Glad I didn’t wait as this copy came with some deluxe components for the little alien/moth minions and some shiny cards 
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Christmas Shopping ist almost done now.
One is for me bought by me.
One is for my partner bought by him.
One is for the “I am almost 4” niece
Two for the “almost 11” nephew
I have made the calendars for both friends and family and they have arrived.
Now all we need is something for the 2-last-august nephew. Too young for games. Maybe a ukulele… instead of a plastic toy guitar.
Oh and the half-wheel of cheese for the traditional raclette is not in the picture because we haven’t ordered it yet.
And the big box of really nice chocolates also isn’t in the picture because we’re getting that the week before Christmas and no earlier.
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We have bought the boys those Mars Rover sets
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Bought a whole lotta Concordia
Concordia Venus plus two map expansions to cover the ‘accepted’ player count range from 2-6
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I absolutely love Concordia. I did my usual thing and bought far too many expansions for it but in this instance it’s such a superbly good game I don’t really mind.
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Can’t go wrong with Loopin’ Louie. Two sets of the boring 3p Star Wars version can be grafted into a 6p version with a 3D-printed adaptor.
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I bought the sets. Haven’t committed yet to the physical modifications to the components to make the 6p version work. Sort of irrelevant at the moment because my 3D printers aren’t really set up at the moment.
But I saw that Loopin’ Louie (or, rather, Loopin’ Chewie, because I think it’s the 3-player style) got a new edition with a Bluey theme (which means I’ll end up with a copy of that eventually). That’ll make it easier for me to commit to the permanent modifications to convert the Star Wars ones to 6p
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I’m curious about the intention behind the Rubik’s Cube box statement:
“WITH 43 QUINTILLION COMBINATIONS”.
(My first thought was: “Collect them all!”)
If someone was on the fence about whether or not they wanted to buy a Rubik’s Cube, that text seems more likely to scare them away than to convince them.
And is that an American or a British quintillion? I haven’t done the maths, but it’s going to make a difference to my planning…
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On the old one I had I’m pretty sure they used scientific notation to represent the number on one of the sides.
American quintillion id say.
The notation I remembered was this.
Which I think is just nonsense.
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Well, I am just hoping that my nephew who likes puzzles and has a bit of a hard time with manual dexterity might still find this fun and not too frustrating. My thought is: He is pretty good at using a game controller, so why not this? And there is no speed required at all–unless you watch too many youtube videos about it anyway. It might give him some incentive to train with his hands without knowing he is doing it? It’s a bit of a risk but I guess worst case is he hates it and my dad brings it back here.
For those who are still looking for stuff for smallish kids, my cousin had a really nice one that the niece will probably get in January for her birthday: an amaryllis bulb to plant and watch grow–it was apparently a huge hit with his partner’s niece last year.
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Saw Strike on a geeklist, looks like you just roll a lot of dice, which sounds like fun to me. A friend once told me he hates games with one or two dice, but loves games with lots. I never would have picked him for an ameritrash player, but there you go.
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The Rubik’s cube is fun. I think if they can remember steps then learning how to solve the thing is a) quite a good task for Christmas Day and b) impressive to show off. If you can find some simple instructions or an appropriate YouTube links i think it would make a good set rather than just giving them the cube.
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Strike is good. It is barely a game (in the way that gambling on horse racing is a game) but it gets lots of people invested in a really consistent way.
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I think almost everyone now uses American mode, including most British people. (Points at the “language is for communication, not for being ‘correct’” sign on the wall.)
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Picked up a copy of Ticket to Rude: Legacy at Airecon West… ideally to play with my partner on our games nights. Hopefully it lasts longer than @yashima ‘s run.
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I don’t know what I’d rather do, replace the u with an i on Ride, or ad an o to make it Ticket Too Rude…
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With the Holidays season fast approaching (like, REALLY fast, holy crap), we’ve gone to some Christmas markets (we hadn’t last year due to Maryse’s back being much worse off). One thing that was new this year was a small local publisher who’d rented a table! That was neat! We picked up a couple of small card-based trivia games about Quebec (Along the 20 and Along the 138, both of which are about geography, namely stuff you can find along said highways) and two games with a view of playing them with our niece and nephew, a language game, Kiddi, and a team-based game, Archipirata. No idea if they’re any good, though we both tried out Kiddi and enjoyed it, but it felt good to help out the little guy.
I did receive two Christmas presents early, Maryse being notoriously impatient about gift-giving at times: Hit!, a Knizia card game, and the big one, Great Western Trail: New Zealand. The idea being that we can play something new when my time off starts and before Christmas.
Gonna be fun!
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yeah we have yet to get back to it. that said we‘ve been quite busy me with Advent Of Code and my partner has begun programming the home automation so… the latter being absolutely worth waiting for a few weeks for more games until maybe he has cooled down a bit 
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That’s the second one, 2 Ticket 2 Rude. In the high-stakes world of illegal train racing…
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I vaguely recall during the later Blair years that a government spokesperson was asked by a journalist whether the figure they quoted was in British or American billions. They confidently said ‘British’, and then had to be corrected by another government representative a few days later. I would wager that most British people these days are unaware that a billion in Britain used to mean 1,000,000,000,000. I’m not even sure why I know that fact.
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