Month: May 2024

Midwest Tulip Fest

When last I wrote about Kuipers Family Farm, I sung the praises of their apple picking and sunflower features, with a blurb about the pumpkin experience I’d never actually done. Well, I’ve still never been to their pumpkin picking, but they’ve now added a tulip festival!

In front of a building labeled "The Farmstand," a metal structure is completely surrounded by pink tulips, with a gradient from darker in the middle of the petals to lighter on the outside, and yellow at the very bottom. There are occasional white and yellow tulips interspersed.

Like the sunflowers, the tulips span seven acres, and you can pay extra to cut your own and bring them home. Or, if you have cats like ours who don’t understand “don’t chew that” (tulips are bad for them), you can just pay admission to wander and enjoy. It’s in the same area as the pumpkins with what I assume are year-round features (though again, never having been to the latter, I can only infer). These include a sort of jungle gym, games like tetherball, and a small zoo! There are also food vendors. All in all, it was a lot bigger than I expected, and of course the tulips were gorgeous! Their season is over now, but there’s always next year.

A swathe of deep purple tulips, almost black, on tall green stems. Seemingly much taller for the fact that they were photographed at their own height.
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Hearthstone Updates: The Good and the Bad

There have been some changes to Hearthstone since I last posted about it, bringing good news and bad news. The bad news: they’ve discontinued Duels, which I was rather fond of. The good news: they’ve added a Duos mode to Battlegrounds!

Instead of eight players fending for themselves, four sets of two share health stats with their partner, and so must coordinate their approach. This includes the ability to Pass cards to your teammate’s hand at the cost of Gold. To that end, you can flag certain cards or other options (i.e. Tavern Upgrade) to confer with your opponent! It’s a very simple system, just a checkmark, an x, a question mark, and a portal symbol. Part of the joy for me has been learning how to click with each new teammate, because we all use the same four-symbol shorthand a little differently!

For the combats themselves, you and your teammate take turns fighting first, facing off one-on-one with an opponent until one or both combatants lose all their minions. Their teammate(s) immediately tag in, the fighting continues, and whichever team still has minions in the end does damage! If one player defeated both their opponents, their teammate’s minions fill in the empty spaces in their board and contribute to the damage total.

(Additional note: the Anomalies update I mentioned in the previous Battlegrounds post was, I believe, Season-specific, and isn’t currently in effect. They shuffle cards and rules like that with the major updates, so there’s always something new to play with!)

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