Will have a house warming party but maybe not until August.

I ran a small Tichu tournament which went very well with Brian and AaronW beating Nate and I in the 1500 pt final in an incredibly close game. My Grand on the final hand which would have won it for us was hurt badly enough by Brian's King call with a 1-6 straight for them to stop me and win. However, given I had called it with only Phx KK, can't complain too much (ended up with DPAAKK) and overall they played really well, while I definitely made mistakes, like losing track of the Phoenix not being played on the first hand and thereby giving them a 1-2.

Also helped AaronW run a small puzzle event which ran just the right length and which 3 of the 7 teams finished all of the puzzles for, only one of them meaningfully early. He is amazingly good at judging the lengths of these things, something I really don't understand how he does.

Hopefully the inspection and the rest of the process goes well as I really don't want to end up back out looking and comparing other places to this one, as they just aren't going to stand up to it.

I am really excited and not having or expecting to have the slightest bit of buyer's remorse.

Btw, the place only has two bedrooms but both of them are effectively masters and will be very happy to have guests if people are in town once I am there and settled in - closing at the end of June. Also, will plan to definitely have a housewarming party.

Well, recently David Dyer implemented an online version of Knockabout at www.boardspace.net and decided to run a tournament of the game. The tournament was 16 players in a single elimination format but playing best of 5, 5, 7 and 9 games in the four rounds to even out the luck elements there are in the game. Well, the tournament ended last night and I won with an overall record of 16 wins and 4 losses (played 1 extra fun game with one opponent which is why it is 16 and not 15), and that against some quite good opponents. Now, I think this 80% win rate was definitely lucky and all and wouldn't have expected to do nearly that well but still, I really do think this tournament pretty much proves my point in regard to the disagreement above.

Thanks to Greg Lam for designing the game (and providing prizes for the tournament), David Dyer for implementing it and running the tournament, and Doug Orleans for pointing out the tournament to me. Also, of course thanks to all my opponents for some very fun plays of this great game.

Crossposted to my blog and to BoardGameGeek.

If anyone knows of a realtor (or a house) they would highly recommend, please let me know their name and contact info. I am looking for a house (single family, detached) and fairly flexible about where although based on my searches now and when I was looking a couple of years ago, the two towns that seemed to provide the most hits on my criteria were Waltham (preferred) and Framingham but lots of other places (Watertown, Natick, Somerville, Cambridge, Arlington, etc...) are not out of the picture either. Would probably prefer to be West than North or South.

Will be first time buying assuming I find something too so any other tips or whatever welcome as well.

Last night I had a pretty amazing 2-player game. The deck was a great one with no attack cards but Bureaucrat and with Chapel, Village, Throne Room, Market, Council Room all included. I had an early lucky turn where I got 13 money and had 4 buys and used it to buy 3 Villages and a Throne Room rather than a Province/Duchy. These purchases ended up sending my deck into overdrive, and I later had turns with 22 Money and then 25 Money, all with multiple buys. On the last, I bought 3 Provinces in a single turn, which is definitely a first for me. We both Chapeled all of our Estates and the scored ended up being 36-12, entirely on Provinces.

Got in one fun Tichu game with Brian too, which we won pretty easily despite some fairly major booboos. He passed me an Ace on a hand where I gave him a King so I confidently led the 1 and called an Ace. Well, turns out he passed me an Ace from a great hand so not surprisingly was hit by it. Then, in a later hand, on a bad timing issue, my right-hand opponent led pair of Kings and I was last to play and played pair of Aces. Brian ended up bombing my Aces, as he didn't see in time I had played and didn't want the Kings to win. BTW, my login is AaronDF so feel free to add me to your watchlist.

This post is purely an effort to try to ingrain the above in my head. I don't know why, but I get this wrong almost all the time, including last night and another game not that long ago. I have a really good memory in general for game rules (albeit not for much else unfortunately) but this one thing, in a game I play a lot, I just always forget. I'd probably post a note on my copy of the card if I regularly played with my own set, but I don't so wouldn't do any good.

I worked on a bunch of puzzles and with the site not up not going to try to list individual ones. Every one of them I worked on with other people (particularly as usual Mike K. who is just brilliant and great to co-solve with), no solo-solves (which is totally fine with me, even great) but the Star Wars constraint problem I was basically the lead solver on with lots of help. That one I saw as right up my alley right away and got two color copies printed but then didn't get to working on it for probably two hours as other things distracted me and then Matt Z reminded me of it and four of us very quickly group-solved it.

I was also happy to play clean-up hitter on a couple of puzzles which other people did 90+% of the work on but didn't figure out how to end and to get several other puzzles like that to completion by bringing in other solvers to do the clean-up in just a few minutes.

My most amazing moment however was also a bit painful as my brilliantly lucky guess/insight into the answer to the Virtual Sectors Meta got wasted as we couldn't figure out how to actually produce the answer and the associated way to save Harold/Foggy. I managed to guess Mr. Mxyzptlk as the "wierd little guy" who had captured Harold just from that description and the vowels theme of the round somehow. I came up with this during a team meeting and went and googled to be sure I was right his name had no vowels. I then very sheepishly brought up this idea to the team but thankfully others on the team believed in it much more than I did and so we called it in. This clearly flustered HQ and they ended up having to call us back confirming it as the answer but saying we still needed to figure out how to defeat him (we had given this as "getting him to say his name backwards" even though we knew this was the "normal way" and thus probably wrong but had to say something). Unfortunately, we somehow never managed to find the way to produce this answer even with a bunch of us looking to produce the string "SPRMN". Turns out that quite late my colleague and friend Erik B. did find this string (but with two letters missing) but he didn't realize its importance and didn't bring it up to the rest of us.

My one bad note on this hunt was the "grid" for the Combat Simulator Meta. This was a great round in all sorts of ways badly hurt by using a completely arbitrary 7x8 (or 8x7 - don't know which) rectangle missing its corners as the grid to tile using 52 squares of Pentominoes. On the board of Inner Zyzzlvaria there were TWO much better 52 square grids (the 8x8 minus either the 12 white spaces or the Core Reactor and starting Pawn spaces). We really respect the Bombers and their elegant puzzle construction and just couldn't believe they had given us two great choices for tiling 52 squares and then intended us to use something as arbitrary as a 7x8 rectangle missing corners - we did try the 4x13/13x4 despite not liking nearly as much as the board. I talked to Foggy afterwards who did this Meta and he said they constructed this puzzle not having the board which I find completely understandable but still feel someone should have noticed when they added a grid to the game components that this would be what people would try to tile and was a much better thing to tile and switched things. I don't think you can fairly use a 7x8 rectangle missing corners as the tiling surface without cluing it. Anyway, though, an overall minor thing in a great hunt.

Also, huge congratulations to Beginner's Luck! which includes many of our ex-teammates. I personally am much happier you guys are constructing than that we are ;)

Then flew out to the Bay Area on New Year's Eve to have a quick lunch visit with my Uncle and Aunt in Berkeley and then a long gaming weekend at David's (thanks!). Was asleep for actual New Year having gotten up at what was 1AM CA time but then had lots of fun playing games for four days. Although we are originally connected through Titan, I unfortunately only got in one game (and was knocked out pretty quick although in a fun battle after amusing trash talk by Andrew) of it but tons of games of Dominion and Tichu and some of Race for the Galaxy and various other things. In addition to the Titan regulars, also got to play a bunch of games with Tom and Wei-Hwa and other locals which was fun.

I then headed directly to Las Vegas to meet my brother, sister-in-law and nephew. We had a really nice time hanging out and doing Vegasy things (although no gambling or poker for any of us while I was there) including me taking everyone to Love, the Beatles-themed Cirque du Soleil show, which was absolutely amazing but for me probably not quite as good as the unbelievably sublime O. We also went to see Penn & Teller which was also a really fun show. Other highlights were the Dolphins and incredibly active and playful young Tigers at the Mirage's Secret Garden and hanging out at the Venetian pools playing nerf football with my nephew, who is adorable and wonderful.

None of the brand new games I played rise to my buying level (generally an 8+ of 10 rating) but still enjoyed Battlestar Galactica, Space Alert, Le Havre, Oregon (which isn't new but played for first time and is closest to being a buy for me), and Carcassonee: A New World (despite some serious rules questions in a simple game - C- for rules). However, front on expansions is better. I will definitely buy the Galaxy Trucker and St Petersburg expansions and of course the Race 2nd expansion when it comes out.

750 people is definitely getting to be kind of too much though, not that I actually want them to restrict the numbers more. There were a bunch of friends I didn't get to play anything with and a couple of people who I only know from the Internet that I wanted to meet and realized after I got there that I really just had no way to arrange it - will exchange cells or something next year. Was nice to at least meet/talk briefly to Jonathan on the shuttle there and thanks to Chris and Jim for the beer at the Dallas airport before I rushed off to sit on my plane for 1.5 hours before getting taken off and put on another plane. Hotel a bit of a jinx for me too as I left my iPhone charger there - realized that while sitting on the broken plane and called hotel and have it back now - pretty cool too that can use the iPhone to Google the hotel number and all to call them about it. Anyway, fun trip.