Hello, lovely blog readers. I’ve been neglecting you and for that I’m sorry. However! I am not sorry for the reasons I’ve been neglecting you, which is a whole long list of fun stuff and projects. So rather than trying to break it down into a whole bunch of different blog posts, I’m just going to do an all-inclusive life update. Here are some of the things that have been taking up my time: 1. Cosplaying! Eia and I had a blast dressing up as Anna and Elsa at Emerald City Comic Con, and we’ve definitely caught the bug. We’ve been hard at work planning more costumes, getting our cosplay Deviantart account ready, and figuring out how this whole crazy community works. Expect much more fun us in the future on that front. 2. I was in LA! I headed down with Joe earlier this month and had such a great time hanging with friends – and the highlight of my trip was absolutely the day we hit up the LA Renaissance Pleasure Faire. It was great to jumpstart faire season early this year and it just gave me the itch to attend as many faires and festivals as I can in 2014. You can bet I’ll be filling you in on my adventures as the summer progresses. I can’t turn down another chance to hang out in costume for an entire weekend. 3. A secret Adventure Time project with Cinesaurus. I can’t say much about this yet, just that when it’s finished it’s going to be AMAZING. I think the plan is to have it finished by VidCon, but I will keep you posted. 4. Another secret project that will be announced tomorrow. Just one day of waiting, I promise! Keep an eye on my website for the details! 5. A total rewatch of all four seasons (and three movies!) of the original Sailor Moon from the 90’s. If you want to follow that adventure, make sure you’re subscribed to updates from my second twitter, MoreKristina. It’s been an amazingly enjoyable thing to do, which is a good thing, being that there’s nearly 200 episodes to get through. We’re about 60 in, so we have a ways to go! As usual I have a few new videos that have been posted since the last time I wrote a blog post. First up is my April Favorites video, featuring a lot of anime and television and misc. nerdy stuff:

And my most recent new video – the TMI tag. This video has 50 questions and answers covering just about everything you never realized you might want to know about me:

That’s about it for now… it’s getting a lot nicer here in Seattle so I’m feeling more motivated to be active. I’m hoping to use that energy for good and start roller blading again, or even dig out my hula hoop and start working on learning hoop dancing. I’m considering making progress videos, so please let me know in the comments if that’s something you’d be interested in at all! How have you guys been? Let me know in the comments, and also, tell me what sorts of things you like to do to stay active when the sun comes out! Have a great day and I’m hoping to start blogging a lot more frequently again, so thanks for sticking around.

This week’s video was a collaboration with a new friend and fellow YouTuber named Josh Jepson. We initially met at a Nintendo event and decided to team up for a few videos for our game channels, but upon finding out he also vlogs, we had to make use of that.

SO! In this new video, my Mad Libs series officially becomes a “thing”. Get ready for more Mad Libs. They’re coming.

That’s right – from someone who hates the act of learning a new game (“it’s so clunk and tedious, let’s play one we already know”) I went into Tabletop Day 2014 with only one rule:

We can only play new games.

I assumed this meant we would spend the day learning two or three, then spend the rest of the time hanging out, meeting people, making videos, etc. This is not what happened. What happened was that over the course of the day, across two different game stores and an attached bar, I learn EIGHT NEW GAMES. I still can’t believe it. And the best part was – I actually really enjoyed every single new game I learned!

So for this blog post, I’m going to very briefly summarize and review the games in case you want to try them out for yourself.

1. Click Clack Lumberjack (played at 11:30am)

This game was awesome, and an absurdly simple game to start the day off with. It was explained to me as “reverse Jenga”, where you use the above hatchet to attempt to only remove the bark from the tree (which, really, seems like ineffective logging to me). The bark gains you points, but the inner circles (the tree’s guts) lose you 5 points if you accidentally knock them down. It was a silly, fun, and a good ice breaker. I played mostly with complete strangers.

2. Locke & Key (played at 12pm)

This was a hand management style card game based on a graphic novel I haven’t read, but it looked awesome. You work with the other players to face “horrors” and collect keys that give you special abilities to open new gameplay options as the game goes on. I’ve played a few of these style games recently, and I think this one is my current favorite. It made me want to check out the graphic novel, so it’s doing something right!

3. String Railway (played at 1:30pm)

I LOVED this game. I’ve never played anything like it before – the game consists of a bunch of pieces of different colored string, and you place them down on a map according to various “train station” cards you draw at the start of your turn. It sounds simple but gets impressively complicated as your world map fills up with string-trains. I think this was my favorite game of the day.

4. Steam Park (played at 3pm)

This game was much more fun than I ever imagined it could be. I saw something about it online a few weeks ago, and read that it was “if Roller Coaster Tycoon was a board game”. That game was my jam as a kid, so I was totally on board for this. The premise is that you’re building a theme park for robots and you have to clear away the dust that accumulates as you’re building things. The art was adorable, it was a quick learn, and I’m hugely excited to add this to my personal game collection.

5. Shadows of Brimstone (played at 5:30pm)

This is a game that a few of my friends and I kickstarted together a few months ago, and it’s not out yet. This was actually the first demo of the game ever, which is a big reason we chose Card Kingdom as our game store of choice for most of Tabletop Day. It’s a wild west, dice rolling dungeon crawl made by the same people who made Last Night on Earth, another favorite of mine. The game is huge – there are tons of miniatures that go along with it, the game board pieces are amazing and I really love that every character you can play comes in male and female. We demoed the game with one of the creators, which was a crazy awesome experience, though some of the cards were still hand-drawn. It kind of added to the thrill of playing it early! I can’t wait until this game is out for real and I can play at home.

6. Donkey (played at 9pm)

After our Shadows of Brimstone demo (which took quite a long time) Joe and I packed up and headed over to Uncle’s Games in Bellevue for a change of scenery. Immediately we were pulled into a game of “Donkey”, a musical chairs or spoons inspired card game where you had to grab the puck in the middle as fast as you could when certain things happened on the cards in your hand. I’m particularly good at these sorts of games, so I had a blast with it.

7. Castle Blast (played at 10:30pm)

This is a game that was set up behind up on a demo table, right outside the children’s games section. This game is meant for kids, but I had a really great time playing. You set up a castle made of blocks and then use the included wrecking ball to knock it down to steal a princess, dragon and treasure chest from inside. It was cute, and surprisingly difficult.

8. Avengers vs. X-Men Dice Masters (played at 11pm)

At this point in the night I was ready to call it and go home to my warm snuggly bed (playing games all day really takes it out of you!) but Joe convinced me to try one last game. I’m super glad I did, because Dice Masters was fantastic. Imagine a deck-building game, but instead of cards you’re using dice. And all the characters and abilities are from the Marvel universe. It was easy enough to learn, and while the game isn’t quite out yet (it comes out next month), I heard it’s going to be dirt cheap, which is nice for a game that encourages buying more dice to build your ideal “deck”. Looking forward to it!

Did you learn any new games for Tabletop Day, or did you stick to old favorites? What was your favorite game of the day? Let me know in the comments!

This is the video I have been so excited to share with you all – this one shows the Anna and Elsa cosplay my friend and roommate Eia and I made in action at Emerald City Comic Con!

We had so, so much fun waltzing around in our coronation dresses all day, and I think our shared favorite aspect of the whole experience was getting to meet so many little kids who thought we really were the characters from Frozen. We managed to capture a lot of that on camera, and it melts my heart every time I watch it.

We’re going to be compiling the best photos from the day on our brand new Deviant Art account, but those aren’t quite ready yet. I’ll keep you posted on when that’s available!

This past weekend was Emerald City Comic Con here in Seattle – one of my favorite conventions of the year. It topped record breaking attendance with over 70,000 people and went down in history as one of my favorite con experiences of all time.

I’ll be putting out another video soon with footage from the con itself and my thoughts on my first time cosplaying, but for now, here’s a haul video of all the sweet stuff I picked up in the vendor/expo hall. I’m a bit of a shopaholic when it comes to comic cons, so I went a little nuts. But I regret nothing! I just need more wall space for all my art!

What’s been your favorite convention purchase? I love supporting independent artists and most of the stuff on my walls is stuff I picked up from booths at comic con. Let me know what you can’t live without in the comments below!