Shavuot Gaming

None, actually. But I did play some games on shabbat.

Dinner on Shavuot evening was at Nadine's, and Adam from the game group was also there. One of Nadine's son's friends was also there, and he is into freeform RPGs. I have always wanted to play a freeform - actually, anything other than D&D. Hopefully he will swing by and run a one-shot for us, sometime.

Shavuot evening is for learning, however, which is what most of us did. Many people stay up all night learning; I fell asleep by 12:30.

We had a great lunch the next day in someone's garden, just mellowing and singing old Jewish and 1960's/1970's folk songs until 5:00pm, at which point it was time to get ready for shabbat.

All of these friends, no matter when they moved to Israel, stopped listening to music around 1973. They know Dylan, Dead, Baez, etc, and as far as they're concerned, music ended at that point. I keep trying to get them to try out new music, like Dar Williams, Gordon Bok, etc, but it's an uphill battle. Maybe, when it was my turn to choose a song, choosing "Baby Got Back" wasn't the best choice to convince them.

Anyhoo, on to games ...

Saturday, before lunch and while waiting for Saarya to show up (he never made it, owing to being too tired and it being too hot), we met Ariella's new boyfriend Yoav for the second time. Nice boy. He is in the army, so she only sees him once every three weeks or so.

Ariella actually consented to play a game with us. I needed something easy and quick, so I chose For Sale. For Sale does make a pretty darn good intro game, doesn't it? I totally won the first game, 71 to 58, 55, 44, and then totally lost the second game 68, 65, 53, 43.

After lunch, Nadine was in the area, so she stopped by for a 2-player game of Caylus, hoping to play before Rachel's shiur. We were just setting up, when the downstairs neighbor's kid Ezra wandered up looking for a game. He wasn't ready for Caylus, we figured, so Nadine suggested Primordial Soup.

Primordial Soup is a good game, but it does have a a runaway leader problem. I started with the genes Speed and Streamline, and then moved to Struggle for Survival. Ezra took Movement, Substitution, and Tentacles. But Nadine took Movement, Longevity, and the one for cheap babies.

The latter two were just so flat out better than the ones that we took, that the game was over after a few round, even though we played the remaining rounds to completion. Nadine just pumped out to seven amoebas on turn three, and kept up that number the whole game. There was no way to catch up, since we could never afford that many babies at one time. And genes are limited by the climate. Funny how the number of amoebas aren't.

Ezra came in second.

Later in the evening, Rachel and I started a Scrabble game. I had a bingo on my opening rack, POLIT*R. Unfortunately, Rachel went first. She was going to put down LAID with the D on the center, which thrilled me to pieces, since I could make PLAID, with the P on a double letter. But she changed it to JAIL.

I couldn't think of any way to get out a bingo, which made me unhappy. I'm sure someone else out there can. Rachel played her own bingo the next round, I forget what. This gave me a triple word score for PRICKS (42 points), and we played one or two more rounds.

I picked up a rack EEEORS*. Rachel took three minutes to do her turn, which gave me enough time to find the bingo (give it a try). And I played it on another triple word, too.

But shabbat was over, and we had to end.

Link: I saw this little gem of a picture on Spielfrieks. The original article is here. A slideshow leads to some other pictures of the nuns of St Anne's church playing tennis, basketball, jumprope, as well as the more typical activities you would expect.

Yehuda