I rose at 6, having woken to prove hydration once, but without any other side effects from travel. I was happy to sleep in my own bed (cleaned of doggy stuff) and sleep. I made the bed, and I checked that there were no remains of Hank the Dog’s ploy to own the bed. It is mine again!
I found my way to the coffee, ground more OP Bean from Portland, and performed the purification and summoning rituals necessary to grant the boon of decent Pacific-style coffee product. I ignored the luggage still stuffed with clothing needing laundering after my visit to NYC and Hope 2026.
I started writing the blog and updating my transactions in Quicken. Just a reminder to readers (and new readers) that I connect Quicken to most of my banks, credit cards, and investment accounts, keep a running balance, and watch all accounts. There are bad actors out there, and my IRA balance and Social Security payments are what I have to live on for the rest of my life. It is important to watch and act. Also, with all my traveling, it is important to check that none of my account information has gone astray. Thus, I am disciplined about checking this every day. I try not to look at my IRA balance all the time, but it is fun, I have to admit, to measure the markets this way.
I manage to write most of the story, but I run out of time before I finish and to decorate the blog with media. I rush to the shower, then quickly dress in a T-shirt and grab some of my pencils from The Observatory and the NYC Library. Air VW the Gray is fully charged. I unplug it (forgetting to shut the door and pull over to fix that a mile into my trip), and head out to Richard’s for our 9:30 Tuesday game of the cooperative tabletop board game ISS Vanguard. This game was released a few years ago and finally made it to the table: James’s copy with pre-painted figures. It uses an app, books, and a complex system to simulate a Sci-fi story about a ship, the ISS Vanguard, traveling the universe and trying to understand a secret of the ancients. We have the advantage of videos, gaming aids, and some helpful add-ons from early adopters.
I am tired and jet-lagged and find it a little hard to be patient, but I let Richard and James mostly run the ship administration with just a few suggestions from me. Stories are important to me, and I remember more of the events in previous plays. Richard focuses on rules and efficiency, power gaming, or Min/Maxing in role-playing game terms. James wants to try everything and take a lot of risks. He wants to miss nothing from his investment. I am looking for a flow that advances the story without the farming and repetitiveness of video games. I search for the keys to open the locks in the game. I push to move forward.
It takes us to noon to work out a landing party. We manage to finish some necessary upgrades in the game and then return to a planet that we had visited before. We discover that we need to record more information and have to repeat the planet, but we select our first-rank characters to move them up a rank. We play one character in a landing party, and then we have one we share. I passed on playing a second one; it was my turn, as I was jet-lagged and felt I would be challenged with one. I was right, and James did struggle to play two.
The material is copyrighted, and I cannot recount it here. I managed to fall into some mistakes I made before, with a bad roll. This time, James recorded the final state of the planet, meaning we can return to it if we wish to skill up some more first-rank, but we will not repeat much of it (including getting infected with a suit-penetrating goo that I managed to get infected with again).
We lost no characters, though one of mine and one of James’s were injured and placed in the med-bay. We managed to level up and even expand our capabilities. We are trying to upgrade our ship and we only got some upgrades. We will be scrounging the area for tech and science until we can proceed to the rest of the systems on our map.
Traffic on the way back from Richards was slow, and I wasted another 30 minutes. I usually don’t care, but today I had a Call of Cthulhu role-playing game to run at Rune & Board, “A Time for Sacrifice: Chapter One, Egg Out of Time.” I was in the original Kickstarter and have the prop set that goes with it. I needed to get my head back into this.
I grabbed a Western Burger from Carl’s Jr, a guilty pleasure, and it was unusually good. I got it at the drive-thru on TV Highway and Murphy. I munched it on the way home in slow-moving local traffic. I then got my laptop and my food and started to crash-read the adventure. I missed a few connections, but I had the basics back in my mind. I was surprised how little I had retained.
I managed to muddle through and discovered that the pre-made handouts were not marked. I also had a book of glyphs that I handed out, and M@ and Emma enjoyed translating the glyphs presented in the adventure. Also, one translation booklet was helpful for the props. Emma read the journals and summarized them.
The adventure is escape rooms, puzzles, and running away. M@ and Emma enjoyed this mix, and scoring impossible rolls allowed them to complete the adventure without too much insanity (M@ managed to roll a failure of 00 on one sanity check). We were able to hit the fast-forward without much trouble at the end, and at 8:45 we were packed and out as Bone & Board closed.
Emma and I then did drinks at The 649 and a snack (nothing too crazy, cheese fondue, as I have a colonoscopy coming up on Monday). We talked about the game and some family things. No insanity-causing secrets were revealed. No unusual family-tree members with strange and deep connections to the sea.
I took Emma home, and I was very tired but happy to have completed my week in NYC and the next day of playing games.
Alohawild (Michael Wild's) Website 