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January is almost over, so it's time for my list of my favourite games I was introduced to last year. In total I played 58 games for the first time over the period. (16 of them was children games (I'll write another post on that later), so 42 games qualify as nominees.) As last year I go from light to... meatier... categories. But, this year, I have tried to select only 9 games. For simplicity. And it allows me to do this: Off we go. Filler games Kingdomino worked quite well with a six years old. Slightly too complicated scoring, but interesting to build cute landscapes with monsters et co. #bgg #j2s #boardgames #kingdomino #brunocathala #juegodemesa #gamingwithkids #games #cyrilbouquet A photo posted by Of Cardboard Sheep (@do_meeples_dream) on Dec 10, 2016 at 3:38am PST Kingdomino is one of Bruno Cathala's many new games of 2016. An excellent take on, well, domino. (Kind of.) This really clever 15 minutes filler is along with  Deep Sea Adventure ...

I haven't been able to participate too much in @truecuckoo 's excellent #jamuary2017, sadly. (Even though I have a close to a million of quirky drafts on various tapes from my OP-1. (It's amazing how it's such an idea generator that instead of finishing something it is way easier to just get a new idea and start following that instead. (I'll have to find a way around that one day. (But I digress.)))) This time I sat down in front of Cubase and started playing around with some new soft synths I haven't tested too much before -- Xpand2, SynthMaster, and the Kontakt library Solid State Symphony. I ended up with this stadium pop thing here. With @simsmi we will probably rearrange it and add some lyrics (on "Alternative Facts"!) and record a @1bisHill version one day, methinks. But, for now, since this is a weekend for finishing things, this is what it is -- a pompous cliché-ridden thing with the catchy name of "Jamuary2017 #29". Enjoy. ---- ...

In my constant... need... to get everything music instrument related to communicate with each other, I wanted to look into ways to get some of my keyboards/synths with only MIDI over USB to talk to devices with regular good old-fashioned 5-pin MIDI ports from the eighties. Cables! First I had a quick look at off the shelf solutions. The most interesting one being the Kenton MIDI USB Host – providing MIDI host functionality for USB devices as well as regular MIDI in and out in a small box. Unfortunately it is rather expensive (~125 €) and a reliable online source warned me that it was not entirely stable in collaboration with my OP-1, so I started thinking of more... home-grown solutions. I decided to try to use my old Raspberry Pi and see if that would serve as a USB host with a borrowed MIDI USB adapter. (Thanks Simon.) A cheaper, and, as an added boon, a nerdier solution. Step 1: Get the USB MIDI device up and running This was the easy part. The device I have been lent ...