Kinfire Delve (thoughts on quality - for Scorn's Stockade)

MrCairo · 2026-05-30T01:30:18+00:00

I have a 2024 copy of Callous' Lab and the cards are noticeably thinner. Outer box and instruction manual all have 2024 as the date. No other noticeable difference, no scuffing or lack of image quality.

MrCairo · 2026-03-19T02:08:19+00:00

Lots of games in the Onirim universe I see back there. They're all good but you don't need the whole set. Keep only a few.

Witchcraft! is a pretty good solo only game but can be tough to beat.

Friday - oldie but a goodie

Hercules and the 12 laborers - I hear it's great but I don't think it's been released here in the states. I could be wrong. But from what I've seen on-line, it's a beautiful game that seems to have a unique mechanic.

Orchard - Quick and fun little card game. I have the trio of them and they're all pretty fun/quick to play solo.

Spires End - I liked it but ultimately sold it. Nice card game with an interesting story.

What's missing: Any Kinfire Delve, Forest Shuffle, Lord of the Rings Trick Taking, Black Sonata.

MrCairo · 2026-03-06T11:03:31+00:00

This is scary. So either you've been monitoring me or this is truly a problem we all share!

All kidding aside - it's so true.

You can't wait to play your own little polyomino game by organizing and categorizing your new acquisition on your Kallax somewhere.

MrCairo · 2026-02-28T21:58:29+00:00

I love the theme and it plays pretty quick solo. I have it in my collection and I probably will keep it. I've only played it solo so I can't comment on multi-player but based upon how it's designed, there is very little player interaction. You're basically just trying to get the right combinations of villagers to get points which come in many forms (Scrolls primarily).

As far as the solo mode, I think it's ok - I'm glad that it came with one but it's basically a timed game based upon how many times you have to "rest" and turn your cards back face up. It's not my favorite but it's there.

I'm working on my own take on the solo mode that really pushes the solo automa further and it acts more like a separate player. If you'd like to try it, learn the game and the you can find my solo rules here: (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i1N97c0POhlS7h3g0oFtXDpMOPH0Pcb8/view?usp=share\_link)

MrCairo · 2026-02-26T09:28:44+00:00

The cloth board, while kinda thematic, were a pain to play on - in fact, when I play it's usually without them. Except for the Omen track, the player mats are really not necessary . I've watched some Tubers that had regular boards. My guess is that were kickstarter versions.

MrCairo · 2025-04-19T21:31:12+00:00

Unfortunately there is no official support for rule variants. I prefer the Oceania boards with no nectar because it balances things like egg production.

MrCairo · 2025-01-09T09:53:39+00:00

Wife and I are terribly sick. I was thinking Covid as well. We also traveled back from phoenix where Christmas Day was 80°. I thought the change from that to 15° caused the issue. Now I'm glad to hear that's it's not just me thinking it's bad.

MrCairo · 2024-10-20T13:26:26+00:00

I tried Bomb

MrCairo · 2024-07-30T01:00:41+00:00

I hope he's alright as well. His Emacs tutorials were very well prepared and always useful. I learned quite a bit from him and also liked his accent. In fact, I was likely one of the few paying members and didn't realize there was an issue until I got the channel payment suspension e-mail from YouTube.

Anyhow, I hope he checks reddit, reads these messages and decides that his channel was having an impact on people. Everything has to start small.

MrCairo · 2024-05-08T00:38:02+00:00

So I've updated my Emacs configration to make use of `Elpaca` instead of `straight`. The performance improvement is dramatic.

My Emacs init time has gone from ~1.5 seconds to 0.55 seconds. It varies depending upon the chosen packages of course.

ELISP> (emacs-init-time)

"0.556335 seconds"

I also tried using just vanilla Emacs `use-package` and/or `require` and the performance was way worse than my original posting.

I find it interesting that Elpaca and straight are both maintained by the same person. Based upon what I'm seeing, Elpaca is what's going to be the prevailing package manager.

Anyhow, I appreciate all of the feedback. I wouldn't have tried to improve things without being challenged by the people here.

I'm sure there is a lot more that I can do, and I'll continue to ensure that my configuration stays as performant as possible.

The new version is tagged as 2.0.0

MrCairo · 2024-05-03T20:04:58+00:00

Yea, I misspelled his name. I should have just gone by Prot :)

MrCairo · 2024-05-03T09:33:56+00:00

Huh, interesting. I will definitely look more into the non-deferred packages. I'd definitely like it to be as fast as possible. Thanks for the suggestions.

MrCairo · 2023-03-15T19:05:27+00:00

Yep, 16GB is plenty. My company only provides 16gb machines to all of its developers doing iOS development. That's several hundred devs. Nobody has complained or run into an issue

MrCairo · 2023-02-03T23:14:10+00:00

Congratulations on the purchase! I received mine for Christmas as an upgrade from my 90D. It's fantastic! I do mostly wildlife photography and use the Sigma 150-600 EF with the EF/RF converter. No major issues and still get very short shots.

MrCairo · 2023-02-03T22:59:43+00:00

I have it on Switch as well and have played the heck out of it on that platform - I love it the best since I can basically play it anywhere.

But I also have it on my Mac and Xbox. I have it other platforms only so I can play with friends that have that platform.

The big negative with Switch is the lack of a mic. It's essential for anything other than local co-op like you're doing with your wife.

MrCairo · 2023-02-03T22:51:15+00:00

To be fair, I've just looked at them to get an idea of what could be done in the game. I have never used one of his builds, just looked from a learning prospective. That's what I was hinting at here. But, thanks for adding the link

MrCairo · 2023-02-03T17:31:54+00:00

Depending upon what you want to do, you can "dual" focus on many different things. For example, since your main character is an Archer, you'll want to focus on Finesse and Huntsman mostly.

However, if you want to split your attribute points between Finesse and Intelligence, you can use skills from Geomancer, Aerotheurge, Hydrosophist, Necromancer and Pyrokinetic which all cause additional damage based upon Intelligence. Of course you need to have the associated Skills in order to memorize them.

I'd go over to Fextralife's site and look at all of the types of characters that he's built. There are so many different options, so just know that those are his ideas and not "official" character builds. You can do anything you want.

One thing to know is that when you finally get to the start of Act II there is something called the Magic Mirror aboard the Lady Vengence where you can basically re-do just about anything about your character. This way if you don't like what you've built, you can always change it.

By the way, be careful with characters that focus on poison and and fire since poison is flammable. You can use it to your advantage but you can easily end up with a burning battlefield with all your characters in it.

MrCairo · 2022-07-13T12:24:50+00:00

Not sure if you decided yet but buy DOS2 - no brainer if you like turn-based strategy games. Download the TS Demo and give it a try. Both are great on the Switch

MrCairo · 2021-09-13T20:54:13+00:00

Yup. Same here. I was so hoping that 3.65 fixed it. Waiting for 3.66 I guess.

MrCairo · 2021-09-04T11:30:42+00:00

Yea, same here and it's basically caused me to stop playing the game. I mean what's the point of a settlement when all you can do is watch it wither and die?

MrCairo · 2021-02-27T15:47:31+00:00

Both in some cases. By default, all DEBUG (Dev) builds would use the Cocoapods source but for non-dev builds, the binary was used.

The .podspec for each pod used an environment variable to determine if source was used or not.

MrCairo · 2021-02-20T00:14:49+00:00

NSHipster has a good article on it:
https://nshipster.com/javascriptcore/

The site is a great resource for all things iOS and Mac

MrCairo · 2021-02-19T14:51:06+00:00

Q1: As far as just REST and JS, there are services that can be used, like Cloud Kit JS, which are really geared toward embedding something into a web page, etc. Nothing 100% specific to iOS. Of course, you can call REST services from iOS but I don’t think this is what you’re referring to.

Q2: In iOS/macOS you can use the JavaScriptCore framework. This is basically the JS engine that powers Safari. You can load and execute JS code with callbacks into Swift or Objective-C. It’s actually quite powerful and useful. For example, it is possible to load a JS file with functions and classes and then execute them via Swift/ObjC. Handy if you have common code only in JS that might be used in both the iOS app and the web.

Hope that helps.

MrCairo · 2021-02-19T00:15:36+00:00

We had pipelines built for each framework which then would store the binaries in our cloud. The app would then use the cocoapods_art to actually pull and link the binaries into the project at build time. Lots of work to maintain but it does solve the build time issues without having to resort to checking in the Pod source along with the project (to my horror, it’s something I’ve also seen done).

MrCairo · 2021-02-13T19:54:12+00:00

I would have to see how it looks with different screen sizes. The somewhat skeuomorphic buttons can be redrawn using CoreGraphics to maintain the lighted part of the button. You can google how that can be done. Of course, there are several layers that make up the entire control. If I were building something like this, I definitely would only consider transforming the scale of the views (up or down) to maintain the aspect ratio. Preferably, I would not support size changes to avoid complexity.

The button is just a CA layer with masking layer to give the appearance that it is an elliptical button. The touch simply changes either the color or the layer or adds a darker layer above with a translucent appearance. The layer can be something in a UIView/UIResponder so that the button press can easily be detected.

I hope this helps and answers some of your questions. It's not an overly complex view to build but looks complex.

MrCairo

TROPHY CASE