It was Ryan that first let me in on the Brawl Stars thing, then I got in there, and now Gabriel has invested himself in it and statistically lapped me several times.

I think that, rather than being arch about the whole thing, the right call is to laud Gabriel's Krynn Excursion. First of all, like Hamburger Helper, it occupies a valuable midpoint between homemade and store-bought. You can partake in the camaraderie and industry of a working kitchen with greater frequency because portions of the toil have been commodified. I don't know every aspect of his life but I know that Gabriel is a grown-ass man who has to do a bunch of time consuming shit nobody appreciates, and nurturing some kind of Mind World other people can inhabit isn't always gonna happen.

The year is coming to an end and I wanted to take a look back at the games I really enjoyed in 2018. This is not a top ten list and these are in no particular order. Here’s my favorite games of 2018 and where I played them.

I run home games for Elliot and Ronia both, very different ones: Elliot's is a D&D romp that is like a whimsical take on the Pied Piper, except the parents are pulled away and they have to figure out their shit. They have a powergamer who likes wants to interrogate, torture, and slit throats while the rest of them use their skills and powers to steal as much candy as possible. Ronia's game is a Tales from the Loop campaign set in Aberdeen at the precipice of grunge. They are... quite different.

Gift giving between Growlithe and myself typically does not involves gifts - let alone the giving of them. We are like an old married couple that has decided that their are rich enough in their union that any gift would be redundant because the greatest gift of all - love - is one they share daily.

I found a lot of great games at PAX Unplugged, and a surprising percentage of them have actually managed to enter proper rotation. My daughter Ronia and I have tested them all, and if we want to play them more than once, that's when other people get the nod.

I was eventually able to get Gabe into Bloodborne, and then he got farther than I ever did; I suspect the same may be true for Ashen as well.

We thought it would be fun, embedded in the heart of the Blizzard campus, to try and make up a couple Overwatch heroes in the afternoon. What we did not expect was to be doing this alongside Arnold Tsang, a man whose work you've been steeped in for years even of you didn't know that he was its origin coordinate.

Most PAX shows have a space carved out to shine a light on independent talent - and PAX South is even more novel, as it focuses exclusively on heroism in the tabletop space. What can you expect to see at the show? Glinting treasure such as this!

Chris Perkins so regularly generates fanciful sums donating his time behind the screen for Charity that we have a good sense, by now, what his time is actually worth - and it's not looking good for us.

Hades is sick with the fever.

We were watching some high level tournament play for Smash, as one does, and while I've played tons of it I got the sense like I did with its predecessor: there is a whole other game here that I didn't know about, and may not even be able to see.

It's quite true, unfortunately. I stuffed my Switch full of rad shit to play, but then I ended up reading the Kill Team manual the whole way, dreaming of ways in which I could better serve our twisted Patriarch as five long hours evaporated. Shortly thereafter, I left the row and also left the Goddamn Switch in there, which burns us.

I got the opportunity to help announce a new Overwatch skin over the weekend and I’m still giddy about it.

Our Merchandise Manager, the incomparable Lidija Piper, has given me a code for the store. The code is KTHRISSMAS. It will give you fifteen percent off. That's real good. The only question is what you're gonna do with it.

When we wrote the strip, what I said wasn't true - but when I went into the Epic Games Launcher just now to poke around for SuperGiant's new roguelike Hades, it looks like it?