Category: Home
More Summer Gaming
Lots of more gaming time through August and September, including introducing Jon and Roland to the popular tile-laying game Suburbia as well as my newly-arrived copy of Bargain Quest, where you act as shopkeepers trying to sell supplies to the adventuring heroes on their way to vanquish the dragon.
With the local library gamers group, I got in a couple more games of Bargain Quest, we enjoyed wine making with the “worker placement” style game Viticulture, we unsuccessfully hunted Darlene as the great white shark in Jaws, wheeled and dealed in the trading game Chinatown again, and vied for success across the industrial age in the fantastic economy game Brass: Birmingham.
At Nacho’s, we swapped gems in the engine builder Century: Golem Edition and pushed through Clank! In! Space! trying to keep Nacho from getting away with all the glory. Back home we had more bewildering adventures in Tales of the Arabian Nights and up in Tahoe there was more Clank! and Splendor and Darlene and I introduced Mark, Eve and Matt to the tasty fun of set collecting in Sushi Go! Party.
As usual, I forgot to snag pictures of several other game sessions (like with Greg & Erin, playing For Sale while camping at Pinnacles), but click through for the full gallery.
Early Morning Bear Patrol
Video from my front camera at the Tahoe house early yesterday morning catches a bear checking the car doors of both Mark and Lindsay’s cars in the driveway. Unfortunately my video stops short of showing how they try to pull on the door handles. Lindsay noticed somebody’s car down the street appeared to have been opened up and searched by a bear that morning. Matt went out the previous morning to find both of his passenger side doors wide open but nothing ransacked. Last year, Troy found all four doors of his extended cab pickup truck open in the driveway with dirty paw prints over everything. Looks like even if you don’t leave any food or trash in your car, this bear goes around checking for unlocked doors!
And on a related note, the Placer County Sheriff recently helped this crying cub bear get out of a trash dumpster:
Early Summer Gaming
Lots of gaming over the first half of the summer already: Darlene and I started Pandemic Legacy Season One in the early spring, and things were going pretty smoothly with my pilot/medic Hudson and Darlene’s quarantine specialist Zoe, despite the plot twists over the course of the game year. Glenn and Michele even joined us for an episode, though Michele’s character turned out to be a traitor against all of humanity – we should have known – or at least Glenn should have warned us! Anyway, despite the rioting in parts of North America and Eastern Asia, and the loss of some medical centers (including the CDC headquarters early on), things were more or less under control with no total failures… that is until October and November came around. (Hence Darlene’s convincing sad face above.) But ultimately, we persevered through December and the world was saved from ruin!
Darlene and I also enjoyed trying Memoir’44, the simple but engaging WWII battle simulation game and the new, deck-building race game of The Quest for El Dorado (safari hat not included). I introduced Darlene to Suburbia and Suburbia Inc and we worked to partially solve the connected crimes in the second chapter of the “Power Behind” scenario from Chronicles of Crime.
At Nacho’s place and the local library, we had an epic game of Cutthroat Caverns, a few games of the ever popular Quacks of Quedlinburg, the challenging Tiny Towns, the fantastic open trading game Chinatown, the surprisingly fun Wits and Wagers trivia-based betting game and I finally got Container: 10th Anniversary Edition to the table and it was well received – the huge container ships are amusing to move around but it’s just too bad that the artwork is so incredibly dull. I was introduced to the very pretty bird-themed Wingspan, which I though was just okay – it seemed to lack an exciting build up or pay off to getting your game engine going. Darlene enjoyed A Feast for Odin (which I have yet to try), while I taught classic Cosmic Encounter to Nacho, Dan and Elizabeth.
In mid-July, I joined Roland, Charles and Tom at Roland’s place where he introduced us to the great little brain teaser Century: Eastern Wonders and the gorgeous-looking Call to Adventure which turned out to be rather abstract pattern matching rather than much of a promised adventure. I dragged them into a game of Chinatown and Charles and Roland stuck it out to face the zombie-infested, cooperative adventure Dead of Winter with me.
I was able to get in a few more games of Dead of Winter, including a two-player, pure co-op play in “difficult” mode with Darlene (we failed!) and a five-hour long epic play with five of us at the library meetup: we had to try to survive for eight rounds while stockpiling fuel, keeping the hordes of zombies at bay, feeding our growing colony of survivors, and managing one difficult crisis after another. We lost a few survivors along the way and it was looking like failure toward the end but we just barely squeaked through with a win on the last player’s very last turn with minimum morale, food and supplies. Fantastic!
Click through for the full gallery:
A Covey of Quail
Bunnies, Wizards and… Real Estate Developers
Lots of gaming this month, including several meetups at the local library. After the second broken playthrough of the auction game Estates, I finally realized I had goofed a fundamental rule in teaching the game. Nobody could possibly come out ahead… next time let’s try playing it in the way that it’s possible for someone to succeed!
On the other hand, our first playthrough of Chinatown was really fun, though hard to keep our voices down in this wildly interactive, open trading/deal-making game. And it was fun to finally get Wiz-War to the table with a group of four – even though my wizard got killed off first! D’oh!
Nacho started hosting some gaming nights at his place this month. We did some finger flicking of race cars around a track (what was that called?), squeezed little miniature towns together in Tiny Towns and enjoyed lots of repeats: building amusement parks in Unfair, werewolf hunting with One Night Ultimate Werewolf, pattern matching in Sagrada, space conquest via Space Base and maze maneuvering in Drakon.
Besides a couple more rounds of Bunny Kingdom, Darlene and I finally started Pandemic Legacy: Season One at home. We’re only a few “months” in but so far things are under control – which probably means things are going to spiral out-of-control soon.
Oh and I introduced Kathie and Dave to Quacks of Quedlinburg. Dave came out the clear leader – and the supreme Quack!
Gaming in March
Darlene and I got in another game of Great Western Trail – not withstanding Pan’s attempt to thwart us. That picture was after having just finished setting up the starting game state – the first time. We had to herd him away from the table mid-game a few times after that to avoid disaster.
Later, with my local gaming Meetup group, I tried out the cold war espionage, item-collecting game Covert (and cleaned up like a super-spy! ;-)
At another gaming meetup, I finally got the hidden traitor game Dark Moon back to the table again and incorporated some of the Shadow Corporation expansion into play with six players but it went very strangely. All of our dice rolls were so lucky that we completed all four events in just one round and a half of play – without really any intrigue of trying to suss out the infected players. Lame. Will have to try again. Meanwhile, others were engaged in a multiple-hour, six-player, three-stage bike racing series championship with Flamme Rouge. Darlene and I were introduced to the dice-rolling Space Base game and we introduced others to a quick three rounds of Cheaty Mages.
On a Wednesday night, five of us attempted to summit K2 (via the board game, K2) and alas, one of my climbers and somebody else’s were caught up top in a blizzard and died. Very sad. Kat came through though with maybe just a little frostbite to win the game.
At a Saturday gathering, I introduced the group to Quacks of Quedlinburg, in appropriate costume of course! Several of us managed to max out our potion-brewing cauldrons – but then I did forget a rule about when you’re allowed to use the neutralizing agent. Oops. After that I tried a game of Whistle Stop for the first time – that one was interesting, but a bit slow with five players.
Darlene and I also introduced her niece Joslyn to some board games while she was here for a week visiting from Wisconsin. Besides Quacks of Quedlinburg, Bärenpark and Evo, we made a first run on the new spin on cooperative, crime-solving detective games, Chronicles of Chrime. This game uses an app to allow you to explore a crime scene and related locations in virtual reality and has you prompting characters with the various bits of evidence you find to gather more clues and eventually piece together a solution to the criminal mystery – all while consuming in-game time that allows the situation to evolve. Pretty cool!
Ice Dams Remain
As I detailed earlier (Those Ice Dam Blues), the Tahoe house developed thick ice dams all around to the point where I was getting water intrusion where the dormers meet the roof above the deck. Turning the poorly-installed heat tape/cables back on, and leaving them on 24/7, let the melt water drain off (and re-freeze into a thick layer on the deck). I called around and found Millers Roofing would be able to come out and clear the snow and ice from the roof about a week later. (Boy would that suck if the heat tape hadn’t been able to get the water to drain.)
Well… it would seem that I had some entirely unfounded expectations over what to expect. I was thinking that a service to clear the snow and ice from the roof would leave the roof relatively clear of both (at least until the next snow storm). Though I had no idea how they would safely remove the foot-plus thick ice, I was surprised to discover that they apparently don’t actually remove all of the snow or apparently any of the ice. Six hours of work for three guys (and $2250) and what they do is remove about three-quarters of the snow off the top. Troy sent me a photo of the front of the house two days after the roof snow removal crew finished (and after another storm dropped some more snow). Here’s the before/after shots:
One week before and two days after the clearing work
When I did get to the house about ten days later, I was dismayed to see that while a lot of snow was dumped off the roof, the ice dams remain everywhere around the house except for where the heat tape/cables run beneath the dormers:
And there’s quite the load of snow and ice from the roof on the deck now:
The concern here is how the melt water from the roof continues to fall and refreeze into a slab of ice on the deck – getting up to the door thresholds. We are starting to get a little bit warmer weather so we’ll see how this goes in the coming months but this clearly needs some work to avoid this mess in the future – both the ice dam formation and the ice slab on the deck.
All of this makes me wonder if it was worth hiring that crew to do that partial snow load removal. I can see some more shingles are peeling off the roof eaves but maybe it would be worse. On the other hand, the ice dams remain until they eventually melt away and there’s plenty of snow remaining (and to come) to feed them. Hopefully there won’t be any water intrusion elsewhere on the roof where there are no heat cables installed.