Chris Brooks - Games, Technology, and Other Stuff

Lake O’Hara and the Canadian Rockies

Julie and I took a small detour on our way back to Oregon from Keuka Lake. An old friend from high school invited us to join him at a very special place: Lake O’Hara in the Canadian rockies. We had perfect weather and an amazing visit. More Canada is in our future.

Photos from the trip are here in my Flickr album.

The Story of Us: Intro

Tim Urban:

So part of what I’ve spent three years working on is a new language we can use to think and talk about our societies and the people inside of them. In typical Wait But Why form, the language is full of new terms and metaphors and, of course, lots and lots of badly drawn pictures. It all amounts to a new lens.

I’ll be following this closely.

Summer Gaming

It is high time I shared at least some sort of update on my summer goings-on, so how about gaming? We’ve had a range of short- and long-term visitors that enjoy meatier games, so the balance has definitely been on the side of mid to heavy weight strategy games. We still get in a game of Guesstures or Dixit from time to time, but the new hotness Res Arcana has hit the table over 20 times this summer.

Res Arcana – I love this game. It is a Tom Lehman game that shares some mechanisms with Race for the Galaxy but is lighter and faster like Jump Drive. I had held off on getting Jump Drive for some reason (I’ve played it 13 times) and this game nicely fills that niche for me. Experienced players finish in 40 minutes or less, sometimes around 25 minutes. It has a fun 2-player match format, drafting for a metagame strategy, and seems ready for expansion. Highly recommended. Thank you Greg for the surprise gift!
SpaceCorp – Sadly High Frontier didn’t hit the table this summer, largely because SpaceCorp is a bit more approachable to new players. Played this three or four times and I think it has earned a permanent place in my collection.
Root – Played this with neighbors here at the lake and sadly I wasn’t as familiar as I should have been with all the factions so we stumbled a bit with the rules. At least 2 of the 3 new players enjoyed it though.

Kingdomino – This is one of our go-to gateway games now for “all ages”, ranging from 7 to 70. Easy to teach but still with some strategic depth.

Acquire – We needed a five player game one night and everyone wanted a “real strategy game” instead of a party game or activity. Acquire was about the only option (though Dominion as it turns out does fine for a learning game with five players) and not surprisingly it was a big hit. Folks my age and older are always surprised when I mention that this game came out in 1964.

Magic: the Gathering – My friend Matt brought a box of recent boosters and we had fun doing a draft round-robin tournament. This game remains a perfect 10 for me, and I still spend less than $50 a year playing it (about the cost of a round of golf).

KC Air Show

We’ve had an amazing weekend here in Kansas City for the relaunch of the KC air show. Julie’s brother Mike Saxton is one of the principals responsible for the event. So we got some much appreciated VIP treatment.

Six hours in the hot sun had a big payoff at the end with a spectacular Blue Angels demonstration. I’d seen them fly from a distance before but had never seen the full routine at a show.

Keuka Projects

It is almost July 4 weekend and I feel like I’m not even where I normally am by June 1 in terms of opening and key projects. We just got the raft anchored and floated after recovering our two lost anchors from last season.

The clasp pins worked loose but the anchors (Lowes buckets filled with cement and a long U bolt) are still in good shape. We’ve since learned the value of zip ties to keep pin from rotating out.

My big projects to finish before I feel I can move on to activities are a big repair job on the Flying Dutchman and some cleanout from under the yellow cottage. That huge pile of wood came from under. Some will be saved, some will be used for camp fires.