C# – The Industrious Squirrel

New Photo gallery

I’ve updated the look of my photo gallery and changed how the photos are stored. My goal is to make the gallery work better on mobile devices and modernize the look and feel. I also moved the hosting of all the photos from my website to Amazon S3. I’m planning to switch my web hosting to a private server and it will cost less if I don’t store my photos on that server.

Here’s a comparison of the look of the old gallery to the new:

Old album list
Old album
Old photo detail

New album list
New album
New photo detail

Touch table Space Base

I’ve finished converting Space Base for the touch table. Space base is a fairly quick card drafting game where you buy cards to fill in 12 columns. Each turn two die are rolled and you can take rewards from either both die or the sum of the dice. Cards give money, income, victory points and some have more complex abilities that need to be charged before use.

Touch table Brass: Birmingham

The original Brass has always been one of my favorite games. It’s a complex economic and network building game that rewards both multi-step planning and quick adaptation to board conditions. Brass: Birmingham is a 2018 re-design of the original that slightly changes the theme, simplifies some rules and adds a third resource but leaves the feel of the game intact.

Touch table King and Queen Domino

I’ve completed a touch table conversion for King Domino and Queen Domino. King Domino is a relatively simple tile placement game with the interesting mechanic where the player who chose the “best” tile goes last in the next round. Queen Domino takes the kingdom building and tile placement mechanics from King Domino and adds city tiles that can have buildings added to them.

Touch table Galaxy Trucker

I’ve been working on a touch table conversion of Galaxy Trucker since October. I’ve completed the base game and a few of the expansions (new tech tiles, five players, and side B ship hulls). I’m still planning to do at least some of the Rough Roads expansion.

Touch table Between Two Cities

I’ve completed a touch table version of Between Two Cities with the Capitals expansion. I had a hard time getting excited about this conversion and it took me two months to put in the 50 hours needed to write the game.

But I’m glad that I finished it. The conversion plays well and it adds another relatively easy 7 player game to the touch table.

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Touch table Settlers of Catan

I’ve finished my touch table conversion of the Settlers of Catan board game. I also converted the expansions: Seafarers of Catan and Cities and Knights

It ended up being a larger project than I expected, but I’m pretty happy with the game.

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Touch table Notre Dame

I’ve completed a touch table version of the board game Notre Dame. In Notre Dame, players add influence to different sections of their city by playing action cards. Some sections give the player additional influence or money which can be used later while others are better for generating the prestige needed to win the game.

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SimRetirement update and release

When I quit my job in 2011 I wrote a program to simulate retirement and give me a feel for the odds that we would be able to survive on the money we’d saved. The program used a Monte Carlo approach to simulate thousands of possible market scenarios and had logic for how we would spend money, collect social security, pay taxes, etc. At the time the program said that we had an 85% chance of outliving our money. That was good enough to quit; knowing that we could go back to work if we had to.

Since writing that program I’ve come back to it every few years to put in more recent data and make improvements. Once my spouse and I got married, I took out a bunch of code that split expenses and taxes between the two of us.

A few months ago I decided to give the program a full makeover and add features to make it useful to more people. The original program was very specific to our situation and didn’t handle account types, expenses, and investments that we didn’t have. Along with adding new features, I needed to make the program much more user friendly and error tolerant.

I’ve completed this project, and the program (and source) are available for download. It still doesn’t handle nearly as many situations as I’d like, and it has very little support for people who are still working, but it is good enough to release.

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Touch table Village

I’ve completed a touch-table version of the board game Village.

Village has an interesting mechanic where you manage the life and death of your workers. All your workers start as farmers and can be trained as specialists. Actions take “time” to perform, and when enough “time” has passed, a worker dies. A limited number of each type of worker is rewarded with fame and victory points upon death while the rest get an anonymous grave. The key is making the best use of your workers and their time while trying to arrange a good death.

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