Random Babblings

Life is to hectic, and weekends should not be on a schedule. So nex weekend I’m not doing anything with anyone… except my wife
Not a bad weekend, just busy. I bought two things that made me happy this weekend though, Robo Rally, and Harry Potter 6. Played a few games of RR and as I type this I’m about 1/3 of the way through HP. Though I do have to wonder what a ‘fug’ is….
Diets suck btw, and this weekend is proof why the one I’m following says not to really pay attention to the daily numbers, just pay attention to the trend. The dailys fluctuated like a yo-yo, but at least the trend is still working it’s way down.
Tip: pay attention to what input is selected on your TV. The whole time I was watching Pulp fiction, I was thinking god this looks shitty. Turns out that it was because it was going through the reciver on a composite input instead of directly to the TV on Componet inputs…. sigh.

Another board game on my way back into the regular habit. While this is not one of my favorite games/systems, my wife loves it to death and she’s been bugging me to play for a while now. We had some friends over that we’ve been traditionally playing card games with and have been trying to get to play board games. So anyway …

Players: Lisa (wife), Todd, Rosanna, and myself.

A quick run down of the rules and we were off.

The beginning was decently spread out, with no contention for track placement. Rosanna had some quick runs between Texas and Kansas City. Todd Started in New York and built up to Canada and back down to Chicago. Lisa had some quick runs in the Chicago area, and I had a quick run of Cattle to Birmingham, so Atlanta to Miami, and back north to KC.

Things progressed nicely, Todd starting to control the northern end of the board, Rosanna working her way east and into New England. I continued to spread myself out in the South/Southeast, and Lisa worked the central area.

Not to much longer and while the three of us are building our network in a spread out pattern, Rosanna gets the first sugar run and makes the bee line for San Fran. We postulate it has something to do with the red marker, another friend we play with tends to be red, and is also usually the one to head west first… figured it was just his strategy… who knew .

Things progress steadily, and I finally make the break west by the Northwest route, hauling Cattle to Seattle, with a side of rice to Vancouver. Which dovetails nicely for this run of Nickel to Denver that I’ve been holding since the start of the game. About this time Lisa is running into issues with her load cards and takes the opportunity to dump them for new. Todd on the other hand is getting one uranium load after another, so he makes his way west by the southern route. Rosanna turns into the Sugar queen however with a few key runs there.

Things are going well for me, I’m amassing money, however all three others have upgraded to a Super Freight and the night is winding down getting on 1am. We call it early, but it looked to be inevitable, I end the game with $180+ while everyone else is sitting in the $30-60 range, and everyone had their 5 major cities connected.

Rosanna declared the game a hit, and Todd had a good feel for it after this first run. While it is probably never in danger of extinction in our house, this session has probably made it more available to play with the addition of a regular or two.

Well it’s been many months since my little group has managed to break out any board games, but I decided to “force” the issue this evening, and broke out with Elfenland.

After a quick review of the rules, and a puzzled look at a hand written “event chart” that didn’t seem to correspond with the rules, we headed into the game.

There were four of us, Lisa (start of first round), Duane, Steve, and myself. First round was fairly uneventful, we ended up going in 3 different directions, and except for a little “cock blocking” in the north between Steve and I, we didn’t seem to get in each others way much. First round score: Duane, Steve, and me – 6; Lisa – 3.

Second round continued to see Steve and I fighting a little for types of transportation through the NW corner. I tried to haggle with him a bit, but I guess we didn’t have much matching in our travel cards. Duane and Lisa managed to stay out of each others way, as they came across the south and made their way up the western edge.  Their travel markers helped me greatly. Second round score: Steve and I – 12; Duane – 11; Lisa – 9.

Third round and things are starting to heat up. No one is in danger of collecting all their tokens so it’s still just a question of getting in position. There wasn’t so much getting in the way of each other as we were literally going in all different directions. I unfortunately had to leave behind a token that I knew ultimately that I would not be able to retrieve. Third round score: Steve – 17; Me – 16; Duane – 15; Lisa – 14.

Fourth round, and all the chips are down. Steve is coming south down the Easter edge and I’m coming north. Duane is on the far west border with most of his tokens left in the middle of the board, and Lisa is quite spread out a little. I’m comforted by the fact that I’m the only one who has retrieved the token from the dead end, and I still have my obstruction counter, unfortunately so does everyone else. I manage to play a few tokes in the far SE corner like I’m going to come up that way, but I’ve really got the rafts to cut across the lake, and I got that corner token on the first turn. Steve however has a token down there. I play my obstacle into the dead end, Lisa plays her obstacle from the corner town to the capitol, but Duane plays his from the capitol to the eastern city. no one gets all their tokens. Final score: Steve – 19, 3 Cards; Me – 19, 1 card; Duane – 18; Lisa – 17.

Fun was had by all, and hopefully this will be the sart of a new wave of board gaming in our little group.