Games night roundup

I’m posting late again due to the fortnightly board games night happening last night. Yesterday was very busy.

I started with the weekly grocery shop, then launched straight into taking photos for a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. I finished that just before lunch, had lunch, and then went on to writing my lesson plan for the afternoon’s online ethics class. In between I had to pick up Scully from my wife’s work, and then after I’d finished writing the lesson I took Scully out for a bit of exercise to get her tired so she’d rest through the lesson and I wouldn’t need to interrupt it to take her out again.

After last week’s class had 5 students in it, this time there were only two, and one had connection problems, so popped in and out a bit before giving up. So for most of the lesson I only had one kid. We discusses natural resources, and the questions of whether it’s okay or not for people to use resources that are just lying around in nature – such as forests, water, minerals, etc. I raised many questions over whether various resources were needed by people, or whether using them deprived other people, or caused harm in various ways. With just the one student it was interesting to explore exactly what she thought on these issues and dig deeply into her reasoning. Several times when I asked her to explain why she thought a certain way, it took a lot of thinking for her to articulate her reasons. She said she really enjoyed the lesson, when it was done.

When that was done it was time to head off for games night! Usually we order pizza, but tonight we decided to get Thai food from the place near where we all used to work. They make excellent dishes there, and we used to be spoiled having them for lunch, but we’ve all missed out since losing our jobs there and going our separate ways. One guy picked up a bunch of dishes on the way and we all shared them – it was great.

For games, we started off with A Fake Artist Goes to New York. This is a party-style game where everyone has to collaboratively draw a picture. The catch is that all the drawers except one know what they’re drawing. At the start of each round, one person (who will not be drawing) selects a thing to draw and writes it on slips of paper, and gives those to the artists – except that one of the artists just gets an X and has no idea what the other artists will be drawing. The artists then take it in turns to draw a piece of the artwork, by placing their pen, drawing a contiguous line, and lifting just once. Each artist who knows what they’re drawing tries to draw something so that others will know that they know; while the artists who doesn’t know just has to bluff as best they can. But the catch is that the artists can’t make it too obvious, because then the artist who doesn’t know will figure it out. Once everyone has drawn twice, the artists all simultaneously vote/accuse someone of being the imposter. If a majority get it right, the real artists get a point – unless the imposter can successfully name what they were trying to draw, in which case the imposter gets a point. If the artists don’t identify the imposter, the imposter gets a point. And you play several rounds.

A Fake Artist Goes to New York

Here’s what we came up with (with the correct word added after the round so you can see). Because the artists are trying to reveal they know the word but without giving it away to the imposter, the drawing become rather abstracted. Of course this runs the risk of other artists not being able to successfully infer that you know what you’re doing. For example, for the “Church” drawing, two real artists drew two parts of a cross, separately, and they knew what each other was doing, but the other true artists had no idea what they were drawing and thought maybe one of them was the imposter.

Next we played Fantasy Realms. This is a card game where you have to collect a hand of seven cards, drawing and discarding rummy style, except the discard pile is laid out in full and you can draw any discard you want.

Fantasy Realms

Once the draw pile is exhausted, each player totals up the points in their hand. Simple! Except each card is worth a certain number of points, which usually varies depending on other cards in their hand. So the goal is to collect the various combos that enhance one another and minimise the combos that subtract points. I won this game with a combo hand of wizards and beasts! I actually grabbed the Warlock Lord (shown in the discard pile in the photo) despite having 5 wizards and thus it having a -40 point penalty, because another card gave me +100 points for having five cards of the same suit (wizards in this case).

After this we moved on to King of Tokyo.

King of Tokyo

A simple dice rolling, beat-em-up game where each player is a giant monster attempting to rampage through Tokyo and defeat all the other monsters. I didn’t do so well in this one!

After that we split into two groups and I tried a new game for me: Nova Luna.

Nova Luna

This is an abstract game in which you need to collect tiles and lay them out in front of you, forming various combinations that allow you to place discs on some of the tiles. The goal is simply to be first to have used up all your discs. The intricacy comes about from the method of claiming tiles using a “moon phase” board – if you select low numbered tiles they are less useful, but you get to move again before other players, whereas if you select high numbered tiles they are often more useful, but you will need to wait longer before you get another turn. So there’s an interesting mix of strategies to consider. It was a very close game. I thought I was going strong and set myself up to win on my next turn with a high numbered tile, but the other players then each got multiple turns before I could go again, and two of them managed to finish before me!

To finish, we played Tussie Mussie. This is a very innocent looking card game in which you have to collect a set of four flowers, and then everyone scores points for their set. Each flower is worth 0, 1, or 2 points, but many also have abilities that give them bonus points when combined with other flowers, or restrictions that attract penalties if certain conditions are met.

The evil comes in the way the you collect flowers. Each person in turn draws two flowers, looks at them, then places one face up and one face down, and offers them to the player on the left. That player must choose one – either the one they can see, or the face down one. So the idea is to make the one you want to keep for yourself seem less tempting, without giving away that you want it for yourself. There’s a lot of psychological warfare and guessing going on, and it becomes very difficult to figure out the best move.

Another fine entry in the category of games that look sweet and innocent but are evil psychological minefields. We love them!

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Variant cauliflower bomb

This morning was another online ethics class, doing the “getting even” topic I mentioned on Friday. A new student signed up for the class about 15 minutes before it started, and was my first student from the USA. I’ve got students from at least 6 different countries now.

I had some things to do in the city today, so caught a train in. We no longer need to wear masks on public transport here, since there’s no COVID circulating, but it still feels a bit weird being in close quarters with so many people.

I spent a couple of hours in the city, and before coming home I visited one of my favourite bookshops. Browsing the gaming section, I found and decided to buy The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book, which looks like some good fun.

For dinner tonight I tried a variant on the cauliflower bomb which I’ve made a few times. I had half a tin of chick peas leftover from Sunday’s dinner, and decided to make hummus with them, and then realised baked cauliflower would go well with that. So I basically did the recipe replacing the honey cashew cream sauce with hummus, and it worked beautifully. Really delicious. I neglected to take any photos though, so I can’t share with you, alas.

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Tech panic!

I woke up this morning, got out of bed, grabbed my bowl of muesli and yoghurt, and sat down to check my emails and stuff from overnight.

When the computer screen came on, there was a system dialogue. It said the most recent backup attempt had failed. And…

… that the most recent available backup was from some date in 2018.

Now, I’m no expert in how Apple’s Time Machine backups work, but that seemed somewhat sub-optimal. I didn’t have time to do much about it, as I had to get ready and head to school to teach my weekly Ethics class. So I set it to try and do another backup while I was out, and headed off.

I taught my class, and popped into the supermarket to buy a few things we’d run out of, and came home, to find the new backup had also failed. A quick discussion with some of my more tech-savvy friends confirmed what I suspected – it was time to get a new backup drive. I ordered one online, for pickup, not delivery, so I could get it today. It was ready to pick up pretty quickly, and I caught a train a few suburbs over to get it.

While I was out, I decided to grab some lunch, and had some tonkotsu ramen at a place in the shopping centre. It was okay, but I’ve had better. I picked up my new hard drive, and then since there’s a game shop there I popped into have a quick look at the games. They had copies of the new D&D book: Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. I had a quick flip through and it looked like the sort of thing I’d like to read through fully and mine for ideas, so I bought a copy, with the limited edition alternative art cover. When 5th Edition first came out, I bought every book as it was released, but now I’m being more selective, as I don’t really have much use for some of the books they’ve been releasing lately (e.g. Candlekeep Mysteries, Eberron).

When I got home I plugged in the new drive, formatted it, set it as the new Time Machine backup drive, and started a full backup. Now, seven hours later, it’s still going, although it should finish in less than another hour. And then I can breathe easy again…

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The day passed too quickly…

Somehow today just got away from me. I woke up early, before my wife had to get up to get ready for work, and was up earlier than usual. But I think I didn’t sleep well because I felt a bit lethargic. I did the grocery shopping a bit later than usual, after realising I was wasting time doing nothing.

And then I’m not really sure what happened. The day just went and next thing I knew I was picking up Scully from my wife’s work. When I got home, I had my online ethics class.

As mentioned yesterday it was about “Trusting experts”. I started with a story about three kids discussing a movie with aliens in it. One wondered if aliens had actually visited Earth, one was sure they had because thousands of people say they’ve seen them, while the third said that scientists say there’s no evidence of aliens visiting Earth. Then we had a discussion over who people should believe – and why. We had a few other stories of people having to decide whether to trust experts or not, and raised more questions about the topic. It was a good discussion with the students, and they both said they enjoyed it at the end of the lesson.

This evening I went out for Thai food with my wife and Scully. I had some chilli basil crispy fried barramundi, which was very nice.

And tonight is virtual board games night. We’re playing online right now as I type. We just finished a couple of games of 7 Wonders, and are now starting Welcome To….

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Hosting board games night

Late update for Friday, as I was hosting our fortnightly board games night last night, and didn’t have time to write up this entry.

I spent most of the day running chores. I did the weekly grocery shop, and then I had to go out again twice more, once to get some yummy Italian baked goods for dessert, and once to pick up Scully from doggie day care and also buy some beers to share with the guys. In between I did a thorough vacuum cleaning and dusting of the house and then tidying up various clutter to make space for us to sit around and play games. And then just before everyone arrived I had a shower and cleaned the bathroom.

There were seven of us for games. Four of us started a game of Azul before the others arrived, and once they had arrived they played Abandon All Artichokes until we’d finished. After those, we all played another section of our ongoing game of Legacy of Dragonholt. And finally, we resplit into two groups, three people playing Lost Ruins of Arnak, and the other four playing Parks.

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Quick Friday fill-in

I didn’t have time to post on Friday evening as I went through a string of other stuff to do. I had my online ethics class at 4pm, after which I made sourdough and spent time kneading and getting it ready for baking (which I’ll be doing in the morning after letting it rise overnight). Straight after that I went out with my wife and Scully to our favourite local pizza place for dinner.

When we got home, virtual games night was well underway, and the guys had just finished playing a game, so I leapt straight in to a new game of Nidavellir. It’s an interesting bidding game with some cool mechanics – you’re bidding coins to recruit dwarves to your army, and score points for various combinations of dwarves. You can also increase the values of your coins through various means to improve your bidding in later rounds.

After that we played Gartic Phone, which is a web implementation of Telestrations, essentially a cross between Telephone and Pictionary.

Then we played a couple of games of good old 7 Wonders. And ended with a couple of rounds of a Discord implementation of Scattergories.

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Late Friday games night update

On Friday I was very busy! I did the grocery shopping first thing, then I had a doctor’s appointment to get a flu shot before winter sets in. This was slightly complicated by the fact that my doctor is a couple of train stations away, and they’re doing some major construction work at my nearest station, necessitating a long pedestrian detour to reach the station from my place. On the way back I considered just walking all the way home, which takes about half an hour. But I decided it’d be quicker to get the train again—forgetting about the detour—and then I just missed a train and had a ten minute wait for the next one… basically it ended up taking just as long overall.

I had to work on my lesson plan for the second Outschool ethics class, which I had at 4pm. And in the middle of it I had to go pick up Scully from my wife’s work and bring her home. Then to ensure that Scully didn’t want to go out for a toilet or a walk during the ethics class Zoom meeting, I took her out to the park at 3pm and gave her a run around to tire her out. This was tiring work for me, because she’s a fairly reluctant ball chaser, and does it in a leisurely fashion. The best way to get her to run is to play chase with her, and run around after her myself. So I did a bunch of short sprints, wearing myself out in the process.

But it worked – I got her to do a toilet after the running and then we came back inside and Scully flopped into her dog bed and stayed there throughout the entire ethics class. The topic for the day was “generalisation”, including jumping to conclusions, and touching a little on prejudice. The main questions raised were when is generalising valid or invalid, and what caveats do we need to take when generalising from our own experiences? It was a really good discussion, and at the end the two students both said that they’d “loved” the class. So think both of them will continue with weekly lessons for a while, which is good.

In the evening it was games night. We had an attendance of only four due to people having various other engagements. We played Extraordinary Adventures: Pirates!, then Istanbul, and then had a big game of Apples to Apples, which caused several hilarious moments.

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Wingspan night

Late Friday update, because last night was fortnightly board games night!

To warm up while waiting for latecomers to arrive, we played a new game: Abandon All Artichokes. It’s a quick and light deck-building game, like Dominion on whatever the opposite of steroids is. You start with a deck of 10 artichoke cards, and you draw from a choice of other vegetables which have various ways to modify your deck, either by adding more vegetables or composting artichokes (removing them from your deck). At the end of every turn you discard your hand and draw 5 new cards from your deck (shuffling your discard pile if you need more cards to draw). As soon as you draw 5 non-artichokes, you win! I was primed to win on my next turn, but the guy ahead of me in the turn order got there first, alas. So I wuz robbed!

After this, we launched into our ongoing game of Legacy of Dragonholt (described earlier here and a little bit here and here). Here’s a shot of the game in action:

Legacy of Dragonholt

There’s not actually a lot to show. The map of the village of Dragonholt is at the top. My character sheet is at the bottom. The only mechanically relevant things are the list of Skills, the Stamina score, and the Items. All of the character personality and background stuff I made up to give me some idea how to roleplay my character.

In this episode we explored the village a bit more, reconnected two old lovers, and explored a creepy crypt just outside the edge of town, where we encountered some scary monsters and prevailed by the skin of our teeth to retrieve what we hope is a significant item. We’re now back at the village and taking a break until next time we play.

Following this we broke into two groups and I joined the group playing Wingspan. This is early in the game, with my board on the bottom right:

Wingspan board game

Later on I’d assembled a good collection of birds (and we’d eaten more of the chocolate):

Wingspan board game

At the end of the game, I managed to win with a score of 93 points, over the second place of 87 points. So I was pretty happy with that!

Earlier in the day… I mostly spent it running errands and doing housework. I had a morning tea at a cafe near the school where I teach Ethics, to meet our new Ethics Coordinator who will be taking over from the outgoing one. After that I did the weekly grocery shop, and then when I got home I did a round of vacuum cleaning, folding laundry, cleaning the shower and bathroom, and then a long overdue washing of the car. There was pretty much no time for anything else.

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Games Night: Istanbul and Mysterium

Late Friday post because last night was Games Night. I arrived last this time, and everyone else was in the middle of a game of Starbase Jeff. I played this game a lot back when it was newer and really like it – it’s very strategic. But while the others finished their game, I did some Italian lessons on my iPad.

Then we got stuck into a new game (for us, but released in 2015), Istanbul.

Istanbul

In this game you lay out a randomised board made of 16 large tiles, representing the bazaar district of old Istanbul. Your goal is to be the first to purchase 5 gemstones. To do this, you need to move around the market, visiting various tiles. Each tile allows you to do a specific action, ranging from collecting goods (jewellery, fabric, spices, and fruit), collecting small amounts of money, selling goods to get larger amounts of money, using money to buy gemstones. Some tiles do other things to make all of this easier: the Wainwright allows you to buy larger wheelbarrows to carry your goods around in, the two mosques let you pick up small tiles that give you bonus actions to do more things, the Caravansery lets you draw special action cards which give you a one-off bonus action.

Istanbul

The thing that ties it all together and makes it tricky is how you move around the board. You have a large counter representing your agent, and a stack of four smaller counters as your assistants. You start in a stacked group at the Fountain. You can move up to 2 tiles, and the whole stack moves as one. To perform the action on the tile you land one, you have to remove one assistant from the stack and leave them there. So as you travel around the board on your turns, you leave a trail of assistants behind. If you land on a tile that already has one of your assistants on it, you pick them back up into your stack to perform the tile’s action. And you need to do this, because if you run out of assistants, then you don’t get to perform the action on a tile you land on, which is a wasted turn. So you’re constantly having to plan ahead, then backtrack or do little loops around the board to pick up your assistants again.

There are a few other details that add strategy and some more things you can do, but that’s the gist of the game. It was a lot of fun, and ended fairly tightly, with two people achieving the five gems and the game being decided on a tie-breaker.

After that we played Mysterium. We’ve played this several times. One player is a ghost and trying to give the other payers clues about who murdered them, so they can solve the mystery. But the ghost is very restricted, and can only give clues by handing the players cards which contain cryptic images of dream-like scenes. The players have to interpret what the ghost meant by them – and it’s very easy to go astray because each card contains many items on it.

I’ve never played this game as the ghost before, so I was keen to give it a try. It’s very challenging, but in the end I managed to clue the others to the correct conclusion, so we shared a victory.

Mysterium

In this photo, for example, I used the card with deep sea diver and Anubis statues to clue the racing car driver (top left on the screen) – because the wheel with spokes evoked the image of the spoked wheels on the driver’s car.

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Writer’s block

This morning I did the weekly grocery shop. Normally it’s on Friday, but I moved it up a day because we were out of milk, and decided I may as well buy everything rather than just go to the supermarket for a carton of milk.

Much of the rest of the day I worked on Darths & Droids writing, but it wasn’t as productive as I hoped. I got completely stuck on coming up with a joke for one strip, and stared at it for a couple of hours without any progress. That’s just how it goes sometimes.

My wife is back to working in the office full time, which meant today I had to go in and pick up Scully at lunch time and bring her home for the afternoon. I took her out to the dog park later in the afternoon for a bit of a run around. It’s getting very pleasant in the late afternoon down by the waterside now, as the sun is going down earlier due to the end of daylight saving, and the progression of autumn. The “Gobi Desert” part of the regular walk we do with our dogs isn’t nearly as bad as in the middle of summer.

One productive thing I did was actually while reading reddit, I stumbled across this post about how to reward player creativity in a roleplaying game. The response mentioning Old School Hack (a free RPG game system) struck me as brilliant. Putting it into my own words:

Establish a pool of “Awesome points” (or some other cool name), initially with some number (1.5× the number of players if following Old School Hack’s suggestion). Allow the players to award points to other players for good/creative character roleplaying. Players who have been awarded points may spend them for some game benefit (a reroll or dice bonus, or whatever works in your game system). The GM should add an extra point to the pool whenever they (a) introduce a plot complication, (b) acknowledge that a character has done something disadvantageous due to a character flaw.

This encourages players to roleplay creatively and cleverly, and also to bring their character flaws into play. I’ve made a note of it in my general notes file for RPG game mechanic ideas.

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