Board Gaming

Feb 5: I played a solo game of Hadrian’s Wall and as usual, my scores for this game are good, bad, good, bad, repeat and this time it was on the down swing. I went for new strategy and I’m not sure it paid off as well as it should. I chose a few path cards that probably weren’t as useful as they could have been, but the choices felt right at the time. I overall like this game still. I’m not sure how much I enjoy the large heavy roll and write genre. I think I prefer most of those style of games to be pretty chill and low key, and so I might not hold this one forever.

Feb 6: Continuing the roll and write series we’ve been on, we got our Monday night group together to play The Isle of Cat’s Explore and Draw. They had played the original game before and this one would count for the I game in our alphabet challenge. I feel like I just excelled at this one and I won pretty easily. I kind of question if I prefer this game over the original. The original is good, but this is just easier to get to the table and a lot less hassle to play.

Feb 10: I’ve wanted to play Fjords one for a bit and we just never got it to the table. We played the epic two player variant where you use extra pieces and all of the tiles. We both got started and were playing pretty well having a few spots where we were really competitive over the map. As we went along and did the scoring I had used all 30 of my Vikings while my wife only used 29 of hers, giving me the win. That is until I realized I had one left in my bag meaning we tied and she won because she went second.

Feb 11: We then played a game of Project L with the Ghost piece expansion. This was pretty neat. I don’t think either of us used the Ghost action, but instead just kept the large tiles for placement. I liked this expansion. It adds a few interesting decisions without really complicating things too much. We read the rules for the Finesse expansion and I think we’ll try that again soon. We then moved onto Jubako as our J game and I just could not get anything I needed. I floundered the whole game just never quote finding the tiles that worked for me and I lost pretty well.

Cardboard Edison Update – I’ve continued with my judging for the Cardboard Edison award and I’ve done 8 out of 15 entries I’m assigned. 3 of them I’d like to see go onto round 2. None of them so far have been “not a game” which is nice. I usually have at least one entry a year between the two contests I judge that are just solidly not a game and are just kind of an activity or a barely held together set of concepts. I hope the games I want to move on do and I get to play them in round 2. Or potentially even at Unpub if they end up there.

Movies and TV

I watched a movie I didn’t know naything about . It’s called The Greatest Beer Run Ever Made and it’s on Apple TV+. Zac Efron plays Chickie Donahue, a real person who decided during the Vietnam War to head overseas with a duffel bag of beer cans to bring them to his friends in the war. He starts off very pro-war and pro-America and can’t stand protesters against the war, and gets into fights over it. As he gets into the country and starts to find his friends, he quickly finds himself in, you know, a war. Seeing what he sees turns his opinions around and makes him grow as a person. It was a really good movie I had never heard about until I just was flipping through. Still didn’t get around to Nope, maybe this week will be the chance.

Additionally, a show I never heard about before is Welcome to Wrexham, but here I am having watched the whole thing. It’s about a Football Club in Wrexham, Wales that find themselves with the new owners of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. I’ve enjoyed watching Rob on Mythic Quest and who doesn’t like Ryan Reynolds so I watched this one out of curiosity. It’s an 18-episode docuseries on Hulu. It does a fantastic job of getting me to care about a group of players for a sport I don’t have tons of experience with and with a town I’ve never heard of before. It’s well made in that it’s not just about the game, but it looks at the town. The people are what make that club what it is and it looks at the highs and lows of the players, the fans, the sport.

Video Games

I didn’t play anything this week. But it was announced that Advance Wars 1+2 Reboot Camp is finally coming out. I think Nintendo did make the right call to not release their war game just as the war in Ukraine was starting. But it’s been 10 months of no information on it and I’ve been wafting for this game. So I’ve preordered that one along with Tears of the Kingdom, the new Zelda game. I’m very excited for these games to come out.

Pottery

Not much to share, but my kiln was delivered this week. We’ve begun really planning out where everything is going to go and what supplies we need to get. We have a lot of garage organization to plan for in the meantime and basement prep as well. But I’m looking forward to it.