Category Archives: Board Games

Card games, work, and thou

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This weekend was the Salesforce 156 Sandbox release. It was the first release I was working for, and it was pretty exciting. Friday night there was downtime and I got to monitor application errors and such after the upgrade. Then I went into work Saturday and Sunday (I live so close I figured it was easier to do that than stay at home and use VPN) in case I was needed for bug fixes.
Fortunately, the release seemed to go well. My team didn’t get any bugs and the e-release that went out yesterday seemed fairly straightforward.

In the meantime, I’ve been playing Vegas Showdown online with Tim, Greg, Mars, Dan, and Keith (though not all at the same time). Managed to win for the first time today… it came down to the last renovate where I was able to move the Space Age Sports Book next to the Fancy Lounge and score an additional 6 fame from completed diamonds… won over Tim by 1 point.

Besides that, I’ve been working a bit on the RPG Get! Card Game. The first set is going to be PSO Episode 1. I’m rather excited about it… most of the basic spells and weapons now have cards (I need to get screenshots of a couple more weapons, but then I should be good) and I have monsters up through Mines complete. I need to work on Mission and Character cards though. If I continue working at this pace, I should have a tenative base set posted for playtesting sometime next weekend.

I’ve also been sporatically opening DBZ TCG boosters (7 boxes left, which will be opened next month). The distribution overall seems rather skewed. It’s not unexpected that, out of the 36 boosters I’ve opened, I have duplicates of some rares (despite the fact that I’m still missing over 2/3 of the rares) and uncommons… but the fact that I have 6 copies of some of the common cards while I have none of some other commons and that I have 4 copies of some uncommon cards while I’m still missing about 1/4 of them makes me feel like they purposely skew towards the basic attacks (Blue, Black, Red) and certain characters (the humans, mostly) while skimping on the more interesting cards (Saiyan, Namekian, Orange attacks and non-human characters).
I suppose we’ll see how the overall distribution ends up after 10 boxes.

I need to revisit Student Wars v2 and rebalance GPA. The game still seems incredibly skewed towards kill-counter win, and that needs to be fixed. Has anyone besides me actually tried it yet?

Games!

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So despite most of today’s plans falling through (people coming up and/or heading down to San Mateo for fondue), it was still awesome and fun.

Matt came up from Sunnyvale and we soon collected a Dan, Gopi, Tao, and Raphael. Went to the mall and had tasty Chinese food and green tea smoothie, then watched Raphael play around with the projected stompy ad games, then went to the Metreon for some DDR and Beatmania.
Then we lost everyone but Dan but gained a Justin and played card games… Hecatomb (first time playing… seems like an awesome game), World of Warcraft TCG (which I think I like… but ugh, I really do not want to pick up a mainstream TCG), 3-player DBZ TCG (which gave off the impression that the game isn’t as well designed as it could be, possibly due to it not being built for multiplayer), and Race for the Galaxy (which is awesome and has elements in common with Puerto Rico/San Juan).

There should be people and games more often. Today was fun.

Also, Tim… again the issue with buying a new computer is with the amount. Over a period of a few months I undoubtedly spend the $700 or so it would cost to buy a new computer… but spending it all at once just makes it seem like a much bigger deal than it is. Also, the cards I just received were $117, but that cost is being spread out over 3 months so it’s not as bad.

Pittsburgh

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The weekend summarized in snapshots.
(Lots of photos!)


























After all that was halfprice tastiness at Fuel (they have awesome mixed drinks there!). Today was flight home. My plane arrived 50 minutes early into Las Vegas, turning a 2 hour layover into a 3 hour layover… but besides that, the trip was uneventful. Final tally of of airline abuse to the ceramics and glass I packed to bring back here: two of eight glasses broken and one of six small ceramic plates broken. Everything else survived, amazingly (including the giant Costco bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and soap as well as all the dinner plates, all the bowls, and all the silverware and knives). Huzzah.

Best weekend in a long time. Thanks again to teh Ben and Jon for picking me up at the airport.

I might eventually sort through the photos again and post some of the more portrait-like ones in portraits and/or a reselection of photos from the weekend in photos2. Would anyone be potentially intested in this? I think I’m just feeling photo deprived (besides the beach trip with brewer and dkb, this is the first serious use my camera has gotten since leaving CMU).

Tomorrow is work. Blah.

Dette er en Tittel.

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Last night was one of my best KoL nights ever. Was able to get from the airship all the way to ascending in one day. Granted, I started the day with 170 adventures, and got an extra ~75 from my pasta dishes, but still… I had amazing airship luck. Used my spooky fairy, and got all the drops I needed along the way to getting the 4 immateria and S.O.C.K. Had good luck in the castle… got enough muscle non-combats to gain 4 muscle stats while getting all the drops needed while turning the wheel to get the egg. Got slightly screwed in the hole when it took a while for the third star chart to drop (ended up with something like twice as many stars and lines as I needed), but that’s ok. My chef-in-a-box exploded just after I made my last necessary potion (yay for weird food!). Had to go back to the valley to get ‘n’s, but it only took 10 adventures to get the two I needed. Sorceress went down first try (yay thrust-smack!). Woot.

Today Vicki and David came over and we played Risk. It is incredibly scary to see an army of ~12 cannons (120+ units) marching across North America and Asia… especially when you’re the one trying to hold Asia. Oh well. Was a good game though. I don’t know if I like this style of playing (draw a card every time you conquer a country; trade in at any time during your turn; redeployment phase limited to one country’s troops across one border) or the style I played at CMU (draw one card at the end of your turn if you attacked at all; trade in at the beginning of your turn; unlimited redeployment of all troops across any distance). This style lets the game turn around really quickly… all you have to do is conquer a bunch of small countries (easy in Asia, where borders are drawn weird) and trade in to get huge armies… Vicki basically conquered the other half of Europe, North America, and Asia (or would have if I hadn’t surrendered) in one turn since she kept on getting cards and trading in. She ran out of yellow troops and had to start using green. Meh.
Oh yes, and I still get horrible defense rolls. Bleh.

I think it’s going to be my goal to post one picture in every post from now on. Not necessarily a photo… but at least some kind of image (just because I’ve been doing it lately, and it adds something to posts besides boring text).

Also adding a new page to archive all the used photos, I guess. Whee.

What else… um… graduation last night was fun, but I already wrote about that. Photos are up. You should go look at them.

Fixed my forums after they’d been dead for a couple months. Not that anyone cares, since no one ever uses them anymore. Had to actually go in and hack the database since the upgrade somehow screwed up and didn’t upgrade the tables properly (and screwed up the theme I was using). Then had to hack at the script itself a bit too. Meh. At least it works now.

Props to anyone who can identify all the “This is a title” post title languages over the past few days. I’ve just been using online translation sites. Whee. Also props to people who give me good suggestions for post titles.