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It’s been a few months since I posted about new games at Games Club. I think we fell into a habit of playing mostly old games for a while, and then bugsybanana and I skipped going for most of this summer’s exile period. But now, here, some games that were new, or at least new to me, from this semester:

Maharaja
I barely remember this now; we played it back in September. It involves moving around a board building palaces, with money generated at the end of each turn based on what you’ve got in a particular city, and it costs money not just to build houses and palaces but also to move your architect token around the board. First player with seven palaces wins. Challenging, but we haven’t played it again since.

Clans
A pretty simple movement-based game. I’ve played it a couple of times now, and while it’s not great, it’s pretty simple and doesn’t take long to play.

Arkadia
I’ve played this twice, and both times came in second one point behind mnemex. It’s a pretty good game based on construction, worker placement, and earning colored seals which have varying values. One of the challenges is that you have only five opportunities to cash in your seals for victory points, and you get to choose when four of those happen (the fifth is at the end of the game), and have to time them for when the seals you have are at maximum value. But those cash-in phases are also the only way to get the workers you need to earn more seals….

Race for the Galaxy
Race for the Galaxy is a new game (just shipped a couple of weeks ago) based on the original design for San Juan, and incorporating more elements from the parent game, Puerto Rico, like exchanging goods for victory points. It’s about as complicated as Puerto Rico, though it seems more intimidating because of the variety of strange little icons on the cards, but it plays faster. We played it four times in five hours last night, and that included learning the rules and explaining them twice.

Like San Juan, it’s plays pretty quicly and is easy to set up. Like Puerto Rico, it supports more strategies — not just a shipping strategy, but multiple build strategies. Because play within a phase is simultaneous, you’re not screwed if the player to your right is following the same strategy you are, as you are in Puerto Rico.

I’ve got one big complaint about the card design: The card titles are printed in black, on top of a dark gray gradient. But the title is the least important part of the card, so it’s not that big a problem.

Update: One of the developers posted a “periodic table” of the cards. (That’s the large version. You need to be a member of BoardGameGeek to get at the super-large version.) A few observations:

• Military worlds make up a bit more than a third of the total set of world cards (23 military to 41 non-military). It didn’t feel that way when I started with New Sparta, tried to follow a military strategy, and only drew two meager little military worlds all game.
• There are more blue production worlds, and fewer blue windfall worlds, than any other color:
  • Blue: 9 production, 5 windfall (14 total)
  • Brown: 5 production, 7 windfall (12 total)
  • Green: 4 production, 7 windfall (11 total)
  • Yellow: 2 production, 6 windfall (8 total)
• Also, blue and brown have a smaller proportion of military worlds.
• And there are 17 uncolored worlds.
• There are 12 6-cost development cards, out of 31 development cards in the deck, but that doesn’t count duplicates.
• There are 14 cards that increase military strength.

(Earlier posts about boardgames.)

You may have noticed some LJ posts turning up behind LJ cuts with “Adult Content” warnings. Whether you’re an adult or not, here’s how to get that to stop happening:

1. Go to your Edit Profile page. Fill in the Birthday data. Keep in mind that:
   1. You don’t have to use your real birthday. Make sure to use a year that makes you more than 18 years old.
   2. There’s a Birthday display options menu that lets you decide who (if anybody) can see your birthday, and how much they can see. I’ve got mine set to display only the month and day, and that only to people I’ve friended.
2. Remember to scroll down to the bottom of the page and hit Save Changes!
3. Go to your Viewing Options page. Scroll down to the bottom, and set the Viewing Adult Content menu to Do Not Collapse. If you haven’t already set your birthday, that option will be grayed out. Oh, and while you’re at it, you may want to reset your Safe Search Filtering preferences, which Six Apart has set to “Use moderate filtering” for you, without asking you or notifying you.
4. Remember to Save Changes!

Hughcasey has more about LJ’s new content-filtering feature.

Just watched the first season of Heroes. Some thoughts:

In general, far too much of the plot is driven by the fact that the most powerful good guy is a moron. Still, I like most of the other characters.

Last night my subconscious made contact with an alternative timeline where Robert Heinlein was a scriptwriter for I Love Lucy, and pulled an episode through. Sadly, I retained pretty much nothing of it on waking.

Today, Jeffrey Rowland suggests that you can tell everything there is to know about someone by looking at their last five Wikipedia searches. Of course I looked to see what mine were:

• Brikka
• Moka Express
• Latte
• The Dakota
• Strawberry Fields memorial

The coffee-related searches were inspired by today’s Questionable Content. If I’d read Overcompensating before QC today, here’s what my last five would have been:

• The Dakota
• Strawberry Fields memorial
• Nixtamalization
• Grits
• GeGeGe no Kitaro

Just as well Rowland didn’t run that strip yesterday, when I was looking up euphemisms for genitalia.

This is a list of the 106 books most often noted as unread by users of Library Thing. Bold for books you’ve read, italics for books you’ve started but haven’t finished, strikethrough for books you found unreadable. Via camwyn.

Here’s a tip for anybody who uses Faber-Castell PITT pens: After the tip gets all worn and frayed, you can pluck it out with tweezers, spin it around, and put it back in backwards. There’s a second tip on the other end! Make sure not to spill the ink out of the marker’s body while you’re doing this. Here’s a YouTube video of the process, from Adam “Ape Lad” Koford.

A few weeks back, when I was going through my books looking for stuff to toss out, I found some old copies of this British kid’s fantasy series — Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, etc. And I was wondering, what ever happened with that? Did it ever get finished?