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What I did on my weekend: went to a games convention in Stockport.
Friday afternoon, turned up, wrote you a bluey (which got a little self-pitying). Went for a walk. Waited for people I knew to arrive. Waited for them to go to dinner. Dashed to catch them up. Their faces fell a bit, as they (M and J and N and MII) were driving, but my face fell even further (as the carvery closed in 15 minutes) so they gave it a go. Me and MII and N squeezed into the back seat, and we set off - to a grinding noise. Stopped. Started again. More grinding noise. MII got out. Started again. Still grinding noise. Newt and I got out. Car rear rose by about 4 inches. M and J drove off with no noise, with ~45 stone less weight in the car. N and MII and I v. embarrassed! We walked instead, and had a nice curry and lots of talk of weddings.
Friday evening. Played Cash and Guns, where you play one of a gang of bank robbers. Each round, you have robbed a bank and have to divide up the spoils - but the notes must be shared exactly - you don't get change - so you need to winnow down your gang! You simultaneously pick someone to point your (foam!) gun at, then they choose to duck (and take a financial penalty) or stand and risk a wound (3 and you're dead; dead men don't win). But your aggressor may not have loaded their gun - you play 8 rounds, but you each have only three bullets... Surprisingly good fun, but difficult to import! I won the first two games, so everyone decided to kill me in the third!
Played a couple of rounds of Werewolf (with the proper cards) and managed a lot better than usual. I even got to be a werewolf (which was fun) ;-)
Bed at 2am.
Saturday morning breakfast. Toast and hash browns appeared to have been carved from the same piece of yellow bath sponge. Chatted with MIII; MIV was mostly not being well that weekend and indeed since Christmas.
Played Grand Tribunal. You are mediaeval sorceror/inventors, working in your sanctum to build enchanted items. A tribunal is held to vote for the best. This is quite clever - you draw Item cards (5 types) and Spell cards (4 types). You can do two actions per round - you may want to obtain some Vis (mystical energy used to develop your items), spend it on your items, cast a spell, place a vote etc. If you have a Wand item, and its card says it can have two Thaumaturgical spells on it, and you think you will be able to make this combination, you want the balance of voting to go towards Wands and Thaumaturgy, not Talismans and Runic spells!
Went for lunch. Burger and chips in the restaurant. The chips appeared to have been carved from the same piece of yellow bath sponge as breakfast's toast and hash browns. Felt disgusted with myself so went to the room, got changed into my actual gym kit and went to the actual gym!
"You do know there's a charge?" they said at the door.
"No... how much is it?"
"The pool area is free to residents, but the gym" (and here she put on a very worried look) "is two pounds fifty."
"I think I can manage that!" I said cheerfully.
"It's valid for 24 hours, so if you hurry you can come back again tomorrow morning!"
Treadmill - 6km/hr walk for 20 minutes.
Cross-trainer - lowest level for 10 minutes but was killing me! Either I'm unfit, or just not comfortable with the motion.
Stretches.
Weight machines! Shoulder press, leg extensions, chest press, leg press, lat pulldown, ab curls. 2 x 12 for most of them, and my upper body is very puny. I was mostly using the lightest weight or next one up. Leg presses though - I did 12 at 40lbs (which is where the machine had been left). No trouble. 12 at 75lbs. No trouble. 12 at 100lbs. Just starting to feel it. That'll be where my muscle is :-)
Felt hugely invigorated. Washed, dressed, ate apple and banana, and returned to games room. Played another Cash and Guns (and lost), then Reef Encounter. Very pretty game where you use larva (cubes) to place polyps (tiles) to build corals (groups of adjoining tiles) on reefs (the board). You protect corals with your shrimp. Sometimes when you add to your coral you do so by the mechanism of eating a neighbouring coral polyp (placing your added tile on top of theirs and removing it - the coral food-chain hierarchy is determined by colour, and is marked on cards which the players may turn round). When you eat a neighbouring coral you can spend the tiles you have eaten on useful stuff. When your own coral is large enough your parrotfish can eat it (and your shrimp) - these eaten tiles are the basis for your final score. It was VERY confusing in the beginning. We spent nearly an hour reading and interpreting the rules, then just over an hour playing the game and saying "Isn't it simple when you know what you're doing!" It is very pretty, with different coloured corals growing across the board. Three different classes of item are distinguished by colour - you expect your player colour to relate to the coral colour or the alage colour - but they are distinct, though some of the colours overlap. The rules also kept using the same word ("coral") when referring to different things (a single tile, a group of tiles, the cards denoting food-chain hierarchy). It would be much easier to explain later to someone else.
Dinner in the carvery. Avoided anything made of sponge, and had a couple of slices of very meaty beef and a huge pile of mixed veg containing seven different vegetables!
9pm went to play R (not BW)'s Gurps Infinite Worlds game. We were members of Infinity Patrol - I was a techy geek chap, keen on the outdoors, had set up my own company which made futuristic GPS-type things for hikers and the military but which went bust, so I joined the Patrol. Didn't enjoy Basic Training or the guns much, but here I was on my first mission.
Started off quite I-Copsy, with a kidnapped scientist and a mission to steathily board the boat he was on to make a positive ID. Lots of planning, then we set off but there was a tornado and we were knocked unconscious. We woke on a beach - could be Bermuda? It's where we were headed - until we noticed the two moons.
Then it went a bit D&D, as we explored a cave, chamber by chamber, as it was the only potentially safe place we could find out of reach of the tide. Odd things, scrawled messages in pentacles, glowing eggs in subterranean lakes. All looked rather suspicious, and we were advancing cautiously in case there were hostile inhabitants.
Then an egg hatched, and it all went a bit Pern! I fed the baby dragon some spam from my ration pack, and then we were all inseparable and I didn't want to kill it any more! Dragonriders came and took us back to the Weyr, and things were explained, then we just had to figure out how (and if) we wanted to get back home. This was achieved with a nice flourish.
Finished at 12? 1? And took myself sternly to bed so as not to be too broken in the morning.
Sunday. Breakfast yadda yadda. Did not get up early enough to make it to the gym! Checked out. Did some Project while waiting to play Toon at 11am. Kev played (who runs the Call of Cthulhu adventures we've been in a couple of times), new to the game so he took an existing character - Pete Proton! It was odd to see him played by someone not you.
The department had a problem - we had wiped out too many evil overlords, and had to find some more! We went to set up a Secret Evial Volcano Base in Snowdon (where they have good tea shops). It wasn't a volcano when we got there, but by the end of the session it had been blown up a couple of times once involving crust breakage and magma... Well, Acme blew it up once, then we blew it up by accident (an explosion in the armoury), then Acme dropped a load of lead on it... We caused an awful lot of Evil Mayhem, quite unintentionally. Much more fun than being good!
P and RBW and I finished our respective games around 2pm, so we left and I was home by 6:30. I've had a nice quiet evening to check e-mail and make a nice dinner (well, it would have been nice but I seem to have gone off roll-mop herrings - too vinegary).
Friday afternoon, turned up, wrote you a bluey (which got a little self-pitying). Went for a walk. Waited for people I knew to arrive. Waited for them to go to dinner. Dashed to catch them up. Their faces fell a bit, as they (M and J and N and MII) were driving, but my face fell even further (as the carvery closed in 15 minutes) so they gave it a go. Me and MII and N squeezed into the back seat, and we set off - to a grinding noise. Stopped. Started again. More grinding noise. MII got out. Started again. Still grinding noise. Newt and I got out. Car rear rose by about 4 inches. M and J drove off with no noise, with ~45 stone less weight in the car. N and MII and I v. embarrassed! We walked instead, and had a nice curry and lots of talk of weddings.
Friday evening. Played Cash and Guns, where you play one of a gang of bank robbers. Each round, you have robbed a bank and have to divide up the spoils - but the notes must be shared exactly - you don't get change - so you need to winnow down your gang! You simultaneously pick someone to point your (foam!) gun at, then they choose to duck (and take a financial penalty) or stand and risk a wound (3 and you're dead; dead men don't win). But your aggressor may not have loaded their gun - you play 8 rounds, but you each have only three bullets... Surprisingly good fun, but difficult to import! I won the first two games, so everyone decided to kill me in the third!
Played a couple of rounds of Werewolf (with the proper cards) and managed a lot better than usual. I even got to be a werewolf (which was fun) ;-)
Bed at 2am.
Saturday morning breakfast. Toast and hash browns appeared to have been carved from the same piece of yellow bath sponge. Chatted with MIII; MIV was mostly not being well that weekend and indeed since Christmas.
Played Grand Tribunal. You are mediaeval sorceror/inventors, working in your sanctum to build enchanted items. A tribunal is held to vote for the best. This is quite clever - you draw Item cards (5 types) and Spell cards (4 types). You can do two actions per round - you may want to obtain some Vis (mystical energy used to develop your items), spend it on your items, cast a spell, place a vote etc. If you have a Wand item, and its card says it can have two Thaumaturgical spells on it, and you think you will be able to make this combination, you want the balance of voting to go towards Wands and Thaumaturgy, not Talismans and Runic spells!
Went for lunch. Burger and chips in the restaurant. The chips appeared to have been carved from the same piece of yellow bath sponge as breakfast's toast and hash browns. Felt disgusted with myself so went to the room, got changed into my actual gym kit and went to the actual gym!
"You do know there's a charge?" they said at the door.
"No... how much is it?"
"The pool area is free to residents, but the gym" (and here she put on a very worried look) "is two pounds fifty."
"I think I can manage that!" I said cheerfully.
"It's valid for 24 hours, so if you hurry you can come back again tomorrow morning!"
Treadmill - 6km/hr walk for 20 minutes.
Cross-trainer - lowest level for 10 minutes but was killing me! Either I'm unfit, or just not comfortable with the motion.
Stretches.
Weight machines! Shoulder press, leg extensions, chest press, leg press, lat pulldown, ab curls. 2 x 12 for most of them, and my upper body is very puny. I was mostly using the lightest weight or next one up. Leg presses though - I did 12 at 40lbs (which is where the machine had been left). No trouble. 12 at 75lbs. No trouble. 12 at 100lbs. Just starting to feel it. That'll be where my muscle is :-)
Felt hugely invigorated. Washed, dressed, ate apple and banana, and returned to games room. Played another Cash and Guns (and lost), then Reef Encounter. Very pretty game where you use larva (cubes) to place polyps (tiles) to build corals (groups of adjoining tiles) on reefs (the board). You protect corals with your shrimp. Sometimes when you add to your coral you do so by the mechanism of eating a neighbouring coral polyp (placing your added tile on top of theirs and removing it - the coral food-chain hierarchy is determined by colour, and is marked on cards which the players may turn round). When you eat a neighbouring coral you can spend the tiles you have eaten on useful stuff. When your own coral is large enough your parrotfish can eat it (and your shrimp) - these eaten tiles are the basis for your final score. It was VERY confusing in the beginning. We spent nearly an hour reading and interpreting the rules, then just over an hour playing the game and saying "Isn't it simple when you know what you're doing!" It is very pretty, with different coloured corals growing across the board. Three different classes of item are distinguished by colour - you expect your player colour to relate to the coral colour or the alage colour - but they are distinct, though some of the colours overlap. The rules also kept using the same word ("coral") when referring to different things (a single tile, a group of tiles, the cards denoting food-chain hierarchy). It would be much easier to explain later to someone else.
Dinner in the carvery. Avoided anything made of sponge, and had a couple of slices of very meaty beef and a huge pile of mixed veg containing seven different vegetables!
9pm went to play R (not BW)'s Gurps Infinite Worlds game. We were members of Infinity Patrol - I was a techy geek chap, keen on the outdoors, had set up my own company which made futuristic GPS-type things for hikers and the military but which went bust, so I joined the Patrol. Didn't enjoy Basic Training or the guns much, but here I was on my first mission.
Started off quite I-Copsy, with a kidnapped scientist and a mission to steathily board the boat he was on to make a positive ID. Lots of planning, then we set off but there was a tornado and we were knocked unconscious. We woke on a beach - could be Bermuda? It's where we were headed - until we noticed the two moons.
Then it went a bit D&D, as we explored a cave, chamber by chamber, as it was the only potentially safe place we could find out of reach of the tide. Odd things, scrawled messages in pentacles, glowing eggs in subterranean lakes. All looked rather suspicious, and we were advancing cautiously in case there were hostile inhabitants.
Then an egg hatched, and it all went a bit Pern! I fed the baby dragon some spam from my ration pack, and then we were all inseparable and I didn't want to kill it any more! Dragonriders came and took us back to the Weyr, and things were explained, then we just had to figure out how (and if) we wanted to get back home. This was achieved with a nice flourish.
Finished at 12? 1? And took myself sternly to bed so as not to be too broken in the morning.
Sunday. Breakfast yadda yadda. Did not get up early enough to make it to the gym! Checked out. Did some Project while waiting to play Toon at 11am. Kev played (who runs the Call of Cthulhu adventures we've been in a couple of times), new to the game so he took an existing character - Pete Proton! It was odd to see him played by someone not you.
The department had a problem - we had wiped out too many evil overlords, and had to find some more! We went to set up a Secret Evial Volcano Base in Snowdon (where they have good tea shops). It wasn't a volcano when we got there, but by the end of the session it had been blown up a couple of times once involving crust breakage and magma... Well, Acme blew it up once, then we blew it up by accident (an explosion in the armoury), then Acme dropped a load of lead on it... We caused an awful lot of Evil Mayhem, quite unintentionally. Much more fun than being good!
P and RBW and I finished our respective games around 2pm, so we left and I was home by 6:30. I've had a nice quiet evening to check e-mail and make a nice dinner (well, it would have been nice but I seem to have gone off roll-mop herrings - too vinegary).
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