Christmas break is always great for gaming.  Even more so this year as I did not bring any marking or other work with me (normally I bring a boat load of marking or planning home over the holidays).  The majority of my gaming this year was online games with friends, mostly League of Legends but we did also delve into Team Fortress 2 a bit and I played a little bit of Star Wars: The Old Republic (finally got my Bounty Hunter past the first chapter)

Anyways, while playing League with my friends I quickly realized that it would be quite a while before most of my friends get to my level (and I'm only Silver at the moment!).  Sometimes it's frustrating I suppose but I've decided that I just need to get better so I can carry them harder whenever we play normal games.  I've become quite a good Leona player and can set up a good deal of plays to help feed the carries on my team.  I also can't wait for the Season 4 LCS to start.  Will give me something to watch again.

On the MTG front I did enlarge my cube (see earlier post) but due to various issues I never did get a chance to try it out.  I'm thinking of starting some kind of MTG cube league at one of the local gaming stores so I can play more cube with more people.  I just have to be careful no one steals anything (I'm thinking of buying some unique sleeves to help prevent this).  Thankfully there are no big money cards in my cube.

Family gaming has become quite a thing in my household too as my in-laws have been coming over to play games on a weekly basis.  Generally it's board games like Ticket to Ride or Settlers of Catan.  This holiday season we got the Seafarers of Catan and the 5-6 player expansions to Settlers so I am thinking of inviting my sister-in-law and her husband to join in.  It helps that their son is around Penny's age so the two can play together while we play our own game.

Steam had massive sales this holiday season as they usually do and I got a Steam gift card from my sister (she always gets me gaming related gifts which is great as no one else does).  I picked up a few games I had been wanting to play (Hitman: Absolution and Assassin's Creed 3).  I missed out on the 75% off Skyrim sale on the last day because of the alleged DDOS attacks but oh well.  I'm sure that sale will happen again in the future.

Work also gave me a reimbursement for my internet which I turned into a new desktop that plays games better than the laptop I was using.  It's hardly a super gaming computer but it does play all the games I want to play at medium-high settings and some games at high-ultra settings.  The biggest bonus is that I can upgrade it fairly easily with a relatively cheap graphics card (it's got an AMD APU processor so I can pair it up with a graphics cards to get better mutual performance).

I'm looking forward to this year as Penny is getting older and learning her numbers and is getting quite an imagination.  All this translates into a great opportunity to teach her how to play RPGs and other games.  She already likes playing with my dungeon tiles and rolling dice so it should be an easy transition.