gaming – Page 15 – dangermouse.net

Magic: Goldfish Draft results

I missed posting an entry last night because I was busy last night and bedtime crept up on me. Since I still haven’t quite fallen into a regular sleeping pattern after getting back from Europe, I decided to go to bed rather than stay up later writing a blog post.

I mentioned just over a week ago that I was playing a new game of Magic: the Gathering Goldfish Draft with my friends. Well, now a week later I can tell you the results of the game. Yes, it took me that long to calculate my score, using a spreadsheet – that’s what I was finishing up last night that caused me to have a late night. My result? I scored 10^246.8 points.

Now you might think this is an awful lot of points to score in any sort of game. Surely I must have beaten everybody else’s scores! But you’d be very far from the truth. In fact, I came last out of six players. All the players’ scores were, in increasing order:

10^246.8 (me)
10⁷⁴⁶⁸²
10⁶²⁸⁹⁶⁰
10^3×10¹⁴
10↑↑4.1
10↑↑↑↑2.7

The last two use Knuth’s up-arrow notation for writing extremely large numbers that are beyond the capability of standard exponential notation – using a monotonic extension we worked out for interpolating non-integral operands. Also, these scores are all approximate – there’s no point, or even possibility, of tracking all the digits of the numbers we’re calculating here.

Also yesterday: did some housecleaning, dog walking, cooking, the usual day-to-day stuff.

Today: I slept in a bit after a solid sleep, which was good. I think I’m now pretty much back into a sensible sleeping pattern, which was not something I would have said yesterday. My arm is still a tiny bit sore from the 4th COVID shot on Friday, but otherwise that seemed to be fairly unremarkable.

I went for a big walk with my wife and Scully, out to our favourite bakery for a kind of brunch-ish snack. We just had a pastry each. Then on the way home we took a longer detour to see some different scenery and stretch our legs more. The day is actually nice today! Sunny and a forecast maximum of 20°C, which is considerably warmer than it has been for the past few weeks. So it was good to get out and enjoy it.

This afternoon I cleaned out the garage a bit and put some things out for the fortnightly household items collection that the council runs. Every two weeks you can put large items out on the kerb and council trucks come by and pick them up for disposal. I got rid of an old chest of drawers that we’d been storing in the garage for years, but it was pretty filthy and we were never going to use it again. I also took out my old set of golf clubs – the ancient ones I got second hand for about $50 and used until our neighbour passed away and his wife gifted me his very nice set of clubs. I’d seen second hand clubs at the golf course and asked if they wanted a donation, but they said they get lots of old clubs and don’t know what to do with them any more. So I didn’t expect to be able to get rid of them any other way, and placed them out for collection, and then a neighbour drove into our apartment driveway and saw me putting them there and asked if he could have them, for a friend of his who was just beginning to play. I said sure, and helped him take them. I’m really happy that they will get one more life with a new player!

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Friday games, Saturday game

Friday was online board games night with my friends, so I didn’t have time to write up an entry. We played games of Fruit Picking, 7 Wonders: Architects, Codenames, Nidavellir, 7 Wonders, and then Sketchful.

Fruit Picking is a new game we tried for the first time. It’s based on mancala; you move “seeds” round several “farms” mancala-style, and then use sets of seeds to buy fruit cards form the market to build winning sets of fruit. The tactics were interesting and we may try it again. The Codenames game was hilarious, as both sides had difficult combinations of words to clue, and also one side had SAND while the other had DESERT, so the team spymasters (me and a friend) also had to come up with clues that indicated one of those words but not the other. Our team-mates ending up hitting numerous bystanders and failing to make sense of either spymaster’s loose associations. Eventually the team opposing my team won, alas.

The other big event on Friday was Scully had her annual vaccinations at the vet. She’s been healthy the past year, with no visits to the vet since her last vaccinations. After the vet visit we gave her a bath and extra cuddles all evening.

The other thing I was doing on Friday, which extended into Saturday, was drafting a new round of our Goldfish Draft Magic: the Gathering game format that we invented. I may have mentioned this before – it’s a game based on Magic: the Gathering, in which players attempt to score the most points, and scores can often be so large that they require exponential notation to write down, or even more than that, things like Knuth’s up-arrow notation.

Today we finished drafting our cards, and now my mind turns to calculating my score. This is non-trivial, and can take several days to work out, often involving a spreadsheet. Yes, we’re complete nerds – we’re playing a game that requires a spreadsheet to calculate our scores, and often we actually deal in the logarithms (or super-logarithms) of our scores to make it easier to handle. When I’ve figured out my score, I’ll let you know, and I’ll also report what the other players scored.

Also today I worked hard on my current secret project. It’s approaching completion – so close I can taste it. Potentially I could knock it over tomorrow, but it will probably take until Monday or Tuesday given I have other things I want to work on too. You won’t see the finished result straight away – its publication is contingent on another thing happening first, but it will finally be ready, and that other thing will happen within a few weeks. So all the teasing is nearly over – you will see the result soon.

For dinner tonight, I took my wife out to the French galette and crêpe place in the next suburb. They’re having a series of special “French flavours” this month to celebrate Bastille Day. I had a galette with duck confit, carrots, potatoes, Swiss cheese, and pickled onions as my savoury meal, followed by a sweet crêpe with poached pear, flaked almonds, and chocolate sauce. All very delicious!

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Back to ethics and games

I got a bit more sleep last night, but didn’t sleep through, waking up for a couple of hours in the middle of the night. I think one more night should reset my body clock to the right time zone.

So I was still quite tired today. But I had the first two ethics classes, restarting my teaching after my trip. It was little a bit of a struggle against yawning, but not too bad once I got into the material.

And tonight was face-to-face games night with friends. We did COVID tests before going there – all negative. I picked up some Thai green curry chicken from the Thai place near where we used to work, since the hots lives near there. It’s the best Thai place I know, and I seldom get to eat there any more, so it’s a special treat when I can.

Four of us played some casual Apples to Apples while waiting for the fifth player to arrive. Then we played a new game: Nusfjord.

This is a worker placement/action selection game played over 7 rounds of 3 actions for each player. There are several actions you can select, involving gaining various resources: fish, wood, gold; building ships or buildings; recruiting village elders; and issuing shares in your fishing business or buying shares in others people’s fishing businesses. The buildings, ships, and gold are worth points at the end of the game.

Unfortunately I made a critical mistake in interpreting the rules and wasted about a dozen fish on one turn that I thought I had planned out, which set me back a lot. Another player also made a similar mistake, and we ended up on significantly fewer points than the other three players. Oh well… first game is always a learning game! It was fun – I’d definitely try it again.

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Gaming and comics

Friday was online games night with my friends, so I neglected to update here. I actually won two games of 7 Wonders, which is highly unusual, although I did exceptionally poorly at 6 Nimmt to make up for it. We had an absolutely hilarious game of Gartic Phone, with some truly ridiculous drawings and descriptions.

I’ve been spending time yesterday and today doing more prep work for my trip next week. Yesterday I got caught up on a lot of ISO standards material that had arrived in my mailbox over the past several weeks. I’ve also been making comics as fast as I can manage, to make sure I have enough buffer to cover the time away.

Yesterday I also received my Kickstarter reward for Filth & Grammar, a book about editing comics. I’ve only had time to have a quick flick through, but I’ve already learnt something about preparing comic dialogue layout that I’ve now been consciously applying to the Darths & Droids strips that I’m working on.

Today I used some more bunya nuts in dinner, making a mushroom, leek, and feta tart to add them into. It was pretty rich, but delicious.

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The Solar System

Today I had another science class with my online student from England, who I’ve been teaching intermittently for some months now. I decided we could move away from biology and start looking at some more astronomy. I prepared a lesson on the solar system this morning, pulling together lots of cool images form various space agencies and observatories. The great thing about these is that most are either in the public domain, or very liberally licensed, so fantastic images are easy to find and use, which is not the case for some other subjects.

And in between teaching that class and two more on the ethics of human rights, I got a message form a parent of a student who I had in ethics a few months ago saying that she was looking for a D&D group for her daughter and stumbled across my gaming group on Outschool. She signed her daughter up right away, and asked me if I had any plans to run actual game sessions in classes. That’s exactly what I plan to do some time in the near future! So I told her, and she said her daughter would be thrilled to be one of the first one to try my adventures online.

So that’s very cool – and it provides motivation for me to get this idea up and running as soon as I can. It will need to be after my trip to Germany in 2 weeks, but hopefully some time in July/August I can get it running.

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Another day of secret projecting

Not much to say about today, since I mostly worked on my current secret project. I picked up the grocery shopping in the morning, had a couple of ethics classes, and went for a run in the early evening.

Tonight is online board games night with my friends. We’re in the middle of a game of El Grande, and I seem to be in a good position to come second.

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Gaming and Voting

Friday was wet and cold and miserable, weather-wise. After enjoying a huge 4 days without rain, we’re now in for a solid week of forecast rain. I’m pretty sure we’ve now reached the point where there’s been more rainfall in 2022 (so far!) than in any (full) year since 1996. And we’re still less than 5 months into the year. I know I keep going on about it, but it’s truly a ridiculous amount of rain we’ve had in the past few months.

And it was also freezing cold all day. The temperature never reached as high as 15°C, making it the coldest day of the year so far. Definitely an early taste of winter.

Friday evening I went to a friend’s place for board games night. My wife took Scully and the car to go visit her mother for the evening, so I took a train over.

We played a case from MicroMacro: Crime City while waiting for the sixth person to arrive. This is a very cool game that plays like a Where’s Wally? crime investigation. There’s a huge poster with an isometric drawing of dozens of city blocks, populated with thousands of tiny people. You take a set of clue cards and have to spot various things in the drawing to advance the investigation, eventually building up a sequence of events that explains a crime, implicates a suspect, and provides motive and means. It took us about 20 minutes working together peering across the map, and was a lot of fun.

After this we played a six-player round of Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest. Then we split into two groups of three, to play Dune Imperium and Azul: Queen’s Garden (the one I played). This is somewhat like its three predecessor games in the Azul series, but more different than any of the previous iterations, and considerably more complex. It’s the game I tried to buy last week. Now I’ve played it, I definitely want to get a copy. Following this, our subgroup of three played a game of Draftosaurus while the others finished Dune. To finish up we played a six-player game of Skull.

One of the guys gave me a lift home, so that was good – I didn’t have to catch a train around 11pm.

Today was election day, with Australia voting for the next federal government. We got up early and went to the nearest polling station, arriving soon after it opened at 8am. There was hardly any queue, maybe ten people ahead of us when we arrived.

As we waited, a guy in the queue right in front of us was hassling the staff about masks. They were handing out masks and asking everyone to wear one, but not forcing them to. And this guy was putting on a rant about how if it wasn’t compulsory he wasn’t going to do it, how he was here to “exercise his democratic right” and if the democratically elected government didn’t have a law requiring him to wear a mask then he wouldn’t.

He asked the polling booth volunteer if he had to and she started saying, “I’ve been told…” and he interrupted her with, “So you just do whatever someone tells you? Is that what you think democracy is?” I got so annoyed that I actually told him to shut up and stop hassling the staff. There should have been a security bouncer there to back her up, but this poor woman was all alone. And it probably didn’t help that she looked Indian/Sri Lankan. I bet the guy wouldn’t have been so vocal if it was a white male.

Voting done, we returned home to huddle inside out of the cold and rain all day. We only ventured out again at dinner time to go get some French galettes and crepes for dinner from a French restaurant. It’s a good place to go in cold and rainy weather, because their “outdoor” tables where we can sit with Scully are actually inside an arcade, so very well sheltered.

And now it’s time to settle in for the vote counting and watch the unfolding of how we’ll be governed fr the next three years…

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Games and Indian dinner

Friday night was online board games night with the guys. I ate dinner at home so I could join in early this week. We played Dice Forge, Can’t Stop Express, 7 Wonders, Azul, Scattergories, Codenames, and Sketchful. And possibly something else that I’ve forgotten.

Most of the day yesterday and today I spent working on my current secret project. There’s a bit of a deadline on this, so it’s occupying a lot of my time at the moment, and there’s nothing I can really say about it.

Oh, Thursday night I had that ISO planning meeting. We were deciding if enough people were prepared to travel to Cologne to have a face-to-face meeting, or if we should convert it to a fully online meeting. I was hoping the agenda would be finalised as a three-day face-to-face meeting, so I could travel to Germany, attend the meeting, and then have several days free at the end to explore some of the Netherlands. On the other hand, if we cancelled the face-to-face and did a virtual meeting, I would reschedule our flights and we’d have a pure vacation trip a few weeks later.

Unfortunately we kind of ended up with the worst of both worlds. Enough people are planning to travel to make it worthwhile doing it face to face, but virtually all of the Japanese contingent are not travelling—probably restricted by their companies in ongoing COVID precautions. So to please them it was decided to have a hybrid meeting, and instead of 3 days of 9-5 meetings, it’s going to be spread out as 5 days of meetings from 12:00-17:00. This is bad for me, because now I have to spend 5 full days in Cologne, while my wife entertains herself while I’m in the meetings, and then we only have a few days left at the end for sightseeing before heading home. SO it’s less than ideal, but I guess we just have to make the most of it.

Tonight for dinner we decided to go to an Indian restaurant that is a bit over half an hour’s walk from our place. We took Scully there in her doggie backpack, and she walked all the way home. I tried a new dish that I’ve never seen before: pistachio chicken, which was very nice.

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Game night and comics day

Friday was board games night with friends, and we had a face-to-face meet-up for the first time in ages, although only four of us could make it. Not having met for ages, there were brand new recently acquired games to try.

We played Libertalia first, a pirate themed game in which each player has a deck of cards numbered 1-40, each one representing a different crew member. A set of 6 of these are randomly selected and each player draws the same 6 cards in to their hands. Then each player selects a crew member simultaneously and reveals them all at once. The crew are ordered by number, and there is a Reputation track that acts as a tiebreaker – higher Reputation players sort higher.

The cards are the processed in increasing order, and each may have an ability that does something – such as modify the players Reputation, or modify the loot that each player will receive in the next step. The cards are then processed in decreasing order, with each player selecting an item of loot from a predetermined selection. Some cards also have abilities that trigger in this step, such providing a bonus for selecting a particular type of loot. Each player’s card then goes on their Ship (just an area of the table).

There is an in-between phase (“night”) when some cards have other abilities that do stuff. Then you repeat choosing a new crew member from your hand. This is done 4 times, leaving 2 unused crew in your hand.

Then it’s the next round, where more 6 more cards are selected and added to each players’ hand. So at this point each player has 6 of the same cards, plus 2 leftovers from the previous round, which may differ depending what they played. You play this round of 4 cards, and then you play a third round of another 4 cards.

Over the course of the game you accumulate various loot tokens, which are worth different amounts of points, and the most loot points wins!

The second game we played was a longer one: Ark Nova. This was a more complex game, in which each player manages a modern zoo, developing conservation programmes, and links to other zoos and to universities for research and stuff like that. It’s quite involved, with a lot of interlocking actions, resources, and scoring tracks.

It took us about 3.5 hours to play the game, though being the first game it was slowed down by learning to play. The turns go by pretty quickly and smoothly once you get into it, so there isn’t much down time, and there’s plenty to do and plan out. By the end we were being pretty efficient.

Today I spent most of the day making Darths & Droids comics, and working some on the secret project.

Oh, and it was really cold today. Winter has definitely blown in.

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Codenames night

It’s Friday games night and we’re playing Codenames tonight.

Earlier this evening I went out for dinner with my wife and Scully. We went to an Indian restaurant that we used to go to a lot years ago, but haven’t been there since we got Scully, because they don’t have any outdoor seating. It hasn’t been super urgent for us to try to go there, because there are other Indian places near us. But it was good to go back.

Mostly today I worked on the secret project a bit more, so I don’t have a while lot more to say about today.

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