It's been a while. I am still gaming, of course, as it is still my main hobby. As I have revealed in the previous article, I have also been a full-time dialysis care partner and that does take away a lot of my free time. You may think that it's easy to just get into gaming while the treatment is running, but it is not. Mostly because doing so while managing treatment really ruin the flow of the gaming experience because of the frequent stops that may or may not be predictably timed. Most of the time these days, I ended up doing non-gaming stuff while I am managing treatment so that the experience that I want to have with my games are not impacted negatively by it. It's funny though; in the official training documents for home dialysis, they actually recommend that people undergoing the procedure should consider getting into gaming. I can see that, for sure. You just sit there while the machine does its work so there are plenty of things you can do while that's happening because you don't have to worry about managing the actual treatment. The care partner definitely doesn't have this luxury.
I am trying to insert tabletop gaming into the mix these days too on top of doing mostly random stuff around the house during dialysis time because it is more palatable to take a break in between turns while playing a board game. This resulted in me actually spending more time with my tabletop collection, something that I have not been good at doing. The real problem is actually space, not time, but the dialysis management is pushing me into strange territories. I rather keep the open space in the middle of my Game Room for room-scale virtual reality but there is no other spot in this house where I can setup a tabletop session. The one board game that I really want to spend a lot of time in is Marvel Champions and while I was planning this, I knew that I would probably be playing mostly as Rogue. This resulted in me looking into sleeving my rogue deck because I know that I will have to be shuffling it a lot. I actually don't believe in sleeving. Life is not permanent and after Yoshi's loss, I live with that in my head all the time now. I am very careful with my physical gaming items, both with video games and tabletop games, so I don't worry about wearing out their components at all. I have played a lot of Legendary Marvel however and I have noticed that some of the cards do show a sign of wear and tear after a lot of shuffling. There are little scratches at the edges of the game cards and this can take away the surprise of a draw. Thus, I started looking into sleeving perhaps just a couple of the hero decks in Marvel Champions: in this case, Rogue and Jubilee since I plan to play them as a duo if I play two handed. I found a discount brand and went for it and when the sleeves got here, I was pretty happy with the result.
Will Rogue be able to beat all the game scenarios? Why wouldn't she?
I was so happy in fact that I then decided to order some more and started sleeving my Legendary Marvel cards because, well, Rogue is there too you know. And it took me forever, but I did manage to completely sleeved the whole entire thing, expansions and all. It may sound exhausting, but here is what I have discovered: Sleeving the cards is actually quite a relaxing, zen-like experience. It makes time go by so fast and after I got used to doing it, it becomes an automated process where I can get it done while focusing on other things. So, I have been doing this during the dialysis monitoring time, and it has helped out tremendously and I feel rather productive. Do I plan on sleeving every tabletop game that comes with playing cards? Maybe not. But nowadays, I don't think that it is such a bad idea because it's a nice way of killing time and it can easily be multi-tasked. I don't understand why people are opposed to these cheap sleeves. I personally really like them, so the cost associated is becoming almost non-factor now if I choose to continue doing this.
I am currently working on a couple of playthroughs of Filip Neduk's Sanctum but expect my Rogue gameplay from both Legendary Marvel and Marvel Champions to follow suit. In Legendary, I plan to have her team up with unconventional mutants like Karma and Siryn. Should be fun to finally play around with these games on a consistent basis.
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