Board Games

Feb 20: For our usual game night we had 6 for once and so that limited our choices. We decided on Love Letter (2019) as we’ve played it before and could just get going and have conversation while playing. It was good. We had a few exciting rounds and a few interesting eliminations. My friend won on the last round by being the last one in the round and having a Spy giving her 2 points for the 3 needed to win the game.

Feb 22: I posted a shelfie in a new Discord server I joined and someone asked about Witchstone. It had been a long enough time that I didn’t remember the details of it so we played it. I like this game. It’s a solid puzzle game with the great potential for comboing. But how you do so is dependent on how you best lay out your player board and the actions you have at any given time. I tried to blitz the wand track to get the first player bonuses, but that proved a bad plan as I didn’t have any much to score on that track and when Rachael finally got there she scored tons. So lessons for next time.

Feb 23: Someone in that group also mentioned getting a print and play of all the Clever games. I’ve only played the original, so I printed off a set of the other three. I sat down to try a solo game of Twice as Clever to see how I liked it. I’m unsure. I didn’t score terribly, but I don’t feel like I did well. Maybe I just haven’t figured out the strategy yet, but it felt like I just couldn’t get anything filled in like I wanted to. I’ll have to give it another shot.

Feb 25: A friend on Mastodon tooted that they got Codex Naturalis and was excited to play it solo. I didn’t know it could be played solo, but the official instructions are on BGG. So I printed off a set of them and gave it a try. It’s OK. It works but I’d rather play against a human. That said this is the first game of it that I’ve ever won, so that’s nice.

I also judged a couple more games for the Cardboard Edison award and I don’t think either of them will make it to the finals, but one looked pretty fun.

Videos

No movies this week as all of my usual time that I would have to watch a movie was spent getting estimates for my kiln wiring.

That said I did watch this video on YouTube this week about the ways that German and English interact. I’ve been learning German for a few months now and this was pretty helpful to learn some tricks on how the two interact. They’re a lot closer in some ways than you would expect.

Another fun video I watched was a Pokémon Challenge video. Quinn Rutledge was challenged to catch Pokemon based on a target weight. He and Matt had 5 minutes each to catch a Pokémon then they compared. First to 5 wins wins the challenge.

Lastly, if you’ve never seen Buckets the Drummer, you’re missing out. Here’s a compilation of 10 drum solos played by a horse man in the bathroom on buckets.

Video Games

Pokémon Go Hoenn Tour is going on right now. This is like Go Fest or the other Tours in the past and for me, it’s a chance to get Relicanth, the only Pokémon from the third gen I don’t have in the game. We had a slow start to Saturday because we stayed home, but after lunch we went out and really dove in. We’re partially stuck on some of it as we don’t have as much luck with the raiding. Hopefully tomorrow we can get a bit of better luck and be on our way toward finishing the quest line. I did get a shiny sunny Castform which was on my desired list to catch so that was nice.

I also officially wrapped up the Starfall Street storyline in Pokemon Scarlet and I’m onto finishing the Titans now. I’m motivated again to do finish this so hopefully next week’s update will have some good news on that.

Pottery

With the Monday holiday I got a chance to go to the Columbus Clay Company. It’s our closest pottery supplier and I’ve never been there. So I ventured forth and got to try out a few wheels. I’ve only ever used a Brent, so I was able to try out a few Shimpo wheels and I think I’m going to go with one of them. This isn’t until a decent ways off because of cost, but I liked the VL-Whisper the most. But the VL-Lite was also pretty good and it’s about half the cost of the other. The guy at the store mentioned even if I got the Lite now, I could probably sell it again for a good percentage of the cost and put that toward an upgrade should I want it.

I picked up my kiln furniture, a banding wheel, and a few hand building tools because that’s how I’m going to start working once the kiln is ready to use. Speaking of, I’ve had 2 out of 3 electrician visits come through last week to get estimates for wiring up my kiln. It’s more than I was hoping, but not more than I was expecting. Both are pretty comparable, so I’m waiting for the third one to come back to decide on anything. It’s also still not a right around the corner thing. The cost of this is high enough that we need to plan for it and save for a few months. But the dream of doing this at home is getting closer and we’re all excited about it here.