Tag: Canada

Vancouver and SHUX 2019

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Darlene and I returned to Vancouver, British Columbia last week to enjoy three days of board gaming at Shut Up and Sit Down’s third annual board gaming convention (SHUX ’19) after enjoying ourselves so much last year at SHUX’18.  Once again we got to meet a bunch of new people (as well as bumped into a friend local to the Santa Cruz area) while learning and trying out many different games.  As always, there’s also lots of other gaming-related stuff going on all around the convention hall but we pretty much stuck to the game library and play area for the whole convention this time.

 

We dove in deep starting with the viking-themed, “worker placement”-style game A Feast for Odin.  It’s good but I’m not sure I really want to play it again, and it’s also really time-consuming to teach to new players.  (Luckily we found someone who already knew the game to teach us.)  We moved on to try the tableau-building Valeria: Card Kingdoms (not great), before getting transformed into mice trying to battle and escape our rat guards in the story-based adventure game Mice and Mystics (very cute!).  Then we tried playing classic Disney villains in Disney’s Villainous with just the two of us – and then tried it again when the first game ended rather abruptly.  I give it a pass – you’re pretty much at the mercy of your card draw, with little decision making to do each turn.  The card decks do wonderfully capture the spirit of the feature films though.

We both loved playing the soon-to-be-released Ecos: First Continent and I immediately put in a preorder for it.  Next up was trying Lowlands, a classic euro-style game with the added twist of having to decide whether to give up some of your precious turn actions to work on the community dike holding back the rising seas.  We liked it… but not as much as Istanbul that we tried later in the day.  I’ve had that in my wish list to try for a while and playing it with a group of five turned into an immediate purchase.

Richard joined us for the bizarrely themed and misrepresented Lords of Waterdeep after somebody we met earlier in the day insisted we try it.  It was okay, but it was really just a totally abstract cube-exchanging affair. However, from there we moved on to finding a group to try laying out a suburban neighborhood together in the puzzle-y “roll and write” game Welcome to… – and yes, the third purchase as a result of SHUX this year!

 

We joined up on the last day with another couple to figure out how to play the intriguing time travel-based cooperative mystery adventure game  T.I.M.E. Stories – which turned out to both not be so straight-forward without giving ourselves any story spoilers and reminded me why it got some less than stellar reviews.  The problem is that the game intentionally sets up the story to play out in such a way that you’re going to run out of your allotted actions and fail multiple times and then “get” to experience going back in time again to try again with your new knowledge.  However, unlike a well-scripted time travel movie, it’s not that fun to have to go back and repeat previous sections to gather needed equipment again.  We ended up cheating a bit on the second go-around only to be forced into a second failure anyway where we decided to quit without seeing the first story through to its end.

We didn’t get to finish the last game of the weekend, The Ancient World, with yet another couple before the convention closed down.  This one started out rough and afterwards I discovered that there’s a newer edition of the rules which would have avoided much of the confusion and outright invalid actions we were taking.  Maybe we’ll try it again sometime somewhere.

Darlene had to take off super early Monday morning to teach a class by noon, but I hung out for the day in Vancouver and ended up going for a walk to Stanley Park and spending the afternoon at the Vancouver Aquarium.  Click through for the full gallery:

   

Vancouver and SHUX 2018

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Darlene joined me for a trip to Vancouver, British Columbia, last week to enjoy three days of board gaming at Shut Up and Sit Down’s very own, second annual board gaming convention (SHUX ’18).  I only discovered Shut Up and Sit Down and their most excellent and entertaining board gaming content last year.  I’ve since been hooked on their written and video reviews as well as their podcast. They’re also responsible for me being driven to buy a trunk load of additional games over the past year.  (As if my game collection wasn’t large enough already.)

We got to try out a bunch of games I’ve been meaning to check out, meet some new people, get to see Quinns, Paul, Matt and Pip live and even see a little bit more of Vancouver – including tooling around on some electric bikes for a few hours. It was a great trip and great convention, though I wish we had used our time a little more wisely and squeezed in a few more games as well as been prepared for the early closing of the game-lending library.  Also, would’ve been great to participate in one of the day-long megagames (if the convention were longer) or in a more involved version of Two Rooms and A Boom.  We only got to try the basic version with just a couple of people with roles.  We did get to try and got hooked on several great ones: Bunny Kingdom, Mystery of the Temples, Bårenpark, Great Western Trail, Sagrada, and Azul.  Not so great: Crows, Koi and Kodama: The Tree Spirits.  Terrible: Cat Lady, Nefarious.

I also wish I had thought to take pictures of all of the games we tried (and the folks we played with), but click through for the full gallery:

      

Walking with Polar Bears

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I joined Glenn and Michele last week on another segment of their extended, six-month travels (Glenn and Michele’s Most Excellent Adventure™) – this time flying up to Churchill, Canada, to stay at a small remote lodge along the Hudson Bay and go out on guided walks to see and hug polar bears!  Well, not so much hugging really.  (But they do look so huggable!)

A video montage of our polar bear encounters and other activities near Churchill.

We stayed three nights at Dymond Lake Lodge, one of three small “eco-lodges” operated by Churchill Wild, looking for polar bears and other wildlife during the day and enjoying the wonderful meals and the stars and the aurora borealis at night.  We lucked out with weather.  At this time of year we should have encountered daytime highs no greater than the teens or single digits (in Fahrenheit) even before any wind chill (as in seriously cold, the primary reason Darlene didn’t join us), but we lucked out with temps way up in the mid-20’s!  Yes, below freezing, but really relatively balmy!  Just ask the polar bears!

Speaking of which, we were able to see lots of bears and even watch an unusual encounter between two different mama bears and their cubs.  The guides are very good at approaching and reading the bears’ behavior and working to keep the experience safe for everyone, including the bears.

After several amazing days of walking out amongst the bears, we returned to Churchill for an afternoon of dog-sledding with Bluesky Expeditions and then a full day on an arctic tundra safari with Frontiers North Adventures in one of their massive custom-built “tundra buggies”.

Click through for the full gallery of photos and video clips from the trip:

   

Here’s a separate gallery of pictures from just the dog sledding excursion.

Michele wrote a great detailed post about our Churchill trip in her blog:

Birthday in Banff

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For Darlene’s birthday last week (mid-April), I took her on a ski trip to a surprise destination: Banff, in the Canadian Rockies!  We stayed for five nights and skied at Sunshine Village and Lake Louise. We also spent a little time exploring the national park: hiking in Johnston Canyon to see the ice falls, up to Lake Louise to walk out on the mostly frozen lake and out to Lake Minnewanka.  We were super lucky to decide to go revisit Lake Minnewanka after dinner on our first night because not only were the skies clear but the aurora borealis made a pretty good showing that night.  It also happened to be the first time either of us had ever seen an aurora in person!

Aurora Borealis over Lake Minnewanka, near Banff, Canada.

Click through to see the full gallery and video montage:

  

I was worried about the snow conditions when we arrived because there was no hint of snow in the valley around Banff (and the previous times I was there in the winter there was tons of snow everywhere). There wasn’t even any snow on the drive up to Sunshine on our first day. However, Sunshine is actually up pretty high and you take a gondola to get to the runs from the parking area. And, even before the weekend snow, it was great conditions and good coverage.

We went to the lower elevation resort at Lake Louise after the storm came through and I’m glad we waited because there were plenty of clues of how nasty and frozen the snow was on some parts of the mountain underneath the new snow. It definitely gets warmer there than in Sunshine. This was mid-April of course.

Compared to Whistler/Blackcomb, Sunshine (Banff) and Lake Louise certainly have a better chance of snow and cold weather, but they’re not as convenient. Sunshine is like 15 minutes from Banff and Lake Louise like 40 minutes or so. You don’t have to drive as there are free shuttles (with resort passes) to/from Banff and the drives are very pleasant. And there are other things to see and do if people want to take a day or two off from skiing.

Short video montage of our trip.

Sunshine and Lake Louise are both fairly large resorts, with plenty of terrain to explore. Their trail ranking is pretty strange at both resorts: lots of green runs and black diamond runs which would be rated blues in Tahoe. At times it seemed pretty arbitrary how the runs were ranked. You had to just go and check it out. You couldn’t trust the ranking at all. (Didn’t try any of the double-blacks: just assumed they were super steep chutes.)

One negative is that Sunshine has a few large portions (maybe a third) of completely open terrain above the tree line. Not only are these areas open to a storm but they also don’t let you feel like you have anything to explore in those areas. It’s just one big open expanse that feels the same all over, rather than many runs to check out. This certainly isn’t true all over the park, it’s just a couple chunks of it. Also a couple of sections of their acreage are special, restricted areas where you have to partner up and carry avalanche gear.

Similarly, as big as Lake Louise is, most of the backside terrain is double-black diamond: presumably chutes which Darlene and I didn’t try. But there are lots of other fun blue and black runs. Unfortunately, we found our favorite run after lifts closed on our last day!! D’oh!

I think it would be easy to enjoy five days skiing between the two resorts. There’s also little Mt. Norquay but we didn’t bother. It looks much smaller than Sugar Bowl (here in California) and I like Sugar Bowl.

Ski Trip to Whistler/Blackcomb

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A ski trip to Whistler/Blackcomb in British Columbia with Ralph, Thomas, Stephanie, Mike and Nanci turned into a hiking/touring trip in the absence of any significant snow.  Sadly, California was getting loads of snow while we were away!  And now we will *never* let Ralph live down all his talking up of Whistler that he subjected us to prior to this trip! ;-)

Click through for the full gallery: