Played Everdell Farshore at a board-game meetup. It’s a standalone game in the Everdell world. Same base mechanics but several aspects simplified for faster play and easier learning for new players. Rather than set in a forest it’s set in a south-Pacific archipelago. So if that environment is more your thing than the woods you might prefer it overall. I won.
Played through quests 3 and 4 of Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall with my group. We were victorious on both counts. Now headed into Din’Lux to explore the big city.
This is a wide-ranging treatise on the advancement of knowledge. One of the author’s premises is that advancement relies on recognizing that reality is understandable. It wasn’t until the Enlightenment that this concept really took hold resulting in the continual growth of knowledge and technology we live in now.
It also requires the mindset that problems are soluble. Without that mindset no one would bother trying to improve things.
Very dense reading.
Season of Storms by Andrzej Sapkowski
Book 8 in the overall Witcher series taking place before the events that involve Ciri.
A return to form of telling the tales of Geralt as he travels the world and vanquishes monsters.
I wrote about more about why I wanted this in the post about the ePhotoFrame. The short version is I wanted to hang something over this old telephone switch plate so I designed this hook which can slip behind the cover and be threaded through by the screw to be held in place. Works great (so far anyway, but I think it’s sturdy enough).
Since the game group I got together chose to play Kinfire Chronicles I decided I needed to redesign the card holder boxes. Especially since, after resetting the game to start fresh, one section of cards didn’t fit at all anymore in my original design. I know a deck of cards will take up more space once it’s been handled for a bit as the cards take on a little warping, but I wouldn’t have thought it would be as pronounced as it was.
Anyway, with my greatly improved skills with SolveSpace I whipped together this version which has movable dividers and should work much more effectively as the game progresses and cards need to move around.
A friend is restarting a pre-COVID tradition of weekly dinner & game nights on Fridays. We played The Crew: Mission Deep Sea at the first event. It’s a cooperative, trick-taking game of restricted communication. Not my personal favorite of game mechanics, but it was still a good time. We played several missions with a mix of defeats and victories (they get harder as you succeed).
I finally made the effort to corral a group to play some of the many campaign games I’ve purchased over the years. By “campaign game” I mean any game with continuing state from session to session, but focusing on off-the-shelf experiences which don’t require a game master (so not something like Dungeons and Dragons).
I got a group of 4 of us willing to make a reasonable effort to meet approximately every other week. We’ve met twice now and the first rule is to always schedule the next session before we start playing. I figure that gives us the highest likelihood that we actually keep it running.
The group selected Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall as our first game and we’ve played through 3 quests (1, 2, and 16) so far. Victorious in all 3–though by the absolute barest of margins in the third. The monster we were fighting died just as it was about to land the killing blow on our revenant.
At another meetup I played Critter Kitchen. It’s a lighthearted game of gathering ingredients to prepare dishes for a set of food critics. It can be rather frustrating as ingredient gathering depends heavily on what the other players try to collect. So it can commonly happen that you end up with very little while other players collect copious bounties. But it was decent overall. Has enough going on that it would take a few plays to get the full hang of it and has a lot of variability built in to which shops/critics are in each play through. I lost.
The couple who host the regular meetup occasionally hosts all-day events at their home. I was able to stop in for a few hours in the afternoon after the Mathcounts tournament. Lots of turn out this time around. I jumped in to a group that included a 6 year old so we played a couple of simple games. First was Moose Quest. You need to lead your herd of moose on their annual migration. Grow your herd, limit your casualties, cross lands to earn points. To me, the game would have been stronger with a more serious take on the theme. But it’s designed to be more whimsical and goofy. Probably a better design for a target audience of <10. I lost.
Next up we played Taco vs Burrito. This game lands in the same vein as “Exploding Kittens” in that it’s extremely simple, short, with little strategy. Draw a card, play a card, antagonize the other players. I lost.
Next the groups rearranged and I moved onto a more serious game, rather misleadingly so given the art and theme. Fort is a game of improving your play fort to be the best while recruiting kids from the other players to help you. It has a lot more going on that it seems like there should be. We decided that was intentional to play on the idea of kids making up new rules as they go about whatever they’re doing when playing “fort.” I won.
This is book 7 in the overall Witcher series and book 4 in the subset called “The Witcher Saga.” It’s the culmination of the storyline centered on Cirilla.
I think the story got away from the author. I think the Witcher was strongest when he was doing retellings of classic fairy tales. The “Saga” story line starts out strong, but I feel like the author didn’t figure out how to bring it all together into a satisfying ending. So things get a bit absurd and then it just kind of ends.
Perhaps I just didn’t “get it.” I think he was clearly trying to do something in the vein of stories of the knights of the round table which have elements of mysticism. Perhaps someone with a better background in that literature would “get it.”
Somehow that was the only book I finished reading in January though I’m in the middle of a few others.
