This morning I had bread for breakfast. This is unusual, as I almost always have cereal – home-made muesli with fruit and yoghurt on weekdays, and Weet Bix on weekends. But I forgot to order the groceries for pickup on Friday, and we’d run out of milk, so I couldn’t have my normal Weet Bix. And I’d baked a new sourdough loaf yesterday, trying it with some rolled oats for the first time, so I decided to just have a couple of slices, one with butter and one with marmalade.
After breakfast I went for a 5k run. The morning was warm and humid and it was pretty draining. But it was good to have that done before the day got hotter.
Before lunch I played another game of Root with my wife. She wanted to try Marquise de Cat again, after attempting the Eyrie last time. Playing the Eyrie birds myself, I was attempting to gain territory by initiating battles to gain clearings and then build roosts. When you battle, you roll two dice, which are 12-sided, but numbered 0-3 three times each, so there’s an equal chance of each number form 0 to 3. Battles favour the initiator: the defender loses warriors equal to the higher number rolled on the dice, while the attacker loses warriors equal to the lower number.
What should have been about halfway into the game, I started a battle. I rolled the dice and got double 3, meaning we each removed 3 warriors. So I took heavier losses than expected, as double 3 is the only way of losing 3 attackers, a 1 in 16 chance.
In the next battle: I rolled double 3 again.
In the next battle: I rolled double 3 again.
I took so many unexpected losses, that my wife ran away with the game from there. Yes, she was losing the same number of cat warriors as I was birds, but the cats recruit forces significantly faster. I should have been inflicting a lot more casualties than I was sustaining. Anyway, it was basically a debacle from that point, and my wife won easily.
After lunch, we went to visit some friends, taking Scully so she could play with their dog. We hung out for a bit in the very slight breeze outside, in the shade at the rear of the house. It was really pretty hot out in the sun.
Tomorrow is supposed to be even hotter, forecast up to 37°C.
New content today:
When you battle, you roll two dice, which are 12-sided, but numbered 0-3 three times each, so there’s an equal chance of each number form 0 to 3.
Are the dice used for anything else? Why don’t they use a 4-sided die?
No, they’re not used for anything else in the game. At least not as far as I’ve read the rules (there are two factions we haven’t used yet). I guess they just wanted dice that roll better than d4s.