The 4th annual Iron Man Blogging Competition has begun! Nineteen participants this year. I’m gonna predict the winner blogs for 150 days. Here’s my totally unfounded forecast on how the top four will shake out: Finley (1st), Torbox, Beefy, Tim (4th). (Hey Peter, what odds wouldja give me on that?)

What better way to begin IMBC 2008 than with an image dump? Here are some shots from my board game spree the past few days (hover for descriptions):

We played a lot of new games this weekend. Streetcar, Red Dragon Inn, Elfenland, Blokus. I mentioned Streetcar in my last post; we’ve since played three more games (Kris, an occasional boardgamer from south Richland, joined us for one). Now that we have a much firmer grip on the rules I’m even more fond of it. The only thing that really needs improvement is how the tiles slip around on the board. A quarter-inch plywood board with balsa strips glued on in a (slightly expanded) grid would make play much easier. Best New Orleans trolley game I’ve ever played.

Justin recommended Red Dragon Inn. I probably would’ve picked it up, but Jones beat me to it. The premise for this one is that you’re a party of adventurers (of the “elves & wizards” milieu) carousing at a tavern. The rounds are pretty straightforward: Draw, take an action, buy someone a drink, drink. Try to stay conscious, try not to go broke. Of course, on top of that you have cards that let you act out of turn or participate in gambling sub-games. The whole thing plays like a combination of Lunch Money and a very basic version of Magic: The Gathering. Tons of fun with four players (we roped in Damien on Warhammer Sunday), but surprisingly less great with three (and not really worth playing with two).

I can’t say much about Elfenland as we’ve only played one game. It has some superficial similarities to Ticket to Ride, but requires a lot more planning. And it’s a little abashing to play… Just try to retain your dignity as you mutter “I take the troll wagon to Rivinia, then ride a unicorn through these woods so I can use my elfcycle here and here.”

Finally, Blokus. Blokus is awesome. The rules are incredibly simple: Start in a corner and place your pieces so they only touch at the corners; try to get as many of your pieces on the board as possible. Easy, huh? There’s not much I can compare it to, though I guess it’s a little like Go. I love the feeling you get when you “infect” another player’s territory.

I also pre-ordered Bohnanza (the German bean-farming game) and Jones bought Mwahahaha!, but we haven’t played those yet.

Jones and I saw 21 tonight. It was pretty mediocre. I kind of hated the main character. Kevin Spacey was good, but that’s a given, right? The whole thing was just too simple. Dialogue kinda sucked too. Worth a DVD rental, not quite worth the price of a movie ticket.

Re: TotD (Fonts): Hate Comic Sans, Verdana’s cool, Arial: Meh.

Okay, time for bed. I was only up so late cuz I had to clean some lab equipment (not doable during business hours). Gotta get up in four hours to grab part two of the report series I started running on Sunday.

Okay, so we played Zombies!!! last night. It really is an awful game. I don’t know how I forgot that. The tiles are flimsy and hard to place without constantly Hanwooling (i.e. messing up the layout of the board) and the actual gameplay is slow and dull. I like the zombie-killing alright, but you’re only doing that for a few seconds of the three to four minute rounds. Anyway, we played long enough to reveal the helipad tile, then gave up and declared Heather the winner. Upon expressing my severe displeasure with the game, Logan offered to let me trade it in for a five-dollar discount on Elfenland (which looks wicked queer, but won the 1998 Spiel des Jahres so how bad can it be?).

After that, we played Streetcar, which is incredibly awesome even though we totally screwed up our game by beanplating my version’s poorly-written rules. (BTW, Logan, Jones, et al.: I found another set of rules and it turns out it’s way, way easier than we made it: First, you have to lay all the track from your hand before you can draw new tiles. Second, you can’t do tile exchanges that change existing track — that is, your new tile can add new paths but it must also include track from the old tile. So our whole “change someone’s inaugural route” business was actually verboten.)

Anyway, fantastic game. It’s vaguely like Carcassonne (with only road tiles) crossed with Ticket to Ride. Now that I know how to play correctly, I really want to try the three-stop routes.

In other news: No new Lost until April 24th?! I hate when shows go on hiatus.

Been playing the first-ever MeFiNo this week. If you like arguing about and drafting rules, Nomic’s the game for you.

So it looks like Logan, Jones, Heather, and Justin will all be participating in the IMBC! Pretty awesome. Sadly, Paige won’t be because she’s in Hawaii with her family (though she did submit a ton of great TotDs). BTW, if you registered for the IMBC but did not get a reply to your registration email, it means your registration wasn’t received. Apparently this has happened at least once. Please re-send your registration and cc my personal email address.

Progress on the house: Nothing new as of yesterday except they sprayed this green stuff everywhere to keep dust from blowing about.

Some new Flickr sets:

• Geology Field Trip
• STIKFAS figures
• Houses on Pioneer Hill

Random MetaFilter/MetaTalk hilarity:

Another day, another lame MeTa, another lame comment complaining, wash, rinse, repeat, HERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT CANADA

HEY DID YOU JUST MAKE A JOKE ABOOT CANADA WHY I OUGHTA PUNCH YOU RIGHT IN THE HEALTHCARE SYSTEM
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:32 PM on March 18

What was up with last week’s Frisky Dingo? They killed three main characters in one episode! That’s hardcore.

Um… what else? I’m back in the Tri-Cities. Definitely going to be here till at least Monday (major software updates). Hung out with Jones, Amanda, and Logan last night (Heather was ill) — we went to Outback and played Bang! (with all expansions) and Manhattan (best game ever! I won, of course). Tonight we’re playing Zombies!!! and some new board game (TBD). Because of an insurance-related bit of weirdness at Amanda’s second job she has the week off, so we’ve been able to game with her at times that she’d normally have to sleep or work. So that’s pretty cool.

Boxhead: The Zombie Wars is a pretty awesome little Flash game.

More blogging/yet-to-be uploaded pics later. I’ll try to be less lazy.

Ordered-list blog GO!

1. Registration for Iron Man Blogging Competition 2008 opens in a little more than two hours.
2. Stargate: The Ark of Truth is out! The copy I pre-ordered a million years ago arrived on Wednesday. Plan to watch it tomorrow.
3. I know my blog’s been pretty dead lately, but my Flickr stream has been seeing pretty regular additions. Some new sets:
   1. Nigiri Sushi I’ve Eaten
   2. Construction of House in West Pasco
   3. Coos Bay, Oregon
4. Progress on my house: The foundation is all in and the dirt around it has been backfilled. The electrical wiring is partially run and the sewer hookup’s been trenched in.
5. Watched season six of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Very funny, but made me dislike Larry David more than usual. (I can only dismiss his rudeness with “oh well, it’s okay–he just doesn’t get it” up to a point.)
6. I discovered Phun (a 2D physics sandbox) and made some neat stuff with it, like this scissor lift.
7. Lost continues to be awesome. This week was great: Korean stories, another Oceanic Six reveal, and the return of Michael.
8. Yak Shaving.
9. Top Chef season 4 premiered! Hate Andrew already, think it’s dumb that they let a couple on.

The movie-spree I mentioned in my last post continued a bit. I went on to watch The Ten (funny, typically Stella-ish humor; loved the H. Jon Benjamin parts), Sweeney Todd (kind of boring/unpleasant; dull music), Death at a Funeral (okay), Juno (very good, even though the main character is rather contrived), Run, Fat Boy, Run (decent), and The Mist (better than I expected; reminded me of Half-Life).

Still reading Born to Kvetch. Been learning some really cool stuff about Yiddish that I’ll expound on later. Haven’t been keeping on with Wizard’s Bane though; the author stopped the narrative to tell this long, pointless side-story about two wizards adventuring on a mountain and it got a little intolerable. Started reading (well, skipping through) Mortgages for Dummies.

Worked out a couple times this month (stopped logging it in January, but I’ve been going occasionally). The gym is so crowded now that it’s not really pleasant for me anymore. A few times now I’ve driven down there, seen that most of the ellipticals were occupied and just turned around and come home. And this is at like 10, 11 PM, even midnight. The whole reason I paid for a membership there (instead of using WSU’s SRC) was so I could work out with few people around. If that meant going late at night, fine. But now that’s not even enough. I think I’ll cancel my membership (which I need to do before moving anyway) and start taking daily walks around Pioneer Hill or something.

Made some pretty killer roast beef sandwiches for lunch today.

I don’t know how it happened, but all my WordPress pages (e.g. Contact Info) became unpublished (returning 404s) at some point. Took me a while to figure out what had happened. At first, I thought my .htaccess had gotten messed up. Anyway, fixed it by opening each page in the WP editor and saving it. Good thing I don’t have a lot of pages…

I finished Vacuum Diagrams. It was a lot longer than I thought it’d be. And the last few stories just dragged along. Going from galactic wars and exotic aliens to teepee-dwelling primitives kinda killed my momentum with this book. The breadth of history covered was cool though; reminded me of Terraforming Earth that way (though it was only four million years in this case). After Vacuum Diagrams I read The Burglar in the Closet, another Lawrence Block book. Not as good as his hitman series, but it’s okay. It’s told from a first-person perspective and I kinda resented the times when the protagonist kept the audience in the dark about a crucial detail, like when he described “objets d’art” found in a suspect’s apartment as “two pieces of meticulously engraved copper plate … mounted on blocks of three-quarter inch pine” knowing full well at the time that they were printing plates for counterfeiting.

Now I’m reading Wizard’s Bane (cheesy, cliché-ridden fantasy, but kind of cool cuz it’s about a C programmer who learns to apply his coding know-how to magic in a new world) and Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods.

I’ve been on a sort of movie-watching jag lately. In the past five days I’ve seen Mallrats (so much worse than I remembered it being; awful acting), Enchanted (okay, had some good music), Dan in Real Life (awesome), Jersey Girl (decent), The Darjeeling Limited (gorgeous, but a little vacuous compared to previous Anderson films; I’d never realized how cool Adrien Brody is), Idiocracy (bitter/depressing), and I Could Never Be Your Woman (fantastically awesome; Paul Rudd at his funniest/most adorable, hilarious references to other Heckerling movies, amazing cast).

Got new tires last week (was getting the studded ones taken off anyway). Had the Les Schwab beef (steak) for dinner last night. It was pretty good; very tender. Also ate at the Moscow Bagel & Deli a couple more times. (Tip: Do not go there on a Saturday night — the nearby bars make the whole area too crowded. Damn Idahoans.) Anyway, got a better picture of the Sweet Midge:

I noticed that those poppy seeds leave a weirdly sweet taste in your mouth for hours after eating… Not unpleasant, just strange. And persistent.

Hey, didja see the new Venture Bros. season three characters spread over at Jackson Publick’s blog? Can’t wait for June.

Oh, and how gratifying was last week’s Lost episode? Time travel, yay!

IMBC 2008 starts in 28 days.

Edit: Gary Gygax RIP. Also, Kaleidosketch is fun.

Edit 2: No, wait, Myoats is better.

Okay, so first, here are a couple pictures from before the Las Vegas trip that I’ve been meaning to post. This is me, Jones, Logan, Amanda, and Laura (a new clerk at Adventures Underground) playing Ticket to Ride on Valentine’s Day:

I just finished dinner. My mom made peppercorn ribeyes (the super thick ones; seared, then roasted), a shiitake-heavy cognac sauce, a simple green salad, and a fennel & red grapefruit salad (which calls for bee pollen as an ingredient; kinda wacky, huh?). It was very good. Here’s the food porn:

Oh, and here’re some photos of the lot where my house is going to be built. I picked this lot because it was the only one left that didn’t face another yard in the back, doesn’t have an ugly transformer box out front (no power lines, see?), isn’t easily visible from the highway, has a normal shape (all corners 90°), and has a straight fence-line (no indentations for hydrants or sewer access on the Chapel Hill Blvd side). Took these on the way to the home and garden show on Sunday.

The lot, incidentally, is on Oliver Drive. How cool is that? BTW, met with my mortgage broker today. Looks like the closing costs will be about three thousand more than I was expecting, but otherwise everything’s going according to plan. It’s kinda scary to see the total monthly payments laid out with the real estate tax, mortgage insurance, and hazard insurance all added in.

Last night Jones, Logan and I played Munchkin and Manhattan (a new board game I picked up). Manhattan is simple and a lot of fun. Won the 1994 Spiel des Jahres. For me, it’s a welcome change of pace from Gheos and Tongiaki which have similar themes (expansion/control) but force you to worry about defense in an unpleasantly frantic way.

Here’s a quick play summary: Each round you pick out some skyscraper building blocks (which range in size from one to four floors), then build (or steal) towers in six different cities. Each city is a 3×3 grid; the grid squares you’re allowed to build on are dictated by your orientation to the board and a set of four cards you hold. (Each card corresponds to a spot on the grid; upper-left, lower middle, etc. with center (middle-middle) cards being the rarest.) You can build new towers or steal existing towers by capping them with a block of your color (but only if you’ll then own a number of floors in the building equal to or more than any opponent’s colored floors). At the end of each round points are awarded for the highest skyscraper, majority-control of each city, and the total number of towers each player controls.

I really like some of Manhattan’s dynamics, like how rivalries just tend to hurt the players involved and fortification is nearly prohibitive in cost. Anyway, great game. Reminds me of Weinhandler for some reason. I took a bunch of pictures of our two games (winners: Logan, then me) and the box contents and collected them into this Flickr set: Manhattan board game.

After board gaming, we had dinner at Sonic and went bowling at Atomic Bowl. It was late, so we only got in one game before they closed. Lotsa fun though. I scored 127, Jones 88, Logan 135.

Oh, and Logan requested that I blog about how he owes me $10, so… yeah. There’s that.