Board Games
Feb 26: Last Sunday I played two solo games of Keystone: North America. I was on scenario 2 and had failed at it twice before. This time I failed once, but finally got it on the second game. Admittedly it had been a bit since I played it and partially forgot how scoring worked, so that’s on me. But when I finally got the win it felt really good. The board looked so nice laid out in a good way. I’m excited to start scenario 3 as it’s the first scenario that unlocks an envelope of cards.
Feb 27: Monday was a night no one was able to come for game night. Just didn’t work out with various schedules. So we played a game of The Rival Networks. Rachael loved the Networks, and it might be one of the games in our collection that truly was her pick rather than something I picked first. So when Gil launched the Kickstarter for a 2 player dedicated version we jumped on it. We hadn’t played it in a bit and did a rules refresh. I was slow to get started, losing much of the first round. But I got a few choice Network cards and several genre bonuses bringing me even on the second round and just completely destroying the third round. I had a significant lead at the end and I was pretty happy with how I planned my turn around.
Mar 2: I had some time before work on Thursday and set up a game of Raiders of Scythia. I enjoy this game so much. Raiders of the North Sea was in my top 10 games for a long time, but adding the expansions felt a bit clunky to me and I never played with more than 4, so the extra player count never mattered to me. So when I found that Scythia wasn’t just a reskin of the original but wraps all the expansion content into the game seamlessly, I was very excited. So much so I’ve sold off North Sea and all the expansions and such. I still prefer the artwork and theming of North Sea, but for the gameplay I can’t shake Scythia as the better game for me. I won this one using the second difficulty AI and it wasn’t as close as I thought. I think I’ll try the next one up next time.
Mar 3: On Friday we finally ended our online Board Game Arena game of Trekking the World I joined in. I like this game a lot. We have it at home. But I did not like playing an asynchronous game of it online. I had a very hard time of keeping track of where things were when I was taking a day or so between turns. I came in third and stayed there for the whole game. I like the game, but it won’t be one I play again online unless we’re playing all together.
The Cardboard Edison finalists were announced and one of the games I judged was Quilted and it made it to the finals. I suspected (and hoped) that it would. Next step for me is in April I make a trip to New Jersey to do the in person judging where we’ll play the games and go from there rather than just a video and rulebook. This is my first year attending the in person judging so I’m excited to join the others.
We also picked up a copy of Puerto Rico 1897 from our FLGS. I always thought Puerto Rico was a great game, but once someone pointed out to me the issues with the theming, I had a hard time not seeing them when I went to play the game. This retheme/second edition/touch up whatever you want to call it of the original fixes most of the historical inaccuracies and puts the power of the game into the hands of the Puerto Rican people as they achieve independence.
TV and YouTube
Survivor returned for a new season. I started watching this when it first game out, but fell off around season 5 or so due to life changes. Then years later we were watching TV and flipping channels and we stumbled on season 25. They were setting up for a challenge so I watched just to see how it goes. It was post merge and I knew no one so I didn’t really care about the beach banter, but we did watch Tribal Council. We did this for the rest of the season mostly just watching the challenges and seeing who gets voted off. The next season we came back in and watched the whole thing and we’ve been watching ever since. This new one looks to be interesting again. I think there’s one player who is already making a notably strong strategic lead and I’m curious to see how far they make it.
Returning for its fifth season is Jet Lag. I talked about this one before and it’s currently only out on Nebula but will appear on YouTube starting this Wednesday. This time they’re racing across New Zealand with various challenges and blocked roads and such along the way. I like this concept for a season and I’ll be curious how the teams fare.
Another series returning is the “…Life” series (for lack of a better name) that several Minecraft YouTubers do. This time the series is Limited Life and they have 24 hours to survive. Each death loses them an hour, and certain players can become backstabbing attackers at random intervals. It’s always fun. Here’s the link to Etho who I’ve been watching the longest. His video was pretty entertaining and you get to at least see generally what everyone is up to at some point, though there are about 13 other players you can watch from their perspective.
Echoing the first week of the year, my movie this week is once again by AbsolBlogsPokemon with Matt’s Violet Badge Quest Movie. Here he attempts to beat Pokémon Violet by catching a different shiny Pokémon before completing each badge along the way. It’s an interesting way to complete the game and it was fun trying to spot the shiny Pokémon on screen before he pointed them out.
This week I also stumbled onto a new channel called Struthless that does some wonderful videos. The two I’ve watched so far are about fonts and where they come from, and one on why “content” is such a terrible way to view creative work. Both are worth a watch.
Pottery
We finished up my kid’s pottery classes this week. We have our plate and various things we brought home yesterday. Our bowl fell apart in the kiln so we painted a few pieces of it. We used underglaze on some tiles for our last session. We bit off a bit more than we could chew with the number of tiles we attempted so I’m not sure how successful the firing will be. We’ll find out sometime this week if everything goes right.
We also got all the quotes for our electrical work to get our kiln hooked up. Unfortunately all the prices are a bit outside our price range at the moment, so this is looking like it’s officially a summer project for us.