Game night with Brian and Chris

While the guys were here we played a cooperative game of Pandemic.  It's a fiendishly difficult game.  We tried to beat back the outbreaks that kept popping up around the globe, but alas we lost. 

Game night

Game night
Originally uploaded by jbellis

The central Texas board game meetup meets on Wednesdays. It's tough to find a babysitter since that's Mutual night for the ward's teenagers, so we grabbed our chance with Brian in town to check it out.

Rachel played a marathon, eight player Munchkin session. I knew it wasn't going to be a short game from past experience (7 player Munchkin at PyCon a couple years ago), and I was right: it lasted about 90 minutes. (A four-player Munchkin round can be done in 30 minutes.)

I tried "Zombie Dash," a game being demoed by its owner, an indie publisher. There wasn't a whole lot of strategy. But it was done quickly, which worked out nicely, because just about then Corinna got fussy. I walked her around the store where the meetup was held, and we checked out their games and I looked up reviews on board game geek.

Finally, I took her to the grocery store across the parking lot, and pushing her around in a cart until she fell asleep.

Rachel heard that Steve Jackson comes to this meetup once or twice a month to playtest his new games. I told her that if Steve Jackson is there, I'll make an exception to my "no Munchkin with family members" rule.

We'll have to find more babysitting options so we can go back.

Take me out to the ball game

Photo051
Originally uploaded by jbellis

My sister Telitha and her husband Nolan took me to a Spurs game tonight. We congratulated ourselves on getting a ride from one of the parking lot attendants on an electric cart -- since Telitha and Nolan were each carrying one of their boys -- but then found we'd left the tickets back in the car and Nolan had to run back to get them. I told Telitha, "His birthday present just got twice as expensive."

This is the first time I've been to a professional sporting event. There were a lot of people there. Even from the very last row of seats (I kid you not), it struck me how TALL the players were. You miss that on a 2D television, somehow. And it was loud, with lots of flashing lights.

As with college sports, seeing that many people take a game so seriously seemed like a form of collective insanity to me at first. 20,000 people boo-ing at once is kind of a shock. CONFORM, it commands! I don't do conform.

But after a bit I got a little more acclimated to the noise and relaxed. Saw some good plays and hot cheerleaders. We left before they got to the "foul on every possession to stretch out the clock" stage.

Insanity doesn't seem too strong a word for the prices, though. Just one section below us the tickets listed for $100! (Telitha recommends stubhub to save money. Ours were $5.) I'm still boggling, a little. Telitha and Nolan's strategy of "get cheap tickets so you don't mind arriving late and leaving early to avoid the parking lot mess" seems like a winner.

Power Grid online

Rachel and I played Power Grid with Jeremy over Skype last night. (Andrea declined to join us. Next time!) We used BrettspielWelt as our board, which added half an hour to our 90 minute game. The interface was significantly worse than the asobrain one that powered our Settlers experiment, and half in German to boot! Unfortunately, asobrain has a far more limited selection of games to play -- pretty much just Settlers and Carcassone. I am not a Carcassone fan.

Now that we know the interface, more or less, we can probably get Power Grid games down to 75 minutes or so (from 100-120 for an in-person game). Power Grid is a game that is about at the limit of the amount of bookkeeping I will stand for in a non-computer-powered game, so it definitely benefits from having that automated away.

Skype FTW*

Played Settlers tonight with Grant and Ellis and Rachel, over Skype and asobrain. Just like old times, except we all had to provide our own cake + ice cream.

My main complaint was that skype apparently doesn't let you do video with more than one person at a time. In that respect ichat is better, but we were not all on macs. Even Rachel might be going mac-free soon too, depending on what Apple decides to charge to fix the bad connection to the power supply.

Ellis won, thanks to me thinking that Rachel had already gotten largest army at three and saving up for a fourth soldier instead of grabbing those points when I could. Gah. Next time!

*For The Win.

PSA: Type Racer

Type Racer is a lot of fun. How much fun? My officemate Eric has been playing all morning. He just won his first match in Intermediate. "I probably just made some six year old cry," he says.

(Eric is testing one of my Kinesis keyboards to see if he wants to spend the money on one. I have two, one for home and one for work, since I'm prone to developing tendinitis in my wrists. I would say they are not worth the money if you have no RSI problems, but if you do, I haven't found anything better.)

Sign in to Type Racer with facebook and it will show you who else in your network has tried it and how fast they are. (This is probably a guy thing.) I was pleased to average 92 wpm but I didn't feel fast for long; my friend Todd types 128.

That settles it

I need to get a gaming PC. (To my dear wife: since I intend to play on our relatively low res TV, it won't be that expensive!)

I still haven't been able to play Mass Effect since work got me a laptop with a graphics card that would have been embarassing five years ago. And now that the trailers for Alpha Protocol are out my days are numbered. (You know, the new game by the makers of KotOR II, which was almost a great game but time pressure gimped it to merely "good?")

Or we could move my Mac (formerly Macbook, now just a Mac since I can't actually close it anymore or the damage gets worse -- did I mention that Apple decided this wasn't covered under their $400 extended warranty? they did) downstairs close enough to the TV that an HDMI cable would reach. But then we'd have to move my desk too which Rachel thinks is an eyesore.

Nothing lasts forever

My kids killed one of my dreamcast controllers -- the connector end looks like it was savagely beaten. I ordered another from Amazon (cheaper than eBay for most things these days, it seems). And when I tried to load up Sonic Adventure for Melissa the Dreamcast kept asking me to "please insert game disc." I ordered another copy of that from Amazon, too.

Fortunately Sonic Adventure 2 worked (the copy I ordered from eBay long ago and turned out to be a warez disc), so my promise to amuse my daughter with a good Sonic game was not in vain. But it made funny noises. I wonder if the Dreamcast itself is dying. The thought makes me sad. The games still compare well, technically, with modern Wii titles (if not 360 or ps3). And it hosted an array of category-defying titles that you can't find the like of anymore. (With the exception of a few downloadable titles from PSN.)

Even if it isn't dying this year or next (and of course there is always Amazon), the odds are good that twenty years my grandchildren won't be playing my Dreamcast collection. That's a depressing thought.

(Then again, maybe by then we will be downloading Dreamcast titles for the equivalent of 2029's Virtual Console.)

Ow

Not the worst injury I've had, but the dumbest.  (And I seem to have a lot of dumb ones.)
Coming down with a cold tonight.  Throat has that "I'm going to be sore tomorrow" itch.  Feeling a little crummy.  So I accept Rachel's offer of a heated rice sock.
Lean back into the couch with the rice sock at the back of my neck.  Ahhh.  Shoot the stuffing out of some insects in Savage Moon.  (I've realized that I've become a casual gamer.  There's too many interruptions to play games that you can't pick up and drop in bite size pieces.  Never thought it would happen to me...)
Twenty minutes later when I came out of my game zone, my neck hurt.  Not an achy hurt but a specific, localized hurt.  Rachel looked at it: I'd gotten a blister, and popped it, from too much heat while concentrating on the game.
Yes, video games really are that distracting.  Good ones, at least.

How to drive your brother crazy

How to drive your brother crazy
Originally uploaded by jbellis

Play "Calling all Cars." Make no effort to attack other cars or catch the criminal.

Poor Matthew kept offering to show her what to do. But she was happy just driving around.

Grandma is a good sport

Video games are not Rachel's mothers's cup of tea, but she has gamely given Rock Band and Bomberman a try.  I've already recounted our Bomberman victories.  But on Rock Band we had to reluctantly conclude that Grandma was never going to be a Guitar Hero.
We tried to get her to try vocals or drums, but rhythm having been her Achilles heel at guitar, I had to concede that drums probably wouldn't go much better.  And Matthew didn't want to give up vocals, becuase he sucks at guitar (and drums) too.  So Matthew and I played a few songs by ourselves.  (Where Matthew saved my bacon three times.  The "hard" difficulty on drums, really is.)

Team spirit

Grandma and I challenged Matthew to a game of Bomberman.  Matthew got a computer partner to keep things even.
The first two games Dad and Grandma were shut out 3-0, 3-0.  Matthew was thrilled.
The next two games the old farts took 3-1, 3-2-1.  And recriminations ensued.
"RRRRRR!  He keeps making me die!" Matthew complained about his partner.  "He ALWAYS makes me die!"
A few minutes later: "Haha!  I killed Red! [his partner]"
"Why'd you do that?  You would have won the game if you hadn't killed him."
"That's cause HE MADE ME DIE!"  Matthew's face is fierce and he's literally shaking his fist at the screen.  I wish I had a video.
I never was able to explain that if you want to win (and oh boy, does Matthew ever), killing your partner is suboptimal play.  Even if he killed you first.  (And it's more accurate to say that Matthew walked into his bomb, than that Red killed him deliberately.)
So if you're ever on Matthew's team... watch your back.

Where's Matthew

Matthew likes playing "where's Dada" but he likes playing "where's Matthew" even more. Last night and again this morning out the blue he said "Where wawa" and took off running. We played quite some time last night, but at 6:30 I wasn't up to it. (But we played tonight at Daddy's initiative.) Anyway, he discovered a new part of the game -- when he's "caught" he tries to run between my legs and prolong the chase. He's such a short kid that he only has to duck his head a very little to cruise through. He gets a real kick out of this.