Britt's Blog

This is a video from last year, but it gives you a sense of scale of the Board Room (which was downstairs in one of the Exhibit Hall this year (boo). Sorry the quality is so poor, but it does lend an appropriate sasquatch-film atmosphere to the three frames in which I walk past in my yeti hat at the 1-minute mark.

This year, Team Ithaca representation was weak, but we had a lot of fun with Dan, Amy and Zach.

New games played:

• Galaxy’s Edge Previously unknown to me, yet not a new game. We kinda liked it. The military control resolution is kind of brain-hurty and neat.
• Darjeeling Tea! Yay!
• Pack & Stack An all-too-eerily-accurate simulation of moving, including not being able to get the right truck from U-Haul.
• Steam Excellent new track-building, goods-delivering game.
• San Juan All the best elements of Race for the Galaxy and Puerto Rico, in one convenient package.
• Le Havre OMG too effing long.
• Race for the Galaxy: Brink of War Prestige can bite me.
• Nautilus Neat underwater exploration game with a a pretty board. Unfortunately, it just barely surpassed the fiddly-bits limit.

We never did quite manage to get into a game of Martian Rails. It was not available at Origins 2009, and we’ve been trying (in a half-hearted way) to get a copy for a while, though I’m deeply disappointed by the fact that the cities are drawn from fiction, unlike Lunar Rails, which awesomely uses actual lunar geography.

Acquired:

• Darjeeling, Assyria, Street Illegal and Dragon Parade (You get two randomly selected free games you get when you first visit the Board Room with your ribbon. This is the first time we got bumpkis in the Board Room raffle, which was a disappointment. :( However, Rio Grande Games provided free lunch and dinner for the Board Room, which was pretty extravagantly generous of them! Thanks, Rio Grande!).
• Powergrid China and Korea boards, RftG:BoW (at the Rio Grande Booth)
• Steam, Fredericus and Oriente (at the Mayfair Booth, the last two at deep discount)
• Suitors.

(Can’t wait for this week’s boardgame night: Origins Swag Edition!)

On the not-spending-all-my-time-inside front, I did manage to go running three times along the Scioto and Olentangy Greenways that follow the rivers through downtown Columbus. (Yay for Google maps, without which I would never have known that they exist.) The Olentangy Trail was especially nice.

Okay, this was done a while ago, but I wasn’t happy with the pictures I took, but i’m too lazy to take new ones, so here they are.

Here you can see our new bench, and the very attractive pillows we used as the inspiration for our color palette.

And here you have the best feature in our whole house, the awesome woodwork by the staircase. The new paint is much brighter than the gray that was previously on the back wall. And I think the cool color of the paint really makes the warm color of the woodwork pop.

So, the net result is that the woodwork stands out more and the foyer is a lot brighter, in a kinda chilled out aquatic way. Worth the effort, for sure.

Mauna Kea has kept popping onto my radar for some reason. I’ve never been… Maybe I should start proposing for IRTF or Keck time.

I just listened to this old ep: Aloha Astronomy from Are We Alone, the SETI podcast.

And saw this on Facebook. It really captures the flavor life on an observing run. “You can close the dome any time you like, but you can never leave…”