Sunday, April 30, 2006

Bargain!

I popped into The Big Weekend for lunch today, and found Ace selling off some games pretty cheap. I got Nexus Ops and Sword & Skull for $35 each. I am a bit worried that Sword & Skull isn't very good, but for the price it was worth a go. They also had Plunder for $30, and a lot of others which escape me right now. TBW continues tomorrow as well.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

BGG Support

"New Webserver Up! New Fileserver Up! BGG Bank Account Down!"

That's the news from Aldie over at boardgamegeek. As a programmer myself, I was stunned when I read that Aldie had quit his day job to run BGG full time. That's a giant leap into the unknown. If you're thinking of contributing to BGG, let me add my voice to the nagging one inside your head and encourage you to do it. I don't know anything about BGG finances, but Aldie is swapping his future income for your quality of service, so make a donation and make Mrs Aldie feel a bit more secure :-).

Monday, April 24, 2006

Back On-line

Well, at least one thing has turned out OK - I bought a new computer ($A330, pretty cheap) and put the old hard drives in it and it's working beautifully now. I have even re-run the augmented stats at http://members.optusnet.com.au/~friendless/ and that worked fine. Took a lot of fiddling and remembering to get the screen configured to a sensible resolution but I'm happy with it now. I never liked that old computer anyway - too many heat problems!

In other news, the family situation is looking bleaker than ever. Looks like the kid will be back next weekend, but not the rest of the family. All I can say is, if you're having problems with your partner, go talk to them now and start getting it sorted out, before it's too late. What is happening to me is the worst feeling, you don't want it. Also, I played 96 games last month and it's only 32 so far this month, so it plays havoc with your gaming. Not to mention your best little game buddy...

I never meant this to be a personal blog, only a gaming blog, but as happens in Lord of the Rings, I have been overtaken by events. I hope that you'll bear with me while I sort out enough of my life to get back to some decent gaming. My gamer buddies who haven't known me very long (and some I've never even heard of before) have been there for me. It's nice to know that I have friends. Somewhere out there is a woman who loves the Gipf Project as much as I do, and I know we will be happy together.

Friday, April 21, 2006

She Left Me

My wife has left me and taken the kid. I believe she will look after him, I believe I will see him again soon. It's kinda hard to deal with. I need friends now, she was the best friend I ever had. Greg Schloesser, if you read this, it wasn't too much gaming that caused it.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Bad Month for Gaming

Oh, what a disaster this month has been! I have been dealing with family problems and now BOTH of my home computers are broken - I suspect bad motherboards in both cases. I suspect blogging will be slow this month :-(. Went away for Easter with my sister's family, and played a good game of Ca$h'n'Gun$ with the kids and a bad game of Mystery of the Abbey with the grown-ups, but gaming has not been the priority this month.

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

PitchCar and Gyroscopic Inertia

We took PitchCar along to QUGS on Saturday morning. Ann completely kicked our butts with her careful style of play, but the revelation of the day came from Brian who took quite a while to even get past the start line. As we were all gently tapping our cars along, Brian flicked his viciously and and it zoomed halfway around the track. We were very impressed but he was thinking about what he had done, and sat down with the game for a few minutes to figure it out. He discovered that by flicking the car off-centre so that it starts spinning, it goes further.

My understanding of this is that the spinning disc is acting as a gyroscope and hence resists the urge to move away from the horizontal. As long as you can keep the disc horizontal and below the guard rails, it should stay on the track even if you flick it very hard. I tried it myself, and although I have trouble getting my fingers in the right place, I did manage it. I'll have to practise.

That adds a whole lot more strategy to the game, if you can use this skill to make big flicks where appropriate. We have the expansion as well, with the jumps, so obviously there is some sort of soft-flicking needed to get over the jumps, and hard flicking can be used in straights and round easy corners. Hard corners would the ones where there is no guard rail to keep the hard flicks on the track. You'd need to be multi-skilled to be a good player. I suspect experienced players have accuracy which helps them get the car into the chicanes as well. Definitely need more practice!

Saturday, April 01, 2006

It's Here! It's Here! (part 4 of 6)

Frank's Zoo arrived yesterday. I'll need to find some time with the family to show them how to play it. The kid says he doesn't like it. I think he has played it, but he doesn't need to play something to dislike it. And if Mum plays it, that makes it much more fun anyway. Still waiting on 2 orders from Boulder Games, both coming sea mail.

Yes, But Do You Care?

I have hacked my statistics program to automatically upload its results to the web. Look at this. If you'd like to be in the list, please let me know your BGG user name. There are heaps of features, and more every week as the obsession continues. I just can't stop playing with it.