Weekly status update [0029/????]

Let’s get right into it.

  • As mentioned before, my shoulder was acting up all week.  Fortunately it seems almost completely better now.  I’m still going to take it easy for another day or two, minimizing my time at the computer and with a controller, because boy howdy did it suck for a while there.
  • Due to the aforementioned shoulder issues, I ended up spending most of the week reading rather than playing games.  I finished Christopher Moore’s Secondhand Souls, which was good but not as good (or captivating) as A Dirty Job, a book I read in a single sitting a week or two ago.  Then I picked up Golden Witchbreed by Mary Gentle and read it from cover-to-cover in a single day.  I’m currently working on its sequel, which seems like it will also be excellent.
  • One of my old coworkers moved out of town this week to go back home to his family (and a job much closer to home).  We spent basically the entire weekend playing board games; Saturday was just the two of us, with his son joining on Sunday after he flew in.  It was a good time.  The two new-to-me games that we played were Cinque Terre, which was fine if rather slight, and Keltis: Das Kartenspiel.  On the face of it, the latter game is pretty ridiculous: it’s a card game adaptation of a board game (Keltis) which itself is an adaptation of a card game (Lost Cities).  Instead of being a third-generation blurry photocopy, though, it’s actually a pretty fascinating tactical game on its own, and the fact that it supports more than two players means that it could potentially hit the table more often than Lost Cities in some gaming groups.  I need more time with it to establish a firmer opinion, but I liked the game of it we played.
  • The big thing that happened this past week was my coming along to my old work’s Summer Outing as an old friend’s “+1” on Friday.  The weather was stunningly nice, hovering around 80°F and with low humidity; we were at a combination pavilion-greens-lakeshore thing, and the water in the pool was just the right level of cool to feel infinitely refreshing.  It was nice to see a bunch of old faces again, including the kitchen staff, who I miss dearly.  I had a really good time… and a much better one than the last time we were at the same venue, four years ago, when I jumped into the pool with my phone, destroyed it, and then got paged by work and had to spend the rest of the trip furiously fixing remote issues rather than having a good time.
  • I also managed to have a few games hit the table while on said outing.  The only new one was Lost Cities: Rivals, yet another game in the Lost Cities/Keltis franchise.  It was… fascinating, with a bidding mechanic that is wholly new to the series, and I didn’t really wrap my head around it by the end of the game.  I still managed to win, somehow, but we also weren’t playing by the rules entirely (it was a first game and I was rushing, as we had to leave soon).  I look forward to playing it a little more deliberately… and correctly… in the future.
  • I didn’t get burned at all despite spending a lot of the day in the sun!  Woot!  That… might be a first?

Despite the frustrating health issues, it was a nice week, with more board gaming than I’ve done in the last few months, and a lot of time spent with people I like.  What more can one ask for?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.