Troy Press

When asked what kinds of exercise or fitness activities they do, 19% of Americans said cycling. It’s well behind walking/treadmill at 61% and behind the next three: hiking or trail walking at 34%, strength training at 32%, and running at 28%.

Pravic is a constructed language, even within its setting, where it was created as part of the settlement of the moon Anarres by refugees from Urras. Here are links to the pages that I found most useful to learn more about Pravic.

With free time being precious, I tried to apply lessons from my past as a professional programmer to speed development of my BASIC game, Cycladic League. Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes I didn’t.

Cycladic League is a browser-based BASIC pixel-art civilization game where you lead the people of your island to explore more of the Cyclades archipelago, to construct buildings, and to recruit sailors, warriors, priestesses, and more. You can play it in about twenty minutes.

In 1956, to implement chess on the MANIAC I, Paul Stein and Mark Wells reduced the size of the chessboard from 8×8 to 6×6. Their Los Alamos chess variant is possibly the first bit of chess ever programmed.

With the release yesterday by Office Dog of The Two Towers: The Trick-Taking Game, the sequel to The Fellowship of the Ring: The Trick-Taking Game, I reached out to interview their design, Bryan Bornmueller.

The boyfriend of one of my best friends calls me “The Logger.” Not “The Blogger”: “The Logger. He knows I log my beers, log my boardgames, log my books, log my rides, log my weight. (He should see our work logs, where I’ve kept timesheets since 2012 so I can conduct time-usage analysis on myself.) Why do I log so many things?

Our most popular posts are now Star Trek watchlists and other top-10–style lists. These pushed out the PbtA and card-game articles that dominated in 2024.

If you’re thinking of cutting back alcohol yourself in 2026, consider these non-alcoholic beers. Here are the average ratings for each type’s top 10: Sour (3.83 rating), Porter & Stout (3.65), Lager (3.64), Pale Ale (3.49). Turns out the diehards who rate beers rate non-alcoholic sours the highest by quite a bit. The top 10 non-alcoholic beers, regardless of type, are identical to the top 10 sours.

With just 10 Star Trek episodes and a movie, the year 2025 saw a dramatic drop from 2024, when 40 episodes premiered across Discovery season 5, Prodigy season 2, and Lower Decks season 5. This year had the lowest number of new Star Trek episodes since 2018, when only the 6 episodes of Discovery season 1 chapter 2 premiered.

As part of the recent trick-taking renaissance, The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game improves upon the mechanics of The Crew: Quest for Planet Nine with more thematic missions (chapters) and tasks (characters).

Voyage of the Marigold, by Andrew Stephens, is an interesting twist on classic Trek games. Like the first Trek, in Voyage of the Marigold you’re exploring a grid, but—in contrast—you’re encountering strange new worlds and anomalies as you explore, and you responding to choice prompts rather than using a command menu.

Near the end of my watch-through of the top 100 episodes of Star Trek, I got to the Star Trek: Prodigy series. I decided to expand from the eight episodes that made the top 100 and watch the top 10ish Prodigy episodes.