Today, I have a bit of a strange review of a board game to go over.  I'll skip to the punch line right away and then work my way back to the same conclusion.  The board game Dungeons & Dragons: Adventure Begins is a bad game.  That said, it's also my most played game for the month of April thus far and my son loves it...and so I also love it.  But it's bad.  So bad.   Confused?  Me too, so let's get into it and I promise it'll all make sense by the end. Dungeons & Dragons:  Adventure Begins is a board game that claims to be for people a ..read more

For the first part of the bracket creation, we need to seed the various full-sized insert sets.  I thought it'd be fun to first have a vote for the best insert set within each year and use each year vote winner as a top seed.  From there, I'll fill in the rest of the bracket with the remaining full-sized sets. I also hope that each of these Seeding Vote posts give you a bit of information about each of the insert sets for a specific year.  That should help with your voting as we move forward into the heart of the Ultimate Ginter Full-Sized Insert Set Bracket.  I laid out ..read more

Back in 2020, I ran a Allen & Ginter Mini Set Bracket Contest/Challenge where I took all of the mini sets in Topps Allen & Ginter across all years (up until 2020, obviously) and held a series of votes to determine the best mini set in each year.  From there, I used the results of the voting to seed a full bracket of mini sets where we then had a "March Madness" type competition go on until there was only one mini set left standing as the overall champion (you'll have to see my series of posts if you'd like to remind yourself of what mini set won).   While that series was ..read more

I'm sticking with eBay to try and track down the various Barry Larkin parallels from this year's throwback Chrome set (which is based on the 1989 Topps design).  I recently acquired the Blue parallel which happens to be numbered out of 150 copies: I think these parallels will look great in a binder page once I'm able to track them all down.  Of course, the odds of me actually completing the full run of parallels is slim-to-none but at least I'm one card closer today! With the Blue Chrome Foil now in hand, I officially own eight different Barry Larkin cards from 2024 Topps!  ..read more

Barry Larkin Year:  1995 Brand:  Stadium Club Insert set:  Virtual Reality Member's Only Card number:  24 The Virtual Reality set is a partial parallel of the regular Stadium Club set while the Member's Only stamp means this card was only available in box set form.  I guess that means this card is a parallel partial parallel?  I dunno, Topps goes crazy with their parallels sometimes.  I'm not a big fan of the "box set only" form of parallels, nor am I a fan of parallels that are differentiated by only a gold stamp.  File this card under the "glad I ow ..read more

I recently picked up a copy of a game called Dungeons & Dragons:  Adventure Begins which is basically a kids game that serves as an early entry into the D&D world.  Now, for all of my "geek cred" that I have (I mean, I teach math after all), I have never played D&D proper in my life.   As such, that kids game has served as my entry into the world of Dungeons and Dragons as well.  What I didn't expect from playing the game with my son was how much he took to the creative side of the game - so much so that I now am starting to look into a way to play ..read more

Barry Larkin Year:  1995 Brand:  Stadium Club Parallel set:  Member's Only Card number:  35 The 1995 Stadium Club set had a Member's Only factory set that was made available exclusively to Stadium Club Members.  Sets were sold for $200 and Topps claimed that 4,000 sets were produced (though it seems the internet generally agrees that many fewer sets were actually purchased and therefore released "in the wild").  The entire concept seems silly to me, why pay $200 for what amounted to nothing more than an extra foil stamp cluttering up the front of the Stadium Cl ..read more

Now that baseball season is back, I've been spending a lot of my evenings putting on a baseball game and then sorting through my Barry Larkin cards that aren't yet in my Larkin Collection binders.  Currently, my binders are up-to-date through 2021 so for the past week or so I've been working diligently on getting all of my 2022 Barry Larkin cards in binder sheets. You might not think that would be a hard process...but I don't make things easy for myself!  First, I like to have redundancy built into my collection so I keep tabs of everything I need (and own) on both Trading Card Data ..read more

Sometime over the past week, my blog rolled over the 2,000,000 visitor threshold!  That's an amazing total that I never thought I'd hit!  Many people say that blogging is a dying art but there's at least two million visits here that show it's not all dead quite yet.  A huge thank you to all of you who have stopped by over the years, let's keep the good times going as we move forward and start the march to visitor number 3,000,000! Onward and upward ..read more

Today might be a normal Monday for a lot of the country, but where I'm located it's eclipse day!  My son's school district is letting the students out three hours early (ostensibly to have no responsibility for kids staring straight into the eclipse)?!  Of course, where I live we almost always have cloudy days so I guess we'll have to see what happens later this afternoon.   That all said, while we do wait for the sun and moon to play their games, why not look at another week's worth of TCDB trades?   Let's begin with a trade with user Trinitydawg22: I suppo ..read more