Tagged with miniatures …

11.02.01 [Tuesday]
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games

my urge to paint is rising

I played Blood Bowl on Saturday and it was more fun than I remember it being back a decade ago. The big difference for me was not playing Lizardmen, which I’ve since learned are a tough team to play well. There are so many interesting decisions to make in a Blood Bowl game, even if you don’t care about the score.

On Saturday I was using a Norse team (sans werewolves) against a team of dwarves. My players got pulped because they don’t wear armour, but I managed to shove a dwarf into my own end zone so he couldn’t keep running down the clock and mauling my players. Then I pulled off an amazingly lucky passing play to score and end the first half. The second half saw me score again, but just a bit too early so the dwarves had time to rumble down the field and tie it up in the last turn of the game. My opponent was really nice and didn’t show too much impatience with my figuring out which order to make blocks in so as to maximize my chances of not failing.

All in all it was pretty fun. I like playing fragile guys who have a chance at making plays. I don’t think I’ll continue with a Norse team though. The passing game has too much allure.

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11.01.16 [Sunday]
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games, vancouver

playing my sabbath away

Today has been such a nice day. I got my paper for my Instructional Role class finished last night, so today was a day of rest. And by rest I mean games. There’s a game store, Strategies, a walkable distance from my house here and on Friday when it was so beautiful in the afternoon I headed down there and picked up the new Space Hulk card game.

I love Space Hulk a healthy amount. The actual board/miniatures game is one of my favourite games ever, because of its incessant against-all-odds drama. The card game captures a good amount of that in a more abstract manner. You’re still controlling a squad of armoured marines in a derelict space ship filled with aliens that’ll claw you to pieces at a moment’s notice. But there’s no map, just areas you travel through, with terrain for genestealers to spawn in.

The main reason I picked it up was because it can be played with 1-6 people and it’s cooperative. When we play regular Space Hulk one person is the Genestealers and it’s always kind of a hard thing because you sort of instinctively root for the humans. In the card game all the humans are a team against the cruel cards of fate. It works pretty well. I’ve played solitaire twice now to get a handle on the rules and one game was very quick and deadly to me (100% mortality in the third room), but I achieved victory in the other one.

The other part of my day was spent painting Blood Bowl figures. Well, they’re actually a Celt warband, but I didn’t give them any weapons and posed them like football players. They were much cheaper than actual Blood Bowl figs. I’d put these guys together months ago when I was making Sean’s wedding present, but hadn’t gotten around to painting them. But Strategies is having a Blood Bowl tournament in a couple of weeks. If my homework stays on schedule I might be able to go play. It’s been years since I played Blood Bowl so I want to be ready.

Now I get to laze away my evening and count my weekend a success.

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10.08.26 [Thursday]
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games, library, 中国

back from the red

There hasn’t been news for a month and a bit as I was off in China. My amazingly talented girlfriend (Holly – yeah, stuff happened this trip) has a bakery in Nanchong and I got to hang out for almost the entire first month of it being open. I arrived on day five or something like that. And because of how doing anything in China works, it felt very different by the time we left. Not that the bakery itself felt much different (though displays were being moved around all the time and new paintings were being added, so the appearance did change somewhat) but the getting into the swing of the bakery and how it would work and look in the future morphed a lot.

Anyway, I got to be Holly’s photographer, dishwasher and white boy in the window (I figure was responsible for about half a sale per day I sat out front, enticing people to see what the waiguoren was eating) while I was there. Also learned about all the decision-making crap you do as a small business owner. I’m probably a better employee/independent contractor kind of person than I would be owner/boss material.

And now I’m off to Vancouver for library school. I move tomorrow. I have two checked bags and two carry-on, which is insane to me, and everything else I need (and a pile of crap I probably don’t) has been sent. DJS5ers, there’s some stuff at Reyn’s for you. Some miniatures and games I didn’t want to get rid of but didn’t want to cart across the country with me. A pair of slippers and a baseball bat (those’d be for Sean).

I’ll be back writing again. In a new place I feel like I’ll probably have a bit more to say.

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10.04.29 [Thursday]
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games, library

sucker and a suckup

I’m volunteering for my first library conference in May, the Manitoba Libraries Association thingy here in Winnipeg. We had our first meeting last night down at Millennium Library.

I’m doing this for a couple of reasons. One is because hey, I’m going to be doing a bunch of these once I get to library school so I might as well get my first one out of the way. I have no idea how the age breakdown of my class at UBC is, but if I’m going to be old, I want to at least have a bit of experience to go with my white hairs.

The other reason is less about my experience at school and more because I was going through my resume recently and the “volunteer experience” in there is pretty light. I don’t claim my MCC time as volunteering, since I got paid by my school for my teaching. And other than that, well, I suppose I’m a selfish jerk who’d rather paint miniatures than feed the sick or what have you.

Speaking of miniatures, I’m on a 1/300th scale World War II aircraft kick right now. They’re so small and cheap! I got a game, Wings of War: The Dawn of World War II, which Reyn and I played a few games of before he went to Africa, and it’s a bunch of fun. It uses cards for maneuvering and also for the planes, but you can also use figs. The official figures are like $15 each, though they come with maneuver decks which makes them useful in game terms. What I’ve done is bought a few flight bases of the appropriate size and a swarm of these cheap little planes. So far I’ve got some Battle of Britain planes painted up and some Italian and Vichy planes to fight the Free French and RAF in North Africa.

But yes, back to the conference, most of the volunteers, apart from the coordinators, were Red River students. I always forget there’s a library tech program there. I don’t really know what they learn in that program that you wouldn’t learn from working in the library. But it’s a qualificationary foot in the door I suppose, and I’d look pretty stupid calling anyone out for getting one of those.

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