At least we're diverse
After loosely made plans to meet O's sister for dinner loosely didn't really happen (those days when you feel more like lazing about the house), our afternoon instead turned into a bout of games.
Both because we hadn't played it in ages, and because I may be teaching it to my coworkers later this week and wanted to freshen up, we pulled out Ticket to Ride: Europe for a couple of games.
Let's just say my Ticket to Ride skills have waned compared to hers in the last several months since we played it last.
Okay, I'll be honest, she utterly annihilated me.
She easily doubled my score on the first game, and outscored me by 40 points on the second.
In that first game, I think I had as many unfinished routes as I had finished, and the look of pity in her eyes as I subtracted one score after another — it was bad.
Not to be discouraged, I took her up on the original offer to play Agricola. If you haven't heard of Agricola, it's perhaps the most ridiculously hyped game of the decade, a fairly complex but ridiculously cute game about running your own small family farm in Europe in the 1600s, complete with sheep, cows, pigs, fences, barns, fields, vegetables, and all the thousand little coloured wooden discs and cubes you'd expect from a game like this.
I don't say "ridiculously hyped" because it's not really that good (it most certainly is a very good game). No, it's only ridiculously hyped because now matter how good it is, it's ONLY A BOARD GAME, people. If any of you non-gamers are really bored, and want some spiteful fun at the expense of game nerds, I dare you to read the Agricola game forums on the BGG site (follow the link earlier): customers threatening to boycott the publisher forever because some editions of the game included little wooden sheeps and cows ("animeeples," to the properly initiated), whereas others did not; customers all in a snit because their pre-orders were held up for 4 months at the publisher; and some people pissed off (and here's where it gets really fun and silly) literally because it allegedly doesn't deserve to have taken the #1 title away from the previously reigning long time champion Puerto Rico — to the point where Puerto Rico fans are giving Agricola "1" ratings "just to balance the hype," and Agricola fans are retaliating by adjusting their 9 and 10 ratings of Puerto Rico down to 1s and 2s out of spite.
You'd think the next US Presidential election were being decided merely by the outcome of which of two relatively obscure (by North American standards) European board games winds up on top.
People are dying over this battle, and, speaking of, that's precisely what happened to O when I spanked the beet-farming pants off her.
My stone house / 4 field / 4 pasture / 8 sheep / 4 cow / 4 boar plantation made her little wooden house and solitary sheep and boar look like a poor man's petting zoo (she'd had some other critters, but had to cook them), and my 42-to-18 point victory more than eased the pain of my prior Ticket to Ride defeats.
So, there you have it. She may be the better giant multi-national trans-European railway mogul, but when it comes to important things like tiny subsistence farms in the 1600s I'm the undisputed . . um, I'm not sure where I was going with that, actually.
At least no animals were harmed in the course of my railway defeats, right?
Update: It turns out she also had a lone cow hiding out in one corner of her farmland, netting her an additional 2 points. So in all fairness, it was 42-to-20. Not exactly a tiebreaker, though.
Both because we hadn't played it in ages, and because I may be teaching it to my coworkers later this week and wanted to freshen up, we pulled out Ticket to Ride: Europe for a couple of games.
Let's just say my Ticket to Ride skills have waned compared to hers in the last several months since we played it last.
Okay, I'll be honest, she utterly annihilated me.
She easily doubled my score on the first game, and outscored me by 40 points on the second.
In that first game, I think I had as many unfinished routes as I had finished, and the look of pity in her eyes as I subtracted one score after another — it was bad.
Not to be discouraged, I took her up on the original offer to play Agricola. If you haven't heard of Agricola, it's perhaps the most ridiculously hyped game of the decade, a fairly complex but ridiculously cute game about running your own small family farm in Europe in the 1600s, complete with sheep, cows, pigs, fences, barns, fields, vegetables, and all the thousand little coloured wooden discs and cubes you'd expect from a game like this.
I don't say "ridiculously hyped" because it's not really that good (it most certainly is a very good game). No, it's only ridiculously hyped because now matter how good it is, it's ONLY A BOARD GAME, people. If any of you non-gamers are really bored, and want some spiteful fun at the expense of game nerds, I dare you to read the Agricola game forums on the BGG site (follow the link earlier): customers threatening to boycott the publisher forever because some editions of the game included little wooden sheeps and cows ("animeeples," to the properly initiated), whereas others did not; customers all in a snit because their pre-orders were held up for 4 months at the publisher; and some people pissed off (and here's where it gets really fun and silly) literally because it allegedly doesn't deserve to have taken the #1 title away from the previously reigning long time champion Puerto Rico — to the point where Puerto Rico fans are giving Agricola "1" ratings "just to balance the hype," and Agricola fans are retaliating by adjusting their 9 and 10 ratings of Puerto Rico down to 1s and 2s out of spite.
You'd think the next US Presidential election were being decided merely by the outcome of which of two relatively obscure (by North American standards) European board games winds up on top.
People are dying over this battle, and, speaking of, that's precisely what happened to O when I spanked the beet-farming pants off her.
My stone house / 4 field / 4 pasture / 8 sheep / 4 cow / 4 boar plantation made her little wooden house and solitary sheep and boar look like a poor man's petting zoo (she'd had some other critters, but had to cook them), and my 42-to-18 point victory more than eased the pain of my prior Ticket to Ride defeats.
So, there you have it. She may be the better giant multi-national trans-European railway mogul, but when it comes to important things like tiny subsistence farms in the 1600s I'm the undisputed . . um, I'm not sure where I was going with that, actually.
At least no animals were harmed in the course of my railway defeats, right?
Update: It turns out she also had a lone cow hiding out in one corner of her farmland, netting her an additional 2 points. So in all fairness, it was 42-to-20. Not exactly a tiebreaker, though.