Monthly Archives: August 2026

The UK is oK for U

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We had a trip to the UK, this time up to Scarborough and York.

For some reason, my travel anxiety was particularly bad this time around (maybe because the trip involved so many logistics: the usual airport bus, a flight, a tube ride, a walk, a 2 hour train ride, a 1 hour train ride, and then a walk to finally get to the first hotel), and the hotel had a “preferred” checkin time of “by 5 PM”, which we were already going to miss by around 30 minutes based on our booked train times. Unfortunately, the anxiety became somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

On the flight out, for the first time in my life, I forgot my boarding pass in the security bin. (I blame the fact that the scanners were broken, so they sent our bags through like 5 times, and my brain was not in a state to process things at that point.) I thought I’d lost my passport at one point (I put it in my pocket but not in the usual holder). And I tapped out of the tube “wrong” which made me worry that we’d be mischarged for the ride. (All things that wouldn’t have happened if my brain hadn’t been in a weird state.)

Then, of course, our 2-hour train arrived 6 minutes late for what was a 7 minute connection time… we did our best (the conductor told us to walk to the front of the C car which would put us right next to an overhead bridge, and then run for it) but arrived at our platform just in time to watch our next train pull out of the station, so we had an extra hour to burn before the next train.

(On the plus side, if you’re delayed more than 30 minutes on a train in the UK, you’re apparently eligible for a partial refund of your fare paid. Apparently a delay of 60 minutes would result in a full refund, but we missed the 60 minutes by arriving into our final station 2 minutes early, which is just par for the course with this trip.)

The transit back to the airport was fortunately uneventful, but I’m still kind of amazed at how easy transit in the UK is. A 2-hour (direct!) train ride followed by an 80 minute tube ride feels surprisingly effortless, and the general frequency of trains for those kinds of distances is so nice.

(Incidentally, I’m realizing that my brain experiences different travel anxiety for every “leg” of a journey, and separately tries to mitigate for each one, which is perhaps why the long list of different legs on the way out was so problematic. At least we didn’t have an airport transfer. Thus, therapy continues to be useful, even while I’m not actively going at the moment, because it gives me tools to better articulate my brain, which lets me start to figure out what to do about it. Go to therapy, everyone. It’s fantastic.)

Oh, and I also got food poisoning on our first full day there, so I spent like half the trip being unhappy and unable to really properly enjoy the British food, including the amazing breakfasts (and vegetarian haggis) from our first hotel. So that was great. (It was from Indian food, too, which turned me off having more Indian food for the entire trip. Boo.)

I also do not recommend going on an 8-mile hike the morning you wake up with severe food poisoning. Between my stomach and guts being in active revolt, and the dehydration making me want to faint every time I stopped walking, it was not a good time. 0/10 would not do again.

In any case (and other than the food poisoning), the trip was nice. We saw a partial eclipse in Scarborough (which mostly manifested itself as “outside is weirdly dark for early evening”), got to experience a British seaside town (really nice and clean and full of surprisingly expansive beaches), explored all of the old parts of York (including the Minster, which is extremely impressive), saw a friend, enjoyed (and brought back) tons of tea and tea biscuits, and ate tons of meal deals (which I still think are just about the best deal for tourists, and have a surprising amount of variety).

Also elderflower and lemon cake. I want more of that cake. We need more elderflower things in the US.

I’m also proud of the fact that my checked bag on the way home was 22.9 kilos out of the allowed 23 kilos. I was completely estimating without a scale or any real reference (other than the fact that the bag was 15 kilos on the way out) so I’m super glad we didn’t have to re-pack the bag at the airport.

Also also BA apparently switched the aircraft on the way back, so the seats we’d selected on checkin were not the seats we got. We weren’t the only ones, either… a bunch of families got separated, and there was a ton of moving around after boarding was complete. This ended up working out well for us, since the other person in our row moved to be with his wife, so we ended up with a row of 3 seats to ourselves on what was otherwise a mostly full flight. I just don’t understand why BA can’t seat people together when they’re on the same reservation. It wasn’t like there was a lack of rows to do it, since people were able to self-rearrange to make it happen. (At least BA has significantly better food and snacks than any US carrier. Mmm caramel chocolates and chocolate digestives.)

Photos, uh…. when I get to them. They’ll be at photos at some point, probably. (Or maybe not, because I’ve been bad at dealing with photos recently.)

Life (other than my self-sabotaging brain) is amazing.

Types of TCGs

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A late night walk conversation got me thinking about this topic, so you get another journal post about card games. Skip if this isn’t interesting to you.

I was thinking that there’s roughly three types of card games, at least that are based on licensed properties. (We’re going to ignore games that have original properties, such as what Magic used to be, or the WARS or L5R or Force of Will games.)

The first is a card game that is designed for (and around) a specific property, and the mechanics and gameplay are so tightly integrated with that property that there’s no way you could separate them. Star Trek (particularly 1E) is probably the best example of this: You can’t slap something like Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica on the engine and have it actually feel correct (because the primary goal in those games would be combat, not exploration of planets on a spaceline).

The Austin Powers card game is another good example, because it’s the right blend of absurdity and comedy on top of a spy theme that you couldn’t put on top of James Bond (for example). The original DBZ CCG probably also belongs in this group because, while the idea of controlling a character and playing cards to attack your opponents isn’t hyper-specific, mechanics such as powering up and gaining anger to level up are very much drawn directly from the IP and are critical to the game. These mechanics wouldn’t make particular sense with anything else. (And, of course, collect 7 dragon balls as the alternate win condition.)

The second is card game “systems”, such as VS System, QuickStrike, MetaX, or UFS/Universus. (Or, yes, what Magic has become.) Even if these engines start out as somewhat specialized, that specialization often gives way (probably thanks to financial pressures or incentives) to pulling in fairly unrelated properties. (And, of course, engines like Union Arena are just designed to combine whatever the heck they want, together.)

VS System and MetaX both started as superhero games. VS’ mechanics were somewhat superhero themed, but the general idea of “fighting other characters in formation” and “playing cards to surprise your opponents” were so general that they were able (in VS 2PGCG) to slap on arbitrary other properties such as X-Files, Alien, and even pro wrestling. MetaX had an Attack on Titan set that worked with the mechanics just as well as Superman or Batman did.

Universus is probably the most interesting example of this (and one that’s particularly near and dear to my heart, because it’s one of my favorite card games), because it started out very much with a fighting game theme. The attacks were fighting game moves (and special moves). Foundations were training the characters went through. Keywords such as “combo” and “reversal” were very much fighting attack mechanics. But the engine was so good that they soon started slapping just about every property onto it, such as Yu Yu Hakusho, Godzilla, TMNT, My Hero Academia, Critical Role, and Star Trek Lower Decks. The last one, in particular, is such a skin-deep layer on top of the gameplay that it’s funny to think about, but… that doesn’t matter. The game is great. People come for the game. The theme is secondary.

The third type of game is where (the majority of) the game mechanics are designed first, and then a property is slapped on top later. I don’t know of any direct examples of this, but there are enough games with fairly generic mechanics that I’m sure there were plenty of game designers with mechanics sketched out, which just needed some slight refining and theming when a company came along with an IP for them.

I would speculate that things like World of Warcraft and Bleach fall into this category. While I’m sure these games were ultimately fleshed out specifically for the properties, there’s nothing in the gameplay that ties them to those properties. “Control a hero and recruit allies to fight another hero, with a type of card providing energy to play other cards” is the basis of both games, and that description could easily work with so many other IPs.

In any case… I dumped a big update to my defunct TCG website today, and posted an unboxing video on YouTube. More videos (including an actual episode, with actual information about a card game) will be coming soon as well.

All of this has recently been supported by “Alan is playing lots of card games, including defunct card games, with bblum”. I’m so glad to have been able to get back into UFS/Universus, and I’ve been getting a good introduction (and exposure to) Netrunner, and generally there are so many card games happening right now, in the best possible way.

Go go gadget hyperfixate.

Life is amazing.