Oops. Yesterday I was so busy with other things that I completely forgot to make a new Irregular Webcomic! strip. I had a script and the photos were taken ages ago. I just had to assemble it and upload it into the buffer. But I was busy with ethics classes, and in between I had to work on some other Outschool admin stuff, and I also put some lots of Magic cards into eBay. And I took Scully for a walk. And after my last class had a shower and got ready to go out for board games night at a friend’s place.
And making the comic just slipped my mind. And because I was playing board games into the night and went straight to bed when I got home, I didn’t even realise I’d forgotten until I woke up this morning and had multiple emails and forum messages and Discord chat messages telling me and wondering if something terrible had happened to me.
No, I just totally forgot.
So today I made the new comic and buffered it up to replace Saturday’s usual rerun strip. I feel like I need to take a week’s break making new strips though, because I’ve been run off my feet doing other things and I really don’t want to spend all this weekend writing a new batch of strips when I have other things I need and want to do.
Anyway, at last night’s games night we started with The Shipwreck Arcana, a cooperative deduction game which I described once four years ago. Then we moved on to Heat: Pedal to the Metal with 6 players. We played the USA track, and one of the guys tried a risky move on the first turn, double upshifting to third gear and using a stress card to try to get a quick start, and ended up drawing high and overshooting the first corner, thus spinning out on the very first move! It was hilarious and he spent the rest of the game trying to recover and catch up to everyone else who were at least a turn ahead.
After this we played a new game: On Tour. Each player is in charge of a band, planning a tour around the US (there’s also a Europe board in the game). It’s kind of like a travelling salesman problem, except that you roll two 10-sided dice to assign numbers—representing the day of the tour—to each node (the nodes correspond to either a large state, or a group of small states like on the east coast). You can put the numbers where you like, with some constraints specified by random cards that everyone must follow – for example you can only place numbers in the southern half, or western third of the country. The goal is to form a connected route through monotonically increasing numbers, showing how your tour progresses as the days go by, and visit as many states as possible.
It gets hard because the dice are unkind. You might have a node with 15 and a node with 20, separated by an empty node and be hoping the dice roll a 15-20 so you can fill it. (You can do multiple concerts on a single day.) When the dice betray you, inevitably, you end up having to cut off chunks of your optimistically planned grand tour. It was a right mess! When you roll doubles on the dice you get a wildcard number which you can fill in as a star on your board, which would have helped immensely, but nobody rolled doubles for the entire game!! You also get a wild star if the three region cards are identical, which also never happened! We ended the game with no wild stars at all. So my grand 40-state planned tour ended up only visiting about 12. But it was fun and interesting.
Today my wife went into the city to see a matinee performance of Sister Act, the musical. Meanwhile I took Scully for a walk to get some fish and chips for lunch, and spent the afternoon working on Darths & Droids strips. In the morning I did the grocery shopping and a 5k run.
I met my wife at the new Metro station near us after 5pm and we went straight to Salmon & Bear restaurant for dinner. I had a nice fish pie, with vegetables and mashed potatoes. Very filling!
New content yesterday:
New content today: