Upcoming Gameshelf stuff: talent needed!

Upcoming Gameshelf games need players! Comment or email if you're interested or have questions about it.

Acquire, a classic and oft-reprinted Sid Sackson strategy board game themed around corporate acquisition and merging. Takes a little more than an hour to play. (At least that's what Wikipedia says.)

M.U.L.E., an obscure but very highly regarded 1983 computer (and, later, NES) game about supply-and-demand competition among extraterrestrial settlers. Plays like a board game.

I have personally not played either of these games, but already find both intriguing for reasons besides gameplay. I think they'll make for good TV!

When/Where:

I'd like to play Acquire at the SCAT studio on the evening of Wednesday, March 7. Yes, that's next week. If I can't get enough people I'll punt to a later date but I have the studio time reserved now and would like to swing it if possible.

M.U.L.E. time and location is TBA. Sometime later in March, probably. I want to do something like the technique I used for the Rampart feature and dedicate a camera or two to filming the people playing the game, letting another camera just slurp the video of the game itself, editing it all together in post.

Meanwhile, in Holy Crap news

Congratulations, meerkitty, on earning your number!

There's been disagreement about this since first grade

[Poll #937076]

ROTWANG GIP

I swear to god I just happened to find this image on my hard drive a minute ago. It's Rotwang, the batshit insane cyberneticist from Fritz Lang's "Metropolis", and a template for the mad-scientist visual stereotype that would develop over the 20th century. It's pronounced ROHT-VAHNG but believe me he's heard it all.

I am fixing problems with exploding filehandles. It causes me to find things like this.

Visiting doctor_atomic

So the vacation last weekend was great. The train trips to and from New Jersey were uneventful, comfortable, and not overly long. I like the train.

It was so nice to spend a lot of non-thon time with doctor_atomic, which I haven't really done since we were housemates four years ago. As she's usually completely consumed in her research, my arrival made her quite game-hungry, so we played plenty of games. Besides being fun, this had the additional effect of rekindling my interest in games. I hadn't noted it here, but it had been somewhat on the wane and needed a kick. It's less the games themselves as it is my approach to them that's been getting stale, but this is a blog for another time.

We played Cribbage twice, including once at a bar, which is pretty cool coz it was originally invented as a pub-friendly passtime, y'know, and I hadn't played in that sort of venue before. After I giddily toasted to the spirit of Sir John Suckling, its inventor, the bartender asked us what we were playing and I told her. Sadly. She let me get about four sentences in to excitedly explaining the game's English origins and American traditions before saying "Ha ha I'll have to learn that!" and then fleeing. I thought of so-and-so's comment of Ahh, I see, I am informing you against your will from last week's This American Life about the mystery hunt, but really she had drinks to pour too. She got a nice tip from me.

The doctor is slightly but consistently better than me at games. She beat me at both Cribbages, and we also played the Settlers card game once, which I fought like hell to just-barely win despite her never having played before. Uh, and we finished a game of Babel, a Kosmos two-player game that you haven't heard of because it's not necessarily all that good. It was significant to us personally because she bought it when we lived together and the one time we tried to play it she fell asleep, and it's sat inert in her game bin ever since. (I'd like to play it again, actually, but I doubt I'd want to buy it. It's neither broken nor particularly elegant.)

Other than that we made walking and driving treks around the New Brunswicky area to find interesting shops she'd heard about, and while we failed every time (Google maps WTF?) we succeeded in finding other interesting stuff. We ate and drank at various places. We took up no less than three tables when playing the Settlers card game at a cafe full of Rutgersians that we happened across. (I had forgotten the ridiculous amount of real estate that game demands.) I think people were looking sideways at us and wondering what we were doing, but we were gossiping most rudely about them too, so all was well.

And we ate approx. 400 cookies that the doctor made on my arrival. The end.