We played a mix of the expansions for the game Flash Point. I started out as the hazmat guy, and got all the flammables out. Tina was the dog and as such was useful and moving around and getting into hard to reach places to find the people. The 12 move with the dog is amazing. We did really well at controlling the fire and getting the people out quickly. We didn’t focus too much on either, and with that nice balance were able to save everyone but the dog. It was fun, but the play style isn’t something that can keep me interested for more than one game.
This game was a lot of fun at the start, but at the end it got incredibly frustrating. It got especially frustrating when you realized that there was no way for you to win. I did a very predictable play, but Tina wasn’t ready for it and that made it impossible for her to be even close to first. She then did a play out of spite to make it so that I couldn’t win. I would have tied Brian exactly had she not done that one play. Steph and Chris did moderately well, but Chris had taken too many pieces to be a contender.
I played this three times and did moderately well all of them. I got second, third, third. The first game had Jeff, Chris, Tina, Steph, and Nick. Jeff and Chris left after the first game to play something else, but the others played two more rounds. I tried a few different strategies, and they all turned out moderately. I wasn’t able to get a win in any of the circumstances, mainly due to over-planning and not being able to come through on the original plan. That left me out in the original plan working. I would very much like to try again with a non-traditional play of trying to get lots of free buildings and a few other things. This would mean not getting many resources early and relying on other stuff to come through. The winners were Chris, Nick, and Steph. Tina got frustrated when she relied on others to do things and we didn’t come through on them.
This was a really nice game, and the mechanics worked rather well. The units and bases concept was nice. I also like the combination of factions as it makes the game much more expansive and doesn’t force a specific play style. I happened to get pirates and ninja, which have very similar play styles. That made it hard for me to do anything other than sneak around. Without the ability to drop lots of big hitters or bring up lots of other units I was unable to get many wins. I was able to sneak in for two of them, but it would take most of my hand playing special action cards. Jeff ended up winning, with Chris and I taking a back seat at the end.
This was a pleasant change from the previous two books, and it seems like it would require more than one movie to do right. Either way I look forward to seeing the movie version. There is a lot more information given out in this, but at the end I felt like it left things hanging. I wanted to have more resolution with the government and districts and hear how things went. It just follows the main characters off to their little corner of the world and ends instead of talking about all the big things that were happening. It sounded like the system had just resumed with slightly less inequality. Either way I really liked the books, but would say that this series ranks just above the Ringworld series.
Candice and I went to a Unity Developer meetup and talked to a number of developers. Several of them were very interested in the system we were proposing and game some good feedback on the plans. I hope to see them again so that we can get them to play around with the system and make some games for it. It would also be pretty easy to make their current games into ones that work with the system.
After the meetup we went to La Bamba, the old location. We walked in and it was all deconstructed, but they were nice enough to redirect us to the new location. We got some dinner and talked about company stuff. Things are coming together nicely. Now we just need to polish and complete the alpha product.
We did 2 days of paragliding. It was tons of fun. I got the fewest flights with around 20, with Steph getting the most around 25. It was all amazing, and I would love to learn more paragliding and get into longer flights. The flights at the training hill lasted about 45 seconds, but were still really fun. We got some red tailed hawks flying with us, and they were only a few tens of feet flying off my wing tips. There was a van picking us up at the bottom and driving us back up to the top. The turn around was very quick and the number of flights we got were impressive. We also had the perfect weather and wind for most of the weekend. Towards the ends of the days on Saturday and Sunday we got cross winds, and that made it harder to launch.
We went to a little town near Santa Barbara called Solvang. It is made to look like a Danish village. The place was amazingly cute. We wandered around trying to find a place to eat. Many of the places we tried to eat were full, but we found a nice place on the outside of town. It was very tasty, and the seating was surprisingly relaxing. After dinner we went to a nearby campsite. We didn’t get to have a fire since there was a fire advisory. The night ended up being really cold, but we stilled played some games on Brian’s iPad. The night didn’t go well, but we managed to stay warm enough.
We did two hikes in the morning and they were both beautiful but arduous. The first hike was down the cliff of Cliff House. The cliff had a beach at the bottom, and it was a really steep hike. The trail was a little loose with the chopped rock. It was a lot of fun, but I chose to not go on the beach since I didn’t want to get sand in my shoes. The hike back up was hard. We then went to a hike down the road and had a little over a mile hike up the mountain. The view from about a third of the way up was really nice. Everyone was ready to head down, even though it wasn’t nearly as far as we had planned on going. We went back down the mountain and got some ice cream. Steph and I shared a chocolate shake.
We then drove down to the Elephant Seals beach. The beach was fun, and there weren’t nearly as many there as there will be at peak. There were a few of them that had gotten there, and the males were massive. We mistook a few of the huge males for large boulders.
