Samantha Carter = Hot.
Alternate timeline nerdy Samantha Carter = Super hot!
May 2005 Archives
And this weekend I got to play a lot! First there was Pikmin 2, which I beat on Friday afternoon. Then Billy and Kalin came over and we went to the Sunnyside McMenamins for burgers and beers (oh, and we ordered an extra basket of fries after we finished our meals, because they’re just that good!) Went back to our place and watched the two-part season finale of Stargate SG1. Played some more Pikmin, went to bed.
On Saturday afternoon, Dave and Scott came over to play some boardgames. Scott was running a little late, so Dave, Kara and I played Zirkus Flohcati while we waited. Once he showed up, we played Puerto Rico. I won, but no great feat since Dave only vaguely recalled the rules, Scott was new to German games, and Kara was sick! After PR, Kara was down for the count and retired to the couch. We three boys continued, and played Drakon and Daytona 500. Drakon was only ok... I always feel like that game just barely works, and I’ve actually seen it completely break on one occasion. It’s definitely just a filler game, but it seems too mean-spirited to even do that well... Daytona 500, however, was better than I remembered; somehow I forgot that it’s so fraught was difficult decisions (though I don’t know how I did, since that’s Knizia’s trademark).
On Sunday, Billy and Kalin came back over and we played outside all day. First, copious amounts of fetch with Cooper, then lunch at the park, then baseball at the school down the street from our house. After we tired of smacking the wiffle ball with the giant orange plastic bat, we walked back to my car (we had driven to the store and the park before arriving at the school, otherwise we probably would have just walked there since it was so close). We all got in the car except Billy, who was still throwing the Frisbee around. I started the car and thought it would be funny to slowly drive away while Billy tried to get in. But instead of trying, Billy turned around and started running back toward our house!
A race!! I popped the car in gear and sped through the parking lot and pulled out onto the street with only a cursory glance for traffic. At this point Billy was already across the street and starting to turn at our intersection! I hurried to the intersection and turned left onto our street (again with far less caution than I would normally use) and then bombed down the street to our driveway. Billy had the head start and didn’t have to worry about traffic, yet the three of us in the Tempo arrived at our house the victors! In your face, running!
More fetch with Cooper and lazing around outside while listening to Radiohead’s Amnesiac. Once B&K left, Kara and I watched the second part of “evil” Enterprise (nice idea, now maybe if it had a point...) and the season premiere of Family Guy. Kara fell asleep halfway through American Dad, so I was free to watch Deadwood! Afterward, I realized that the second half of the third season of Curb Your Enthusiasm was now on OnDemand, so I binged and watched all 5 in a row. In bed at 1:30am, a weekend well done.
I remember that fateful night as clearly as it were yesterday. We were sitting around at Cindy’s house and TJ & Michelle pulled out a boardgame that I had never heard of. That game was none other than The Settlers of Catan. I was instantly floored by it; this was exactly the kind of game I dreamed of!
Before Catan, the only Euro game I had ever played was Mille Bornes, and I loved it for the strategy and theme. I used to think “I wish there were more games like Mille Bornes” but every time I saw games on the store shelf, they looked more like Monopoly than Mille Bornes... Of course, I had no idea what a Euro game was, else I might have had a chance of finding more. But along came Catan and my eyes were opened.
As soon as we finished that first game of Catan, we started another. And then as soon as I got home, I started searching on the internet for more information. I stumbled across rec.games.board, and the rest is history. Holy crap! I actually just found my original first post to the newsgroup, it gives me serious chills to find this and read it again! Wow...
Anyway, that started a serious buying frenzy as I wandered wide-eyed through this newfound treasure-trove of entertainment. As I said in that thread, I ended up buying Bohnanza and Tigris & Euphrates. Bohnanza is still one of my favorite games, and one that I turn to time and time again to help introduce non-gamers to the realm. T&E, however, was far too deep for the people I was gaming with, so I eventually traded it off.
As for the people... First, I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that Kara too enjoyed these games. However, you can’t play Settlers with only two players (trust me, we tried and tried and tried) and since we were new to Seattle, we didn’t know anyone, let alone anyone that wanted to play boardgames! So, I looked up Seattle game groups on BoardGameGeek and discovered Peter Sarrett’s group. Funny thing, I had no idea when I emailed him that he was a bit of a gaming celebrity, what with his magazine, The Game Report, and a published game under his belt (and not just any game, but Time’s Up, the best party game out there). All I knew about him was that he ran a weekly game group.
Gaming at Peter’s was exactly what I was looking for! First off, the guys were all really nice (Nate, Damon, Michael, Peter) and I got to try tons of new games. Peter’s game collection was absolutely huge, and so every game night I’d leave having found another game or two that I wanted to buy. But if I was going to be buying my own copies of these games, I’d need some people to play them with! I started meeting guys at UW, and I recruited them into our little game group. My two very successful converts were Phil and Nolan. They’d come over nearly every time I’d send a “games tonight?” email, and then we’d play for hours and hours. There were others that came and went (K.D., Brad aka ‘Windopaene’, the Claesons, and some other scary dude that only came once), but Phil & Nolan were my mainstays.
And then we all graduated, and Phil & Nolan moved to other cities. Now I was sitting on a sizable collection of games, with no game group to speak of. And so it stayed for a year or so. Every once in a while I was able to play a game when Dave or TJ would come to visit, but I definitely wasn’t getting to use my collection the way I wanted to! Eventually I floated the idea of a game night to some of my coworkers at MS, and after a few attempts I was able to persuade a few to come over. Brett & Jess were the big converts from that attempt (they got their own copy of Catan and played a few different games when they came down a few weeks ago). The seeds of the new game group were planted, but it wasn’t meant to be because we ended up moving back to Portland (Brett just told me a few days ago that he and Jess met up with Rich and Hilary to play Settlers. He made it sound like it might become a weekly thing, so it sounds like the new game group might go on without us!)
And now that we’re back in Portland, I’ve got both Dave and TJ nearby to fill the seats. The last three months in Portland have been more game-filled than probably all of the last year! The proselytizing has continued as well, as I’ve gotten Scott and Katie to try Settlers, and Scott has already come back for more! This renewed game action has really started getting me excited about the hobby again, and I’ve been visiting BoardGameGeek and Funagain a ton lately looking around at all the hot games that have come out in the past year. I’ve also started sending out feeler emails to a few people with advertised game groups in the area. I’d prefer to get my own group going, but there’s no better way to meet other area gamers than to attend other groups as well.
My extensive time over at BoardGameGeek recently has got me listening to the GeekSpeak internet radio program, which I’ve been enjoying. I’d heard rumblings about it on Defective Yeti and Static Zombie but hadn’t had the motivation to start listening until a few days ago. It’s pretty neat hearing them talk to the industry leaders because the game industry is such a small world. When I went to the Gathering of Friends a few years ago, I met a lot of these people and it’s just a neat thing, this web of gamers and designers.
Well, there you have it... My history in the realm of the German game. Initially this post was just going to be me pointing out the new ‘Board Game List’ link on the right sidebar, but it ballooned into so much more! I’m guessing there are few, if any, that will make it through the whole thing, but lately I’ve been using Less Than Me more as a diary of sorts. But, yeah, the new link! It’s a list of all the board games I own (I generously included my American games as well) and each one links to the BoardGameGeek entry. If I’ve piqued the interest of any of you, definitely contact me! I’d be more than happy to suggest good starter games and even teach them to you if you’re in the Portland area.
Game on!
This weekend was our first trip up to Seattle as visitors... Brett had his new laptop shipped to our place (for tax evasion purposes) which gave us a good reason to drive up there. We got there on Friday night; Kara went to visit with Layla and I got dropped off at Brett’s. Brett and I played a bunch of Halo 2 until Carlton came over, then we sat around and talked and watched some TV. Kara came back and promptly fell asleep, Carlton left and Brett and I fired back up the Halo 2 machine.
Got up late on Saturday morning and picked up lunch at Paseo. (Best. Sandwiches. EVER.) After lunch, we introduced Cities & Knights of Catan to Brett and Jess; they liked it and wanted to play it again, but we never got the time... After Catan, we planned an impromptu party and went to the store to get supplies. With the night planned and shopping done, it was time for a nap...
Around 7pm, people started showing up (Chris, Kieran, Ritchie, Ben, Carlton, & Sindy). We ordered tons of food from Mandarin Chef and porked out! After a couple of hours, we decided to go out to Jillian’s, which is a giant bar that has pool tables, ping pong, and lots of arcade machines. We met up with Nicole, Aldo, and his lady friend and hung out there for the rest of the night. I played Mrs. Pac man, raced Brett at NASCAR (he won), shot some zombies in House of the Dead, and got fourth place on Centipede (JDF forever, baby!)
We left early on Sunday morning so that we’d be back for the Mother’s Day events. My mom cooked dinner for her mom, and we freeloaded on that meal (literally the best salmon I’ve ever had). I gave my mom The Phantom of the Opera DVD and, as a joke, I wrote in the card: “Like the mask that covers the hideously disfigured half of the phantom’s face, so has your love covered me.” I expected a slightly amused snort, but it cracked up the whole place in a “this is so weird, WTF is wrong with you” kind of way... mission accomplished. Then we met up with Kara’s family at Ya Hala’s and had some delicious Lebanese food.
Home by 8:30 and dead tired. We let Cooper in and let him run around while we watched the new Family Guy... and then to bed at 10pm. I got 9 hours of sleep but I’m still tired... which, I guess, means it was a good weekend!
Monday night, TJ & Michelle came over to play games... We warmed up with Zikus Flohcati, and then taught them Dampfross. We played on the smallest map (Ireland) and it went pretty well (I won). My only complaint was that track building died out WAY too early in the game. I think it was due to the smallness of the map, but we were all essentially cut out of certain regions of the island. So, we were stuck with the areas we initially built in, and the game became only about the races. Still fun (I love that negotiation phase where people decide teams and routes for races), but I would have liked more difficult ‘to build or not to build’ decisions. Oh, and I really need to make a deck of cards to determine race cities instead of using the crappy dice method...
Last night was movie night. Scott, Katie, Dave, & Billy came over to watch The Phantom Menace. I haven’t seen this movie for quite some time, and I was reminded of how bad it really is. And not bad in a ‘failed to meet up to expectations’ kind of way, but bad in a ‘bloated, boring, and messy’ kind of way. The movie definitely has its high points (the pod race and final lightsaber duels were exhilarating) but I was honestly bored through most of it. Yes, Jar-Jar is a disaster, but even without him the movie would have been a mess. So, I guess it was good to refresh on the events leading up to Revenge of the Sith, but I should have just read the Cliffs Notes instead...
I love trading games... Settlers, Bohnanza, Traders of Genoa, etc. But I also love trading games... as in trading one game for another game. In the past I used rec.games.board.marketplace to arrange trades and I’ve gotten a number of excellent out of print games for my effort (Wildlife Adventure, Daytona 500, the original version of Medici). But the last few times I’ve posted my trade list I’ve gotten zero responses...
BoardGameGeek has become the new trade finder, and it’s actually pretty slick. You make a list of games you have and a list of games you want, and then click ‘Find Trades’ and you get a list of users who match up with you. Because I entered all of my games last week to make this list, I was able to find new trades out there! One guy contacted me about trading his Can’t Stop for my Tikal. He lives in Portland, so we met today at Coffee People to make the exchange. I also contacted a guy about trading my Clippers for his Lord of the Rings. He asked if I would be willing to part with Union Pacific instead and he’d give me Lord of the Rings AND both expansions!! I mailed UP off today (this guy lives in Massachusetts) and should be receiving LotR sometime next week.
So, I got rid of two games I didn’t like and got 2+ games that I really wanted, and I only had to pay to ship Union Pacific, which was less than ten bucks!
Shers gowwn tor hervern scho i gottabe goord...
e*** sent me down to San Jose this week to take a class at Xilinx. But, I flew down a few days early so that I could play in Cali. While there, I went to Games Day XXXVIII, Paramount's Great America, watched Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, oh and also learned some stuff about embedded development! I've got more in-depth entries hand written on the stuff I did and I'll be typing and posting them in the next few days. Stay tuned!
When I landed in Cali on Saturday, I got my rental car and went to my hotel. I took a short nap, and then went to Games Day in Los Altos. I showed up there around 5:30pm, and didn’t leave until almost midnight! I met a couple of really nice guys, Rick & Eric, and gamed with them the whole evening.
We played:
Around the World in 80 Days: This one was fun enough to play again, but I definitely wouldn’t buy it. There really wasn’t much to the game, and the end-game goal makes sense thematically, but didn’t seem to work well as a game mechanic...
Web of Power: This was one of the games I brought down for the event, not much to say about this game, except that I love it because it’s so elegant. I need to pull this one out more often (which is easy to do, since it plays so fast!)
Ra: I’m not a big fan of auction games, this one included... This play through, I felt like I really had a handle on the values of tiles and therefore had a better idea of when to declare ‘RA’ or when to sweeten the pot. This is one of the games that I own, and am on the fence about whether to keep it or not.
Klunker: A cute card game where you buy, sell, and collect jewelry. It seemed pretty light but had, I thought, some pretty weird/confusing rules. I followed it just fine, but a newb playing with us was pretty confounded. It seems like it could be a mass market game, but doesn’t play like it.
Lost Valley: As the rules were being described, I said “this sounds Goldland-y.” I was right, and it has the same problems as Goldland. It’s funny, because these types of games always initially appeal to me, exploration, harvesting, using different tools, etc. They sound like they’ll be tons of fun to play, but they turn out to be kind of boring in execution. I think the problem is, players have too many options and they spend too much time trying to find the best possible move to make. As we were starting the game, I thought “this might finally be the exploration game I’ve been looking for.” By the end of the game, I knew it wasn’t...
And, so how did I do at these games? I got second in every single one! Seeing that 3 of them were new and I was playing with people that had played them before, I felt pretty good about my performance!
Put this baby in a batch file and use it to open files regardless of what subdirectory they are in:
for /F "usebackq delims==" %%i IN (`dir /s /b %1`) DO start notepad %%i
Last Sunday I went to Paramount’s Great America, here are my impressions of the rides (and how many times I rode each one):
Top Gun (x3) – An inverted coaster (rail above you, feet dangling) and probably the best ride at the park. The ride seems so fast and smooth; spiraling just above the lake was a blast!
Psycho Mouse (x2) – Mouse coasters hold a special place in my heart since Mad Mouse at Oaks Park was my first rollercoaster. This one was excellent, the hairpin turns at high heights made me cringe (and squeal) and the drops were gut wrenching.
The Demon (x3) – An older ride that hits all the stops and is made immensely better by the theme/terrain. The first drop goes straight into two loops followed by a second drop that ends in a double corkscrew. Good... but the caves!! Directly after the second loop, the coaster goes into a barely tall enough tunnel (it looks like it’s going to chop your head off!) The second tunnel starts at the end of the second drop, right when the corkscrew starts. As you emerge from the tunnel, you are sideways and there’s a waterfall RIGHT next to your head! It really freaked me out since I couldn’t see where I was going and I definitely wasn’t expecting water!
The Grizzly (x1) – Mark this down as the last wooden rollercoaster I’ll ever ride. These oldies are SERIOUS gut shakers; they’re intense because they’re painful! I almost didn’t go on this one because of my previous experience with woodies, but I thought this time might be different... nope. Pain.
Vortex (x2) – A stand-up coaster, too shaky and rough for my tastes. It wasn’t as bad as The Grizzly, but it hurt too much to be fun... The only reason I rode this one twice was because I was distracted on the first ride when my headphones popped off!
SpongeBob 3D (x1) – A 3D SpongeBob movie with motion seats; it was fun but short. The best part was the bicycle ride through downtown Bikini Bottom; I really felt like I was there!
Invertigo (x1) – This baby is intense! It’s an inverted boomerang coaster with a loop & the half turny thingy that is common on these types. The insane thing is you return through the loops going backwards! I have never felt such weird sensations; I’d think the loop was over and then my guts would get pulled in a new and weird direction! I would have ridden this one more than once, but it was broken down for most of the day...
We went over to Scott & Katie’s place on Friday night to play some games. We played Settlers of Catan (Kara won AGAIN with longest road and largest army... I’ve really got to keep her from doing that again!) and the newly acquired Lord of the Rings. We lost and didn’t even make it to Mordor, but it was a lot of fun! That game just GLOWS when the fellowship is nearly lost and everyone is frantically struggling to stay alive.
On Saturday, TJ & Michelle came over to... you guessed it, play games! We played LotR (we won too easily, which made it less exciting), Mama Mia, Adel Verpflichtet, and Can’t Stop. At 6pm, we went to McMenamin’s Pub 205 to meet friends for my birthday dinner. We were waiting for a large table to open up in the back, but ended up just taking over a medium sized table in the front of the restaurant as people showed up (the full list of attendees: me, Kara, Billy, Kalin, Reese, Monica, JP, TJ, Michelle & her unnamed fetus); burgers, extra fries, and plenty of beer! Afterward, the Arkos and the Kennemers came back to our place to hottub and watch Star Wars: The Clone Wars (an animated series that takes place between episodes 2 & 3).
On Sunday (my birthday, yay!) Dave took us to see Revenge of the Sith and then out for lunch at Chevy’s! The movie was pretty darn good; it was the movie we’ve been wanting all along. Anakin’s initial turn to the dark side was a little unbelievable (to me, Dave disagrees) but once the decision was made, the downward spiral made sense. After the movie and lunch, we went to our house to... PLAY GAMES! First Can’t Stop, then LotR (we won, and this time it was pretty close). My family came over to do the birthday thing, I got Dark Side of the Moon, The Incredibles, and a new Elmore Leonard book that I didn’t even know was out!! Pizza, Cake, MXC, the shorts on The Incredibles DVD, some chatting, then the fam took off. Dave had said he wanted to play LotR again, and I did too, so we pulled it back out and this time played with the Friends & Foes expansion. We were in a bad situation for most of the game, and ended up JUST BARELY winning with a military victory (we defeated all of the foes instead of taking the ring to Mordor).
This weekend goes down in the record books as the best birthday weekend ever!! So many games, a good Star Wars(!), extra fries (and beer) at McMenamin’s, friends, family, awesome presents, and yummy spice cake with penuche frosting! Thanks all, for a very special weekend! (I think I wore out the ‘!’ button on my keyboard with this post!)
I’ve been listening to a bunch of Geek Speak lately (still catching up) and they always wrap up their shows by asking their guest what their favorite game is for each number of players and an overall top 3... I came up with a list of my own, here it is:
Best game for 2 players: Lost Cities
Best game for 3 players: Web of Power
Best game for 4 players: Cities and Knights of Catan
Best game for 5 players: Traders of Genoa
Best game for 6 players: Showmanager
Best party game for 6+ players: Time’s Up!
Overall Top 3:
Settlers of Catan
Taj Mahal
Traders of Genoa
Bought some new games recently:
Billy asked me today how many games I have... I checked my list, and with the new acquisitions from the weekend, I have exactly 100 games! Not coincidently, I spent a good chunk of yesterday rearranging my collection to get it to fit in the cabinet and the overflow closet...
Here's to the next 100!
