Week in review: Week to 28 February
Mar. 2nd, 2026 07:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. The family walk-and-talk has successfully occurred for two weeks running.
. The weekend boardgame group continued to play Ticket to Ride Legacy.
On what turned out to be my second-last turn, I decided to get another ticket in the hope of boosting my score a bit. I looked at the options, realised I couldn't expect to complete any of them in the time remaining, told myself that the sensible thing would be to take the one with the lowest point value so it would do the least damage when I failed to complete it, and then took a different card that I thought I might be able to complete if I had a couple more turns.
I did not have a couple more turns.
As it turned out, I'd been in the lead by a good margin when I chose to take one more ticket. If I hadn't taken one more ticket, I'd have won; if I'd taken the lowest-scoring ticket, I'd have won. Instead, I came second by a single point.
. At the weekly game meet, I played Cockroach Salad, 7 Wonders, The Mind, The Royal Game of Ur, and Thirty-One. I was particularly pleased to find someone to play The Royal Game of Ur with, because I've been in the mood for it for a while but it's difficult to get to the table because it's strictly a two-player game and at the meet people tend to prefer to play games with more players.
The Royal Game of Ur is one of the oldest known board games, with archeologists having found examples of the board over 4000 years old. Nobody's ever excavated a complete description of how it was played, though, so there are several different reconstructions of the rules. In general, it's a race game where each player has to get a set of pieces from the start of the race course to the end; there's an element of chance, because you roll dice for movement, but also strategy, because you choose which piece to apply the movement to. One of the things I like about it is that it has some built-in catch-up mechanics: for instance, if a player is doing really well and has got most of their pieces to the finish line, they have less freedom of movement, because they have fewer active pieces to choose from, while their opponent who is doing worse has more options available (and fewer opposing pieces to keep track of and attempt to thwart). In the game I played this week, my opponent got all but one piece to the end while I still had most of my pieces in play, but then I was able to repeatedly block the last piece while I got most of my pieces to the end, and it finally came down to each of us having one piece left in play and the game being decided by who got the winning roll first.
I also enjoyed the game of 7 Wonders, and came second. The game of The Mind went very poorly; I was tired and not very brainpower, and I got the feeling the same was true of most of the other players.
. I have completed the jigsaw puzzle I was working on. It made a bad initial impression which it has not subsequently succeeded in overcoming. The instructional booklet is verbose nonsense that appears to have been written by someone who doesn't actually understand what the jigsaw puzzle is depicting. Part of the picture prominently features a word that would be unexceptional in Spanish but I really wasn't expecting on a puzzle that says it was designed in the USA. (On consideration, I'm fairly sure it's meant to be an advertisement in Spanish for black coffee, but it really doesn't help that the word for "coffee" is half obscured while the word for "black" is clearly visible.) I don't like the art style much, and I remain unimpressed with the quality of the piece shape engineering. I have a second puzzle from the same series, and I'm going to do it next because it's there (and I'm curious about whether the nonsense booklet is a regular feature), but it's going to have to work a bit to gain my good will.
. I went to another concert, at the same venue and with mostly the same group of friends. This week it was the Hindley Street Country Club, which is much more my kind of music; I had an okay time last week, but this week I really enjoyed myself, ending with a big grin on my face and at one point going so far as to consider thinking about getting up and dancing.
It turns out that I've been mispronouncing the name of the band all this time; it had seemed obvious to me that "Hindley" would be pronounced to rhyme with "spindly", but it turns out that the first syllable is pronounced to rhyme with "find" (or, come think of it, "hind"). One of my friends was equally surprised by this revelation, while another, who has visited Adelaide more recently and has actually been to the eponymous Hindley Street, was surprised that it was news to us.
I will not be making a habit of this; I'm pretty sure this is the last concert at the open-air venue until next summer, and I don't tend to do concerts at indoor venues due to an ongoing disagreement about what constitutes a comfortable distance from the big noise machines.
. I am continuing to play and enjoy XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. It's an indication of how much extra content is in the DLC that this first play-through has been going for over two weeks, during which I've been playing fairly often, and I'm still a fair distance from the final boss mission. I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the final boss mission; another thing that the DLC adds to the game is a series of mini-boss missions that are less intense versions of the final boss mission and provide opportunities to develop and practice useful strategies. Defeating each of the mini-bosses also results in a reward of a unique powerful weapon that I expect I will be glad of in the final battle.
. The weekend boardgame group continued to play Ticket to Ride Legacy.
On what turned out to be my second-last turn, I decided to get another ticket in the hope of boosting my score a bit. I looked at the options, realised I couldn't expect to complete any of them in the time remaining, told myself that the sensible thing would be to take the one with the lowest point value so it would do the least damage when I failed to complete it, and then took a different card that I thought I might be able to complete if I had a couple more turns.
I did not have a couple more turns.
As it turned out, I'd been in the lead by a good margin when I chose to take one more ticket. If I hadn't taken one more ticket, I'd have won; if I'd taken the lowest-scoring ticket, I'd have won. Instead, I came second by a single point.
. At the weekly game meet, I played Cockroach Salad, 7 Wonders, The Mind, The Royal Game of Ur, and Thirty-One. I was particularly pleased to find someone to play The Royal Game of Ur with, because I've been in the mood for it for a while but it's difficult to get to the table because it's strictly a two-player game and at the meet people tend to prefer to play games with more players.
The Royal Game of Ur is one of the oldest known board games, with archeologists having found examples of the board over 4000 years old. Nobody's ever excavated a complete description of how it was played, though, so there are several different reconstructions of the rules. In general, it's a race game where each player has to get a set of pieces from the start of the race course to the end; there's an element of chance, because you roll dice for movement, but also strategy, because you choose which piece to apply the movement to. One of the things I like about it is that it has some built-in catch-up mechanics: for instance, if a player is doing really well and has got most of their pieces to the finish line, they have less freedom of movement, because they have fewer active pieces to choose from, while their opponent who is doing worse has more options available (and fewer opposing pieces to keep track of and attempt to thwart). In the game I played this week, my opponent got all but one piece to the end while I still had most of my pieces in play, but then I was able to repeatedly block the last piece while I got most of my pieces to the end, and it finally came down to each of us having one piece left in play and the game being decided by who got the winning roll first.
I also enjoyed the game of 7 Wonders, and came second. The game of The Mind went very poorly; I was tired and not very brainpower, and I got the feeling the same was true of most of the other players.
. I have completed the jigsaw puzzle I was working on. It made a bad initial impression which it has not subsequently succeeded in overcoming. The instructional booklet is verbose nonsense that appears to have been written by someone who doesn't actually understand what the jigsaw puzzle is depicting. Part of the picture prominently features a word that would be unexceptional in Spanish but I really wasn't expecting on a puzzle that says it was designed in the USA. (On consideration, I'm fairly sure it's meant to be an advertisement in Spanish for black coffee, but it really doesn't help that the word for "coffee" is half obscured while the word for "black" is clearly visible.) I don't like the art style much, and I remain unimpressed with the quality of the piece shape engineering. I have a second puzzle from the same series, and I'm going to do it next because it's there (and I'm curious about whether the nonsense booklet is a regular feature), but it's going to have to work a bit to gain my good will.
. I went to another concert, at the same venue and with mostly the same group of friends. This week it was the Hindley Street Country Club, which is much more my kind of music; I had an okay time last week, but this week I really enjoyed myself, ending with a big grin on my face and at one point going so far as to consider thinking about getting up and dancing.
It turns out that I've been mispronouncing the name of the band all this time; it had seemed obvious to me that "Hindley" would be pronounced to rhyme with "spindly", but it turns out that the first syllable is pronounced to rhyme with "find" (or, come think of it, "hind"). One of my friends was equally surprised by this revelation, while another, who has visited Adelaide more recently and has actually been to the eponymous Hindley Street, was surprised that it was news to us.
I will not be making a habit of this; I'm pretty sure this is the last concert at the open-air venue until next summer, and I don't tend to do concerts at indoor venues due to an ongoing disagreement about what constitutes a comfortable distance from the big noise machines.
. I am continuing to play and enjoy XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. It's an indication of how much extra content is in the DLC that this first play-through has been going for over two weeks, during which I've been playing fairly often, and I'm still a fair distance from the final boss mission. I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the final boss mission; another thing that the DLC adds to the game is a series of mini-boss missions that are less intense versions of the final boss mission and provide opportunities to develop and practice useful strategies. Defeating each of the mini-bosses also results in a reward of a unique powerful weapon that I expect I will be glad of in the final battle.
