Boda Borg Birthday!
Apr. 30th, 2025 04:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressIt's Todd's birthday, and what he really wanted this year was a polycool trip to Boda Borg. So we squeezed out a time where all five of us could make it, and had a really good evening. Possibly too good an evening --I'm writing these words after coming home and crashing for several hours, and it seems that my current body status is: kinda sore!
(look, the little joke we had that maybe we should be wearing kneepads might not be that much of a joke. I wonder if we still have the old protective gear I used to use as a kid, and if any of it would still fit me).
For the unknowing, Boda Borg is related to Escape Rooms, except instead of having one space that you're navigating for about an hour, it's a warehouse with a couple dozen little sequences of rooms. Most rooms you will be in for under five minutes, before they time out and you're forced to leave. Sometimes, you manage to solve whatever the challenge in the room is and go to the next room to the sequence. Much more often, you do not!
Challenges come in three varieties: green door, red door, black door. This is *not* a difficulty level, it's a physicality level. Green is mostly walking/standing, red is maybe a little bit of clamboring around, black is why I am legitimately thinking kneepads for next time. If you succeed the entire sequence, a little box opens and you can add a stamp to your collection.
This genuinely feels like an especially accomplished two hours! I handwrote "SuperBa" because we got 3/4 rooms of SuperBanan twice (and 2/4 like....ten or twelve times? I wasn't counting and maybe I should've been). We also did Alcatraz 6-8 times, but only made it through the second room once, and never even got close on the third. I don't think there were other rooms we tried, we were a guided missile of purpose!
The purpose was very much "clambour until we barely couldn't, because it's TODD'S BIRTHDAY! and then spend a brief cooldown break in one of the red or green rooms then BACK TO SUPERBANAN!" I am, to be clear, so happy. It was absolutely delightful even though I am very sore. I really _really_ like climbing on things, and SuperBanan is one of those rare spaces where adults are expected to do just that.
More importantly, I am _thrilled_ to have gotten Spook House, since for a really long time, that second room has been killing me and everyone I know. Is it stupid easy, it turns out? YES IT IS. Glad to have figured it out, especially because many years ago I had been in a group that had gotten it, so I was extremely grateful to be able to use my knowledge/recall of the third room.
Wumplefrump's was the one Todd/Tess/Phoebe had been working on when Austin and I arrived, and it was a fun collaboration warm-up before Bananing --I'd not seen it before! It was cute and I liked it, but it is somewhat colourblind unfriendly so we had to structure carefully so Austin could be both included/helpful.
Star Trails was a little too intuitive in what to do, but still quite pretty aesthetically, and with five people, we were able to reduce the complexity pretty well (by everyone focusing on different components). It was also new to me, and probably not one I'll be excited to repeat.
Area 51 was _delightful_, some of the best aesthetics I've seen in a long time. It felt more like a classic Escape Room than most, albeit one with some very fast puzzles. There's a lot of science fiction references that were fun to try and catch, and the aesthetic setup was quite distracting. We did a really joyful half dozen or so rounds of the first room, as we figured out the puzzle there, then two or three attempts at the second room (which was much more intuitive, but also not easy), and finally one incredibly enthusiastic go at the third room, in which we all walked in and there was a lot of delighted "oh we got this!" from our group.
It's possible we could've gotten SuperBanan if we hadn't been pushing ourselves quite so hard. Fatigue was definitely setting in towards the end there. Chalk, to go along with the kneepads, feels like it might be a good idea. I am incredibly pleased that my general strategy of the last few years of "I should do pullups occasionally so that I can lift my own body weight in case I need to" turns out to absolutely be the correct one for this. Now I need to add "okay, let's have some less stable surfaces to grab on" because boy, them rings were fucking me. Yes, I am instituting a training routine for my fun game day, this is a normal plan, shh!
One of the most unexpectedly delightful parts, was that I had never been to BodaBorg on a weekday before. Weekends tend to be pretty busy --they do have a maximum capacity that they enforce pretty well, but when full you generally have to wait a few minutes before each door while the other group goes. On a random Tuesday, I think we waited _once_, and we didn't even wind up in a loop with them! (they came out of Alcatraz to find us about to go in and decided to do something else).
Since rooms are designed for 3-5 players (many of them literally cannot be completed by two simply because no one (sidelong look at Darker here) has the ability to hit three buttons that are each eight feet from each other simultaneously), this might lead to another polycool evening trip. As an aside, I am incredibly charmed that this means BodaBorg is *not* an acceptable date night _unless_ you're in some kind of polyam situation. And very pleased of course to be in the sort of polycule where we can work together, and figure things out, and have a grand time.
And now it's time for me to get a bit more sleep before work. Goodnight!
~Sor
MOOP!
(look, the little joke we had that maybe we should be wearing kneepads might not be that much of a joke. I wonder if we still have the old protective gear I used to use as a kid, and if any of it would still fit me).
For the unknowing, Boda Borg is related to Escape Rooms, except instead of having one space that you're navigating for about an hour, it's a warehouse with a couple dozen little sequences of rooms. Most rooms you will be in for under five minutes, before they time out and you're forced to leave. Sometimes, you manage to solve whatever the challenge in the room is and go to the next room to the sequence. Much more often, you do not!
Challenges come in three varieties: green door, red door, black door. This is *not* a difficulty level, it's a physicality level. Green is mostly walking/standing, red is maybe a little bit of clamboring around, black is why I am legitimately thinking kneepads for next time. If you succeed the entire sequence, a little box opens and you can add a stamp to your collection.
This genuinely feels like an especially accomplished two hours! I handwrote "SuperBa" because we got 3/4 rooms of SuperBanan twice (and 2/4 like....ten or twelve times? I wasn't counting and maybe I should've been). We also did Alcatraz 6-8 times, but only made it through the second room once, and never even got close on the third. I don't think there were other rooms we tried, we were a guided missile of purpose!
The purpose was very much "clambour until we barely couldn't, because it's TODD'S BIRTHDAY! and then spend a brief cooldown break in one of the red or green rooms then BACK TO SUPERBANAN!" I am, to be clear, so happy. It was absolutely delightful even though I am very sore. I really _really_ like climbing on things, and SuperBanan is one of those rare spaces where adults are expected to do just that.
More importantly, I am _thrilled_ to have gotten Spook House, since for a really long time, that second room has been killing me and everyone I know. Is it stupid easy, it turns out? YES IT IS. Glad to have figured it out, especially because many years ago I had been in a group that had gotten it, so I was extremely grateful to be able to use my knowledge/recall of the third room.
Wumplefrump's was the one Todd/Tess/Phoebe had been working on when Austin and I arrived, and it was a fun collaboration warm-up before Bananing --I'd not seen it before! It was cute and I liked it, but it is somewhat colourblind unfriendly so we had to structure carefully so Austin could be both included/helpful.
Star Trails was a little too intuitive in what to do, but still quite pretty aesthetically, and with five people, we were able to reduce the complexity pretty well (by everyone focusing on different components). It was also new to me, and probably not one I'll be excited to repeat.
Area 51 was _delightful_, some of the best aesthetics I've seen in a long time. It felt more like a classic Escape Room than most, albeit one with some very fast puzzles. There's a lot of science fiction references that were fun to try and catch, and the aesthetic setup was quite distracting. We did a really joyful half dozen or so rounds of the first room, as we figured out the puzzle there, then two or three attempts at the second room (which was much more intuitive, but also not easy), and finally one incredibly enthusiastic go at the third room, in which we all walked in and there was a lot of delighted "oh we got this!" from our group.
It's possible we could've gotten SuperBanan if we hadn't been pushing ourselves quite so hard. Fatigue was definitely setting in towards the end there. Chalk, to go along with the kneepads, feels like it might be a good idea. I am incredibly pleased that my general strategy of the last few years of "I should do pullups occasionally so that I can lift my own body weight in case I need to" turns out to absolutely be the correct one for this. Now I need to add "okay, let's have some less stable surfaces to grab on" because boy, them rings were fucking me. Yes, I am instituting a training routine for my fun game day, this is a normal plan, shh!
One of the most unexpectedly delightful parts, was that I had never been to BodaBorg on a weekday before. Weekends tend to be pretty busy --they do have a maximum capacity that they enforce pretty well, but when full you generally have to wait a few minutes before each door while the other group goes. On a random Tuesday, I think we waited _once_, and we didn't even wind up in a loop with them! (they came out of Alcatraz to find us about to go in and decided to do something else).
Since rooms are designed for 3-5 players (many of them literally cannot be completed by two simply because no one (sidelong look at Darker here) has the ability to hit three buttons that are each eight feet from each other simultaneously), this might lead to another polycool evening trip. As an aside, I am incredibly charmed that this means BodaBorg is *not* an acceptable date night _unless_ you're in some kind of polyam situation. And very pleased of course to be in the sort of polycule where we can work together, and figure things out, and have a grand time.
And now it's time for me to get a bit more sleep before work. Goodnight!
~Sor
MOOP!
no subject
on 2025-04-30 12:21 pm (UTC)Which is also to say...yes it is perfectly normal to institute a training plan for your fun game day, why wouldn't it be.
And also I will be genuinely delighted to go to Boda Borg with you literally any time (or to yell about it with you!), and also Monday nights are usually the quietest and imo best for never having to wait.
I'm really delighted that you got to have this good time with your polycool!
no subject
on 2025-04-30 12:26 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2025-04-30 03:49 pm (UTC)Room 2 of Spook House remains my personal record for "room I've failed at most", as well as an amazing lesson in how superstitions arise. Potions might eventually overtake it, though? We'll see.
many of them literally cannot be completed by two simply because no one (sidelong look at Darker here) has the ability to hit three buttons that are each eight feet from each other simultaneously
:D
I was at Level 99 last week and one room had me using climb-clamber-monkeybars skills and long-reach-to-hit-buttons skills at the same time, it was AWESOME.