Saturday and back to games and writing

Now that I am home and have handled all the laundry and bills, it is time to return to writing and drinking local products!

Air VW the Gray had me back at the house just before midnight. The drive proved I was in the Greater Portland Area, not California. The general traffic was just above the speed limit, with other pockets of drivers going 5 or more under for reasons that were not obvious. Then, a blur would pass on the right, dodge between cars, changing lanes and sliding by cars somehow going sideways at high speeds, then disappearing into an exit, going too fast to safely enter Portland’s streets, sort of a ghost rider of Portland’s highways.

I had dropped Kathleen off at her house outside of Portland to the northwest after we had met at Richard’s to play games. I retraced my trek back towards Beaverton and arrived safely—though haunted as I described, having spent only 10% of the charge. We had met at Richard’s for our usual Saturday night board game.

Lauren and Richard met us there, and Kathleen took the bus to get there. Tonight, we played another new board game, Autobahn (2022), that Richard has meant to get on the table for some time. The game is set in Germany and themed on Germany’s post-war and post-Cold War rebuilding and commerce.

The game is an efficiency race without engine building and a minimal scoring system. It is hard to score as it uses a strange election system and promotion system for scoring. This kind of game, without extra goals and scoring systems, is my favorite. Richard would beat my score, knowing a few more things than I did, but only by less than 15 points. Lauren and Kathleen tried to be generalists, which was a good strategy for an engine-building game or a game with various scoring systems, but this game was just a race, and their scores reflected this. You go with your strength when learning a new game.

The components did not fit together well. The map was busy and could have been 20% larger. The use of money was limited, but the cash generation was complex and required maintenance and calculations. Various superpowers could be earned but only provided small changes, usually only once. These were represented by small cardboard squares (cards with explanations would have been better). I spent the game upgrading and building roads and nearly took the game. While I like efficiency race games, this one seemed unfinished. I would play it again. I would like to see if I could do even better or if I like it. I try not to decide about a game that I only played once.

Before heading to Richards’s, I spent the afternoon at The Lucky Labrador in Portland’s Hawthorn area. I was happy to get parking in their lot instead of risking the EV on the streets. A backgammon tournament was ongoing (with a cash prize, I saw later when the winner was declared–a shy-looking woman), and the strange keyboard group was meeting. They had various old and/or decorative keyboards on display with cards describing the hardware and its owner. Mainly, folks were displaying their personal collection of keyboards, drinking beer, and having a good time. I have seen the group before.

I drank a few beers and ate a bowl of peanuts. I spent the afternoon writing my SciFi story in Scrivener. I managed to get a 1,700+ word total for the first chapter. I am looking for about 3,000 words for the first chapter. I am not sure how many chapters yet. I am still reading about how to compose more extended works. I usually finish between 500 and 8,000 words for a micro-story or a short story, and I have never tried 100,000 words!

I do not rewrite, but I add more descriptions (I am guilty of the software engineer’s proclivity in writing the minimum features for the product) and smooth the transitions (again, software engineers always have issues with interfacing). There is no deadline, and I want to build an image in the reader’s mind of the magic and main characters in the story. I have a general storyline in my mind, but I know the power (and risks) of stream-of-consciousness writing; I let the writing carry me along, edit out repeats, and fix mangled thoughts. When writing, I create some parts of the story, mythology, and magic system.

I spent the hours writing and drinking two beers. A group of folks were playing chess, and one game went on for over an hour. I peeked at it a few times and saw that black had started to win. The black finally exchanged out most of the pieces and overwhelmed the remaining pieces for white. I wrote, edited, and polished the story.

Before this, I woke up at around 7 a.m., found coffee (making it too weak again), made toast from the milk bread I made in the bread machine, and enjoyed a banana. I wrote the blog, doom-scrolled (reading the news as a liberal), and updated my transactions in Quicken. The last bills from my California trip are coming in, and my new bills for the upcoming Michigan trip (April 10-17) have started to appear.

With the blog done, I clean up, shower, shave, dress, etc., and soon board the VW, which is now at 100% charge, and head to Portland.

And that, dear reader, brings me full circle. Thanks for reading.