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Saturday, July 19, 2025
A two boxes board game
Having finished two campaign games in the last 2 years (Agemonia and ISS Vanguard), I am going to start playing a third campaign game, Nova Aetas: Renaissance, with that group. So I am currently unboxing the game, learning the rules, watching some how to play YouTube videos, etc.
While this process is far from finished, one thing already became clear: I will need to organize a second box for this game. Basically I can divide board games into three categories regarding their "reboxing", putting all the components back in the box between sessions: The best category is the one that both Agemonia and ISS Vanguard were in, where the original box comes with trays and containers that are designed to easily store all the components between sessions in the original box. The second category is the most common one: All the components fit back in the box, but I need to either buy an insert, or provide smaller containers to keep the tokens from mixing all together, which would make setup a nightmare. Gloomhaven was probably the worst offender in this category. Nova Aetas: Renaissance falls into an even worse, third category: Not only do many of the unpacked components not have a tray or container to go in, they don't even fit back into the original box.
In Nova Aetas: Renaissance, one reason for this is 3D components: You assemble things like houses and trees out of cardboard to give 3D components for your battlefield. That really adds to the table presence of the game, and adds tactical options like sniping down from the roof of a house, but also has its disadvantages: You really don't want to disassemble everything at the end of the session. Cardboard components easily fray if assembled and disassembled repeatedly, and the process would add a lot of time to setup and reboxing. In addition, it isn't just the 3D components. The box of Nova Aetas: Renaissance is tightly packed to start with, when are the tokens are still needing to be punched out. Once you punched out all the components and put them into some sort of container, that increases the volume, and they don't really fit into the box anymore.
So now I have to basically get another box, in which I store the 3D components and token containers between sessions. Fortunately we are playing at my place, so I don't have to lug around two boxes somewhere when I want to play. But I sure prefer games in which some thought has gone into the design of the box and the trays, so that there is a place for everything.
Labels: Board Games
- posted by Tobold @ 9:32 AM Permanent Link
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Completely off topic, but too fun to dismiss: for some reason I was playing around with ChatGPT after reading this post. And I figured I’d ask this: “Where is Gevlon Goblin from?”. It’s an obscure question, so I wondered what AI would do with it. This was the answer: 🧙 Who is Gevlon Goblin?
• Gevlon Goblin is the alias used by a blogger who was originally known as Tobold. He created a separate “evil” persona called Gevlon, the Greedy Goblin, to provide more provocative, market-focused MMO commentary—especially around Goldmaking in WoW and later ISK strategies in EVE Online .
• The persona went on to blog extensively about MMO economies, survivor politics in virtual worlds, and even founded an EVE mercenary group to take on major alliances like Goonswarm
• Gevlon Goblin is the alias used by a blogger who was originally known as Tobold. He created a separate “evil” persona called Gevlon, the Greedy Goblin, to provide more provocative, market-focused MMO commentary—especially around Goldmaking in WoW and later ISK strategies in EVE Online .
• The persona went on to blog extensively about MMO economies, survivor politics in virtual worlds, and even founded an EVE mercenary group to take on major alliances like Goonswarm
# posted by 
: 19/7/25 10:46
: 19/7/25 10:46
To understand that story, you'd need to read the following two posts from 2009 in this order: First https://tobolds.blogspot.com/2009/08/my-secret-evil-twin-identity.html and second https://tobolds.blogspot.com/2009/08/contentious-writing.html.
Basically I once falsely claimed to be Gevlon, in order to make a point about a range of subjects, including the meaning of identity on the internet, and the advantages and disadvantages of contentious writing. Which in 2009 was still a matter of discussion. Unfortunately flame bait content has then clearly won the internet over the last 16 years.
ChatGPT believing that doesn't really surprise me. It's like that story where ChatGPT recommended eating one to two small rocks per day, based on a joke Reddit posting. If the source material is sufficiently thin, and there aren't many identical answers to a question on the internet, ChatGPT ends up quoting one possible answer. And ChatGPT is even worse than the average human at spotting hoaxes, humor, or satire.
Basically I once falsely claimed to be Gevlon, in order to make a point about a range of subjects, including the meaning of identity on the internet, and the advantages and disadvantages of contentious writing. Which in 2009 was still a matter of discussion. Unfortunately flame bait content has then clearly won the internet over the last 16 years.
ChatGPT believing that doesn't really surprise me. It's like that story where ChatGPT recommended eating one to two small rocks per day, based on a joke Reddit posting. If the source material is sufficiently thin, and there aren't many identical answers to a question on the internet, ChatGPT ends up quoting one possible answer. And ChatGPT is even worse than the average human at spotting hoaxes, humor, or satire.
I did that - ChatGPT itself actually links to the post. But I still found it interesting that, when asking about Gevlon without any reference to Tobold, rather than using Gevlon’s years of blogs as a resource, it prefers your one post about Gevlon that is contradicted immediately in the one post after it and countless others. Apparently there is some kind of mechanism in place that values your hoax about everything else. I can understand it to some extent - your blog is still active… but still interesting.
# posted by : 19/7/25 13:28
: 19/7/25 13:28
For what it's worth, I asked "Who is Gevlon Goblin" of Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro and Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4, two other leading LLMs. Neither mentioned Tobold, and both game me similar, thorough and presumably quite accurate historical summaries of Gevlon's illustrious blogging career. Not sure why ChatGPT in particular went off the reservation on this.
I'm pretty sure I was reading this blog that far back, and I actually made a lot of gold very early in WoW's release by trading off of parsing the auction results via a mod that I heavily revised for that purpose. Yet somehow all this escaped me? But I was out of actually playing WoW for good in 2005, before Gevlon began. One big reason I quit is that I was spending 90% of my time trading the AH rather than playing the game.
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I'm pretty sure I was reading this blog that far back, and I actually made a lot of gold very early in WoW's release by trading off of parsing the auction results via a mod that I heavily revised for that purpose. Yet somehow all this escaped me? But I was out of actually playing WoW for good in 2005, before Gevlon began. One big reason I quit is that I was spending 90% of my time trading the AH rather than playing the game.
# posted by : 19/7/25 21:00
: 19/7/25 21:00<< Home
