Hello and good day to you loyal blog readers. It is time for me to start the thing that I am starting so let’s start.

Thursday night was a great night. I finally saw The Force Awakens and it was good. I may even venture to say I thought it was great. I went to see the movie again on Friday so obviously I didn’t think the movie was BAD, but I did go see The Phantom Menace something line nine times in the theater, so you may find my judgement a little suspect, but there were circumstances of opportunity for Episode I that haven’t been open, at least to me, since.

I won’t spoil any plot points from the movie in case either of my regular readers hasn’t seen it yet. I will only speak of it in general terms. First off, I love the new characters. Finn, Rey and Poe Damaron are a lot more dynamic and likable than anyone from the prequel trilogy and BB-8 is adorable. I don’t know if it’s just coincidence, but BB in French sounds like “bébé” which is the word for baby and at times he acts just like a toddler (but not in a groan-inducing way).

To be fair, the plot is anything but original. The basic plot reads a lot like A New Hope with a little Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi thrown in for good measure. But the way it’s executed, I didn’t feel like I was just watching a fancier version of an old movie. I could have lived with the whole rathtar sequence being excised from the movie as it doesn’t truly serve the plot, but that’s my biggest complaint.

Unlike every other movie, there were no new themes from the score that I found truly memorable after two viewings. I’ll need to hear more of it to see if there’s something I’m overlooking.

To offer a differing viewpoint, my friend Frank didn’t enjoy the movie as much as I did. In fact, he nearly walked out on it at one point. He was really upset. His qualms have to do with an event that happens in the movie so I can’t go into detail on why he didn’t like it. This is just proof that not everyone loved the movie.

Okay, other than that, I can now say I’m finished with my Christmas shopping…mostly. I may pick up a few extra trinkets next week for the games at a late Christmas party, but the bulk is bought. Now I just have to wrap them all. Praise be to the fellow who came up with gift bags and those fold-out gift boxes. They save a LOT of time.

After a few more games played under my belt, I think I’m ready to say that Lords of Waterdeep is my favorite game of the year…or did I say that last week already? I really dig it. If I had to rank my top ten games as of this moment it would be:

10 – Imperial Assault
9 – Firefly: The Game
8 – Medieval Academy
7 – Pandemic: The Cure
6 – Elder Sign
5 – King of Tokyo
4 – Dice Town
3 – Takenoko
2 – Dark Gothic
1 – Lords of Waterdeep

Firefly and Imperial Assault would be higher on my list if I had a group to play them with on a regular basis. The same goes for Mice and Mystics and Krosmaster Arena which didn’t make the list at all. They’re just not the type of games I think would go over well with my mom and niece.

I think that’s everything for this week. Merry Christmas everybody! We’ll talk again next Monday.

…there are only 10 days before the release of The Force Awakens. Granted that’s if you’re going to the midnight showing on the 17th, which in all likelihood I’m not. But the movie WILL be out so that’s good enough for me. I’m trying not to get my hopes too high for the movie, but I’m still pretty excited for the release.

But speaking of the number of shopping days before Christmas, that’s also dwindling down and I have next to nothing ready. I see some wild internet shopping going on in the next few days.

I didn’t have game night this past weekend so I had to make due with the board games I bought on Steam. I played a fair bit of Splendor but more than that I’m getting the hang of the Witcher Adventure Game which, as my friend Mike pointed out, is a video game port of a board game of a video game. After playing a few games, I can’t imagine playing the tabletop version as the digital port is so smooth. In the board game, you and up to three other players take on the roles of one of four available characters and try to complete quests and subquests for victory points. The game ends at the end of the round where a player has completed the requisite number of main quests (1, 3 or 5 depending on the length of game desired).

Players have two actions per round which can be used to travel, develop (gain abilities/spells), investigate, heal or a special ability unique to each character. By traveling and investigating, the players will collect 3 different types of hint tokens. These players can trade use the hint tokens to complete subquests or to get investigation tokens which are required to complete the quests. Each character requires a different number of hints to get investigation tokens. Triss for example, only needs 3 blue hint tokens to get a blue invetigation token, but she needs five purple hints and seven red hints to get the respective investigations tokens for those colours. In addition, Geralt has more character dice at his disposal, Triss is good at recharging spells, Dandelion is good at amassing money and Yarpen can take more hits before he loses access to his abilities so each character really has a different feel. I’ve only tried Triss so far as I wanted to get an idea of how she works before trying another character. I’m going to try Dandelion next because he’s a bard and bards are cool.

I guess that’s all for now. I have one more overtime session ahead of me next Saturday. It’s subtle but I can feel an extra bit of fatigue starting to build so it’ll be none too soon. Anyhoo, have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. Carja V.

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.