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Picnicon - Virtuous Reality!
Jul. 5th, 2020 02:58 amToday has been a really lovely -and different- day!
Different is huge right now, as we slink into summer and every moment reflects off the last and the next until time itself boils into the ether. Different is the thing that makes things worth it. Is it totally obvious that I am an ADHD nightmare childe who fears boredom far more than I would ever fear death?
Anyways, Anu3bis and BalsamicDragon are hosting PICNICON! This is their hyperlocal board-games-and-food convention that they run out of their house. Obviously they are not running an in-person con this year, so I have learned a little bit about slack, and am jumping between zoom, BoardGameArena, TableTopSimulator, and several Google Docs and Slideshows.
I have played _six different board games_ which is _so many_ games! A listing:
*Kingsdomino (on BGA) which I thought I'd never played but as soon as I saw the box remembered I'd played the last time I actually visited Anu and Balsamic in person. It's cute! it's fun! BGA is a pretty-good-but-not-perfect implementation and screwed me over with one piece in a really annoying way but I still won so I am mollified!
*Potion Explosion (on BGA) which definitely loses something by being digitized. Yes it's easier to set up and keep track of everything, but the whole point is touching all the marbles. I...like touching marbles, they are a good texture and round and shuddup. I lost hideously, but had a decent time doing it.
*[When the Cat's Away], (TTS) - a prototype game by Michael, who I've known tangentially through the Asmadi crowd for a bunch of years now. It had a tile laying aspect that felt extremely familiar, and a scoring mechanism that felt quite fresh, and I look forward to being able to bring it to Pinewoods someday.
*Encore (Zoom). I GOT TO PLAY ENCORE! I got to play Encore, adapted for Zoom, and it *DIDN'T SUCK*, mostly because Balsamic is _really_ smart about game design and adaptation. People pre-submitted lists of words, and then the teams looked at the entire lists and used zoom chat to reserve words. The moderator would call on people in turn to sing (just them!) and if it was a success, that word would be highlighted the team colour and removed from the pool of potential words. We got, mm, 80 or so out of the 104 words submitted? Anyways, it was very good, it *felt* like an actual game of Encore, and I got to sing a bit of Anna and the Apoc, so yayyy.
*Six Nimmt (BGA) one of my favourite games in the "My Hand Sucks" genre. I lost horrifically, which was okay, since it was mostly a quick and dirty timekiller between other games.
*The Grandest Lexicon of Baron Munchausen (Google Slides). See, Picnicon *always* has Encore and Munchausen, and they're both spectacular events, so obvs they needed to be adapted somehow. This year, Munchausen is being run the entire weekend long, in the style of Lexicon, a collaborative wiki-writing game. I am having a *blast*! It's always fun to spin yarns, and my verbosity plays nice with creating bullshit for the baron, but now I get to play with fonts and aesthetics and background images and that's just delightful! Plus, there's a really lovely anonymity aspect this year --no one is signing their slides with their real names!
It feels _really_ good to be writing any sort of fiction again, even just a few paragraphs of collaborative bullshit.
In between everything else, I've been hanging around and chatting with folks. Tomorrow will be more of the same --I'm probably going to have zoom on for most of the day and I'm not bothered by this? One of the things I like about the curation/feel of the con is that it really does feel okay to sit at my computer desk and do my own thing while keeping only half an ear on the conversation.
I hope you are finding ways to do things that are _different_ in your life.
~Sor
MOOP!
Different is huge right now, as we slink into summer and every moment reflects off the last and the next until time itself boils into the ether. Different is the thing that makes things worth it. Is it totally obvious that I am an ADHD nightmare childe who fears boredom far more than I would ever fear death?
Anyways, Anu3bis and BalsamicDragon are hosting PICNICON! This is their hyperlocal board-games-and-food convention that they run out of their house. Obviously they are not running an in-person con this year, so I have learned a little bit about slack, and am jumping between zoom, BoardGameArena, TableTopSimulator, and several Google Docs and Slideshows.
I have played _six different board games_ which is _so many_ games! A listing:
*Kingsdomino (on BGA) which I thought I'd never played but as soon as I saw the box remembered I'd played the last time I actually visited Anu and Balsamic in person. It's cute! it's fun! BGA is a pretty-good-but-not-perfect implementation and screwed me over with one piece in a really annoying way but I still won so I am mollified!
*Potion Explosion (on BGA) which definitely loses something by being digitized. Yes it's easier to set up and keep track of everything, but the whole point is touching all the marbles. I...like touching marbles, they are a good texture and round and shuddup. I lost hideously, but had a decent time doing it.
*[When the Cat's Away], (TTS) - a prototype game by Michael, who I've known tangentially through the Asmadi crowd for a bunch of years now. It had a tile laying aspect that felt extremely familiar, and a scoring mechanism that felt quite fresh, and I look forward to being able to bring it to Pinewoods someday.
*Encore (Zoom). I GOT TO PLAY ENCORE! I got to play Encore, adapted for Zoom, and it *DIDN'T SUCK*, mostly because Balsamic is _really_ smart about game design and adaptation. People pre-submitted lists of words, and then the teams looked at the entire lists and used zoom chat to reserve words. The moderator would call on people in turn to sing (just them!) and if it was a success, that word would be highlighted the team colour and removed from the pool of potential words. We got, mm, 80 or so out of the 104 words submitted? Anyways, it was very good, it *felt* like an actual game of Encore, and I got to sing a bit of Anna and the Apoc, so yayyy.
*Six Nimmt (BGA) one of my favourite games in the "My Hand Sucks" genre. I lost horrifically, which was okay, since it was mostly a quick and dirty timekiller between other games.
*The Grandest Lexicon of Baron Munchausen (Google Slides). See, Picnicon *always* has Encore and Munchausen, and they're both spectacular events, so obvs they needed to be adapted somehow. This year, Munchausen is being run the entire weekend long, in the style of Lexicon, a collaborative wiki-writing game. I am having a *blast*! It's always fun to spin yarns, and my verbosity plays nice with creating bullshit for the baron, but now I get to play with fonts and aesthetics and background images and that's just delightful! Plus, there's a really lovely anonymity aspect this year --no one is signing their slides with their real names!
It feels _really_ good to be writing any sort of fiction again, even just a few paragraphs of collaborative bullshit.
In between everything else, I've been hanging around and chatting with folks. Tomorrow will be more of the same --I'm probably going to have zoom on for most of the day and I'm not bothered by this? One of the things I like about the curation/feel of the con is that it really does feel okay to sit at my computer desk and do my own thing while keeping only half an ear on the conversation.
I hope you are finding ways to do things that are _different_ in your life.
~Sor
MOOP!