Yes, Forever Game

With brief respites for obtaining food, I basically gamed from noon yesterday until 7 am this morning. Summary: I won, I lost, brain no worky. Of course, all of this was after a wedding.


I was about to leave ML in normal clothing when I ran into , who reminded me that I should probably dress up for the wedding that I completely forgot about. Don’t worry, weddings always trump gaming if I’m invited…

It was a brief Quaker ceremony, something I’ve never been to. Amy’ and John had a really nice set of vows that they wrote themselves, and there was a moment of silence. Then, in true Quaker spirit, there was a time for people to stand up and say things to or about the couple. Heard some funny stories from friends and relatives alike. At the end, everyone present was asked to sign and witness the marriage certificate.

I think my favorite part of the whole event, aside from the vows, was when Amy’ came in the back of the meeting house in a very nice wedding dress, and practically everyone in the place gasped. Amy’ doesn’t usually wear dresses, and in fact, I’m not sure I’d ever seen her in one, so I guess that’s where the shock came from. Also, was Best Abby and was Rebecca of Honor. Hee.


After a too-long, too-expensive trip to the cheese court, Jawaad, , and I started a game of Robo Rally. It was unfortunately short, because of a bad flag placement, such that was able to ride an express conveyor belt to victory in less than 5 turns.

We played another game, this time with two boards, which included such additional features as portals, ledges and ramps, flame throwers, repulsers, trap door pits, and the like. The other Chris also joined us for the game. It was pretty fun; I became a big fan of the Fire-Control Laser option, but Jawaad still zipped way ahead of the rest of us and won.

There were other assorted games, including a short round of Chez Dork, in which wiped the floor with his player’s RPG obesssion.


wanted to use my computer to update the PBEM Diplomacy he’s running that I’m in, but we wasted a lot of time dealing with technical problems. First, in the WRC, ITS says I need to netreg my computer (it’s obviously already registered), but then it says I can’t netreg my computer because it’s already been netregged. Jenius! I rooted the OS X machine in the WRC just to make myself feel better (can you believe that they leave single-user mode enabled?).

The best part is, Mark Dumic (one of the network admins) had told me that the netreg system was going to be turned off for Alumni Weekend, for this exact reason. He better have had a technical reason for not doing it, because otherwise… grawr.

and I eventually got an open port in the SCCS Media Lounge, but we had to wait for Dan to reboot Osprey to fix a mutt configuration problem. Then JDip was being annoyingly slow (stupid Java), and then it refused to export a map image, but eventually everyone’s build orders went through.


and I got back to the WRC just after the ginormous Peking dinner party had left, but before everyone had left, so eight of us went to an Italian place on the pike. They had good bread, good pasta, and even better deserts. We had four recent students, and four alums: me, , , , plus Ruth, Kir, Jeff, and Gavin (whom I kept calling David… I think the “avi” in the middle kept throwing me).

It’s always nice to have normal geeky conversations over a meal – we talked about Proto-World linguistic theory, web standards, wineries, computer interfaces, and more. Good times.


I started off with a game of 4-player Demon Settlers (Seafarers + Cities & Knights), played with , , and . Brought back some great memories of Comma winning during the game, and then ~Elliot actually winning the game. The game sucked for me, due to a complete lack of production, but it was still fun.

I made it downstairs just in time to start building a creature for Clay-O-Rama, a game introduced by . You create a creature out of Play-Doh, choose some special powers from a short list, and then determine your attacks, movement, and hit points based on the shape, size, and configuration of your creature’s limbs, mouths, claws, tails, legs, wings, etc.

I named my creature Foobar, made it completely symmetrical, and took the Divide Self power. I ended up with two creatures (Foo and Bar, of course) each half the size, but did fairly well. I used my other power, Borrow Power, to remove one of Amy’s creature’s limbs after she removed one of mine. and Robert finished each other off in my general vicinity, but not after Robert scavenged my lost limb. was playing as this giant flying pancake thing, but I was able to finish him off, and in the process use Borrow Power to use Bar as a missile against the other creatures. It was a very fun game, and I’d love to play it again.


I just missed the beginning of a game of Puerto Rico, so I briefly joined a game of categories, but that dissolved so people could watch a collection of Buffy music video remixes. Since I’m not (yet, in ‘s opinion) a Buffy fan, and it would be full of spoilers, I wanted to find people to play games with. After watching the Puerto Rico game for a while, , , and I played my third game of Robo Rally today.

It lasted FOREVER. We made the mistake of putting the first checkpoint in a really hard to access place, in a corner behind a pit, two laser beams, and two conveyor belts that move the wrong way. In other words, we couldn’t get to it very easily without dying a lot. After I finally got out of Hell’s Kitchen, I was able to tag the last two checkpoints in only a matter of turns. It took me only two turns to get from the second to the third checkpoint, thanks to a thoroughly excellent hand.

Hung out for a while down in the WRC basement, talking with people about neat ways to make Robo Rally Deluxe (with actual moving board elements), as well as Live Robo Rally. I have to track down a copy of this game, although I understand that they are very hard to find, since it was only a small printing.

Peter, , and I eventually settled on playing a game of Carcasonne. We played with all of the expansion tiles, including the river, but with none of the expansion features (that is, inns, cathedrals, and the like had no effect beyond their base value). Hmm… probably another game I should purchase :o).

We had a great conversation, ranging from technology policy through the SCCS and Christianity to polyamory (hope I didn’t offend you, Noda – it seemed like you were comfortable with the direction of the conversation) and the SWIL debate list. If it hadn’t been for much Mountain Dew intake earlier in the evening, I would not have been coherent.

I walked all the back to ML, in time to see the PECO crew finishing up work on the transformer that had been on fire earlier in the evening. We could see the burnination from the top floor of the WRC. Then, I slept.

Obvioiusly, much more to follow, including such fascinating topics as Food and Robots and Exercise and Gradumutation. I’m so behind… at least I’ll have some actual content for SWAPA this month!

Get Down Moses” from Streetcore by Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros


Comments

One response to “Yes, Forever Game”

  1. Mmm…much fun was had by all this weekend.

    Great song, BTW.

Nurd Up!