(Editor’s Note: Welcome back, class. Today, we will share what we did over the summer. Oh, Noob has his hand up, so we will start with him.)

Well, it’s September. Summer is winding down. My wife and kids all started back to school last week. I started back today. What better time than now to reminisce back and write one of those lame essays about “what I did this summer” that were always the first assignments in elementary and middle school. I’m actually writing four of these. This one will focus on PC gaming. Two others will talk about console and mobile games and the final will deal with my tabletop exploits.

I am starting with PC because it allows me to open with a long and meandering story that may more may not have anything to do with the overall point of the article. It is one of my favorite things about writing for the page.

I am currently restricted to my ancient Acer laptop after yet another electronics disaster. I have had computers get stepped on, tripped over, fall off of the couch and chairs, and one even fell down a flight of stairs. I sat on my tablet. I also dropped it out of my bag onto the parking lot after repairing the screen. That happened even though I got smart and started putting it into a case. Oh, but it wasn’t in the case because I took it out to clean the case and then didn’t have time to put it back in. What could go wrong? In that same parking lot, I watched as my month old phone got run over by a car. The point is that I have bad luck with electronics. I have bad luck with vehicles, too, but that is a different story.

This last laptop lasted me longer than any other one had by several months. I had no reason to believe that it would not continue to perform for months, if not years. Sure, I had to replace the screen and two hard drives, but the thing kept going. And then, one day, it didn’t.

That’s how it happened. It was working fine as I watched some stupid Hearthstone streamer as another. It was shaping up to be a fine day of relaxation. But, wait, what’s this? The computer does not appear to be charging. That’s okay. Maybe there’s a loose connection in the cord. No. Okay, well, I’ve had this problem before and it was just a quick solder job. I’ll pop on Youtube just to see how to disassemble–

Oh, my. Oh, well, that’s complicated. Okay, that’s fine. It won’t be a quick fix. Just take my time and it will be no problem. Well, to make a long story short (I know, too late!), you know that the story ends with the computer being non-operational. More specifically, I severed one of the ribbon cables. that might have been an easy and cheap fix, too, but by that point, the computer was in so many pieces that I just gave up. I’ve also learned my lesson. My next computer will be a desktop.

So, as a result, I’m restricted to my old laptop that has somehow survived the five plus year purge of electronics. The thing is a tank. t overheads and is only really good for web browsing and word processing, but it works decent for those two things. That brings us, finally, to the reason for this lengthy explanation.

The laptop may not be able to run many of the Steam games I own. So far, it has been unable to download the card images for xMage with any reliability. Heck, it sometimes has trouble playing Twitch streams. One thing it can play, though, is Hearthstone.

Chris will give me crap about this because the number of times that I’ve texted him to tell him that I uninstalled Hearthstone only to come crawling back. Heck, one of my articles just before the summer hiatus talked about my hate/slightly less intense version of hate relationship with the game. So, I deserve the abuse. All of that notwithstanding, the only PC gaming I’ve done all summer is Hearthstone. I can therefore report that, even though they’ve recently released a new adventure since the last time I covered the game, not much has changed.

In fact, the game has become even more face-centric and control decks exist only in legend, whispered by Mt players as proof that their game is superior. As a dyed in the wool blue mage, I consider myself among that group. The interaction of different archetypes and the ability to win games through different strategy on a consistent basis is what makes MtG a vastly better game. still, when I’m feeling SMOrcish and I just want to point that arrow at the opponent’s face, Hearthstone is there for me.