Month: July 2025

Part of the reason for this sudden revival in blogging (I used to have a blog on the now-defunct otherleg.com which I updated for many years) is that youtube doesn’t allow you to update videos.

And fair enough! If you could update a video you could rickroll people every day. But it is an annoyance for me when I want to post a video for the rules to my card game Neapolitan, because if I point people to the video, what happens when I need to update the rules?

The obvious thing to do is have an intermediary – say, a web page that can point to the rules video and/or rulebook. Then I can update each as I need to and still have a QR code that I can include on a business card etc.

So in a sudden burst of enthusiasm (I have come to understand that this is one of the perks of ADHD) on the night before PlayCon, I registered andrewshellshear.com, make a wordpress website, made a quick page for Neapolitan, made a QR code that pointed to it, and made a bunch of business cards that had the QR code.

So the website is still pretty rough. Hopefully my enthusiasm carries me far enough to do some better styling on the pages, it looks kinda ghastly at the moment.

Played my first two solo games of Snowcrest after picking it up from Play Con on the weekend, and what a delightful half-hour solo game this is.

There are minimal differences between the solo and multiplayer experience, graded difficulty levels, and in half an hour I built two very different engines in my two playthroughs – the first focused on gold; the second on buildings.

It’s a tableau-builder game, secretly a worker placement where the workers are cards. Quick to learn, nicely thinky, definitely a keeper for me due to the quick play time. Like Jump Drive I feel like this is going to be one of those palate-cleansers that I play far more than the chunkier games.

So far the difficulty has been a little easy, so I’ve bumped it up to difficulty 9 for my next playthrough, and I’m looking forward to this one! I’ve already got the Monk out who has recouped some of the hefty cost, no sign of the gold miner so looks like it’s a new strategy lads…

I’m attending PlayCon tomorrow, giving a demo of my card game Neapolitan for the first time in public.