I’m Back! My paternity leave is over, my baby is a month old, and I am ready to jump back into game designing, blogging, and brewing.

As usual since today is Monday I recap the Boards & Barley I’ve enjoyed. But it has been a long time since I posted so I have an extensive list today. We’d better get started… (So many beers means I won’t be linking them all. If one sounds interesting, just do a search for it.)

The Barley:

Oh Baby!

I can’t pick a Barley Spotlight beer since there were so many good ones. Here’s what I’ve enjoyed over the past few weeks:

• Bell’s Oberon
• La Trappe Quadrupel
• Anchor Old Foghorn Barleywine
• Leinenkugel’s Lemon Berry Shandy
• Capital Amber
• Grand Teton Sweet Grass American Pale Ale
• Vintage Sasparilla Killa
• Capital Supper Club
• Delirium Tremens Tripel
• Konig Pilsner
• Solemn Oath Snaggletooth Bandana American IPA
• Leinenkugel’s Honey Weiss
• Tyranena Down & Dirty Chocolate Oatmeal Stout
• Capital Lake House
• 4 Brothers Prodigal Son
• Labatt Blue
• Southern Tier Creme Brulee
• Breckenridge Nitro Vanilla Porter
• Kostriker Schwarzbier

Wow… what a list. Probably could have done without the Labatt Blue, but otherwise it’s been an enjoyable few weeks on the Barley front!

The Boards:

No Boards Spotlight here either. We’ll be back on track next week with the spotlight items.

• Qwirkle
• VivaJava Dice x3
• Le Havre: The Inland Port
• Nauticus
• Feudality
• King of Tokyo
• Mutiny

That’s not as many games as I thought. Maybe I forgot some. I guess I was pretty busy painting the baby’s room, hanging curtains, putting mulch around our house, playing with the two older kids, watching the World Cup (Pretty good timing for my paternity leave!), and sleeping. But it’s good to be back!

Designer’s Corner:

It’s time to make a strong push to get Brooklyn Bridge ready to demo for people at GenCon. I’ve got just under two months to refine the game to a point where it is fully enjoyable without any gaping holes. There’s aren’t really any gaping holes right now. It’s just not fully enjoyable. But I have a few tweaks that I want to test this week that my Level 1 friends have said sound like good changes.

Also, I have a new game design idea that I really like. The theme is totally fun and interesting to me. I’ll give you more information on Thursday when I plan to share the concept with the world. The cool thing is that I will be doing all the design publicly on this blog. Each Thursday for the next few weeks I’ll be posting design articles about the game and I’ll be wanting your feedback for it. We can all design it together in a sort of crowd-sourced design thingy. That should be pretty awesome.

So progress is being made on Brooklyn Bridge. I’m going to tweak a few things with Quantum Orcas and make it more flavorful, which hopefully will increase replayability. And it should be a fun 7 weeks leading up to Gen Con! Will I see you there???