Fog of Love

My collection of board games is light on two-player games. I don’t mean games that allow just two players to play, I mean games built specifically for two players. Lately, I’ve been looking to change that, with special emphasis on games that look like I might be able to convince my fiance to play.

Fog of Love turned out to be exactly what I was looking for.

The box is easy to organize and has plenty of room for the expansions

Fog of Love is a two-player, RPG card game in which each player assumes the role of a person in a romantic relationship. The base game comes with several different scenarios of varying difficulty and complexity. During these scenarios, the two players take turns playing scene cards from their hands and react to those scenes by making choices. Different choices have different outcomes, and sometimes the outcome depends on whether you both agree or disagree.

We played the tutorial scenario, which begins with a Sunday morning first date. All of the cards in the box come presorted so that this is the first scenario you play with helpful tutorial cards inserted into the decks so you can play without ever having read the rules.

The traits you pick at the beginning are hidden and incentivize you to make certain choices throughout the game.

A challenge with any RPG is that if the players aren’t invested in the roleplay the game can get a little awkward. The scenes are basically story prompts and the players are free to invent the specifics. Not everyone is comfortable with that, especially if they are new to board games, what’s so beautiful about the game’s design is that it actively helps you roleplay.

A player’s trait cards, destinies, and secrets are all hidden from the other player at the start. All of these cards work together to tell the player what kind of relationship the character wants and what is basically the character’s ideal personality. The choices players make can force them to exchange cards, reveal cards, change their satisfaction score, or their personality attributes.

The personality attributes and satisfaction scores are out in the open, providing a record of choices and allowing the two players to get to know each other’s characters naturally. Right off the bat, the game provides an easy and intuitive way to decide how your character would behave AND it provides a way for your character to change and for you to change how you play them. Your choices could have made you bitter and quick to anger, or more sensitive and caring.

What does all this add up to? An elegant roleplaying game for friends and couples. One where you can work together to become equal partners in a fictitious relationship or selfishly work to only make yourself happy.

I really can’t say enough about how elegant the design of this game is. There’s tons of room for complexity while at the same time it remains very accessible for newcomers to the hobby. If you’ve been thinking about this game or looking for something new to do on date night then just buy it. You’ll be glad you did.

Five Months with the Drop Alt

There are a lot of mechanical keyboards out there. Many of them are “for gamers,” and you can find a keyboard with that gamer aesthetic for under $100. However, if you start looking for enthusiast keyboards, the prices can quickly get into hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Why are these so expensive? It’s really a matter of supply and demand. Enthusiast mechanical keyboards are a niche market. Many designs are either made by small companies or by enthusiasts. Many of these kits also need to be assembled by the user. The selection and soldering of components can take a lot of time, knowledge, and tools. So if you have a few thousand dollars you can pay someone to build it for you.

Luckily, as the hobby gains steam, there are more and more options for people who want to dip their toes in the mechanical keyboard ocean. One of these options is the Drop Alt.

What is the Alt?

The Drop Alt is a hot-swappable mechanical keyboard, which means that the switches can be added and taken away without soldering. They just pop into place. As soon as I learned this, I was sold, I ordered the high-profile version without switches, but a low-profile variant is available as well.

Once I had the board picked out I went with switches. I knew I wanted linear switches, switches that press down without a built in “clicky” sound of a tactile bump. I settled on the Gateron reds. These switches were great, but I eventually swapped them out for Gateron blacks. This was just due to personal preference, I knew by this point that I like linear switches but I wanted a switch with more actuation force. This is the great thing about the board being hot-swappable. If you aren’t sure what kind of switch you like you can try another.

The keycaps I picked out were the the Drop + Matt3o MT3 /dev /tty keycap set.

I picked these out because I liked the color scheme and I have been extremely happy with them. The PBT plastic that they are made of is durable and the keycaps themselves are nicely contoured for comfort during extended writing sessions.

Mods

One thing I knew going into this is that some enthusiasts have complains about the sounds that some of the keys on the Alt make. Most of these issues relate to the stabalizers, the metal bars that help hold larger keys like shift and enter steady. They default stabalizers on the Alt have been known to rattle. Now, this may or may not bother you, but eventually, it started to bother me, and so I decided to make a few modifications.

The first thing I did was lube all of the stabilizers so that they would move more smoothly. I used a small paintbrush and some Teflon grease I keep around for my trombone slide, but many recommended some kind of krytox grease.

Then I did the bandaid mod. This was considerably more annoying to do, so I only did it on the space bar, which was the one that still annoyed me the most when I was done lubing the stabilizers. The bandaid mod is simple. All you do is cut the pads off of a couple of bandaids and place them between the base of the stabilizers and the circuit board to cushion the stabilizer’s impact against the circuit board when you type.

These mods might sound complex, but they really aren’t. I just made them difficult because I did them impulsively and didn’t really think about what my plan was before I started.

Is the Drop Alt Worth Buying?

In my opinion, absolutely. I wanted an excellent keyboard, one that I could customize to my liking and occasionally tinker with. I was not disappointed. If you don’t want to dip your toes into assembling your keyboard, you might be interested in something like the RK61, but I whole heartily recommend the drop alt.

Buy the Alt if you want:

  • To experiment with different types of switches.
  • To customize your typing experience without a soldering iron.
  • To have a quality mechanical keyboard that you will likely enjoy for years to come.
  • To have something that you can both enjoy and occasionally tinker with.

If you go with the high-profile variant I recommend getting some kind of wrist rest as well to enhance your typing experience.