Friday evening was online board games with friends. I played games of Boomerang: Australia, Bärenpark, Just One (our own Discord implementation, with vastly increased word list).
Then at the end most of the others begged off and there were just two of us left, so we searched through Board Game Arena’s list of games suitable for two players, and the other suggested how about we play the lowest ranked game of that entire list. It turned out to be ChinaGold, an abstract strategy game played on a hexagonal “map of China”—which so unresembles China that neither of us twigged at what it was supposed to represent—with two types of overlapping territories: rivers and mountains. Each hexagon has a gold nugget on it, initially hidden. On your turn you get to “discover” up to 4 nuggets in a straight line, governed by a dice roll. If your discovery reveals the final nugget in one of your territories, you claim all the gold in that territory. But if you discover the last gold in one of your opponent’s territories, they get to claim it all, so you need to be careful.
It was okay, but it took us a few turns to get the strategy down, by which point I was behind, and could no longer recover, so I ended up losing. Interestingly, not only was the board nothing like a map of China that it supposedly represented, but the rivers run through the mountains, not between them. I might be tempted to play it once again, just to have a full game knowing the strategy a bit better, but probably not more than that.
I also did the usual grocery shopping and online classes on Friday. Today, Saturday, I went for a 7.5k run. I went early in the morning, but it was already 26°C. The weather is still ridiculously hot for this time of year. It reached 30.5°C and we’re expecting more temperatures above 30°C in the week ahead. Which is close to 10 degrees Celsius above the average maximum for this time of year.
Also today, in preparation for the big repainting, I removed the old telephone landline socket from the wall. The electrician who came to install our new kitchen lights advised me that I could do this, and seal the wires with electrical tape to prevent them touching and possibly shorting something at the telephone exchange, then tuck them into the wall and get a builder to come and plaster over the hole, before we paint it. I did the removal and taping, but I’m not up to plastering a hole neatly, so I’ll get a pro to do that.