For Nothing Days, a lot is happening!

[spindizzy]

I usually refer to the days between Christmas and New Year as The Nothing Days, because nothing really HAPPENS this week and nothing feels like it really counts, but I've actually been BUSY AS HELL.

• Came back to Nottingham, and Lex and I have spent the last two days hanging out with JosephTansley and madebyjenni!
  
  • They accidentally ended up with enough turkey to feed the five thousand, so we've nobly been helping them with that. I am not joking. There was A LOT OF TURKEY.
  
  
  • We've been playing Ticket To Ride expansions! We played Old West, France, and Pennsylvania, and... Well.
    
    • Old West suited my playstyle the most, because I will build one incredibly long route that everything's connected to in any form of Ticket to Ride, because THAT'S HOW YOU WIN. But it introduces towns that you can build, which means that if ANYONE builds a train line going into or out of that town, you get the points instead of them. And then Joe and Jenni accidentally locked down every route in and out of Denver except the ones that would give them both fifteen points. And ALL FOUR OF US needed to go to Denver. I swear there was nearly bloodshed.
    
    
    • We played Pennsylvania as a warm-down, because it's way more straightforward. Plays like regular Ticket to Ride, but most of the routes now offer shares? Like "stocks and"? So unless you're good at cardcounting, which sithe is and the rest of us are NOT, it means that the winner is way less obvious than in other expansions! Because it's not just who completes the most tickets, but also who actually scores what off the shares. That said, first time we played it, I accidentally went round the board twice and won with something ridiculous like 230 points, and the second time all but one of my five routes started in Buffalo so I was contractually OBLIGED to make them all one track.
    
    
    • France was the one that we were expecting to be the most cut-throat, because it has TWO weird new mechanics. One is that most of the tracks don't have pre-defined colours on them; whenever you take cards, you get to put down tracks of whatever colour you want. The other is that some of the tracks overlap, so if one person builds a route that overlaps other potential tracks, those can't be used anymore. And did I mention that there aren't enough coloured track segments to actually fill the entire map? So yes, we all expected that to end in tears and actually we were all very civil! No blood was shed, there was minimal name-calling, and no one stole anyone else's tracks irrevocably. It could have gone so much worse!
  
  
  • We played Colt Express! Which is a train robbery game, and I'm here for it. As far as I can tell, it's like Robo Rally in that you all set your cards before anyone's actions resolve, but better because everyone sets their actions sequentially and no one has to know their lefts from their rights. It does still end with you trying to fight someone who isn't there anymore, but the most fun bit for me was tactically deploying the Marshall (who throws you off the train) to either get rid of people or as a free way to escape to the train roof. I didn't win, but I DID have fun. (And accidentally ended up shooting Joe's character a lot, and getting Jenni shot by the Marshall or the train passengers. WHOOPS.)
  
  
  • Jenni got the expansion for Port Royal that gives it a story mode! ... Which is only printed in German. Which only Lex speaks. So Jenni, bless her, has been scavenging translations from Imgur and Boardgame Geek, and actually writing out what the cards are supposed to say on stickers that she's sticking to the cards, and between Lex and Google Translate, they've managed to puzzle out most of it I think? We played the first chapter of it today and it's FUCKING NAILS though! Like, you have to complete a bunch of objectives AND get a certain amount of points AND you're on a timer, which is... Pretty much the opposite of how regular Port Royal plays. We're pretty sure we've missed something really obvious about how we're supposed to play, because it has crushed us each time.


• Discovered that if I want to play Mario Kart/trade Pokémon with people who don't live in my house, I have to pay for a Nintendo subscription. DAMMIT CAPITALISM, JUST LET ME LIVE MY LIFE AND CRUSH JILL WITH MY ADORABLE POKÉMON.


• I want to start my planning for the New Year, but also I'm caught up in how much stuff I've left undone that I meant to get done during the Nothing Days and blatantly haven't. I'm doing a quick shuffle around to see what I CAN get wrapped up before Wednesday, but I'm not hopeful. On the plus side, I'm doing sensible things like "reducing my Goodreads goal by 20" and "trying to triage what is actually important to me to get done," so maybe this is what character growth feels like?


• I promise that next year I'm going to try to take on FEWER PROJECTS. Like, I'm not going to remove the "NO, FEWER THAN THAT, PUT SOME BACK" reaction image from its hotlist place on my phone, but I'm going to try to make everything a little more achievable. It helps that at the start of December I actually made a list of all of the bits and pieces that I've already committed to in 2020, so I've got sort of a sense of scale? Not sure how to apply it, but definitely smaller reading goals and fewer weekly/fortnightly commitments, because it turns out that that DOESN'T WORK FOR ME. ... Levelling up is hard and I'm doing my best is basically what I'm saying here.


• Tune in tomorrow for me screeching about Past!Susan leaving all of this work for me and hoping that Future!Susan will be a mensch and take some of it off my hands!