home and bright-ish

[jazzfish]

Spring in Vancouver is mostly like winter. It's still grey and rainy but there's a subtly different quality to the rain, and it's not so cold.

Except for days like today, when the sky clears and the sun's brighter than anyplace else I can think of. Days like this I just want to go out walking for hours.

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We got a three-month extension on our lease, so we don't have to try to find a place to live while we're on the wrong coast for most of May. As a nice side benefit we'll also get to watch this year's rooftop crop of baby seagulls.

Although one of the regular nesting spots has been taken over by a grumpy Canada goose. Looks like geese lay a little earlier in the season than seagulls do. Not sure if the seagulls will attempt to share that particular tiny roof or just go elsewhere.

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Leftover bits from the Gathering:

The secondary highway in Niagara Falls is the Robert Moses Parkway. I suppose that's appropriate enough. If you're going to run a road through a park you may as well name it after the guy who destroyed NYC and screwed up North American city planning for a century with his love of running expressways through poorer neighborhoods.

I came home with a copy of 1862 from the prize table. This is one of those overly complex 18xx train/stock games I seem to have become fond of. Not sure when I'll get a chance to actually *play* one around here, but hey. I look forward to trying to explain to new players that "In this game trains can only change direction at cities, no matter what tiles you want to place or upgrade: eventually you will need to yell that THERE IS NO FORKING TRACK."

Other games of note: Coal Baron, a fast (45 minutes), reasonably deep worker-placement-y game with less annoying blocking than it might have. Splendor, light and fast, with tough decisions; reminds me of Piece Of Cake in that "argh what now" feeling. Roll For the Galaxy, which is not Race but looks suspiciously familiar: I think it's lighter than Race but I could be wrong, and it's worth more plays (whenever it finally comes out) regardless.

Comments

[rbandrews]

Can tracks cross? Because if not, that could get nasty.

Splendor is on my list. :) Maybe next month. Glass Road is pretty sweet too, if you haven't played it. The resource-tracking-wheel thing is neato and it plays well solo.

Roll for the Galaxy: did that start as a joke, you think?

[jazzfish]

The thing about 18xx games is that you're building a single track network that every company can use (although it's possible to put blocking tokens in cities). The real problem here is that in most games if someone decides the track is curving this-way and you wanted to go straight through that hex instead of curving, you just upgrade the tile to a fork. In 1862 the non-city upgrades all have two separate lines of track on them. You're stuck going the direction that whoever laid that track wanted to go.

I'm rather fond of Glass Road. It feels lighter than other blocking-worker-placement games, but it works for me.

Roll as a joke: almost certainly! But it's developed into a pretty good game at this point, which is impressive. (See also: Cleopatra's Caboose, which did *not* develop into a good game.)

[rbandrews]

Glass Road, I think the trick is that it's not really blocking. You can half-block the person but they still get to do half of what they want.