You know you're old when you can afford the things you used to have time for

So I guess I never got into chapter two of my chronicles of my Waterloo trip. It's all a blur now, so I'll never get around to it.

Well, I caved and bought the Heroscape Master Set, and now you're going to hear about it. I'm enjoying it so far, but it seems like there are so many different ways to play it that I'll never get around to trying them all to see which I like the most. It feels like you're at the mercy of the dice, but because of that, it's really quite fun. It reminds me of Risk, in a way (and I'm sure you could invent some sort of variant that has area control as well). I've played a handful of 2 player games with Adam, and even a four player match.

Even though the master set has so much in it, I think I'm going to wind up spending a lot of money on this game. I doubt I'll get any of the individual boosters unless they're on sale ($15 for two squads or four heroes is a bit much), but they're coming out with a new Master Set (which comes with lots of terrain pieces and figures). People speculate that when the new master set comes out, box stores like Walmart will put the current one on clearance to make shelf space. If that's the case, I'll probably get another copy of the current master set (if it's marked down enough) and one copy of the new one for the new units. I suppose that's quite a bit of coinage for one game, but I can just think of it as a Wii game and a half (not that I've even purchased a single new game for Wii yet, but that's beside the point!).

Listening to... Sparta - From Now to Never
Link of the moment... There's a smattering of useful information and discussion on this forum, but it's muffled by off-topic discussion and elitest snobs.

Monopoly? More like monotony.

It's been a while! I'll break up my adventures into multiple posts. I'll start off jabbering about board games for a while, I think.

While I was in Waterloo, one stop I was intent on making was to J&J to pick up some board games (since I brought a Wii to Waterloo for Andrew, I had some space in my luggage I had to fill up). I bought Dodge City, an expansion for Bang, a two player abstract game called Hive, and a starter deck for the Harry Potter TCG.

Hive has turned out to be a pleasant little suprise. I've played it a few times and have managed to lose most of those games, but it's a really nice little game. It takes no setup time whatsoever, and can be taught in about three minutes. Once you've played for five minutes and "get" the game, you can throw some interesting strategy into it right away.

I haven't played a game of the Harry Potter TCG yet, but I'm already looking to acquire some more cards. I can get 24 or 36 booster packs (11 cards each) from ebay or other online sources, but the shipping to Canada costs more than the cards themselves. I don't really know what to do about that.

I've already got a nice little list of games on the proverbial chopping block (or shopping block if you will). I suppose I've gotten most of my geek talk out of my system. I'm looking at Alhambra (for a good light 3 player game), one of Shadows Over Camelot or Arkham Horror (for a pseudo-RPG co-op game; the latter has decidedly heavier gameply and takes longer but has a nice theme), and I've been interested in HeroScape for a while (but I feel like I already have so many 2 player games that never get played).

I got a lot of game time in while I was in Waterloo. I played three games of Catan (one with 3 players, one with 5, one with 6), two games of Bohnanza, a game of Monopoly, two games of Mario Party 8, lots of Smash Bros, some really good 4 player Wii tennis, a few games of Hive. That's quite a lot of gaming in one weekend. Even after all those games of Catan, I'm still ready for more! It gets a lot of table time on Tuesdays, so I'm sure I'll get into another game soon.

I'm not really sure how many games I'll have in my collection before I think that I have enough games. I have a ton of games that I rarely play (I don't want to introduce too many to my friends at once), but there is always a set of games that I want to purchase. I really hope that once the Game Shelf gets a website up, I can hook up with some more hardcore gamers. I might even be able to come across a few gamers in the math department at Lakehead. Until then, I'm going to have to try to mold my Tuesday night crowd into hardcore gamers.

Listening to... Opeth - Deliverance
Link of the moment... HeroScape even has a nice little community and is loaded with customized scenarios.

OMG! Game store in Thunder Bay!

Hm, so I guess I'll nerd it up on my blog since I'm at a loss of other nerdy things to do at the moment.

Last Saturday I went to a concert with my mom at my old high school whose theme was video games. Even though I was well aware that I'd be subject to the usual high school concert conditions (babies crying, uncomfortable seating, idiot high school kids hamming it up), I couldn't turn down video game music. About half the songs were from Final Fantasy games, and unfortunately about half of those were from the FFs I haven't played (8, 10-2, 11, and 12). Among the songs I recognized were the generic Zelda and Mario medleys, "To Zanarkand" (FF10), "Aeris' Theme" (FF7), "Red Wings" (FF4) and the Pokemon theme.

Accompanying the Zelda medley was the worst choreographed fight between a guy dressed up as Link and some girl with a scythe (can anyone identify this character? I don't think Ganon(dorf) ever used a scythe). Actually wait, I take that back. "Choreographed" implies that they knew ahead of time what they were doing. What I saw must have been impromptu. Props to that guy for having a good Link costume. I'll finish this topic with ten words: hot high school girls dressed up as video game charcters. Yeah. I know it's wrong too. Wrong and awesome.

I've heard of a few good games lately, one of which is called Cash'n'Guns. Unfortunately, the game seems to not have been picked up by an American publisher and thus can be difficult to find. For some reason (and I really can't remember why I thought to do this), I had the bright idea of constructing the game myself and printing off a copy of the official rules. After some forum research, I found a program that lets you create custom decks (called nanDECK; if you ever need to to create a simple deck for anything, take a look). I also have used Cool Text extensively in the card design. I'm accumulating different guns as they come to me from dollar stores (I'm up to three, I need six).

Before making components for that game, I decided to make a more permanent deck for werewolf. After a little tinkering with card sizes, I've gotten to a finished product. I printed a front side and back side, used an old playing card between them for stiffness and threw them all in a clear plastic card sleeve. Normal printer paper is 20lb, I bought and used 28lb; I suggest using at least 65lb (card stock) if you are going to print a front and back and use a sleeve, otherwise shoot for 110lb if you dont' plan on using a sleeve. Two 28lb sheets are for too flimsy (these are the sorts of things you learn when you feed your nerdy habits).

I went the extra mile and constructed a tuckbox for the deck as well. It was inredibly easy considering I made a friggin' tuckbox on my first try. I used 65lb paper for this which is the heaviest I could find in the house. It's not too bad, but I might track down some 110lb paper for any I make in the future (I likely will; they're very nice looking and an upgrade from elastics).

I went to the Bookshelf (factoid: the website of the Bookshelf is www.thunderbay.com. The city's website is www.thunderbay.ca) today to track down clear plastic card sleeves. I could get 200 on eBay shipped for $5, but I figured it would be cheaper to find some locally. When I parked, I looked for a sign that said "parking for Bookshelf customers". What I saw was "Parking for Gameshelf customers". I looked up at the store next to the Bookshelf. There was no sign, but the door was open. I peered inside, and saw a girl behind a till, a lot of empty space, and a few stands set up with board games. Yes that's right my friends: Thunder Bay is getting a (dedicated) game store! They're not officially open until next weekend (or so they told me), but they sold me my card sleeves. I looked around at the stuff they had set up, but I (stupidly) didn't take note of any of the prices for comparison puposes. I did happen to look at Hive which has caught my attention lately. It had a marked price of under thirty dollars. J&J has their copies marked at $27, so if the rest of their stock has similarly comparable prices, they'll get a lot of my patronage.

Before I found out about the Game Shelf, I figured out a nice little plan to acquire games cheaply. Thought Hammer comes highly recommended on BGG, for good reason. With the Canadian dollar doing as well as it is (or is the US dollar just doing poorly?), it is much cheaper to place an order at TH and get it shipped (free if the purchase is over $125) to Ryden's (a store just across the border that handles packages) which is only about an hour drive away from Thunder Bay. I'd still have to pay some form of taxes crossing the border, but even if I have to pay some sort of fees on top of PST/GST, it would have to be extremely high to not make it worth my while. The prices at TH really are amazing.

Pictures follow:

My werewolf deck, with tuckbox in the background (yeah, I even added some "colour text" to all the role cards).


My table in all its glory (well, not all of it. I obviously don't have the legs folded out at the moment).


A close-up of one of the corners. Isn't that exposed wood rail just breathtaking?

Listening to... Iced Earth - Wolf (I've listened to this song about a dozen times in the last few days)
Link of the moment... My new TV drama fix

It's a nice day to start again

Last night I hit up a place I've never been to called Fastlane, over in Current River (for Thunder Bayites, you might have known it as Bunnies back when I was in high school). I think the average age of patrons there was 42 (cougar city), but overall I liked the place, mostly because of the karaoke. I did my usual White Wedding cover, and I've decided that the next time I go to a karaoke place, I'm going to have a song list prepped. I heard Chris sing Run to the Hills by Iron Maiden, and I was thoroughly impressed with his vocal range. Impressed indeed.

While I was there, I chatted it up with Alexa's American friend Rebecca. She's in town for the next week (in addition to last week) for some DNA course. Adam made a good point after we left that I should have arranged some sort of phone number exchange before I took off. I told her I hope I get to see her again before she leaves, and that's no joke. I'd like to introduce her to the wonders of five pin bowling.



I've sort of been going crazy with torrents lately. Chris brought his portable hard drive over the other day and I picked a few things off of it, and I quickly got the notice that my hard drive was full. Well, I've burned a lot of my older media to DVD now, so I've got some more space to work on. I'm wondering if I should invest in an external drive myself. I cuold get a standalone 500GB external drive from Future Shop or an enclosure and 500GB SATA drive from ncix for under $250 each. Jeez, I never thought I'd see the day when I fill up my 200GB drive and 100GB partition. It's times like that that a DVD burner really comes in handy.

Also, congrats to Steve and Nat who recently got engaged! About time!

Listening to... 36 Crazyfists - Two Months for a Year
Link of the moment... I don't think I've mentioned it yet, but I got Guitar Hero for my birthday. As of yet, no one has been able to give me a challenge.