1835

I spent most of the day Saturday playing 1835 with a group of people. This is the sort of game that takes all day to play (we started at 1:30 having decomposed the game from sheets of cardboard and reviewing the rules, and finished around 11:30). It's the same family of game as 1856 and 1830, but the rule differences actually made it interesting to play, since people hadn't figured out all of the strategy beforehand.

I got off to a fairly good start, and was actively laying down smack-down, until the owner of the SX came and placed a token in an inconvenient place. Then nobody wanted to buy my company's stock, and I was kind of stuck. This eventually got turned around and I was certainly in competition for the end game, until same owner dumped one of his other (mostly worthless) companies on me. I think hosage got passed around the table to the left, mostly. :-) I came in a fairly close third ($100 behind second, $400 behind first, out of about $7000 per player).

( Gory rule details )

Bands nobody's ever heard of

I was walking through Davis Square on Friday after picking up a burrito from Anna's (mmm, Anna's). And, to my astonishment, the Someday Cafe was playing a song by Sunny Day Real Estate, which isn't the one song that got radio time ten years ago. (Not actually a big SDRE fan, but it does come up in xmms occasionally.)