Hello and good Monday to you all. It is that time when we blog.

I forgot to post last Friday’s installment of Bandit Baby. I remember remembering that on Saturday but given that it’s still not posted, I apparently forgot about it almost instantly after. I’ll post it tonight.

My goal for the past few years has been to bike to work until the end of November. Why until then? Well, it’s getting colder obviously, but it’s also getting darker earlier. I don’t feel safe biking in the dark.

At any rate, to date I have never achieved that goal as something has always happened to keep me from doing so. Either it was a flat tire with no spare, or the time I crashed and wrecked my knee, or just an early snowfall. I’ve yet to make it. That will hopefully change this year. I’m entering the last stretch. Barring any rainy (or snowy) days, I have just five work days left. I think I can, I think I can.

I woke up at 3am on Sunday morning and couldn’t go back to sleep. What did I do? I played Dungeons & Dragons Online of course. I figured a quest or two and I’d be good. The next thing I knew it was past noon. Time flies and all that business. I hit Level 12! I may succeed in capping out a character in an MMORPG that isn’t DC Universe Online (which at the time you could cap out in a weekend).

My boardgamegeek Secret Santa sent me two new board games this year: Ghost Stories and Lords of Waterdeep. We tried Ghost Stories on Friday and it’s HARD! In three tries we never even got to the halfway mark.

Ghost Stories is a cooperative game for 1-4 players. Each player controls a Taoist monk trying to save their village from being overrun by ghosts and the evil incarnation of Wu-Feng. To banish a ghost, a player has to roll a number of color symbols equal to the ghost’s resistance with three dice (the green monk can have a fourth die depending on the special power he chooses). To help them, they can acquire tokens of the appropriate color. Actually in some cases you HAVE to acquire those tokens because some of the ghosts have a resistance of greater than 3.There are nine villager locations that can help the players out but if the ghosts are left too long, they’ll scare the villagers away. The game ends when either Wu-Feng is defeated the appropriate number of times according to the difficulty level chosen (the players win) OR the monks are all dead at the same time (the players lose) OR three villagers get scared away (the players lose) OR the last ghost in the deck enters play before Wu-Feng can be defeated (the players lose). Wu-Feng always appears as the tenth to last card but the incarnation is chosen at random and the ghosts are shuffled too so you never know what order they’ll come out in. The players can be overwhelmed pretty quickly if they don’t have a good strategy and so far…we haven’t found that strategy. We’ll have to keep trying.

That’s all for this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday! Carja V.