Work-avoiding? Moi? ;)
Today is back-to-work day, as I ended up actually taking a full ten days off this year. That was definitely a good plan. :)
So, of course, I'm still not working yet.
Things which need to happen today before I can get down to work include hanging up the load of laundry which will beep at me shortly, having a bath and going to an optician's appointment (almost a year overdue, and booked for today because they had no slots free during my holiday when I called them shortly before Christmas).
Things which don't strictly speaking need to happen but which I'm doing now anyway: this update. ;)
So, yesterday, after the usual Sunday lunch (somewhat depleted of the usual crew), I headed to a gaming day in another bit of north London. The person who actually invited me didn't make it all and the two people I knew were mid-game when I arrived and left not long after that, but (as is often the way with these things), a whole bunch of complete strangers were friendly and welcoming.
I ended up playing three games I'd never played before:
-Seven Wonders: a set-collecting game which anyone reading this who cares about games will almost certainly know without any description from me. Play was not helped by the dreadful light in 'our' section of the pub, which made it hard to see my own cards, never mind anyone else's, but I got the hang of it and came fifth out of seven players, so I considered that a success.
-Unspeakable Words: a word creation game with added Cthulhu mythos. In this game, points per letter are not given according to frequency in the alphabet but according to number of angles (e.g. X and A score high and O and S score nothing). The cards all have pictures and sentences on them (N is for Nyarlathotep, etc), and each player gets five little Cthulhu figures to represent sanity. The aim is to get to 100 points without losing one's sanity, and one loses sanity by rolling a d20 and failing to equal or beat the score of the word one has just played, so playing high scoring words is quite risky. There are some fun mechanics relating to sanity loss and I enjoyed the game where I went out for losing all my sanity nearly as much as the one I won at the last minute.
-Betrayal at House on the Hill: a tile game where a group of characters explore a haunted house, collecting artifacts and so on until a 'haunt' happens and one of them tuns into an evil adversary and it all gets quite fight-or-flight. I became a flesh-absorbing monster, with a win condition of killing and stealing the power of two of the other five characters or surviving until all but one was dead (whereupon nobody would believe their mad tale). Turned out that I played tactically very badly, getting drawn into a physical confrontation with the strongest character rather than moving to block the exit and killing the weakest, as I should (in retrospect) have done, and I realised far too late that they had lured me into a room with only one exit and then set the adjoining room on fire (again, it being too dark to see the tiles didn't help!). Silly, but fun, and apparently there are 50 different haunts, so it has plenty of re-playability.
So, of course, I'm still not working yet.
Things which need to happen today before I can get down to work include hanging up the load of laundry which will beep at me shortly, having a bath and going to an optician's appointment (almost a year overdue, and booked for today because they had no slots free during my holiday when I called them shortly before Christmas).
Things which don't strictly speaking need to happen but which I'm doing now anyway: this update. ;)
So, yesterday, after the usual Sunday lunch (somewhat depleted of the usual crew), I headed to a gaming day in another bit of north London. The person who actually invited me didn't make it all and the two people I knew were mid-game when I arrived and left not long after that, but (as is often the way with these things), a whole bunch of complete strangers were friendly and welcoming.
I ended up playing three games I'd never played before:
-Seven Wonders: a set-collecting game which anyone reading this who cares about games will almost certainly know without any description from me. Play was not helped by the dreadful light in 'our' section of the pub, which made it hard to see my own cards, never mind anyone else's, but I got the hang of it and came fifth out of seven players, so I considered that a success.
-Unspeakable Words: a word creation game with added Cthulhu mythos. In this game, points per letter are not given according to frequency in the alphabet but according to number of angles (e.g. X and A score high and O and S score nothing). The cards all have pictures and sentences on them (N is for Nyarlathotep, etc), and each player gets five little Cthulhu figures to represent sanity. The aim is to get to 100 points without losing one's sanity, and one loses sanity by rolling a d20 and failing to equal or beat the score of the word one has just played, so playing high scoring words is quite risky. There are some fun mechanics relating to sanity loss and I enjoyed the game where I went out for losing all my sanity nearly as much as the one I won at the last minute.
-Betrayal at House on the Hill: a tile game where a group of characters explore a haunted house, collecting artifacts and so on until a 'haunt' happens and one of them tuns into an evil adversary and it all gets quite fight-or-flight. I became a flesh-absorbing monster, with a win condition of killing and stealing the power of two of the other five characters or surviving until all but one was dead (whereupon nobody would believe their mad tale). Turned out that I played tactically very badly, getting drawn into a physical confrontation with the strongest character rather than moving to block the exit and killing the weakest, as I should (in retrospect) have done, and I realised far too late that they had lured me into a room with only one exit and then set the adjoining room on fire (again, it being too dark to see the tiles didn't help!). Silly, but fun, and apparently there are 50 different haunts, so it has plenty of re-playability.