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I had one of the better weekends in a long while this past weekend. What could make my weekend so good? Games of course!
It started Friday with my mom as we played Lords of Waterdeep (still my fave), Castle Dice, Dark Gothic and Takenoko. I won the evening 4 games to 3. We had probably our shortest game of Dark Gothic when my mom picked up all three villains in short order. The first time we played Castle Dice, I found the wording on the cards a little funky and couldn’t understand how anybody would want to use some of them. Now that I understand them, the game plays a lot better and all of the cards are useful. I like the game even more now.

On Saturday, I didn’t game, but it was a day filled with discussions about gaming. Fab and I went to Trois-Rivieres to see our friend Steve whom neither of us had seen in ages. It only cemented my desire to get a RPG campaign going. I tell you, it’s GOING to happen. I also got the last of my Christmas presents: the expansion to Dark Gothic! WOOWOO! I can’t wait to try it out on Friday.

La Crique o jeux decided to hold a game day to mark the beginning of the March Break. I got to game from 2 to 10 and had a great ol’ time. I was introduced to Telestrations (imagine playing the telephone game only instead of writing down what you think you heard, you write down what you think you saw! Each player has a pad with an erasable marker. On the first page, players write a word and then pass it on to the next player who has to try to draw that word. The pad gets passed along and the next person has to write down what was drawn. The next person has to draw what that person’s guess was and so on. It’s a nice party game with plenty of laughs.

I introduced some people to King of Tokyo to some mixed reactions. The kids really liked it, the adults a little less so.

After that I was taught how to play Abalone. It’s a tactical abstract game where the goal is to eliminate six of your opponent’s pieces. The pieces are all marbles and the board is made so that you can push lines of them from space to space. The trick is you can’t move a row of more than three of your own colour and you can never break a line in the middle. You can only push an opponent’s pieces if your line outnumbers his. So I could use a line of three pieces to push my opponent’s line of 2 pieces. If we both had lines of two pieces, it’s a stalemate until someone manages to maneuver their pieces around to gain the advantage. I have trouble seeing potential pitfalls so I’m not a great tactical player. For my first game I managed to do okay and it came down to the wire. I thought I had my opponent trapped but in my rush to spring it, I missed the opening I left for him and lost the game.

Next I had to choose between Rampage (a game I’ve seen played on Tabletop) and Abyss (a game I’ve played before). The dexterity based game play of Rampage didn’t really appeal to me, so I joined the game of Abyss. We had fun and I came within two points of winning.

We closed the day out with a game of Dead of Winter, which is a semi-cooperative game set in a post-apocalyptic world where zombies are running rampant and the players control a group of survivors trying to forage for the resources they need to stay alive. Now I make no secret that I hate the zombie theme. It’s unfortunate (for me) that they’re so popular. I played Dead of Winter because a) it was the game being played and b) because I’ve heard nothing but good things about the game system. I’ve seen it played on Tabletop as well and I have to admit I found it intriguing. It’s semi-cooperative because while there’s a common objective that everybody needs to pitch in to complete, each player also has a secret objective they have to do which can put them at odds with the common objective either by holding out a little help now and then or by straight up betraying the colony. In our game, we achieved the common objective, but I misread my secret objective and equipped two of the cards I was supposed to just keep in my hand. Having now played it, I will say that it’s a solid game that has plenty of theme. If I LIKED that theme, it’d be an easy addition to my collection. Plaid Hat Games is supposed to be releasing a new game using the same system with a sci-fi theme. I’m much more open to that so I’ll be on the lookout for it when it comes out.

With all that gaming, I was a little lax on my drawing this weekend. I had a Bandit Baby strip and a mash-up to draw and I only got one of the two done. I wasn’t able to figure out the script for the strip. I was going to draw it tonight, but I’m beat so it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. I guess I’ll have to make up for it next weekend.

Okay, so that about covers things for this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. Carja V.

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It is cold outside and I do not have the month of May. I checked my pockets. It’s not there.  So yes, hi there folks! Welcome back to another installment of the Monday Blog. How y’all doing?

We’re on the tail end of the coldest snap of the winter so far. I’ll be glad when it breaks and the weather gets a little milder.

Shawicon was held over the weekend and by all accounts it was a success. I chose not to go because there was no solid hook to pull me in. It’s great for the local economy though.

I tried Castle Dice on Friday and I liked it. It plays in seven turns. Each turn, players get a certain amount of set resource dice and a number of resource dice they can choose for themselves. They then roll all the dice together (keeping any Barbarians they roll) to form a common pool. After that, players take turns drafting the dice from the pool to hire villagers, buy animals and build castle sections. Villagers help with resources, animals can provide special powers and castle sections are worth points at the end of the game. It plays quickly with very little down time for players as the draft keeps everyone involved. There’s an expansion that gives each player asymmetric decks to draw from, as opposed to everyone drawing from the same common deck of cards.

I’ve had my computer for over six months now and I still feel like I’m missing something from the way I had things configured before. My drawing pad hasn’t changed and yet it just feels different when I draw in Manga Studio and MyPaint. It annoys. The eraser tool in MyPaint changed and I can’t seem to configure it the way I had it before. I want a clean erase instead of a gradual erase. I’ve been working around it, but it’s a little more tedious to erase now.

Next Sunday, La Crique o Jeux is holding a game day…but WWE Fastlane is on that night. Will I miss my first PPV since getting the Network…or at least miss watching it live since I can just record it on my DVR? All signs point to yes.

It’s been a long day so I think I’ll call it quits for this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all next Monday. Carja V

Hello and welcome back to the blog! I don’t have anything wittier for an intro so let’s just get into it.

I’ve been subscribed to the WWE Network for about a year now. Without question, it’s a great value based on cheaper access to monthly pay per view events. However, one of the things I enjoyed was being able to watch some classic programming from the 80’s. Bell has yet to come to an arrangement with Rogers to allow access to the online content. That means that I can only watch what’s on the cable channel which is a direct port of the US streaming service’s linear channel. At first this was fine because the content was all new to me. Over time though I’ve seen most if not all of the shows that they cycle through. They’ve also reduced the throwback programming to an hour of old Raw and Nitro episodes on Thursdays (and it’s still the early episodes before the Monday Night War caught fire). This is very disappointing. I understand the desire to push new programming, but in a 24 hour cycle, surely they could do better than to repeat one block of 3-4 hours of programming 6-8 times.

Given the above, it was a pleasant surprise to see that the Network aired the first Wrestlemania yesterday. It’s interesting to see how Wrestlemania has evolved over the years. Except for the main event, the show was very short on spectacle whereas today Wrestlemania is almost more about the show than the wrestling. The title matches were all interesting, but the undercard was pretty bland. I’m familiar with that era of wrestling, but there was next to no story to the first couple of matches. That changed with Wrestlemania 2. Sadly, they’re skipping straight to Wrestlemania IV next week. I would love to watch 2 and III (for some reason, they only started using roman numerals in Wrestlemania III) again. That’s what got me thinking about the lack of variety and access to classic content on the Network actually.

I attended my first meeting of La Crique ö jeux last Tuesday. It was co-op night and not knowing what to expect, I brought Pandemic: The Cure with me. There were a number of games available to be played including titles I’d never tried like Dead of Winter, Yggdrasil and Atlantis Rising. The people who told me about the club were there and they invited me to join them in playing the game they’d chosen, Shadows Over Camelot, which was of course, the one game that I HAD played before. Now, I’ve never won Shadows and the guy running it said he had so if anything I thought I might learn a few tricks on how to play more effectively. Sadly, the luck of the draw had us behind the eight ball almost from the start. For the advancement of evil phase, we exclusively drew from the shadow deck until late in the game. I’m thinking we should have let more catapults be set up outside of Camelot and just taken time to destroy them. This might make the game longer, but I think it would make it a lot more manageable. Even with the right cards we weren’t making any progress because the shadow cards would always undo what we’d accomplished. I’m not enamored with the game so it’s not one I’m inclined to pull out for game night. That makes developing a working strategy that much harder. For the record, we played without a traitor, so we all lost together.

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