GameNight: Blueprints
We’re 14 days into “stay-at-home”. How about you? Hanging in there? We pulled out this game the other night as an effort to get away from screentime and I had forgotten how fun it is. I have to admit I bought this one without knowing anything about it. My dad is an architect, so any game called “Blueprints” was automatically appealing to me.
Blueprints is a dice game where the dice represent building materials: glass, stone, wood or recycled materials. It is played over 3 rounds and each round you get the blueprint for a building you are trying to build.
You keep your blueprint behind a screen so it is secret from the other players. Every building is made from 6 dice; the card shows you a side view and a top view and the numbers tell you how many stories high the building is.
Everyone takes turns picking dice from a shared pool, placing one in their building and then rolling and replacing one. It seems really simple, but there are a bunch of things to think about when you pick your dice. A dice that is on the second or third story of the building must have a higher numbered face than the one below it. So if you put a 6 on the first floor, you won’t be able to build the second floor.
Each color of the dice also scores differently. Glass (clear) is worth whatever the number is showing on the top face. So there are 7 points in Glass showing in the photo above. Wood (orange) is worth more for every side of the dice that’s touching another one. This orange is only touching one face, so it’s only worth 2 […]
Game Night: One Deck Dungeon
Many of you are stuck at home with bored kids by this point, but here at Chez Rahn, it’s just us and a labrador who thinks that work-from-home-week is the most amazing thing ever. So today I want to tell you about a 2 player game called One Deck Dungeon. My husband and I really like to play games, but most things are really designed to work best with 4 players, so it’s a challenge to find one that’s really fun with two.
In One Deck Dungeon, you and your partner are exploring a dungeon. It’s a collaborative game, which means either the players win or the game wins, you aren’t playing against each other (which can also be awesome if your partner is a competitive sort.) One each turn you explore a room by opening one of four doors (flipping over the card). You will either find a monster or a trap which you have to defeat (or dodge) in order to move on.
Each character has a pool of dice to roll in order to defeat your obstacle. The dice have one of 4 different colors and each character gets different ones. One quirky thing I like about this game is that the game designers decided to make all of the characters be girls. So the Paladin, Rogue, Warrior, Archer and Mage are all female. It doesn’t change anything about the way you play the game, but I love it.
The monster or trap has some specific dice rolls you need in order to defeat it. For this monster, you need to fill up each of the colored boxes with dice totalling or exceeding the number in the box. We’ve already placed a 6+4 of […]
Game Night: Carcassonne and The Princess & The Dragon
Next up in my Game Night series is a game called Carcassonne. Carcassonne is a map-building game; players build the map collaboratively but your score is based on placing your “meeples” on features of the map that score points when they are completed. On your turn you draw and place a tile. Then you have the option of placing your meeple in a place where he can score. You only have a limited number of meeple tokens, and your guy is stuck there until the feature is complete, so there is a little strategy to knowing when to place and when to hold out.
For example, the blue player placed a meeple on this road when she placed the tile. When both ends of the road are connected to something, then the road is complete and the blue player gets the score and takes their token back. This completed road is worth 1 point for every tile with a road segment on it, so it would score 4 points.
Things start to get competitive when different parts of the map get joined up. Someone can place a tile so that two previously unconnected parts of a city are suddenly joined together. If there are different colored meeples now all in the same city, everyone gets the points. There are symbols that give you bonus points and rules for having a majority of meeples in one area and how that scores, but the rules are pretty simple and easy to learn.
The basic game is pretty straightforward. But if you like a little random twist in your game, there are a LOT of expansions that shake up the basic rules. My favorite of the expansions is The Princess and the Dragon. It works just like the […]
GameNight: Sushi Go & Sushi Go Party
I decided today that it was a great time to do some more board game posts. Many of us are looking at some quality time inside our own houses and I think board games can be a great way to pass the time. Some friends and I are talking about playing a virtual game night through Google Hangouts so we can have some virtual social interaction. In that spirit, I am testing out some new video recording space and so I made a little video to go along with this post.
Sushi Go and Sushi Go Party are two related games. They work the same, but the “Party” version just has an expansion with more cards. The theme is sushi and the game play is as simple as Pick, Play, Pass.
Sushi Go is a great game for nearly any group of people. It’s marked as ages 8+ but even non readers can play because there isn’t any text you need to read. Like I said in the video, the game play is as simple as Pick, Play, Pass, which means it’s fast to learn and you can just jump in and play. The “Party” version mixes it up a bit and adds some cards with more variations in the kinds of sets you need to make and a little more strategy you can use for messing up your neighbor if you can stick them with a card. For example, with tofu you can have too much of a good thing: one or two cards are worth points, but if you have three tofus they are worth zero. Here’s an example round worth 13 points: 10 for having a set of 3 sashimi, 1 for the dumpling and 2 for the salmon nigiri. To score a tempura, you have to […]
Did you know? A Spoonflower tip about proofing different scales.
I recently uploaded some new colorways of this “Steampunk Squid Damask” design to my Spoonflower shop. It’s one I designed for The Spoonflower Handbook and the original is a pale blue and white. After I had all of the new colors proofed by ordering samples, I had a request from a customer that she was super excited about new colors, but she wanted a smaller scale of the design. In the original the squids are about 8 inches tall, but I have a few of the colors available with a squid 4 inches tall. I certainly didn’t want to have to order another set of proofs just to change the size of the squids.
Did you know that if you are uploading a new version of a design and ONLY changing the scale or the rotation of the design (no color changes or changes to the repeat) that Spoonflower will help you do that without requiring a proof? I hadn’t had a reason to rescale like this before, but I knew it was just a matter of sending an email. I uploaded all of the smaller scale versions of the same designs. Then, all I had to do was email the help team with the URL of the original (already proofed) design and the URL of the revised design at a new scale and they were able to manually set them to “proofed” for me. Once they were set to proofed, I could put them up for sale for my customer.
It’s always a good idea to order a proof of any design, but in this case, I know already that these look great at the smaller scale so there really wasn’t anything I needed to proof. So now there are 8 new colorways available in two different sizes. That’s a […]
Learning things takes time.
Tutorials that say that a project is “quick and easy” are kind of a pet peeve of mine. You see entire pages of results on Pinterest: quick, easy, no-sew, only 2 steps, 5 minutes to make, 30 second hacks. It’s not that I don’t think there’s a place and a need for quick and easy projects, but I think that’s often all you can find: the quick and easy solution to a problem that might not be so quick and easy.
I’ve spent the last week or so putting together some new classes. I know how to do that planning part, but I needed to set up a new way to take registration payments and to link them together with the event and to post them as a draft event on Facebook. None of those are “hard” things to do, but they were all things that I needed to learn something about. Square recently updated the way they do their web shop. So I needed to learn the new system. It was super confusing, but I finally have the basics figured out. My event calendar needed an update and I spent a few minutes figuring out how to add a link for the class cancellation policy to every page so I didn’t have to copy and paste it in every time. I got the events posted and then spent many minutes tapping around on my phone trying to figure out how to accept the invitation to co-host the event with my FB page, because although I found the “accept” button in the browser version on my laptop, the button didn’t work. But I digress…
The thing is, it feels good to learn something like this. It’s a sense of accomplishing something. I spent the time […]
Hi, I’m Becka.
Talking about fabric design, Spoonflower, teaching, and the life and business of being an artist.
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