Greetings and salutations. It’s time to blog!

I got caught in the rain again today. The rain by itself or the cold by itself would have been fine on their own, but combined, they were a fighting force terrible to behold. It wasn’t a true schlorping as one would have expected, but still wet enough. There’s a certain amount of irony in needing to take a shower because you got caught in the rain. At least, I think it’s irony. Popular music and the backlash against such has me second guessing myself on this point.

This past weekend was the annual giant sidewalk sale. It used to be that I could reasonably expect to find a number of treasures hidden in the junk. I’m a little more discriminating as to what constitutes a treasure now so for that past few years, I haven’t walked away with very much. This year, however, I scored one of those hoped for treasures. Back when I was about six or seven, I got a Disney LP of three stories featuring the Three Little Pigs. I may have discussed this very record before here. It was one of my very favorite records. I still have my original copy to this day, but it’s in a poor state and I long lost the album cover/book that came with it. It’s one of the records I put on my wish list on discogs, because I wanted a better copy. You can see where this is going. At one table, I saw a small stack of children’s records. I expected to find the same old copies of Disney records I already had, but there at the bottom of the pile, was the Three Little Pigs record I’d been waiting to find! I asked how much, and was told $5, which for a sidewalk sale seemed a bit high, but considering the rarity of the thing, it was a price I was very much willing to pay. So now I have a very good condition copy. Score!

I ran into Frank and Melanie during the sidewalk sale and we made plans to get together that evening to either go see a movie (Warcraft was discussed) or get some gaming in. We did settle on going to the movies, but rather than see Warcraft (the next available showing was in accursed 3D), we chose to see the new Ninja Turtles movie. Actually, we hemmed and hawed and kept passing the buck to each other to pick a movie until finally I just said, “Okay, we’re going to see Ninja Turtles!” And to my great surprise, it was pretty good. By no means a great movie, but quite entertaining. We did not regret the choice.

I watched Zootopia prior to going out and it was also very good. I really liked the character designs. One of the directors cited Robin Hood as one of his early influences and it showed (I love that movie). The story was pretty solid and I have no real complaints about the movie. Oh, I guess there’s the music. I didn’t care for Shakira’s song. It’s the first time in a long time where I didn’t like the songs in a Disney movie so that’s saying something.

I picked up Broom Service on Friday. The rulebook was a little long to read before game day, so I’ll have to wait until next week to give you all my thoughts. It’s an award winning game that supposedly scales down well to two players which is a big plus for me.

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

Hi there! Ready for some blog? Let’s get to it.

We had our first campfire get together this past weekend. It was a nice couple of hours with friends even if we no longer have the stamina to stay up as last as we used to.

Star Wars Carcassonne and Star Wars Timeline came in last week. I got to play Carcassonne with my mom and I thought it was solid. Instead of abbeys, you lay down planet tiles. Instead of cities, you build asteroid fields and instead of roads, you build trade routes. There’s no equivalent to building fields which my friend tells me is for the best, since they made the game much more swingy. The other big difference with the original Carcassonne is that instead of sharing points for having meeples in the same scoring area, there’s a combat mechanism where the winner scores all the points and the loser only gets points equal to the number of dice they rolled in the fight (two dice for the big meeple, one die for the regular meeples and an extra die if there’s a symbol (equivalent of shields in the original) matches your affiliation to a maximum of three dice per player. Each player rolls and keeps their highest die. The player who rolled highest wins. In our game, there was only one combat and I won, but still ended up losing. So I won the battle but lost the war. My mom thought the game was decent, but she said she wouldn’t want to play more than once in an evening while I could see myself playing a few games in a row. It’s pretty mellow. An expansion is set to be released sometime this year which will add a sixth player and new scoring tiles. I’ll definitely pick it up. Having now played, I can see just how heavily Galaxy of Trian borrowed from Carcassonne in its design.

I had a feeling that Star Wars Timeline would be too easy for me and it looks like I was right. If they hadn’t limited themselves to scenes from the original trilogy and added stuff from the expanded universe, there might have been some challenge to it, but with just the movies, it doesn’t look to be a challenge at all. Even casual fans should find it pretty simple with only a couple of card coming close to being able to trip someone up. If you recognize which movie the card is, the game has a chance to play itself, especially for a small group. I don’t regret buying it, because I still think it’s a cool idea.

Moving on to Animus stuff, any thoughts on the latest mash-up theme? Any guesses on which video games with be featured? Todrick should be the easiest one to guess.

I guess that covers all I have to say for this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. Carja V.

Hey there sports fans. Thanks for dropping by this non-sports related website. Glad to have you. Just please, no spam. 🙂

So this morning I woke to the sight of snow on the ground. And it didn’t just fall during the night. It snowed throughout the morning as well. This is unusual even for Canada! I biked to work all the same and while it was better than if it had been raining, I could have done without it all the same. Things are supposed to get warmer on Wednesday. We shall see about that. Oh yes, we shall see. And upon seeing it we will know that it was seen for we will have seen it! Oh yes. Seeing.

I burned through that last of my Bandit Baby buffer on Friday. That meant I had to kick myself into gear and draw a strip for next week. I’ll need to be good about that from here on out because I don’t foresee building a new buffer, even with the end of the series in sight.

I don’t know what it is about my phone, but I seem to miss a lot of text notifications. I turn the sound off when I go to work and I pretty much forget to turn it back on when I’m at home. When I have it in my pocket I don’t always feel it vibrate so I won’t know if someone has texted me. This made me miss out on an opportunity to go out on Saturday. Curse you ineffective vibration settings!

I tried 10,000 on Friday. Fans of games like Yahtzee will enjoy it. The goal of the game is to reach exactly 10,000 points (it’s a lot faster than it sounds). You roll six dice and set any dice that score aside (1’s and 5’s always score, other than that it takes 3, 4, 5 or six of a kind OR if you’re extremely lucky, if you roll a straight in one go). You can push your luck and roll the rest again, but if none of those dice score you get nothing and your turn is done. If all six dice score you HAVE to roll at least one more time, risking it all. If you stop with two dice left, you get your points, but the next player can try to build off of your score for the round. If they roll a die that scores, they add it to the score you received last round and can keep going. If they don’t, their turn is up. Finally, if you stop with only ONE die left, the next player can try to still your points for the round away from you. You each roll a die and the higher die gets the points. Regardless of whether the next player succeeds or not, their turn is done and play goes on to the next player. So do you risk your whole turn on a single die roll? Well if your opponent scored 2000 points you just might. It’s entirely luck-driven but it’s a lot of fun. Since you need to reach exactly 10,000 points the end game can be tricky. You HAVE to take the dice that score so you may end up with too many points on your very first roll to be able to win. This gives other players a chance to catch up. In our first game, my mom pulled out to a HUGE lead but kept overshooting the last 450 points she needed. That gave me time to catch up and I actually won the game. So even if you fall behind there can be time to catch up. The game plays in about ten minutes so it doesn’t overstay its welcome either. It’s a fine filler or cooldown game.

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