Wrenny and I spent Sunday afternoon at the local coffeehouse. We had a great time drinking a “frappé” (latte blended with ice) spiked with chocolate syrup, yum… Kept us fuelled up for a nice long game of Elfenland. In the end it was a dead even tie, broken by Wrenny smashing my remaining pieces before I could get hers. 
We also played Bluetooth games across the iPhone and iPod touch. Whee!
PAX 2009 flew by like a sonic jet. Dan and I met out in Seattle again this year (we did it once before in 2007) for the Penny Arcade Gaming Expo. In my quest to find work, I picked up a pretty nice Macbook Pro so I can do iPhone development. It turns out that it has a nice dedicated GPU, can boot into Windows, and with the latest Bootcamp set of Windows drivers that came with the latest OS X (10.6 aka Snow Leopard), it fully supports Windows 7 RC, to the point where I was ripping it up with all the latest games. What a deal! Dan kept the party rolling with a new laptop purchase in the 11th hour, so that by the time the games began on Friday morning, we had covered half of Seattle on foot but managed to be fully geared up.
On Friday we spent a lot of time in BYOC setting up the shiny new rigs. Saturday was a full day of joyous fun, from 10am ’til 2am (that’s 5am EST, for those keeping score). We played Legions on a local instantaction.com server (I was happy to place in the middle of the pack in the deathmatch tourney), a 100+-player Trackmania Nations Forever contest, Call of Juarez, Fallout 3, Eve Online, Marble Madness, board games including Puerto Rico, and most of the PAX 10, including Tag, Osmos, Puzzlebloom, etc. And we caught a minute here and there of the excellent panels, incliding watching Gabe and Tycho put together the strip for that day. Sunday we kept plugging away while managing to collect over a dozen t-shirts – LOTS of Tribes loot! On Monday we gamed the most, with our homebrew LAN-out-of-a-suitcase setup in the hotel, shooting each other endlessly in Juarez, and still managed to get to the mall to buy the wives something. And there was so much good food… Red Fin tempura, Cheesecake Factory, cyber-dogs… the Teriyaki rage of 2007 has been replaced by Pho on every corner (HOT hot salty yummy soup). When you get it to go, you get a vat of hot water and all the ingredients to build it yourself. And of course, literally, Starbucks on every corner. In central Seattle I had a triple-shot latte that made my day. Too much fun. Thanks Danno!!
Andrea packed her bags and headed to the beach with her book club buddies this weekend. The girls and I (and Grammy on occasion) had fun playing Age of Mythology, Tribes, soccer, wrestling, cooking cinnamon rolls, walking the dogs, getting takeout at the Gillespies (including Guitar Hero and Carcassonne games), going for pizza with the Prevosts… wow, we did a lot! :>
The girls and I gave Andrea the Pirates’ Cove board game for Christmas, and it’s turned out to be great fun. In the first game, we teamed up to go up against the Flying Dutchman, with cannons that “heal” every firing volley, and we managed to sink her! Wren loves the Pirates of the Carribean movies, and she continued the theme on her birthday – everyone came dressed up as a pirate! We burned the edges of the invitations, the sign on the door (“Beware There Be Pirates!”), and everything else we could think of. We served rum (ok, it was really lemonade). I made a treasure map that had the girls running around the house, and included a Piratey Perplexor Puzzle (say that three times fast). And a couple days later, on the actual day of her birthday, she got another pirate board game, Dead Man’s Treasure, which is “easy to learn but difficult to master”, and the Pirates of the Carribean game for the Wii, so we could swashbuckle all day long – it uses a fun linear cinematic style of play. ARRRR!
Easter dinner tradition continues, this year with a fabulous Celebration Roast at Grammy’s house, followed by a round of Pictionary. Wonder what we did with that huge Pictionary whiteboard we had in the 90′s…
My friend Gary has been waiting for PAX to end, so I will get back to reality and get my head out of the PAX cloudcover. It was worth it… here’s my PAX post… if you’re not a gamer, “move on”… Continue reading »
This game always seems to be billed as second-in-line, because it’s a two-player spin-off of Puerto Rico, a bigger game. But dig around for it, it’s worth it – a great game of skill building up your base city before time runs out. There are lots of ways to achieve that goal – Andrea used a new one on me today (monument-building) to sneak up and clobber me. I guess it’s not too new, Reiley has won before that way. Wait a minute, I think I better reassess… :> Anyway, we play a lot of two player games, and this is one we keep coming back to for its well-balanced strategy options and manageable scope. Here’s Andrea whooping it up on me today… I’m so glad for the little ways I can make her happy. UNTIL NEXT TIME! :>
The night before last, the girls stayed with Grammy and Andrea and I found ourselves with a Saturday pretty much all to ourselves. We ate up the morning with a massive game of Carcassonne, including the River, Builders and Traders, The Dragon and the Princess, and Inns and Cathedrals expansions. Later that day, Jane and Larry invited us over to see our Scotland photos on their big HDTV, sweet. The kids all played upstairs while we got in another big game, this time with The Count expansion (which is great). It was fitting to play a game set in France, as they faced Italy in the World Cup Final today. Too bad Zidane tainted the whole experience with a tasteless headbutt to the chest of an Italian player. By the time they lost in a penalty shootout, I had lost the urge to cheer for them. Zidane just eclipsed Rooney for the most disappointing World Cup performance. But it was still a great ride, even if it was full of disappointments and surprises.
I guess if you’re on your third expansion for a game, you’re officially a fan. Carcassonne came with the River expansion, and we added Inns and Cathedrals a year or two ago. This time around, we’ve added The Princess and the Dragon to the mix. All the expansions layer on top of the base game, and now it’s extended to a Hera-and-Zeus level of near chaos, which makes for an awesome game. We played until 1am last night (and I still biked to work, woop!).
