Final Fantasy XIV - Dungeons with Penny

Penny and I have been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XIV over the past few months.  It got to the point that my wife decided (on her own with no convincing from either Penny or me) to join us as well.  She's a level 50 Bard now and slowly progressing through the post-50 story quests like Penny.

At some point I decided to record some of my dungeon runs with Penny.  What follows below are the first 3 episodes of our YouTube series Dungeons with Penny.

Episode 1 - Halatali

Episode 2 - Tanking Thousand Maws

Episode 3 - Haunted Haukke Manor

We don't really have a set schedule for when episodes get released simply because it was hard to find time to edit the videos during the school year and the last two months were super busy with end of year stuff.  However, with summer coming up I think Penny and I will be able to put out a more regular schedule.  Going to try 1 video a week so one Dungeons with Penny episode each week!

Anyways if you enjoyed any of them, please subscribe to the channel and comment on the videos!

Final Fantasy XIV - Family Adventuring

In my last post I posted a picture of my character Mialee Liadon in her new look as a Miqo'te.  Considering how much time and gil I spent trying to find a look I liked for her when she was an Elezen, changing her race was not a snap decision (see post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4 for the evolution of Mialee's look as an Elezen).

A few weeks ago Penny watched me play and then asked if she could play too.  She had made a character on my account when I first started playing and although she didn't get too far she remembered she had one.  The combat mechanics were too complicated for her as she was only 4 I think so she spent all her play time just wandering around looking at things (and dying to high level things when she found them).  Now I didn't want to give up my play time so she could play so I made her a trial account.  I figured why not since it wouldn't cost me anything and she would have plenty to do while on her way to level 35.

So she made a new character on my server (Exodus), a Miqo'te named Luna Khaleesi (named after our two cats, Luna and Khaleesi).  She was annoyed that my character was not a Miqo'te and kept wanting me to change to one.  Penny wanted my character to be the same race as hers so that she can pretend our characters were sisters.  I didn't think much of it at first but eventually I came to the decision that this might be funner for her so I surprised her during one of our gaming sessions with the new Mialee and she was very happy.  I think that simple change made Penny connect with both her character and my character better and as a result she seems to enjoy the game even more than before.  And, like me, she likes looking for nice outfits for her character.

Luna (on the left) and Mialee (on the right)

After trying out the Marauder first (mostly because that was my main class) she eventually settled on the Arcanist because it has pets.  She liked the carbuncles and when she made it to 30 she got access to the fairies which really made her like the class.  I ended up gettting her a 1 month subscription as a treat for doing well at a recent violin competition she attended and as of this post she's a level 40 Scholar.

I truly don't know if this was a good decision on my part or not but wow is it ever fun being able to share my Eorzean adventures with her!  She loves exploring all of Eorzea and because she's playing on my gaming laptop the scenery looks amazing and the gameplay is smooth (compared to my old bare bones desktop at least).  Penny especially loves night time in the La Noscea region as she can see the stars so clearly and often just wanders around at night following the stars.

One really neat thing is that she is learning how to play in a party and learning the different roles.  She's a fairly proficient healer but does spend most of her time DPSing and letting her fairy handle all the healing.  I have to remind her for tougher fights to pay attention to the tank's (me) health bar because if the tank (or healer) dies, so does everyone else.  It does help that I'm an experienced tank so there's a little more room for error but I am wondering how she'll handle the more mechanically intensive fights as she continues her adventure.

I guess only time will tell if this is a good thing for her or not.  In the meanwhile we get to enjoy a hobby as a father daughter tank-healer team!

2016 and 2017 Years in Review

The last two years were busy to say the least.  I'm going to blame all the other stuff on why I didn't write anything about my gaming those years.  It's not that I didn't get a chance to play games or be involved in the gaming communities in town, just didn't have time to write or reflect about it.

Here's a brief run down of what occured

• Started an Esports club at NVSS.
• Even competed in the High School Starleague
• Penny and I played the Pokemon TCG competitively and regularly placed in the top 8 at our local events.
• Once she could read better, the decks we played got more complicated and we started buying singles and building meta/net decks.
• Finally reached Gold rank in League of Legends in Season 6 (2016)
• And got the shiny gold border for all of Season 7 (2017)
• Sadly I didn't play much ranked in Season 7 and ended up in Silver again.
• More board games!
• Got into cooperative board games big time.

Back From the Void

I have not paid much attention to this for a year and a half now.  I did not die and I did not stop gaming.  Just got busy and fell into a rut with regards to chronicling my journey as a gamer and geek dad.

Anyways, I neglected to do a Year in Review post of 2016 like I did the years prior, so I will post a Years in Review 2016-2017 later this week.

Lots of cool things happened in the last year and a half, the most significant of which being that Penny learned to read!  That opened a lot of opportunities to show her various games and what not.

So stay tuned as I chronicle my continuing journey as a gamer and geek dad.

Pokemon - Re-Learning the Card Game with Penny

Summer has arrived and with it a bunch of free time (when I'm not doing housework at least).  This summer Penny is a lot more cognizant of her surroundings and after a year of kindergarten is eager to learn how to read and do math and other stuff.  I've already started on teaching her the basics of game play with games like Tsuro and X-Wing so following a set of rules is getting easier for her.  She does have occasional bouts of why can't I do this but those are getting lesser and lesser.

Anyways, she started watching Pokemon on Netflix a few months back and out of the blue I asked her if she wanted to learn to play the Pokemon card game.  From my perspective this accomplished a few things.  First, she would learn to play a game that I used to play when I was younger.  Second she would learn to count by 10s since for some inexplicable reason Pokemon hitpoints and damage are in 10s and third she would learn to read some words like Cut or Tackle or other simple words that are Pokemon attacks.

So to start the road to learning the game we picked up the new Trainer Kit from Game Quest.

And so it begins...

The set contains two 30 card decks with fairly simple Pokemon, a playmat and all other necessary components for playing the game.  I thought Penny would want to play with the Pikachu deck as Pikachu is so prominent in the series but she opted for the Suicune deck as she liked the look of that Pokemon better.

The first game we followed the scripted game plan.  By scripted I mean that the decks were already pre-ordered and the instructions told each player how to play each turn for the first 8 turns or so.  This pre-scripted game ends up with the Pikachu deck winning.  Needless to say Penny was not happy so wanted to play again.

This time we shuffled up the decks and went at it again.  I kind of got a little unlucky in the second game as I did not draw enough energy cards to fully power my Pokemon (especially my Electrivire) and Penny eventually knocked out enough of mine to win.  She even made good use of Retreat to save her Suicune from my Electrivire and then brought it back the next round (after letting one of her Seakings eat an attack) to finish off my Electrivire for the win.

Penny laying the beats down.

As for the objectives I set out when teaching her the game, all were met save for the reading one.  We will have to work on that a bit more.

The rules for the game were really simple and haven't changed much at all when I first learned them back in 2000.  Penny picked up the rules really easily and she seemed to enjoy the imagery of the cards as well as imagining the two Pokemon fighting each other.  The only hangup we had was when we used attacks that had additional conditions like coin flipping.  She couldn't read the whole sentence so I had to explain to her that some attacks did extra stuff or only hurt under certain conditions.

Penny picked up counting by 10s pretty easily especially with the counters available.  She was even able to do some elementary algebra by figuring out how much more damage was needed to knock out (though she used the term kill) a Pokemon.  Interestingly she understood weakness easily enough (she referred to it as the Pokemon being allergic to certain types) though her math skills were not enough to multiply by 2 yet (admittedly I have not taken the time to show her what doubling means).

I need to figure out how to play the game for 3 players so that my wife can join us too.  My biggest concern is it would end up becoming gang-up on whoever was winning as is my experience in most other card games.

Teaching her the Pokemon card game coincides perfectly with the recent release of Pokemon Go too.  Just gotta wait for it to come to Canada now.

2015 Year in Review

This year has been a busy one.  Both in terms of gaming and life in general.  A lot of highs and one gigantic low at the end of the year.

Here's a brief run down of what occurred this year.

X-Wing - Introducing List Building to a 5 year old

We just got Penny's report card back earlier this week and she appears to be doing well.  Her social skills are also meeting expectations which is great as my wife and I were worried because she's an only child and has not had much interaction with peers outside of pre-school and kindergarten.  She can count fairly high in both French and English which is great and her addition skills seem to be on par with everyone else.

As a math teacher I'm ok with that but I'd like her to be better at math than her peers.  Call it pride if you will.  So in that regard I've decided that I'm going to introduce proper X-Wing list building to her soon.  Not sure how far I'll get though but from what I have seen her do and the report card comments she should be able to add tens (so add like 20 + 10) and she can already do ones addition (things like 1 + 4, and 5 + 2).  Shouldn't be too far of a stretch to do something like 12 + 23 (a Bandit Z-95 + Red Squadron X-Wing) or 16 + 5 (HWK-290 with Ion Turret).

My plan is basically to give her the points value for one of her ships and have her add upgrades to it and see what the new total is.  If that goes well, we can move on to adding the costs of ships together and hopefully get to a point where she can pick ships that add up to something close to 100 or whatever points total we decide to play at that day.

So the next game we play will be with a list that Penny makes herself!

X-Wing - Things are Escalating Rather Quickly

Exciting day today!  A little over a week ago I had asked Game Quest if they did special orders as I was looking for a 10th anniversary edition of Ticket to Ride that didn't cost an arm and a leg (the other game store in town had a few copies of it but they were selling them for $160 + tax!).  I knew I could order it via Amazon for way cheaper but I liked Game Quest and wanted to support a local business.  Turns out they were able to order it for me and at a price comparable to Amazon.

Not content with ordering just the board game I asked if they could order a few X-Wing ships as well so with my board game order came the Millennium Falcon and a pair of TIE Defenders.  Game Quest also got a restock of other ships so I will probably add more things to both Penny's Rebel Alliance and my Imperial Squadron in the near future (as it stands I have 6 ships to her 5 ships and she thinks it's unfair despite her having two large ships).  The influx of reinforcements for both sides coincided perfectly with us having finished our starfield battle mat!

Before we played with the new ships though I took some time to rearrange the ships and pilots so that both sides were roughly even in points and came up with the following squadron lists.  I also added some ordnance because in the last game we played, Penny had asked what the "alphabet tokens" were for.  I explained to her that they were called Target Lock tokens and next time we played I'd show her how to use them.

Penny's Rebel Alliance - 160 points

• Han Solo in the Millennium Falcon - 47 pts
• Dash Rendar in the Outrider with a Heavy Laser Cannon - 48 pts
• Rebel Operative HWK-290 with Ion Cannon Turret - 21 pts (I opted for the ion cannon turret as it doesn't require focus to be used and I can try and introduce ion tokens to our games)
• Bandit Squadron Z-95 with Concussion Missiles - 16 pts
• Blue Squadron Novice T-70 X-Wing with Proton Torpedoes - 28 pts

Mr. Arocena's Imperial Squadron - 160 points

• Gamma Squadron TIE Bomber with Homing Missiles, Proximity Mines - 28 pts
• Bounty Hunter in a Firespray with Heavy Laser Cannon, Seismic Charge - 42 pts
• 2x Zeta Squadron TIE/fo - 32 pts
• 2x Delta Squadron TIE Defenders - 60 pts

So a quick recap of what rules we have played with so far:

• All the basic rules from the Learn to Play guide except for stress tokens
• Focus Tokens
• Evade Tokens
• Secondary Weapon cards (just Cannons and Turrets so far)

We still don't play with pilot special abilities as her reading comprehension is not at the level necessary to understand the abilities.  I could just tell her what each pilot does and I think she'd remember that but I'll hold off until she can read better.  We also don't play with critical hits for the same reason.  Interestingly enough, Penny tried to make a case for dealing two damage with the big explosion because it's a bigger explosion.

In this game we learned about target locks, how to use ordnance and ion tokens.

X-Wing - Playing among the stars

The last two weeks were a little busy so Penny and I didn't get to play much X-Wing together.  She still asked on a daily basis though so I think she's quite interested in the game.  That didn't stop us from doing other X-Wing related things together though.  Like making a starfield battle mat.

I was tired of having the ships slide around so much on the dining room table so spent a few days looking how other people made their DIY starfield battle maps.  Lots of things came up on the internet ranging from felt cloth (decided against this as it would just slide off the table) to yoga mats (lots of pros but relatively expensive compared to other DIY solutions).  So armed with this knowledge of what others had done, I spent an afternoon (while doing other errands) looking for some materials and pricing them out.  I ended up picking up two black anti-slip shelf liners (something like this but 18" wide and shorter) from the dollar store for $6 and taping them together underneath to make a 36" wide field.  The mat looked good, gripped the dining room table well and the ships didn't slide so much when placed on the mat.

To make the mat even better, Penny and I looked up various star fields on the internet as references and spent an evening painting the mat.  She had a lot of fun flicking the toothbrush of white paint on to the mat and adding some large pink gas clouds/planets/stars to one of the quarters.  The following was our end result

We were happy with it, but I might try and find a way to make her pink celestial bodies blend better with the rest of the star field at some point in the future.

X-Wing - Adapting for a 5 year old

Since picking up the Force Awakens Core Set for X-Wing last Sunday, Penny has asked to play the "Star Wars game with ships"' almost every day this week.  Sadly I could not oblige every day because of work but we did play a few more games.

Having a second ship certainly helped even things out since we weren't playing with Actions or pilot skills.  The game at this level was basically just ships moving and shooting at each other so a lot of our games came down to who could point their ship at the enemy and roll better.  With only 1 ship, Penny had quite a disadvantage despite the added shielding, but with 2 ships she was able to hold her own much better.

My TIE Fighters chasing down a Z-95. Penny's X-Wing coming in fast to help the Z-95.

Earlier today we went back to Game Quest and added a bit to each of our respective forces (pay day!).  Penny wanted the YT-2400 but she didn't have enough money for it.  She was going to settle for just the HWK-290 and another Z-95 but I mentioned to her that we could look through our old video games and trade in any games that we didn't play anymore to see if we could get the extra money to get the freighter.  She was quite happy I suggested it and we ended up getting a fair amount for the games we traded in.

HWK-290 and YT-2400

After pooling all of our money together, we got enough to get the YT-2400 and a HWK-290 for her, and Slave I and a TIE Bomber for me.  I had a hard time deciding between Slave I or the Imperial Aces expansion (both the same price at Game Quest) but finally decided on Slave I as it was the only one they had and I needed a big ship too.

TIE Bomber and Slave I

Anyways, what I really wanted to write about was how to modify the game a little (and it really is just a little) so that someone as young as 5 years old can play.

Northern Fancon 2015!

The weekend of May 8th-10th saw the first ever Comic Con style event near my home, Northern Fancon 2015!

I was a pretty excited about the event and my parents ended up buying me a ticket for Christmas.  The event itself didn't seem to have that much for the first few months as it took forever for them to post a schedule for events and things (their guest line up kept growing as time went on as well).  I think it was about a month or so before the event took place that they started scheduling panels and about 2 weeks before the event that they had a schedule for the guest panel/interview and some workshops.

It didn't feel like there was a whole lot this first year.  I felt like I was in a trade show with lots of booths for vendors, artists and even some other events coming up later in the year.  Maybe that's what these things are like?  I was hoping for a few more gaming related events like tournaments or demos or what not.  The venue has a lot of space and closed rooms so I could see doing a wargaming tournament or card game tournament or something.  There was a (seemingly hastily put together) Settler's of Catan tournament as well as a Smash Bros. tournament but that was only for one day and I think they could have easily done something like a Warhammer tournament or Magic: The Gathering draft or what not.  I mean Northern BC has a large community of wargamers and Magic players they could have easily tapped in to (no pun intended) for either logistical support or participants.

There were some cool guests though; most notably William Shatner, Jewel Staite and Tia Carrere.  My family was totally stoked that John de Lancie was there as he appears in one of my favourite fandoms (Star Trek) and also one of my daughter's favourite shows (My Little Pony).

Speaking of Mr. de Lancie, when we went to get his autograph he noticed Penny and asked her if she was a fan of My Little Pony, to which she replied yes.  He then continued to talk with her and told her that he suspected daddy (me) actually wanted his signature on one of the prints featuring Q and proceeded to pick one and sign it for me.  Mr. de Lancie then told Penny that he would give her one too as a present and signed a print of Discord (his character in My Little Pony) to which she said thank you.  He made the event quite worth it for both Penny and I.  Kind of regretting not getting a photo with him, but c'est la vie.

My father in law also got something out of it as we shelled out the money to get him an autograph and photo with William Shatner.  He grew up watching the original Star Trek and is a big fan.  He also had a great time perusing the comic book vendors looking at old comics he used to read as a kid.

One of our favourite parts about Fancon was all the cosplay going on.  Penny decided to participate when we told her she could dress up.

D&D - Dungeons and Princesses

So this past weekend was BCs Family Day long weekend.  As such I got to spend some time with my daughter when I normally would be at work.

My wife had gotten her some Capsule Books a few months back and she decided to introduce one of them to Penny.  Penny chose the Disney Princess one and her mother read her the story.  Each book had a bunch of thick cardboard cutouts of the princesses as well as cutouts of the princesses dancing with their princes.  Penny had a lot of fun moving them around on the included playmat and was having a good time.

But I noticed something about the cutouts as she played with them.