Week in review: Week to 15 November
Nov. 17th, 2025 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. At board game club, I arrived late enough that all the spots had already been taken for the evening's big game, so I spent the evening at the casual table, where we played Love Letter, Flip 7, and Saboteur. We had enough players for Saboteur that we played the expanded version with two competing teams of miners and all the extra roles with special victory conditions. I suspect several players were confused about who needed to do what, including the player who helped my team to a narrow victory and turned out, when the roles were revealed, to have been on the opposing team.
. We also had a weekend gaming session where we played Onitama and Who Goes There?.
Onitama is a two-player game with some resemblance to a simplified version of chess. The distinctive feature is that the pieces don't have specific movement rules, but can be moved by playing one of the movement cards in your hand -- which then becomes available for your opponent to add to their hand and use on one of their turns. The challenge then is to manipulate which movement cards you pass on to your opponent and set up situations where they can't do anything to block you because they don't have a card which lets them move the right way.
Who Goes There? is a mostly-cooperative game in which a group of scientists is trying to escape from a polar base without being assimilated by an alien Thing. It's not, officially, John Carpenter's The Thing: The Board Game, but it's not shy about the inspiration. ("Who Goes There?" is, of course, also the title of the novella that inspired Carpenter's film.) On this occasion, we managed to identify which player was the Thing in disguise before he managed to recruit any more Things, but after that events went badly for us and we all froze to death before we managed to secure the escape route.
. On Wednesday, the power was out for most of the morning and afternoon -- a scheduled outage, as the power poles along the street were being refurbished. I managed all right, although it did expose how reliant I've become on electronic entertainments: after I'd finished my library book, worked on the jigsaw puzzle a bit, and gone for a walk, I was rather at a loss for what else to do with myself. (I could have read another book -- there were plenty around -- but Brighton Rock was substantial enough that I was still digesting it and not ready to start on something else yet.) Since it was a localised outage, I could still go into town around lunch time and do some shopping; I thought about having a sit-down meal to use up some time, but I wasn't that hungry. I also considered going to the cinema, but there was nothing on that I was willing to spend nearly twenty dollars to sit through, even for the sake of a couple of hours in air conditioning. In the end, I resorted to an afternoon nap (which I probably would have considered anyway, with how wobbly my sleep patterns have been lately).
There was a second outage on Saturday as they did the power poles they hadn't got to before, including the one nearest my front gate. This time I was more prepared; I had a couple of places to go during the morning, and rather than keep threading through a maze of traffic cones to get in and out, I took a book with me and stayed out until the work was over. I had a sit-down lunch in town, and spent much of the afternoon reading my book in a shady spot in the park. When I got the text notification that the power was being turned back on, I headed home, where I found that one of the workers had parked their vehicle blocking my driveway, so I went off and found a place to park and read some more until they'd packed up and gone away.
. Someone over on Tumblr has organised a group watch-along of Doctor Who's 12-episode epic "The Daleks' Master Plan", watching each episode on or about the 60th anniversary of its first airing. Episode 1 is one of the episodes where the original footage is lost -- as indeed are most of the episodes of the story arc -- so I watched a reconstruction patched together out of surviving still images. At one point, a character suddenly started moving, and I immediately said to myself: "Ah, he's a goner -- if this clip has been preserved, it means something is about to Happen to him." And I was right, although his fate didn't strike me as the kind of thing that would have resulted in the scene being clipped by the censors, so I'm not sure how it came to survive.
. My current playthrough of XCOM 2 is going well: I'm up to the point where all my soldiers have fully upgraded weapons and armour, and have maxxed out their skill trees, which means I have enough firepower that I can afford to make the occasional mistake without everything immediately spiralling out of control. I've been playing every day, and I haven't had occasion to take a do-over since Tuesday.
. The current jigsaw puzzle is a bit stuck. It's a picture of whitewashed houses with blue roofs by the sea under a cloudless sky; I find myself faced with three piles of white, blue, and brown pieces and no obvious way of figuring out which piece goes where.
. We also had a weekend gaming session where we played Onitama and Who Goes There?.
Onitama is a two-player game with some resemblance to a simplified version of chess. The distinctive feature is that the pieces don't have specific movement rules, but can be moved by playing one of the movement cards in your hand -- which then becomes available for your opponent to add to their hand and use on one of their turns. The challenge then is to manipulate which movement cards you pass on to your opponent and set up situations where they can't do anything to block you because they don't have a card which lets them move the right way.
Who Goes There? is a mostly-cooperative game in which a group of scientists is trying to escape from a polar base without being assimilated by an alien Thing. It's not, officially, John Carpenter's The Thing: The Board Game, but it's not shy about the inspiration. ("Who Goes There?" is, of course, also the title of the novella that inspired Carpenter's film.) On this occasion, we managed to identify which player was the Thing in disguise before he managed to recruit any more Things, but after that events went badly for us and we all froze to death before we managed to secure the escape route.
. On Wednesday, the power was out for most of the morning and afternoon -- a scheduled outage, as the power poles along the street were being refurbished. I managed all right, although it did expose how reliant I've become on electronic entertainments: after I'd finished my library book, worked on the jigsaw puzzle a bit, and gone for a walk, I was rather at a loss for what else to do with myself. (I could have read another book -- there were plenty around -- but Brighton Rock was substantial enough that I was still digesting it and not ready to start on something else yet.) Since it was a localised outage, I could still go into town around lunch time and do some shopping; I thought about having a sit-down meal to use up some time, but I wasn't that hungry. I also considered going to the cinema, but there was nothing on that I was willing to spend nearly twenty dollars to sit through, even for the sake of a couple of hours in air conditioning. In the end, I resorted to an afternoon nap (which I probably would have considered anyway, with how wobbly my sleep patterns have been lately).
There was a second outage on Saturday as they did the power poles they hadn't got to before, including the one nearest my front gate. This time I was more prepared; I had a couple of places to go during the morning, and rather than keep threading through a maze of traffic cones to get in and out, I took a book with me and stayed out until the work was over. I had a sit-down lunch in town, and spent much of the afternoon reading my book in a shady spot in the park. When I got the text notification that the power was being turned back on, I headed home, where I found that one of the workers had parked their vehicle blocking my driveway, so I went off and found a place to park and read some more until they'd packed up and gone away.
. Someone over on Tumblr has organised a group watch-along of Doctor Who's 12-episode epic "The Daleks' Master Plan", watching each episode on or about the 60th anniversary of its first airing. Episode 1 is one of the episodes where the original footage is lost -- as indeed are most of the episodes of the story arc -- so I watched a reconstruction patched together out of surviving still images. At one point, a character suddenly started moving, and I immediately said to myself: "Ah, he's a goner -- if this clip has been preserved, it means something is about to Happen to him." And I was right, although his fate didn't strike me as the kind of thing that would have resulted in the scene being clipped by the censors, so I'm not sure how it came to survive.
. My current playthrough of XCOM 2 is going well: I'm up to the point where all my soldiers have fully upgraded weapons and armour, and have maxxed out their skill trees, which means I have enough firepower that I can afford to make the occasional mistake without everything immediately spiralling out of control. I've been playing every day, and I haven't had occasion to take a do-over since Tuesday.
. The current jigsaw puzzle is a bit stuck. It's a picture of whitewashed houses with blue roofs by the sea under a cloudless sky; I find myself faced with three piles of white, blue, and brown pieces and no obvious way of figuring out which piece goes where.
no subject
Date: 2025-11-17 07:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-17 10:15 pm (UTC)It's really driving home how lucky I was with the set of cheap puzzles I got from the supermarket a while back that had very well engineered joins.