Welcome to a New Year of Gaming

Good Lord, has it been a month already? These festive seasons sure do take their toll. Between finishing a semester in graduate school, work, and fending off an evil, soul-sucking mortgage company, it's been all I can do to get from dawn to dusk with my usual 3 hour nap and 2 hour martini break in between.

Seriously, though, I've been going through almost stratospheric levels of stress lately, and it's taken a toll on my writing, my health, and my sanity (which some would claim was already pretty fragile)(and by "some" I mean mostly my mother). It's also cut deeply into the extra gaming time, which is what (in theory) makes State of Play more than just a repository for my print writing. Board and card game play has fallen off a cliff, and it's all I can do to write for work while still leaving time to live a full and happy life as a High Elf Werewolf Companion Archmage Thief Legionnaire with two houses, a wife, a couple of housecarls, some daedra, and a horse with a unquenchable desire to charge into every dragon encounter and promptly get either barbecued, frozen, or eaten.

(I've been through 6 horses, and my daughter is running out of chocolate-themed names to give them. We've had Chocolate, Hershey, Snickers, Musketeer (he lasted about an hour--tried to stomp a bear to death--failed), Reeses, and M&M, and I'm afraid I'm about to wind up with M&M With Peanuts, which is just all kinds of wrong.  Why the chocolate names? Because Bethesda, which has populated Skyrim with hundreds of unique creatures, seems incapable of making a horse in any color but "brown", and I sold naming rights to my horses to a 10-year-old girl in exchange for leftover Halloween candy.)

So am I abandoning State of Play? Nope. I'm still here. Just slowing down while life kind of reforms around me. I'm increasing my school schedule and my non-game writing, and still working my way through the insanely ill-conceived and horribly implemented HAMP process. That means posting will be intermittent, but I've put down a fairly solid footprint here and don't intend to abandon it. 

And I'm looking forward to a new year of gaming. I have a stack of good stuff waiting for the table, and the electronic platforms have been an absurdly rich banquet of high-quality titles. I'm about to post my review of the most high-qualityist of them all right after this, so stay tuned.