Games anyone?

Not alot new in the past little while, but I have had the opportunity to play some games. Over the weekend I had some friends stop by and we played some board games. Carcassonne - Hunters and Gatherers, San Juan, Mystery of the Abbey and Ticket to Ride to be more specific. They're all quite good games, even if they're all quite different. Well, why don't I put a bit of description here for the uninitiated.

The game play in Carcassonne - Hunters and Gatherers is very simple, and sort of resembles dominoes. You get several pieces of a map with rivers, lakes, forests and plains (with animals to hunt) on them, and attempt to build large groups of these resources. Whenever you've completed a section, you get to take points. The key here is that you must have placed a marker on territory to claim points for it, you can't take them back until the section is 'complete' and you only have 5 markers. Not only that, but you cannot mark a section already marked by another player. So there's alot of balance involved. Other players can also make it very difficult to complete a section, thus locking your marker on the board, and making it more difficult to take points. Plenty of strategy available. :)

Mystery of the Abbey is basically a Clue style game, not alot to say really. But I really enjoy it.

For the train buff, there's Ticket to Ride, whose goal is to build train routes to score points. At the beginning of the game, each player is given a set of routes that he must complete, and will be given a set number of points for completing. By collecting different types of cars (i.e. coal, mail, passesnger, etc) he connects cities on the map on the way to his destination. The key here is that in most cases, only one player can make a connection between cities. As the game progresses, it becomes important to make your routes as quickly as possible before you get blocked from completing your route.

I belive I've forgotten San Juan... This is a card game in which players attempt to build the best "settlement". Each card is a building either producing resources, or providing a 'service' for the settlement. For each round, there are 5 different events that can happen, such as producing goods, building structures, selling goods, etc. and the players choose which event they will make happen on their turn. Each building is worth a certain amount of victory points in the end, and simply enough, the most victory points wins the game.

So we played games on Saturday, and Louis-Philippe won 4 of 5 games - beginners luck I say :)

I also picked up a couple of new video games -- Wario Ware Touched for the Nintendo DS and Xenosaga 2. I've played 95% of the mini-games in wario ware after only a couple of hours - I'm a bit disappointed that it went so quickly. I don't remember the first one going so fast. But it's cool - and it's pretty much what the touch screen was designed for if you ask me. Now that I've picked up Xenosaga 2 it's pretty much time I go back to finish off Xenosaga 1 - which has been sitting for over a year in a semi complete state. It's a decent game, but when I went to Florida for a month for work, it sort of fell out of mind and I never got back to it... Seems I remember enough of the story and gameplay to get back into it though...

Going to Toronto again this weekend - will post more, maybe even with pictures(excited yet?) on Monday.

Went all the way to toronto just for soup

Well, not quite. I was really looking forward to this weekend and it went quite well. Ernie, Dave and I cramped into the van for our $20 ride, and arrived about 9:30 PM, a bit later than we had originally anticipated. Oak met up with us there and we proceeded to drive around for another 45 minutes to find the hot pot place. If you've never been to a hot pot, it can be easily be described as making your own soup. You get a pile of meat, veggies and various other goodies to put into a couple of different kinds of broth (one of which being incredibly spicy), cook it for a few mins, and then dredge it out with the strainer that's supplied. You can see the aftermath below ;) We then head over to James' apartment and had a couple of drinks. I got to try some very good rum from Cuba. I'm sure James will enlighten me as to the brand again next time he reads this.

So we got up bright and early Saturday morning for the 4 hour (ha) drive to Detroit for the car show just as the first flakes of snow are just starting to fall. We scrambled to the car, grabbed some starbucks, and some McDonalds and got going. The storm got quite bad really quickly however, so our ride down ended up being a bit longer than anticipated. Amazingly enough we didn't get stuck in traffic due to an accident a single time, although we did see several rather nasty accidents in the other direction. So after about 6~7 hours we arrived in Detroit and quickly found the Cobo centre.

The car show was awesome - the amount of money that they spend on advertisments there is ludicrous... but certainly impressive. There were lots of really nice cars to see, but I think the one that stuck on me the most was the Mini convertible - gotta get me one of those :). The show was rather uneventful, excepting for Ernie getting himself lost. We spent about 4 hours at the show, took about 250 pics between us, and head back to the car for another 7 hours in the car.

On Sunday we hit the Walker Hill Korean BBQ - always a good decision. This is like the hotpot, you cook the food yourself, except this time it's a grill in the centre of the table. And it's a bit more meat oriented. Still - tasty. Dave decided it would be the best idea in the world to open a similar restaurant - almost no work since you don't have to do any cooking :)

Hot pot is quite a messy ordeal. 

We had to find an easier way to let ernie know when he was being bad ;) 

From the Car Show in Detroit 

From the Car Show in Detroit