Day 17: Saturday

I managed to get started around 9AM. The air quality was lower today, and the lack of wind left the smog building in the valleys. My chest feels like a vice–the usual bad air feeling. I will use my inhaler all day, and that provides some relief.

I made NYC Zabar’s coffee in my French Press today (thanks, Cat, for bringing that from the source) and had just a banana. I then wrote the blog for the remains of the morning. I wrote over 1,200 words–more than I expected. I tried to publish it, but the email version was hung on the server until I discovered it this evening. The Facebook version was out when I finished it. Puke!

I jumped into the shower, dressed, grabbed my Dungeons and Dragons stuff, and boarded Air Volvo. It is about thirty minutes to M@ house, our Dungeon Master who hosts and runs the game. M@ made burgers for us. M@ and others practice Keto, and so he had something appropriate. Our Vegan player was exposed to something and thought it best to isolate, so he did not join us with a salad and other Vegan positive foods.

While it is wrong to cover the details here as others might play this adventure, and some of the content is purchased and copywritten, I will cover some. We are playing a Spelljammer 5E version of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). This is a sword and sorcery in a space setting. My cleric, evil and lawful–highly effective and an excellent, if not violent ally, had a vision. He would conquer and rule a flying fortress. My cleric worships the concept of war and is unimaginatively named War. Our player playing a fighter believed that it would be a great battle. Our ranger believed that our adventure would make a great song. So we were all in.

We first fought a small ship in orbit, and it was close. We fought off the initial brutal attack with my cleric using up all of his best spells. Our ship has a ram, and it finished off the bad guys (remembering that I play an evil character) with remote spells. They ran out of air. This led us to find the real bad guys.

We flew our Spelljammer and pretended to be the bad guys while my cleric was pretending to be an ambassador from the God of War–not far from the truth. In the game, our luck held to an insane level, and we reached the throne room. By even more insane luck, we were expected (apparently, another cleric was late for his/her/appointment).

It was a fun game. I will likely miss the next session while I am in Texas next month.

After the game ended, I headed to Oak Hills McMenamins for a light dinner. I ordered clam chowder and a Ruby (locally made raspberry wheat ale). I ate that and decided to head to Portland early and tour Guardian Games’s huge building. I had not heard from Richard if we were on for a game.

Air Volvo faced light traffic and no surprises on the dark Oregon Mist-covered roads. I arrived at Guardian Games and saw that one table remained open for a large group. I hope to play my D&D 5E adventure again there after the holidays with Corwin and Kathleen. I did not find anything I needed, which was unusual, and I got a text saying we were on for games tonight.

Darwin’s Journey is a working placement and resource management with unique mechanics to unlock options and improvements for your workers. I like the game but score at the bottom as it takes a while to remember how to play, and the game has only four rounds–every choice is important. We played with four players: Shawn and his wife Val, joining Richard and me. Richard crushed us, and Val and I missed a few things, sending us to the bottom of the scoring.

If you like a heavy game with layers of complexity, this is one of the medium-difficult ones that lose the theme in the mechanics. I did lead the game for a while, but I made some mistakes and soon slipped to last place and stayed there only chasing Val. Next time.

We played a card game after that, which was fun, with Shawn winning. After that, I headed out and took the large ramps and bridges to get home, but without issue and nothing scary this time. It was the right mix of Oregon Mist and darkens to hide the heights of the ramps and bridges.

I arrived home, no neighbor cats demanding to be fed, and headed to the in-home office to write the blog.

I am headed back to the coast on Sunday. Thanks for reading. Sorry if it feels rushed tonight–it is.