gaming – Page 16 – dangermouse.net

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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Friday/Saturday joint update

I was too busy last night to write an entry, so today will do for both Friday and Saturday. I’ve been busy working on a secret project, which I can’t say more about yet, so there’s actually not very much I can say.

I did my running, had two ethics classes yesterday, went grocery shopping. Last night was online games night with my friends, but I went out for pizza dinner with my wife and Scully first. While walking home, a storm rolled in from the south, and there was a lot of lightning and thunder, very loud. We rushed a little, and managed to get home just a minute or two before the clouds opened and the rain came pouring down, so we were very lucky. It was incredibly heavy for about 20 minutes.

Today I pretty much just worked on the secret project, with some short breaks to do a few chores and other things. Tomorrow we have our market day, the first one since before Christmas. Hopefully my wife and I will sell a good amount of stuff!

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Rain and floods update

The big news in Australia, which was even ahead of the war in Ukraine on the TV news bulletin tonight, is the absolutely massive amount of rainfall and subsequent flooding currently hitting the eastern coast. Six people are confirmed dead from floodwater incidents, and it’s feared another has died but no body has been found yet. Brisbane’s Wivenhoe Dam is now up to 180.6% capacity – from the 120% that I reported yesterday. They are doing controlled releases of water to avoid dam failure, which means it’s washing downstream towards Brisbane. There’s already flooding of central Brisbane streets from the elevated river level, and flood warnings have been issued fore many suburbs. Current estimates are that around 1500 homes will be flooded in the city tonight and tomorrow.

And that’s just the city. There are smaller towns around the region that are experiencing much worse. Some river levels are up to 22 metres above normal, and thousands of people are being evacuated.

The heavy persistent rain is set to continue for another day or so, and the weather system is moving south, into New South Wales, which is already experiencing flooding in many regions. It’s not anywhere near as bad all the way down here in Sydney, but we’ve received 250 mm of rain in the past four days, and the forecast is for another 150 mm or so in the next few days.

Besides watching the weather reports, I had the 4th class of 6 in my current run of the game design course. Today we worked on combining ideas into a playable set of game rules. The main concept the student came up with for the game is “disagreeing with everyone”. I proposed a few possibilities for how to theme it: (1) a simple party game where you propose business ideas and everyone criticises them, (2) a meeting of philosophers, who naturally can’t agree on anything, or (3) a family gathering, where everyone gets into arguments about various topics. The student chose theme 3 – so we’re now working on a game which is set at a family gathering, and the goal is to argue with all the family members.

I’ll make a first draft of the game rules and equipment—probably just a couple of decks of cards—this week and send it off to the student to playtest before our next lesson next Sunday.

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Collecting bunya nuts

This morning I did the usual grocery pick-up run, collecting my pre-ordered groceries form the supermarket. Then my run. And then right after that I took Scully for a short walk while my wife left for a day out in the city. She was taking a day off work and going to meet her mother for a morning tea in the city.

While she was there, I’d asked her to pick up a book for me at the gaming shop in town: Dungeons & Dragons: Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos.

And speaking of gaming, tonight we’re playing Tapestry in our weekly online board game night. We’d decided we wanted to play a longer game and settled on this in advance, so we could all learn the rules before we start playing.

But an interesting thing I did today was collect some bunya nuts! Bunya pines are large native Australian trees that produce large seed cones every 3-4 years or so. There’s one not far from my place, which has been dropping cones for a couple of weeks. It’s the tall dark green tree in the centre of this photo:

Here’s a piece of one of the cones. The cones are about the size of a soccer ball, but they slowly break open after falling, and all the ones I could find had broken up into segments.

I spent time opening the segments and extracting the nuts, which are about the size of brazil nuts.

I collected 3.2 kilograms of nuts!

Banana for scale:

To eat them, I’ll have to boil them for about 20 minutes and then peel off the shells, a bit like chestnuts. The flesh inside is also rather like chestnuts – at least that’s what the web says. I haven’t actually tried eating these before. I’ll try to report here when I try them.

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Friday/Saturday double post

Friday I was very busy, doing the last part of the paper editing, so I could get it sent back to the author by the end of the working week. Then when I’d completed it and sent if off, the author wrote back to remind me that I also had their response letter to the journal to go through! So I had to do that as well, and cross-reference all of the comments regarding changes they’d made to address concerns raised by the referees, to make sure they were consistent between the edited paper and the letter. I had to change a couple of the edits I’d made. Finally I got it all done and sent off. Then the author wrote back to remind me that I had to draw up an invoice for the labour!

I had a couple of ethics classes before dinner, and then my wife and I went out to a Turkish restaurant near us to unwind and enjoy a nice meal. We tried a new dish, red lentil koftas, which I liked, but my wife thought they were very spicy.

After dinner it was virtual games night with my friends. I was joining late because of the dinner, but got in games of 7 Wonders, Kingdomino, Coloretto, Azul, and Wavelength. I neglected to post a blog entry because I was playing games.

Today my wife was doing a few things, and I took Scully out for a walk a couple of times in the morning so she wouldn’t get upset at my wife leaving. Then in the afternoon we all went for a walk together and to give Scully some ball-chasing exercise. The weather was unsettled, with intermittent sun, showers, and some heavy rain. We got caught in the rain when out with Scully, but it stopped and we’d dried out by the time we got home.

New neighbours moved in downstairs today. They have a cavoodle, and unfortunately Scully was barking and growling for much of the afternoon, hearing it running around in the yard down there. I posted a note under their door to introduce ourselves and suggest that we let the dogs meet each other some time soon, so they can get to know each other to eliminate the territorial behaviour. They messaged back and sounded nice, saying some time tomorrow would be good.

Late this afternoon I took some time to do a taste test on four bottles of gin. I’ve almost finished one bottle, and had been waiting for a chance to do this comparison test before emptying it. I was comparing Bombay Sapphire Sunset, Buffalo Vale Clair de Lune, Backwoods High Country, and Backwoods Muscat Gin (a special limited edition, no longer available). I find the differences between gins to be fairly subtle, and can only really pick it with side-by-side tasting, which is why I do this occasionally with as many bottles as I have, comparing the old ones just about to run out with the new bottles that I’ve recently acquired. The muscat one is unusual because of the sweet muscat grape infusion, but the other three are all conventional gins with subtle differences that I took notes on: Sunset was warm and spicy, with citrus peel notes; Clair de Lune is earthy and woody with lemon/lime hints; High Country was orangey, floral, and a bit grassy.

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Golf aftermath

My forearms are sore, and also my glutes. They were a bit sore yesterday, following from golf on Tuesday, and have become a bit worse today. I expect they’ll start feeling better tomorrow – I hope so! It wouldn’t have been the round I played, which involved fairly gentle swings. It would have been the driving range afterwards, where I was smacking balls as hard as I could, and using muscles I don’t strain so often.

Today I have four ethics classes. Three down and one to go later this evening as I type. It’s interesting, in the six classes on this topic of “wealth” so far, almost all of the kids think it’s fine (both legally, and ethically) for wealthy people to keep all of their money to themselves – “because they earned it, because they had to work hard for it”. They all reiterate the story that anyone can become wealthy if they just work hard. It seems they don’t know that most wealthy people inherit their wealth, and don’t actually build it up from scratch with hard work. I guess their parents want to encourage them to work hard so they succeed, so they tell them that hard work and diligence lead to wealth.

Today I received the scientific paper from the university that I’m being asked to proofread and edit. It’s very technical, about image processing for text recognition, and it’s going to take some serious concentration to read understand, and then edit. My plan is to tackle it on the weekend when I have some time.

Doing a bit of tidying up, I ran across some old boxes of Wizards of the Coast Netrunner, vintage 1996. I have a bunch of sealed English starter decks, French starter decks, English v1.0 booster packs, French v2.0 booster packs, and English v2.1 Proteus booster packs.

I’m thinking I’ll sell these on eBay… unless I find a buyer sooner. Let me know if that’s you.

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The Wordle variant bandwagon

Like nearly everyone else, my friends and I have been playing Wordle and comparing notes each day. We were discussing the various variants that have popped up across the net, and someone suggested we should try to make a quantum version of it.

Lo and behold, a few hours later one of my friends had implemented Schrödle. It’s not available on a website – he implemented it as a game on our Discord bot. But here’s a (edited) screencap:

Schrödle game 1

The green/yellow/white marks describe a superposition of two different words. It’s possible for each letter to be white/white (present in neither word), white/yellow (present in one word, but in a different position), white/green (present in one word, in the correct position), yellow/yellow (present in both words, but in a different position for each), yellow/green (present in both words, in the correct position for one but not the other), or green/green (present in both words, in the correct position for both).

Eventually you guess one word correctly, at which point the wavefunction collapses, and the second word vanishes into the ether. And the cool thing is he implemented it with arbitrary word lengths:

Schrödle game 2

So after that quick implementation, we’ve been playing it all afternoon. Before you ask, I don’t think my friend has any plans to make a web implementation.

In other news, I set a new best time for my 2.5k run today: 12:03! I’ve set myself the goal of breaking 12 minutes. I thought it might take most of the year, but who knows… maybe I can get there by the end of January.

I spent some time today putting together the last in my series of private science lessons for a student on Outschool. She’s been homeschooling, but is starting up regular school this week, so her mother said they’d need to concentrate on that for a bit until they figure out if their schedule allows continuing with Outschool. It’s a bit sad because she’s been a great student, but hopefully school will give her more socialising and learning opportunities.

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Virtual board games night again

Today was another warm and very humid day, with intermittent rain. It seems we’re stuck in this weather pattern, and it’s not particularly pleasant.

I had to make a quick Irregular Webcomic! today, because my buffer had run out and I hadn’t had time this week to make a full new batch. So this is a temporary fix until next week when hopefully i can get a new batch underway on Monday.

Tonight is virtual board games night with my friends, after we skipped last week due to it being New Year’s Eve. One of my friends has implemented a new Discord bot game, based on a game he plays with his family, in which you have to make words based on letters spotted on car number plates. We played it a few times and I actually managed to win a game, which I was pleased with.

We’re continuing now, as I type… It’s been fun and promises to be moreso as we continue into the evening.

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