Quite a Bit More Snow in Tahoe

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Three weeks into February and Lake Tahoe ski resorts have already received record snowfall for the month: Squaw Valley got over 21 feet this month so far and nearly 43 feet for the season, and Homewood even more at 23 feet for the month.

Crazy!  As in awesome fun! Well, except when the roads are closed due to nasty, accident-prone weather conditions – we spent one Saturday night trying to get back to the house in Tahoe Vista from Homewood.  First the lake road was closed due to numerous accidents and when we finally tried to take the long way around via Truckee (and through some crazy whiteout conditions across the meadow below Northstar), they ended up closing Brockway Summit.  After taking a break in Truckee for dinner and going back around through Tahoe City, we finally made it back to the house by 10 pm – maybe only barely before the unplowed snow on Regency Way got too deep for us to pass.

Three bountiful feet of snow overnight and many resorts had trouble opening for Sunday morning.  (Squaw and Alpine didn’t and Homewood was overwhelmed with people and only one chair lift they could run.)  That pattern of three feet of new snow repeated again and again over the month.

Short video montage at Homewood, Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows over February.

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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.

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.

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Stormy Week in Tahoe

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I went up to Tahoe last week (Monday through Friday) to catch a series of storms.  Monday night delivered a couple of inches on top of the old frozen stuff.  That made for some very rough and bumpy rides off of the groomed runs on Tuesday.  However, then we got a couple of feet Tuesday night but Wednesday was windy and gusting enough to keep the upper mountain from opening at Squaw or Alpine and eventually even closed the mid-mountain lift by noon at Alpine.  It was super wet and heavy snow too and way too tiring after the previous day so I bailed mid-day.  Resi, Troy and Aiden came up Wednesday afternoon and we got another couple of feet overnight.  Thursday proved to be fantastic and Troy and I spent all day making fresh tracks at Homewood until they started closing all the lifts on us.  Sheesh!  They stayed for another day but I had to head home to prep for the weekend.

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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:

  

      

Home Theater Build Out in Tahoe

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The Tahoe house has a large basement bedroom that was just crying out for a home theater conversion using my recently retired JVC DLA-RS55 projector and my old Sony amp/receiver.  This involved getting a full set of speakers for 7.1 audio, running wiring through the walls for speakers and the HDMI video, moving the badly placed heater vents and intake, painting the walls and ceiling a dark green, mounting the projector and adding power, building another seating riser and getting it carpeted, ordering and hanging a projection screen, ordering and setting up two rows of reclining seats and of course hanging movie posters!  The guest bed up front is a little weird and perhaps might make for some weird dreams of imagining an audience watching you sleep, but it doesn’t interfere with enjoying the big screen image or sound.

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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).