(no subject)

A fine Christmas with parents & Ricky. Dad is quite recovered, able to walk around inside with no problems, and outside with a crutch (which he'll be able to ditch, in time). And he looks like his old self (maybe a little better than), which is great. My parents are getting a good mix of new tenants, too, including some healthy, younger people, which they really needed in the house. I speak no ill of other sorts of tenants, but for a long time all the renters were either insane freeloaders or Section 8 (Maine landlord lingo for people using state-funded housing assistance programs, named after the law code that provides it) and this was actually kind of depressing. But now little families and young professionals are moving in, and my parents are very pleased.

Dad liked unwrapping Battle Cry, though we haven't played it yet. I have played it a couple of times with Ricky, who actually liked it a lot and grasped it quickly (being a military man and all). I dunno if he's actually a good opponent, because he plays more to amuse himself than actually win... though his amusement is amusing to me too. Example: At one point he destroyed a command unit, leaving one of my generals exposed. His obvious followup move would have involved attacking the general with another unit, but he had it chase my artillery instead. When I pointed this out to him, he said that he couldn't do that. When I threatened to surrender if he didn't attack my general, he patiently explained to me that this was a gentlemanly battle, and gentlemen didn't attack a lone, defenseless field commander who was stuck in front of his fence line. Then on his next turn, he was able to advance a command unit of his own to within range of my lone general, and made up a backstory about how my general and his went way back, and a festering bitterness lay between them, based on ill words spoken at a tavern one night. This allowed him to roll the dice and successfully snipe my general with impunity. Because, you know: that was personal.

Yes, this is actually excellent. Though I'm not going to enter him into any tournaments anytime soon.

My parents' big present to me was a portable Poker tabletop. (Literally the top of a table, with chip slots, drink holders, and a felt-covered, recessed play surface.) This was pretty thoughtful: exactly the sort of thing caring non-game-player would think to get for the game-obsessed, ho ho. It's lovely but I don't foresee myself ever actually using it, so I may pass it along to the community when I get back home; dunno yet.

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Visited the Bangor offices of Arcus last night for the first time, to play a couple of games with the assembled northeners. Metro (a present to me from J) was a blast, and far better than one would think from reading the poorly-written instructions. (If the text and the figure-captions disagree about what constitutes an illegal move, you know you have problems.) I tried to show them the joy of Memoir '44 but it was a bust; due to dumb luck, the Germans (poetgeek and I) completely wiped out the Allied attackers (daerr and kyroraz) within four or five turns, despite their larger numbers. Nobody except me wanted to try again... shucks. In retrospect I should have given the other side more hints (they forgot they could take cover in forests, for one thing), and I wasn't clear that all retreats happened in the same direction. (daerr thought it seems strange that a unit would always want to retreat towards its own side of the board, even if that's the direction the enemy was attacking from. This is a good point; I guess the "in-character" explanation is that retreating towards the larger enemy territory is even more dangerous than retreating towards the smaller (if more immediate) threat. Shrug.)