Board Games
A slower week of games this week, though not for trying. I currently have 7 games running on BGA but they’re all taking more than a week to finish, so expect a bigger list next week. But I did play a game of boop. against someone who was highly ranked on BGA by accident and did pretty well against them until I made a very dumb move that lost me the game. I still think the abstract is pretty neat.
I played two more games of Dorfromantik upping my high score both games and unlocking more content inside the box. I really like this game and I see myself playing this one a lot. Really easy to set up and the thrill of opening new packages and exploring new things really exciting.
We did another BGA game of Tucano which I was feeling alright about except I flipped all my cards facedown without taking a solid look at them first so I completely forgot anything I had previously taken. Which didn’t help me and I lost this one pretty badly.
I played a game of the Guild of Merchant Explorers solo on the Kazan map. I might have gotten a rule wrong as I was playing from memory so I’ll have to check that again next time, but I really enjoyed this one. It’s a roll and write without a pen. I like seeing the exploration and the slowly growing progress markers you add over time to make the next round easier. I also really like the era cards that give you a very different way to play from your opponents and I had cards I’d never seen before this time so that was a fun change of strategy.
There was a BGA play of Evergreen with a come from behind loss for me. I was leading pretty well the entire time and feeling really good. I had a bit of a poor final round as nothing I had really worked too well for my strategy and that’s when I lost the lead by 30 points. I still like this one a lot and I’m happy I bought the physical copy of it.
The last game for the week was our new acquisition. I bought a copy of Hadara off of someone local and we played it last night. I won this one, possibly due to having played it before, but it was really enjoyable. My wife said she felt like it was a “proper game” for a game night, without the heavy strategy planning that requires her to be fully awake after a long day. I think this will be a long term winner in our colleciton.
Museum visits
My family took a 2 day vacation to Cincinnati to visit a couple of museums. First day was the Newport Aquarium. We’ve heard great things about this before, but this was really neat. Tons of displays and lots of information. My particular favorite was the cuttlefish as we got to see them change colors and textures to camouflage in their environment. The shark exhibit was also great as there are side windows, a tunnel, and then a bridge to see the exhibit from three different perspectives. In there was a shark ray which is in the same family as a sting ray but looks more like a shark. It was really cool. There was also this fascinating kids interactive display in the play area where you could color in a fish on a piece of paper, then scan it, and it would show up with your design on the screen and swim around. I think our kid did maybe 5 of these. There is also a couple of white crocodiles which were just massive and super cool to see. We enjoyed this place so much we debated whether we should get a membership for a museum that’s 2 hours away from home.
There was a candy store right outside as well that had flavored cotton candy and we got a bag of grape and a bag of lemonade and it was fun to have a flavor that wasn’t just your standard option.
Day 2 was to the Cincinnati Museum Center, which I did not take as many pictures as I thought. It’s located inside the old Union Terminal which was the inspiration for the Justice League HQ in the old cartoons. It also had these amazing mosaic murals on the inside of it. But they had a cave replica, dinosaur bones, a full children’s museum, and some science experiments to try. There’s also a Holocaust museum which I would like to visit, but it’s a bit too heavy for my kid just yet so we didn’t visit that one. We also didn’t get to see the big LEGO display because that was an extra charge we didn’t spend. But what we did look at was a lot of fun and we really enjoyed our day.
Then on the way home we stopped at a mall near Dayton to visit Original 151, a store specializing in Pokémon merch and I got myself a shiny Hisuian Zorua plush which is 100% my favorite Pokémon.
My kid got a summer Deerling plush which she loves and I admit it was hard for me to not go home with a whole slew of things. More reasons to come back in the fuutre.
Video Games
I’ve continued on with Tears of the Kingdom. I haven’t done much more of the story, but I’ve done a lot of caves, shrines, and I’ve been exploring the world. My plan this week is to get the next temple completed and maybe the third. I’m enjoying taking my time with this, but there are some videos I would like to watch so I want to try and get the story done before I spend the entire game exploring like I did with Breath of the Wild.