Board Games

Mar 6: I was home sick on Monday and to get my mind active I set up a solo game of Verdant. I’d only played this solo online once so I had to read the set up rules. I did pretty good. I had some good combos, and only had two plants without a pot at the end. It was my first time using the potless plant cards and they’re really good for corners. Filling in those spaces that aren’t going to likely get finished from rooms alone. I’ll probably just continue to use them in the future as well.

Mar 7: I needed to get a picture of Sprawlopolis for an upcoming blog post I’m working on, and it’s almost easier to play a game of it than to pretend to have played on, so I took it with me to lunch and played a game while waiting. It was not my finest and I lost pretty badly. Sometimes I get too focused on some of the scoring cards and lose sight of how best to play the game. That night, we had a small window between Rachael finishing a webinar and me having a meeting so we played a quick game of Passtally. We have both been looking at it on the shelf and decided today was the day. I thought I might want to cull the game from our collection, but we both enjoyed it quite a bit so it’ll stay.

The rest of the week was busy with other things so we had a pretty low game week. I’ll be off to Unpub this next week so our games together will be pretty small, but hopefully next week I’ll have some good prototypes to talk about from the show. If you’re in the Hunt Valley, MD area next weekend and are looking to help designers make their games better, stop by the show. More info can be found at www.unpub.net.

Movies and TV

On Sunday I took the afternoon to go see Creed 3 at the theater. I liked the first Creed a lot but skipped out on the second one. I thought this was really good. I read the plot of the second one and was kind of disappointed it was just another character from Rocky’s past come back to fight his protégée. At least with this one the opponent is someone central to Creed’s story and life rather than someone else’s. Jonathan Majors was fantastic as was the rest of the cast. Majors is someone I have my eye on because of his involvement in (presumably) a lot of the upcoming Marvel stuff in the next 2-3 years and so far he doesn’t disappoint.

Also on Monday while sick I finally got around to watching NOPE. Horror isn’t really my thing and I have to say, the tags of horror on there are pretty misleading. Sci-fi Thriller is probably a better term for the movie. Not that there weren’t horror elements to it, but not in the traditional slasher horror I tend to avoid. I went in knowing perhaps just a touch bit more than I should have and it did kind of ruin my enjoyment because one of the big twists of the movie was known to me so it took some of the suspense out of it. But still a very good movie and I’m glad I finally watched it. Get Out is now on my list because a friend told me that I should be able to handle that if I can handle Nope.

I also started Hello Tomorrow on Apple TV+. It’s an odd show of retro futurism. There’s something not quite right and I think I know what it might be, but they haven’t confirmed my suspicions yet. Billy Crudup is fantastic in it though. Some sort of tortured salesman. Always has the winning line, but you can tell something isn’t right with him.

I was also out to dinner with some friends when my phone dinged to let me know that the new season of Top Chef is out now. We picked up a year of Peacock on a 50% off deal in January and so we came home and watched it that night. It’s kind of an international All Stars this season and there’s some recent favorites and some others I’m excited to get to know more of.

YouTube

This week’s YouTube recommendation is a video by Alpharad where he and 5 other YouTubers competed in a Nuzlocke race of Pokemon Emerald. They drafted their teams at the start and then tried their best to beat the game the fastest. It was pretty entertaining to watch.

I also enjoyed the video on the Making of Star Wars by StudioBinder. I knew some of it, particularly the sound design elements of how blaster sounds and such were made, but the visual elements like the way they blue screened the ships and the painting of sets was entirely new to me.