My weekend.
saturday:
I played some Puzzle Pirates in the afternoon. My flag had an "Olympic" matchup in Sea Battle... we lost it horrendously :) But it was kinda fun. We learned that normally one person can do carp bilge, but NOT DURING BATTLE! HAR! It was pretty funny, though... especially since Farren showed up over here right as we were spectacularly losing our second match... so he was looking over my shoulder as we got decimated. Heh.
Well, so it wasn't time to go over to Nykkel's yet at that point, so we played IIDX to waste some time. That was really fun :) I hadn't played in a while and neither had Farren, so we did a lot of Light 7. That was neat! I can still pass a whole bunch of songs, which is good... and my timing is even pretty good, since I got a whole buncha A's and AA's on 5-6 star songs. Shrug.
After an hour or so of IIDX, we went over to Nykkel's house. We were about half an hour late because I second-guessed whether it was time to come over. It was ok. Phaedrus was the only other one who'd shown up at that point. So the four of us stood around talking about Puzzle Pirates for about 15 minutes until I said "ACK I'M HUNGRY AND I WANT TO PLAY BOARD GAMES", so we decided we were all hungry, and ordered some pizzas and talked some more, and Nykkel went out to pick them up and then I made Farren and Phaedrus play Ricochet Robot with me. To their credit they got 7 goals between the two of them :) I feel like I need to make people play it more so that they'll get good and I'll have fun with it again.
Nyk got back and we put the pizzas in the oven and we got out Cosmic Encounter and started setting it up... and Mwinzi showed up right about then! Yay! So we played our first game of Cosmic, which DJ showed up about halfway through. First game we chose powers by picking four cards, you choose a power for yourself, then throw out 2, and put another into the middle, and we'd randomly redistribute the ones in the middle to all players. I ended up as Warpish (I picked) and Amoeba (I got randomly and never used). Most of the other powers weren't particularly interesting except that Nykkel was Silencer, and Farren was Vacuum (which meant he kept feeding the warp!), and Jon was Seeker/Pavlov which was really annoying. I really like Warpish :) Phaedrus tried to convince me that I wasn't allowed to "accidentally forget" to take a token out of the warp at the start of my turn, but I invoked Nykkel, and we found the rules that said I sure as hell was! Anyway, the funny thing is... I honestly don't remember who won the first game. I'm dead serious. I seem to recall it involved Nykkel totally getting screwed over towards the end and someone winning on the next turn because I was just like "ACK MAKE THIS GAME END". I hate being in a game with Silencer... unless it's me :)
We ate pizzas and Phaedrus left, and so DJ played with us for our second CE game, which we had two moons per system and we started with Hidden Powers. And our way of selecting powers was pretty interesting -- we got a random order for the players, and then we went through three rounds in order of people nominating powers to be chosen from -- after we had 15 powers we'd deal them out randomly to everyone and you'd choose two of the three (Thus you might not even get any of the powers you nominated, so I tried to nominate powers I liked playing and wouldn't mind having people use against me). Everyone was so sure I'd pick Mesmer that I kept stalling... first round I nominated Sniveller, second round I nominated Zombie... then I gave in and did Mesmer third. I was so sure that Nykkel would nominate Terrorist :) but instead he picked Loser, Mirror, and Sorcerer. Jon nominated Vulch and Empath and Philanthropist, DJ nominated all annoying shit like Demon and Wrack, and I think Farren picked Pacifist and Magnet and something, but the final powers ended up being -- Nykkel: Mesmer Sorcerer, Me: Loser Mirror, DJ: Philanthropist Wrack, Jon: Vulch Sniveler, Farren: Pacifist and... I'm blanking. Yeah. In the end, Jon and Robert shared the win with an Emotion Control, and there's not too much I want to talk about the gameplay except:
Loser Mirror is a total mindscrew for you *and* your opponents.
I swear, all of my cards were between 5 and 7 for most of the game... but I kept playing this psyching game. See, Loser has the power to say "upset" before cards are played, and the lower total will win and the higher total will loser. Mirror, after cards are played but before they're revealed, can say "I'm switching the digits of the cards." So it'd be like... say I had 2 tokens in the challenge, my opponents had 7-8... and I was going to play a 6... I'd think "Hmm, should I mirror? Or Loser?" And then I'd guess what kinda cards they were going to play, and decide on the two options, and I think all except twice did I guess completely correct and outguess the opponent and win. The second time I didn't, sadly, was when I would have won if I'd guessed right. One of the funniest was one time that Nykkel attacked me and we were both mindgaming, since Sorcerer has the option of switching the face-down cards :) I can't remember exactly how it went, but I deliberated for a while over whether to Loser, and then declared smugly whether I was... then Nykkel sat there deliberating over whether he should switch the cards... ("Therefore, you would have put the poison in front of me!") Then after that, I decided whether to mirror them... we revealed cards, and I won :) I think that was seriously one of my favorite moments of the night, for whatever reason. Something about beating Nykkel with his own powers :)
Yeah, so. After that, we took out, and I am not kidding, the Pop'n'Music Card Game. DJ brought it over... it's SO CUTE! Nykkel sat there reading the instructions since they were all in Japanese... I tried to glance over his shoulder, but he did a great job of reading it and I figured I didn't need to, so instead I sat around looking at all the cards with everyone else going "ooh!" about all the various characters. Anyway, it was a pretty cute game. It's kinda vaguely like Uno, but... they have the Pop'n characters, and you have numbered cards, in different colors, and you have to clear characters to get them, and the game ends when someone gets rid of all their cards, and the different cards make people draw stuff or whatnot, and there's even a Battle Mode card or two. Dude. I think DJ won if I recall correctly. I don't think it really mattered :) I was all like "I HAVE THE SANA AND RIE CARD!!!" and whatnot.
After that we should have given up and gone home, but I really wanted to try out Karaoke Revolution (the Japanese version, which Nykkel ordered a few weeks ago). Despite how scared I am of singing solo for real in front of people (choir doesn't count), I decided to just suck it up and try a bunch of songs. I kicked ass on a few, and I utterly failed a few others (![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
crackoon would be ashamed of me as I couldn't pass 桃色片思い). The first song I tried was "Best Friend" by Kiroro... which I had heard ninety thousand times when I was in Japan in the summer of 2001, so it went over pretty well :) I did some others ("However" by Glay, which I've heard a billion times but couldn't remember the exact melody), um... I whooped ass on 桜の時 by Aiko, and Jon and I tried to read そばかす by Judy and Mary, which I think I did pretty well on :) I made DJ do 天体観測 by Bump of Chicken, and I forget what else. We played a couple other songs just to hear them and whatnot.
The general thing is that I can read Japanese just fine but not quite fast enough to sing it, y'know? :)
But, everyone somehow put up with my singing for half an hour and except for an extreme case of being super-nervous about singing in front of everyone, I had a lot of fun with it :) I need to go actually look at the lyrics to some of the songs in the game... so next time it won't be quite as much sight-reading the words. I should probably just break down and buy the damned game, although I'm thinking I might just wait until after the winter holidays so I can get a whole bunch of the discs that are coming out next month.
And I have kept my streak of still never doing Karaoke in anything but Japanese :)
After that Farren gave me a ride home. I logged into PP for a little while to say goodbye to Russel, who's going off to the Air Force for two months or something. Oddly, I really hated Russel when I first started playing and first met him, he was just really mean and annoying, but then as I stopped being a newbie he started being nicer to me and his sense of humor and attitude grew on me, and I was actually kinda sad to see him go. Especially since he's another semi-local person, so it's another timezone person gone. Oh well. I also found out that Fronsac and I have some RL friends in common from the east coast :) I didn't stay on PP too long, and went to sleep without writing an LJ entry.
Today I got up and played PP :) I jobbed forryani and his Mad Mutineers, including the illustrious Tronstad/rsinnott. We did a gem run from Byrne to Epsilon. I got to carp a few leagues and got myself up to Solid/Grand-Master in carp, and then navved Cnossos-Guava because I'm still missing a league point. Was fun stuff. Then I went pillaging with my crew for a while. Alpha to Horseshoe Crabs and back... foraged two Leushite, lost one in a battle, beat haste back to Alpha, sold it, still had a decent take to give people money...
...and had to log the fuck off so I could take a shower and change and whatnot in like 10 minutes to be ready for Josh to pick me up. Har, I just barely made it, it took me 14 minutes total and Josh was there in 12 minutes.
D&D was good, I think we're within 2 sessions of the end of the campaign at this rate. We had pizza and brownies and chex party mix and... so, our party got up to the city we'd been travelling to, and it's under siege by lots of weird undead things. My character wildshaped to a bird and flew in to spy on them, and found out a bit about the layout of the city and the creatures guarding it... then I was like "HEY, I have Water Breathing as a spell. Let's go see if there's a way in underground?" So I cast it on Justin and Mike's characters, 5 hours each, and they went in to walk along the bottom of the sea looking for sewer grates. Found a whole bunch! Yay! Then they had a few battles with skeletons, un-yay. But they got out okay and now we think we have a plan to assault the city. In theory. We'll see.
Either way, I had some funny D&D ideas:
1) Make an infusion of Tree Shape... crumble it into someone's porridge... they eat it, and turn into a tree for 5 hours! Har!
2) Turn our whole party into trees when we camp. As a tree, we could totally sleep standing up.. and what kind of crazy creature would attack a bunch of trees at night?
Yeah, so I was being pretty silly, but it was really fun. I got home and I played a little PP - mostly trying to memorize routes, still unsuccessful. Did the hanging-out thing for a little bit, then logged out so I could do other things like write LJ and manage some files and whatnot. Somehow it's still way too late as usual and now I really need to go to sleep.
I played some Puzzle Pirates in the afternoon. My flag had an "Olympic" matchup in Sea Battle... we lost it horrendously :) But it was kinda fun. We learned that normally one person can do carp bilge, but NOT DURING BATTLE! HAR! It was pretty funny, though... especially since Farren showed up over here right as we were spectacularly losing our second match... so he was looking over my shoulder as we got decimated. Heh.
Well, so it wasn't time to go over to Nykkel's yet at that point, so we played IIDX to waste some time. That was really fun :) I hadn't played in a while and neither had Farren, so we did a lot of Light 7. That was neat! I can still pass a whole bunch of songs, which is good... and my timing is even pretty good, since I got a whole buncha A's and AA's on 5-6 star songs. Shrug.
After an hour or so of IIDX, we went over to Nykkel's house. We were about half an hour late because I second-guessed whether it was time to come over. It was ok. Phaedrus was the only other one who'd shown up at that point. So the four of us stood around talking about Puzzle Pirates for about 15 minutes until I said "ACK I'M HUNGRY AND I WANT TO PLAY BOARD GAMES", so we decided we were all hungry, and ordered some pizzas and talked some more, and Nykkel went out to pick them up and then I made Farren and Phaedrus play Ricochet Robot with me. To their credit they got 7 goals between the two of them :) I feel like I need to make people play it more so that they'll get good and I'll have fun with it again.
Nyk got back and we put the pizzas in the oven and we got out Cosmic Encounter and started setting it up... and Mwinzi showed up right about then! Yay! So we played our first game of Cosmic, which DJ showed up about halfway through. First game we chose powers by picking four cards, you choose a power for yourself, then throw out 2, and put another into the middle, and we'd randomly redistribute the ones in the middle to all players. I ended up as Warpish (I picked) and Amoeba (I got randomly and never used). Most of the other powers weren't particularly interesting except that Nykkel was Silencer, and Farren was Vacuum (which meant he kept feeding the warp!), and Jon was Seeker/Pavlov which was really annoying. I really like Warpish :) Phaedrus tried to convince me that I wasn't allowed to "accidentally forget" to take a token out of the warp at the start of my turn, but I invoked Nykkel, and we found the rules that said I sure as hell was! Anyway, the funny thing is... I honestly don't remember who won the first game. I'm dead serious. I seem to recall it involved Nykkel totally getting screwed over towards the end and someone winning on the next turn because I was just like "ACK MAKE THIS GAME END". I hate being in a game with Silencer... unless it's me :)
We ate pizzas and Phaedrus left, and so DJ played with us for our second CE game, which we had two moons per system and we started with Hidden Powers. And our way of selecting powers was pretty interesting -- we got a random order for the players, and then we went through three rounds in order of people nominating powers to be chosen from -- after we had 15 powers we'd deal them out randomly to everyone and you'd choose two of the three (Thus you might not even get any of the powers you nominated, so I tried to nominate powers I liked playing and wouldn't mind having people use against me). Everyone was so sure I'd pick Mesmer that I kept stalling... first round I nominated Sniveller, second round I nominated Zombie... then I gave in and did Mesmer third. I was so sure that Nykkel would nominate Terrorist :) but instead he picked Loser, Mirror, and Sorcerer. Jon nominated Vulch and Empath and Philanthropist, DJ nominated all annoying shit like Demon and Wrack, and I think Farren picked Pacifist and Magnet and something, but the final powers ended up being -- Nykkel: Mesmer Sorcerer, Me: Loser Mirror, DJ: Philanthropist Wrack, Jon: Vulch Sniveler, Farren: Pacifist and... I'm blanking. Yeah. In the end, Jon and Robert shared the win with an Emotion Control, and there's not too much I want to talk about the gameplay except:
Loser Mirror is a total mindscrew for you *and* your opponents.
I swear, all of my cards were between 5 and 7 for most of the game... but I kept playing this psyching game. See, Loser has the power to say "upset" before cards are played, and the lower total will win and the higher total will loser. Mirror, after cards are played but before they're revealed, can say "I'm switching the digits of the cards." So it'd be like... say I had 2 tokens in the challenge, my opponents had 7-8... and I was going to play a 6... I'd think "Hmm, should I mirror? Or Loser?" And then I'd guess what kinda cards they were going to play, and decide on the two options, and I think all except twice did I guess completely correct and outguess the opponent and win. The second time I didn't, sadly, was when I would have won if I'd guessed right. One of the funniest was one time that Nykkel attacked me and we were both mindgaming, since Sorcerer has the option of switching the face-down cards :) I can't remember exactly how it went, but I deliberated for a while over whether to Loser, and then declared smugly whether I was... then Nykkel sat there deliberating over whether he should switch the cards... ("Therefore, you would have put the poison in front of me!") Then after that, I decided whether to mirror them... we revealed cards, and I won :) I think that was seriously one of my favorite moments of the night, for whatever reason. Something about beating Nykkel with his own powers :)
Yeah, so. After that, we took out, and I am not kidding, the Pop'n'Music Card Game. DJ brought it over... it's SO CUTE! Nykkel sat there reading the instructions since they were all in Japanese... I tried to glance over his shoulder, but he did a great job of reading it and I figured I didn't need to, so instead I sat around looking at all the cards with everyone else going "ooh!" about all the various characters. Anyway, it was a pretty cute game. It's kinda vaguely like Uno, but... they have the Pop'n characters, and you have numbered cards, in different colors, and you have to clear characters to get them, and the game ends when someone gets rid of all their cards, and the different cards make people draw stuff or whatnot, and there's even a Battle Mode card or two. Dude. I think DJ won if I recall correctly. I don't think it really mattered :) I was all like "I HAVE THE SANA AND RIE CARD!!!" and whatnot.
After that we should have given up and gone home, but I really wanted to try out Karaoke Revolution (the Japanese version, which Nykkel ordered a few weeks ago). Despite how scared I am of singing solo for real in front of people (choir doesn't count), I decided to just suck it up and try a bunch of songs. I kicked ass on a few, and I utterly failed a few others (
crackoon would be ashamed of me as I couldn't pass 桃色片思い). The first song I tried was "Best Friend" by Kiroro... which I had heard ninety thousand times when I was in Japan in the summer of 2001, so it went over pretty well :) I did some others ("However" by Glay, which I've heard a billion times but couldn't remember the exact melody), um... I whooped ass on 桜の時 by Aiko, and Jon and I tried to read そばかす by Judy and Mary, which I think I did pretty well on :) I made DJ do 天体観測 by Bump of Chicken, and I forget what else. We played a couple other songs just to hear them and whatnot.The general thing is that I can read Japanese just fine but not quite fast enough to sing it, y'know? :)
But, everyone somehow put up with my singing for half an hour and except for an extreme case of being super-nervous about singing in front of everyone, I had a lot of fun with it :) I need to go actually look at the lyrics to some of the songs in the game... so next time it won't be quite as much sight-reading the words. I should probably just break down and buy the damned game, although I'm thinking I might just wait until after the winter holidays so I can get a whole bunch of the discs that are coming out next month.
And I have kept my streak of still never doing Karaoke in anything but Japanese :)
After that Farren gave me a ride home. I logged into PP for a little while to say goodbye to Russel, who's going off to the Air Force for two months or something. Oddly, I really hated Russel when I first started playing and first met him, he was just really mean and annoying, but then as I stopped being a newbie he started being nicer to me and his sense of humor and attitude grew on me, and I was actually kinda sad to see him go. Especially since he's another semi-local person, so it's another timezone person gone. Oh well. I also found out that Fronsac and I have some RL friends in common from the east coast :) I didn't stay on PP too long, and went to sleep without writing an LJ entry.
Today I got up and played PP :) I jobbed for
ryani and his Mad Mutineers, including the illustrious Tronstad/rsinnott. We did a gem run from Byrne to Epsilon. I got to carp a few leagues and got myself up to Solid/Grand-Master in carp, and then navved Cnossos-Guava because I'm still missing a league point. Was fun stuff. Then I went pillaging with my crew for a while. Alpha to Horseshoe Crabs and back... foraged two Leushite, lost one in a battle, beat haste back to Alpha, sold it, still had a decent take to give people money......and had to log the fuck off so I could take a shower and change and whatnot in like 10 minutes to be ready for Josh to pick me up. Har, I just barely made it, it took me 14 minutes total and Josh was there in 12 minutes.
D&D was good, I think we're within 2 sessions of the end of the campaign at this rate. We had pizza and brownies and chex party mix and... so, our party got up to the city we'd been travelling to, and it's under siege by lots of weird undead things. My character wildshaped to a bird and flew in to spy on them, and found out a bit about the layout of the city and the creatures guarding it... then I was like "HEY, I have Water Breathing as a spell. Let's go see if there's a way in underground?" So I cast it on Justin and Mike's characters, 5 hours each, and they went in to walk along the bottom of the sea looking for sewer grates. Found a whole bunch! Yay! Then they had a few battles with skeletons, un-yay. But they got out okay and now we think we have a plan to assault the city. In theory. We'll see.
Either way, I had some funny D&D ideas:
1) Make an infusion of Tree Shape... crumble it into someone's porridge... they eat it, and turn into a tree for 5 hours! Har!
2) Turn our whole party into trees when we camp. As a tree, we could totally sleep standing up.. and what kind of crazy creature would attack a bunch of trees at night?
Yeah, so I was being pretty silly, but it was really fun. I got home and I played a little PP - mostly trying to memorize routes, still unsuccessful. Did the hanging-out thing for a little bit, then logged out so I could do other things like write LJ and manage some files and whatnot. Somehow it's still way too late as usual and now I really need to go to sleep.