(no subject)

[prog]

This has just been an unusually good goof-off weekend for me, modulo the writing I got done. (There wasn't much to do.) Today I really just paced around my secret underground headquarters, amusing myself with this and that. The LL came by randomly and gave me some sandwiches, so I didn't even have to go out. (But I did, anyway. For coffee. To go with the sandwiches.) Not something I want to do every day, but today the mood was right. Yep.

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More games: played several rounds of Ticket to Ride at the Days of Wonder website. It's another great "railgame reaction" in the same vein as Trans America. More complex than that, but still very easy to learn and play. Lots of tense risk management added through just a few mechanics. I can see why people like it so much.

It costs $12/year to play online, but the proof-of-purchase code from Memoir '44 that I typed into the site a while ago (in order to access some special goodies for that game) apparently gives me a free pass to all the company's online games. I think I really like Days of Wonder.

Also, yes, more market research. I find it interesting and frustrating that all these games sites don't have a language-preference setting available when you create new tables. The DoW interface lets you browse individual players' language settings, but that's not convenient when you're looking for a table to join. It seems so simple and so needed, especially since so many (most?) of these particular sorts of gamers live in non-Anglophone places. (Is it correct to refer to a place as "non-Anglophone" if English isn't the first language, regardless of how much of the population can speak it anyway?)

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Saw the "last" Carinvale. Well... I've seen series finales and that sir was no series finale. Not the cliffhanger that the end of the first season was, but in the final scenes they introduce some major questions -- ones not at all naturally emergent from other things, as far as I can tell -- and make no motions to answer them. And no real satisfying bridge to the future, to bookend the visions that opened the season. So do we get another season in N more months?

I did appreciate the good guys' lame-brained plan to get the bad guy at the start. It's totally something that an RPG group would think up, especially when they all were immediately enthusiastic about it.