My train goes from Sapporo to Fukuoka

[dr4b]

Today, Benoit came downtown with me again. So I actually took an hour lunch break (gasp!) and we went to Tropics, in the international district. I had figured on either there or Shanghai Garden, and SG was packed with Amazonians. I kinda expected to run into former coworkers, but I guess many of the people I worked with are now gone, and there are ninety billion new people at the company anyway.

Apparently nothing blew up when we did the code rollout yesterday, fortunately.

After work I went to the gym with Megan and Heidi. We were there for like two hours -- we did our leg weight workouts and then went swimming for a while. I smell like the pool! Whee!

bpr and oren came over in the evening. We played Carcassonne, and then Benoit came back, and the four of us played Nippon Rails, which he won because he's a lucky bastard. Damn train games. No, seriously, he always had three contracts he was working on and I think the rest of us got lousy draws -- I never was working on three at once, and I even swapped contracts at one point. I think Oren just kept swapping, too. It was sad. I did start off with Hokkaido though, which was new and different.

The funny part is that I know all of them from Wean, but none of them knew each other. Oren was class of 2000, Brian was class of 2004, and Benoit is a CS grad student. Although they all know chamois, so go figure.

Comments

[dleung8.livejournal.com]

Nippon Rails sounds just like Ticket to Ride. Have you played that before?

[dr4b]

Yeah, of course I've played Ticket to Ride. TtR is a completely different game and much simpler. In the Empire Builder train series, of which Nippon Rails is one of the games, you get contracts to deliver goods to various cities. You have to build tracks on the board by drawing with crayons, and then run your trains from supply cities to delivery cities -- you get money when you deliver your contracts, which you can then use to build more rails, the eventual goal being to connect a certain number of large cities and get a certain amount of money. You get new contracts each time you deliver a contract, and sometimes there are events which mess with the world, too. It's really a much more indepth exercise in graph theory than TtR, too, because different train segments cost more to build (like through terrain such as mountains, alpines, forests, etc)

[nickjong.livejournal.com]

Hey, I know all three of them, too.

Also, I miss you. :o(

[dr4b]

I am wearing my Cameron Mets shirt today. It reminds me of you.

[oren.livejournal.com]

I think from now on before I play a rail game, I should make a cheat sheet and strategy plan. It's too hard to figure it out while playing.