gaming – Page 4 – dangermouse.net

Packing eBay sales

All of the Magic: the Gathering and Netrunner sealed packs I listed on eBay last week sold today. So I spent a fair bit of time dealing with buyer queries, sending invoices, recalculating combined postage costs for multiple lots that single buyers won, and then after a few of them paid for their purchases I had to package them up and take them to the post office for mailing. I sent off three packages today, and I have five more to go either tomorrow or whenever the buyer pays for them. Three have already paid, but after my last trip to the post office (I went twice), so they’ll have to be mailed tomorrow. Hopefully the other two buyers will pay overnight too.

On my lunchtime trip I stopped off at Moon Phase to try another one of their baked treats. It was after lunchtime by the time I got there, and they’d sold out of a lot of their selection. I chose a coconut brioche, which was very nice.

In between all the packing and posting, I worked on my new critical thinking/ethics class for tomorrow. The topic is “The Countryside”, as in rural areas. With questions for the kids to think about on topics such as: What different opportunities are there for people in cities versus rural areas? What are the benefits and difficulties of living in rural areas, compared to cities? Why do young rural people tend to move to cities, is this a problem, and can anything be done about it?

Tomorrow morning I also have my next visit to Loreto school for mentoring with my students. Last week’s session was cancelled because of a school event, and this was the earliest we could reschedule it.

Another photo, taken yesterday. There’s a lot of roadworks and construction in the neighbourhood at the moment, and I saw this wonderfully helpful sign for pedestrians to avoid the work in progress.

I can only guess that you’re meant to walk under the sign.

New content today:

Moving cards on eBay

I have a week with no ethics classes, but only because I have the ISO Photography Standards meeting beginning tonight… at 3am.

Without needing to prepare for a new class this week, I spent the morning doing photos and creating listings on eBay to sell lots of Magic: the Gathering and Netrunner cards, all in sealed packs. I bought a bunch of Magic booster boxes some years ago, at the tail end of our regular draft tournaments with my friends, thinking we’d use them to play tournaments. But we haven’t played Magic for ages and I don’t think we’ll ever get to use all these booster packs. So I’ve decided to sell them off. There are sealed boxes from Dominaria through Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance to War of the Spark. Plus boxes of Unstable and Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. And also some loose boosters, dating back to original Ravnica: City of Guilds, and Dissension. I also created listings for sealed starter and booster packs for Wizards of the Coast’s 1996 Netrunner, the original game that later evolved into Android: Netrunner.

If you’re interested at all in any of these, you can see my eBay listings here.

I took Scully for a couple of walks during the day, which was cold and wintery, but dry, thankfully. And did a few comics things to keep up. And then did a little prep work before the ISO meeting tonight. I’m going to try to go to sleep a bit early, although that may be difficult because I’m not tired at all. I have an alarm set for just before 3am so I can get up in time to join the meeting online.

New content today:

A missed classic

I discovered yesterday the greatest missed cover song opportunity ever. In 2003 No Doubt released a greatest hits compilation and wanted a new song to feature on it, and decided to record a cover. They considered hundreds of songs and narrowed it down to “It’s My Life” by Talk Talk and “Don’t Change” by INXS.

They chose “It’s My Life”.

I really like No Doubt’s “It’s My Life”, but hot damn…. I want to hear them do “Don’t Change”.

Friday was games night with my friends. It should have been in-person at someone’s place, but there were a couple of illnesses and we decided to convert it to online so more of us could participate. We played a new game for me, Cat in the Box, which is a quantum trick-taking game. The deck is simply 5 copies of each card, numbered 1 through to 9. Each copy is identical and has no suit.

You play tricks as normal, except that when you play a card, you declare its suit: red, blue, yellow, or green. There’s a board where you mark when you play each card. So if you lead with a 9 and say it’s blue, you put one of your pawns on the blue 9 on the board, to show that that card has been played. Other people have to either (a) follow suit by playing a card and declaring it to be blue—making sure it’s a card that hasn’t already been played by marking an empty space on the board with their pawns—or (b) play a card and declare it to be another suit. If you don’t follow the led suit then you have to mark on your personal player card (for everyone to see) that you have no more cards of the led suit (blue in this case); then in future tricks of the current hand you are not allowed to declare any card to be blue. Red is always trumps, so you can trump another led colour by declaring you have no more of that colour and playing a card and declaring it to be red (if you legally can do so).

Note that there are 5 cards of each number, but only 4 of them can ever be played, because there are only 4 suits. Also, it’s possible for you to get into a situation where you have several cards in your hand, but are unable to play any of them. For example, you have a 3, a 5, and a 6. But you’ve declared yourself out of blue cards, and the only available 3, 5, and 6 on the board are all blue. If this happens, you can’t play a card without causing a quantum paradox, and the round ends, with you scoring zero.

On top of this, after the cards are dealt you can discard any one card (to help avoid having unplayable cards), and then you have to bid a number of tricks that you expect win before the hand begins. You get one point per trick won. If you make your bid exactly, you get bonus points equal to the size of the largest cluster of your pawns on the board, connected vertically or horizontally (not diagonally). So there’s incentive to play cards of adjacent values or suits rather than more freely.

It’s a very different trick-taking game, and requires some very different strategies. I throughly enjoyed it.

Today, Saturday, I went for a 5k run in the morning and then spent the rest of the morning doing some overdue housecleaning – a thorough vacuum cleaning and cleaning the bathroom. And then the rain came in. It’s been raining heavily all afternoon and into the evening, sometimes very heavily. There’s also some heavy thunder and lightning this evening too. We’re just a tick shy of 100 mm of rain in the past 12 hours, and will likely reach that value before the 12 hours are up, with more heavy rain throughout the night and into tomorrow.

This evening our new neighbours across the hall invited us over for pre-dinner drinks and appetisers. We made some small pizza bites to take over – bite sized blobs of pizza dough topped with either tomato paste or pesto, and then a little bit of cheese, either mozzarella or feta. We sat and shared some wine and they also provided cheese, crackers, chips, nuts, dips, carrot sticks, and some dried fruit. We had a nice discussion of various things, getting to know each other better. They’re South African, having moved here from Johannesburg (which we knew), so they had some interesting stories to tell about that and various travels they’ve done. Scully got to play with their dog Sophie.

We came home after a couple of hours, and have eaten so much that just a bit of extra snacking will do us for dinner!

New content today:

Games and art

Friday was online games night with my friends. I had a pretty standard day except for trying to troubleshoot my web sites. I still couldn’t log in to the server via SSH. Support from my webhost was not very helpful and I sent several messages back describing the problem and what I’d tried. A friend helped me and said it sounded like the machine was out of processes, so couldn’t launch a shell process when I tried to log in, nor processes to do various tasks.

Besides that I had my usual ethics classes. After the last one, I went out for dinner with my wife to a local Indian place. The samosas there are always good, and this time I tried a pepper chicken dish which I thought I must have had before, but it was different to what I expected, with a creamier sauce, and very nice.

At games night we played Space Base, then Wavelength, and Just One. I think that’s kind of all we got through – everyone seemed to be tired and wanted to end early.

Today I went for a 5k run. it was only 13°C when I went, which is too cold for me! But I managed a good time, just over 27 minutes. After that I cleaned the bathroom and shower cubicle, then worked on some comics for a bit.

After lunch my wife and I took Scully on a long walk over to the Coal Loader, where the local council was holding a local art exhibition and competition. There were mostly sculptures, with a few paintings and audiovisual installations. Some really interesting ones, and some a bit strange – a good mix for art, really.

In good news, it looks like my web server issues have resolved today!

New content today:

Games and next Lego construction

Friday was face-to-face board games night at a friend’s place. I took Scully with me and there were six of us altogether for games. We played No Thanks, then Heat: Pedal to the Metal, and then a new game for me, Dungeon Academy.

In this game there is a dungeon map made of sixteen dice which are dumped at random into a 4×4 square tray, like in Boggle. Each player has a character card with different amounts of health (red) and mana (blue). Each player needs to plot a path through the dungeon grid on their own sheet of paper, at the same time, entering from any side, traversing adjoining squares (maximum once each), and then exiting from any side. Each die in the grid shows either a monster (red or blue, small or large) or a potion (red or blue). A small monster drain one health/mana (matching the colour), large ones drain two. As long as your health/mana don’t go negative you kill the monster and gain 1 gold. Potions add to the corresponding health/mana. Your character also has a special ability (mine was gain 1 extra gold per large blue monster slain).

It’s a race to see who can plot their course fastest, without messing up. If you mess up and drop below 0 health or mana you score zero gold for that round, but heal back to full in both for the next round. When finished, you grab a numbered card from a pile in the middle, first player finished gets 1, last gets the largest number (6 for our six-player game). Then you draw a treasure card for each player and choose in order, from 1 to the last player, excluding anyone who died in that round. So being faster gets you a better choice of treasure. Treasures can do things like give you extra gold, or give you abilities such as a helmet which can be discarded to avoid a monster hitting you, or invisibility cloak which means you can ignore a monster. Some are curses, which are negative, so you don’t want to be picking last!

You play over 4 rounds. In round 2 and 4 one of the regular dice is swapped out for a special die that has different faces that do other things. The last die is the “boss die” which has, for example, a dragon that drains 3 health and 3 mana, but is worth 3 gold.

I scored a final total of 30 gold, which was equalled by one other player, but we lost to someone who managed 31.

During the day I had 4 ethics classes. One of the parents contacted me early on and said that her daughter had been sent home from school with a fever, and might not join the class. But she really liked it and might want to join anyway even though she was feeling sick. It turned out she did indeed show up. Such dedication!

Friday was also warmish, reaching 23.7°C, in fact the warmest day of May so far. But Saturday dawned cold and didn’t heat up much at all. We only reached a maximum of 14.6°C at 10am, and then it just got colder again. A strong cold southerly wind has been blowing drifting showers across the city and it really feels like winter now. But I dragged myself out for a 5k run, and actually did a decent time. Probably because I was cold and wanting to get back inside as quickly as possible!

Today I finally got back into the construction of the Lego Dungeons & Dragons set. Stage 11 adds details to the exterior part of the castle/dungeon. There are spiders and plants and trees. If you look closely you can see a third spider lurking in the shadows behind the top of the left tree:

The door has also been covered with a removable rock face, making it a secret door!

And there’s a secret cache of gold and a key:

And part of the dungeon wall is removable too!

Inside this part, seen from the other side, has been added a skeletal torso guardian and a spellbook (behind the shield):

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Friday D&D night, Saturday Star Wars night, Sunday… work

I missed updates on Friday and Saturday due to running games both night. Friday was Dungeons & Dragons at my place, the finishing up the adventure of Titardinal’s Tower. I spent much of the day in between ethics classes preparing the adventure for the evening.

I kid of repeated the dose on Saturday, spending all day preparing an adventure for a Star Wars adventure using Scum & Villainy rules, which I ran at Professor Plums, the local geek shop, for a special May the 4th Star Wars night. The adventure outline was:

Greedo gives the PCs a job to retrieve a Kyber crystal from a Jawa sandcrawler. They get the crystal, but as they leave the sandcrawler, Imperial troopers attack the crawler for some reason. They get back to the cantina to meet their onward contacts, only to discover the alien has had his arm sliced off, and Greedo is lying slumped dead in a booth with a blaster wound to the chest… And then things get complicated.

Ponda Baba was their pilot, but now he can’t fly because of the missing arm. He and Dr Evazan were supposed to escort them to Dantooine to sell the crystal to Rebel agents. So they have to find a new pilot. But then Mos Eisley spaceport is locked down because apparently someone blasted their way out of there, so they have to get through that somehow. When they finally get to Dantooine, the place is crawling with Imperials apparently looking for a Rebellion headquarters.

I had six players, mostly around 12-15 years old, plus one 40-ish woman who was the mother of one of the girls. She was clearly into Star Wars and seemed to have the most fun recognising the plot as the adventure unfolded, whereas a couple of the kids didn’t know the original movie, so it was a bit lost on them, But I think everyone had fun playing. Here’s the flyer the shop used to promote the event:

Today I was also very busy, catching up on things that I couldn’t do the past two days because of prepping for the games. I made another week’s worth of Irregular Webcomic! strips, and wrote most of a Darths & Droids strip, but I’ll have to finish that tomorrow.

New content today (I’m not going to list Friday & Saturday’s strips, just click back if you need to):

Friday games and Saturday comics

No update yesterday because it was online board games night with my friends. My Friday began with getting up and heading to the supermarket for the week’s grocery shopping. Because Thursday was a public holiday and we went out, I forgot to make an online order for pickup, so I had to do it the old fashioned way and actually walk through the aisles and grab items off the shelves.

One weird thing I noticed, and this has sort of been a thing recently whenever I go into a grocery store, there was no skim milk whatsoever. There were hundreds of bottles and cartons of regular milk and some specialty varieties like lactose-free and stuff, but no skim milk at all. The past few times I’ve gone looking for milk there’s been hardly any – the previous time I tried to buy milk I got the very last 2-litre bottle of skim milk in the whole supermarket. I don’t normally buy 2-litre bottles, but there were no 1-litre cartons at all. I don’t know what’s going on, but it sure feels like there’s a severe shortage of skim milk for the past couple of months for some reason.

After shopping I had 4 ethics classes during the day. In between I used the time to sell some more of my Magic cards. I walked Scully up to the post office to send off two more packages to new owners.

For dinner we drove over to Lane Cove and Four Frogs crêperie to have galettes. I tried one of the weekly specials, a galette with lamb sausage and Moroccan spices, which was pretty good. Normally for dessert I have a sweet crêpe, with chocolate or berries or ice cream of whatever, but I felt like more savoury instead, so had a second galette, with prosciutto and goat cheese, and a drizzle of honey so there was a touch of sweetness there.

After dinner was online games with my friends. We played a new game called Bang! I didn’t like it much – it seemed pretty random and lacking any way to make reasonable decisions about what to do. I don’t think the others liked it much either. We moved on to some of our regular games: Just One, 7 Wonders, 6 Nimmt, and Sketchful. The last one is always hilarious and a great way to finish the night when we’re all feeling a bit silly.

Today I went for my first 5k run in three weeks, since I hurt my back. The back is much better now, and I managed a reasonable time even though I didn’t push myself too hard The cooler weather definitely helps. It was only 16°C when I went out this morning.

My wife went out with Scully to visit her mother, and I used the time to make a new Darths & Droids comic, and write more Irregular Webcomic! strips, in preparation for hopefully photographing the remainder of this current batch tomorrow.

I also did stage 7 of the Lego D&D set. This adds part of the walls to the stage 6 base, which seem to be separating it into an outdoor area and a dungeon-like underground area.

And here’s the rear side, showing the dungeon area, with a bunch of abandoned weapons, coins, bones of adventurers who met their untimely ends here, and a gelatinous cube complete with a skull inside it!!

And finally, I disabled my Facebook account today. I’ve wanted to do this for years, but it was the only way I kept in contact with a lot of people. But I decided that it was getting annoying enough that I had to cut the link. It feels good never to have to look at Facebook again!

New content today:

Story of a Magic card

I’ve mentioned that I’m in the process of selling off some of my old Magic: the Gathering cards. I started playing the game in 1994, too late to buy any of the Arabian Nights expansion cards myself. But I traded for some of them early on, in a vain attempt to assemble a complete collection of that expansion set. I never managed this, because already by the time I started playing, some of those Arabian Nights cards were considered valuable (like $20 or so!) and it was difficult to find anyone willing to part with them.

I did manage to trade for a City in a Bottle. Here it is, a photo I took a few days ago of my personal copy of this card:

This was one of the difficult rare cards to get, but I was determined to get one because I admired the work of the artist, Drew Tucker. Unlike all the other card artists at the time, he worked in watercolour, and his images were always slightly impressionistic, different to the regular sort of fantasy art of the time. I eventually assembled a complete collection of all of the cards with Tucker’s artwork, as far as the Mirage expansion. But this City in a Bottle was the pride of my collection, as it was so rare.

The reason I took a photo of it the other day is because someone on the Discord where I am selling my cards was in search of a copy to buy. I figured I’m selling my collection, I should let this card go if someone wants it. The current value of this card in good condition, according to recent online sales, is about US$340, or AU$530. I offered a bit of a discount—because the listed selling price is never what you actually get after fees, or the middle-man taking a cut; if you sell direct to a buyer rather than through an online selling site then the accepted practice is to price the card around 15% lower.

The buyer PayPal-ed me some money, and I’ve now sent the card off. I messaged to say it was in the mail, and I hope he treated the card well, because it meant a lot to me because it was the pinnacle of my artist collection of Drew Tucker cards. I didn’t really expect too much of a response, because I know a lot of people don’t really appreciate Tucker’s artwork, preferring more traditional painting media for fantasy art. But the buyer said:

Will do. Drew Tucker is my favorite magic artist by far. I had him do a painting on the back of an artist proof when I was at eternal weekend and it’s one of my favorite cards. This is my first City – very excited to finally get one!

Wow! Now that’s cool. I’m sad to see one of my favourite cards in my collection go, but if it has to go to anyone, I’m glad it’s this guy.

In other news, I’ve scheduled an extra ethics class on Mondays, after requests from parents for more suitable timeslots for their kids. I’m now up to 6 classes on Mondays! I could probably schedule something close to a 40-hour week working on these and get plenty of enrolments, but I still need some time off in between to breathe and get other things done.

I used a bit of spare time today to do stage 4 of the Lego Dungeons & Dragons set. This adds the roof and exterior of the bedroom from stage 3. The roof bits are really nice, with clever angles and construction.

There’s also more details inside. And this new figure of an orcish fighter. Who appears to have bested the bed-mimic from stage 3, and is now interested in this treasure chest that might be full of loot.

But oh no! It’s another mimic!!

This set is so much fun to build.

I also made new IWC comics today, ready for a new update tonight to replace last week’s hiatus of reruns.

New content today:

Selling Blood Bowl miniatures

Besides selling some Magic: the Gathering cards, I’m working on selling a bunch of old Blood Bowl miniatures from Games Workshop. I have a few teams and star players that I bought back in 1994 when I was enthusiastic about the game (3rd edition), and had high hopes of painting and playing with several teams. But these were never taken out of the original packaging and have been sitting in my garage for years. So I thought I’d sell them. They’ve gone up a bit in value, going by eBay sales, but not nearly as much as some of the Magic cards.

I didn’t have any good venue to sell them other than eBay, until I remembered one of my friends is a keen online Blood Bowl player. So I asked him, and he pointed me at a Discord chat for Australian players. I joined up and posted my wares there, and have sold a few things already. So tomorrow I’ll be putting a box in the mail with some of those old gaming miniatures.

It feels good to get rid of old stuff and actually make a bit of cash doing so! My wife and I also cleaned up some of our bookshelves today, and I made space for some of the board games that have been piling up on side tables and things.

And I found time to write some more Irregular Webcomic! strips and take photos, which I’ll assemble for new strips this coming week.

New content today:

Wet Saturday, pizza, Root

It was a cold, wet day today. It’s astonishing how just a week or two ago it was still hot like the end of summer, and now the weather has turned downright chilly. I managed to find a window around 9am to go for a short run, 2.5k. I want to ease back into it a little since my back is still a tiny bit tender after pulling it a week ago. I might try for 5k tomorrow, but we’ll see.

My wife and I played a game of Root this afternoon, this time using all four factions for the first time, with robot versions of the Marquisate and the Eyrie, while she played the Alliance and I played the Vagabond. I’d been introducing new elements of the game to her slowly so she can get used to them, and this is the first time we included the Vagabond. The robot factions did pretty well and controlled a lot of the board until late in the game, but we both overtook them and my wife managed to race to victory.

I also spent some time building the next stage of the D&D Lego set. First, here’s a photo of the enormous box!

Inside are a couple of dozen numbered bags full of pieces, which are constructed in order. Here’s the first stage of construction, a tavern, showing the outside with a dwarven adventurer:

Stage 2 added more to the upper parts of the walls, the tavern sign, and a wizard character:

Today I completed stage 3, which is the upper floor of the tavern, where there’s a comfy looking bed:

But oh no! It’s a mimic!!!

I’ll try to do stage 4 tomorrow.

Tonight for dinner I made pizza – our usual with pumpkin and walnuts and chilli. We had some left over sour cream from Mexican meals in the past week, so I added some of that and a bit more chilli oil onto the cut slices after it was cooked. Very nice!

New content today: