Enjoying Summer

I haven't been blogging much recently. It's not for lack of things to write about, but due to lack of time. Over the past week or so, I've been unusually gregarious and haven't had my usual allocation of solitude to write in.

What have I been up to? I saw a performance of The Pirates of Penzance with a group of co-workers. Michelle Jasso (playing Mabel) easily steals the show — she can sing! The rest of the cast is more or less what you'd expect from a small-town community theatre, but Michelle is a pro.

My high school performed The Pirates of Penzance about a decade ago, and I remember the performance being much more flamboyant. Frederic was tossed into the air on a tarp by his crew, and even after all this time I remember being impressed with the performance of I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General — it was choreographed, not simply sung, and the student who did it (alas I forget his name) had wanted to play that role for years. He was very serious about it, and the result was excellent.

I've also been playing a lot of board games recently. Settlers of Catan, Alhambra, Pirate's Cove, Carcassonne, Acquire.

We've only played Pirate's Cove twice, and had a lot of questions about the rules. (Note to game designers: Playtest with validation engineers. They'll find all the corner cases in the rules.) Reading the forums at the link above, I found answers to two of our questions:

• Legendary Pirates are supposed to pick targets on the second and subsequent combat rounds by going clockwise from the previous target. This isn't in the rules at all; they totally omit how you're supposed to pick subsequent targets and we made something up.
• Regarding the Consort card, one of the game designers said "… what we meant by everything was 'everything on the treasure card' or 'any treasure getting buried by the victim player on Treasure island'. We did not envision it being sharing fame points from defeating LPs." But he said that sharing fame points "probably would work too."

It looks like we'll be playing board games on a regular basis for a while.