I was really tempted to use this post to talk about my HIVE goals for the year. I know a lot of people are probably doing that between yesterday and today. Instead, I decided to save that post for Friday. It might be a couple of days late compared to everyone else, but it fits really well with my Friday Finance theme.

In the United States, games seem to have a close association with the holiday season. Perhaps it's the number of sporting events that you find on television this time of year. Maybe it's just the fact that you find yourself getting together with family and friends and you need something to pass the time. Then again, it could be the fact that those reindeer get to play games in that song and we don't want to feel left out.

My in laws always get together and do our big Christmas thing on Christmas Eve. Then on Christmas Day we have breakfast together and just spend the day lounging around and watching games on TV or playing them ourselves. For the last couple of years the adults have staged games for the kids to play. We buy some prizes and give them some tasks to do.

You can see that in the opening photo. Videos of families playing these and similar games are pretty common on social media these days.

Hues and Cues

My sister in law from Ohio picked up a game that is quite popular right now called Hues and Cues. I got the chance to play it on Christmas Day while we were waiting for dinner and it was actually a pretty fun game to play.

Each turn there is one person who draws a card. They have four colors on the card and they get to pick the one they want to try and describe. From there, they get one word to try and explain to the others what color they picked. You can't use items in the room, and you can't reference the color itself.

After everyone goes around the circle and places their piece on the hue they think you are referencing, you then get two words to try and describe your color and everyone goes around the circle again.

Once you have went around the table twice, you place a nine square grid on the board with the color you picked in the center. If someone picked your exact color, they get three points. Anyone else in the square gets two points. If they are touching the square, but just outside of it, they get one point.

The person who picked the color then gets a single point for every player piece inside of the square.

For each point you get, you then move your third play piece through the black and gray play slots until you get to the end. First player to 50 wins. Like I said, it's a really fun game and although you are playing against other people, you also want them to be on the same page as you when you are the "picker" so that you can get as many points as possible.

I have to admit, it was really hard to think of one or two words to use for the specific color that you are looking at. I really struggled with that when it was my turn to be the picker. I think it took me a good five minutes to come up with my two word phrase.

Actually, thinking back now, the two words don't have to be a phrase, but that is how I was viewing it. In reality, I think they just need to be two different words than the one word you used in the first round.

Path of Exile II

I've been looking for a new game to play for quite some time now. I was looking at Diablo 4, but I didn't want to spend the $70 to $80 they were asking for it. Someone else suggested that I should look at Baulder's Gate III. While that looked appealing, the price was still a bit more than I wanted to spend my money on.

The other day I saw a post by @themarkymark that referenced Path of Exile II. I had heard of the original Path of Exile, but I had only played it briefly. I thought that PoE2 was already out, but it turns out it is just early access right now. I started looking into it and I decided to pull the trigger.

For early access you have to spend at least $30 USD for a package. I didn't really want to spend the money, but it felt better than the $80 I was looking at for Diablo 4. After digging around a bit more, I discovered that PoE2 actually accepts a wide range of payment options.

Most notably one of them being Crypto.com Pay. I have a Crypto.com account, so that seemed quite appealing to me. I also had some USDC sitting in my MetaMask wallet, so I moved that over to Crypto.com, then I used Crypto.com Pay to buy one of the early access packs to PoE2.

It was a pretty slick process and in less then ten minutes I had access to download the game. On top of that, I didn't use any of my hard earned fiat to purchase it. In fact, the money I used for PoE2 was actually gains I had taken from some PEPE token I bought a while ago.

The game is pretty big at close to 100 GB and it took me most of the afternoon to get it installed and tweaked the way I want it, so I didn't really get to play it too much before I left work. I am really looking forward to digging into it more. So far the graphics are looking really good and I know there is a huge community that is quite hyped about this game.

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