WRUP: It’s finally the weekend, and at least one of us is ready to triangulate some strategies… or something

I don’t know about you all, but this was a busy week over here. Thankfully, we have successfully made it to Friday! And that means it’s time for us to go through our weekly ritual of sharing our weekend plans and just generally nerding out about things we’re looking forward to.

So why not join us and see what’s happening? If you’re feeling really adventurous, let us know what games and events are on your plate. Phil “Red” Xavier leads us off.

Phil Xavier

• Triangle Strategy

Triangle Strategy comes out this Friday. That is all.

Christian “Kalcheus” Thoma

• Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons
• Horizon Zero Dawn

Monday marked the release of Guild Wars 2‘s latest expansion End of Dragons, so I’ve been pretty much just playing that all week. I do expect to finish the main storyline this weekend, so the rest of my time will be spent playing Horizon Zero Dawn (I put Horizon Forbidden West on pause because I was missing out on too much not having played the original).

I’ve started catching up on Disney/Pixar films I’ve missed, so this weekend I’m planning to watch Coco and The Good Dinosaur (for those keeping track, last weekend I watched Soul, Luca, and Raya and the Last Dragon, of which Soul was easily my favorite). I’m also going to venture out to the theaters to see the latest Batman film because much to my surprise it’s getting good reviews!

Finally, now that I’m painting minis as a hobby, my planned painting this weekend is a Labyrinth Guardian (basically a huge armored minotaur) and a Blue Dragon Whelpling.

Joe Perez

• World of Warcraft
• Horizon Forbidden West
• Elden Ring
• Pokemon Legends: Arceus
• D&D

I just swapped covenants in WoW so I’ll be working on recovering my Renown this weekend while learning how to effectively use the Kyrian totem.

I still have plenty of Horizon Forbidden West to go through as well as Elden Ring to figure out my next path. I am still working on my AlphaDex in Pokemon Legends: Arceus and prepping for the next episode of the D&D show I’m in, where I offend literally every player character because my Owlin Rogue cannot lie.

Mitch “Mitch” Mitchell

• Elden Ring
• Horizon Forbidden West

My weekend is going to be a mix of gaming and socializing. Elden Ring leads my list of games, with Horizon Forbidden West following not too far behind. It’s not that I like Elden Ring more — both games have their pros and cons — but Elden Ring is one where I can either mostly turn my brain off and explore/farm or where my brain only has to be focused on one very specific thing (i.e., a boss encounter). Horizon demands more attention (for good reason) but lately my brain has wanted to turn off, and bashing my face against the world of Elden Ring is a good way to do that.

I also have a lot of smaller things I’d been hoping to do on my staycation last week, but I’m not holding myself to them. Do I hope I do them? Yes, totally. Do I need that to-do weighing me down in the back of my mind? Nah.

Ted Atchley

• Star Wars: The Old Republic

My gaming friend and I sorted out the issues on Dromund Kaas and made our way to the war torn planet of Balmora. We just got started on the story when we had to stop, so we’ll pick up this weekend where we left off. On the Republic side, my Jedi Knight Guardian is now level 76 and I’m still slowly working through the Legacy of the Sith story.

I know Thursday isn’t technically the weekend, but I’m super excited for this week’s episode of BattleBots. This is one of my favorite shows. It is a great mix of competition, combat, and engineering geekiness. Faruq is always entertaining with his poetic and punful introductions. I love the sheer power of bots like End Game and Uppercut, the phenomenal driving of teams like Whiplash and Lockjaw, the creativity of teams like Mammoth and Huge, and the whimsy of teams like Rusty and Duck. The preliminary rounds were completed last week. This week, they start the single elimination tournament to determine the winner of the greatest trophy in sports: the giant nut. It’s robot fighting time!

Andrew Powers

• Settlers of Catan
• Agricola
• Werewolf

As I was about to say, “I shouldn’t post, I’m not really playing anything,” I remembered, playing isn’t limited to the digital world. We’re pretending the world is phasing back to normal, and having real people over, to play real, live, board games. Some of our favorites are Settlers of Catan, Agricola — a farming game that takes hours to play — and the Werewolf card game. Also, there will be cooking and socializing and all of that stuff.

Whatever I play in video game format will be boring in comparison to having an actual party at the house for the first time in over two years. We’ve had people over recently, but one offs, or couples. This is our first actual party. Assuming they show up, if not, ignore everything I just said.

Anna Bell

• Valheim
• Cozy Grove

The Valheim game with the Mr is still kicking, and he is woefully ahead of me. On the plus side, this means I don’t actually have to farm building materials. On the minus side, this means I’m often left to my own devices to defend the base. Unfortunately in one such attack, the trolls got in through the part of the base where I hadn’t yet finished digging the moat. Fortunately, that means that instead of killing all my pigs like I thought, Kelly Rowland and Boaryonce had merely run off. Now, to slowly shove them back into my base.

It’s officially spring in Cozy Grove, so I’ve been running around catching new fish and collecting new shells. This also means it’s sort of spring IRL, so we have spring soccer for the kids, and spring cleaning for me. I suppose there might be something to make of how it’s fun to rearrange furniture and clean up in a video game while letting your actual surroundings languish, but to ponder that I’d have to stop digging my moat, and we’re due for another attack any minute now.

Liz Patt

• Animal Crossing: New Horizons
• World of Warcraft

Still no blue rose in AN:CH. The method I followed basically has a 1 in 64 chance at the final (4th) stage, which makes me even more curious to track when I started. On the flip side, I have some beautiful purple and black roses now that I want to use to decorate EVERYTHING.

I’ll also be completing Chapter 4 in the ZM quest chain. Might see if LFG has some baby M+ available for gear farming. Otherwise, it’s Torghast for leggo upgrades, but only if I feel like it cuz… I haven’t played HZD all week and I want to see what happens next! Give me more Aloy!

That’s all for this week! It’s somehow already March, so I hope whatever the first weekend of the month brings you, it’s awesome!