spreading the word

Last year at my family's Christmas party, D and I taught my siblings and cousins how to play Settlers of Catan. We all had a great time despite a small mishap where D got excited and spilled someone's red wine all over the game.

This year, we played at Thanksgiving, after which my cousins tried to find the game at Target and Walmart, but gave up because they could only find it online and wanted it "right away". We (of course) had brought our set to Christmas dinner, so we obligingly broke it out after we finished eating. After two games, D and I went to sleep; it was nearly 1:30am and we had an early morning flight to Maui from SJC. We left the game with them during the week we were gone. Later we discovered that they played another three games that night, and then my brother played again during the week with our mom and his girlfriend.

We'd also taught the game to D's cousins last year, so they were able to participate in the Thanksgiving festivities as well. For Christmas, instead of playing more Settlers (which they've been playing online all year), we decided to teach them Puerto Rico. I think we may have at least one PR convert; we caught him reading online strategy guides during the game. Craziness!

that's a first

It appears that I am going to (part of) a bachelor party tonight. I'm pretty sure I was only invited because D is going to be at a different bachelor party in New Orleans and they need even teams for Starcraft, but whatever, I'm not passing up a SC LAN party. If there are strippers, they better be dressed up as zerglings or something.

blast from the past

Over the holidays, I dug up an old cassette case at my parents' house, and brought it home to use for storing board game cards. (As an aside, Dominion, Intrigue, and Seaside fit together perfectly in a case designed for 30 cassettes.)

Looking for a place to store the instructions, I unzipped the outside pocket and found a booklet full of coupons: "$2 off compact discs or VHS videotapes, good at any Wherehouse until November 30, 1990". Those coupons had been expired for nearly twenty years! I threw them away, anyway.

strategy

Overheard during an epic 4-on-4 battle, at our Starcraft LAN party on Friday night:
"We just have to hold out for another 15 minutes and <opposing player> will give up. He has RSI."

We're all good friends, really! (He did give up.)

second annual Puerto Rico tournament

After finally getting home from Jamaica last Sunday, I took a shower, picked up some cupcakes, and headed over to a friend's house, for our second annual Puerto Rico tournament!

I unfortunately missed out on last year's event because I was out of town, so I was determined to make this one, jetlag be damned. There were 12 participants, so the preliminary round consisted of four games with three players each, and then the final round had three games with four players each, with the four winners of the first round playing against each other, etc.

I won my first game with my standard small market + harbor strategy, using coffee as my cash crop. Luckily both the other two players chose tobacco, so I was able to cash in throughout the game, and ended up buying two large buildings.

The second round was interesting; although I managed to secure both a harbor and a wharf, I seemed to be unable to gain ground on the leader by shipping often during the endgame. He had a wharf of his own, plus a small warehouse, and used some interesting tactics to make shipping less productive for me; he chose the captain before anyone had crafted, chose the craftsman twice in a row, etc. In the end, he beat me by two points for the championship. It was certainly an interesting game, though! I'm looking forward to next year's tournament already.

fun and games

Over Labor Day weekend I went to a games night at a friend's house, where we played several of the usual games (Settlers, etc.), and then followed those with a round of Taboo and a round of Trivial Pursuit, Millenium Edition.

Usually we play Taboo with guys against girls, and the girls have a pretty high winning percentage. However, the last time we played I accidentally sabotaged my team while trying to describe the word "pregnant":

me:	Hmm. If you're a girl, sometimes after you have sex you become...
teammate:	(confidently, no hesitation) sore!
me:	???
same teammate:	chafed! irritated!

At this point we all turned around to look at her boyfriend accusingly, before collapsing with laughter. As I recall, our scores deteriorated horribly after that.

This time, there was no such disturbing episode, the girls beat the guys soundly, and we decided to mix up the teams for Trivial Pursuit.

Around 2am we were still nowhere near done, and one of the girls wanted to go home to her two kids, so we played a "sudden death" round where each team tried to answer all six of the questions on the same card, and then we compared to see who had the most correct answers. In the end it came down to me correctly guessing "Marcus Allen" as the oldest active NFL running back in 1997. Yay for useless sports trivia!

no boys allowed

It always feels a little "junior high" to me to be in a group which is all girls and no guys.

Well, last weekend, I had an overnight BBQ & games party at my parents' house, and for the first time (for a variety of reasons, none of which involves anyone disliking the company of guys), I invited all girls.

Things that were different:
- We did an arts & crafts project instead of playing waterpolo-type games in the pool. I like both crafts and sports but I find that when there are guys around, there's less general interest in crafts. Anyway, I thought I'd take this opportunity, and asked my sister to put something together. She came up with a really cool candle-making activity which involved lots of different colored chunks of solid wax and pouring liquid wax on top. Fun!
- There were a lot less people, so there was more time to talk and hang out with everyone. I think my mom and sister had a lot of fun chatting with my friends. My dad went to a dinner party for most of the night; I have no idea if that was planned specifically to coincide with the BBQ or not, but it was probably good timing, since he might have been bored.
- One of the girls put together a trivia game, where we all answered questions about each other. It was really well done; obviously carefully planned, the questions were challenging and interesting, and the question cards themselves were gorgeous.
- We baked our own desserts (chocolate souffles) instead of my mom baking them for us, and they turned out well, which is not a given when it comes to souffles.
- I bought two dozen mini-cupcakes from Sibby's. I probably wouldn't have bought them for mixed company since they're super girly-looking. (Of course we finished them, since they're delicious.)
- One person brought her year-old toddler, and we spent some amount of time making sure he didn't hurt himself or break anything, but it was actually not too bad with twelve or thirteen adults around to keep an eye on him. Plus, it was kind of entertaining to watch him running around begging random people for more cherries.
- I got to do the BBQ-ing. Guys always think that they own the grill, for some reason. Silly people.
- We ate a lot less steak and drank a lot less beer than usual. My mom now has eight extra premium beef filets in her refrigerator. Good thing I warned her and she didn't buy too much beer.

Things that were the same:
- We ate a lot. My mom always has lots of good quality fruit and we gorged ourselves on cherries, blueberries, pineapple, etc. We didn't finish the steak but we finished everything else; chicken wings, BBQ beef, shrimp, squid, mushrooms, corn, Chinese chicken salad, and more. For dessert, we had the cupcakes and the souffle, with ice cream and gelato. For brunch the next day, we had my mom's excellent shi fan (rice porridge), ham and cheese crepes, and scallion pancakes, and then she baked us a homemade rum raisin cake for "snack". So much good food, so little time...
- We played board games until late and didn't get to bed until after 4am. It's so nice to be playing games and know you don't have to go to work the next day and you don't have to drive anywhere afterwards.
- We had a lot of fun. I do like overnight parties. Maybe it's because I wasn't allowed to stay overnight at other people's houses when I was a kid, until fifth grade or so.

board games & coffee

Yesterday, we had some people over for games. With eight people, we were able to split into two games with four people each. I played Thebes for the second time ever, and the other table played Puerto Rico. It was a fun time as always, and even though I played an extremely straightforward strategy, I managed to win this time.

Anyway, I was commenting to one of the other players that I hadn't played games in forever, but I realized that wasn't true. While in Taipei, a friend took us to a small coffeehouse near 台大, which boasted an impressive two-wall collection of board games, both for play and for sale. We spent two or three hours there, drinking tea and coffee and playing a new game, Notre Dame. I wish we had one of those around here!

Incidentally, the cafe was running an interesting promotion at the time; any female customer could get 10% off her order by doing 10 push-ups, or 20% off by doing 20. Unfortunately, the discount only applied to her drink(s), not to the rest of the table, otherwise I would have done it. (It didn't seem worth it to do push-ups in a restaurant in order to save 50 cents.)

government power

Just now I heard about yet another Taiwanese flag controversy. Nothing new, really; the Chinese government issued threats, the Chinese participants hurled insults at the Taiwanese winner, and in the end, the organizing body will probably apologize profusely, groveling in fear of China's economic might. In short, a Taiwanese person was again ridiculed and/or punished for having a small scrap of national pride.

What caught my eye was this astute reader comment, submitted by an American living in Taiwan:
The rabid and irrational reaction of young people in the PRC to the concept of “Taiwan” is getting dangerous... for all of us. The manner in which the PRC govt. indoctrinates youth with anti-Taiwan venom reminds me of a pit bull owner who is training it to fight; the dog itself is not inherently bad, but the owner, for its own goals, encourages rabid aggression. No better way to encourage rabid aggression by telling some die hard gamers that if they allow the R.O.C. flag to be seen they will not be allowed to participate in future competitions. Come on, that’s just twisted and manipulative! The 23 million people that live here in Taiwan, living an independent life from the PRC for over 50 years developing democratic institutions and a free press, are living with the threat that one of these days, those kids in the PRC are going to be unleashed on them.

Indoctrination, brainwashing, propaganda; whatever you want to call it, it's scary stuff. I worry about the Chinese government brainwashing its citizens about Taiwan, of course, but I also worry that the US government is trying to tell Americans what to think. Who is it that's been pushing the idea that anyone who opposes the war in Iraq is supporting the terrorists?

new games = sleep deprivation

We ordered some new board games a few weeks ago, to go with the original set that we bought almost two years previously.

Up until last year, our favorites were Settlers (+ both expansions), Puerto Rico (+ expansion), Carcassonne (+ expansions & variations), and Ticket to Ride (usually Europe).

Recently, we've been playing a lot of Goa and Power Grid, so we ordered those two, plus Caylus, Thebes (brand-new in 2007) and A Game of Thrones (being the George R. R. Martin fan that I am, I couldn't pass it up).

Yesterday, we opened the new games for the first time, and inaugurated them by playing a 4.5 hour game of Caylus. Granted, three of the players had never played before, and the other two had only played a few times before, but it was still a long game. Amazingly, it didn't start to feel long until sometime well after midnight, when I realized I was losing and I would have to drive twenty minutes to get home afterwards. I ended up getting home at 2am, which meant about 5.5 hours of sleep, but I think it was worth it. It's a good thing today is Friday, though.

Katamari

Two winters ago, when I was in Taipei, my brother bought a game called "Katamari Damashi" which was only available for the Japanese PS2 at that point.

Basically, the goal of the game is to roll a ball around and pick up objects to make the ball bigger. Only objects which are smaller than the ball can be picked up, but as the ball grows, you can pick up larger and larger objects, until you can pick up people and cars and buildings. It sounds like a silly game but is actually horribly addictive.

Anyway, my cousin, my sister and I spent about 8 hours one night and finally beat all of the levels. We had to take turns because we found it was possible to get motion sickness from playing for too long, and because our hands started to cramp up.

Why am I writing about this now?

Last weekend, I was at a wedding, and as the groomsmen were walking down the aisle, I heard some strangely familiar music. It only took me about a minute to realize that it was the theme to one of the early Katamari levels. I think about 20-25% of the audience recognized the music, and perked up. The other 75-80% were probably wondering what was with the tinkly video game music.

Then, this morning, as I was walking through the parking lot at work, I saw a license plate reading KATMARI, with a holder entitled "THIS IS HOW I ROLL". This is probably less funny to other people, but I was very amused.

annual bbq

Last weekend, I invited some friends to my parents' house for a BBQ/pool party and games night sleepover. I've done this every summer for a few years now, and it's not a particularly difficult event, coordination-wise, but it's always nice to plan for something to be fun and then to have it be fun.

Games played (not all by me): Power Grid, Arkam Horror, Puerto Rico, Goa, Deflexion, Settlers, Mastermind, Scrabble, Mario Kart, Super Smash Brothers.

gaming is for grownups

I just came across this article which claims that adults play video games more than teens.

I can't say I'm surprised. Anecdotally, I've noticed:
- Most of my friends are Halo addicts.
- Starcraft is still well loved as a LAN party game among those of us who played in college.
- My sister and her boyfriend were/are FFXI junkies. In fact, they met while playing FFXI.
- I know of several people my age (including myself) who have game consoles in their bedrooms.

The first generation of people that grew up with video games is now well into adulthood, and I guess they're just choosing to continue playing games, both new and old.

short weekend

Recently, weekends have been going by in a blur. Then, when I'm asked what I did over the weekend, I can't remember, at least momentarily.

This past weekend, I spent Friday night playing board games again, Saturday morning shooting around, Saturday afternoon at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, and Saturday evening at home with friends. Sunday morning, I ran some errands, and Sunday afternoon was basketball practice as usual.

That list doesn't seem to detail an unusual amount of activity, yet I was completely exhausted on Sunday night.

Perhaps it's just that I'm due for a vacation. There's something to be said for leaving your daily and weekly routine completely behind. I guess there's only one month left until we leave for Europe...

Taiwanese food & board games

Yesterday I hosted a small dinner party and games night. The guest of honor was a friend who had just come back from China after a year of travel and study, so I didn't want to serve Chinese food, but I did want to try something new. Finally I decided to make lwun bianh (transliteration mine), a Taiwanese-style meal that consists of lots of tiny portions of different dishes, mixed together and rolled in a wrapper with peanut powder and Hoisin sauce. It's actually pretty healthy, since most of the dishes are cooked vegetables, except that the recipe calls for lacing the peanut powder with a substantial amount of sugar.

I did discover that peanut powder is pretty hard to get, even here in the Bay Area. They didn't have it at the Asian grocery store in my neighborhood, I didn't see it at Ranch 99, and when I asked my mom where to get it, her response was to ask "...in this country?" and to send me some that my dad had just brought back from Taipei.

I'm not sure if I got everything 100% right, but only two or three people had any basis for comparison, and everyone seemed to enjoy the food. Now I'm somewhat motivated to learn more Taiwanese dishes. Maybe I'll try gwa bao next, since I have leftover peanut powder.

After eating, we broke out a new game, Carcassonne, named after a city in France famous for its Roman and medieval ruins. It's basically a tile-placing game, with "follower" figures that represent control of tiles, with some points calculated during the game and some afterwards, which keeps things interesting. I liked it about as much as Puerto Rico, but less than Citadels and Ticket to Ride. I know, I'm weird.