Yesterday was intended to be Dungeons & Dragons night at my place. However due to multiple different circumstances, several of the players couldn’t show up, and we ended up with only three people plus myself. I decided the successful threshold for D&D would be 4+me, so we abandoned that and played board games instead.
We started with Fujiyama, one of the games I bought in Japan. It works differently with more than two players, and I think better, as you have a different opponent sitting on either side of you to make the tile passing interactions more interesting. You also end up with a lot more animals for higher scoring opportunities.
Next we played Evergreen, which I bought a while back and have played with my wife a few times.
And we finished with a nice chaotic game of Camel Up. These games plus a break to eat pizza was enough to fill the night. Most of the rest of Friday was taken up by teaching ethics classes online, and cleaning the house before my friends arrived.
Today I went for a run in the morning. The weather was beautiful and warm. It really doesn’t feel like winter here at the moment, despite us being in the middle of it.
We went out (with Scully) to Newtown for lunch. We went to the Carriageworks Farmers’ Market to look around, and then walked over to The Pie Tin for pies. They had some interesting ones that I hadn’t seen before: chicken pesto; duck with hazelnuts and cherry sauce; and one with pulled pork, lentils, and African spices. I tried the duck and pork pies, which made a substantial lunch. They were both good, although I was a little disappointed that the cherry sauce in the duck pie was extremely muted, to the point where I wouldn’t even have suspected that it contained a fruit of any sort unless I already knew it.
This afternoon I tried the other Japanese board game we got with my wife: Gin Crafters.
You have a hand of gin cards and “brand” cards (goals, worth points). You use actions to buy ingredients (juniper, various botanicals), distil gin according to recipes on the cards, collect cash, or draw more gin or brand cards. Distilling gin scores points according to their difficulty, plus bonus points depending on interactions between cards. It’s a fairly straightforward game design and easy to play, but enough combos and competing strategies to keep it interesting and fun.
In other photos, I thought I’d share a picture of some redevelopment that is taking place near us. This area used to about 25 houses, facing on to two streets (the other at the top of the hill here, along that line of trees). The whole lot has been demolished in the past few weeks to make way for a huge new apartment complex. I dunno, but I suspect there’ll be a hundred or more apartments in the area formerly occupied by about 25 houses.
This isn’t the only redevelopment going on here either. Within the same block there are at least two other apartment redevelopments in various stages – one has started building recently, and another two are in early demolition stages. And that’s not all either. The two adjacent blocks also have dozens of houses fenced off and awaiting demolition. It’s quite crazy the amount of demolition/construction work being done in this area at the moment.
New content yesterday:
- Irregular Webcomic! rerun annotation #2460
- Square Root of Minus Garfield #5169
- Lightning Made of Owls #884
- Comments on a Postcard #5294
New content today: