December 2006 Archives

Jenseits von Theben

We started out with this very thematic game, Jenseits von Theben. I decided to spend most of the time collecting cards around the cities. I turned out to be pretty well rounded in specific knowledge. And I gathered 5 Kongress cards (triangle point cards). So, I started digging. I was pretty lucky on one dig: out of 4 cards, I received 4 artifacts. Marty was even more lucky than I though. His excessive knowledge in Palestine, his breadth of artifacts dug up from there, and the two showings that he was able to attend won him the game.

The cards dried up during the game. Early on, we had a number of showings (only two of which were attended). However, towards the middle of the game, no conferences showed up at all. So when the cards stopped being attractive, the only thing left to do was dig.

Rainbow Trump

I played a prototype trick-taking card game called Rainbow Trump. There are seven suits (the colors of the rainbow with red being the highest rank and violet being lowest) with values from 1 - 7. Therefore each card has two attributes to it. You are dealt out some amount of cards (in a three player game it was 15) and there are some amount of cards which were not in play but instead used as bonus points (4 for us). Each player chooses a personal trump card by secretly picking a card and facing the desired attribute towards himself (if can be number or color). Which are then revealed. Someone leads a card either as a color or as a number. Standard trick taking rules apply: you must follow what was led, you can sluff or trump otherwise. If multiple people want to trump, then something special happens. The first trump starts to take it, then, a second trump can beat it: if it is a number trump then if the number is higher, or if it is a color trump, then if the color is higher. If it was overtrumped, then you take the trick and an extra point as recorded by an extra card (so these points could run out during the course of a hand).

One strategy you can use is to attack the base trump. If someone is forced to play the card that they used to show their trump card, then they loose the power of trump. Whatever cards were left which would have been trump are now normal cards. So one strategy is to try and get someone to be forced to play that card. Of course, usually people will pick trump of whatever is their longest suit or number. However, if that person picked blue and displayed the blue 5, then playing other 5's as a number will get them to play that card.

I always like trick-taking games. And there are many of them out there with unusual twists. For this game, you are forced to now keep track of 7x7 things instead of 7 things. Also, when you try and save walkers of a suit (low cards that are the only ones left), it is hard to try and stop someone else. Normally you will trump in, but if you are out of trump, then chances are that the cards that they will play will be different than cards you can cover. For example, if you hold the 6 of blue, then someone can play the 5 of blue as a number. Which means that the 6 that you hold is considered sluff. Only a 5 of red, orange, yellow, or green will beat that blue. Did you save one of those as well?

Werewolf

We went for a late lunch at Doneraki. Which was supposed to be pretty good. However, by the time we arrived, they stopped serving the buffet. And we had problems with the waiter. It seems that I have bad luck when I eat with Kevin and Debra. ;)

While we were eating, the group decided to play werewolf. But there wasn't a vote on it because I would have surely have voted against it. Sigh. I wasn't picked as a werewolf or seer. So I remained quiet and hoped that everyone would leave me alone. We did make a good pick on the first suspected werewolf though. I had a feeling that Brandon was just a little too vocal in his accusations. The next werewolf was harder though. Mary volunteered the fact that she was the seer. So her life was going to be short. She did say that Tim Houston was not a werewolf. Tim then used his logic arguments to get people to vote in a certain order. Tim Burnet and I agreed and we killed off the next werewolf. Phew. Hopefully I won't have to play that game any time soon...

Cleopatra and the Society of Architects

I have been wanting to play this game for a while now if only for the bits. You are building Cleopatra's palace. The different pieces are obelisks, sphinxes, walls, door frames, and Cleopatra's throne. The box is used as part of the building, so at the end of the game, the completed structure looks impressive. Game play is easy. You either collect cards that represent resources (wood, stone, marble, lapis, artisan) or special abilities, OR build a section of the palace and collect money. When 5 of six sections of the palace has been built, the game is over.

Only money counts as victory points at the end of the game. However, there is one mechanism that you have to watch out for. And that is corruption. Some of the more powerful cards, like the double resource cards or the special ability cards, are tainted. If you play them, then you get corruption tokens which are secretly placed inside of a pyramid bank. At the end of the game, you get more corruption tokens if you have cards in your hand that are tainted. The person with the most corruption automatically loses. There can be points in the game where you offer money to remove corruption tokens. However, only the person who offered the most money gets to remove three tokens. The other people get one or more tokens. Painful. And unpredictable. It can happen a lot or a little during the game. In our game, it only happened once.

During the game, the ladies at the table (Mary "Corruption Jones" and Amy) were taking corruption tokens. I knew Amy was going to spend a lot of the money that she earned during the offering. So I went for second place. Amy ended offering 13 dollars which I thought was a lot. As the game progressed, I started taking corruption tokens. And when the game ended, the corruption tokens were surprisingly close (9, 8, 8, and 6). Mike lost and I ended up in first place based on money. If Mike would have taken one less, then only Mary would have won.

Trainsport Austria

Marty brought out this game claiming that it would be quick. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the complete opposite. But I was able to chat and do other stuff during the massive downtime.

Carolus Magnus

Since only myself and Mike were not playing games, Mike suggest that we play Carolus Magnus as a two player game. I like this older Colovini game. It doesn't really need a them. In fact, I cannot remember what the theme is supposed to be. All you need to know is that it is a majority game. You want majority in some of the five colors. Because if you are first in a color, you can use that color on the board to cast votes for you. And if you have the most votes on an island when the king comes around, then you place your marker(s) on it. If the neighboring islands are also owned by you, then you can merge them into one super island. Once you place all ten of your markers on the board, the game is over.

This game was close. It came down to a dice roll at the end. Could Mike roll the colors that he needed? Yes, he did.

I certainly had fun at this convention. But I am sad that I didn't get to play Train Raider, Struggle of Empires, or my many other Wallace games that I brought. Kevin was still the nicest person at the con. Amy, the Cookie Pimp, made some wonderful cookies. Imperial was surprisingly the most played game at the con. The hotel was actually pretty good. It had a Tempurpedic mattress, fitted sheets, and free WiFi.

Yspahan

I like this game since it has dice and it has mechanics that mitigate the randomness of the dice. But I have yet to win the game. This game had some new players in it. So it turned out that everyone played with group-think. Which I absolutely hate. Because I seem to loose out on arguing my case or convince others to change their plans and hose someone else. When I hear things like "and you can move the Supervisor here to hurt Mark" and "okay", I just cringe. It was no surprise that I did not enjoy playing this game...

Einfach Genial

We played this quick and lightly meaty game as a partnership game. Our team maxed out the orange color first. So I turned to other colors. Unfortunately, red was our Achilles heel and it proved to be our downfall.

Augsburg 1520

This is a new game that I wanted to try. It is a bidding game that uses four currencies for five auctions. You bid on chips that give you actions in three categories: money, victory points, and drawing cards. Also, there are two structures that you must build that will let you score more victory points. If you don't build the church, then you cannot score past 25 and if you don't build the cathedral, then you cannot score past 45. So it is imperative that you keep some money to build those structures when you need them.

Lexio

I like the tiles in this game. They have a great build quality to them. And I like the Tichu-ness of the game play. We played only five rounds (for the number of players). I think that this was too little as it doesn't offset the luck of the draw. But still, its an alright game.

Sticheln

Next up was Sticheln. With four players, I think it starts pushing into unpredictable territory. It is at its best with three players. And I like the feeling of impending doom that this game gives you. On my hand, I had some poor choices. So I went for the blue suit (10, 8, 5, 3 - I think). I was a bad sign when someone else chose blue as well. Luckily for me, I was able to duck under the tricks on my 10 and 8 card! Phew!

WTF? Is someone drinking biscuits at this convention?

Traumfabrik

I like this old Knizia game. Part of its charm is the "what if" scenarios that you imagine when you pair up famous actors in old movies. The new re-release is just ugly. They use fake but recognizable parody names. Gah! Anyways, I was surprised that my 19 green movie was able to hold up for the whole game. It got me best picture for two years and best picture overall. At the end I was trying to finish any one of three yellow movies. I just needed one chip each. But it was not to be. Still, I finished in first though.

42 Tournament

Since I have been playing 42 at lunch lately, I had to play this tournament. My partner, Brandon, was new to 42 and I tried to teach him all that I knew in the time before it started. He did well though. What was different was the utter lack of variants that we used during the tournament. The two were that you could call doubles as their own suit and that you could call nillo at anytime. You couldn't lead the low side of a bone or splash or plunge. I think that the nillo at anytime is just too powerful though.

In the first game, I came across an interesting ethical dilemma. Due to the table, I had difficulty shuffling the bones. Sometime, one would flip over. So when someone told me that they had noticed that the 6:5 flipped up and then tracked it during the shuffle, I was not happy. They declared that they were going to take advantage of people messing up. When it happened again, that person would stare like a hawk during the shuffle. Of course, trying to speed up the shuffle was not helping matters. Afterwards, Marty told me a good way to combat that by taking the tile and one other and putting them behind your back. You then swap them or not and replace them on the board.

Oftentimes, I might be able to see someone's cards during a game. I either don't look at them or if it is just too obvious, then warn them. Thankfully, our game group does not have this type of person playing at it.

On the second round, one of the opposing teammates called nillo a lot. Like three times. And was set each time. So from my experience, the winning percentage of nillo calls during this tournament was not very good (like 25% or so).

On the third and final round, our score went from 0/3 to 3/4 to 3/6. I never had a hand worth bidding. How sad... Still, it was a blast!

Another year has passed, which brings me to the start of the Lone Star Game Fest. I bypassed the usual Thursday gaming in order to pack and go to bed early. I left at around 6:15 am and drove east on 79. Google maps had me take FM-1660 south when I got to Hutto. But, when I saw the new SR-130 toll road, I was not about to try and find an unfamiliar road in the dark. Besides, the toll road was still at its introductory free price. It linked up to US-290 which I then took down to Houston.

US-290 is interesting because it is a road where you can drive 70. Yet it passes through all these towns. A couple are no stop light towns. They slow you down to 55. At one point I looked up and noticed that I was going north-east. WTF? I thought Houston was south-east of Austin. It was around Burton, TX. A road hiccup, I guess.

I made it in at around 9:15. The drive through Houston was a blight of interstates and big box sprawl. I wonder if there are any houses in Houston because I sure didn't see any. I had one tense moment when I was in the left lane and realized that I had to be in the right lane immediately to make it to another interstate highway. I just put on my blinker and forced my way over. I think that the frontage roads here train people to just accept that behavior. After all, you are transferring from a three lane, 65 mile per hour road to a three lane, 45 mile per hour road and then making a right turn into a business.

When I got to Mosley road, I pulled into the first Marriott hotel. Which was a mistake. It seems that there are three Marriott hotels that are besides each other. And mine was the third. Go figure.

Desert Bazaar

After I dropped my luggage in the room, I went down to scope out the scene. There was already a table of gamers playing. Kevin was there setting up and he started a game called Desert Bazaar. Which was designed by another gamer, Brian Yu. The rules are simple. But with analyzing gamers it takes a little longer than it should.

The board is a hexagonal map of the desert. Tents are built on that map that hold bazaars. There are four types of bazaars that are color coded red, blue, green, and purple. There are two parts to this game:

Collect materials: Take a card from one of the four supply decks. Roll three dice. The dice have on them the four colors, one blank desert, and one wild color. You can pick one of the four colors and get the number of cards that was rolled on the dice. Optionally, you may set aside one die and re-roll the other two. However, if the color that you picked did not show up on the re-roll, you loose any chance of getting cards.

Build: There are two groups of 4 tiles and you pick one to draw from. The tiles have three colors that are required to build them. Already built tiles that have ownership markers can generate the color of the tent pictured on the tile (which means you do not need to play a card matching that color). As soon as 7 contiguous tiles are placed, then that group scores one point per ownership marker and the ownership markers are removed from that group. Groups can never exceed 7 in size. If a tile is placed by itself it scores two points. Otherwise, it will not score until it reaches 7 in size or only at the end of the game.

Indonesia

I tried out a new strategy by choosing spice as the third player. Sadly, it didn't work all that well. Also, people kept doing different things than I thought they would.

Unfortunately, players cheated during the game. Player A operates a shipping company and expands it by placing a new ship, I ship rubber to cities, then player C tried to operate a rubber company but they notice that they cannot ship rubber because the city has been occupied already by me. So then player A undoes the ship placement and places it to help player C be able to ship that rubber. Both players have played the game before so that wasn't an excuse. Sigh.

Hameln

I just had to try this game out. The company, Fragor Games, made a splash with their second game because it had such nice figures. This game continues that tradition by adding more nice figures. The game play didn't wow me. And the pieces don't justify its expensive price. But I had to at least try it once.

UR

John brought out UR. It is a tile collection game where you fight over ownership of the tiles. Tiles have two colors on them (one on each side). The color that is face up determines what action you can perform if you have pieces on the tile. The actions are:

• agriculture - put two tokens on every green tile that has your tokens. Keep your tokens on adjacent tiles and remove tokens on all non-adjacent tiles.
• commerce - put tokens on every purple tile. The number of tokens that you can place is one for adjacent orthogonal enemy owned tiles and one for non-existent adjacent orthogonal spots.
• culture - put one token on adjacent orthogonal tiles that are occupied by you.
• politics - redistribute your tokens where ever you want. There is a limit of five tokens per tile.
• war - attack another tile. Losses are the number of enemy tokens and one extra if the tile is a different color than where you attacked from. You then move tokens into the attacked spot.

You have one tile in your hand that determines your two actions. You can skip an action to add one token to an already existing controlled tile. Or you can skip both actions to put one token on an empty token. After performing your actions, you then pick an empty tile that is different than the one you hold and then replace that tile for the one in your hand. At the end of the game, you score triangle points for different colored tiles that you control.

Imperial

I started out with Italy again. But this time France did not hose me over by going into to Mediterranean Sea. Consequently, I was able to build Italy up quite well. I also had shares in England (from the start) and Germany. But the people who took those countries over didn't increase their multipliers. The person who was controlling Russia realized that they could force another Taxation to end the game. Sigh. I tried warning them. But I still scored second place.

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Today I made a loaf of sourdough bead with the leftovers from feeding the culture. You get a awful lot of spent batter when you feed a culture for a number of cycles. Usually, these go down the drain. But I pored off a cup of the active culture and used it in a rather simple recipe to make bread.

I used the wet kneading process where you 1) only add 75% of the flour and the other ingredients 2) autolyze for 20 minutes 3) knead for 6 minutes 4) add the rest of the flour while still kneading. It proofed for 5 hours. And it didn't rise all that much (maybe doubled in size).

Pictures and more after the cut...

During the now weekly feeding ritual, my forgetful mistake became a fortuitous surprise. I use a wide-mouth quart-sized canning jar to hold my Camaldoli sourdough culture. Usually, I pour out enough culture to leave 1 cup left in the jar. I then add a cup of flour and 3/4 cup of water, stir it up, and put it back into the warm oven. Today, I made some bread. So I didn't pour anything out before adding flour and water. I took a cup of the culture for my bread but still had a lot left. Mistakenly, I poured out the refreshed mixture down to one cup. Sigh. Oh well, I thought, I'll just let the culture do its thing with less than normal. Two cups is overkill anyways.

I check back and was surprised to find out that the culture had more than doubled in volume! It went from 1 11/16" to 4 1/2" for a 2.769 times increase. The lowest line is the starting level. You can see the beginnings of a hooch forming. The second line is the level of the foam. And the top line was the maximum height that was reached.

If I would have left it at its normal level, it would have surely overflowed all over the oven again.

To Court the King

After disc golf, we showed up at Tim's house. He was cooking chili which smelled really good. Unfortunately, I think I experienced a shock to my system when I was outside at disc golf. The Juniper trees were visibly pollinating and our discs knocked some off that pollen down. So when I was at Tim's house, my eyes were watering badly. At first I blamed the onions. But it was probably the cedar pollen. And maybe some cat dander as well. Who knows... but I was miserable.

We started off with a light game. One that I wanted to try out. It is like Easy Come, Easy Go where you are rolling dice to achieve a goal. However in this game, there are many intermediate goals. These goals give you special abilities which you can "tap" during your turn. Some cards give you extra dice while others let you modify the dice that you do roll. Your goal is to roll seven of a kind. This gets you the King and Queen card and puts the game into a final round. Everyone now tries to better your roll. If you rolled send 3s, then they need to roll seven of a higher number or eight (or more) of any number. When it comes back to you, you get one last try to beat whoever had the best roll. And thats it. It seems like a light and quick game.

Space Dealer

Next up was space dealer. The rules were simple but there was a nagging question that I was unable to answer. This consumed a lot of time and we finally just made a house rule and started playing. I will have to look up the answer on the geek sometime...

At Cat Hollow this morning, it is a cold and windy day. I almost regret wearing short sleeves. But it warms up as the day progresses. And it didn't rain!

It seems that the MUD is going to replace basket #13! Yea! Throwing at a bucket is just not the same experience. I wonder why they call it a "catcher." Thats a term I didn't know about.

Ugh, I wonder if this is some more vandalism? But when you look at the amount of concrete that they are holding the sign post up with, I am not surprised that the thing eventually fell down.

There were more discs in trees today. Here, Adam tries to rip a tree out to get a disc down. Not really. He was trying to shake it instead. But the tree proved tougher than him.

Jon's group's best shot here was inside a Juniper tree. Now that's dedication. And Rehana was able to throw it out successfully.

Hrm, someone abandoned a bike on the green. I wonder what happened to them?

It looks like the sign was lying to us. Basket 13 was already up! It looks like they tacked the pieces of the basket together with a wielder as a security precaution. But I didn't see a sign of concrete at the bottom of the pole. I hope that they just didn't stick the thing into the ground like they did the last time.

Adam threw close enough to the basket for us to birdie it!

On the next hole, I throw an arcing anheizer throw. And I hear the sound of the disc hitting the basket! So close... It would have been nice to get my first ace...

To end out the round, it looks like the team cannot putt at all. Two missed attempts. Fortunately Gravitt can putt.

Old Settler's was beautiful out. Nice and warm (for December) out. Today, I had problems with water. On hole 3, my disc went into the tiny stream and it was easily recoverable. Then, on the next hole, I had a dilemma. There was a father with a kid next to the lake. And my disc lands close to the stream so that they are between me and the basket. I realize that they are not going to move (and are probably oblivious that they are on a disc golf course). So I carefully throw it. I mean they shouldn't be in the path of the disc, and I wasn't trying to hit them, but the mere fact that they are out there cause me to mess up the throw. I yell "four" as it heads near them and lands in the water. Sigh. Fortunately I was a able to barely see my disc and successfully use John's retriever to catch the disc and drag it to the shore.

Imperial

Yeah, someone in our game group bought Imperial. My copy is somewhere over the Atlantic ocean... In this game, I started out as Russia. I was a little worried at first since it seemed like a hard country to start. But I made a good jump with it. My secondary stock was in France and my next purchase was to take over controlling interest in France. Which was a mistake.

This is definitely a return on investment game where your initial investment needs to pay you money. Which you then use to buy more stocks which pay you even more money. If your investments don't pay you money, you are definitely hurting to win. Also, you should only invest in countries that will have high multipliers at the end of the game.

Battlelore

This time Adam joined me in Battlelore. He too was new to the game but he picked it up quickly. We started out with a slightly more complex scenario with Goblins in it. Still no lore yet. I thought that my side was the better off because I had one more card in my hand and Goblins can flee twice as much. But Adam definitely had the terrain to his advantage. He raced to the hill in the middle of the board giving a good defensive bonus. So I decided to focus on the left flank and the possibly weak Goblins. The river really hampered me. It weakened some of my troops. But what really depressed me was when I tried to use the Battlelore card. I had a poor rolling of the dice and could not activate 6 units. For the units that I did activate, none of them did any damage, let alone kill anything! Gah!

Battlelore

I convinced John to play Battlelore with me and since he hadn't played it before, he gave it a try. When I arrived at Gravitt's house, he still had same gamers from his day games. They convinced me to go to Chuy's with them to eat (sadly I had already eaten before coming over).

Finally after dinner was over, we started playing. Since John was new to this game system, I explained the rules to him. And then we started out playing a basic scenario. Too bad he didn't like it. Shockingly enough, he compared it to Titan by saying it was just as bad. Sigh.

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Although I haven't been continually blogging about my pizzas, I still have been chugging along. Can you chug pizzas? Err, never mind.

I have got most of the variables working together in some sort of harmony -- at least a sort of non-discordance. But I believe that my dough is wetter than I would like. So my next step is to try a dryer dough. The recipe that I am using has a baker's percentage of 62% (345 grams of water and 555 grams of flour). I recalculated the ratio to 58%. But there was an unknown in the pizza recipe that was bugging me. It called for 48 grams of sourdough starter. And I have no idea what the percentage of water is to the flour in my sourdough culture. Since I started a new sourdough starter (an Italian Camaldoli culture), I have been adding exact amounts of flour and water. For each feeding, I add 165 grams of water (3/4 of a cup) and 120 grams of flour (1 cup). This results in a percentage of 137.5%. So, in my recipe, when I add 100 grams of culture to the flour, water, and salt, I now know the exact amount of water and flour. I calculated that I needed to add 99 more grams of flour to get the final percentage down to 58%.

Pizza pictures after the cut...

Antiquity

Ed and Susan held another gaming day and the group made the long trek up north. Susan wanted to play Antiquity. Jon and myself eagerly jumped in. Paul volunteered to play as well. After explaining the rules, we jumped in. I started out strong but then bogged down. I was playing a little too conservatively and not pushing my economy. In this game, if you do not have enough food, you take graves. These graves take up spots and can disable buildings. But you can man a hospital to remove the graves. So it is only temporarily punishing once you bring enough food to meet the demand. It is definitely a balancing act where you want to efficiently use your workers. I tried out the forced labor building. But I wasn't that efficient in using that building either. When Jon announced that he could win the game in two turns, I scrambled madly. And it was at that point that I realized that I could use the market to get the goods I needed to also win the game. Doh! I already had one winning condition with Santa Maria. It then came down to a tie breaker. So we carefully counted unpolluted areas in our control. And I pipped Jon for the win.

Paul was definitely having problems in this game. He wasn't bringing in enough food to keep ahead of the famine level. So he started taking graves. When it was clear that he was going to lose the game, we allowed him to remove all of his graves and ignore further ones. Next, he realized that he was out of wood. In this game, it takes wood to make more wood. So we gave him a couple of freebies. Unfortunately for this game, the first game that you play is a learning experience. Your goal is to stay alive during the game. And you can't hope to win your first game unless everyone is is a newbie too.

Die Säulen von Venedig

Ed brought another new game to the table. This one looks like it has interesting bits and a bit of theme. But it also has some problems. There are cards that give you abilities and, from a hand of five, you select one, simultaneously reveal it, execute it in turn order, and then pass it to the player on your left. You do this until you run out of pylons. The cards are (generally):

• Take control of the gondolier. If a building is built on the river, then you score points.
• Take pylons and mark some of them as owned. Buildings are built on pylons. If you build on a pylon that is owned by another player, you still score all of your points, but, the other player scores three points for each of their pylons that you use.
• Take buildings from the stock. The builds come in different shapes and victory points that they generate.
• Perform the action that someone else has performed during this turn.
• If someone plays a certain type of card, then you get six points. There are three types of cards that correspond to three of the above actions.
• You can pick a person and spy on them. Take one of their cards and give them something else.
• You can cover marked pylons and not give those people any victory points. Ouch.

The problems in this game is the simultaneous reveal and guessing what others will do. Since you must build your buildings on pylons that someone has placed, another person can take up the only spot on the board if they build before you. Another problem is the power of the start player. They get to pick a person and randomly take a card from them. Another card from your hand is given back to them. Ugh. Also, your actions are limited to what cards you have in your hand. So if people upstream play cards that are not beneficial to you, then those cards are going into your hand. You must keep an eye on this during the game.

I made a couple of mistakes during this game (after post game analysis, of course). I got second place though so I wasn't too upset. Ed probably hates me because I picked on him once during the game (there was a choice of two places to cover and not give any victory points to players).

Perikles

Ahhh, I have been dying to try this game out. And Jon was nice enough to enable me. Susan also wanted to play it to decide if she wanted to buy it.

The only problem was that I played this game past my bed time. So I made a major mistake in the final round. Ugh! And when I got home and went to be at 12am, I woke up four hours later and couldn't get back to sleep. Major ugh!! I have noticed that my sleep cycle is highly fragile... Still, I had fun playing it. And want to play it again.

Another sad thing is that our gaming group do not like many Wallace games. They like Age of Steam, Volldampf, maybe Tempus, and possibly Liberté, but do not like Struggle of Empires, Byzantium, Empires of the Ancient World, Perikles, or Princes of the Renaissance.

The group went up to the usual Rivery course because there was a game day at Ed's. John also wanted to check out a comic book store after Dos Salsas. We continued our level of inaccuracy. Discs in trees...

... discs in water. That sort of thing.

Here, John putts from on top a rock in one of the more interesting holes.

Oh oh. This is not a good sign. Are they installing a mountain bike course??? I hope they don't move the disc golf course again! Or remove it for that matter...

I went to disc golf today and it was warm (high 70s/low 80s) and beautiful out. Man, this park looks different when all of the leaves and bushes have died out for winter.

What a cute little duckie with a blankie. Hello, Mr. Duckie!

Hrm, they are digging a trench along hole four. Irrigation? Electrical? Too small for a moat.

I had one good throw today on hole nine. It went a little more to the right than usual off the tee. This allowed the disc to fly down an open path to the basket. So close... Sadly, I missed the birdie.

A two mile race does not sound all that far...

... sourdough babies. Its time for a change. I am trying a new sourdough culture out. Just to see how different it is in yeast action and taste. So I went to and bought the Italian sourdoughs. There were two that came and I resurrected the Camaldoli culture.

The picture is a day after sitting in my oven with the light on (it keeps the temperature around 90 degrees). This is the third feeding (there was enough culture to go into two wide-mouth canning jars). It is interesting how there is are three, very clearly separated layers. That is the first time that I have seen that before.

A couple of days later, it is now looking very homogeneous. And it is pretty active. A three-fourths full container overflowed all over the bottom of my oven. Fun, fun.

Formidable Foes

I received Formidable Foes on a game order and had to play it. It is the third in a series of Friedemann Friese games (Fische Fluppen Frikadellen and Fearsome Floors being the first two). You have bartered with Prince Fieso and have escaped his monster, Furunkulus. Now you must fight in a dungeon!

There are 46 monsters, Prince Fieso, Furunkulus, and two treasure chests. Fighting is really simple, just roll two dice (one for the monster (2,3,3,4,4,4) and one for the player (1,1,1,2,2,3)) and subtract the player from the monster. You pay the difference in power chips and with a -1 difference you instead get one gold. Both you and the monsters have wisdom. You cannot fight wiser monsters than you. For less wise monsters that you can fight, you advance to the wisdom of the monsters level + a constant modifier (different based on the number of players). If the monster is too dumb (where you cannot get any wiser), then the monster dies of fright.

Most of the dungeon is hidden and is only revealed when you beat a monster in front of you and you can now see past it. Intersections in this dungeon are randomly determined when you can see them. So there is a little bit of variability in this game.

Because you can sometimes loose up to three power chips when you fight monsters and usually loose at least one, you must sometimes choose not to fight and rather grab some more power chips. This has the effect of stalling your progress in the game. You do not keep pace in the wisdom department. And other people are killing the monsters that you are able to kill. So there is another way to gain wisdom. And that way is to follow people and learn from them. The problem with this approach is that you only gain one wisdom point per turn.

Another equalizing mechanic is the dumbest player. Whoever has the least wisdom is the dumbest player. This mechanic is enabled after the 23rd monster enters the dungeon. The dumbest player is not in contention for winning the game. And therefore can control the dumbest monster to possibly hose other players. At the start of your turn, you can move the dumbest monster up to three chambers. As the monster walks to the new location, it can pick up a player. If the carried player passes another monster, that person is dropped off.

The game ends when both the prince and Furunkulus are killed. Your victory points are the total of the gold coins on the monsters that you have killed. This game had a lack luster first impression. It was definitely not as fun as Fearsome Floors. I will have to play it another time to see if it is worth keeping.

Himalaya

John brought Himalaya to the house and suggested it. I definitely wanted to try it out. Adam countered with Zepter. Himalaya is a simultaneous path traversal game. You program six moves during a round and then reveal it. Everyone then executes their moves in turn order. This mechanic creates a lot of conflict in this game. The two main types of conflict are in picking up resources and fulfilling resource demands. There are five resources that are ordered by priority. You always pick up one of the goods in priority order. So, if someone arrived at a spot and picked up the only good before you could, you are hosed. If they picked up a good of a color that you wanted, you are hosed. Each location on the map might possibly demand goods. The demand can be from one to three goods. The first person to arrive at the spot and drop the goods off get some choices. Other people are screwed. The choices can be to place the only statue at the spot (giving from 1 to 3 points), place men in a region (for an majority win in influence), or take some number of herds that were represented on the chit.

Three times during the game, you score for majorities in goods collected (gaining 3 victory points for each majority). And at the end of the game you compete in three contests: most points in statues, most number of herds, and most influence in the regions. The winner of the game is the person that does the best in these contests.

Unfortunately for me, this is a guessing game. And Doug was able to get to spots that I was planning on going to before me and hose me. A lot. This is essentially a guessing game where, if you guess differently than other people, you will win. Not the type of game that appeals to me.

This is a picture of the 85mm f/1.2 lens against the mirror. I took it with my 50mm f/1.4 lens. With a f/1.4 bokeh, there were three levels of focus points. I choose the middle one which was the back of the 85mm lens.

I was lucky today because we had enough players for Tichu today. This game will certainly be the last lunch game of the year.

On the first hand, I called Tichu and made it. After I made it, I learned just how lucky I was. Adam could have played over my straight. And Ed had a bomb! My Jedi mind powers were strong this hand...

I had an interesting hand later on. I was passed two bombs. I had 2222 5555 Mahjong Ace Qxxx (three lowish singles). I was seriously considering calling Tichu. I probably spent five minutes agonizing over it. But in the end, I did not. I know my Ace is not a winner and I could probably not play one of my singles before having to play the ace and/or bombs to get the lead. I would have needed help from my partner to keep playing singles to me.

You can see where the point swing happens in this game. Fortunately, our team stayed ahead the whole game...

I have been in the habit of leaving a B-B-Q surface thermometer on the grill at all times. I haven't been grilling anything lately. Instead, I have been using the grill as an oven that can get a pizza stone up to 650 degrees Fahrenheit. I looks like the poor thing couldn't stand the heat. How does that old saying go? Well, into the trash with you!

Roads and Boats

Adam wanted to play a meaty game after disc golf and Jon was the only other person interested. We decided upon Roads & Boats. Surprisingly, it was Jon's first play of it. He did come prepared though having read the rules and printed out a player aid. We decided on this 3 player map (Atlantis) but did not use it like it was designed (where the desert hexes irrigate and the light green hexes go under water).

Adam was his usual goose-thieving self and took some of Jon's mine output (an iron and a gold). Fortunately, Adam left me alone during the game. During this game, we were all rock poor. And I did not want to spend any of it building walls which could have been easily torn down (everyone was wood rich). I purposely did not extend towards Adam's section and did not build any more roads than I needed. When I built my stock market, Adam worked his way down to use it. There was really no point in trying to stop him (lots of wood can tare down walls easily). I was trying my best to speed the game up and end it soon. Unfortunately I could not end it one turn earlier and Adam was able to build some stock certificates. However in the end, we were tied in gold/coins/certificates and I out scored him in wonder points. A close game!

We tried some mini-bridge hands after that. But my brain was used up from all the previous meatiness. Adam tried to teach scoring to us but I was retaining none of it...

The group went to Wilco today. The morning was a little cold. But then an hour later, it warmed up rather nicely.

Everyone was out of sorts today. I was having problems with my release (either too early or too late). Of course, there were discs in trees today (its been a while since that has happened).

Jon climbs up to get another one. Its a lot quicker than trying to throw rocks at the disc.

John threw in a cactus. All kinds of problems today...

On the way to lunch, I saw a grass fire along the side of the road. Austin has been very dry this year.

Today it was cold out. But I still went out to disc golf. I am not going to let a little cold weather stop me. However, I still feel like this picture. Both Jo(h)ns ditched me... Sigh.

I was "working from home" today and minding my own business when I heard a police siren nearby. That's odd since my neighborhood is pretty quiet. I look out the window and see a bunch of police pointing weapons towards my neighbor's driveway. I wonder what's up?

Whatever precipitated it, they called an awful lot of squad cars in (at least nine). And a firetruck and ambulance as well. The police stood around my neighbor's truck with weapons pointed while they negotiated with him. Scary. I hope everything ended well.

Today we had five people for gaming and Mike showed up in his Cult Of the New persona with Gheos. While we listened to him read the rules, I played around with taking Doug's picture with the 85mm lens. Doug did his best to ignore me.

Gheos

This is a tile laying game with a twist. The world is composed of triangular tiles. Civilizations can be placed on the land as long as it is bigger than an island (covering more than two tiles which is called a continent) and as long as no other civilizations exist on that continent. You have three types of scoring opportunities during the game: if an epoch tile is drawn, of if you place a tile that has a temple, or if you decide to use one of your three scoring markers. In the first and last cases, you score by having shares of ownership in a civilization. If an epoch tile is drawn, then you score one point for each share of a civilization that touches a pyramid. If you place a tile that has a temple, then you score points for the corresponding type of symbols on that continent. I believe these types of scoring to be relatively minor. The last type of scoring should get you the most points compared to the others. When you choose to score, you get one point for each share in the civilization that you own. Each of those civilizations score the number of wealth symbols on the continent.

During your turn, you place a tile on the board. It is either placed as a new tile on the map, or it replaces an existing tile. Then you can either start a new civilization or take a share in an existing civilization. Finally, you can choose to play one of your three scoring markers.

Tiles can have a number of features on them. They can have one or two symbols on them. The symbols are wheat, gold cups, or swords. They may have a pyramid. Or they may have a temple that corresponds to a symbol. The land can either be shaped so that it splits continents with a river running through it or it can join continents with all land on two or three sides.

Starting new civilizations can be good. If that action is allowable, then you get a number of shares based on the amount of wheat symbols on the continent. Remember, that this action is instead of taking a share in an existing civilization. Playing a new tile on the map is free. If you replace a tile, then it will cost you a share in any of your civilizations. By replacing a tile, you can cause a couple of things to happen. You can split a civilization up. The civilization marker will go to the side with the most wheat symbols (with ties, you choose). This will weaken a civilization you may not have shares in and hurt your opponents. The other possibility is to join two civilizations. There can be only one civilization in the end though. The civilization with the most swords will win that battle. The loosing civilization is put back off the board and everyone discards their shares in that civilization.

Doug was able to split up my large civilization rather effectively and score many points in the process.

Rheinlander

Next up on the table was an older Knizia game, Rheinlander. For some reason, the group was not groking the rules when I read them. The rules were quite simple, but this translation tended to be rather verbose. And I guess that is what confused them. What was frustrating was when they would ask a question and I would answer it, they would not believe my answer. So I just handed them the rules and let them read it for themselves.

I chose to try and go after the most churches and therefore the archbishop. Unfortunately, the turn I got it, I was attacked and it was taken away. I was too spread out to try and fight for it again. The group seemed turned off this game after it was finished. So I suspect that it will be a year or more before this game comes back to the table.

Forum Romanum

To finish off the night, John was successful in convincing the group to play Forum Romanum. This is a game with simple rules but with meaty consequences. Mike was amusing during this game. At the point of the picture, his yellow senator was not in the lead but rather laying down because it was negative. So I tried to convince him to help me close out a section so that he would not score more negative points. But, towards the end, other people helped him score a number of sections and he eventually came in second (Doug and I were tied for first).

Sadly, I think that this will be the only lunch time Tichu for December (and therefore the rest of the year). I was a little worried when I drew Ed as my partner. After all, he has been notorious for "the luck of the Ed". But I shouldn't have worried. The cards were with us today. Although the points were not. It seemed that who ever called Tichu made it, but the other team scored more points. It got so reinforced, in fact, that on Ed's last Tichu call, he decided to get tricky. He has AAKK and the Phoenix and decides to play them as sequential pairs. Which Adam immediately bombs. Luckily, he leads a low pair which I was able to win with Kings. I lead a low card and Ed plays the Phoenix on top of Jon's Jack.

Yeah, right. I believe someone made a mistake. I really doubt that the "plus" version of the gasoline is 93 octane. I wonder if anyone has noticed this...

For lunch I went to the new Ikea superstore. I didn't go to shop or to look at furniture. That will have to be some other time -- but only to eat. Unfortunately for me, the restaurant is located in the middle of the store. And it takes quite the maze-like path to get there. They obviously want you to visit every nook and cranny of the store. The main path visits every square inch of the place. They do offer "shortcuts", but they are too short and do not get you any closer to the place you are trying to get to.

I finally got there and I was rewarded with a plate of Sweedish meatballs. They offer a choice of three different counts of meatballs, a side dish of new potatoes, gravy, and some lingonberry jelly. Now this is a meat and potato dish! And it was not quite what I was expecting. I would rather of had pasta instead of the potatoes. But it was good. It was amusing to hear the cashier complain about having to count the number of meatballs to determine the price. How flawed...

And for a drink, I tried out the Lingonberry soda. Which was pretty good. It was not that powerful, but subtle and refined. I probably won't eat there again. But I had to try it at least once.

I went into Austin to watch Babel with a friend. Since the theater is so near the Arboretum, I decided to have lunch at the Cheesecake Factory. With a name like that you know the desserts are going to be good. I liked this chain back when I was in Boca Raton, Florida. So I was happy when the restaurant took over the old movie theater location. The menu is positively ginormous. There is something for everyone to eat here. Of course, you must try the cheesecakes. They have a rather large selection of them as well.

While the lunch was great. The movie (Babel) sucked. Rather pointless. But there was a young, naked, Japanese woman in the picture. So it wasn't a total waste of time...

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The group went to Cat Hollow today to play disc golf. And I was out of the running from the start. However, I remained upbeat. It is not about the competition. It is about being outside with a group of friends and enjoying yourself...