) the hiatus in its testing.

On Zombology, there's not much to report, I'm still waiting for the majority of the artwork for the NaGa DeMon competition winners' copies and I want to incorporate cures into the next version, though I've not quite worked out how yet.

And no progress whatsoever on Codename: Dragon :-( Perhaps three games is an overcommitment, considering how little free time I have.