Category Archives: Board Games

Moving, games, and disappointment

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Haven’t done a general life post in a while. Life goes.

People seem to like my SimSimi pillows that I brought back from Thailand.

In any case, Greg’s sister Chris recently moved to Pittsburgh for a year-long internship thing at UPitt. We spent most of the weekend helping her move things from there to here.

Nothing like helping people move to realize how much stuff people can accumulate. It’s left me and Greg with a desire to get rid of more of our things so any future move we might do isn’t nearly as painful.

In any case, after moving was done, we went to Red Robin for dinner, as I had been wanting to do for a while. Maybe I have unreasonable expectations or something for a casual restaurant, but I felt rather disappointed. Our waitress didn’t refill my tea unless I asked (and would come by and grab other people’s empty glasses and refill them), and generally seemed like she was unhappy at me. Also, my “well-done” burger came out terrifyingly red in the middle. (Not even sure how a burger that thin could manage to be that undercooked.) By that point, I was feeling unhappy enough that I just wrapped it up and took it home instead of asking it to be fixed. And then reheated burger is never that good… managed to eat it tonight, somehow. But kind of a disappointment for something I’d been looking forward to.

In any case, today we had some more board games.


Besides Ingenious, which seems to be getting popular on game nights and is one of Greg’s favorite games, and My Happy Farm, which I think has become my favorite “quick” game choice, we also played Puerto Rico for the first time in a while. There was also a lot of 7 Wonders (with Max and Yubin’s set that we’re holding on to until they return from getting married), which is quickly becoming one of my more favorite games… perhaps it will be time to buy a copy in the near future.

This upcoming week will be interesting. On call for work while I’m spending Friday being driven to a wedding in Connecticut, then on call all weekend while I’m there and on a train to Boston. With luck, nothing will happen. Without luck… well, at least I’ll always be at most 30 minutes away from an internet connection.

Food, Kickstarter, cards, and thou (but not really)

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Life goes. Yay life.

I’ve started cooking again, which I think is a sign that I am generally happier. This is a good thing. Here’s a couple of the things I’ve made in the past few days (when I, unfortunately, neglected to get pictures of any of it). I’m still using organic and local ingredients when possible, so I made it all with organic chicken, organic eggs, organic carrots, and locally-grown zucchini. I feel like I’m eating better that way. Yay.

Chicken “Parmesean”

2 chicken breasts, sliced in half lengthwise
1 egg
1c breadcrumbs
1/2 jar pasta sauce
1/2 box whole wheat spaghetti
4 slices of cheese (I used extra sharp cheddar)

Dip chicken breasts in egg, then liberally coat with breadcrumbs. Brown both sides in a skillet over medium heat. Move to a baking pan, top with a little sauce (not enough to even cover each piece) and place cheese on top. Bake at 400 degrees for 40 minutes. Serve over spaghetti with remaining sauce.

Chicken and rice and veggies

2 chicken breasts, sliced in half lengthwise
1/2 package frozen mixed vegetables
1c dry rice
1/2 zucchini, sliced
2 carrots, peeled and sliced
Spices to taste (I used an Indian Curry blend from Giant Eagle)

Cover chicken in spices and bake at 375 degrees for 30 minutes.
Add frozen vegetables to rice with 2c water. (You can also add some herbs and it comes out very tasty.) Bring to a boil, then simmer on low heat for ~20 minutes until done.
Put carrots and zucchini in a bowl, add a little water, cover, and microwave for 4 minutes on high.
Serve chicken with rice and vegetables.

They’re both really low effort to make (throw stuff together and surf the web while it all cooks) and are much healthier than eating out due to lack of added oil, salt, and sugar.

In other, non-food news, I have been exploring the awesomeness that is Kickstarter recently. I’ve already pledged to three board games (all of which succeeded), and am contemplating pledging a fourth.

  • Ground Floor looks kind of like Puerto Rico, except it has elements of placement like Agricola, which are two of my favorite games. It also looks like it has a good theme.
  • My Happy Farm is a *lot* of fun, and I’m sad it didn’t get more support. I already received and played the print-and-play version, and it’s a very cute, very entertaining game that is a good time-filler while you’re waiting for people to show up or finish other games.
  • Pixel Lincoln looks like a very interesting deck-building game. I tend to like deck-building games (Dominion is good, Rune Age is better, and Ascension is… interesting), and this looks like a very interesting twist on one.
  • Currently looking at Flash Point, which Greg has apparently played at Yubin’s before, and which has excellent reviews online. Still I don’t particularly need to spend another $65. We will see. The only cooperative board game I’ve played previously is Pandemic, and I find that to be a little too fiddly.

Each game also comes with a lot of awesome extras (like Ground Floor coming with an entire extra game, or Pixel Lincoln coming with a bunch of extra cards), which makes supporting through Kickstarter more than worthwhile.

Also been starting up on People Wars again, after a hiatus following Carnival (and the last expansion). I always like working on my card games, and always find it interesting to look back at my card game history and seeing how they’ve evolved.
In particular, since People Wars represents the fifth iteration of the same basic game, it’s interesting to see how it’s been refined over the years (8 years now!), and to look at how certain things have worked (dual characters, storage cards, working on GPA/tasks) and other things haven’t (trigger text, group nodes, division of characters into primary affiliations).
I suppose it’s kind of sad, but I still consider the PPA TCG/Student Wars/People Wars game series to be one of my most fulfilling accomplishments. Sometimes I wish I had the skill (or luck?) to work on card games as a career, but I also enjoy my current job, and my current job probably pays the bills far better. (Likewise with photography, although I haven’t felt urges to do that professionally for a while.)

So yeah. This post has gotten far too long and contains far too many words. Have a picture of My Happy Farm

and a card from the upcoming People Wars expansion

Meme: KoL and board games

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There was a Pittsburgh marathon a while ago. I failed to post photos from that. Here’s a Chris and bblum.

Continuing meme topics, we have KoL and board games.

With most video games, I tend to go through phases of obsession followed by periods of general disinterest (and, if they have enough social pull, I go back to being obsessed). I went through this with PSO, and I go through this with KoL.
KoL, as a game, is awesome, but extremely repetitive (much like PSO, actually)… once you get reasonably good at the game, you just do the same few things over and over every 5 or 6 days. But a couple things make it worthwhile… first is that the devs are extremely involved in the game and therefore new updates (or world events) happen fairly frequently. These are usually extremely fun and interesting and break up the normal grind of the game. And there are also seasonal challenge paths which change the core of the game (either slightly or drastically, depending on the path). And those are always pretty awesome.
Second, it’s always fun to talk to people about the game. My periods of inactivity in KoL roughly correspond to times when I know people that play. For example, I played a lot in undergrad when most of the housing group played (at least casually). And I play a lot more now since I know a few people that play (and talk to them about new paths and items pretty regularly).
I suppose sometimes the world events bother me though, because I somehow feel obligated to participate or I’ll miss a one-time item. I was burned out of the game back when they released the Haunted Sorority House clan dungeon for Halloween, and somehow forced myself to finish the run I was in and get some dungeons completed. In retrospect, I’m glad I did, because there were a bunch of awesome things that can no longer be obtained, but that probably just reinforces the requirement that I play when I sometimes don’t want to. That’s the downside of having invested so much time (and real-life money in the form of donations) into a game, I suppose.
But in general, I think KoL is pretty awesome. It also limits the number of turns you have per day, which means I don’t have to obsess over it and spend as much time as possible playing.
I think I’m approaching a period of inactivity again in the game, since the new challenge path isn’t too appealing to me and I’m going to be out of the country for a month. But it was still fun.

Board games are one of those things I wasn’t really into before college. The group of friends I lived with liked board games, and they were fun, and I liked being social, so I kind of got into board games. (In high school, I was much more about video games, but those seem to hold little to no appeal to me now.)
I suppose they’re good because they involve a lot of social interaction and are (usually) short (so you can play a lot of different games in one sitting) and there are so many options so you’ll always find something that you like.
With the absence of Tim, I’ve been trying to build up a meager board game collection so I can have people over to play them. It’s unfortunate most of the good ones are so expensive.
I’m not sure that I really have a preferred type of game, or even a favorite one. If you count card games as board games, then I generally am a fan of TCGs (creating and collecting and playing). But as far as actual board games, I’ll play anything from quick pointless games (Pokemon dice game!) to long strategy games (Through the Ages) and enjoy pretty much everything inbetween.

San Francisco

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I am in San Francisco through Friday. Yay San Francisco.
Photos!


Plane. Yay plane.

Southwest in Vegas has these nice ceiling-mounted boarding signs instead of the poles they have at other airports. I think these are nicer.

There’s a tech company ad on the BART based on insanity wolf. This is rather… bizarre.

Sunday dinner, as always, was all-you-can-eat pizza at Local. This time I went with Ian, Trisha, Ben, and Mark.

Afterward, we went to Jeremy’s for games.

Monday dinner was Stone with teisenbe and Kempy.

Dinner tonight was Xanh in Mountain View with jgrafton, Jack, Krieger, Ben, dfontain, Gopi, Raphael, and Erik.

Life

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Life has been up and down lately. Mostly down. Mostly due to work and (sometimes) feeling like I’m drowning in work and that there’s always so much work to do that I will never finish it all.
I guess I also feel bad because the poor QAs on our team are super stressed. And because Greg is super stressed. I really have no right to complain about anything given how horribly busy Greg *actually* is, whereas I have the luxury of 9-5 hours and being able to go do non-work things and keep myself from going crazy.

But that is not good to think about. So let’s not talk about that.

This weekend there were games. There was a very interesting 3-player game of Power Grid where 4 of the high-level green plants were removed from the game and all of the high numbered plants came out early. The result was much unhappiness and a resource track that actually became completely depleted at one point. There was also an interesting game of Carcassone where all of the large city pieces came out at the end, resulting in a 12-point unfinished city for Keith.

Oh yeah, which means that I bought Power Grid last week. It was a good purchase, and I’m very happy with it. I also ordered a copy of Puerto Rico‘s anniversary edition (with nicer pieces) that should be here in a week or two. Board games are nice things to buy, because spending time with people and being social is an awesome thing.

If anyone has suggestions for other games to buy, I will gladly accept them.

The new People Wars expansion set is out. I like the new templates with the larger images. Your mileage may vary.

So yeah. I guess stuff goes.