Here's a brief run down of what occured
- Started an Esports club at NVSS.
- Even competed in the High School Starleague
- Penny and I played the Pokemon TCG competitively and regularly placed in the top 8 at our local events.
- Once she could read better, the decks we played got more complicated and we started buying singles and building meta/net decks.
- Finally reached Gold rank in League of Legends in Season 6 (2016)
- And got the shiny gold border for all of Season 7 (2017)
- Sadly I didn't play much ranked in Season 7 and ended up in Silver again.
- More board games!
- Got into cooperative board games big time.
Aside from League of Legends, I didn't actually play much video games in 2016 and 2017. I only managed to get through Final Fantasy XV (in French because Penny is in a French immersion school and it helped her learn vocabulary). I started Mass Effect: Andromeda but haven't finished it yet. And I 'bought' a bunch of games through XBox Live but haven't actually played any of them (with the exception of WWE 2k16 and Warriors Orochi Ultimate because sometimes you just want to piledriver someone through a table or hack and slash through a horde of nameless bad guys)
The biggest thing I suppose from a video game perspective was that the Street Fighter Friday club from 2015 continued in 2016 and eventually turned into the NVSS Esports club in 2017. I was able to organize a year end Street Fighter 4 tournament in 2017 and crowned the first NVSS Fighting Game Champion. There was also a lot of students who played League of Legends in 2017 so we formed a team and competed in the High School Starleague and managed an over 0.500 record! (4W - 3L)
The unfortunate thing is that most of the players graduated so at the moment the school does not have a League team but the Esports club still exists. We just end up playing Street Fighter 4/5 and new this year Smash Brothers. But there's a bunch of students who want to form a CS:GO team so that might be what we do in the 2018 spring season.
One really interesting development is that there is an Esports promotion company in town now, Volcanic Gaming, that is looking into promoting more high school events! This means we can compete at more local events and help promote Esports in the area!
On the Tabletop Front
Not much actually happened here. We didn't expand our X-Wing collection much in the last two years and haven't played many games at all.
When 40k 8th edition came out though some of my friends tried it out and as a result dragged me back into it. I even ended up running an event at the local game convention NPC-Con. The new edition is really fun surprisingly and pretty smooth as far as rules go. But not every army faction has rules so it still appears that Games Workshop hasn't totally solved power creep. Still, my preliminary thoughts are that the armies without books are balanced against other armies without books while those with books seem balanced against those with books. But when the two are in opposition, one army does clearly have an advantage.
I still haven't bought any new 40k models though but did pick up the latest Dark Angels codex, because well I have been playing them since 2nd edition and no matter how many times I sell my armies, I always have enough Deathwing and support units for a tournament size army (whether that army is competitive or not is a whole other matter though)
Board games got bigger with my family too in the past year and a half mostly because Penny is getting better at reading and general thinking. She's graduated from playing Tsuro to Tokaido and now plays Settlers of Catan with us. She's actually a better Settlers player than my in-laws and regularly scores higher than they do in our games!
2016 and 2017 was busy and slowed my gaming down a bit but it laid the foundation for more games in the future with milestone events such as Penny being able to read and the NVSS Esports club continuing its existence. Here's to a good year of gaming in 2018!