It’s been a full week since we got home from Japan. I still feel like I’m in catch-up mode a bit, because I’ve been concentrating the past few days on copying material off my private wiki as a safety precaution before upgrading it. Which hasn’t given me a lot of spare time to catch up on other things. I think I’m going to have to let Irregular Webcomic! go on a brief hiatus until I get this sorted – maybe a week or two.
That’s what I was doing most of today. I also went for another run, but didn’t manage as quick a time as yesterday. I think my muscles were still recovering a bit from yesterday after three weeks with no hard exercise.
My wife and I went on a long walk with Scully over lunch, to the Italian bakery. It’s about the longest walk we do with any regularity, clocking in at just under 6 km return. I had a slice of pizza there, and a special pastry of the day, it was a mandarin and ricotta danish-like thing. On the way back through the closer shopping area I picked up a couple of the limited edition spiced caramel apple scones from another bakery. I’ll try one of those for dessert later tonight.
This afternoon my wife and I tried playing one of the board games I got in Japan. The first one is Fujiyama.
Each player starts with an empty board and the goal of the game is to fill it with hexagonal tiles in such a way as to maximise points by forming complete forests (triangles of the same colour) and groups of animals. The forests come in four seasons: spring (pink: flowers), summer (green: deciduous and evergreen trees), autumn (brown: chestnuts, mushrooms, grapes), and winter (blue: snowflakes). Each completed forest scores points in a different manner depending on its season, while mixed forests score zero. You also score points for groups of animals, more for groups of more different animals. The tiles are acquired by choosing which ones to give to your opponent/s and them choosing which tile to use – if they choose the one you gave them, they give you an animal to place. If they don’t choose the tile you gave them, you don’t get the animal. So there’s quite a strong incentive to give your opponents tiles that they can actually use.
It plays in 20 minutes or so, and there’s plenty of strategy going on. I look forward to playing this with my friends at one of our board game nights.
New content today: