Friday night was board games night, hosted at a friend’s place. During the day I did my usual ethics classes. This current topic of Rights, Privileges, and Responsibilities is really good, and I think the kids are enjoying it a lot more than they expect when they hear the topic title!
I had to do a bit of tidying up some issues with university assessment marking, after consulting with the professor about them yesterday. And I picked up the grocery shopping in the morning, and at lunch took Scully for a walk to the fish & chip shop, where I had a chicken burger for lunch.
After the evening ethics classes, I took Scully over to my friend’s place for games night, since my wife had a dinner out with her friends. We had six people and split up into two groups of three. The others played Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin, while my group of three played Concordia, an old game from 2013 that I haven’t tried before. It’s a game of the Roman Empire, with each player in charge of a family aiming to settle and build towns across the Mediterranean. You have a hand of cards and each turn play a card to choose an action, such as moving colonists and building towns, gaining money and/or resources, or buying extra cards to add to your hand. The extra cards both give you more options and also the cards are used to score points at the end of the game, so there’s a lot of inter-relationship between the different things you can do. It was fun, and I ended up coming second of three, behind the guy who had played before and explained the rules, so I was happy with that.
Next all six of us played a game of The Gang. This is a new game and is, weirdly, a fully cooperative version of Texas Hold’Em poker. Everyone has a poker hand built up using Texas Hold’Em rules, and at each “betting ” phase you instead take a numbered chip (from 1 to the number of players) based on your estimation of how good your hand is. If you think your hand is likely the worst, you grab the 1, if you think it’s the best, you grab the 6 in this case (with 6 players). People might disagree – if someone else takes the 1 chip but you think your hand is probably even worse, you can take the chip off them. You’re not allowed to talk about your hands, you just take the chips. If you get your chip taken off you, you can take it back, or you can settle for a different chip. In this way, people sort of jostle and evaluate how confident the other players are, and may settle for different chips than they initially thought. This phase only ends when everyone is happy (more or less) with the chip they have.
Then you reveal some cards (Texas Hold’Em style), and have another phase of chip grabbing. The chips for the first round stay there, there are new sets of chips each betting phase. The fourth of these phases is the final one. At the end of this, everyone has their final chip – the older chips are disregarded at this stage and only serve to remind people during the grabbing phases what people thought their hands were like at the time. Once the final chips are settled, everyone reveals their hands. If they rank in exactly the same order as the final chips, the players win the round. If there’s any mistake, the players lose. The goal of the game is to cooperate and win three rounds before you lose three rounds.
It took a bit of getting used to, and we lost three rounds in a row, but I think by that time we had a better grasp of how to play and judge each other’s chip grabbing. I would have been good to try a second game, but the others wanted to move on to something else.
We then played Platypus, a cooperative party game where you need to give clues using a hand of cards to let the other players identify a mystery thing from a set of eight. That was kind of fun, a bit like a Codenames-light. That ended the evening.
This morning I had to go get a blood sample taken for some testing. I thought I had to fast overnight, so went first thing when the pathology place opened at 08:30. And then the woman who took the sample said my doctor had ordered a basic test that didn’t require fasting!
I was home by 9 o’clock and had my delayed breakfast, then went for a run. I decided to push myself and do 7.5k instead of my normal 5k. I took it fairly easy and found the distance fine without getting too worn out. It wasn’t as fast as the previous times I’ve extended to 7.5k, but that was okay.
After having a shower and cleaning the bathroom and shower stall, I settled into making some comics. I also spent some time cleaning and polishing our dining chairs. We just had them reupholstered because the seat padding was getting flat and hard, and a couple of them had the seats falling off the frames due to loose screws that couldn’t be tightened due to stripping the plywood screwholes. So we decided instead of discarding them and buying new chairs, we’d get them reupholstered with new fabric and stuffing. I found a place not far from us, and they picked the chairs up on Tuesday, and were done and ready to bring them back by Friday! I’d hoped that they’d clean off the wooden frames, which were a bit dusty, but they came back with the same dust still on them! So I cleaned them up carefully and rubbed some furniture polish into them.
For dinner tonight my wife and I went up to Organica, an Italian/Greek kind of restaurant near us (which I’ve probably mentioned before). Tonight I tried the lamb shank, in red wine and tomato sauce, with mashed potato. It was really good, the meat tender and falling off the bone.
New content yesterday:
New content today:
It’s nice reading about your board game nights! Some games are familiar to me, as names as I haven’t played most of them. Roots I have talked about with my friends, but I’ve never gotten to play it.
Today we had our board game day, we have one about every three weeks, depending on our other schedules. Usually we play Frosthaven, with four of us playing. We’ve been playing it since September last year and we are not that far into the campaign so it’s still a long project. We played ‘ISS Vanguard’ for the year before that, it’s a four-player co-op campaign game, and shorter than Frosthaven. Recommended, if you’re into those kind of games.
One of was sick today, so we played a three-player game of Spirit Island. It was fun but quite a mess, because we used most of the expansions and it’s been a long time since any of us have last played it. Even the spirit selection was a bit difficult, because there were all the published spirits available. We found fun ones, and won with a fear victory over the invaders, about three turns before we would have lost.
Then we played a shorter card game of ‘On the Edge’, the old trading-card game, for which one of had three random starter packs. We just grabbed those and started playing. I lost by a wide margin because I drew basically nothing useful and very few characters.
We’ll try the Frosthaven again in a couple of weeks.