No new games this month, so I won’t spend time describing any of them again.
Played Creature Comforts a couple of times. Jess won both times.
Played Kodama. My tree made the tree spirits happiest.
I gave Jess Hardback for Mother’s Day. We’ve played 5 times since then. So far I remain undefeated.
Introduced a friend to The Guild of Merchant Explorers while Jess was off at Six Flags with Heather’s orchestra. I won.
Wool by Hugh Howey
I’ve read this a couple times before, but wanted something easy to read and familiar while Jess was in the hospital.
What if you’re entire world were a massive silo buried in the earth? Why can’t you go outside? How long has humanity lived this way?
The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall
A tragic, but fascinating, true story. A contest to see who could be the first person to single-handedly sail around the world without stopping. A man who dreams to make his mark on history. The reality of his under-prepared journey on an untested vessel. His ultimate demise.
Blindsight by Peter Watts
I feel pretty certain I didn’t “get” this book. It’s an odd one.
Okay, so vampires are real, and there are solid biological explanations behind their mythology. They went extinct, but scientists recovered their DNA and brought them back. That’s just a given and entirely secondary to the actual story though, which is about scientists detecting an anomaly at the edges of the solar system and sending a team out to investigate. First contact…..with….something. It doesn’t go well.
The Mercy of Gods by James S. A. Corey
I’m excited for another series from the authors of The Expanse. Somewhat interesting to read back-to-back with Blindsight as many similar themes are explored.
A scattered fragment of humanity has their planet subjugated almost offhandedly by an expanding galactic empire.
You get thrown into the deep end and it took a bit for me to get my feet under me in the universe they created, but I enjoyed it and am looking forward to the next installment.
The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast by Andrew Blum
This was my pick for my book group at work. It was interesting, but I was hoping for a little more meat.
Interesting to read about how long ago scientists were dreaming of a day that they’d be able to use physics modeling to calculate what would happen in the atmosphere to generate forecasts. And now multiple teams around the world operate supercomputers doing exactly that.
Lost a game of Creature Comforts played with friends. Still enjoy playing. Made a cozy little house for my critters to spend the Winter.
Played Quest 11 of Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall. We were defeated, I think by some gargoyles if I remember correctly. We seem to be getting slapped around pretty good recently. I think we needed at least one of our characters to be much stronger on defense to absorb more damage. But we should be getting close to the end of the story now.
Played Harmonies at the board game meet up. It’s a game of stylized ecosystem building. You place tokens that describe terrain types and place animals in their habitats to gain points. I won.
After Harmonies, we played Hardback. It’s kind of a deck-building version of Scrabble. You start with a deck of cards with letters on them and on your turn you have to make a word and the letters used determine how many points or coins you get. You use coins to buy new letters to add to your deck. It was fun. It solves one of the biggest issues with Scrabble which is your turn is often highly impacted by the other players so you often need notable time to make a move during your turn which slows the whole game down. In Hardback you can figure out your word and then just play it when its your turn so everything goes pretty quick. I lost.
And after Hardback, we played Stockpile–a game about engaging in insider trading on the stock market. Not my typical choice of game concept, but the mechanics are well designed and I enjoyed playing. I lost.
Back at home we played a round of Kodama: The Tree Spirits with friends. Grow your tree and create cozy homes for the tree spirits. I lost.
Introduced the girls to Heat: Pedal to the Metal. I gave them a substantial advantage in having additional heat cards and fewer stress cards while giving myself a substantial handicap of fewer heat cards and more stress cards. I also handicapped the “computer” players. I put up a good fight, but Heather won in the end after I pushed too hard and spun out on the last lap. Corinne found the concept of intentionally using heat to push harder to be too stressful and chose to play it safe. She still came in second.
The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson
The 3rd book in what-is-apparently the first Mistborn trilogy.
The world continues to deteriorate after Vin assassinates the Lord Ruler. Things are looking bleak as forces they don’t understand ravage the countryside. Then, a hero arises.
Reamde by Neal Stephenson
I really liked Anathem and was hoping for something in a similar vein of uniqueness in terms of world building. However, Reamde takes place in a contemporary setting. Mostly an action-adventure story with some bits of spy novel mixed in.
It was fine, but not quite what I was looking for at the moment. And it’s very long. Spent most of the month reading it.
Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich
A hurricane ravages New York City. One guy predicted the cascading failures and follow-on disasters around the event. But then decides to live a life of isolation.
I’m still not really sure what the point of the story was. The writing was fine, but when I finished it was mostly, “okay, I guess were done now.” But maybe that had to do with being phenomenally distracted by other events while trying to finish the last ~15%.
Played another race in Heat: Pedal to the metal at the board game meetup. I lost. Still enjoying this game a lot each time though.
After the race we played a session of Unmatched. It’s a player-vs-player battle system made of up compatible, themed-boxes of characters. I played as Hamlet who on each turn had to decide whether “To Be” or “Not To Be.” With each option offering various tradeoffs. Hamlet faced off against Ms. Marvel, Dr. Strange, and someone else I’ve forgotten. I lost.
Played a couple of games of Creature Comforts during the month. Still enjoying the cozy art and chill gameplay. I lost one game and won one game.
At the next board game meetup we played another session of Marvel Dice Throne: X Men. This time we played 2v2 teams. I played as Psylocke. I rolled an Ultimate move which tipped things in my team’s favor and led to our scant victory.
With time for something short we played two rounds of Stool Pigeon. This is a silly game of memorization and deception. You each have cards with points on them face down in front of you. You get few opportunities to look at them and many opportunities to swap them around the table. Your goal is to have the fewest points on your cards at the end which occurs when someone uses their turn to trigger a final turn for the other players. I lost the first game, which I called (I managed to work myself down to only 2 cards, but other players swapped in high-value cards on their last turn). I won the second game when someone else called and I was able to keep a hold of only very-low value cards without anyone taking them off me. A silly game, but fun for killing 10-20 minutes at a time.
Jess and I finally got back around to moving our Kinfire Chronicle’s: Night’s Fall campaign forward. We picked up a side quest (Quest 21) and were doing quite well in the battle. But we lost control of our boat and capsized. So we weren’t defeated by the enemy, but neither did we defeat them. Tails tucked between our legs we limped back to town still dirt poor after several less-than-successful missions in a row.
Update:
Played a couple sessions of Keep the Heroes Out! with the family on the last day of the month. We played scenario 7 on “challenging” difficulty and were defeated fairly quickly. So we reset and played again on “family” difficulty. We were defeated again, but we survived a lot longer.