Games Day at our house! Whee!
Today I had a board gaming party at my house, in honor of "Holy crap, we've been living in Seattle for a whole year!" among other things. A lot of people showed up and this was highly encouraging.
In short:
I bought too much beer. Hard Lemonades have cryptic caps. I got in on games of Ricochet Robot, Citadels, Zoff in Buffalo, Puerto Rico, this building-blocks-in-a-sack game, Lost Cities, Set, and Pokemon Puzzle League. We had 33 people here at one point or another unless I can't count. All in all it was a pretty good turnout. And before people tune out... if![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bk3c or ag5j or any of the other old Akiba crew are reading this, we have houseguests right now - one is Eli's friend from high school, Dan, and the other is Dan's girlfriend, Daphna... Buchsbaum. What a WEIRD coincidence. Just goes to show that I'm still inexplicably linked to half of the western hemisphere :)
Yeah. So I got up and went out to the Safeway in Ballard to buy snacks and stuff. I really didn't need to bother as half the people who showed up brought snacks and drinks anyway. But, so I bought some chips and dips and sodas, and then I got some hard lemonade and cranberry hard lemonade, and then I was like "Wait, I said in our email that we had beer... so I need to get beer... but I don't know ANYTHING about beer... oh no!" So I picked out some random stuff that sounded good. Got Sam Adams, Guinness, and Pete's Wicked Ale. I love the supermarkets here. I also got a Safeway card at long last. Go me. Anyway, I spent like $90 on party stuff, but that's ok because now we have enough beer to last us a lifetime.
Got home, picking up a fajita pita from Jack in the Box... put snacks away, finished cleaning up the living room a little... and right at 2 people started showing up :) Drew and Matt were the first as usual... a little after that Jack Foy showed up, which was cool, I hadn't seen him since the last drum corps rehearsal I went to in February. Then Megan and Josh I think, and Nykkel's friend Phaedrus, and Casey, and around then we started up a pickup game of Ricochet Robot. I forget the exact order people showed up in after that... but eventually I got a game of Citadels going with (around the table) Casey, Drew, Phaedrus, Matt, and Jack. It was a lot of fun and I won eventually but not by much. I think Citadels is great because of how easy it is to catch onto and have fun with it :) Oh, in the meantime Sean and Jane showed up with Ralph and Lori Melton! YAYYYY!! I was so happy to see them because I hadn't heard from them at ALL since they said they were coming here. So we got to show them around our house and try to get them involved in a few games, but they couldn't stay very long, so hopefully we'll get to see them more later this week.
Josh and Justin and Jarrett and Eli and Cory got in a game of Puerto Rico shortly before our Citadels ended :( But more people were showing up so we were able to split into other games. Casey and Nykkel and me and Matt and Drew ended up playing this cow game called Zoff in Buffalo, which was really kinda cool, it involved trying to figure out optimal ways to get the most cows into fields and stuff. We kept making bad cow puns the whole time and mooing and stuff. Phaedrus started a Robo Rally game with Jack and Joy and Ezzie. Other people were playing one of the sack of puzzles thing for a while in there somewhere too. And I know Colleen showed up with Justin, and Megan was there for a while, but then they were both gone after a while too, which I hadn't even noticed.
I remember getting into a huge sack of puzzle stack thingy game for a while with Casey, Matt, Nykkel, Heidi, Brian G, Drew, and countless people. While I was playing it I remember Mike Loewen was playing Bomberman 64 and it was so weird because he played more of the solo modes than I've ever touched! It was like Jenga in that you have to have steady hands to keep the structures from falling over, so I was notoriously bad at it and eventually ducked out to get a game of Puerto Rico started. Our game ended up being me and Drew and Matt, and Nykkel and Kiefer. Matt won IIRC, and I was second and Nykkel was third, which was good for his first game I think, and he seemed to like it so maybe we'll get more people to play it sometime. I had really wanted to show it to him because I thought he'd like it as a game, so I'm glad I got to, but I'm sad I didn't get to play with Casey because we've been trashtalking each other about PR strategy for a while.
I know a huge game of Apples to Apples got started in our dining room at some point but I'm still just not into it anymore. By this point they had also acquired Deb and Kylee and Wim and Eli's friend Dan and Daphna and everyone. I got Jarrett to play Lost Cities with me. Oh, by this point Dave and Mark and Steve and Chris Smoak had all shown up too. (Wow, Chris looks REALLY different than I remember him... I don't think I'd really talked to him since he was a freshman in Kiltie Band). Dave and Chris played Go, and Mark and Steve played Magic... until I subverted them into playing Pokemon Puzzle League with me :) Kiefer and I ended up in a HUGE 3-D game that took like 6 minutes a round, too. Scary stuff. I also got to show off the house to Mark. It sucks that I finally got everyone to come up here and now they're all leaving in 2 weeks :(
The other fun part was talking to Daphna, since I knew she looked really familiar... there was something like "blah blah outside Philly, since I'm from there" and I'm like "Oh really? I grew up in Northeast Philly and my dad lives in Center City now" "Oh, I'm from Haverford" "No shit, I used to hang out on the main line all the time, a lot of my friends went to Lower Merion and Akiba" "You're KIDDING. I went to Akiba." "Really? What year?" "I graduated in 1997" "Shit! You would have known most of my friends' younger siblings, I graduated highschool in 1994..." and so we both go through the "who do you know" game and I just start listing my whole group, Ben and Josh and Aiton and Chuckie and Aviva and whatnot, and of course she knew all of them. And we think we met at a party at Debbie Seltzer's or somewhere like ten years ago. But that's another story. It's just so funny how still, when someone goes "Oh, I'm from Philly" or "Oh, I went to school in Pittsburgh" or just lots of random things like that, I can still find links to them. Heh. And she says my cousin Ariel is a rabbi now. How weird, I haven't kept up with him in at least 9-10 years, and my link to him kinda died with my grandmother. But it was just so funny. And of course everyone else in the room is like "What else is new, Deanna knows everyone, we're used to this."
Anyway, after a while of PPL and whatnot I somehow got a game of Set going with everyone and that was pretty fun, I still am pretty good at it, which is nice.
I ended up kicking out people around 1am. Dan and Daphna are sleeping on our couch, I'm not actually sure how long they're staying here, but it's fine with me... just that now Eli and I both have to work, so it's a little less convenient to have houseguests. Hopefully we'll get to hang out with everyone tomorrow night or something, we'll see.
All in all it was a really good day. I'd really like to hold these types of things like once a month or so... we'll see, maybe I'll try to do that! And I'd like to thank everyone who showed up!... and invite everyone to come over and drink the rest of our beer :O
In short:
I bought too much beer. Hard Lemonades have cryptic caps. I got in on games of Ricochet Robot, Citadels, Zoff in Buffalo, Puerto Rico, this building-blocks-in-a-sack game, Lost Cities, Set, and Pokemon Puzzle League. We had 33 people here at one point or another unless I can't count. All in all it was a pretty good turnout. And before people tune out... if
bk3c or ag5j or any of the other old Akiba crew are reading this, we have houseguests right now - one is Eli's friend from high school, Dan, and the other is Dan's girlfriend, Daphna... Buchsbaum. What a WEIRD coincidence. Just goes to show that I'm still inexplicably linked to half of the western hemisphere :)Yeah. So I got up and went out to the Safeway in Ballard to buy snacks and stuff. I really didn't need to bother as half the people who showed up brought snacks and drinks anyway. But, so I bought some chips and dips and sodas, and then I got some hard lemonade and cranberry hard lemonade, and then I was like "Wait, I said in our email that we had beer... so I need to get beer... but I don't know ANYTHING about beer... oh no!" So I picked out some random stuff that sounded good. Got Sam Adams, Guinness, and Pete's Wicked Ale. I love the supermarkets here. I also got a Safeway card at long last. Go me. Anyway, I spent like $90 on party stuff, but that's ok because now we have enough beer to last us a lifetime.
Got home, picking up a fajita pita from Jack in the Box... put snacks away, finished cleaning up the living room a little... and right at 2 people started showing up :) Drew and Matt were the first as usual... a little after that Jack Foy showed up, which was cool, I hadn't seen him since the last drum corps rehearsal I went to in February. Then Megan and Josh I think, and Nykkel's friend Phaedrus, and Casey, and around then we started up a pickup game of Ricochet Robot. I forget the exact order people showed up in after that... but eventually I got a game of Citadels going with (around the table) Casey, Drew, Phaedrus, Matt, and Jack. It was a lot of fun and I won eventually but not by much. I think Citadels is great because of how easy it is to catch onto and have fun with it :) Oh, in the meantime Sean and Jane showed up with Ralph and Lori Melton! YAYYYY!! I was so happy to see them because I hadn't heard from them at ALL since they said they were coming here. So we got to show them around our house and try to get them involved in a few games, but they couldn't stay very long, so hopefully we'll get to see them more later this week.
Josh and Justin and Jarrett and Eli and Cory got in a game of Puerto Rico shortly before our Citadels ended :( But more people were showing up so we were able to split into other games. Casey and Nykkel and me and Matt and Drew ended up playing this cow game called Zoff in Buffalo, which was really kinda cool, it involved trying to figure out optimal ways to get the most cows into fields and stuff. We kept making bad cow puns the whole time and mooing and stuff. Phaedrus started a Robo Rally game with Jack and Joy and Ezzie. Other people were playing one of the sack of puzzles thing for a while in there somewhere too. And I know Colleen showed up with Justin, and Megan was there for a while, but then they were both gone after a while too, which I hadn't even noticed.
I remember getting into a huge sack of puzzle stack thingy game for a while with Casey, Matt, Nykkel, Heidi, Brian G, Drew, and countless people. While I was playing it I remember Mike Loewen was playing Bomberman 64 and it was so weird because he played more of the solo modes than I've ever touched! It was like Jenga in that you have to have steady hands to keep the structures from falling over, so I was notoriously bad at it and eventually ducked out to get a game of Puerto Rico started. Our game ended up being me and Drew and Matt, and Nykkel and Kiefer. Matt won IIRC, and I was second and Nykkel was third, which was good for his first game I think, and he seemed to like it so maybe we'll get more people to play it sometime. I had really wanted to show it to him because I thought he'd like it as a game, so I'm glad I got to, but I'm sad I didn't get to play with Casey because we've been trashtalking each other about PR strategy for a while.
I know a huge game of Apples to Apples got started in our dining room at some point but I'm still just not into it anymore. By this point they had also acquired Deb and Kylee and Wim and Eli's friend Dan and Daphna and everyone. I got Jarrett to play Lost Cities with me. Oh, by this point Dave and Mark and Steve and Chris Smoak had all shown up too. (Wow, Chris looks REALLY different than I remember him... I don't think I'd really talked to him since he was a freshman in Kiltie Band). Dave and Chris played Go, and Mark and Steve played Magic... until I subverted them into playing Pokemon Puzzle League with me :) Kiefer and I ended up in a HUGE 3-D game that took like 6 minutes a round, too. Scary stuff. I also got to show off the house to Mark. It sucks that I finally got everyone to come up here and now they're all leaving in 2 weeks :(
The other fun part was talking to Daphna, since I knew she looked really familiar... there was something like "blah blah outside Philly, since I'm from there" and I'm like "Oh really? I grew up in Northeast Philly and my dad lives in Center City now" "Oh, I'm from Haverford" "No shit, I used to hang out on the main line all the time, a lot of my friends went to Lower Merion and Akiba" "You're KIDDING. I went to Akiba." "Really? What year?" "I graduated in 1997" "Shit! You would have known most of my friends' younger siblings, I graduated highschool in 1994..." and so we both go through the "who do you know" game and I just start listing my whole group, Ben and Josh and Aiton and Chuckie and Aviva and whatnot, and of course she knew all of them. And we think we met at a party at Debbie Seltzer's or somewhere like ten years ago. But that's another story. It's just so funny how still, when someone goes "Oh, I'm from Philly" or "Oh, I went to school in Pittsburgh" or just lots of random things like that, I can still find links to them. Heh. And she says my cousin Ariel is a rabbi now. How weird, I haven't kept up with him in at least 9-10 years, and my link to him kinda died with my grandmother. But it was just so funny. And of course everyone else in the room is like "What else is new, Deanna knows everyone, we're used to this."
Anyway, after a while of PPL and whatnot I somehow got a game of Set going with everyone and that was pretty fun, I still am pretty good at it, which is nice.
I ended up kicking out people around 1am. Dan and Daphna are sleeping on our couch, I'm not actually sure how long they're staying here, but it's fine with me... just that now Eli and I both have to work, so it's a little less convenient to have houseguests. Hopefully we'll get to hang out with everyone tomorrow night or something, we'll see.
All in all it was a really good day. I'd really like to hold these types of things like once a month or so... we'll see, maybe I'll try to do that! And I'd like to thank everyone who showed up!... and invite everyone to come over and drink the rest of our beer :O
no subject
Stacking game: was it the game where you have to stack as many items vertically on top of one small block as you can and (if you're playing by the correct rules, which people don't generally tend to do) pay each other beans in order to force people to play awkward pieces on their stack instead of yours, was it the game where you have coloured blocks (some of which are hexagonal cylinders and others of which are circular cylinders) and also have flat pieces going between the levels of the stack or was it something else? The former is Bausack, the second is Villa Paletti and if it's neither of those then I haven't a clue. :-)