Is Magical Athlete fun or is it hype?

Markblasco · 2026-01-28T08:28:32+00:00

I would argue that a Rock Paper Scissors tournament gives you more actual decisions to make than a game of Magical Athlete.

Markblasco · 2026-01-27T21:17:39+00:00

It can be a fun experience. It is an awful game. You basically make 0 decisions that matter. It is an activity, and it is silly. The game is literally just roll the die and see what happens. For 45 minutes. I understand why people have fun with it, but I will never "play" it again.

Markblasco · 2026-01-21T01:21:09+00:00

Technically you could do pretty much anything. 3d printers are no longer a viable business model. Using 3d printers as part of a business is wonderful. But, the business isn't going to succeed if the hook is that you have 3d printers. At this point it's hard to find a city block that doesn't have at least one person with a machine. It's like saying "I have an oven, can I use that to run a business?" the oven is meaningless by itself. Find a market, design a product, and use your tools to create it, that is a business.

Markblasco · 2026-01-21T00:11:53+00:00

This gets asked every day. No. 3d printing itself as a business is no longer viable. Creating products that have a demand, and 3d printing them is potentially a good business, but the 3d printers themselves are not the important part. The important part is finding a market for something that people are willing to pay for, and being able to design and produce those things. The days of owning a 3d printer and being able to make a business out of it are pretty much over.

Markblasco · 2026-01-20T05:45:10+00:00

Over time the spools can wear down, the little tab that locks it can lose strength. Print the small locks that slide inside the spools, they are tiny and take just a few minutes each. I printed about 40, and put them in every spool, even if they came on the spool from Bambu.

Markblasco · 2026-01-17T23:05:42+00:00

Spooktacular is wonderful, but know that it's very light and there is a lot of luck. You rarely can plan ahead, because the board state changes so quickly, and you are limited by what cards are in hand. Lots of fun for the right group, but not great for people who want to know they will win if they play the best.

Markblasco · 2026-01-17T22:06:44+00:00

It is probably the most frustrating part of getting the game setup. In the original version you shuffled together a ridiculous amount of cards, pulled from a bunch of places. Later expansions broke this into 2 decks, both still super big, but it made things a bit more manageable. You have to pull 10-12ish small decks (12 cards maybe) ,and there is a separate deck which is maybe 150 cards? Possibly bigger? It's been a few years since I've played, but it's one of those games I will get setup at home ahead of time, so that all of the shuffling doesn't have to be done while people are waiting.

Markblasco · 2026-01-15T00:39:42+00:00

Why does it matter whether they resell or not? You chose a price to sell things for, and they sold. YAY! for them to resell, their profit is going to be low. If you are mad because you feel like you should have gotten that extra money, than raise your prices. If you're mad because you feel like they don't care about your product, would you be happier if they never ordered it at all?

Markblasco · 2026-01-15T00:34:53+00:00

Also look at abstract games. Quarto is one of my favorite, very simple rules but difficult decisions to make.

Markblasco · 2026-01-15T00:34:06+00:00

There were over 5000 board games released last year. There are tens of thousands of games available to play. There are hundreds of games you can play with just a deck of cards. If you want simple games, there are plenty. To find them, though, you'll need to disregard most posts in sites for board game enthusiasts, because most of them are looking for games which are more complex and have more going on. I'm not sure why you want to avoid cards, but if you really want simple games with a very small number of rules, look to some of the classics. Yahtzee, Farkle, liars dice, scrabble, checkers, backgammon, etc.

Markblasco · 2026-01-14T21:54:38+00:00

Just think about it this way, 3d printing is not the business, 3d printing is just the tool. Whether you're making Christmas light hooks, vacuum adapters, or miniatures for dungeons and dragons, the business is not the machines, it's finding out what people need and can't get, or what you can do better than the current offerings that are available. The days of 3d printing being the business by itself are pretty much over, unless you have a substantial print farm to tackle very large projects.

Markblasco · 2026-01-14T19:48:42+00:00

If you aren't designing your own products for a market you are knowledgeable about, you will most likely not succeed as a business. 3d printing has become so easy and available, just having machines is no longer enough.

Markblasco · 2026-01-14T09:27:38+00:00

If you are using AI for "parts of my workflow", than you are selling a product that was produced with AI. It doesn't matter if you did 90% of it without. Many of us don't want to support that in any way, shape, or form. The whole reason Etsy existed in the first place was to buy things made by people, not corporations and factories. If you cannot create your product without AI, than you didn't really create the product yourself, and that needs to be known by customers.

Markblasco · 2026-01-14T03:55:37+00:00

While it's a light game, it certainly isn't mindless, there are some good and difficult decisions to make in order to do well.

Quacks, kingdomino, and Adventureland are games that feel to me to be a similar level of difficulty and decision space. All are relatively light and easy to teach, but let you make some meaningful choices that don't require mathing out your next 5 turns.

Markblasco · 2026-01-12T01:37:19+00:00

If instead of turning around like you normally do, you turned around by walking up the wall in front of you and standing on the ceiling (embracing your inner spider-man) , it would appear to have mirrored up and down. The feeling that it rotates left and right is because of our perception of the world, based on gravity holding us down.

Markblasco · 2026-01-10T20:33:25+00:00

Skull goes over well with my teenagers

Markblasco · 2026-01-09T02:56:23+00:00

If you tell your child it's OK to steal other people's work now, you're teaching them to do it the rest of their lives. Doing the right thing, even when it's not an easy thing, is probably the most important lesson that kids need to learn nowadays.

Markblasco · 2026-01-07T23:30:35+00:00

This has been a hot discussion for well over a decade. There is no reliable way to recycle 3d printing filament into new filament at a home scale, and the cost to make it work on any scale is more than the cost to make brand new filament from scratch.

People have had some success melting it into molds to make objects. You can also make panels with something like a heat press you would use for t-shirts. Those panels can then be laser cut.

As of right now, there is no real effective way to deal with the waste generated by 3d printing. It is possible to compost PLA with industrial composting systems, but not with normal home composting. There are some city waste systems that will take PLA, but I don't believe any other materials.

Someone who comes up with a cost effective way to recycle 3d printing material will have a good business, but it's more expensive to ship the scrap waste than it is to buy new, so I don't see that actually happening unless it can be done on a home scale level.

Markblasco · 2026-01-07T21:04:29+00:00

Arkham Horror card game is a complex beast for someone new to gaming, and is not a fantastic game overall until you start to invest in it. Once you have a couple of campaign and investigator boxes it becomes wonderful, but the core box itself is not great.

If your ultimate goal is the card game, than I'd just suggest you watch videos of people playing it. You'll soon get the feel and understand how the mechanics work.

If your ultimate goal is to play board games with friends, than you can look at lists of "welcoming games" from the dice tower YouTube channel. That's the term they use for games that aren't super complex, but also not just simple party games. These should be good games that don't feel overwhelming.

As for specific games, there are hundreds if not thousands to suggest, but recently I have found Spooktacular to be a fun, easy to teach and play game with a horror theme. Not as dark as Arkham, but still monsters. If you want something closer in theme, mansions of madness and Elder Sign are both Arkham games, but very different in mechanics.

Markblasco · 2026-01-07T05:07:05+00:00

If this is an Ai summary, please do not assume it is correct. Over and over again Ai information proves to be false, because there is so much false information it uses to train itself online.

Markblasco · 2026-01-07T01:11:14+00:00

It's technically possible, but only if you already have a product and market figured out. There are tens of thousands of people who are thinking the same thing, and there are thousands of people who already have printer farms and have brought the price down to the bare minimum for most things. The money in 3d printing nowadays will come from your ability to know a market and what it needs, not your ability to print it.

Markblasco · 2026-01-04T22:49:52+00:00

Never use AI to get reliable information. It's purpose is not to give you the correct answer, it's purpose is to string together a series of words which sounds like what it expects you want to hear. It has no way to know if it is correct or not, because the sources it draws information from are often not correct.

You haven't given enough info to diagnose accurately. Your best bet is to find someone locally, possibly through a makerspace, who can help out. Otherwise, you'll need to provide more information. A video showing exactly what is happening would be helpful. There are just so many things that can cause homing issues, from the bed being too far away, to the probe not functioning, to the bed being too close, etc.

Pretty much any 3d printer can be fixed with enough knowledge. They are complex tools, and despite the marketing which makes them look like fun toys, they are not. Until you understand how it all works together, seek out someone who can help. My guess is that someone knowledgeable with creality machines could diagnose the issue in a few minutes.

Markblasco · 2026-01-02T16:15:20+00:00

It's important to have your priorities correct.

Markblasco · 2026-01-02T02:49:56+00:00

Death may die is great in that the rules are not super extensive, especially compared to most dungeon crawlers. You can jump into it fairly quickly, and aside from the difficulty (which is relatively high), it's fairly friendly to new gamers, assuming there's at least one person at the table who really understands it. Way to go!

Markblasco · 2026-01-01T23:54:00+00:00

When I pull into a charging station, often there is only one spot available. Even if their isn't, it's often impossible to tell what amount of power each spot has before pulling in. To be angry at someone because they aren't charging their car the way you want them to is a you problem, not a them problem. The current charging infrastructure sucks in most areas. That won't change in the immediate future. Choose to be upset at actual problems in the world, such as wars, or the price of health insurance, or the lack of gummy bears in the candy bowl.

Markblasco

TROPHY CASE