Tag: gaming

It’s not the rain, it’s the humidity

We had another 25 mm of rain today. But the worst thing is that the humidity hasn’t dropped below 90% all day (since 7pm last night), and was hovering around 99-100% for much of it. It’s not particularly warm (only 20°C maximum), but it feels stifling.

Before heading into the university for tonight’s tutorial session, I walked with Scully up to my wife’s work to drop Scully there, and by the time I arrived I was dripping with sweat, all my clothes clinging to my skin.

The tutorial session was a little short, as not many students showed up, and after answering a few questions from some of them, they drifted off early. So I could head home before it was too late. Earlier in the day I was mostly handling the morning ethics classes, the final ones on the Greed topic. Tomorrow I need to write the new lesson plan for Monsters!

In entertainment news, I’ve been watching the Fear Street trilogy on Netflix. It’s been in my “to watch” list for ages, and I finally decided I was in the mood for a slasher flick, so I watched the first one last week. There are a few slightly corny things (to be expected from a slasher film), but mostly I’m finding it to be fairly smart and well made. I’ve finished the second film in the trilogy and plan to start the final one tonight.

And I recently spoiled myself by getting the special 40th anniversary Call of Cthulhu Classic 2″ Deluxe Boxed Set (available here, scroll down). This is a reprint of the original boxed set rules from 1981, with five of the original adventures. A classic piece of roleplaying history – I couldn’t go past it. I’m looking forward to reading through all of this!

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Games night Friday, and humid Saturday

Last night was board games night with friends, so I didn’t have time to write a blog entry. Most of the guys happened to have other things on, so only three of us attended. But this gave us a chance to play a long game, without worrying about people showing up late or leaving early.

We played Arkham Horror. Three turned out to be a good number for this cooperative game, where we’re pitted together against the Cthulhoid forces of darkness.

I took an investigator role, while the others played the muscle, and the mystical. My main task was moving around the map board and working to ward off Doom as it slowly accumulated in various places, while the muscle guy intercepted the various Cthulhu mythos monsters that kept spawning and trying to hunt us down. The mystic was searching for clues and artefacts to help us. The scenario we played was protecting Innsmouth from an incursion of Deep Ones, manipulated by Dagon and Hydra behind the scenes. We had to uncover enough clues to work out how to summon the malign entities and then trust that we could defeat them with a combination of muscle and occult knowledge.

After 3.5 hours of play which became increasingly tense, we confronted the main horrors and beat them, only to discover that we couldn’t figure out what the winning condition of the game was. The owner of the game later told us that he’d missed a single card in the setup stages of the scenario – and that card happened to be the one informing us of the winning condition! But we’d satisfied its requirements and won the game, even if we were confused about it at the time. It was a tight-run thing – there were several decisions that could have led us to disaster along the way, so it felt like a sweet, hard-earned victory.

Besides the usual online classes, I spent time yesterday and today doing Darths & Droids writing and comic making. Oh, and I did some major housecleaning today, doing a long overdue thorough dusting of everything in the living room, polishing up the wooden furniture, and vacuuming floors.

The other main thing to talk about is, of course, the weather. We’ve had more intermittent rain, and the humidity this week has shot through the roof, hovering around 80-100% at different times of the day. Sydney has had 170 rainy days so far this year, today being the 295th day of the year. The annual mean is 99 rainy days. Since we broke the annual rainfall record back on 6 October, we’ve had more than 200 mm more rain. The forecast is for rain every day for at least the next week, with some really heavy rain tomorrow. There continue to be severe floods in rural areas.

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Free(?) car care(?)

Today I went to the tyre place where I had new tyres fitted for our car a few months ago. They gave me a complimentary 3-month check-up to check the pressure, wheel balance and alignment, and rotate the tyres. So I booked it in. When I dropped the car off, I told the woman that I’d noticed the key fob battery needs changing – it’s been intermittent the past couple of days, and for the mechanic to just be aware of that and they may need to open the door manually with the key.

The woman said, “Oh, we might have a spare battery lying around. We can change it for you.”

I was like, “Oh okay.” And went off to grab some lunch (with Scully) while they did the stuff. I walked over to a Japanese place I knew nearby and had a teriyaki salmon lunch set, with rice, salad, and miso soup.

When I came back to pick up the car, there was a different guy there. He said, “The service is complimentary, so that’ll just be $10 for the battery.” I was genuinely under the impression that the battery change, if they did it, would be complimentary. I told the guy so, and he said, “Well, we can take it back out and put the old one back in for you.”

I gave him a speechless look, and explained I never asked for the battery to be changed, because I actually have a spare at home and am capable of doing it myself, and I’d assumed the offer was complimentary.

To which he said, “Well, next time you’re in the area you can drop us off the other new battery.” I must have been dumbfounded for a few seconds, because at that point he sighed and said I could have the battery for free.

I don’t begrudge them charging, but the woman never told me it would cost $10, and if she had I would have definitely told them not to change it. Anyway, I ended up with a free battery change. But now I got home and looked at my key fob, and they’ve cracked it prying it open…

Tonight I’m playing online board games with friends. I came second in my first ever game of Point Salad.

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A big losing games night

Friday: Grocery shopping pickup, more work on my photography engineering lecture presentation, lunch with my wife while Scully was getting a haircut/groom, and then online games night with my friends tonight.

We played games of Boomerang Australia, Boomerang Europe, Codenames, Ticket to Ride (a new release of this classic game on Board Game Arena), Gartic Phone, 7 Wonders (twice), 6 Nimmt. I don’t think I won a single game, but that’s okay – we have fun chatting while playing.

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Random Sunday events

I did a longer run today. I am in a small online group where we share running updates. The group purpose is described as: “For those who enjoy running. And for those who don’t enjoy it but do it anyway.” I’m definitely in the latter set!

Anyway, someone yesterday posted that they’d completed their 5k for September. Which reminded me that I’ve been thinking of doing another 5k for a while, and getting one done before the end of the month seemed like a good goal, so I got out and did it today. That’s twice my normal distance. I don’t particularly enjoy it, but I at least feel familiar and somewhat comfortable running 2.5k, but 5k feels like a serious effort. I managed it in 27:00 flat, which is my third best time over the distance. And Strava also told me that my 2-mile split was my fastest 2 miles, at 16:49. So I’m feeling pretty good about that.

So good that I probably ruined the health gains by having two sweets at lunch. My wife and I walked with Scully to the Italian bakery (which is nearly 3km away, so almost 6km return walking trip). I got a chicken and leek pie, but (1) they didn’t have my favourite banoffee croissant, (2) the pies there are on the smallish side, (3) a pie and a banoffee croissant are filling enough, but the croissant is quite large, (4) I was tempted instead by a chocolate/pistachio scroll, (5) which is notably smaller in size, (6) I was really hungry after my run, (7) they had a tray full of bomboloni, which I’ve wanted to try before but they’ve always been sold out when I’ve looked for them. So I got the chocolate/pistachio scroll and a Nutella bombolone.

At last I asked for a Nutella one. The woman behind the counter confirmed, “A custard one?” I repeated, No, a Nutella one.” She gave me a box, and I walked out with my other purchases to find a seat to sit on with My wife and eat our lunches. After eating the pie, I opened the box. It was a custard bombolone. My wife took the hint that I was mildly incensed and took it back to the bakery for me and exchanged it for a Nutella one.

It was pretty nice, although I missed my favourite banoffee croissant.

This afternoon I tried to estimate my ELO chess rating. One of my friends is into chess, and has been relaying to our group news about the current feud between Magnus Carlsen and Hans Niemann (yes, it has its own Wikipedia article), which we’re all metaphorically munching popcorn over it as new developments occur. We saw the report of the tweet by Grandmaster Maurice Ashley:

This is shocking and disturbing. No one can be happy that this is happening in the chess world. Unbelievable!

One of my friends pointed out that we’re all currently much more excited and happy about chess news than normal.

Anyway, I’ve never played chess seriously in any sense, but I was curious if there was some quick online test I could do to estimate my rating. I Googled and found a few quizzes, but they involved analysing some 80 boards and submitting moves, and they said don’t spend more than 5 minutes on each board… And there’s no way I was going to invest that much time into this. But I managed to find a ten board quiz, and spent a total of maybe 5 minutes with it. It estimated my rating at 1335, which I originally thought sounded ridiculously high, given my amateurish experience with the game. But a bit of research shows this is the realm of the “hobby player”, one step below the level of anyone who plays in a local chess club. Which sounds more reasonable than what I thought it meant. A few of my friends tried the same quiz and got 1400, 1435, and 1590.

Okay, so remind me never to play chess with them. 😀

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Welcome to the Moon

Friday night was board games night at a friend’s place. A few of the regulars couldn’t make it, so it was the four of us. We had a barbecue for dinner, with sausage sandwiches, with plenty of onions of course.

First game off the rank was Welcome to the Moon, a sequel/variant of Welcome to…, which we’ve played a lot both in person and online during our virtual games nights. In this new version, it’s themed along establishing a moon colony in the retro-future of the 1970s (compared to the original game, which was building a 1950s style housing estate). There are actually 8 separate boards to play, which are effectively 8 different games. In all of these games, you flip up a set of 3 communal cards, and each player selects one of the three to score – writing it down in various different scoring zones on their personal board. It diverges very quickly, as each person chooses different things and ends up with their scoring board filling up in different ways, which begins to add constraints on further scoring.

We played the first Moon board, which is a rocket blasting off, and then skipped a few and played one about building residential towers under a dome on the moon. They were very different and indeed like two different games. I lost the first one, but scored an equal victory in the second one.

After this we played Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate. All players start out as fantasy adventurers, exploring a part of the city, until events lead to one of the players being revealed to be a traitor/monster. At that point, the traitor gets a special rules scenario to read, while the other players get the matching hero scenario to read. These establish different winning goals for each side. In the game we played, I ended up being the traitor, and my goal was to kill at least 2 of the other three players before they could escape. Unfortunately this proved far too difficult, and the heroes escaped from my evil clutches. So they all won and I lost.

To round out the night we played several rounds of Apples to Apples. This is a good light game to end the night on as we were starting to get tired and thinking about heading home.

Other things on Friday: grocery shopping, and a couple of ethics classes.

Saturday: I spent much of the day struggling with writer’s block, trying to complete one new Darths & Droids strip. And avoiding going outside during the rain. Except for attempting to take Scully for a walk during a dry period, and ending up getting rained on halfway.

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Games night and comicking day

Friday was games night at one of my friends’ place. First up we had a quick game of Draftosaurus. I actually managed to win this one, with a big collection of diverse dinosaurs in one pen that got me a lot of points.

After that we played a new game: Awkward Guests. It’s a bit like Cluedo, only done right, without the superfluous dice rolling and moving around a game board. And there are hundreds of clue cards, which can be combined in multiple ways to construct many different crimes to solve. The piecing together of clues is clever and fun, and it really requires some thought to play effectively and hopefully pin down the murderer correctly and first.

After that we played a game of 7 Wonders, an old favourite online, but with physical cards, which is something we haven’t done for many years. And then we split into two groups of 3 players each and I played Quacks of Quedlinburg – I don’t remember what the other group of 3 played.

I didn’t win any of the other games, but had fun, so that’s all that matters!

Today (Saturday) I did my 2.5k run early, and then spent much of the day writing and making new Darths & Droids comics. I need to get a few queued up before the trip to Orange that I’m taking with my wife and Scully from Tuesday.

I’m also trying to use up all our vegetables before we leave. I was talking with my wife about how to divide them up into dinners, and we decided tonight to make mushroom and zucchini risotto. Tomorrow will be mushroom and spinach pizza, and Monday will be spinach and potato dhal.

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1980s roleplaying night redux, and a wet Saturday

Friday night I ran my 1980s kids adventure roleplaying adventure again, for my second subgroup of friends. It was the same adventure, but it proceeded very differently! Here’s a summary, courtesy of one of my friends who described what the second group (made of five players) did, for the benefit of those in the first group (to compare notes):

The B team went to gawk at whatever was happening at the lighthouse. We saw the dead body of the lighthouse keeper, who appeared to have been drowned for some time and then partially eaten. Mutterings in the crowd talked about this being similar to events 25 years ago. The lighthouse keeper’s dog came and befriended one of us.

We went to the back of the lighthouse, observing that it appeared to have been struck by lightning. We opened a window and took a look around inside. We didn’t see much at that time, but later when the police had left and closed the door we re-entered through the window and looked around the house itself. We read the logbooks and discovered that bad things happened to the lighthouse keepers every 25 years after a storm on June 1.

Back in town, we found out (I forget how, might have been from the fortune teller) that there was a shipwreck 100 years ago. We held a seance with the fortune teller and found out that the captain of that ship blamed the lighthouse keeper for the wreck and deaths of everyone, and somehow this translated into killing the lighthouse keeper every 25 years.

We were then transported to the past (one possible explanation, anyway), and managed to keep the light lit and avert the shipwreck. We were returned back to the present and found that the lighthouse keeper was alive and well after all. We returned his dog to him and got ice cream.

After he posted this on our group chat I mentioned that the first team’s adventure started the same way, but diverged at the word “opened”. Instead, the first group smashed the window with a slingshot(!), and then proceeded to climb through the broken window.

Both groups found a wet patch on the floor of the lighthouse tower (presumably where the lighthouse keeper’s body was found), but no clues as to how he died or who did it. The A team left and decided to check out the library to find out what happened 25 years ago. They found news stories from 1957 (25 years before the current date in 1982) saying the lighthouse keeper then was found dead under mysterious circumstances after a storm on the same date – and that 2 days later his dog was found dead. They continued looking back every 25 years, finding similar occurrences in 1932 and 1907. But in 1882, on the same date, was a storm that resulted in the wreck of the Warona, a cargo clipper. All hands were lost, except the cabin boy, one James Winchester. They used a phone book to look up any Winchesters in town, and discovered only one, living in the local nursing home.

The A team went to visit Mr Thomas Winchester, and discovered that he was the son of James Winchester. He told them the story of the wreck of the Warona, and that his father had told him how the lighthouse light had gone out as the ship was trying to reach safe harbour during the storm. They expected it to be relit, but it wasn’t, and without guidance the ship was wrecked on the headland. James suspected the lighthouse keeper was cowardly and didn’t bother to relight the lamp, thus causing the wreck.

The A team decided the logical thing to do was to go to Shipwreck Cove and try diving to take a look at the wreck. There they encountered a creepy ghost/kelp/thing that scared them. As they fled the scene, a storm whipped up and in a flash of lightning they were transported to the lighthouse in 1882.

From here the stories converged again. Both teams found the light out – and also that the lighthouse keeper had fallen down the stairs and was lying with a broken leg, unable to climb up to relight the lamp. (So it wasn’t his fault after all!) They relit the light and saved the ship.

The A team concluded their version of the adventure by going back to the nursing home to tell Thomas Winchester what happened, only to find that they had no records of a Winchester ever having lived there.

So, it was very interesting running this adventure twice with two different groups, and seeing the different choices they took through it!

Today, Saturday, the weather closed in. We have rain forecast every day for the next week again. Not too much here in Sydney, but further north parts of the state are getting hammered with hundreds of millimetres of rain again. These are the regions that have already suffered three major flooding events this year, and the ground there is still saturated, so even moderate rainfall is likely to trigger flooding again.

My wife and I took Scully for a lunchtime walk during a break in the rain, but it started up again halfway home and we got pretty wet, even with umbrellas. Scully was soaking, so we gave her a bath straight away.

We’ve also been planning a short trip. We’re going to take a drive out to Orange to stay for a few days in a couple of weeks. We found a hotel that has dog-friendly rooms so we can take Scully. We’re really looking forward to it! But today I spent some time going through all my Outschool classes and notifying parents and students that I’ll be taking a week off from teaching the classes.

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1980s games night and Saturday

Last night I ran the 1980s kids adventure roleplaying game that I’ve been working on. I had four players, playing 11-year-old kids in 1982. I don’t want to reveal any details of the adventure yet, because I have a second subgroup of friends who will be playing the same adventure next Friday during virtual games night. We all want to see if they handle the adventure differently, and compare notes afterwards. So suffice to say that the evening and the game went really well!

Today I went on a long walk with my wife and Scully to the distant Italian bakery. It rained a bit while we were out, and Scully got pretty wet, but fortunately it wasn’t too cold. They had the banoffee croissant special again, which is just so amazingly good that I can’t pass it up any time I see it there.

I spent most of my at-home time today working on new Darths & Droids comic scripts. I had a bit of writer’s block, alas, and broke it up with that long walk, and a 2.5k run. The run was a bit slow, since I was full of banoffee croissant! Tonight for dinner I made okonomiyaki.

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A late storm

The weather forecast for today was ominous: heavy rain beginning from around 8 am, totalling 10-25 mm. But it didn’t turn out that way. There was not a cloud in the sky when I took Scully out for a morning walk. And it remained bright and sunny all morning.

I took her out again for a walk and to get some lunch at midday, and it was still very sunny, and warm. Although it’s still winter, we got up to 22°C. But as we walked home, I could see dark clouds building up on the horizon. The cold front came through after 1 pm, and the temperature dropped rapidly to 12°C. But the rain was localised, and it didn’t start where I am until a couple of hours later, while other parts of the city were getting hammered. Now it’s raining steadily, and the temperature has dropped further to just 7°C, which is really cold for Sydney.

Besides watching the weather, today I worked on material for Friday’s roleplaying game. I used DALL-E to make an invitation image to advertise the game to my friends.

Agate Beach banner

I shared this with them. I also made a map of Agate Beach, the tiny west coast US town where the adventure is set. It’s a real town in Oregon, and I’m basing the game map on the real map, but with some modifications. I’ve also got some new ideas for how the adventure will flow.

And this evening I began the first three classes on this week’s new ethics topic: Friendship. One question I ask: Is it important that friends be of a similar age to each other? It’s interesting hearing kids discuss this. They’re 10-12 years old, and they can’t even imagine having a friend as old as 14 or 15!

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