Handlebar Gaming

Speaking of New Year's resolutions I have one more that stems from the frustration of trying to eat a bowl of soul or a bag of chips with hair in one's mouth. Get your mind out of the gutter, I am refering to my moustache. It started back in April during the NHL playoffs when I didn't shave while the Wings were still around. By the time they got knocked out I decided to keep the 'stache around and get rid of the beard, with the plan of growing a handlebar. I had no clue how to do that at the time, of course, but it seemed like the thing to do.

It turns out it's not as easy as it sounds. Gravity makes it so hair just doesn't grow like that naturally, so you tend to need some sort of method to force it into place. Moustache wax is the typical way to do it, but it's not like there's a moustache wax store downtown. I've made a couple purchases online, one from a company in California and one from a fireman and his wife in Mississippi but neither really did the trick for me. The first one wouldn't even hold for 45 minutes before it started drooping into my mouth. The second one fared a bit better, keeping the moustache out of my mouth for 4-5 hours, but it failed to keep it in a nice handlebar shape for more than a couple hours. Great for a first impression (I think I almost killed Josh yesterday when he saw it) but gets rather unsightly after a bit.

So, the options become to continue the search for a better wax, or resign myself to rewaxxing every few hours, or give up and shave. Maybe not so much give up as end an experiment... How many people can say they've grown a handlebar moustache? My gnome warrior can! Ultimately I've decided that my hair is just too spindly, it doesn't look like a moustache so much as a bunch of random hairs when it isn't nicely waxxed, and I keep chewing on them accidentally and ripping them out by the root. So, I resolve to not have facial hair this year, woo?


To get things back on topic yesterday a bunch of my old University friends got together at Aidan's place for a New Year's Eve's Eve party, Comfy style. By which I mean there were chips, and drinks, and many board games. Sadly we didn't start until the evening and some of us (like myself) had to work at 8am this morning so there wasn't nearly enough games playing, but I'll recant a bit about what there was.

We started with a variant of Cranium, with everyone who was willing to play involved. We started out with Snuggles and Justyna against Adam, Tom, and Dee against Jer, Lindsay, and myself. My brain doesn't quite work the same as most people's (handlebar?) so I'm not terribly good at this game. We had 3 more people show up and join the game in progress, with Sara joining the first team, a second Dee joining the second team, and Andrew joining my team. Unfortunately for us Andrew is the only person in the world worse than I am at Cranium so we ended up not moving after he joined us. Ultimately the team of two Dee's ended up winning despite Mr. Hurd's best efforts to sabotage them from the inside. It was fun times, though certainly not what I would call a good game.

As this was going on I think a game of Ra had broken out in the basement. Rather than go check that out I stayed upstairs to play Can't Stop. (A game in which I came 2nd at the World Boardgaming Championships which I will be writing more about soon.) Anyway, aparently Andrew is convinced the game title isn't merely a suggestion but a requirement as he decided to keep rolling after he'd finished a row off. It might have been the 'right' choice since he didn't get another turn after that, but he still fell off which is sweet justice as far as I'm concerned. This game isn;t as fun in person as it is online, I think mainly because you don't get an awesome scream when you fall off the mountain. (I try to fill in, but my scream isn't good enough.)

With Can't Stop over and done a game of Apples to Apples broke out. This is another game that is fun enough, but is not a good game. Party games are good and all, but I prefer real games, so I stepped aside and went downstairs to kibitz the second Ra game. I didn't catch the whole game but Adam managed to bamboozle the table somehow, ending up with a dozen rivers along with a ton of other tiles and ended up with a huge lead. Jer and Josh combined barely caught third place which was Tmiv. Tom P was a solid second, but no one was anywhere near Adam.

People were starting to want to leave, but Apples to Apples wasn't done, so we busted out San Juan for a quick four-man. I could say I had a grand strategy for the game but I really didn't. I ended up drawing a Zumfthall and going the tried and true method of Poor House, Smithy, money building, 8 production buildings. Everyone else was doing fancy things with chapels and councilor huts and whatnot but they just couldn't generate enough points to compete with 5 point silver smelters for 3 cards. It's really not fair. Tmiv drew the second Guild Hall, and had a Palace, but had built a bunch of normal buildings to start the game off, which sadly for him wasn't good enough. It's one of the two real problems I have with San Juan, the Guild Hall is too powerful when you draw it early enough to craft a strategy around it. (The other is that the stupid Gold Mine is so swingy, but that's another story...)


At any rate, it was then midnight so we all took off in various directions for sleep. I ended up only getting like 4 hours of sleep which made for a bit of a painful day at work, but playing games with good people is worth some exhaustion any day.

Heck, playing games with bad people is sometimes worth exhaustion, as I am about to proove to myself by starting a game of DotA.

Coming up soon... An attempt to recruit people for WBC!

(Oh, as an aside, I couldn't find my post on Gleemax so who knows what the deal with that is. I may dig into that site in more detail later, but for now I'm just going to use this place.)