Games and Wanderings!

So this evening I went to play games at Bo's place.

He's one of the people that came to Card-board club (the gaming group), but stopped because of a class scheduled at that time. He always had some pretty unique games, and knew far more about the good ones. A good player, someone who wants to win, will grill you a bit playfully, but handles losing and winning alike gracefully. It took a bit to find his apartment, but I got there around 7, and Dylan arrived right after.

So it was Bo, his wife Amy, Dylan, and me. What did we play?

First, we played an interesting game called Pandemic It's a cooperative game where you're a CDC team trying to crack down on four separate outbreaks of disease. Each of you is a character (Medic, Scientist, Researcher, Operations Specialist, Dispatcher) with a certain special ability, and you are trying to keep the diseases suppressed until you research all four cures. Every turn, you move around a map of the world, stopping diseases and so on. Then you draw your two cards. Then you draw two, three, or four cities to put more disease in. If you drew an infection card from one of the decks, then there is a new pocket of disease to take care of. And... if a disease gets too much disease, it spreads to other cities, an outbreak. 8 or 9 outbreaks and you lose. If there's too much disease on the map, you lose. If you run out of cards to draw, you lose.

The first game, we had too many outbreaks. They just started cropping up faster than we could suppress them, caused partially by two infections in a row.

The second game was much better run. I was the scientist, which meant I could concoct cures faster. The game finally came down to the last four cards in the draw pile. We needed one more cure. So we had to work out a way to get the cards we needed to me, in a certain number of actions. Finally it worked out. Barely. All of Africa was diseased. North America wasn't much better off, and Europe was being overwhelmed. New York was on total quarantine and recovering, but Milan was a festering wound.

Anyway, then we played a recycling game, which Bo won in a tiebreaker with Dylan. Then Amy got tired and retired, and we played this German Yahtzee-like Bingo game. Bo beat me by two, because he had a phenomenal second round.

And finally we played Ticket to Ride, which I've played before. This time though, instead of using the continental United States, we used Switzerland! It's a game of building trains and connecting routes that fulfill your tickets to gain more points. Very simple to learn, but also quite strategic. And excellently made. I got lucky with the tickets I drew (a lot of them were part of the same route, so it didn't take much to fulfill them once I had one route finished), and so I ended up fulfilling ten of them, more than anyone else. My score was 113, compared to Dylan's 90-something and Bo being in the... high 70s, I think.

But yes, it was fun. Why "Wanderings" as the title, though?

Well, to get to Bo's place, I took the interstate. To go back, I went on roads, trying to reverse-engineer the directions he had provided. I didn't, but had an interesting ride anyhow. Things I saw:

A train crossing closed because a train was going across it.
A man on a bridge in a jacket blowing in the wind, lit by a spotlight, giving a news report.
Another campus of Pellissippi State.
A brief one-way street which required me to detour through a park to get around it.

... that's about it, actually, but it was interesting. I knew what direction I was going, and there were points (like when I hit S. Concord or Western Ave.) when I knew where I was, or at least the street I was on, but then I would try going my meandering way again. I ended up going around to the far side of campus and coming back, but it was fine. And fun.