After missing out on Halloween last year due to the whole family being sick with COVID we got to make up for it this year.
We carved pumpkins on the 30th. The girls each really participated this time with not just coming up with designs, but helping scoop guts out and Heather did almost her entire pumpkin herself.
Corinne's design used the eyes to make ears. Heather's is a cat sitting in silhouette. I added a side view of a cat to make a whole feline crew.
Corinne and Heather were both cats from the Warriors series. Heather was Firestar and Corinne was Graystripe. Jess did face paint for them to complete the looks.
Corinne's friend was supposed to Trick-or-Treat with us last year, so we made that happen this time.
I've been putting the smoke machine out on Halloween since I got it, but just a little wind will clear the smoke almost immediately. So this year I pointed the smoke machine at the ceramic jack-o-lantern we have. So smoke fills the pumpkin and then drifts outs of the eyes, nose, and mouth. It was a much more effective result.
Also didn't get much designing and printing done this month.
I did make an updated light-switch plate for the living room with fall leaves. Yellow seemed like a nice contrast to the red, but it's basically impossible to see from a few feet away. Orange would have been a better choice.
And I printed a bunch of things for Heather's parties. A spider to dangle from the chandelier, the cats and mice for the adventure, and the party-favor pumpkins.
Pretty cool to be able to decide, "I want a big spider to dangle over the table." Then click some buttons and in a couple of hours and for less than a dollar you've got one.
Didn't get much game playing done this month. Too much going on with birthday preparations and Halloween I guess.
I made it out to one game night and one afternoon of games at a friend's house.
At the game night I first played Flamecraft. I'd played once before when the owner first got it and brought it to a game night--which was probably at least a year ago. It's got really cute artwork about dragons and the town they inhabit. I had thought the girls would like it, but the gameplay can be a little challenging and I deferred adding it to my collection.
On each turn you choose from a variety of actions to collect resources or help grow the town. It's competitive, but not adversarial. There are several actions you engage in which require you to give other players resources or points and it's not a zero-sum game.
I had a difficult start, but had two turns where I was able to really capitalize on fortuitous situations on the board and pulled out a sound win at the end.
After Flamecraft I played Zoo Vadis. I knew I wasn't going to care for this game from the beginning as it's a wheeling/dealing negotiation/backstabbing game which just isn't my jam. But I go to play and this is what people wanted to play. Unsurprisingly I lost.
You play as a group of animals in a zoo and your goal is to negotiate with the other animals to get your group promoted up to the premiere animal enclosure.
At the afternoon of games we started by playing Apiary. I played part of a game previously to take over for someone leaving, so this time I got to play through from the beginning. It's a bit of an odd game--sentient space bees building out spaceships--but, it has solid mechanics (as can usually be expected from Stonemaier Games).
I made a run for points via the "Queen's Favor" track and chalked up another sound win for the month.
After Apiary I convinced a group to play The Stifling Dark. I got this from a crowdfunding campaign in December 2023, but hadn't gotten around to playing it yet. It being October it seemed like a good time to give it a go.
I originally backed it because it's a bit of a table-top incarnation of an online game I'd been playing with friends for a while called Phasmophobia. Team of investigators need to go into a haunted location and avoid being killed by the ghost while completing some objective. So same concept, but here someone has to play the ghost.
Having not played before (which I warned everyone about) it was a learning experience and the game ran quite long. I played as the ghost stalking and attacking the investigators who were trying to escape the abandoned sawmill. The team managed to get the gate powered up and one of them made it out alive, but I got the rest--which counts as a win for me.
I think the game could easily be shortened by skipping the "Act 1" evidence-collection phase and instead dropping the characters in the map and randomly drawing an objective for them (with some balance adjustments to the ghost as well). That would probably get a game down to under 1.5 hours. Our game, with learning, making mistakes, looking things up, and trying to make sense of it all, ran for ~4 hours--which was a bit much.
I've been working on whittling down my digital tsondoku. So this month has a random collection of things sitting on my ereader that I hadn't gotten around to yet.
Cyberstorm by Matthew Mather
What happens when massive cyber attacks coincide with a devastating weather event?
Appreciated it wasn't a survival story immediately about the good guys versus the bad guys. There was nuance and misunderstanding and desperation involved too.
The Cassandra Project by Jack McDevitt and Mike Resnick
A slowly-unfolding mystery of an international coverup about the Moon in the context of the Apollo missions.
A more gripping read than I think it had a right to be given its pace, but I think the drip of new information that drives the story along must have been about perfectly timed to keep me going.
Renegade by Joel Shepherd
This started out a bit stiff and clunky. Characters were a bit stereotypical. But it grew into itself fairly nicely and I was enjoying it by the end.
Space opera, power struggles, conspiracies, intrigue set at the end of a generations-long space war to earn humanity a seat at the galactic table.
The Old Willis Place by Mary Downing Hahn
The past two years or so each October I'd read aloud to the family A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny. It's a Halloween story told one day at a time throughout October.
This year the girls wanted something fresh and I found this billed for the right age range. It seems to have been a hit.
An abandoned manor house with a tragic history and the kids at the center of it all.
The Alien Chronicles edited by David Gatewood
Another anthology, this one nominally about human-alien interactions--often in the context of first contact.
Some decent stories in it, some that I found entirely forgettable and/or cliche.
Heather had a birthday / Halloween party this year to start off her celebration. I ran a minigame competition with a "Top Banana" trophy as the prize. They competed in 5 events: jigsaw puzzling (complete a small puzzle), dice stacking (stack dice on a tongue depressor held in your teeth), cup shuffling (alternating hands, remove the top cup of a stack and put it on the bottom until the first cup is back on top), Ping Pong carry (using a tiny, sample spoon carry Ping Pong balls across the yard), and the toilet-paper spray (use a spray bottle to spray a hanging strip of toilet paper that has a clothes pin on the bottom until the strip breaks and the clothes pin falls).
Then there was pizza, treats, and the general silliness of middle-school kids. Then back outside for "ghost pictures" (double-exposures using a flash).
Once our spooky pictures were complete it was back inside for birthday/Halloween trifle and filling up 3D-printed pumpkins with candy to take home. A good time seems to have been had by all.
The Birthday Adventure
On her birthday it was school and homework, but once finally complete it was time for a Warrior Cats Birthday Adventure (Heather's costume this year was Firestar from the book series).
In the stories, cats train to become warriors who hunt for food and defend their clans. After an apprenticeship they must complete an assessment and if successful they have a formal ceremony.
Heather received a letter inviting her to take her Warrior Assessment which would challenge the five essential skills of a warrior: Smell, Sight, Tracking, Hearing, and Touch.
Her first trial (scent) required matching each scent-marked name to the appropriate cat. The cats were under glasses to help isolate their scents. I found a simple cat model online, modified it to have an empty space inside with holes through the back and then filled them with smelly things: cinnamon, vinegar, liquid smoke, cologne, and lavender oil. It worked pretty well, though oddly, the vinegar had no smell when she played the game just a few hours after prepping them.
Correctly identifying the cats revealed the code to the cryptex needed to begin the second trial (sight). I used the same cat model, but scaled it down to about an inch tall and printed cats in four colors. She had to find all ten hidden around the house and the number of cats in each color provided the combination to the lock for the third trial (tracking).
The trial of tracking required following a prey's path through the backyard without getting lost until she caught up with the prey and obtained the code to the fourth trial. This involved a string run all over the backyard in one continuous length with false leads crossing it and confusing the issue. Although she made a mistake early on, she made a countering mistake shortly after and ended up with the right mouse while skipping about half the path. The prey was a 3D-printed mouse I grabbed from online and modified to put text on the incorrect ones ("Try Again", etc.) and the code to the next trial on the correct one.
The fourth trial was hearing. I had recorded the cats meowing as well as myself and Jess and created an audio file for each of us. She had to listen to each file and identify which creature was meowing. Heather found this quite amusing and aced it without issue. The correct identification of the meowers provided the code to the fifth and final trial.
Warriors are sworn to protect their clans and this can require sacrifice. To honor those sacrifices Heather needed to identify four veteran warriors who had been permanently injured serving the clan using only touch. I used the same cat model from before, but modified one to remove the tail, one to remove an ear, one to remove a foot, and one to have a deep scar down the side. I placed each one in a paper bag and she needed to reach in and determine which cat was which. The order of the cats provided the code to the final chest.
The treasure chest contained a letter of congratulations and direction to present herself to the clan leader for the official induction ceremony where she would set aside her apprentice name of Heatherpaw and receive her warrior name, Heatherstorm.
Once the ceremony was complete it was time to celebrate with gifts! She had a blast. Grinning so big she could hardly read the letters and notes out loud.
Then it was off to dinner at Chili's and home again for cake--pumpkin chocolate-chip cake with cream cheese frosting.
