Superman on the subway

[avram]

I rode across from Superman on the subway today. Looked just like him — jaw like the bottom of a stop sign, piercing eyes, black hair with a curl over his forehead. He had a couple days growth of beard, so he wasn’t the ’70s Superman, whose hair didn’t grow under a yellow sun. Good thing he didn’t use his super-vision, or the train would have been held at a station.

I was on the subway (which is shakier than the PATH, making it harder to sketch people) to get out to drcpunk’s and mnemex’s place to watch anime. bigscary never showed with his Shamanic Princess DVDs, so we made do with the Chinese pirate Studio Ghibli collection, or at least tried. We got partway through Pom Poko before the DVD player froze up. (They’d watched Porco Rosso before I got there.) The DVD player seemed really hot, so we let it cool off for a while.

Mnemex and I showed Eric how to play Light Speed, and we played around half a dozen games. Things really took off when we used both asteroids, with six counters on each. (The rules suggest using eight each for a three-player game, but we tried this and liked it.) This kicked ass! Suddenly the endgame is much more tense, with the much greater possibility that an asteroid will get destroyed and the high-power ships ranked around it for mining will wind up shooting each other. This actually happened, with Mnemex’s #9 ship mining off the last of an asteroid’s counters, clearing it out so that my #10 ship parked just on the other side could wipe out his #9, losing him the mining points and gaining me two more points in ship capture than I would have gained through the mining I had placed the ship to do! It would have been even cooler if we’d been using the pirate variant rules (which we did start using eventually). This is probably my favorite new game of the year.

Comments

[avram]

I think it was their DVD player.

Hm. I see a bunch of those sets on sale on eBay for reasonable prices. I may pick one up.