A couple of weekends ago (on the front-end of the Jacob and Matthew's spring break), we spent the weekend at the coast and had some long-time friends as guests.  Martin Danner, an old friend and former co-worker (he runs Arrowrock Software), along with son Greg joined us at the beach house for one night.  The weather was spectacular - high winds and driving rain (this was the same day the barge ran aground at Cape Disappointment) - but that didn't stop us from taking a beach hike around the north end of Salishan spit.

The fuzziness you see around the ground is the blowing sand.  The wind was gusting in the 40mph range.

This is always a great time to hike the beach, but only if you prepare yourself with raingear to stay somewhat dry and warm.  The harbor seals were very active at the point and we saw around 40 of them.

Jacob posing with two seals.

Sorry about the outage today.  Sometimes with dasBlog (my weblog software) a big clump of entry files will show up with zero content and a weird datestamp, causing the engine to fail (though quite gracefully) to render my pages.  Fixed now.

Jacob and I returned from GameStorm (all of 30 minutes from our house) about 6pm tonight.  Didn't get much sleep over the weekend, so I'm tired and will not write anything up tonight.  I'm off for some more business travel tomorrow night but hope to get things written up tomorrow night.

My friend Dave and wife Melanie just returned from China with a new adopted daughter.  Congrats Dave; you'll be busy and tired for quite a while but it will all be worth it.

I periodically do bulk game orders for my local group through Boards and Bits, my favorite online retailer.  This works reasonably well, though with my work and travel schedule lately it has been a challenge to deliver all of the games to my group.  Chuck and I arranged for him to stop by on his way home from work in Wilsonville tonight, and as long as he is stopping by why not play some games?

Originally we had planned on 2p games as I was expecting Julie and the boys to stay out at the coast all week.  They came back mid day and Matthew was around, so we let Matthew choose a game off the shelf.  His all-time favorite is the Lord of the Rings boardgame, a cooperative game.

The stars were aligned tonight (read: somebody must have stacked the event tile deck) because we sailed through Moria, Helms Deep, Shelob's Lair, and Mordor in an almost effortless fashion.  Our family's previous high score was 79 (60 for destroying the ring plus 19 shield points) and we blew that record away tonight with a score of 88.

We had about an hour left and Chuck had never played St. Petersburg, so that was a logical choice.  This game is still top shelf for me - plays quickly, is easy to teach, and plenty of tension.

Chuck picked up on the mechanics and strategy quickly, made great choices and pulled out the victory in the end.

I'm the Cubmaster for Cub Scout Pack 710 - been doing it for 2 years now and will likely do it for one more until Jacob moves on to Boy Scouts.  My favorite event each year is the pinewood derby.

This year we held a workshop at Sherwood High School, hosted by the most excellent technical education teacher John Neibergall.  The high school has an outstanding shop for woodworking, metal work, and computer-aided design.  John is very involved with scouts in the area and had some Boy Scouts from a local troop there to help coach the Cubs.

John makes some cuts for Nick, Jacob, and Matthew at the wood shop.

One of my goals in running the derby is to keep it somewhat competitive but to allow the kids to race as much as possible.  We impound the cars after final weigh-in and assign each car a unique number.  I use the outstanding spreadsheet from Chris Sutton to divide the kids into groups and automatically generate heats.  This allows each car to race 5 or 6 times across different lanes to help neutralize any lane advantages.

The freshly painted track setup in front of the PA and projection system.

I project the spreadsheet for all to see and we keep the action going non-stop.  One challenge in previous years was judging placement in each race.  I would assign four adults to watch the finish line, each one assigned to a lane.  This was problematic at times, especially when we had photo finishes.  This year we decided to purchase a Microwizard K2 LED timer and it worked like a charm.  It has a tolerance down to 1/1000 of a second and we still had a tie during one of our races.

Our shiny new timer.

I'm past due for some postings, so expect to see a bunch over the coming week.  Work and travel have been exceptionally heavy recently so there hasn't been much gaming activity.

From October through spring break I run the chess program at Jacob and Matthew's elementary school, Archer Glen.  This year I taught two classes before school, a beginner class with 1-3 graders and an advanced class with 2-5 graders.  Jacob and Matthew are both in the advanced class and helped me with the beginner class when they could manage to wake up early enough.  Julie was kind enough to cover for me when travel kept me from teaching.

This year we only entered the team in a single tournament, the Chess for Success regional tournament.  This is a great program in the state of Oregon that fosters chess at all levels.  This was going to be a rebuilding year for the team (no strong 5th graders and only three 4th graders that I thought were competitive) so I mixed the team up a bit to give some strong 2-3 graders the opportunity to play.

The 2004-2005 Archer Glen chess team.

The kids had a great time; unfortunately Jacob was sick so the team was left without one of its top 3 players.  They finished near the bottom of the region but I'm confident we'll have a much stronger showing next year.

I came upstairs to the playroom around 7pm and found Jacob setting up Vanished Planet for a solitaire playing.  I offered to join him and he kindly accepted the offer.  We decided to play with the expansion rules, which add some very interesting racial advantages to the game.

I went to mention first how stellar the support is for Vanished Planet.  I received an email late last year indicating that they had completed an expansion to the game.  The asked if I would like it sent to me for free.  Well, sure!  A few weeks later an envelope arrived with a rules sheet and color cards with the racial advantages.  Hopefully their strong showing as the best family game of the year in the Games 100 2004 list is helping clear their inventory and, hopefully, lead to more games in the future from this company.

The racial advantages are similar to those you'd find in Cosmic Encounter; in general they break the rules in some way that provides some uniqueness to the race.  One nice twist is that each race has two abilities to choose from, with the stronger ability requiring a higher victory point total to win the game.  I suspect that these haven been thoroughly playtested, though, as Jacob and I had a quite easy time winning the game.  I chose the Meeyat - Industrialist benefit, giving me a total of 15 tags to place instead of the usual 10.  This has the affect of a much higher resource production peak.  The expansion rules allow you to tag anomalies, allowing instaneous travel between those tagged by players.  This allowed me to tag them without giving up substantial resource production.  Jacob played the Rikae, which meant his fleet came pre-equipped with a translocator.  This allows him to teleport around the board, very useful for certain types of goals that come up.

We played with 4 creature growth cards in the event deck this time.   Creature growth is also handled differently - instead of it growing all 6 tentacles with each growth card, you roll 3 dice to determine three different growths (therefore, it is possible for one to grow much faster than the others).

As I said, we won fairly easily.  We always find ourselves buying a Comm Relay to get new goals after the satellites have been consumed by the creature.  This seems to be a must-have to win the game.  Next time we'll play with more creature growth cards - a great aspect of this game is that it allows you to easily scale the difficulty.

I'm upgrading my rating on the geek for this game to an 8.

Perhaps a new tradition?  We'll see...

Last night Jacob, Matthew and I played our two favorite cooperative games (ok, our only two): Lord of the Rings and Vanished Planet.

Lord of the Rings ranks as one of our favorite family games, and is the game responsible for getting me back into the gaming hobby.  It was a gift from Julie's brother for Christmas 2002, and after doing some searching on the web for this Knizia guy I eventually found BoardGameGeek and the rest is history.

Jacob, Matthew and I work our way through Shelob's lair.

We always play on the easy setting with Sauron starting as far away as possible.  This session played very quickly with the fellowship racing to Mt. Doom and destroying the ring, matching our best ever score of 79.

Jacob requested that we play Vanished Planet, the cooperative game released in 2003.  This game doesn't have the best reputation, but we quite like it.  My biggest complaint is the fiddly nature of the game and lack of consistency in colors and symbols.  A group that plans well together can outperform those that play this as multi-player solitaire.

Jacob, Matthew, and I try and save the universe from the creature.

In this session we were victorious, saving the universe with about 1-2 creature growths to spare.  We only played with a single creature growth card in the event deck; next time we'll try 2 or 3.

Oh yeah, we finally broke out The Amazing Labyrinth last weekend.  This is a classic Ravensburger game, and I wanted to teach Julie so that she could play it during the school gaming program at Archer Glen elementary.  Lately they've been playing Blokus and The Legend of Landlock, so this should add some nice variety.

Matthew and I wait seemingly forever for Julie to get off the phone and make her move.

I like the game, though it is a bit long.  Fortunately it is easy to shorten the game by using fewer treasures.  Also, Julie had a problem in class with some students peeking ahead into their treasure stacks, so she will probably have players draw from a common pile the next time she plays.  Then she can easily control the time as well by choosing a smaller target like 4 treasures.

The weekend gaming ended with a day of mostly longer fare.  Doug left around noon, the rest of us departed around 4pm.

George and Mike squared off in a game of War of the Ring.  I need to play this game!  Jacob and I have played a few turns but couldn't finish and had to clean up.  I believe the Fellowship (George) had the upper hand in this game when they decided to call it quits.

Doug, Dave, Jacob, and I played the new Martin Wallace game Struggle of Empires.  This game has potential, but man I had a rough start.  You see, to move troops across open waters you need to make a single d6 roll.  If a 1 comes up, you roll again.  1-2, you lose the unit to sharks, 3-4, the unit has to return, 5-6, no effect.  I'm sure my memory is off here, but out of the first 10 times I tried to move units this way, I think I rolled a one 8 or 9 times.  Shame on me for trying to be so bold as conquering India I suppose.  There's some real game under the hood though and I look forward to playing again.

After Doug left we watched some NFL playoff football.  Pick Picknic seemed like appropriately light fare.  This was my second play of this game (the first was the original Hick Hack in Gackelwack) and I think it is quite fun.  It is basically a silly guessing game - think of a much lighter version of Hoity Toity.

Mike, Dave, and George play El Caballero.

Jacob and I play Dracula, a solid 2 player game with a memory element that doesn't bother me too much.  This needs to come out more often as it plays quickly and has some decent strategy around hand management.

One of my personal highlights of the week was watching Dave play Bop-It Extreme.  Apparently the best way to score high is to get your whole body in synch with the music.