Weekend Gaming: Ticket to Ride

My sister and her husband came to stay with us over the weekend, so on Saturday night we broke out a board game to play. Having been a little bit overdosed on Dominion, my brother-in-law suggested "anything else". I probably would have pushed for SmallWorld, except it (along with most of the other board games) had already been pack.

So we settled pretty quickly on Ticket to Ride.

It had been forever since I last played Ticket to Ride. It used to be the standard game for K and I to play until we got Dominion, but since then I don't think it's come out of the cupboard. So I had to check back to the rule book a few times to get us going (how many track cards do you start with? How many route cards to you have to keep? etc)

We ended up with a bit of drama when K deliberately went for a section that she knew I was about to grab, which meant my best option was to block her off. I was down to four trains, and so decided to gamble by grabbing some more route cards. I got one card that would have given me another 17 points if I'd had ONE more train - if I hadn't had to make the detour, I would have been fine.

I ended up winning thanks to the longest route card (all my trains in one long line), but it was only by a couple of points. It was a great game.

My Free Ghoul Came!

In the mail this evening was a small padded envelope. I didn't remember ordering anything recently, but it was addressed to me. Turned out it was from Wayland Games, and inside was my free ghoul sprue from Mantic Games.

If you were reading this blog back in June, you may remember that back then Mantic Games and Wayland Games were offering a deal - sign up for the Wayland Games email, and they'd send you one of the brand new ghoul models.

So I signed up, and waited. The emails came regularly, but no plastic monster. I'd actually forgotten all about it, so the package was a very nice surprise. What made it all even better was that it's not one but two ghouls, with three head options and some some extra bits (a couple of weapon hands that would take a bit of careful cutting to use and some other bits that I'm not quite sure about).

Hobby Skills in the Real World

Work and home life have both been crazy-busy the last few weeks, which has left me virtually no time for anything hobby-related. But in the whirlwind of packing, cleaning and generally getting ready to move inter-state, I have had a couple of opportunities to use my hobby skills.

Over the past two years of living in our house, our small dog has been working on scratching a hole through the laundry door. Most of the time she's fairly happy and placid, but then occasionally she decides that actually she doesn't want to be outside by her self while we're all at work.

Despite our best efforts to stop it, she's managed to inflict some serious damage to the door. This will probably surprise anyone who's actually met our dog, but she had managed to tear up a section that was about 10cm wide and 20cm tall, and dug almost half-way through the door.

Unfortunately, the pictures I took of the damage didn't come out, but this photo of after I'd filled most of the damage with wood putty should give you an idea of the area we're talking about. Basically, anything that's brown is what I had to patch up.

After the first lot of putty had dried, I went back over it with another layer to fill in any more gaps. I then scraped over the whole thing to make it level with the door, and sanded back the area to make it all seamless.
Then, through several trips to the hardware store, I was able to get a tin of paint that almost matched the door colour. Fortunately, the door is off on it's own, so it the colour was a little out it didn't matter too much. But I did have to paint the whole door.

I was pretty pleased with myself when it was all done - a few hours work (while I was doing lots of other cleaning), and it looked as good as new!

Then, not really thinking about it, we all went to work on Tuesday. When we got home, I opened up the back door and discovered this

Really, it should have occurred to me that this might happen. But I was pretty close to turning the dog into sausages.

So that evening I repeated the process. I filled in the hole with putty again, sanded it back, and then filled in any remaining holes before sanding it back yet again.

The I broke out the tin of paint again, and re-did the area. Fortunately I didn't have to re-do the whole door, since I knew the colour was going to match

The second time around doesn't look quite as good - if you look really carefully, you can see where the area was filled. But you probably wouldn't notice if you didn't know it was already there.

Now, every time we go out, I make sure the door is VERY well protected!

Fantasy Flight's Excellent Customer Service

When I opened up the Wardens of the West expansion pack to Battles of Westeros, I discovered that I had an extra Daven Lannister figure, but was missing a pikeman figure. I had the right numbers of bases (the pikemen use the longer sized base, Daven the normal one), but I was able to mount the extra Daven on the spare base I had from the core box.

I emailed Fantasy Flight's customer support explaining what was in the box. The next day I got an email back saying that an extra pikeman was packaged up and would be in the post on Monday.

About a week and a half later, a small envelope arrived for me in the mail. This is what was inside:

The Fantasy Flight Games card had a hand-written note on the back

Really, you can't ask for better than that!

Island of Blood: Griffin Rider Part II - Rider Finished

I finished off the rider a few weeks ago, but I'm only just now getting around to posting pictures.

I'm really pleased with how he's turned out - so now I'm going to focus on the bits I don't like.

Like I said last time, the gold armour came out much more bronze then I'd intended. In places where I highlighted with silver, it make it look more like the gear is damaged and worn rather than super shiny.

I'm also aware that some of the highlights on the cloak look a bit odd. I need more practice in dealing with large areas of cloth.

I was quite happy with his face - it was the first time I've managed to paint eyes that didn't look completely stupid. He does look a little crazy, but in a "I'm about to fly over and ram my lance through your chest!" kind of way.

Now I just have to find some time to finish off the griffin itself!

Melbourne Cup Dominion

Yesterday was Melbourne Cup day, which meant everyone had the day off (if you live in Victoria anyway). F came over for lunch, so afterwards we introduced her to Dominion.

F is definitely no gamer. She was initially a little weirded out by not having a board ("I like to see my piece move all around the table!"). But pretty soon she got over that and picked up the game really quickly.

We played the first game with the standard starting deck. Both K and I agreed that for some reason it seemed like it took a long time for things to get up and running - money seemed to be a really tight for a lot longer than normal. But this might have just been because the game was slower while F got her head around it all. I scored a fairly convincing victory - getting 6 Provinces in a 3 player game is always a pretty good sign.

We then played two random decks. In the first game, the cards I was most interested in were the Bureaucrat (I love that card) and the Chapel. I've always struggled to work out the point of the Chapel (aside from getting ride of any Curse cards). But recently I read about a deck minimization tactic. The basic idea is to try and keep your deck as small as possible so your best cards come around more often.

So I decided I would give that a try.

I didn't get off to a very good start - it wasn't until about half way through the game that I started getting rid of cards, and my Chapels had a tendency to clump together in the same hand. I managed to win by 1 point, but that was really much more because of the Bureaucrat than the Chapel.

In the next game we played, the Chapel came out again. So I decided to give my tactic another try. This time I was a lot more aggressive with trashing cards. I also picked up a Money Lender, so when I could I was trashing Coppers for Silvers, or just trashing them outright. I was also pretty ruthless about getting rid of action cards as soon as they outlived their usefulness. So by the end, I was regularly getting hands of 3 or 4 Golds.

Ideally I would have liked to get some extra buys or something like a remodel (turn Gold into a Provence) into my hand, but it ended up being a pretty quick game. I had 5 Provinces, which was enough to beat F by about 5 points.

By the end of the second game, I was pretty happy with the Chapel tactic. It's quite different to how I normally play, and it's certainly not for anyone who doesn't like shuffling. But I liked it a lot.