Update 13

Well, some turmoil in my life has taken my mind off gaming, or at least off posting about it.  Been applying for jobs that can give me more hours. Had an interview with one company that went well. They didn't immediately offer me the job but I am on the list for when opportunities come up. But I have been up to some various gaming stuff...

*The twins are back from England so we have been playing some games. I got to play my new commander deck with them. It worked ok but I didn't end up winning the game.

*We also played Terraforming Mars again. This is a highly rated board game that I bought some years ago at a board game store here in Taipei. We played it the day I got it and haven't played it since. Not really for any particular reason. I guess most of the time the twins are more interested in playing Magic so we usually do that. But recently Yuen has been expressing some interest in this game so we decided to bust it out again. We need a day when we have a lot of time because it seems to take us an awfully long time to play the game. The first time I think we played for like 6+ hours. This time we finished in about 5. Not sure if we are doing something wrong or if we are just slower players than most people. Maybe we just need to get used to the game.

*Been reading old Pyramid magazines. This is a magazine that has been put out in various formats by Steve Jackson Games (the makers of GURPS). The second volume was done as webpages that subscribers had access to. But last year they put out the whole volume (this incarnation ran from like 98 to 08) as an archive that can be downloaded and browsed offline. Everything is still presented as webpages but the entire archive sits on your own computer rather than on servers. The issues have a lot of coverage of other companies' games as well as articles about roleplaying in GURPS or some of the other systems SJG put out. So this can be a lot of fun to do some detective work with. Basically it is interesting to see which of the various games and books and systems that were put out then are still around in some form or another and to learn about what their impact was. Some of the books have since been made available for free as PDFs. (Entirely legally!).

*So reading that has kind of gotten me interested in solo roleplaying again. One of the free books I got was for a game called WitchCraft. This is kind of an occult horror setting where some kind of apocalyptic time called the Reckoning is approaching and more and more people with magical abilities are being born. They have their own system but in some ways it is very similar to GURPS and in fact some of the Qualities in Witchcraft are exactly the same as Advantages in GURPS. This has made it easy to get a handle on (at least the character creation process. I haven't delved into the actual game play rules yet). This has kind of been waking me up to the fact that I do like this kind of horror. Not the mad serial killer type of horror but more like some kind of freaky occult sense where there are evils that lurk underneath the surface of the normal world kind of thing.

*Also been watching baseball still. Just mostly the free game of the day on MLB.tv. 

*A new Magic set is having its pre-release weekend this coming weekend. Prerelease weekends are when you go to a game store that hosts Magic events and participate in a kind of tournament. Basically there are many different formats of Magic. The kind that is played at pre-release weekends is called sealed. This is where your entry fee gives you 6 booster packs. At a pre-release these usually come in special boxes that have some extra goodies but all you really need is 6 booster packs. So then everyone opens their 6 packs and has some time, like an hour or so, to sort through all the cards and to build a 40 card deck (including lands that are supplied by the store). So, everybody builds their deck and then the tournament director uses software to run a Swiss system style tournament. With every opponent you play a best of three games match. Usually there are three rounds. So I have attended a number of these over the years at Growlife (the game shop where I play). So, I feel a bit mixed about these events because in some ways I quite like them but I am not very good so I always end up near the bottom of the cross-table. I do like playing sealed but just wish I was better at it. So anyways, I am planning on trying to play at least one of these maybe more. (stores often host multiple little tournaments that weekend for people with different availabilities to be able to play.)

*I finished the slow live chess tournament I was playing. Had a couple of forfeit wins. The last game was a pretty even game. Opponent was attacking but I was defending well. We traded off most of the pieces but the queens were still on the board. Then my opponent proceeded to blunder his queen. I think he thought he was forking two of my pawns but the square he moved his queen to was defended by my queen. He resigned as soon as I captured it.

*Still playing daily chess. Been playing on some different sites. I am kind of sick of chess.com these days because they are constantly bombarding you with ads for the premium subscription or pop ups for different services I don't want to use and they have gradually been moving stuff behind the pay wall. I was playing the slow league tournament on lichess because that is the server that was dictated. In general lichess is a good server but I often feel kind of bothered by attitude of the people who are ardent supporters (it is completely free but very modern and well run.) So I have also been playing on some other much less well-known sites such as Scheming Mind and GameKnot.