John Michael Montgomery sang 'Life's a Dance you learn as you go, sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow', well weight loss is similar. I've been doing the Two Pound Two Step most of this month, my weight fluctuating more than a freshman's GPA. I've finished the month 3 lbs higher than where I finished last month...and I'm o.k. with that. I said in my last update that I find myself obsessing about weight loss and so I took the last week off, well that mini vacation somehow morphed into a month long hiatus. I've been watching my input, but I haven't been exercising so my weight has not declined.
I will get back into exercising again, I think some of it is the hotter weather, I don't like getting hot and sweaty, I'm a little bored with my work out dvd and it's too hot to go out walking.
Anyway enough excuses, onto the games played this last month.
I set a new personal best this month - 38 games played, and 20 different games.
(Maybe all this game playing is why I haven't been exercising.)
Dominion is still top with 7 games played. It's appeal hasn't dimmed yet and as the first expansion is now available I don't see its charms dwindling anytime soon.
Chains of Fenrir makes a surprise appearance. It's a quick abstract game that uses lots of glass beads. You can learn it in just a few minutes but it has some interesting challenges to it. It reminds me a little bit of the game of
Nim that we used to play with coins or stones when I was a child.
Travel Blokus also made its first appearance of the year and garnered 5 plays.
Back in May I finally entered a new level of geekdom by ordering 2 games from a small publisher in Germany. This marked the first time I paid international shipping simply to purchase a game! The company was a delight to work with, I cannot say the same for the U.S. postal service however. The package was shipped DHL to the U.S, but as DHL no longer make domestic U.S. deliveries it was transferred to the local postal service who promptly managed to 'mislay' the package and then demanded extra postage for delivery purposes even though they didn't deliver it! I eventually tracked it down at the local post office, paid the extra money and obtained the games. I notified the German company just so that they would know that there are problems with their U.S. shipping.
They immediately apologized and sent me a refund equal to the extra amount of shipping I had to pay - plus a little bit extra for my trouble! How's that for customer service!!!
So what was this mysterious game?
It's a very interesting race to climb as high as possible up an ever shifting tower. We've had three plays so far and I really like it. It's pleasing to play and looks great. I can't wait to play in public somewhere and see what kind of crowd it draws.
The game is solid wood so the shipping was heavy! I didn't want to pay shipping on just one game so I also ordered Neue Heimat from the same company. This is a real estate development game, again with wonderful wooden pieces. We've only played it once so far and I don't think we've given it a fair enough crack of the whip yet.
One of the draw backs of having so many games, is that we get very good at learning new games, but not so good at developing strategies for existing games. We've tried combating that by having a 'Game of the Month' - one game that we were guaranteed to play every week in the midst of all the others, but that kind of fell by the wayside.
I think that's why Dominion has proven so popular. We are able to play it quickly and have gotten good at formulating different strategies very quickly, and there always seem to be time for just one more round where we can try a different tactic.
August is going to be an interesting month for games. Steve and I are off to Gen Con in Indianapolis, so I should get a lot of gaming in and hopefully get exposed to a lot more new games to add to my collection (and then only play once every few months!)
1 comment:
Good comment about learning new games. I was thinking about this recently as well. I've been teaching games to new players lately, and I worry about overwhelming them with new rather than letting them get comfortable with something familiar.
One thing we could try (I'd be happy to bring back Game of the Month, too), would be "One New, One Old" where we have to play an equal amount of old/new. That may not help much, but it was just a thought.
Post a Comment