Board Games
Apr 2: As I’ve been prone to do lately, I did an early Sunday morning solo game. This time it was Legacy of Yu. This was the second game in the series and I was excited to pull of a winning strategy. Until I read the post game story beat and realized I played the game wrong which would certainly mean I would’ve lost. It was far too late to undo what I did wrong, so I’m keeping it as a win, and honestly I might house rule it that way if I continue to have a losing streak as this game I found fun. Not just because I won but because I felt I was able to make progress in the game.
Apr 3: On Monday we wrapped up our game of Evergreen on Board Game Arena with a few other people from a Discord server I’m in. Evergreen is one I saw at a store and thought it looked neat and upon playing it, it’s fantastic. I really want to get this one, but I’m not sure how often I’ll play it. I already have had Bosk and got rid of it, and we have Waldmeister as a tree based game. That said I came in second with this one, and we immediately started a rematch of it. This is a game that works really well for me on BGA. It’s fairly multiplayer solitaire. I don’t really have to pay attention to other peoples boards or keep track of what they’re doing. I can just do my own thing and have fun with it.
Apr 4: As I said, we have Waldmeister as our current tree game and I wanted to play it to see how I feel about it in relation to Evergreen. It’s a great abstract game that we imported from Germany through Cabin Games. Here you’re trying to either get large stretches of trees of the same color or height depending on which one scores for you while messing up the other players. I feel I played fairly offensively at times which worked well for me, but the end still kind of was a bust for doing anything other than tacking on a point here or there. We totaled the scores and we managed to tie. There’s not a tie breaker for this game, they just suggest you play again using the opposite scoring method and total your scores, but we didn’t feel like it. This one is I could see selling this year at Origins. I haven’t decided on it yet, but if I could get enough from it that I could pay for most of Evergreen, I’d be really tempted to.
Apr 6: A quiet evening and I had a few moments to play a game so I grabbed The Castles of Burgundy the Dice Game since I knew it wouldn’t take long. I played a solo game of it and it was fine. I feel like I could get rid of this one. It’s nice and fast which is good for when I don’t want to pull out the full game, but also, I don’t know how much I want to pull this one out as well. It will likely stay though because it doesn’t take up space and it is nice to have for a quick take along game.
Apr 7: Today we wrapped up our rematch of Evergreen. I once again came in second but just barely and improved my score. I do think that I want this game now that I’ve played it a second time. I think it’s fantastic and I’ll definitely be ordering a copy for our library when I put my next order in. We also decided to play a big game last night and chose Ark Nova as our game. This is a great game still and I really enjoy it. We used the new expansion boards where you have regions of the map tied to continents and if you stick an animal in there that matches the continent you get a bonus. It’s a hard map to work with, but it was a fun extra challenge. I got some great synergies on using sponsors cards often and was able to claim 2 conservation tasks which I don’t think I got any in the previous game I played. I also filled a petting zoo for the first time so that was fun. Overall still love this game and it was a lot of fun.
Movies
On Letterboxd, Patrick H Willems said that John Wick 4 is the best one. I’ve always held that the first John Wick is the best, so I decided to rewatch that. I still think it’s fantastic. John is best when he’s super specialized and not superhuman like he’s become in the last movies. Though you could argue in some ways that he dies at the end of this one, and comes back as a revenant with the sole purpose of seeking revenge for those who have wronged him, but it doesn’t perfectly hold up. But that would explain the ability to fall off several buildings and not be completely dead each time. Anyway John Wick the original has some of my favorite lines in a movie and especially the parlance of the world which seems to go away as time goes on. It also has some great action. I highly recommend it to anyone.
Video Games
We both purchased the Masterwork Research ticket in Pokémon Go to get the shiny Jirachi. These are usually tasks you work on for a few months and get rewarded with a shiny mythical Pokémon. And boy howdy, they really are putting in the work this time. After spending a few weeks catching 385 Pokémon from each of the first three regions, I now have to have 10 best buddies. This requires getting a Pokémon to like 360 hearts of friendship through battling, walking, giving berries, etc. On an average day, I’ve had luck getting maybe 8 hearts at max. This was going to feel like a task I’d have for years. Then we had the realization that you can swap buddies really fast. So if you can get 30 berries a day from stops, you can feed the required 3 berries per Pokémon to register hearts across 10 different Pokémon per day. Doing a few basic tasks and starting and ending a battle three times gets you 6 hearts. After a certain point they’ll also give you a bonus gift each day which gives one more. So 6-7 hearts per day brings this to around 2 months at most. Add to this that several of these Pokémon I’m using were already about 1/3 or more of the way to best buddy status and this is going to be much easier. It just requires me to do a lot of tedious work every day, but at least it doesn’t feel hopeless.
Local doings
We visited our local botanical gardens, the Franklin Park Conservatory. I’ve never been and my kid loves butterflies so we went to see the butterfly exhibit where you just walk through and see butterflies all around you. It’s very much the butterfly room in Animal Crossing’s museum. It was a lot of fun. We got to watch some glass blowing and see a 373 year old bonsai tree. We have a temporary membership from our library that’s good for one more use and we might go back next weekend, or we might not. The Columbus Zoo is also opening up the Australia section again and they’re adding in sea dragons so we might go see that instead before our membership expires there.