What Have I Been Playing? (A return to normalcy?)

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Sooooooooooooo….

It’s been a little while. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ After a pretty good trip to Disneyland everyone got sick 🤢. EVERYONE👨‍👩‍👦‍👦. I’m a work sick kinda guy and I missed a couple full days then just played catch up at the office. On top of that work ran long, with several after hours meetings. This is not unusual, but just adds to the hectic-ness of life. A couple book keeping things to catch you all up.

  1. The Wife and I saw Arrival. That movie is great. I may write a review. There is so much there to love.
  2. Santa Barbara now has a children’s museum. MOXI, The Wolf Museum of Exploration + Innovation, is the name and it is super cool. Large & Small Fry totally enjoyed all of the “exhibits” to varying degrees.
  3. With the wet weather we hiked the fam up to Seven Falls. Again, everyone had fun, though it was quite a hike.
  4. Did some old school SB stuff with the fam as well. The Santa Barbara Zoo 🐘 and Santa Barbara Natural History Museum 🐘 (<—- a pygmy mammoth) which are always good times. Also, this happened:
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“What are they doing to each other?” — Some Rando Kid

I’ll post some about these in the next couple weeks. I am doing my best not to overstate reality. But today… WHAT HAVE I PLAYED THIS WEEK: Continue reading →

What did I play this (last 😕) week

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This whole blogging three times a week really isn’t working out 😬. 1400 words on pie probably didn’t help much. Also work sucks 🙁. So this is coming out a bit late.

ANYWAYS! What did I play this (last) week? Let’s take a look. Obviously most of my game playing was at my FLGS (Friendly Local Game Store, Avalon Comics and Games). Here’s we played.

  1. Sushi Go Party! This is the game of our group. We played it almost every game night for a couple months. We played Sushi Go a bunch too before anyone had Sushi Go Party.
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    Sushi Go Party (and Sushi Go) is a card drafting game. It has easy rules that can be taught quick and an approachable theme with cute art. Each card provides points in a variety of different ways. In the game you have a hand of cards. Simultaneously players pick a card from their hand, play it and pass their hand to their neighbor. That’s it. Whoever has “the best meal” (ie, scores the most points) wins.Again, great game. Sushi Go has a single deck of cards you play through while Sushi Go Party has a bunch of modules that fit together to make a deck you play a couple times.

    Sushi Go was probably 🔥🔥🔥 HOT TAKES. Sushi Go Party is better. I cannot describe it in emojis. HOT TAKES:
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  2. Sea of Clouds: This is a game one of the game crowd got for their birthday. It hits a lot of the things I love. It uses an alternative drafting format (more on this in a moment). It has froufrou French pirates. Just everything.
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    Look at that posh pirate.

    In Sea of Clouds players draft treasures, relics, crew and rum. This game uses an alternative draft format known by some Magic: The Gathering players as a Winston Draft. In a Winston Draft there are three cards face down on offer. The current player inspects the first card and takes it or passes it. If a player passes on the card on offer they take a card from the deck and add it to the offer. If a player passes on all three offers they take the top card of the deck. The game is won by the player who has the most money from stealing from their opponents, collects the best rum, and has the best treasures/relics.

    This game uses a draft mechanism that is not used enough that gives players many interesting choices. The theme works well and the production quality and choice of art is high (thanks to Iello that always makes good choices here). HOT TAKES: 🔥🔥1/2.

  3. Bottom of the Ninth. BASEBALL ⚾️!! I love Baseball. I like watching it. I like playing fantasy baseball. I like reading stats (just reading stats, out of big books 🤓). I like the stupid trivia my friends and I text almost every day. (Today I learned that Chipper Jones has something in common with Hank Aaron, Vlad Guerrero and Willie Mays 💫). I love baseball.
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    Bottom of the Ninth is fine. It has really great graphic design. The meeples are fun. The theme is really fun. Zeroing into one half of an inning and that back and forth is really fun. The batting/pitching head to head was very fun. Each player has a set of low/high and inside/away  tokens and they secretly set the location of the pitch. The hitter/pitcher gets a bonus for their correct guesses while getting a special power when guessing both correctly. There is a rolloff where the batsman wants to roll less than or equal to the pitchers die (for the most part).
    Then the game kinda falls apart. Unfortunately, once there is contact there is a fielding phase that just isn’t much fun. After contact both players simultaneously roll there die until one player rolls a 5 or 6 and calls out “SAFE/OUT” (as appropriate). This is supposed to simulate a close play at the plate. But in baseball that doesn’t really happen that often. Additionally, the “call out ‘SAFE/OUT'” aspect of the this phase was overly stressful and seemed a little forced. Maybe it was one too many things for my mind to remember to do but it did not feel natural. Several times my gracious opponent called “OUT” while my die was bouncing around only for me to look at the result to see I could have called “SAFE.” Maybe, because I was the one this was happening to made it feel worse, but it definitely did not feel good.

    HOT TAKES: 🔥 (would play again, but I don’t think there is too much upside for me).
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Please like (if you do) and comment (if you want). It helps me know someone is reading. Thanks for reading!