Happy Purim 1. I'm still not used to not observing Purim in favor of Shushan Purim. Everyone around the world is reading the megillah and I'm baking a few dozen potato kugels to give out tomorrow.
Scrabble
Friday night Rachel and I played Scrabble. I don't know if I've told you about the way that Rachel plays Scrabble, but it's not what one would call tournament-style.
Each of us has a dictionary to "check the spelling" of words before placing them. Even that wouldn't be so bad, but if Rachel doesn't find the word she was looking for, she'll just scan the page to see if there are any other words that use the same letters. Kind of takes the challenge out of it, I think.
Also, she'll play any two letters that can be pronounced as a word and insist that it's a word, too, unless I can't find it in the dictionary. Then she'll just try another one.
In our game, I kept having good scoring words that opened up the triple word scores for her, so she would match my points on her turn. We were fairly neck-and-neck until the end when I still got high scoring words but there were no more triple word scores available.
Also, at the end, she played a low-scoring word just to "open up the board", which set her back another round.
And since she doesn't read my my blog, she can't argue with anything I've written here.
Puerto Rico
Nadine, on the other hand, reads my blog (Hi, Nadine!)
We three played Puerto Rico on Saturday evening. Rachel went first, I went second, and Nadine was third. Rachel opened with Settler/corn to prevent me from taking the only corn.
I took sugar and a building, and then Indigo, Factory, and Tobacco. Nadine had a coffee monopoly, and Rachel was doing some nice shipping, but my Factory gave me enough money and more to counteract her shipping.
Nadine blocked a coffee boat once, but it was the small boat and so only lasted for two shipments.
I ended up with three large buildings. Nadine had one and Rachel had none. Final scores were me 52, Nadine 42, Rachel 39.
Game News
The Washington Post talks about how the Wii is beginning to bring families together over video games (although it gives a dig at board games on the way).
In other video game news, Serious Games points to the U.N.'s new Stop Disaster game, aimed at teaching children how to "respond to and mitigate disasters".
StarNewsOnline points to the advertisement by the ESRB on GamerDad. The video game reviewing board is offering a full or part time position to someone to rate video games.
King Lud IC talks about the different levels of goals in games.
Twilight Creation's board game of Dante's Inferno. "The object of the game is to rescue enough sinners (resources) to gain entry to the 9th Circle of Hell and defeat Lucifer while preventing the other players from doing so first."
Bernie's latest Funcast is about teaching Checkers to prisoners, who discover that "all the rules of a game are negotiable. The only rules that aren’t negotiable are the rules that keep you playing together."
And lastly, man stakes, and loses, daughter in a card game.
Yehuda
3 comments:
Blocking the small boat wasn't my choice, Rachel forced me to ship coffee which worked because even though I had a corn, she filled the corn boat. I did block the large boat with coffee once later on, at the same time that you blocked the middle boat with tobacco, which hurt Rachel.
Nadine
Talking of ship blocking I had a coffee monopoly in a five player game a week ago. I was only making one coffee per craftsman, and managed to block the largest ship for about half the game just by picking Captain once.
Weird game.
Simon: That's the way to do it.
Yehuda
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