The Grand Experiment Begins Tomorrow Today

I know you missed me, because I missed you.

I also know that I really felt withdrawal from the Internet; mostly because I thought of the people who may have commented on my blog, and that the comments wouldn't show up due to the moderation. Next time I go away, I'll try to remember to unset the moderation and just delete the spam when I return.

I don't know how I'll survive an entire week away from the Internet in England/Scotland later this month.

Weekend Gaming

The shul weekend was very much like the last weekend, game-wise.

While on a hike, I occupied the kids with a word game: one player picks a single letter to start a series of letters, and each player must add a letter either to the end or front of this series that does not form a word, but is part of a larger word. You have to pass if you can't add a letter without forming a word, or if you can't think of a word containing the current series of letters. The previous player has to say the word they were thinking of, of course.

This is a bit of a challenging game to play with people who can't spell very well.

Over the weekend, we played For Sale. I guess I have to give that game a slight notch up, as it really is a very good intro game, even though I don't particularly care for it myself.

Next we played Apples to Apples Junior. I actually liked this version better than the original or Jewish editions, because there were no proper names, places, or dates, just plain old words, which are the most fun to play, anyway. I never felt like I had a hand full of trash that needed to be tossed, and the comparisons were just as amusing.

Now I'm not sure why the regular A2A editions have so many proper names.

Nadine, Rachel, and I played Puerto Rico. I was second player and did miserably. There was no corn available, so I started with a Hacienda and failed to pull anything useful from it the entire game. Blah. I fell way behind. I couldn't get cash or a good crop going.

Rachel build this incredible infrastructure, including a coffee monopoly and Harbor. Nadine had Factory and early shipping points and sugar. In the end, they tied, with Nadine taking the victory on the tie. I was well behind, just as I thought.

Weekend

As far as the rest of the weekend went, it was a nice retreat with our shul. We hiked Mount Merom area for several hours and the weather was incredible all weekend.

I made some headway into Chris's Game Design book, but then lost the book for most of the day, and only found it again (behind the bed) shortly before shabbat ended.

The Great Experiment

It's very late now. No time to go through all the game news in my box, and all the usual beginning of the month posts waiting in the wings: patents, new blogs, and so on.

Tomorrow I start the great experiment as a professional blogger. The blog actually won't go live until I come back from England (makes sense, no?), but I will go in to work and start working out the particulars and building up a backlog of posts.

That gives me the afternoons free for finishing the Hebrew Apples to Apples, working on my game designs, my blogging here, and so on. But my plan for my first free afternoon is to goof off downtown in a book store.

So you'll have to wait until tomorrow evening for me to get back in gear.

In the meantime, there's an interesting discussion going on at Fortress: Ameritrash.

Yehuda