Bohnaparte

Went in for comics today, only thing I got was New X-Men #149 (part four of the “Planet X” arc). Have I mentioned how very much I like the new student characters Morrison has introduced over the course of his run on the title?

I stopped in at the uptown branch of Pearl Paint first, to get more pens. My old Pitt S fineline was drying out, and my black Pitt brushpen has a frayed tip. I was also intending to get some gray Tria markers, but the uptown Pearl doesn’t seem to carry those.

Met bugsybanana, womzilla, and drcpunk at Cosmic. (Man, having an LJ client that auto-formats user tags kicks ass.) We went out for Indian food (and were joined by mnemex), then headed over to Neutral Ground to get some boardgaming in. Bugsy played her first game of Puerto Rico.

Then we played Bohnaparte, a very odd and hard-to-find expansion for Bohnanza that turns it into a wargame. Seriously. You play a regular game of Bohnanza (though everyone starts out with a third beanfield), and there’s a board of cards (representing territories) in the middle of the table. As you accumulate money, you can spend it to launch attacks on neighboring territories, using bean cards out of your hand to indicate attack strength. I won, narrowly beating out Womzilla; Bugsy and Mnemex were handicapped by unlucky draws early in the game that quashed their first few attacks. One odd quirk: The number on the card, the one indicating frequency, is used for attack strength, so the most powerful cards (the blue beans, of which there are 20) are the most common. Strategic tip, in the unlikely event you find yourself playing: Get a munitions depot early in the game, and dump blue beans and chili beans into it.

Flip-flopping

Looks like Garry Trudeau can’t decide whether his “Gröpenfuhrer” hand icon for Schwarzenegger is the right hand or the left.

Stuffed

bugsybanana and I missed the train we’d planned to take, so we were an hour late for Thanksgiving at my sister’s place in Mt Kisco, but it’s not like we were the last to get there. The public phones in Grand Central will call anyplace in NY state for 25¢, but cut off without warning after 30 seconds, not even giving you a chance to stick in more quarters. They’re Verizon phones; I don’t suppose I should expect useful public phones from a company that would rather I buy a cellphone.

So we got there eventually. Much food was eaten. There was not just one, but two massive-cheeked infants — my brother-in-law’s sister gave birth three weeks before my sister did, to a nose-nibbling bundle of energy. Did I mention that we ate a lot? Ooog.

Now I’m all tryptophan-woozy.