Another long weekend

[kathygnome]

We had another wonderfully extended long weekend. That's more or less what I've settled into. Taking the day before a long weekend to create a 4 day mini-vacation.

It was great. I did some really good pizza. I'm getting very very good at the crust. I also roasted a chicken that came out just perfect, which is not always the case. Frequently it's too greasy or not moist. Or just otherwise isn't that great. Roast chicken is just one of those things that is absolutely wonderful when it's perfect, but despite the apparent simplicity is very easy to mess up. But this was just everything you could ever want a roast chicken to be. 

The Nora-Creature is doing great. We went out shopping for her and got her a flock of new things. She was less than thrilled with the trip itself and I can't say I disagree. Brats R Us had to be well over 80' F. We did find some nice things and she desperately needed some new clothes as she's outgrowing the 3-6.

We also took the opportunity to grab Chinese takeaway. Yum!

The final little thing this weekend is we got a couple of new games. The Catan card game, now renamed Rivals of Catan. And Castle Ravenloft, the D&D board game. We got a chance to try the latter yesterday. It's designed for cooperative play and there's a system that builds the dungeon and sort of automates the monsters and traps. I thought it was fantastic, but Janna found it a bit confusing. I'm hoping she likes it better when she's more used to it.

It's not perfect, but it will do. In particular it seems like it should be balanced a bit more towards 2 or 3 players--after all if you had 5, why wouldn't you just play D&D? That, I think, could be solved by having more "hybrid" type characters. I can't remember, does D&D4E even have hybrid characters? It also has, I think, a bit too many traps and they frequently deal a lot of damage without a lot of chance to avoid or disarm them before doing so. But in terms of a way to play dungeon crawl D&D without a group or DM, it's really pretty good.

Comments

[kithial.livejournal.com]

While I agree that if you have 5 people into D&D, you would probably want to play D&D, this could be a good substitute if no one wanted to GM or no one had any ideas for a campaign that night. Or to give the GM a break -- at least once while STing Changeling I held a high tea for my players and told them to just RP all night so I could have a chance to re-charge. Anyway, the game does sound interesting; one thing our group out here likes is coordinate boardgames (Pandemic and its expansions being our number one). Thanks for the tip!

~kit~

[kathygnome.livejournal.com]

There's supposed to be a sequel coming out next month that will be more of a standard dungeon rather than the undead setting. But it did give a good "feel" of old style D&D.

I'll have to look at Pandemic. Good with two players? That's our big one.