Tame (But Complete) Weekend

It's a pleasant surprise when what turns out to be a simple weekend with only one activity planned per day turn into a full weekend.

From a cancelled trip to Genting First World on Friday (darn you specific Citibank/First World Stay-For-Sure T&C with its must-check-in-before-6pm T&C!), things took a turn for the better when jack208 texted to say that there was another boardgame meetup at Old Town Kopitiam. Baiting 'Nic to join in on the fun (also with the intent of obtaining a much-desired navigator to get us to Cheras with little risk of getting lost) took a bit of persuasive texting, but the Eurogames Evangelist has passion and made a few modifications to his initial plans, thus allowing him to partake of the night's boardgaming fun and still make it for his Gua Tempurung trip the following morning.

Dinner was at Luca's Pizza at Cineleisure Damansara, which served pizza that didn't stand out for their quality, but rather because they sold their pizzas not just as a whole 12" pizza but also in quarters at RM6.99. Once 'Nic showed up Wii were on our way.

Old Town Kopitiam turned out to be quite a happening place, filled full with peeps all the way till closing time. Wii had a table upstairs to fit the 6 of us nicely, plus it was a good view of the upstairs crowd. A small concern Wii had for a while when playing our games was having a waiter come up to us and ask, "Er, cannot gamble here one ya..." but unfortunately that didn't happen. Not that Wii were gambling, but Wii were having paper money passed around, it was a Chinese-dominated hangout spot, Wii were having fun...some people get jealous because of this you know.

Wii didn't realise that 1856 (a railroad game with lots of things to watch about, from stock-market manipulating to building up your railroad company to dumping debt-infested companies to others...) was the event of the night at OTK, and it didn't help reading 'Nic's blog earlier about their previous game. But the brain, survival skills intact, decided on the strategy Wii would follow in order to survive the game with a happy experience. Tame investing while Wii learn the other intricacies of the game. More can be read here, courtesy of jack208, who has written it with full flavour (as how any boardgame should be). As it was, being deathly afraid of what terrors jack208 and 'Nic may pull on us, Wii weren't just tame, Wii were very tame!

The night ended for us near 2am, when OTK finally closed up for the night. Then it was home, upload the pics taken and work on editing mp3s to put as tunes on our L'Amour. After sending 'Nic off at 6.30am it was bedtime...until 2pm that is. Afternoon was seen clicking away playing ".A" as tevets was back and wanted his fix. Lad, on the other hand, was sick of the game but unfortunately his selling skills was not up to convincing tevets to try something new.

Sat night continued with Lad, NJAPF and her housemates, psike and tevets with more boardgames! This time Wii did Balderdash and Cranium. Balderdash turns out to be very fun as what happens is all players take an attempt to 'convince' (read: bull$hit) other players into believing that his or her answer is the real deal to a rather obscure question. Answers were very convincing, some where bizzare, all feasible. The one snag Wii find with the game is that, after a few plays, you'll definitely know the correct answers to most of the stuff as bizzare trivia tend to stick in the brain. Cranium saw NJAPF, Lad and housemate-Cheryl teaming up against tevets, psike and us. Games went well, with no one able to guess the Sideshows (bewildered puppeteering of an arm-flapping tevets for example), everyone save tevets being afraid of getting the Datahead category, no one able to do the Humdingerz category due to the fact of not knowing the songs...good fun.

Sunday saw another full day as what was supposed to be just an afternoon of Twilight Imperium 3 was slotted into second place as an Wii had promised breakfast with Lad, NJAPF and Lemon beforehand - he had a free makan voucher for dim sum buffet at MidValley. Food was surprisingly good (how wrong can you go with dim sum?) but their egg tarts were absolutely good: one bite and it melts in your mouth! At 12.30 and stuffed-full, Wii left MidValley and scraped out of the jam of incoming traffic into MidValley, rushed off to pick psike and head for our TI3 game.

TI3 saw Wolfie, friends Wong, IonStorm, Suraj, psike and us battling it out to become the ruler of the galaxy. This time around the galaxy was built proper (unlike our last game) but amazingly our home planet was still located far far in destitute space. Can't say that our people, the sneaky Yssaril won't have lovely romantic landscapes to look at...

The diplomatic Xxxcha, a turtle race once held in thrall by the tyrannical Barony of Letnev, was led by IonStorm, a puppet leader controlled by Wolfie, who led the Federation of Sol (rabbits, the lot of them). Suraj, the Random Rampager, was felled by bad dice rolls against both Tradeschief Wong of the Hacan and Tame aycee of the Yssaril. Provost psike of the Jol-Nar eyed his neighbours the Xxcha warily as he may have to contend with both Xxxcha and Sol should territories be contested...

Wii'll post up a report on that separately.

Sunday ended with another session of ".A" at AsiaCafe in Subang where Wii acted as feeder *sigh*. Although there's loads of food options, tastewise it failed to please although the place looks to be quite a good hangout spot with the variety of food and the ambience. Being back in Taylor's territory made us feel somewhat old too, looking at all the kids about...

Now to get our sleep back into sync with the weekdays...sob.