Board Games
April 11: This day had us finish a three player game of Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done on Board Game Arena. It was a 3 player game and one where I was very confident in my plays up until about the last 1/5 of the game when I just suddenly fell behind. But I didn’t upgrade any actions, and part of that choice was to see if I could compete without doing so. I think next time I’d definitely focus on doing a couple of those early one to give myself a bit of variety. Still not wild about the theme and I wish Seth would’ve gotten around to the retheme we talked about but it never happened. I also wrapped up a game of Next Station: London on BGA with some people from the BGG Couples Gaming Discord. I really like this game. It gives me MetroX vibes but feels like the decisions are less math and luck based. You can generally keep in mind your possibilities. I’ve enjoyed this one a lot. I think I’d like to get a copy, but also the BGA version works so well I’m not sure I need to. That night my wife and I played Kim-Joy’s Magic Bakery twice. This has a set of scenarios and we went through the first two of them. I’m not super won over by the game. I’m thinking my kid might enjoy playing it, but I’m also fine with moving it onto someone else too.
April 13: This day had me finishing a game of Japiur, once again on BGA (You’ll notice a theme this week.) We had just sold our copy of this game and I’m glad I did. This implementation works so well I don’t need to own the physical game anymore. I won this 2-1 after having a pretty bad first round. Turns out I needed to be a bit more aggressive on making the round end if I wanted to stay competitive. I also played two solo games of Next Station: London, I did one just to play, but then learned there’s a daily solo challenge with a leaderboard. For the future, I plan to probably play this everyday but unless I have a particularly good showing I don’t plan to list each daily play of this game. Then I’m looking to sell some Button Shy games at Origins so I played two I felt were on the cull list. Count of Nine Estates and A La Food Cart are both games I enjoyed before but felt like I wanted to let them go. Count was good, but I feel like over my last couple plays I either have found a way to just easily win, or I’m really getting the rules wrong. In either way I’m letting it go. A La Food Cart is a game that I enjoy the first 2/3 of, then the last 1/3 just drags and doesn’t work for me. We decided on a draw after four rounds of us being unable to finish the final row of our cards and not seeing a chance to really get past that anytime soon.
April 14: One more game on BGA this week, Hadara. This is one I’ve wanted to play for a while but never got around to. A friend and I played through a game of it during the day and I really enjoyed it. We’re planning a 3 player game soon and I look forward to that one. I might actually track down a copy to own because I think it works really well. That night friends came over and one of them brought Canvas. I had played this once and debated if I wanted to own it. I think I can say now that I enjoy the game, but don’t need to own it. I did win by one point so that was fun and we all had some good talking around the table during it so that worked out well.
Movies
On Easter morning I went to see Air. Ignoring the fact that this is a 2 hour commercial for Nike, I thought it was fun. I liked the characters, everyone was great in it and really felt like they were giving everything they had to get this deal to work out. I saw someone say, we all know this movie was going to be good because it featured Matt Damon being really good at his job and let’s be honest, I’d watch that kind of movie any day of the week. But the humor was good and I think it worked really well. I don’t think I’d buy it, but I’d probably watch it again.
Local stuff
Yesterday we took our last trip to the Columbus Zoo for a while. We’ve been members for years, but last year my wife and kid went pretty regularly over the summer and she got burnt out on it. Our membership ends at the end of the month and we decided not to renew and instead do something new this year. Which was great timing because the Australia building just reopened and they’ve added weedy sea dragons so we got to see something new. This was my kid’s first experience with walking the entire zoo and they did great. I’m impressed by just how invested they were in everything, how well they handled the day. It was like 5 miles of walking which is a lot for a five year old, but they did great. Next month we’re going to Cincinnati to do some museums and things we’ve never been to, and we’re looking forward to a year of new adventures.