The Alpaca Advent Calendar

Every year I am organising an advent calendar where each day in December I share one alpaca picture and a fact about this marvellous animal to share some love and educate people. The 2024 edition is the first time this calendar is public. You can follow it here.

Switzerland Travel Game

As I am passionate about Switzerland and about trains (as visible from my blog), I want to explore as much of Switzerland as possible by train. To this end, inspired by the YouTube Series Jet Lag: The Game, which I highly recommend to anyone who is into travel and strategy games, I developed a real life travel game with the Swiss railway system as the playground:

The rules of the game are inspired by the 20-year-old board game Ticket to Ride. The aim of the game is to gather as many points as possible by traveling routes between cities and complete as many random “tickets” as possible. The detailed rules of this game are available here. If you are interested in this game and would like to try it out, send me a message and we might arrange something.

On my Github page you can find the whole source code of the game app. It is written in JavaScript and currently runs in Google Apps Script, so you need a Google account to run it. If you have suggestions on how to improve the app, feel free to reach out.

Merten’s world – The YouTube Channel

There’s nothing to see here yet. I will make videos in which I talk about things I’m interested in, about science, history, or geography, like the topics you find on my blog. Stay tuned for more information coming soon!