"You insult my noodles, you insult my honor!"

So Monday night I got together with the usual gang. First we played a game of Tigris & Euphrates, a really deep tile-laying with a deceptively simple core mechanic. Everyone around the table is still learning the game, some faster than others. (I.e. I'm slower than the rest.) Every game we've played thus far has been radically different than the preceding ones. This time I had a plan and a method and a strategy and everything. Too bad Bruce interpreted my first play as a blatant attack upon his territory and spent much of the game "counter" attacking my position. I ended up in last place. We played Bohnanza after that and on the second hand I tied with Jim for first place. That was nice.

Thanks to the stupid meeting I had to attend, I got very little done in Dave's Feng Shui game on Wednesday. I did manage to spit out the line quoted as the title of this post, so that was cool. For a sec I thought Sean's Old Master and my guy were going to have to duel. Instead I hired him as a cook. Funny how things work out sometimes. (Though I don't rule out a duel at a later date.) And now Ray's drifter PC also apparently works for me/and or rents a squalid room from me. Why make a drifter and then put down roots at the first opportunity? If I was running a drifter, I'd just wander onto the set sometime near the beginning of each episode with little explanation as to where I'd been since my last appearance. Otherwise, why play a drifter? Do they have some sort of kickas mechanical advantage I don't know about? I just don't get it. But then, I follow very little of Ray's chains of thought sometimes. But the real excitement of the episode was the second visit to the noodle shop by the Poison Thorns. Seems Sneezy Tang and the shadowy sorcerer pulling his strings haven't quite given up on owning the Eating Counter. Cool. I really want another go at Smiley, their big grunt. And I wanna see that sorcerer bastard dead, dead, dead. You don't set Master Fo on fire and then let him live.