Gameholecon 2026

In October, I went to Gameholecon in Madison, Wisconsin, with my kid, Klund, and his kids.  We'd skipped a year while Klund was moving out east.  And the year before, I only managed to catch a day because my wife had a heart attack, so I sent Aeryn on ahead.  But one of Klund's kids lives in Chicago now, so he had a place to stay and an easy drive, if not an easy flight.

On the way to the convention, Aeryn and I stopped at the gaming store in Osseo, Wisconsin, where we were finding some brunch.  Not at the gaming store, that's Boards and Bricks.  Huge selection.  We ate at the Norske Nook.  Although I was way too full that early for pie and didn't want to haul any with me.

Aeryn picked up a copy of Cascadia: Alpine Lakes.  They have the base Cascadia and the roll and write versions.  This one adds a layer of complexity by going UP as well as out.  So you end up overlaying some of your own tiles and matching biomes and critters matters, as well as multipliers for how high sets are.  Here we are at a brewery near the Air B&B waiting for the Klunds to get in from Chicago.  We played again later with the Klunds.  You really have to change your thinking around from the initial version.

We also got in rounds of:

• Flip 7 - push your luck style
• Spokes - I have a lot of cycling games now.  This one is amusing as it's mostly an optimize your route via drafting variation.
• Coloretto - make sets of matched chameleons.  I've played this quite a few times before.  The rest of my family really likes it.  I was trying to read what game this was from my list and couldn't tell if it was Color Ho, Colureho...Aeryn was able to read my scribbling.

I was going to take my bicycle, but the weather threatened cold and wet, so I left it behind.  But I got in some good walking every day so that all that sitting didn't entirely derail my health.  Very cool Halloween decorations near the Air B&B.

The actual Con.  There was a big Dungeon Crawler Carl presence this year due to the games / role playing games.  The posters were amusing.

Thunder Road: Vendetta.  You're trying to survive a straight track where the rocks and oil and mines and sides and other cars are trying to stop you.  You play with a small, medium, and large car, so you have some flexibility.  Cars frequently run into each other creating a lot of interaction.  One player in this game reached the end of the road almost immediately, which removes the first tile and everyone on it.  I think about 2/3 the cards disappeared at that point.  I had one car further up and it managed to literally coast in for a win because my first two cars had died.  The left over actions allow your remaining car to move a square.  Bit of irony.

Heat: Pedal to the Metal.  I see why people like it.  Handling the heat and the corners is exciting.  But it is SO much like Flamme Rouge, and I like that theme better.  The difference between optimizing your deck in Heat and knowing the composition of your deck and the likelihood you've already used up a card in Flamme is a subtle difference.

Rebel Princess.  It's a trick taking game with individual differences and some changing goals.  I won this one, but it wasn't a hard win given at least one of the players really didn't understand trick taking in general.  It's almost like having someone else playing for you in that situation unless the other players are really good at trick taking too.

Lemmings in Space! 25 years old.  I played with the creator.  This was an amusing game.  Not a lot of strategy.  Your lemmings WANT to die, so you're skimming stars to get radiation sickness, visiting planets and hoping to find a new disease, and optimizing your ship profile so you're the ship all the other ships attack.  All while studiously avoiding anything that makes your crew reproduce faster.  As my last game of the day, a fun way to end things before bed.

Tenpenny Parks with Innovation Expansion  The expansion is new this year.  Aeryn and I have played this game with the creator - and again this year - and own a copy.  Aeryn's even hosted it at Con of the North.  This is an enjoyable game with a good theme.  You can lean into the money win (which I usually do), and in the past you could sort of corner that tactic, but the new addition does add some new ways to make money to make that a strategy others can cope with.

Street Fighter: The Miniatures Game.  My third time playing this one, Aeryn's first.  The last two times I played it was a free for all with four players.  This time it was 1-1.  Our host didn't know the rules well enough and I forgot how the push worked, so I played my first round wrong and it showed.  My character was supposed to shove and bounce the other fighters around and mostly I just wandered up to their face and then hit them.  The second round I went looking for a correction, and I didn't win that time either, but it was a point of difference instead of almost a full health bar difference.  The chaining mechanism for attacks in this one is fun once you understand it.

Popes and Plagues.  I backed a reprint and own it, but hadn't played with anyone, so I was excited the designer was going to be there to teach the game.  He gave an amusing overview.  You're basically trying to build your population up until the plague and inquisition kick in and then it's race to be the last one standing.  The depopulating is spread around pretty well with minor diseases, war, etc., so you're not really getting a huge population bump before a plague ship shows up.

A guillotine over near the game library.

Faster Purple Worm! Kill! Kill!  Not a game.  We skipped the True Dungeon this year as it's getting a little spendy for noobs (and we're still noobs after all these years; we don't collect and trade and sell dungeon tokens), so I proposed we catch this event.  I've backed their RPG books and a game and watched their series on line.  The basic idea is that the group is level 1 characters and by the end of the session they encounter a challenge that's likely....definitely...going to kill them.  There's a lot of humor built in.  I wasn't sure who the adventurers would be, but they were some of the Con presenters.  For instance, the guy with the white hair, Ed Greenwood of AD&D fame.  He's famous for the Forgotten Realms setting.  For not having done it before, they were hilarious.  The guy on the left channeled a female orc fighter with a bent for officious paperwork.  The interactions made it great.

Back to the Air B&B.  We spent most of a day gaming at the house, although Aeryn and I hopped down to the Con for a game I'd wanted to play.

This isn't it.  This is Klund's copy of Wyatt Earp.  Again, a bit of a trick taking game.  But you can sneak in as the second on someone's set and you're trying to up the bounty of the set / outlaw you're most likely to take.  So even a huge set might have a middling bounty.

We snuck out for Talisman with someone involved in the redesign.  I've played this on the iPad in the past.  It's a pretty basic game where you're trying to up your stats to get an advantage over the monsters on the cards and working your way toward the center.  In this incarnation you could play as a team/cooperatively, which was much more fun because some of your decisions could be based on their usefulness to someone else in the group and rather than having to grind forever to defeat the center monster, players could try to optimize a single player.  It doesn't have a good way to "throw away" a spell, however.  Which has always been the case.  So I got a little spell blocked with one I don't think I'd have ever used (and didn't).

Aeryn and I went to Oishi Ramen for dinner.  We used to love Morris Ramen....everyone loved Morris Ramen...but it's gone as of 2024.  Ironically, Mickey's Dairy Bar was gone when we went out to breakfast this year.  It's been bought by some locals, but they plan to re-envision it, and that doesn't sound good.  I didn't catch that it was closed via the map, so we ended up staring at a closed restaurant and wandered up the street for pastries and coffee.

This is the design on the Fantasy Factory beer from Karben4 in Madison.  I absolutely love the can, and it's an IPA that goes well with ramen.

A Gameholecon tradition the last few times, Power Grid.  You wouldn't think a game about efficiently powering up your cities and managing the kind of power plant and resources would be much fun, but the jockeying for resources to power your plants, different kinds of resources, scarcity of resources, and bidding on more powerful plants that escalates significantly toward the end makes it a great game.  I won this one.  Managed to position myself well enough to generally get my coal on the cheap and squirrel away a crazy amount of cash despite hanging a little bit behind until the last two rounds.

Finally, we played Anomia. I'm not keen on a speed mechanic, but it was amusing.  Cards flip and if any two match in front of all the players, those players have to give a unique (not used before, even between games) instance of that category.  For example, lake.  In the moment, it can be much harder than expected.  And when a player takes the cards for the match, it can suddenly reveal other cards that match triggering a cascade.  Reminds me I should find Aeryn a copy for the holidays.

Great event.  I did skip out on a Circus Maximus big board game to play at the Air B&B one day, but that was probably a good trade.  I called it early, so the ticket was easy for someone else to pick up.  I was dubious about going back as it's a little more expensive than when we started, and the game selections aren't always great if you're not a priority ticket, but I had a great time this year.

Book recommendations With a Focus on Cozy

 I was asked about books I had read an liked in the last few years that I could recommend.  After thinking about it for a bit and reviewing my queue and closest bookshelf and mentally eliminating the programming and management books, this is my short list.  It's got a focus on cozy, not conflict, and a lot of strong female lead characters in many of them, including the general "anything by T. Kingfisher".

• The Dungeon Book (As Told by Cornelius the Skull) by Gareth Hanrahan - my most recent I was reading on the way to Denver and back.  Good humor  Great primary characters.  I think if you like Pratchett, this book would scratch an itch.
• When the Moon Hits Your Eye by Scalzi - a nonsense premise he handles with various perspectives
• Legends and Lattes, Bookshops and Bonedust, Brigands and Breadknives by Travis Baldress - a great series, although I liked the first two better than the last one.  About the family you construct organically, not the one you're born with
• Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman - I put this here not because it has a strong female lead (it has many) and not because it's cozy (it is in a way, but not like the others....it's cozy in the way eight 700+ page books give you a sense of continuity and familiarity), but because I have to cop to liking it enough it's taken up 5000+ pages of my reading in the last two years.  My wife and kid have read them as well, along with half the people I know at work.
• Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz - robot cozy, a really fun short read.
• Anima Rising by Christopher Moore - warning, some themes that put people off, but I enjoyed this more than some of his other recent books and he really leans into the main character/s.
• Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove - a fast, fun read about monsters in space.  Loved this one and someone at work thanked me at our recent offsite for recommending it on the internal book slack.
• The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman - heavier than the others.  King Arthur and company and the clash of cultures in Britain.  I posted a photo of a church I thought captured the intersection of Christianity and Druidry and Lev gave it a like, so maybe I'm biased.
• The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler - this one is deeper and goes into the philosophy of what it means to be intelligent.
• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones - ok, not cozy at all.  This is the only scary one I'm putting on the list because he's a great writer and this was a true number of steps above most scary books I read.
• Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson - I can't imagine anyone not liking this one.
• The Rivers of London Series by Ben Aaronovitch - a bit of Harry Potter meets London cop.  Although a warning, the action isn't as gangbusters as Harry Potter. If you're going to London, a perfect series to read before you go  (or on the tube, like I was for one of them).  Also recommended by my wife.
• The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister - more of a folktale than a horror tale.
• The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty - I hear it has a sequel.  When I say strong female leads, this one is all in.  A very impressive main character.
• Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson - I liked this better than Yumi, and that's a source of debate with at least one friend.  But this is truly a cozy, female led, organic family book.  I've read The Heroine's Journey by Gail Carriger about how writing that arc differs from a hero's journey, and this is textbook.
• Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi - he's got a new book out as well this week I'm looking forward to.  Short, fun, also read by my wife and kid.
• Pretty much anything by T. Kingfisher, and I mean that.  She's a masterful storyteller in the fable style and gothic style depending on the book.  Reading one of her books right now that I'm liking so much I didn't realize it was #2 in a series.  Going to have to remedy that (Swordheart series, only two long).
• Long Way to a Small Angry Planet - e.g. pretty much anything by Becky Chambers, also about organic families

Anything else?  I'd recommend Whalefall and Project Hail Mary, but in the case of the latter, you can catch a very good movie version.  I hear the movie version of Whalefall isn't as good as the book, so I'm unlikely to catch the movie as I don't want to override the book in my head.

I read some scary one-off novels and LGBTQIA+ themed books (but also scary - that subgenre really understands body horror).  A number of graphic novels (truly hit or miss, even with good ratings).  And as a staple: Pratchett, Moore, various programming and management nonfiction.

I really blew through Stephen King's Fairy Tale as an alternate reality tale.  R.F. Kuang's Poppy Wars series is exciting and she leans into some parallels to WW2.  So was Babel.  I haven't read Yellowface yet, although it's on my shelf.

And I read some others like Sanderson's Stormlight series (huge) which I really liked (one left to go...was waiting for it to be more readily available as a paperback or a library book with a less than 2 week turnaround), but is probably only for tastes that run toward epic fantasy (like Wheel of Time, Game of Thrones, or the Lord of the Rings). 

Cycling September/October 2026

Some photos from my September/October cycling events.  Most of them group rides by that time of the year.  I do a week long ride in July usually, but Ming's new job took him out of the partner biz last year, and I didn't feel like two years in a row on my own.  Which is ok...but I truly missed it, so next year I have to find something even if it's on my own.

This is the Tunes, Toons, and Loons ride.  Or maybe Toons, Tunes, and Loons.  A bassist for SallyForth and Favourite Daughter I had gone to see at the Harriet Bandshell and at the Edina courtyard area (I'll get to a music post soon) Insta-ed that the group ride was happening and I thought it sounded fun.  It met at the coffee shop at Broken Clock Brewing (Curioso) and I biked all the way into North Minneapolis.  I ordered a coffee as I was early and as I looked up from my order....bassist! Surprised, I said her name and she looked at me with genuine confusion. I remarked I'd seen her play and was there on her advice and didn't expect her to be my barista.  She found me coffee and let me know we were starting at the OTHER Curioso coffee shop in Uptown.  Which was fun, because I biked down to the other shop with her boyfriend and friends on a nice warm up ride and had a great tine talking local routes and stories.

This is all of us at the coffee shop.  Besides her mom (and dad) and me, it was a pretty young cloud worrying about water conservation and cleanliness in the lakes area.  I'm way in the back representing the "new" state flag.

We stopped by a few different spots that were highlighting their sunken gardens for water run off and how they stopped pollution getting in the run off, and then ended up back at Broken Clock for music.  One of the things I enjoyed was a detour onto the trail that cuts through Minneapolis under the Twins stadium.  Completely new to me, but a bit of a game changer.  On the way up, I pedaled past all the on-the-street Pickleball courts the city sets up on the riverfront, so I went right past it without seeing it.

That's the bassist in the background.  She sings and plays a variety of music including Ska.  At the moment, she's off on a nationwide tour with a well-known Ska band.  Good beer at Clock Works  Wish I lived closer.  My kid and I like Venn because it's a coffee shop that turns into a brewery later in the day.  Good place to work remote.  Amusingly, I saw a FB post by the new social director at Clock Works looking for local music acts and said, "Um, maybe check with the bassist at the coffee shop in the building.  She knows a lot of local acts." 

I did think about going to a DJ Dance Ride going on that night, and then decided I wasn't going to make it several more hours and didn't want to pedal home that late at night. I have.  I didn't want to.  So I popped past Animales to see Sarah Morris and check out the venue where we were going to have our monthly friends' dinner.  A much better choice.  I was famished and the DJ dance ride only has smores.  When I asked for a seat, I asked for a good seat where I could see Sarah and the person seating me said, "Do you  know the musician?"  I said, yes, but not as close friends or anything.  Then Sarah said from the stage as I was being seated, "Hi, Scott!"  I got a dubious look that implied I might not know what friendship was as I was seated.

This is the DJ Dance ride.  It started at Perennial Cycle.  Unlike that previous almost 70 mile ride, I drove up to the start of this one.  I went to the last one of the season.  So I knew it would be dark (I rode home in the dark on that last one, I just prefer not to, even with my new lights).  And, it was raining at the start, but only barely.  So I thought it might clear by the time I drove up. It did, and it stayed nice and cool.  Huge turnout.

Here we are blocking traffic in Uptown near my sister-in-law's old apartment. People do not like mass rides, although we were only on the streets for as long as it took us to get to the trails.

First stop, one of the light rail stations that wasn't in use yet.

Some actual dancing! For a while I was next to a kid who looked like he was an extra out of Newsies.  He definitely upstaged me with his aggressive dancing.  At one point at the stop, a clearly high guy came up and asked if I knew how many stops there were left.  I said no, but I thought one.  He noted he absolutely had to plan for the right time to "get out the homegrown!!!" (three exclamation points is probably insufficient for his enthusiasm).  I'm not sure how he managed to stay on the bike as he was, it had to be mentally tilting all over the place.  Dancing...sure.  Falling looks like dancing most of the time.

There was a bike with an open flame where I could cook a smore.

A better picture of everyone toasting their mallows.

Video of the park stop where we danced and had smores.  I'm glad I went to the last one of the year where it got so dark.  Made for a good vibe.
 

The DJ trailer had wheels, but also a hitch so another bicycle could help pull it.  Pretty heavy with the turntable, speakers, DJ, et al.  Here's The local City Council President sitting in as one of our DJs. Should out to the Joyful Riders Club as well for a great event.

Nice picture of the park.  Some people really went all in with the lights.  I felt like I was skimping a bit.  It was here I realized I'd put in about 12000 steps of dancing.  I wasn't standing around like a post.  I don't think most of my friends or family would have recognized me in that environment.

From the Give Us Wings ride with Ming.  That's a charity ride to raise funds for communities in Africa that include education, health, and business.  The goal is to uplift whole communities.  My sister and mom both volunteered for Give Us Wings and did health care while there.  

It was raining the whole time we were on the ride, and many of the trails were ripped up for construction purposes.  These are my socks at breakfast at the OPH afterwards.  Ming and I still managed to get lost this year, as we usually do, even though he was in charge of some of the signs.  But we figured it out, turned around, and helped a few other people get "unlost" who did exactly what we did (they weren't following us, so it wasn't our fault like it was last year when we almost bonked someone who followed us).


This is from the Twin Cities Bike Classic with Mean Mr. Mustard and Ming.  Got in a pretty long ride.  A little extra even as we parked at the Pancake Bistro a few miles from the start and carbed up before t he ride.  I went to Dave Hill at the Parkway with friends, and he's known for his antics around traffic cones, so I shared this moment of working-across-the-aisle with him on Instagram.

Had been a while since I'd been to the Minnetonka Train Depot.  Was a good ride.  I talked to a bartender from Venn for a bit I often see on Fridays (see above regarding remote) who's excited about doing RAGBRAI next year and is practicing some longer rides.

Whew....that might seem like a lot, but I got in a lot more bicycling doing rides to outdoor music venues this year than I did to group rides.  Group rides just happened to anchor the end of the year.  I have music rides in my queue.  I'll catch up on those sometime soon as well.  Get my year a little better documented for posterity.

Denver Offsite 2026

Ok, so I tweaked the code I had so that instead of cutting and pasting URLs, it points at a Flickr album (if you have an API KEY) and generates my HTML right to the screen instead of an output file.  No more opening and closing and looking at dozens of windows.  Simply "poof" an HTML list of photos that maintains perspective within the confines of a 600x600 window, which is optimal for Blogger.  Slick.  That's a huge difference in my time and might actually get me to blog.

So I'm starting with my most recent event first, which was my company offsite in Denver, Colorado.  We were in the Denver Tech Center area, which is about an hour south of downtown, by train or by Uber in rush hour.  I took the A train from the airport and switched to light rail. I was surprised my team was so pro-public transportation.  One team member came in early enough to take public transportation and his backpack to a canyon and hiked up a mountain.  I took it in early and hiked around the Denver Tech Center area (not very exciting).  And at least one other team member did the $10/day method.  I like the cash goes to the city.  That's always a plus.

I spent time on the airplane reading my "homework".  The Art of Action.  This is an extract.  Not exactly an easy read.  The overall theme of the book was good.  Autonomy over micromanagement.  Micromanagers thrive in the same places as authoritarians and dictators.  Autonomy is good in war as well as in business.  But I don't think I needed a whole book for that lesson.  Our single hour of book discussion was mostly a rehash of the themes because we hadn't had a lot of time to read it, and a few exhortations to share how to change company culture to encourage a bit of esprit de corps across teams and foster more autonomy in tackling problems and innovation.  Sometimes it's like there's nothing new under the sun.  Those aren't groundbreaking ideas.  The issue is always handling managers who do micromanage and enforce a hierarchy in all things.

During my walk, I headed up to the outdoor sculpture garden.  But it turned out to be a music venue, closed, and not as interesting as I'd hoped.  But I found their coffee shop and enjoyed the giraffe statutes outside the doors.

It was a whole family.

When I went to find my room, the key would only let me go to the fourth floor.  I went up and down several times, finally deciding they had coded my key wrong.  And then I thought...what if this is some off-by-one issue.  This was some off-by-one issue.

I met up with most of my team at the local bar, seeing them all for the first time.  I also saw several people from my PREVIOUS teams for the first time.  I told one he wasn't shorter than I expected, because his photos clearly revealed he was 1.5 big corgis tall.  But another former teammate was tall and she had a huge smile, and the combination that didn't gel with my mental picture really threw me for a moment.  My old team was Panda Express and we dispersed last October.  When I saw a Robot Panda beer at the liquor store at the end of the first night, I knew I needed it.

This door in my room was punking me.

We had an offsite Pinewood Derby event run by the local Scouts.  Everyone built a car that weighed no more than 2.9 (hence the pipes, although I still stopped at 2.7), and winners were based on fastest, fastest team, slowest, and best decoration.

And everyone made a car.  It was a lot of cars and a LOT of heats.  We weren't forced to stick around.  We could go find a beer.

This implies I was angling for slowest, but I didn't even come close.  I think some of the ones decorated with pipe cleaners and lacking a wheel had an advantage.

The last night of the actual offsite (versus the next night when I flew out) about a dozen of us went on a beer tour in the RINO district.  I saw these old pinball machines at the Bierstadt Lagerhaus where we started and went down to play a few for free.   That first one is 62 years old.

Our beer at the Lagerhaus.

One of my coworkers bought a bottle of slime on the way into the brewery.  And then went about putting it back in the bottle.

Harder than it looks.

Much harder.  I told his boss it was a metaphor for release management.

They had a great painting in the entryway from The Big Lebowski.

We went to three more bars and had a pitcher of light/usual, dark, and specialty at each that we shared with small tasting glasses.  Great Divide.  O'Dell.  And Ratio.  However, about two to four folks weren't drinking, or weren't drinking a sample of everything, and a couple were drinking wine.  So those three pitchers weren't split between too many people, and less as the evening went on.  It was a LOT of beer by the time we found some food at Ratio.

I took an opportunity to slip into a photo booth between debates with HR about zone of control changes in the market.

I'm either being held up or grabbing at someone's chest in this one.

Almost Buddy Christ.

Maybe a better Buddy Christ.  

My mom's face when she used to make her exasperated expression.  My sister would be familiar with it - I will need to share.

This is for me because our UX group is Onyx.  I'll find a need for this photo some day.

The lead on my old team used to say Huck It a lot instead of swearing.  So I took this picture for the team.  One of them did a search on Slack and found something like 4-6 dozen instances of him using it in a message.  Now when he says it, they can respond in kind.

The last day I wasn't leaving until late on the cheap flight.  A good call as it gave me a chance to hang out downtown and the evening plane was virtually empty.  So I sat around Union Station people watching over coffee and my book.  And found some Birria fusion ramen at Jinya ramen.

I liked it.  Really liked it.  But I like Tonkatsu and Black better, so I doubt I'll have it again.  I missed my half of an egg :(

One more brewery.  I still had a lot of time, even with the train factored in, so I sat around Wynkoop Brewing and read my book.  They had a few equipment rooms you could peek into on the way to the bathroom.

The front desk staff was kind enough to take my photo with their ape sculpture.

Good trip.  Loved meeting everyone.  I wish they had cycled managers between teams to generate some cross team familiarity.  And the technical talks were much better than the other talks.  I still have to parse all my notes and read everything they pointed me at Confluence and elsewhere.  Would have been nice to come back to a quiet week, but today was definitely proof that's not going to be the case (what's that, PHP hacks and TLS hacks and CVE scans installation changes to meet modern systems, and that took all day despite being a very small part of my job? At least I'm busy.).