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Gaming in March

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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!

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Ice Dams Remain

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Partial snow load from off of roof

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.

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Check Your Old Sunglasses and Goggles

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We were just about to toss out some old goggles that were in the closet and, on a lark, decided to check their UV protection.  Mine were maybe 10+ year old Oakleys (haven’t used in many years) and Darlene’s were her old Smith’s that she had been using up until last month.  Both are fitted with orange “high contrast” lenses.

Well, both appear to be failing to provide UV protection now.  Not good!

Sunglasses and ski goggles can lose their UV protection over time.  So… double-check your old sunglasses and goggles for UV protection!

I tested with a UV flashlight (“black light”) I picked up recently off Amazon when I decided I didn’t want to trust the unknown Chinese manufacturer (“Oho”) of some new camera goggles I bought.  As it turns out, those new goggles and my old Liquid Image camera goggles I’ve been using for many years pass the UV flashlight test fine.  (As do my and Darlene’s sunglasses.)

You can do a quick and dirty test just using a $20 bill and one of these inexpensive UV flashlights.  You can also get a more professional test (with an actual UV blocking measurement) from your local optician.

Here’s a bad result on left (strip is fluorescing due to UV light getting through lens), good result on right – both are orange tint lenses and many years old:

Those Ice Dam Blues

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Record loads of snowfall (and occasional bouts of rain) mean lots of snow and ice on the Tahoe house – enough to build up ice dams all the way around the house and to eventually find water streaming down the walls in the dining room.

It looks like the problem spot is where one of the dormers meets the roof.  Melting snow collects above the ice dam below the dormers, getting under the shingles until it gets high enough to stream down where the dormer wall joins the roof.  There is some heat tape installed under these dormers to create drainage through the ice dams but it’s not installed quite correctly and I had mistakenly understood that it’s not necessary to run it at night when the temperatures get down to the teens outside.  Apparently there’s enough heat getting through the roof to melt the snow even when it’s that cold outside.  So I ended up with water streaming down the inside walls (past electrical outlets, to boot):

      

Not good.  I’ve got a crew coming from Mills Roofing later this week to remove the snow and ice buildup.   There will be more snow and then more melt and more ice dams though.  The heat tape that is there now is only on a portion of the rear of the house and it wasn’t installed properly.  It doesn’t hang over the edge of the eaves as it should (to let the water drain off the roof) and a good 8-10 feet of it is wasted strung up on the wall coming from the junction box.  I was able to rearrange some of it but the roof here is too steep for me to deal with most of it.

I’ve been in contact with Brian from Summit Ice Melt Systems and will be looking into potentially installing their product to prevent these ice dams from forming at all.  However, that still leaves the issue of all this melt water collecting and refreezing on the deck below – and potentially leading to further water intrusion into the house:

  

There’s also still the outstanding damage to the roof from prior seasons.  There are several sections of shingles missing from the roof but I wasn’t able to find anyone that wasn’t already booked up to repair the damage over this past year.  I did eventually sign up with Jeff’s Roofing Truckee but he also wasn’t able to get to it before the first snows arrived.  He did manage to locate a supply of the Tamko shingles in South Lake Tahoe though.  Hopefully, he’ll get to my roof later this year once the snow and cold weather is gone:

  

February Gaming

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Got in a few more games this month, including a long gaming night with Roland, Clay, Dan and Darlene that began with Fury of Dracula and continued with everyone’s first time play of Terra Mystica.  Got to try Inis with four players at the local gaming meetup in Scotts Valley.  Darlene and I played many rounds of the new push-your-luck style game of potion brewing in The Quacks of Quedlinburg.  We also had our first encounter with the “boss minion” in the gorgeous co-op Mechs vs. Minions and, lastly, we were utterly clobbered and my character driven insane in our first two player campaign attempt of Arkham Horror: The Card Game.  So much for “standard difficulty” with even the starter campaign “Night of the Zealot” – we’ll be trying again though, with both the lights and the difficulty turned down!

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A Gathering of Gamers

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Six intrepid gamers (Mark, Stefan, Darlene, Charles, Roland and myself) gathered on a Saturday.  We pushed our luck seeking the most treasure in the mines of Diamant, struggled to cross the finish line first in Flamme Rouge, tried to make off with the most loot in Clank! In! Space!, worked to build the strongest foothold at the fringe of the galaxy in Empires of the Void II, screwed each other over with the storms of Category 5, and made and broke mad alliances to establish the most colonies in Cosmic Encounter.  Oh, and there was a bit of dice-throwing for good measure.

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Darlene and I also joined the local Scotts Valley gaming group a couple of times this month.  Early in January we had our first time run through the lovely fourth edition version of Fury of Dracula.  As Dracula, I was eventually tracked down and defeated but surely only because of the fact that I/we misinterpreted a few important rules.  Wait until next time…  mwahahahahaha!

In late January, we got together again and, as Long John Silver, I tried to keep my treasure hidden from four scheming pirates (Darlene included) in the new Treasure Island.  We also got in a game of Sushi Go Party before breaking off into two groups.  Darlene tried out Whistle Stop, while I had another go at evading the vampire hunters in Fury of Dracula.  Unfortunately, we ran out of time.

December Gaming

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Lots more gaming over December, including many more flaming balls of lava with Fireball Island and the Curse of Vul-Kar.  With the local Scotts Valley gaming group, we finally got to grow some trees with a full four players in the gorgeous Photosynthesis and we successfully terraformed Mars again in, of course, Terraforming Mars.  With Clay, Kevin, Rachel and Dan, we had a battle of alliances in the classic Cosmic Encounter; Troy joined me and Darlene for New Years Eve and a couple plays of Clank! In! Spaaaaace!, a lot of pushing our luck too far with Diamant, as well as a relaxing run of Tokaido.  Darlene got me a copy of Alchemists for Christmas which she quickly became so obsessed with that we found ourselves playing multiple games until the early morning hours.  That and she’s also hooked now on deck building games like Clank! and Dominion.  We also enjoyed some more dice puzzle solving in Sagrada, building out our fiefdoms in Bunny Kingdom and uncovering lost Mayan ruins in Tikal.

Unfortunately, I only sometimes remember to snag some pictures while we’re engrossed in the games:

  

      

Great Balls of Fire

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Lots of fun first plays of games this month both at home and meeting up several times with the local gaming group at the Scotts Valley library.  Alchemists has you experimenting on yourself and your students to figure out the ingredients for magic potions and then publish for fame and fortune, Decrypto pits two teams of codebreakers against each other, Inis has several Celtic clans competing to elect a king across all the land, in Mechs vs. Minions you must continually program your mechwarriors to beat back the onslaught of minions and accomplish the co-op mission but lastly, via Kickstarter…

…it’s the silly, flaming marble madness of Fireball Island and the Curse of Vul-Kar:

 

Speaking of Mechs vs. Minions, check out the absolutely incredible components that come with this campaign-style co-op game:

We also got in some great repeat games of Great Western Trail (drive cattle to market), Whitehall (track down and catch Jack the Ripper), Flamme Rouge (bike racing), Bärenpark (design an animal/bear park), Azul (lay pattern-matching tiles), Sagrada (pattern matching with dice), and Arboretum (build out paths of different tree species).