Week in review: Week to 14 February
Feb. 15th, 2026 01:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. It was a good week at work. I tried a new thing, and was complimented by the boss on how it turned out. Unrelatedly, but also good, the boss has taken action to resolve a significant source of client-related workplace stress.
. We had a weekend session of board gaming, where we played 3 Witches, Quacks of Quedlinburg, and a few rounds of Ticket to Ride Legacy.
3 Witches is a bidding and trick-taking game for exactly three players, where each round is a competition between a single player and a team of two who each contribute half the team's cards and take, if the team wins, half the victory points. The cards are themed as potion ingredients, with the suits being animals and the ranks being body parts; thus there are cards representing such traditional ingredients as "Eye of Newt" and "Tongue of Dog".
Quacks of Quedlinburg is also themed around potion-making, but each player makes their own potions, attempting to progressively make bigger and better potions that will score more victory points and allow them to buy new and more potent ingredients for the next potion. I ended up in equal last place, but I enjoyed it and would like to play again before I forget how the game mechanics work.
I'd missed the first couple of rounds of Ticket to Ride Legacy, which had been played at a session I wasn't able to make it to, and I think we misinterpreted the rules for adding a new player in a way that gave me an unlooked-for advantage. However it happened, I did very well in my first game and not nearly so well subsequently, though I still did pretty well and enjoyed myself.
. At the regular weekly board gaming session, we played Liar's Uno and Paperback.
Liar's Uno is a variation of Uno in which some of the cards must be played face down and the player can choose to bluff about what card it is. This was my first time playing it, and I'm not particularly keen on it; I think there are other games that do that kind of thing if that's what I'm after, and that's generally not what I'm after from a game of Uno.
Paperback is a deckbuilding game built around playing cards with letters on them to make words and score points that can be used to buy new cards which are worth victory points at the end or which offer bonuses like extra points for beginning and ending with the same letter or allowing longer words to be made from the same number of cards. The winning player did very well at building up a hand that let him play long words and score lots of points. I tended to go for cards with interesting bonus powers without thinking about the balance of letters in my deck, and at least twice during the game found myself stuck with a hand containing three Hs and no vowels.
. My library hold came in for Lies My Teacher Told Me, which I started reading a couple of months ago but had to return when I was halfway through, so that's what I've been reading this week. It continues to be interesting but slow going.
. I've been doing another run through XCOM 2, this time with the "Shen's Last Gift" DLC, which adds a new story mission that unlocks a new soldier class. I really liked the story mission, and I'm having fun playing around with the tactical possibilities of the new soldier. Definitely worth the money I spent on it.
I also installed two of the other DLC that were included in the bundle, both of which are cosmetic expansions that don't change any of the gameplay but provide new outfits to dress your soldiers in. One of them is going to be uninstalled as soon as this run is finished, because it is badly-behaved and keeps changing my soldiers into midriff-baring tops without asking.
. I'm making progress with the jigsaw puzzle; I'm past the stage where the amount of empty space feels disheartening and into the stage where enough of it is filled in that I can do a piece or two whenever I have a spare moment.
. We had a weekend session of board gaming, where we played 3 Witches, Quacks of Quedlinburg, and a few rounds of Ticket to Ride Legacy.
3 Witches is a bidding and trick-taking game for exactly three players, where each round is a competition between a single player and a team of two who each contribute half the team's cards and take, if the team wins, half the victory points. The cards are themed as potion ingredients, with the suits being animals and the ranks being body parts; thus there are cards representing such traditional ingredients as "Eye of Newt" and "Tongue of Dog".
Quacks of Quedlinburg is also themed around potion-making, but each player makes their own potions, attempting to progressively make bigger and better potions that will score more victory points and allow them to buy new and more potent ingredients for the next potion. I ended up in equal last place, but I enjoyed it and would like to play again before I forget how the game mechanics work.
I'd missed the first couple of rounds of Ticket to Ride Legacy, which had been played at a session I wasn't able to make it to, and I think we misinterpreted the rules for adding a new player in a way that gave me an unlooked-for advantage. However it happened, I did very well in my first game and not nearly so well subsequently, though I still did pretty well and enjoyed myself.
. At the regular weekly board gaming session, we played Liar's Uno and Paperback.
Liar's Uno is a variation of Uno in which some of the cards must be played face down and the player can choose to bluff about what card it is. This was my first time playing it, and I'm not particularly keen on it; I think there are other games that do that kind of thing if that's what I'm after, and that's generally not what I'm after from a game of Uno.
Paperback is a deckbuilding game built around playing cards with letters on them to make words and score points that can be used to buy new cards which are worth victory points at the end or which offer bonuses like extra points for beginning and ending with the same letter or allowing longer words to be made from the same number of cards. The winning player did very well at building up a hand that let him play long words and score lots of points. I tended to go for cards with interesting bonus powers without thinking about the balance of letters in my deck, and at least twice during the game found myself stuck with a hand containing three Hs and no vowels.
. My library hold came in for Lies My Teacher Told Me, which I started reading a couple of months ago but had to return when I was halfway through, so that's what I've been reading this week. It continues to be interesting but slow going.
. I've been doing another run through XCOM 2, this time with the "Shen's Last Gift" DLC, which adds a new story mission that unlocks a new soldier class. I really liked the story mission, and I'm having fun playing around with the tactical possibilities of the new soldier. Definitely worth the money I spent on it.
I also installed two of the other DLC that were included in the bundle, both of which are cosmetic expansions that don't change any of the gameplay but provide new outfits to dress your soldiers in. One of them is going to be uninstalled as soon as this run is finished, because it is badly-behaved and keeps changing my soldiers into midriff-baring tops without asking.
. I'm making progress with the jigsaw puzzle; I'm past the stage where the amount of empty space feels disheartening and into the stage where enough of it is filled in that I can do a piece or two whenever I have a spare moment.
