Yen Are We Playing Power Grid Again?

To the left, observe the China side of the China & Korea map I acquired for Power Grid. It had been a long time since we had played Power Grid, and I was reminded that the last time we played, our friend Topher had played with us (a sad brief memory of our lost friend). I also had purchased the new Power Grid ower Plant deck, and semi-followed the guidelines for blending the old and new decks.

Game: Power Grid
Players: Brian, Ben, Tim, Dave. Rob
Winner: Brian
A good game, but man it was long. 'Twas good to see Ben again, as his presence has been gone far too long. And Tim stated the usual "I hate this game" not 10 minutes into the game. I felt bad for Rob, as a massive overbid on an early power plant left him short on liquidity, and he never recovered. An otherwise close game with the other 4 players, it came down to a last-turn tie with myself and Dave both powering 19 plants. Ben and Tim were right behind. As I had 20 bucks left over to Dave's 6, I won the tie-break. Long, but good game.

Game: Dominion
Players: Brian, Ben, Tim, Rob
Winner: Tim
Dave bowed out, and we taught Ben what has become our favorite game of late. We went with the Village set, if I remember right, from the instructions/suggestions. A good game that had some synergy between the cards. I *think* Tim won, but someone correct me if I am wrong here, as it was 1:30am before we finished.

Lost & Found

I have been eagerly anticipating the premiere of TV's "Lost" for the last day or two. In sum, it was simultaneously disappointing and fascinating, but I'll still give an pverall approval for the season premiere.

The points I did not necessarily enjoy I won't worry about. A couple things here and there, and a couple 'and why is that worth mentioning?' moments that I am fairly confident have little to do with the overall story arc.

I did think it neat that Locke had an early episode encounter with the Dharma guy.

Ben is obviously a weasel, but why do they *all* need to go back, even for nefarious reasons? Haven't figured that one out quite yet.

Faraday mentions Des is 'special'. Was he special before he tripped the failsafe or after?

I recognised the older lady near the end of the episode as the lady from Des's episode where she tells him that triggering the failsafe was the best thing he had ever done. Is that Faraday's mom after Des goes for the visit? And when Des makes up his mind that he must help our islanders, was that a past memory transplant, for lack of a better word, when he comes to the conviction he must help them? It appeared as if it was a dream from Penny's perspective, but Des thought it a memory. Weird and neat.

I did like the end of the episode where the older lady and Ben were conversing. I liked the old Trash-80-ish Dharma computer that had seeming plots on it. I will assume those are pendulum-ish variations on the island's current time position and that it wavers back and forth along the lines (that resemble an older vector graphics video game explosion from the 80s), and when it becomes "central" that is when the island can be accessed in real time sans fear of nose bleeds and dying from the bad side effects from time travel (as Des had to remedy himself from last season).

Overall, pretty good stuff. Cheech was kinda creepy to look at though. I have absolutely no room to talk about someone else's weight, but he was pudgy and older looking, and it bothered me for some reason. Was that a replacement Ana Lucia, or did they hire DUI Rodriguez back?

At least we now see what Lost really refers to, as in lost in time......

Hope and Non-Believers

I was able to watch most of the inauguration of Barack Obama yesterday. Four thoughts pervaded my consciousness as I watched.

First, I know he is just a guy. However, I do have some semblance of hope that he can be a mere catalyst to change our country's recent reliance on hate profiteering to motivate people into political action. Hate profiteers and bitter people with cult-like followers like Rusty Limbaugh and Louis Farrakhan, begone. It has been childish, the angry bickering of late. Angry negative people are tiresome. Very tiresome, even if they have a point. So there is hope that climate will change.

I was moved, several times, as I thought about what this day means symbolically for our nation. Indeed, he is just one man, and that man happens to be black. It means a lot to me that our country has come along enough, at least places outside of rural Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi that we freely elected such a man.

I do hope the spirit of unity prevails. While racism is still around, I hope he shines as an example to those not wanting him alive let alone as president, that there can and are not just a few black men who do not extort all the very negative stereotypes that prevail. There are reasons stereotypes exist, and many are actually valid; yet the over-application of those stereotypes when added with anger become racism, pure and simple. He seems capable of smoothing our cultural prejudices over, at least to some degree.

Also, I know that it means even more to my wife's family. Ruthie hails from Gary, is black, and her parents actually were forced to sit at the back of the bus, etc., etc. While this is not the 'snap, all is good now' moment, I have to believe it means more to them than I can understand, as I never directly experienced that kind of direct ignorance, obviously, as I am white.

[I did have to laugh though, as I heard one comic on TV refer to yesterday as Redneck Suicide Watch Day.]

I liked the fact that during Barack's speech, he mentioned people of varying faiths, Christion, Muslim,Jewish,....and non-believers. In a non-angry and satisfied tone, thank you for not taking the usual egocentric road toward assuming Americans are all Christians, and if they are not, they are of some other emotions-based religion. It's about time somebody recognizes the non-believers crowd is growing.

Rob, You Tool

All I've been blogging on lately are geek sessions, but I plan on changing that. I have just been busy doing other things.

On Monday, MLK Day, all of my gaming friends had the day off as we all work for one of our town's local institutions of higher learning. So we decided that after a D&D session on Friday, a board game session was in order.

Game: Cosmic Encounter
Players: Brian, Tim, Dave, Rob
Winner: Dave
After taking an early lead, Rob stole my hand, took what he wanted and trashed the rest. My game never got back into form. Dave played well, had an abundance of Reinforcement cards (I didn't have one the entire game), and went on a roll, beating all of us to 5 planets. I think I went from first to last in one round about the table after my hand was pilfered. Well played by Dave though.


Game: Stone Age
Players: Brian, Tim, Dave, Rob
Winner: Tim/Brian
Stone Age is only *supposed* to have one winner, but I am declaring two. Tim certainly played well enough to win, and desrves recognition. Also though, during the game, dearest Rob (and I didn't catch this) told Tim the card he just got gave him a permanent Tool of value 4. It was supposed to be a one-time shot. When the end score was calculated, I would have won had the Tool been processed the right way. Now, everyone who knows me knows that winning a game is secondary to having fun for me. Oh, I do try, but no big if I don't. On this one though, and since it is my blog, I will declare 2 winners..... 8P

Game: Dominion
Players: Brian, Tim, Rob
Winner: Brian
Dave bowed out a bit early, so the 3 of us played Dominion, using an online page I got from BGG to generate the 10 Dominion cards. It was a decent set, but not a single card allowed more than 1 Buy, so the game was a bit longer than usual. I think it was Rob's worst Dominion game evar, as he was making noises we think were ones of despair over there. Tim and I finished very close, 39 & 36, as my last Province buy got me over the top. I love this game.....

Games and Games Over Winter Break

One of my many friends named Dave wrote a good year-end game review blog entry (here), which prompted me to think about all the games I meant to blog on and never got to.

You see, I had this l'il problem over the holidays - I had to rebuild my PC not once but twice. Anime is PURE EVIL I tell you. Pure evil!!!!! My daughter loves anime and manga and went to a site she wasn't familiar with to DL a video; that was ad-ware hell #1. After the rebuild, she thought that it was only anime video files that were problematic, so when she went to another yet unfamiliar site to get only pictures, a more serious, alleged ID-theft virus got into the registry and all that fun stuff. It took me 12 hours to fully rebuild. Thank goodness we have an external hard drive to keep out those overseas anime ad/spy/virus-writing hacks.

Anyway, while I like Race for the Galaxy and Agricola more than my friend, the above link nicely covers why each of the games mentioned are excellent ones; Pandemic (pictured above) and Dominion especially.

I had meant to do the uber-geeky thing with this blog to log game nights, and with the aforementioned distractions, got away from it. So here is a sum of all the games I remember playing over the holidays (someone let me know if I remembered the details wrong here):

-First Friday on break-
Game: Dominion
Players: Brian, Dave, Rob
Winner: Dave

Game: Galaxy Trucker
Players: Brian, Dave, Rob
Winner: Rob
I *think* Rob won. I remember this game well, as we played with the IIIA boards for the first time, and my ship got hit twice in the mid-section: the first exposing a weak spot and the second exploiting it for what I believe is the largest to-date chunk of ship to break off yet. I went the way of Khan big time to the great amusement of the others. I actually made it to port sans engines, but half my ;arge ship broke off, and I wound up owing money upon docking.

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-The following Monday-
Game: Fluxx 4.0
Players: Brian, Dave, Lee, Rob
Winner: Dave
Nice new card art, though this particular game went a bit long for Fluxx.

Game: Agricola (aaaaa-greeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee'-co-la!!!!!!!!!!!!)
Players: Brian, Lee, Dave, Rob
Winner: Brian
Got my farming up and going quickly, and being able to ignore 2 Begging cards certainly helped. Thanks to Dave for being willing to play, as this isn't one of his favorite games. Not a thanks to Dave in the incessant chanting of Agricola as you would hear on the Ricola commercials....

Game: Dominion
Players: Brian, Lee, Dave, Rob
Winner: Lee
In one of the lowest-scoring Dominion games I can remember, Lee won on hos first attempt. Nice going, Lee.

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No gaming that Friday, as it was just after XMas.

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-The following Friday-
Game: Stone Age
Players: Brian, Dave, David, Rob
Winner: Brian
David did well for most of the game, but I had a huge end-game bonus for hut-builders of 56 points.

Game: Dominion
Players: Brian, Dave, Rob
Winner: Rob
Even though both Rob and I had our machines going well, Rob won handily.

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Saturday
Game: Pandemic
Players: Brian, Randy, Holly, Ruthie
Winner: Disease
Great game teaching Randy & Holly for the first time, but we lost. We had the game end in sight, but 2 players before we could finish off the last 2 diseases, the player draw deck ran out. That is the first game I have played where we lost to the deck, as it is usually to the number of outbreaks making us lose. A good time though.