Social

[liv]

I've had a good month for seeing friends I don't spend time with often enough. I managed long phone chats with hatam_soferet and lethargic_man, and jack and I managed to get most of a weekend with doseybat and her mother and verazea, and the wonderful angelofthenorth came to stay with me for a few days.

I feel really really blessed by having such wonderful friends, especially when they reach out to me when I'm doing badly at keeping in touch. And several other people have got in touch too and I really do want to get back to them to make plans. And I'm not doing at all well at posting or commenting here (though I'm still reading, definitely, I haven't missed a day.)

It's easy to worry that I'm failing to live up to the standard I've always held, that I shouldn't let friendships slide because I'm too absorbed in romantic relationships. But I think that's not really true, that's just me being self-critical; there are lots of reasons why I'm finding keeping in touch hard, and it's not particularly because I'm poly or caught up in NRE. (Really, it's been 2½ years, I can hardly blame newness.) I've always struggled with regular correspondence, and keeping lots of different friendships going is hard for everybody at a life stage when we're dealing with demanding jobs, parenting – and it's more and more common that my friends have caring responsibilities for older relatives, grandparents or even parents.

And the fact that lots of my time and energy is taken up by commuting. I can't socialize much during the week since basically none of my friends live near me (since mathcathy moved away). I can't easily cram socializing into my extremely tight weekends, because if I go anywhere other than Cambridge I end up not seeing my partners for ages. Also, everybody is ridiculously busy and booked up at weekends. I think the solution to this is probably to move nearer to my main social group, who are in Cambridge and London, and hopefully that will give me more time for friends who are more distant. That is obviously quite a difficult thing to sort out, though, and I don't want to pin too much hope on everything magically becoming easier.

Anyway, the only way to restart the habit of posting here is to just go ahead and do so. Have a meme which ghoti sensibly imported from FB: suggest a category and I'll tell you my top five things in that category. Feel free to propagate it if you think it would be a fun thing to do in your own journal.

Comments

[liv]

Short board games, what a great category!

I'm still madly loving Patchwork, though most of the people I game with are bored of it.

Like every other gamer, Codenames.

Top dogs doesn't literally have a board, but it's a board game type of game that plays in about 15-20 minutes and works well with a mixed group of adults and children, an important priority for me these days.

Takenoko is maybe more like medium length than short, BGG reckons it's about a 45 minute game, but I really really love it, and it's certainly not at long game.

Cacao I've only played online, but it feels shorter than a lot of the online games I play, and it's again reckoned at 45 minutes.

[green_knight]

Oooh, I shall check these out. It's not that I don't love long games, but while I might add one or two to my collection (I would LOVE to play Dominion - it looks fun, but so does Magic the Gathering until you play it), but we don't have time for a long session that often, and we already have plenty of games to fill that slot with.

(Where and how do you play these things online? That sounds like a great way of discovering things.)

[liv]

Dominion has none of the downsides of Magic: The Gathering. It took me a little while to learn but after the first few games, I usually find that it plays in no more than 20 minutes. I wouldn't be surprised if it had been deliberately designed to be like Magic without the annoying aspects. You don't need to buy (or memorize) thousands of cards and you don't lose because your opponent has more money to spend on rares than you do. Expansions exist but the base game (20 cards) is really fun on its own and in my experience has years worth of replayability without having to buy any extra cards. Also the cards are far less complicated than most Magic ones, you can easily understand how they work just by reading them without needing a zillion edge case rules. It condenses the deckbuilding element of MtG down to something that just happens naturally over the course of the game, no advance planning needed, and even a total beginner can usually get something that works.I thoroughly recommend Dominion, it really is a good bits only version of Magic: the Gathering.

Playing online: come and join us at Yucata! It's a really lovely board gaming site, mostly German in culture, and explicitly set up to play asynchronous games. It's free as in beer; they ask for donations but don't nag at all and there is no downside to being a free user. And it has over 100 games, about 90% of which are high quality Eurogames; they've thought carefully about what is actually suited to the format, so eg they don't have games with a lot of trading and haggling, since those don't really work asynchronously. Also they get explicit permission from the game publishers for every game they offer on their site, so you don't need to feel guilty about playing the games without buying them. My user name there is ewerb, but my experience has been that playing with strangers is always pleasant, it has a very friendly culture where people are there for the games, not to win and not to be abusive to other players.

[rysmiel]

I kind of feel logic compels a request for top five long board games here. This is fun.

[liv]

Agricola, unquestionably.

Pandemic Legacy, which AYK is a fairly new thing, a connected series of games, though each individual episode is not that huge.

I don't play a lot of other really long games because it's so rare for me to have more than a couple of hours free with other gamers. But in the medium to long category:

Smash up, which is a very fun game but a bit clumsily implemented, and IME rather slow with more than a couple of players.

And a couple of fairly middle-of-the-road Eurogames I like a lot, playing time between 1 and 2 hours I think, so not really long.

The Castles of Burgundy

Egizia