Old Thumb Drive

I recently stumbled across an old thumb drive of mine.  It was acquired as a gift at a time when thumb drives were rare and expensive, and is all of 128 MB in size. And it's an interesting snapshot of where I was about a decade ago.

There is a folder called "Asmodee Games" and that, in turn, has subfolders for BonQ (released in the US as Good Question!), Ca$h'n Gun$ (the first edition), three different Dungeon Twister expansions, Fire & Axe: A Viking Saga, Wicked Witches Way, Hell Dorado, Iliad, and Mission: Red Planet (first edition).

There's a folder called "DT Tournament Stuff" that is - unsurprisingly - information on running a Dungeon Twister tournament.

There's a folder called "HeroScape" that has an Excel spreadsheet listing all of the Heroscape figures that had been released to date (including a bunch of promos).  I spent way too much money on that game. Especially considering how little I played it before I gave it away.

But most interestingly to me, there is a folder called "Games by Me."  And it contains four subfolders. "Bridal Party," which is a light game about seating arrangements at a wedding (that I might polish up and make available print-and-play some time - I still like how it's turned out); "BSpot" contains is a bunch of half-complete blog posts from the time when Blogger didn't allow us to schedule posts for the future.  "Bunker," which is a half-formed asymmetric wargame that would need a ton of work to get into a playable format, and, finally, "Conquistadors," which wound up being an artifact trading game.

Of the three games, I think Bridal Party is salvageable. Maybe even almost playable - it just requires some balance.  Conquistadors needs a new name - and it's playable. But I don't remember it being fun, so I may scrap it completely.  And Bunker is a bunch of ideas in search of a game.

But the folder full of blog posts.  It has some real gems.  There's a subfolder there called "Uploaded," that contains posts that I made in ... 2006.

Have I really been at this that long?

There are a dozen or so other posts in there, all in various states of 'done.' Most of them wouldn't meet my filters these days.

At least one post contains the complete rules for yet another game. That ... could be good.  Maybe.  I think I may need to try testing it out, too.

Either way, it's interesting and eye-opening to see where I was a decade ago. Reading through these posts remind me a lot of how I've changed (mostly for the better). I'm writing better, and I'm more confident (even though I do still have occasional weak posts).  It hammers home for me something that every writing teacher and book will tell you over and over and over: keep writing. You'll get better.

Edit 5/4: Somehow this saved as a draft instead of publishing on time. Probably my bad. Oops.