2/3/26
We are Painting Miniatures, Sipping Wine, and vibing! Sign up here
7:00PM at WiStudios
Everthing you need, snacks, and drinks will be provided!
Additional & Larger Miniatures available for purchase.
1/26/26
Island Harbor Games is back again with some games for the Teenagers!!
Ever been curious about Dungeons and Dragons? This is the perfect time to jump in! Play with a local game master with thousands of hours of professional experience and take your first step into your new favorite hobby!
Students will exercise their basic literacy, math, and critical thinking skills as they work with others on their team to explore and solve problems in a fantasy adventure setting during safe, structured social gaming sessions.
Teenagers play on Thursdays!
Signup links coming soon!
1/24/26
Why the "most punishing game ever" can tell us something about moving forward.
Click to Expand and read here!
My life has this habit of falling apart during Autumn. I'm chipping away at the mountain of guilt I carry around it, and I think Dark Souls has something to say about shameless tenacity.
Every couple months, an autistic teenager will publish a video essay about how videogames anchored them and helped them find North in an aimless time of their lives. That is not what this is.
For those unfamiliar, the Dark Souls games take place in broken, post-apocalyptic fantasy worlds where players are nameless, unremarkable protagonists to begin. Becoming a zombie is a game-ending failure state in many games, but the player character starts the game as an undead, someone "cursed" with eternal life. In the Souls series this is our thematic cornerstone that works two ways: you're stuck here forever and there's no escape to an afterlife of paradise. But also, you're stuck here and the law of large numbers dictates that you eventually succeed so long as you keep trying.
If you spend any amount of time in Dark Souls communities, you'll encounter git gud, or "get good". It's a simple, seemingly derisive statement that's thrown at newbies asking for advice, complaining about bosses and game mechanics, or otherwise having a bad time in public. But what if it wasn't just indiscriminate mockery? What if it's less "i will not dignify your complaints with an actual response" and more "I have been where you are, and the way out is through; you can do it too!"? These days I choose to read git gud, besides obvious memetic usage, as a call to resilience and an invitation to shift thinking from individual solutions to an overall inclination towards creative problem solving. Hidetaka Miyazaki, the game's primary creative designer is famously adamant about never including "easy modes" and is famously quoted saying, "The main concept has not changed: you try something, die, learn from your mistakes and eventually overcome those mistakes".
Unlike most videogames, your character's story doesn't pause and rewind to a previous checkpoint upon their death. The world keeps moving and they get back up, eventually finding themselves at the last place they were safe to rest. Typically this is at a bonfire. When this happens, every defeated enemy that wasn't a boss returns to life as well, waiting to oppose you in the same place you beat them last time. Most enemies in the world are Hollow, undead just like you with one key difference. They've lost their purpose, and their humanity and sense of self followed. Now, they exist as wandering husks that only know violence. As far as the game's lore is concerned, this is the eventual fate of all cursed with undeath. This is the reason that the undead are so often sequestered away from all others, and why the curse is so feared and reviled.
In Dark Souls 1, after a few hours of bosses and (most likely) a couple dozen deaths against waves of enemies, you can encounter a few overtly friendly characters in the game. Where most characters that aren't openly hostile speak in riddles, mock your character, and chuckle to themselves with a slight madness, Andre of Astora and Laurentius of the Great Swamp are different. They end dialogues in similar ways: "Don't get yourself killed, neither of us wants to see you go hollow" and "Be Safe friend, Don't you dare go hollow" respectively. And call me a nerd, but that feels kinda cool. Characters able to acknowledge then past your fear of death (because for most of us, the worst case scenario lives exclusively in our anxiety) and speak to concern for you losing your purpose and self, feels cool. And maybe a little comforting. As in, "I know you won't utterly fail, so I hope that you keep showing up. Because then, your success is an obvious eventuality."
Similarly, if hollowing and not death is the true fear, one's priorities shift. The call to action is not to seek safety and cling to what exists, but to commit fully to passion and purpose. Because to fail to do so is to lose one's spark and eventually one's very self. The call to adventure and passion and love and novelty become synonymous with self-preservation and life itself.
And that's kind of a vibe.
11/15/25
Some thoughts about my past and current TTRPG system inclinations. Learn a little about Mythic Bastionland and why you should play it..
Click to Expand and read here!
I've had a pretty big shift in my gaming system preferences lately. Last year, EZd6 was my primary game engine. Now, we're playing Mythic Bastionland and Nimble; Let's talk about it.
If you've played with me recently, you know I refuse to play DnD5e for ethical reasons and rejected the system’s mechanical foundation in favor of leaner games with more intentional design. This saw me falling in love with EZd6 and running a campaign for almost two years in it. The pick up and play nature, the 5-minute character creation, and the ability to play with just 1 6-sided die were all selling points. 10/10, wonderful time. Combat was fast, skill checks were simple and universal, and I could blow through 2-3x more content per session than I could with DND/Dungeon Crawl Classics.
Now, I need games to be even faster, I want stats back, and the little ones I'm running games for in the Maps, Math, Monsters program need levels and class abilities to fixate on. The solution is two-fold: Mythic Bastionland for the adults and home games, Nimble 2 for the babies and folks that need a little more crunch.
Mythic Bastionland is a gem by Chris McDowall that features 72 knights you roll at random, 3 stats that you roll randomly, and a roll under system to perform skill checks/saves. Also, it's got the single best story generation engine I've ever seen. You generate a world, use a few of the 72 myths included in the book, and watch as characters slowly uncover myths by randomly encountering their 6 escalating Omens. The prompts and character blocks given for each myth are fast, evocative reads with just enough information for a game master to create gold on the fly with immaculate vibes.
The hex crawl is the meat of the game and its elegant design makes it easy to run with minimal/no prep beyond initial world generation. Combat is quick, deadly, and meaningful. Chris removes attack rolls, introduces guard as a health buffer that regenerates between battles, and makes you regret every hit you take. I've been able to get first timers to the point of rolling dice within 10 minutes of sitting, and I love it.
Nimble 2 is what I was hoping DnD 2024 would be: the dungeons and dragons fantasy/ideal experience distilled and rebuilt from the ground up. Without the legacy mechanics and holdovers from 50 years of iterative game design, it strikes a good balance of speed and detail. And coincidentally, Nimble also removes attack rolls.
Expect more words about these two systems as I build out my Gaming Empire for 2026.
Giant crystal spiders, warring goblins, and ancient powers at work in an abandoned mine!
The local miners have dug too deep. Angry undead, a Ghostly Storm Giant, and a Mysterious Fey stand between the players and glory!
