Tealicious weekend
I had a delightful if perhaps over-busy weekend.
Friday was games, with the somewhat awkward number of six - too big for most games, but too small to want to split into groups. We ended up with two groups of three, my table playing Istanbul with coffee (which I thoroughly lost) and the other table playing King of Siam (and I was mildly jealous, because that game is the best). After a couple of extra lively rounds of Codenames and approaching midnight I meant to wrap things up, but we ended up chatting until nearly 1AM, mostly about animated shows aimed at younger audiences, and lots of discussion of Avatar: the last Airbender contrasted with Legend of Korra. Both are fantastic, but there was some good discussion about the flaws and different approaches in the two that I hadn't considered.
Saturday I attended the Vancouver Tea festival with a group of friends and had a fantastic time. I was introduced to a delicious Chinese restaurant, New Town Bakery (& Restaurant). I don't normally like Chinese food, but this was delicious and cheap. The tea festival was at the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Chinese gardens, which are lovely in any weather. Next door, in Chinese cultural center, were perhaps 40 vendors. On registration, they gave me a tiny tea cup, which was well needed since every vendor had half a dozen to a dozen teas available to sample. I drank *so much* tea, I nearly floated away. Especially because there was a friendly fellow with a table sharing his personal collection of tea and telling stories. I stayed for two and a half teas, and each tea had about 6 brewings, and that was more tea than I realized at the time.
Afterwards, I wandered around downtown with Misty and Zee and enjoyed a chocolate tea donut at Cartem's, before deciding it was time to go home, which ended up going to Zee's for dinner. We had a delicious dinner and some delightful and thought-provoking chats.
Sunday my much-delayed Mouse Guard campaign finally started! I play Aspen, a compassionate and generous mother of grown children who is the cook and healer of the group. I know, she's not much like me, but that's the fun of roleplaying, right? Our DM had set up a Halloween ghost themed intro mission, which was much required since we were still figuring out the rules as a group. I enjoyed it, and it's inherently a cute setting, but I'm noticing serious differences in tabletop playing styles. Apparently my previous (D&D Eberron) group was pretty focused, with all of us interested in the stories and the characters with little tabletop chatter. The chatter and sidetracking at MG seemed excessive to me, but others said it was less that previous groups. I find this frustrating, as well as when a player appeared to mentally check out during the last hour. I'm planning on finding a way to tactfully bring this up. I enjoyed it though, and definitely need to re-read the rules!
Original post at Dreamwidth |
| Comment there or here.
Friday was games, with the somewhat awkward number of six - too big for most games, but too small to want to split into groups. We ended up with two groups of three, my table playing Istanbul with coffee (which I thoroughly lost) and the other table playing King of Siam (and I was mildly jealous, because that game is the best). After a couple of extra lively rounds of Codenames and approaching midnight I meant to wrap things up, but we ended up chatting until nearly 1AM, mostly about animated shows aimed at younger audiences, and lots of discussion of Avatar: the last Airbender contrasted with Legend of Korra. Both are fantastic, but there was some good discussion about the flaws and different approaches in the two that I hadn't considered.
Saturday I attended the Vancouver Tea festival with a group of friends and had a fantastic time. I was introduced to a delicious Chinese restaurant, New Town Bakery (& Restaurant). I don't normally like Chinese food, but this was delicious and cheap. The tea festival was at the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Chinese gardens, which are lovely in any weather. Next door, in Chinese cultural center, were perhaps 40 vendors. On registration, they gave me a tiny tea cup, which was well needed since every vendor had half a dozen to a dozen teas available to sample. I drank *so much* tea, I nearly floated away. Especially because there was a friendly fellow with a table sharing his personal collection of tea and telling stories. I stayed for two and a half teas, and each tea had about 6 brewings, and that was more tea than I realized at the time.
Afterwards, I wandered around downtown with Misty and Zee and enjoyed a chocolate tea donut at Cartem's, before deciding it was time to go home, which ended up going to Zee's for dinner. We had a delicious dinner and some delightful and thought-provoking chats.
Sunday my much-delayed Mouse Guard campaign finally started! I play Aspen, a compassionate and generous mother of grown children who is the cook and healer of the group. I know, she's not much like me, but that's the fun of roleplaying, right? Our DM had set up a Halloween ghost themed intro mission, which was much required since we were still figuring out the rules as a group. I enjoyed it, and it's inherently a cute setting, but I'm noticing serious differences in tabletop playing styles. Apparently my previous (D&D Eberron) group was pretty focused, with all of us interested in the stories and the characters with little tabletop chatter. The chatter and sidetracking at MG seemed excessive to me, but others said it was less that previous groups. I find this frustrating, as well as when a player appeared to mentally check out during the last hour. I'm planning on finding a way to tactfully bring this up. I enjoyed it though, and definitely need to re-read the rules!
Original post at Dreamwidth |
| Comment there or here.