Wedding Card Curlings
Ξ May 31st, 2008 | → 1 Comments | ∇ Uncategorized |
Ever wonder how the wedding cards curlings are made?
All by hand!
Dozens and dozens of my pretties!
The Daily Grind
Ξ May 27th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Uncategorized |
Tried this shop @ Bangsar Village. Serves gourmet burgers! But that is not the best part. The best part is the handmade sauce, totally fresh and chunky! Totally love the sauce.
Alcohol
Ξ May 26th, 2008 | → 1 Comments | ∇ Uncategorized |
Blatant plagiarism warning: I did not write the following piece and to protect the writer, I have chosen not to post links. Thankfully I did not share the author’s extreme experiences in dealing with alcoholics, but i’ve come to regard alcohol as the ’stupid drink that taste bad and makes you feel worse.’ Seriously, guys, got spare cash, please donate boardgames to your neighbouring school.
I saw the effects of excessive alcohol on 3 patients last night.
The first was an Indian lady too intoxicated to give any history except that she was involved in an accident. From another hospital staff, I learnt that she was a chronic alcoholic and regularly falls into drains and all that. She stays with an ‘uncle’ who isn’t a relative and both insisted me letting them go home. I would love to send both of them home, but unfortunately, she’s too drunk to sign her own discharge, and her ‘uncle’ doesn’t have the legal right to sign it on her behalf.
The second was an Indian man who was intoxicated enough to come in and demand to be admitted(!) because of bodyache. When I refused (as he was stable and able) he became aggressive and started shouting and cursing me. Then, he suddenly stood up and threatened me with his fists. Thankfully, a large-sized hospital attendant was around and managed to ‘calm him down’ and got him out of the emergency department after an analgesic injection.
The third was an Indian man was drank so much that his liver had already failed and came in probably in the early stage of hepatic encephalopathy or Wernicke’s. He started giving a story about how his legs were swollen, but his wife gave a story that he had shortness of breath and chest pain. He denied having S.O.B or chest pain, and started telling me to let him go back with ‘extra medicine’.
Alcohol is bad. Everybody suffers, including your friendly neighbourhood casualty doctor. So, for the sake of yourself and everybody around you, stop!
If you want to kill yourself, go jump in front of a train. But make sure you’re not drunk when you do that, coz if you do, you may try to walk home with a bleeding stump that used to be your leg. (This actually happened to an Indian man who was so drunk, he fell asleep on the railway track and after arriving in the hospital with his leg amputated, tried to leave.)
I hate alcoholics. For personal, professional and religious reasons. I think they should all just *die*. To all alcoholics: If you don’t think I should wish death upon you, then stop being one.
OTK Cheras 23 May 08
Ξ May 24th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Boardgames |
Arrived 9pm to find rhyen teaching john, ceternal and shrapnel Mystery of the Abbey. Since phuah and myself knew the rules, we just jumped right in. A fairly friendly game, all of us shared information unreservedly. By the end of the first round, we have eliminated the Franciscans from the suspect list, a bunch of holy do-gooders.
Round 2 saw some scrambling for a cohesive process of elimination as the suspect cards began to move around. Information tracking became hard, but the narrowing down of suspects continues, albeit at a slower pace.
Round 3 saw some reckless questioning as the questions became more and more direct, to the point of asking whether a certain priest was being eliminated as a suspect, to the delight of all involved. This, of course is a bad move, as it allows other people to capitalise on the information.
Round 4 saw rampant accusations flying as it becomes harder and harder to eliminate suspects. Two innocent priest were fingered before rhyen finally accused the correct murderous father.
General impression was that the game take too long and the process of elimination bogged down towards the end. There were many a happy faces as the game end. Verdict: Mystery of the Abbey does not gel with 6 player. probably 3 or 4 is best.
Meanwhile at the next table, cmun and her gang of FHMs have arrived and started a game of That’s Life!. This is lostboyz’s favourite game as evidenced by his participation. jack208 and waiyan also arrived at this point and had a cuppa while waiting for the present games to finish.
After Mystery of the Abbey, table #1 moved to Race for the Galaxy, as instigated by the arrival of Sith Lord darth aa-nemesis. A few games was played while rhyen attempts to decipher the rules of 1870 on the spot. aanemesis and myself grabbed some victories each while ceternal struggled to emulate his 64-points feat. phuah got creamed as his military theory founded 2 weeks ago was shot to pieces.
Table #2 by now had moved on to Carcassonne and this is also lostboyz’s favourite game as evidenced by his continuous involvement. shrapnel also joined in at this point to observe. Later, cmun’s galpals bid adieu and a newly opened Cafe International was played between cmun, lostboyz, rhyen and jack208, not sure if shrapnel joined or not.
After Cafe International was done, rhyen and jack208 came over to table#1 and gave some pressure to aanemesis and ceternal to move on. And so they did move on to play 2-player Race for the Galaxy while rhyen, jack208, phuah and myself setup 1870.
The two Race crack addicts dropped by once a while to poke fun at the 1870 players every 15minutes or so, giving a running commentary of the game progress:
“still explaining rules ah?”
“still bidding for privates?”
“first stock round ah?”
“i see the first line of railroads on the board!”
…
yes well, for the 3 hours it takes for 1870 to reach the mid-game, aanemesis and ceternal probably played like 12 games of Races already. Then as table #2 gradually left, table #1 continued until the wee hours of the morning. I made a mistake this round of not ordering coffee and paid the price as my caffeine-starved brain struggle to compute the best route.
jack208 meanwhile took it like any other 18xx game and execute his ‘in-famous’ train shuffle tech. rhyen caught on too late to float his 2nd company while phuah steadfastly refused to start another. jack208 was then forced to take on a 3rd company to force the train rush.
Initial impressions is that the train rush is slower in coming. Perhaps we weren’t familiar with the ropes yet and started companies later than expected. Since the companies starts with 100% capital after 60% of the shares are subscribed, there’s no further incentive for more capital injection to be made into the companies. Player’s cash should then be used to startup new companies and I believe this can be done much sooner than what transpired in our game.
Furthermore, there were not a lot of share poaching in our game (buy at par and sell at current market value for a quick profit). Since unsold IPO shares will earn companies dividends, there is an incentive to poach the bonds and junk it to the market immediately.
There is also an element of share protection and share revaluation, but since poaching was not done often enough, this part of the game was not explored thoroughly.
The share protection mechanism (as read by us) allows a player to go above the 60% limit on the company ownership, as exercised by rhyen. But the cost in doing so would be the startup of a new company and the subsequent flexibility in shuffling trains and influencing the train rush.
Train qty limits are a constraint on the train rush sequence and if all companies’ train qty limits are maxed out, the onus is on the player owning the lowest level of trains to startup a new company and drive the train rush forward. This is one of the subtleties in this game.
The tiles mix are quite generous and we did not experience too much ‘incompetent engineer’ syndrome. However, like jack208 pointed out, perhaps the players weren’t familiar enough yet. There exists choke points on the board but there is quite often an easy way to bypass them as the board has a wide-open feel to it.
As mentioned, there are still aspects of the gme left unexplored, like the shares poaching, protection and revaluation, so can’t wait to get this game back to the table again.
After the game, rhyen opened to show his 18EU beautiful mounted boards and mounted tokens. The quality of the components are nice, typical of the high end of the deepthoughtgames line, but the map was a let down after the initial hype by jack208, as i thought it was fairly typical. However, the large number of minor companies in the game look nasty as is the crowded nature of the board. Soon perhaps we can play this game?
Boardgame Session @ OTK Cheras 9 May 08
Ξ May 12th, 2008 | → 2 Comments | ∇ Boardgames |
Arrived at Old Town Kopitiam (OTK) Cheras at 9pm. Found the usual suspects missing as aanemesis had to go holiday while lostboyz had to babysit children. I wasn’t to wait long, thankfully, as wolfx, jack208, keealvin and friend samuel arrived in quick succession.
The beautiful TTR: Switzerland map
Before the madness that is Rave for the Galaxy (RftG) started, I vetoed Ticket to Ride (TTR):
Keealvin (left) and friend Samuel (right)
Samuel gave up on completing his tickets first and tried a different tack by drawing more tickets. keealvin soon gave up as well and followed suit. Not long after, even I panicked and tried to draw more tickets as it became apparent that connecting that last destination is going to be A Route Too Far. On hind sight, this is a powerful tactic as there are now city-to-country as well as country-to-country tickets. These tickets have 3 and 4 variable destinations. If you’re lucky, you get to score the maximum points for connecting the furthest location and even if you fail, you can still score less points for nearer destinations. If you’re unlucky enough not to connect to any destinations listed, you are only penalized the minimum amount of points. The effect is that drawing tickets are now a viable strategy against long routes.
The other innovation brought into this version of TTR is that the wildcards can only be used to claim tunnel routes. This decrease in power is matched by a loosening of a restriction: you can draw more than 1 face-up wildcard a turn. The effect again here is that face-up wildcards are more balanced as claiming one does not hamper your resources at all. The fact that there are lots of tunnel routes in
So far so good, TTR:
In our game, all of us failed to complete at least one ticket. Since keealvin and Samuel failed to anticipate my ending the game, they had a higher number of uncompleted tickets. Blocking also occurred rampantly as Samuel and I snapped up tunnel routes that keealvin failed. Keealvin is probably asking the gaming gods what wrong he did as he was hit with the maximum penalty to rescue his tunneling operations 3 times in a row. Painful!
The RftG madness has started! jack208, patomas deep in thought while wolfx giving his characteristic peace sign
Meanwhile, patomas arrived to help jack208 and wolfx kick start a Perlumbaan Cakerawala (RftG). Friedricetheman also came in shortly after to start a subsidiary Perlumbaan Cakerawala after the TTR:
Friedricetheman getting up close and personal in his RftG tutorials
wonglc looking blur as a sotong (left) while friedrice explains a point to keealvin and samuel
As rhyen arrived, a game of Mystery of the Abbey was then setup to intro BGCers in solving murders. Monk jack208, wonglc, patomas, wolfx and nun waiyan joined abbot rhyen in hunting for the murderer. Their game took a long, long time as their game had more participants than our previous hunt. More participants = more clues being spread out = more investigating time. More players also meant that questions such as “how many brothers have you seen?” could not be used to narrow down the suspects quickly. The general impression I had of the game that night was that the players are as ‘blur as a sotong’. This was supported by the fact that there were 3 wrong accusations made before rhyen fingered the right perpetrator. Although monk jack208 had his misgivings about the game and the rapid shifting nature, I guess that patomas and waiyan had fun playing detective. Wolfx and wonglc again i can’t tell their reactions but it should be a unique experience for them.
wolfx, patomas and wonglc investigating murders in an abbey
jack208 looking as blur as a sotong, waiyan plotting her next move and rhyen reviewing his notes
the mystery of the abbey board. as colourful as a days of wonders board can be.
On the other side of the table, a mini Perlumbaan Cakerawala was being held between phuah, who came straight from a friend’s bachelor party, and myself. Phuah played to acquaint himself better with the cards when suddenly, Darth friedrice showed up again. Apparently, he misplaced one of his Perlumbaan Cakerawala card and came back for it. In the process, he took time to give some random training to apprentice phuah who then proceeds to decimate me! Phuah then made a comment which could, or could not, be true: “The Race is won on military strength.”. Now, certainly the strength of an early dropship conquering a military genes windfall world is hard to beat… but i suppose with more plays subtle strategies may yet show. All Race games I played that night were won on the back of a strong military, a timely windfall world to replenish the hand and a Galaxy Imperium (or whatever the 6-cost military development is called) to deliver the coup de grace. I have faith that the game is not-so-easily-solved and i look forward to the next gameday to prove me wrong.
wonglc contemplating his moves, phuah drawing his cards, jack208 biting his nails in anticipation
As phuah and myself wind up our umpteen galaxy game (RftG is perfectly cool as a 2-player game too!), rhyen finally fingered the culprit in Mystery of the Abbey. As waiyan called it a night, phuah and myself joined patomas, wonglc, wolfx, rhyen and jack208 to have some good ol’ Bang!-ing action. As pointed out repeatedly by jack208, the outlaws need an early coordinated attempt to bring down the sheriff and in the 3 games that we played, I shot the sheriff at the first chance I got to rally the outlaws. Some confused shootings by the deputies meant that sheriff rhyen was quickly taken down in the first game. The second game the outlaws were going guns a blazing again and just when it seems that we were running out of steam, a stray dynamite fell onto the sheriff’s lap and took out a surprised wonglc! Hehe. The third game ended a little prematurely as wolfx did a ‘lostboyz’ and revealed the renegade even before the game was over. Yes, a gentle reminder to everyone AND this is stated in bold on the sheriff’s card: Sheriff and his deputies win ONLY when all the outlaws AND the renegade is taken down. Wolfx of course blame it on excitement and offer to shuffle the role cards of the renegade and the deputies to make amends. But since wonglc was tired and had to work tomorrow, not to mention that the renegade revelation had potong steam in the situation, we ended the game there and gave the game to the sheriff team.
jack208 plotting with his cards while rhyen showing off his fastest hand in the west
wolfx sez, that’s nothing! as he shows off his fastest hand in the east. patomas chuckles while wonglc tries hard to suppress a smile
The time honored tradition of late-nite gaming was upheld this day as patomas, phuah, jack208, rhyen and myself continue late into the nite by hunkering down to a deep game of Die Macher. Jack208, rhyen, phuah and myself had played the short 4-round version of this German election game previously. This time, patomas joined us and we took about an eternity to explain the intricacies of the system. As there’s no good place to start other than the deep end of the pool, we dived in this time playing the full 7-round game.
phuah tries hard to channel Angela Merkel while jack208 and patomas concentrates on the board
In this second game of ours, jack208, phuah, rhyen and myself deduced correctly that contesting each and every big state is key to winning the game. As the votes from the states are awarded according to a table instead of splitting between the victors, losing a state election may not be a disaster if you still gain lots of votes from it. In fact, the winners only get to influence the national opinion, and thereby gaining a few more supporters out of the result. Thus it stands to reason to contest for a big state solely for the huge votes it generates.
Another huge source of points is in the media markers. In this respect jack208, phuah and myself are in agreement and we wasted no effort in securing victory over states by using coalitions. Sure, you will bring the other guy up with you but seeing that 3 other parties without coalitions will fall behind, it is worth it. In my case, I went for the hard and fast media blitz, to secure those early and high pointers media markers. However, there is a drawback to the media blitz campaign and that is…
Late game media marker can be used influence the final national opinions. People say Malaysians are ‘mudah lupa’, but apparently Germans are the same as well, since the final national opinions is the only one that matters and provide valuable points. Regardless of how well your policies matched that of the national will/opinions during the mid-game, only the final opinion matters and in this respect, a conserving of media markers to influence the late game opinions are important. In this respect rhyen did well enough by winning the final state election and thus influencing the final opinions. Jack208 also did well enough to anticipate rhyen’s move and thus brought up his scores in this area respectably.
here’s a picture of rhyen, behind him the emptiness of an early morning cafe… as in 4am early morning.
The final area of importance is in the party membership. It stands to reason that the larger the party membership, the more influential and the more votes will be generated for the election. Thus the party membership numbers also count towards the final score. In addition, the party with the highest or the second highest members also will receive a bonus score. Phuah and myself focused well on this aspect of the election and gained the first place and second place bonus respectively. Interestingly enough, I held the upper hand throughout the first part of the elections but phuah gained on me through the ingenious bid on cheap public opinions and withheld their release to gain supporters. In effect, whatever detrimental consequences that his acceptance of corrupt campaign funds had, was offset and superceded by the subsequent use of the funds for massive publicity campaign. Simply ingenious.
In one of the pivotal battles of the state, I, as the initiative winner selected phuah as my coalition partner. One of the key reasons that I selected him was that he did not have a media control marker in the state and even if our coalition won, I would be the sole beneficiary of the media marker bonus. Opposing us was rhyen, jack208 and patomas. Under the Die Macher rules, a single party can never win against a fully maxed out coalition and the three of them knew that an opposing coalition is the only answer. After much deliberation, jack208 formed a coalition with rhyen. Perhaps it was the right move, or perhaps it was not. The end result was that rhyen suffered too much scandals in the state from my party’s smear campaign to fall short of the votes needed to beat our coalition.
A snap shot of the final tally. The points system explained: (from top) election vote points, media points, party member points, bonus majority, national opinion and final tally.
End result: me winner with the party FDP, followed by phuah’s Die Linken, jack208’s CDU/CSU, patomas’ Die Grunen and rhyen’s SPD. From the end results table, it can be seen that at least a focus on 3 of the 4 campaign areas is needed to secure a winning score.
As night approaches morning, patomas and phuah call it a day (night?) and retired home. Rhyen, jack208 and myself went dim-summing and end up discussing the various activities to come. There’s a June trip down south to