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Hiking

We went hiking this weekend. I took Audrial and my friend Luz (whom I board game with, who has been interested in hiking) on a hike on Lamentation Mountain. I intended to bring them up Lamentation, back down, and then up Chauncey and back to the cars, but we didn’t make it up Chauncey. They were both pretty tuckered out after Lamentation. Plus this was the first “real” hike either of them had been on (a 2+hr hike); Audrial’s sandals created hot spots (not quite blisters) on her heels.

I hiked with my ULA Circuit packed with most of my backpacking stuff. I didn’t have a bladder; Audrial was using my Camelbak MULE and Luz was using Audrial’s Osprey Ace. Luz is maybe 5’7” or so, and we were able to adjust the pack to fit her just fine. The Ace is a very versatile back in that regard. I’m sure it would fit me well as well.

My pack performed great. It was very comfortable, and the hipbelt pockets are, as everyone mentions, awesome. The Ace has pockets there as well, but they’re not as big, and the zipper goes in the opposite direction and that makes them difficult to zip back up again. The Circuit hip pockets are nice and large (in my right one, I had my compact binoculars and my camera, and had some room to spare). They zip from the back to the front, and the zipper goes about half way down the front.

Audrial arrived on Saturday at around 2pm. We went to Cabellas, which is awesome. They have an absolutely huge store with all kinds of taxidermy exhibits. They also have a cool aquarium, and a laser shotgun range for kids. They even have a grill on the second floor where you can order bison burgers and venison brats, amongst other things. We had a good time there.

We got home and unpacked, and went over to the Looks so Audrial could play with the kids. We left there a little before they were getting ready to eat (since we’d already eaten) and went home to relax. We were both tired. On the way though, we stopped at the park.

Audrial and I played with the Speedminton rackets, serving back and forth. She was having a hard time with it, so I gave her some instruction and a couple of drills, and she started getting better (though she got a little frustrated). We swung on the swings, and she showed me her monkey bar stuff. We went home and just hung out, watching TV.

On Sunday, we went hiking at around 9 up on Mount Higby. We set up her Hennessy Scout hammock up there and she relaxed in it for a while. I’d tied one end to one tree to show her, and she’d done the other end, but hers was too low and she hadn’t pulled the ridgeline tight enough, so her end drooped quite a bit. I tensioned it properly and moved it up a little, and she was all set!

40 lbs.

That’s what my pack weighed when I left home. Without a full water bag. I was a little apprehensive about that as I left to go pick Sven up. With a name like Sven, you don’t think of a big black man, but that’s who he is. Sven makes me think of a Scandinavian or something. Lederhosen and the like.

We met up with Janice and Kevin at a parking lot off of exit 47 on I-91. I left my vehicle there, and got into Janice’s mini-SUV. Kevin went along with Sven and our other companion Grigory. We drove north for a couple of hours, finally finding ourselves near the base of Mt Greylock, on the Appalachian Trail. We didn’t go south to Greylock, however; we went north, into Vermont.

Saturday

Games I want to play more of

• Tigris & Euphrates: I keep on getting beat by Paul.
• Through the Desert: This is a fun one, if a bit brain burny sometimes
• Abalone
• Quoridor: I’ve really only played this a couple of times with Audrial
• Return of the Heroes: Only played it a couple of times with John, and it didn’t turn out all that well. Before I rid myself of it, I’ve got to play it a couple of more times to see how it really plays. I’m not sure I’m really into the ‘adventure’ genre in board games anymore.
• Jambo
• Puerto Rico Expansion: Never played it, actually. But I’ve played Puerto Rico a few times, and I’d like to see how this influences the game
• Reef Encounter: I totally don’t understand the strategy for this game. I need to play it more. Plus I like it.
• Dungeon Twister: A little on the burny side, but I think I like it. I need to play it a few more times.
• Nexus Ops: Great fun, if unpredictable
• Caylus: Excellent game, but it doesn’t see enough play time for some reason.

• Lord of the Rings – The Confrontation: Deluxe Edition: I haven’t played this one enough to even familiarize myself with the strategy. I’d like to spend an evening on this one sometime

My usual gaming gathering on Fridays was a no-go this week, so I RSVPed that I’d be at the FCBG meetup. It was great to see a bunch of people I really don’t get to see that much of, plus some new faces.

Fairfield County Board Games

Matt Loter and Steve Wood were playing Memoir 44, and had out some kind of airplane expansion that looked pretty cool. Matt was also involved in a game of Blackbeard when I left, which is a game I’m definitely interested in playing from what I’ve heard of it. Don had his blimp game out, and another group was playing Hamsterrolle (a fun looking dexterity game).

When I walked in with this guy Ed, Ricardo and Greg were both idling. We looked over some games, and chose Glory to Rome. Ricardo had played before, but Ed and Greg had no so I taught the game. Ricardo was to my left, Greg to my right, and Ed opposite me. The first client I pulled in was a Merchant; the second a Craftsman.

I built a Storeroom first off, allowing my clients to act as Laborers. I gathered another Merchant client, added the +2 clientele and +2 vault cards. I don’t recall what my other card was, but I had a max of 11 cards in my vault at game end. I filled it, and ended the game with the Catacombs for 47 points.

Friday night after work I got together w/ the normal crew (sans Melissa, who was at Girl Scouts with Unique) and played some Glory to Rome. When Melissa got back we played a couple rounds of True Colors. This was the first time any of them had played and everyone enjoyed it (though I ditched a few of the more risque cards.

True Colors is a party game in the truest sense of the word, since you don’t play the game to win. The strategy of guessing what your opponents will do and you will attempt to counteract them doesn’t fit with a game like this, since that would corrupt the process. Honest play is the best. You shouldn’t “game the game”. I explained this, and then later in the game they accused me(!) of gaming the system. The audacity of it all.

Saturday: Hike & Games

We ended the games at around 10pm, so I was awake bright and early the next morning. I’d planned a hike at Mount Higby for 10:30am, and we had a beautiful day for it. Accompanied by 4 other intrepid adventurers, we braved the heights all the way to the terminus above the exit 19 rest stop on 91-N. Round trip the whole thing was 3 hours, so I was back by 1:45. I went home, gathered together a couple of my games, and headed to the board games event that Mark Casiglio had organized down in Stratford.

Friday night bowling

Usually I play board games in Meriden on Fridays. This past Friday was different in that the men’s ministry at the church had a bowling night. It’s been a while since I’ve bowled, and I was looking forward to it. I bowled 170 the first game, 155 the second game, and 114 the third game. There were two other scores amongst the 16 guys who bowled 3 or 4 games that night: 175 (I think perhaps Jay got that) and Nelson’s crushing 188! The other bowlers kept on speaking about the fluid style I bowled with, occasionally saying it was very “zen” and “smooth”.

I didn’t really tank on the third game. They turned the lights off and the black lights on, and had these runway lights along the bowling lanes. So you pretty much couldn’t see the lane, but the pins were lit up in normal yellow light. With that, I decided to “unzenify” myself and just toss the ball down the lane.

Normally when I bowl, I see and feel the pins and myself in relation to them. I feel the ball. I adjust my placement until it just “feels right”, and then I slowly walk towards the throwing line. I release the ball and send it, not fast, down the lane. I am able to be fairly accurate this way: even to the point of targeting single pins leftover for the second shot.

There are some days when my tongue needs to be reined in. Today is one of those days.

Twice today I have been extravagantly sarcastic, in a flippant way. Not mean spirited, but still…

In the first instance, I’d ran across a game named “Aquaretto”. Thinking this to be a jest of some kind, I found out that it was a legitimate, soon to be released board game expansion for Zooloretto, which itself is a board game version of the card game Coloretto. I was a little incredulous, because the game was marketed both as an expansion to Zooloretto and as a standalone product. In Zooloretto, the theme is barn animals. In Aquaretto, we’re talking about dolphins. It was frankly an absurd idea to market it as an expansion thematically.

I decided to one-up them, and so I started a thread in the game’s entry on BGG entitled Dracularetto:

In the next expansion (cum standalone game), players take the role of a vampire. At night, they go and lure victims into the graveyard. They then bring the victims home into their lair. The vampires can consume as much as they like of only a few types of blood, so they must be wary. Any hot blondes they encounter they will take as dark brides!

Be on the lookout for this exciting new game from Rio Grande in October 2008!

John Look and I have spoken about doing a 2p game theme night some time. I went over my games and targeted some games that excel at 2p that I think would fit the bill. The nice thing about some of these games (which I’ve marked with *) is that they’re not exclusively 2p.

When the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 came out, we started to have some console game systems that could hold a candle to a PC, graphically speaking. But when I’d read about the Nintendo Revolution (which was the code name for what is now known as the Wii) I was very impressed. I thought that Nintendo’s philosophy was right on the money – don’t just play a game of price and graphics oneupmanship with Sony and Microsoft, but innovate in a very radical way (the controller) while keeping the focus on the games.

The PS3 and 360 were trying to be a poor man’s computer, with games thrown in on the side. Putting Bluray on the PS3, in retrospect, was quite the coup, because for $400 you could pick up not only a capable game system, but also a Bluray disc player. But both of those systems were so very expensive, and their games so expensive, that it just didn’t make sense to me to pick them up. I mean, these console games, you play them for a little while and then you’re done. Like 20-30h of gameplay. On a computer, you can easily get 200+ with online gaming. Heck, you can get that with free games (eg Fear, AA, ET, etc).

Saturday Climbing

I went climbing on Saturday. I couldn’t hook up with my climbing partner Michael, so I went for some bouldering. It was like 5ish when I went and the place was only lightly populated. I worked a bit around in the boulder cave, then on the walls of the gym where people weren’t roped up.

They cleared away a lot of the holds in the boulder cave and it’s much nicer now. It was too chaotic before – way too many holds. It was hard to figure out where the route went, and you’d be on the wall looking for the next holds in the midst of a bunch of rudely tagged stuff. Now the wall is much more clean, and it’s easier to identify where you can “legally” use holds in a tagged climb.

So in the middle of my climbing session I tweaked my left shoulder. I was on the ceiling of the boulder cave and I went for the last hold on a new route with my left hand, and something went wrong because it just hurt and I dropped down and felt nauseous. I climbed a bit on the slab wall, giving that arm a rest, and moved it around until it felt better, and later went and completed the climb; apparently I had missed this one large red hold immediately prior to the last hold.

Anyway, on Sunday my shoulder was painful to move. I even tried putting my arm out the window driving (since it was fairly nice out) and that hurt too much to do.

When last we left our fearless adventurer, he was proclaiming the great deal he got on a pair of climbing shoes. He’s been putting them to good use!

Christmas

But first, a small recap. Christmas I spent up in NH with my parents. There was a lot of snow up there; the day before I left, they had 2 feet on the ground and were getting hit with another 6 inches. I didn’t feel any particular desire to ski.

We mostly just hung out. I recall playing a couple games of Battle Line, which both of my parents seemed to take to.

Christmas morning we watched a Stargate SG-1 marathon while opening presents. This fit right in with my current endeavor to watch Stargate SG-1 from the start of the series to the end. I just finished season 3, and am finally off of those horrid 80mb avis to a more respectible 5.1 350M avi. The resolution on those is still only 1/2 720p, but it’s still better than the miniscule other files.

Speaking of Christmas, my dad loved his laptop backpack. My brother seemed to like his book, though I think he was dubious of the Gamerang subscription. My mother said she was going to save her Netflix subscription until she got her knees replaced (which will be this summer). It is step one in her grand plan to become the first cyborg Grammy.

Well, I haven’t been very active here of late! That’s not to say I haven’t been writing. It’s just that my writing has been of a more board-game oriented nature, and hence I’ve done a number of geeklists and/or session reports:

• Recap Geeklists
• Starcraft Ruminations
• A game of Caylus
• Contemplating China
• Shogun

• Wizard vs Up and Down the River

Hiking

I’ve also done a fair amount of hiking over the past month or so. I went with a large group to do more of a nature walk, and then went out to lunch with a couple of the hikers about three weeks ago. This past weekend I went hiking on Sunday at Lamentation Mountain near Guiffrida Park in Meriden. I lead a group of intrepid souls into the wilderness, where we got slightly lost. For an hour or 2.

What an awesome, full weekend.

Housatonic Range Trail

(pics)

Saturday morning came and I headed up to a portion of the Housatonic Range Trail north of Danbury. I jumped in my car and listened to a book on the way up there. I left early just in case I got lost; most of the other people going were car pooling from near Hartford. I chose not to join them in this because they were scheduled to be returning at 6pm, and I had a gaming session scheduled for 6pm in West Haven. So I ended up getting there like a half an hour or 45 minutes early.

We were scheduled to meet at the trailhead for Tory's Cave. I found the trailhead, and hung out. I busted out with M­aelstrom and checked out some of the factions I hadn't seen before. I did some pushups. I went across the road and down over the bank and filled up my purifier water bottle from the river. When 9:15 came around and they hadn't arrived, I went back to the directions and made sure I was in the right place. I was, but that didn't stop me from scouting around in the car. I came back, waited a little longer, and Kevin came up in his caravan.

Well, I had a good visit with Audrial this Labor Day weekend. She flew in on Friday afternoon, and we went to Fratellos in Manchester, NH for dinner with my parents and brother. I wasn't particularly hungry (since I'd eaten some Chinese near the airport, which was actually better than I was expecting), I ordered the “Italian Pie”, with a view that I could always take it home and reheat it. Audrial had some staple linguine and huge meatballs.

Over the weekend we played a lot of board games, and I played outside with Audrial a fair bit. Here are some pictures.