Today was my first time playing games with the group in Portland. I have not played in over a year. We all kept the masks on. It felt safe and it was so nice to play again with more than two players!
The drive back from Portland was pleasant as usual on a late Friday. Richard hosted a game at his house not far from the Boardway and the mall in the same area in Portland. Four of us played On Mars. This is a worker placement, engine building, and resource management game. The theme is building the mars colonies, and the winner is the player who best helps the colonies. This is a giant game of such complex rules it took an overview video an hour to cover the basics. It is also a Kickstarter game, and thus there is some added complexity you don’t usually find in games that go straight to retail sales.
I had a grasp of most of the basic rules. According to my records, I had played once before, and that and a refresher video stopped me from making mistakes. I could not understand the strategy, and I did not understand the engine building of combining blueprints and scientists. I have to play again and try some of the engine building. Nonetheless, coming in dead last, I still enjoyed the game and look forward to another chance to work out the game’s systems. I spent my first turns building for mars and helping to uplift the colony to a better life. I pulled ahead for a while, but I did not buy the scientists and blueprints I would need later for the high-scoring end-of-game items.
One small complaint, the game is not immersive. The player must pay more attention to the game mechanics than the mars theme. There is nothing simple in this game. Even turn order is complex.
All of this happened before I took Susie to Taco Bell. As usual, we drove through and then parked the car and had our in-car picnic. I wanted Susie to have some dinner before I headed out to Richard’s at 5:15. The trip to Richard’s had some traffic, but I managed to be on time.
I stopped working for the shoe company in the late afternoon. I had finally finished all the patches requested (SAP OSS notes for those who know this stuff) and created a request to check my implementation to the vendor (a high incident again for those who speak SAP). This started, again, about lunchtime and went on for hours as I applied each one after another.
I had to get special access for some fixes, and for others, I had to request others to do the changes. I can make software changes, but I won’t change the software setting (config, again for our folks who know SAP). I am happy the base changes are in.
I have a meeting with India time on Sunday night (10PM PDT).
The day started at about 7:30ish, and I was dressed and ready for the first hour of Zoom meetings at 8:30. I did miss one status meeting as I was busy trying to fix one issue.
777 people in the USA died from Covid-19 today.
Today’s hymn is Saranam, Saranam from Pakistan.
Alohawild (Michael Wild's) Website 