Apparently, me being a month behind on posting my monthly board gaming recaps is now a thing.  It took me until nearly the end of March to discuss February's plays and now April is nearly over and I'm finally getting around to discussing March's plays. Without further ado, here are my (in person) board game plays for the month of March 2024 (33 total plays spread across 14 games): The month of March was quite busy for me, other than one week when I was off for spring break.  I definitely got a fair bit of board gaming in that week!  Also, my numbers are buoyed a bit by the ..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 t ..read more

Barry Larkin Year:  1998 Brand:  Topps Tek Card number:  57 Pattern number:  17 The 1998 Topps Tek set is either a player collector's best friend or worst nightmare.  For those of us who have our "PC" guy in the '98 Tek set, there are 90 different versions/patterns for the base card to try and track down.  It's a fun challenge, to be sure, but given how many patterns exist, it seems to be a nearly impossible task now for me to complete this set (especially since the set itself is approaching 30 years of age)!  That all said, I'll keep picking away whe ..read more

Last week, I ran a group break over on my Discord that included a pair of boxes of 2024 Topps Heritage.  As usual, I like to double-dip when I can to get some blog fodder out of a group break so why not review one of our two boxes today? Each hobby box of 2024 Topps Heritage contains 24 packs with 9 cards per pack.  Each box also promises either an autograph or a relic, though historically for me that simply means a basic relic when it comes to Heritage! Box Topper: Each hobby box of 2024 Topps Heritage comes with a box topper.  For the most part, you can either expect a 1 ..read more

Today marks the first day of the final week of the regular semester for the college where I teach.  If that isn't enough to cheer me up, I've also got a week's worth of TCDB mailings to show off.  Let's get this week started! We'll begin with a PWE from user bbcards56: I'm still slowly plugging away at the 2024 Topps Series 1 1989 Silver Pack Chrome set.  I know there are a couple of guys in the set that will be a pain to track down (Elly de la Cruz being one).  However, I'll worry about that bridge when I get there, for now I'm happy to have three more needed cards for ..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 t ..read more

Barry Larkin Year:  1995 Brand:  Stadium Club Parallel set:  Member's Only Card number:  211 Today, we have the Member's Only parallel of Larkin's "Best Seat in the House" subset card.  Topps featured Barry Larkin a lot in the 1995 Stadium Club set, a move that proved to be wise given that Barry won the MVP in '95!  As for this particular card, it's most definitely NOT a MVP-type parallel, basically it's nothing more than another gold stamp on a card front that already had two gold stamps (if you count the Stadium Club logo).  Glad to have this one in my c ..read more

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