deathmtn

So, there's this brown stuff I assumed was mud. After accidentally shooting a fireball into it, I discovered that it was oil. Noita is rich in fossil fuels!

The classic blood-water-acid-anger strata. (That top layer really is anger. Your anger goes up if you step in it.)

What it’s like when you’ve waited nearly three hours.

We waited 2.5 hours in 25°F weather to get inside the building, then waited another 20 minutes to get to the actual swab. There were three tables inside, each doing two tests at a time.

If this is because the district or the Broad Institute only had so many PCR tests, this doesn’t matter.

If it isn’t, not having enough staff means that they might end up testing far fewer students than they could have.

School testing line is better than the Harvard Square one, but still not great.

ONION SWAMP

Less burned than last time!

So, I take back what I said about getting shut out early in Catan Junior. I’m red here, and the guy happened to be the first to build a lair (the game’s version of settlements). He built it next to my ship in the lower right.

Ships are like roads in Catan Senior. You build ships from your lairs, which let you build lairs next to your ship. (A ship has to be built next to a lair, and lair has to be built next to a ship.)

So, by building next to my ship, he eliminated one of my potential lair sites. What, then, is my path to seven lairs (which is what you need to win)? I had to build a lair near his stuff, so I could have a chance of building further into his territory, which I did. So, that’s three.

Potentially, I could get the most pirate cards, then get a lair on Pirate Island. That would be four. Then, there’s an uncontested spot on the east of the board where I could build five.

But the last two? I had to race to build on the center hex to have a chance of building to seven. The guy only needed to block one of those spots to make it impossible to get to seven.

Which he did.

Then, he got the other spot, and I conceded, but he enjoys things like trading things for other things and resetting the market (which I have to say feels like a sweet hack), so he said we had to keep playing, and he took his time getting to seven lairs.

In Senior Catan, if you get locked out early, you can hope to get lucky and win via VPs from development cards. Here, there are no VPs, and you can in fact get locked out of seven lair potential early.

Now that I think about it, maybe there’s some errata online that addresses this.

Cool drop video

The schools shut down so people could get tested. We tried to get tested earlier by showing up half an hour before the testing site opened. But the line had already wrapped around Harvard Square, so we went home, and we’ll try at a school site tomorrow.

This is 2022-01-01, both the song and today's date. We thought this phrase was catchy in our house, so I developed it a bit, but only slightly.

Fun fact: I typo'd the file as 2021-01-10 at first.

Ice cream monster!

We tried Catan Junior today. It’s fairly well done.

As you’d expect, they rounded the sharp edges off of Catan. You don’t lose resources on a 7, and the robber doesn’t steal from you directly. Part of this is making trading with “ports” easier, so players are stuck less often. The development cards are far more powerful.

All of these measures in the service of friendliness actually make the game less predictable. A lot of Settlers games can be called after initial placement. And for kids, figuring out what you can pull off with various resources is exciting.

The end conditions seem to have not thought about the two-player board, though. You have to build 7 lairs to win. We filled the board and had 5 and 5 (sometimes 6 with the pirate island). It seems hard to hit 6 + pirate island without being blocked.

Regardless, it is engaging for an hour.

This is an aesthetic XML mistake.