Elizabeth Grigg nails it in one.

Here:

The true status of an "80% done" claim: "I have just turned my massive intellect to this task"

As someone in the IT field, this is generally true.

Gaming with my wife

Lee's an amazing woman who has tried a vast number of the boardgames and card games in my collection. Recently we've been getting some gaming on Wednesday evenings up at the church while the girls are in free child care. In the last 3 weeks, we've played as follows:

San Juan - an old standby for us. We can burn through a game quickly and easily and still have a conversation during play. At the same time, we're still enjoying it. If a fire destroyed my game collection today, I'd buy a replacement copy of San Juan tomorrow.

Pandemic - Lee hadn't tried this one yet, and I've been working toward getting this on the table for about 2 months. We played the introductory scenario with open hands using the Dispatcher and Researcher roles, and won quite easily. The whole thing didn't gel as a game experience for her. My rating for Pandemic is dropping as it is starting to feel a little scripted; it also doesn't help that I keep being the most experienced player at a table of newbies. I am going to put my copy in a Math Trade on BGG and see what happens - if it trades for something I really want, fine, if not, no loss.

Race For The Galaxy - I recently acquired this and the expansion in a trade brokered through Boardgamegeek, which was a big score for me. I'm a huge Tom Lehmann fan (and since he co-designed San Juan, Lee's sort of one as well) and have enjoyed RftG on 2 other occasions. This was a no-brainer to pick up; the fact that I got the expansion in the trade as well was an awesome bonus. For those of you wondering, I traded off Cuba, which I bought from RJ for $5. Even figuring in postage, this was a definite win.

In any case, Lee did a great job learning the game, which definitely is two levels more complex than San Juan. I had the most trouble with explaining the Consume power, because Lee's tableau was such that we didn't pick the role until both of us had 2 planets with Consume powers, and when we did fire it, we picked Consume-Trade and Consume-x2 VP at the same time. She did have a handle on it by the end of the game, and even won. She said she wasn't sure if the extra complexity was worth it, but would play again. Overall, it was a lot of fun.

BONUS ADDITIONAL CONTENT: Wow, there is a lot of air inside the admittedly-already-small Race for the Galaxy:The Gathering Storm expansion box. It's got two special dice, a double-sided placard used for different things, some cardboard victory point squares, and a small deck of cards. Oh, and the rules. Glad I got this in a trade or I'm uncertain I would have gone for it. Guess it would depend on how much Racing for that particular Galaxy we had already been doing. I also haven't cracked open the deck of cards yet to see what awesomeness lies within. I may throw this into the Math Trade on BGG as well and see if I can trade up with it.

Clever and creepy

This site has a CSS hack that shows how trivial it is to figure out what websites you've visited recently. Not sure what to think about that one.

State of the Todd: Video Games

I quit playing Evony (formerly Civony) and Space Project last Monday. Both of them, ultimately, didn't have any interesting stories to tell me. Cold turkey, walked away from the accounts. That probably means my Evony Princedom is getting rolled over by 12-year-olds with grudges. Sample in-game communication: "Wy R U attakin me? We R not enimeis?" Yes, yes, we are.

Still playing Kingdom of Loathing. I have a couple pairs of Stainless Steel Pants, if that tells you anything.

Gemcraft Chapter 0 is crazy-hard. I was good at the original, too; this is much more difficult.

Alex's rats

I was putting Cori and Alex to bed when Alex began to tell me about the rats in her room.

ALEX: There are little rats in my room. (She makes little scurrying motions with her hands.)
ME: Oh, in the walls.
ALEX: No, they're little. They're tiny.
ME: (puzzled) Okay.
ALEX: They're so little you can't see them. They're like mice. In the carpet.
ME: Mites! You have dust mites!
ALEX: Yeah.

Bleah.

Been feeling out of it all day, and now BGG is down.

Cashflow 101: Who is bootlegging it, and why?

I've been perusing Ebay* auctions for Cashflow 101, because I'm fascinated by the high prices it commands, and there's lots of boilerplate text obviously copy-pasted into them about the need to make sure you get a copy with the special pencils that are the proof you've got a genuine copy of the game.

Seriously, who the hell is making pirated copies of it? Even knowing that a copy of the game is ~$100 on Ebay, why would you go to the nightmarish effort of bootlegging it?

The only reasonable scenarios I can think of: 1. Whatever overseas printer is making copies of the game decided, on a whim, to print up a few thousand extra, and they "fell off the truck" in Singapore or whatever. 2. A bunch of copies "fell off the truck" right in sunny California and they're loose on the market. 3. Kiyosaki had some sort of dispute somewhere with someone doing a mass purchase of games, and that led to adding the pencils as a proof-of-authenticity claim.

Anyone know the story behind this? I find it doubly-ironic since pencils are pretty darn easy to make, compared to entire boardgames.

Yes, I already know about people counterfeiting individual Magic cards, which makes sense since the Power 9 will run you a few grand, and it's a lot less work than an entire boardgame. I am also aware that people "broke" the Eye of Judgment videogame/collectible card game using high-quality printed scans to fool the scanner into thinking they had all the rare cards.

Miscellaneous link

A fellow BGGer shares a couple of pictures of his daughter on his blog. The two pictures are identical except the time when the shots were taken.

Speaking of pictures, all our digital camera batteries are dead, and I need to buy more.