Make That A Five Game Week

Today over my lunch I bought a lottery ticket. Not much of a game considering I exercised the "let the machine pick a random number" option, but I figure if My Guy loses the election I could maybe win 66 million dollars as a consolation prize.

No El Grande or Puerto Rico last night. Instead we played two games of Ticket to Ride and a hand of Bohnanza. I continued to suck at the Bean Game, but I placed 2nd and 3rd in the two games of Ticket. Not bad. Jim is gone next week, off to a big computer geek convention in Pittsburgh, so not much of a chance of playing El Grande. Maybe Puerto Rico is still a possibility.

I'm starting to get the Traveller bug again. Classic Traveller is the game I got to when I'm itching to do something in a simulationist mode. Today it struck me that I could use blogging technology to track some solitaire trading missions, maybe plunk a free trader down on the Spinward Main and try to make a living on speculative cargo runs. I read today on the RPGnet that the Starter Edition of CT had a variant space combat system that used the abstracted range band mechanic. I had that same idea a while back. Maybe I need to track down a copy. Traveller is a good line for the game collector who likes to putz around with his collection, rather than just having them sit on a shelf gathering dust.

Tomorrow night is my Mob War finale. I still have some work to do on it. I'm trying to avoid any overt monkeying with the expectations of the players, like "OH NOs the Basque somehow survived!" and I don't want to amp up the arms race even further (one war surplus flamethrower and a couple of molotovs did that just fine). Given the way the game has unfolded, I'm hoping to sell the fact that this is really the final throwdown with the Tolino Mob will itself carry sufficient dramatic energy to propel the campaign to a conclusion.

In the past couple of days I've embarked upon some tentative explorations in the blogosphere. In the upper githhand corner of this page you ought to see a "next blog" link. Apparently that's a URL shuffler that sends you to a random blogspot blog. Weird, wacky stuff out there. Vapid twit blogs, pornblogs, political blogs, lotsa foreign language blogs, spamblogs, blogs that were started but never posted to, blogs that collate news stories about a single subject, more vapid twit blogs, cosplayers, BDSMblogs, "pro-anorexia" blogs, dog enthusiast blogs, and much much more.