I had copies of Crazier Eights: Camelot prototypes and prototypes of a couple expansions to give to playtesters and reviewers, but I wanted to order some cards that were updated. I got them, but I was too busy to send them out to more than one person. Then my house burned down Tuesday night. I lost everything except some copies of the original Crazier Eights game I had published that were either in my car or at a storage location. You can still buy copies of Crazier Eights on this website here.

I didn’t lose all my computer files. I had two important thumb drives. One of them was up to date for many important things, and the other was larger and had more files, but less up to date. I had the larger one in my wallet. Almost all my newer Crazier Eights updates are on thegamecrafter.com, so I am not totally out of luck. There were some changes to the Persian translation I will have to do again, but it shouldn’t take more than a couple hours.

Everything that is most important for Crazier Eights will not be hard to fix and I will be able to order more copies of the Crazier Eights: Camelot prototype (and expansions) from The Game Crafter for myself, playtesters, and reviewers soon. The Game Crafter has been slow lately, but I could ask for reviews now and make sure they get copies of it in around fourteen days.

The Fire

What do we know about the fire? It occurred Tuesday night. No one got hurt and no one was home when it happened. We had no pets. They don’t know the cause but it seems to have started downstairs near the back of the house close to the sliding class window. My laptop was in that room, so it is possible that the laptop exploded. Everything was turned to ash except things in the garage, but there was water damage to several things in there as well.

The house was still smoking (and perhaps on fire) the next day, so the firefighters drenched it with water again.

The only news pieces I see about it online are in tweets: Here and here.

Pictures of the house during and after the fire can be seen below.

What does the fire mean to my life? I lost thousands of dollars of Magic: the Gathering cards, other games, and painted miniatures in addition to almost everything else I own.We had insurance and that will help to some extent. I have a lot of online receipts for many of the purchases and a lot of personal and business purchases are recorded in my taxes in one form or another. A lot of the Magic cards went way up in value and they were not all bought online, so I will find out if there is a way to present evidence of that to the insurance company. They will also only help us recover so much money worth of items.

The insurance company got us hotel rooms and will get us a temporary residence while the house is rebuilt.

I am in school and it will be harder to finish everything I am working on this quarter. I spent the last five days buying various things I need and celebrating Thanksgiving. I bought a new computer one day but the touchpad didn’t work, so I got a new one. I spent a few hours yesterday getting a new computer and trying to get the ram updated, but they couldn’t get the ram to work. Then I spent hours making the recovery disks and trying to get windows to update. Eventually the internet connection was lost and I am still updating windows now.