Chris, Andrew, and Kevin met me at Beachhead to do drafts of MTG. We started out with the guilds decks, 1 of Gatecrash and 2 of Return to Ravnica. That draft was decent for me, but mainly because nobody else got particularly good cards. The second draft was much better, with Mirrodin. Andrew was able to get a really good deck. I lost to Andrew, and won against Chris. Chris got an indestructible golem that was massive, but I was able to take it down with an infect dragon that I pumped up with my own life total. After that we split up for dinner, then Kevin and Andrew came over to my place to try out a sealed style game. Andrew got the best cards by far, including a god card and a planeswalker.
Iliya and I played a nice game of Galaxy Trucker. I had a really amazing torus ship, that had only one hole. The ship was designed to shield from everything and carry a lot of cargo. I should have put in more aliens, but it wasn’t too bad. There were tons of armed crew, and a good number of cargo spaces. I left a lot on the table and should have picked up even more of the cargo spots. The last round I got completely destroyed early on by boarding parties, and killed on the last card by pirates. It was a very enjoyable game.
For board games night last night, I played against Tina and Steph in two rounds of Factory Fun! Tina won both games, and I did pretty well in the second. Since I’ve told Steph and Tina all my secrets of making fast decisions and knowing what you need I’m not winning all the time, and if I do it isn’t by nearly as much. I then played a really interesting game of ‘We haven’t playtested this theme’ or something along those lines. The game has lots of arbitrary rules of how you can lose, and the point is to play a lot of quick rounds where people lose over and over. I then played Stone Age with Nick and Chris. We changed the rules a bit so that the starving people strategy is much harder. This meant that the tools strategy won. I was the one who pulled off the tools strategy, and got all of the tool multipliers. It was a pretty nice end to the day.
Steph and I joined Jeremy and his gf for The Wind Rises. I really enjoyed the start of the movie, but it had a very anticlimactic ending. It isn’t the kind of movie that I’d want to see again, but it was nice to see once.
We met Nima and Caryn at Skyline and Alpine roads. There was a really great hiking area up there, but the day was really really nasty. We were protected near the parking lot, so it was only wet. When we crested the ridge at the start of the trail we got the full blast of the wind, which made the hike completely undesirable. We decided to head back to Mountain View and go to Esther’s Bakery. We had a decent lunch there, but not a great one. We probably should have gone to Pho Vi Hoa since it was just across the street, but we wanted to try something new.
Jeremy, Steph, and I went to Shezan for dinner, and it was delicious as always. We got the typical Tikka Masala, and it was the highlight of the meal as always.
Jeremy came over to put together and paint some minis with Steph. We also played some Mario 3D World. It was great, and we nearly finished the game. We completed 3 of the 4 bonus worlds. The last bonus world requires you get 100% completion of the game up to that point. We weren’t even close to ready to finish the game to that degree, so we looked up the end on Youtube.
Steph, Eric, and friend joined me in a game of Keyflower. It is a worker placement, engine building game, but doesn’t do the engine building very well. There are only four turns, so once you have an engine the game is over. I was able to get an engine going, but wasn’t able to turn that into points.
I’ve come to the conclusion that Archer either doesn’t want to do it, or isn’t smart enough for toilet training. Lana is very smart and even after we took the insert out of the toilet she has gotten up on it and started to use it. She might even use it regularly if we can catch her doing it and reward the behavior. Archer was at the point where he wouldn’t use a full insert that was clean litter. That was a bad kitty and bad sign.
It's an Exciting World 