Quite a few years ago I received the card game Munchkin as a gift from mom. I recall reading through it, finding it quite silly, then putting it away and never actually playing it. I regularly play lots of other games with friends, but never this one. Everyone once in a while I remember Munchkin, sitting on a shelf, but I’d never actually played it until today.

Tonight I played a round with friends after work and it is great. Wow! I was really missing out! The silliness does add to the fun, but I must say the mechanics of the game really work. Its not a long or complex game like Twilight Imperium or even Battlestar Galactica. You can play it in 45 minutes with three people, if everyone keeps the pace moving.

Can’t wait for another round. Highly recommended!

From the exceptionally low frequency of updates to this site this year you’d think that I have nothing interesting to post about. Not true. Things have been exceptionally busy at work, and I’ve also managed to find some interesting things in my pursuit of building robots.

I took a trip for work to the Sophos HQ in Abingdon, United Kingdom a couple of weeks ago. Its just outside of Oxford, and its a great place. It was really nice to meet people I’ve been talking to (over the phone) for quite a few months now, and the week I spent there was incredibly productive. This was the culmination of a lot of work since spring, and it seems like its only getting more busy now through the summer.

For my robotics hobby I picked up a Hammer board from Tin Can Tools. This is a development board built around a Samsung processor with an ARM 920T core. I have this crazy idea of making a Line Maze robot that runs Linux for the Seattle Robotics Society Robothon event this October. Seriously!

The other major “toy” is my new iPhone 3GS. I’d been waiting for the new model to come out, and I even took time off from work to go stand in line on the morning it was released. I really like it, definitely another solid Apple product. I’ve slowly been re-incorporating Apple products into my household: a 15″ MacBook Pro, a Time Capsule, and now an iPhone. It is just so much better than my previous phone (Motorola Razr) and its also much better than any other device I looked at including the Blackberry product line and the phones running Google Android. I’ve got the iPhone SDK installed and have started writing my first applications. Learning Objective-C is nifty although it makes my brain hurt a little after so many years of writing C++ and Perl/Python/etc.

The day I bought my iPhone I left it with Eileen and I went out to play golf with a friend. By the time I got back she had fallen in love with it too, and demanded we go out and buy her one. So now we are a two-iPhone household.

Golf. Yes, golf. I’ve been playing pitch-n-putt (par 3) golf with people from work this summer and having a great time. I’m not that good but still its a great way to be outside and includes a small amount of physical activity. I don’t think I’ll graduate to playing a full-size course but these short courses are a lot of fun. We’ve lived around the corner from a course for a number of years but never been there. Now I will often get home from work, pick up the clubs and walk five minutes down the street to play nine holes. Lots of fun!

Its been a long time since I updated this site, so let’s start with what I did last night. A few friends I used to work with at Kodak were getting together to play Battlestar Galactica, The Board Game. The fellow organizing it was also the one who introduced me to a number of excellent board games such as Ticket to Ride and Modern Art. There were six of us in total, the game is much better with a large group.

The BSG game uses the storyline through Season 2 as its backdrop. The basic conflict pits the humans against the Cylons, but initially the identity of the Cylons is secret. Each player is one of the cast members although the “who is a Cylon and who is not” is still very much in play. For example, Boomer is already a known Cylon by this time in the storyline but in the game there is no guarantee. In a six person game at least one person is a secret Cylon from the beginning. Their job is to sabotage the work of the humans for as long as they can, and they can choose to reveal themselves as Cylon to gain new and different ways to play the game. Halfway through the game one of the humans is privately informed they are really a Cylon too, and their goals then switch to insure the destruction of the humans. This tension creates a lot of paranoid decision making, and if the humans are truly unlucky the Cylon can be a very powerful figure such as the President or the Admiral of the Fleet (or both, as happened in one of our games).

If you are a fan of the series and really enjoy moderately complex board games I’d recommend this one. It takes a bit of time to find the optimal move for each player on each turn, but the basic rules are pretty easy to learn and it moves along at a reasonable speed. The first game can be pretty long (ours was about four hours long) due to having to learn the rules. The second game went much quicker, once everyone was up to speed.

One word of caution: don’t play this game with people who are easily upset by duplicitous behavior. The whole point of the hidden Cylon agenda is to wreak the most havoc on the humans at the worst possible time. Get used to it, this is how the game works.

I’m not someone who plays video games very often, I own two or three games and have lost interest in all of them. I’ve never owned a GameCube, XBox or Playstation. I never really caught the game fever.

Then comes the Nintendo Wii. I’ve seen the advertising. I’ve heard about it from other people. But never played one until a work event a few weeks ago. It took exactly one game of the Wii Play cow racing to hook me like an addict.

I came home and revealed my new weakness to Eileen. Even my verbal description was enough to get her interested in the idea too.

Of course wanting a Wii isn’t quite the same thing as owning a Wii. They are still in short supply and finding a store with some in stock is rather complicated. Speaking with others in the know, it requires investigation not unlike something out of a Mickey Spillane story.

You must call around to every electronics store in town hoping they’ll know something. You must stop into stores early in the morning to corner the underpaid, overworked staff and convince them to reveal the shipping schedule. You might get lucky enough to overhear about it from someone who’s cousin knows a guy, etc.

Last week we scored. Eileen had phoned a store near us and got the news, delivered in a faint whisper so nobody could eavesdrop: they had them in stock right now. I raced over and of course there are none on the shelf. I managed to corner a staff member who was appropriately cagey about the exact status, but was willing to look around in the back. Another fellow was also buying one and we both felt very cool.

A few minutes later the fellow emerged from the stock room with a plain brown box. He looked around, spotted us and casually strolled over like he was not carrying anything important. We got to look inside the box to see our Wii but couldn’t touch it. We got the long lecture about accessories and extra games (I bought some) and the extended service plan (bought it too).

Then the plain brown box was paraded through the store to the check-out desk, with the small group of people trailing behind like it contained a holy relic.

We’ve had the Wii for several days now and find it screaming fun. My favorite Wii Sports game is the bowling, favorite Wii Play game is the cow racing. I’ve started the Zelda game too, its pretty well done although not as well integrated with the Wii-style controls as I’d hoped.

Is there a Wii in your future?

Last week my company took all the developers to a team-building event at TBC Indoor Kart Racing. About fifty of us descended onto the TBC location for lunch, racing and beer. The beer came after the racing of course.

The organizers got everyone into four-person teams for a two-hour race that had complicated rules about safety, pit-stops for driver changes, and track etiquette. The idea was to get everyone to drive at least a couple of times so there were a minimum number of pit-stops required. Of course there were also rules about bumping and running people into walls and such but pretty much it was a race against time.

These karts go fast – like 30km or more – and you are basically sitting low with your rear end scraping the ground, a gas engine right behind your seat and a full tank of gas between your legs. You get to wear a helmut and a seatbelt for safety.

I’ve done this same thing exactly once before. When I moved to Brussels (for Creo) a number of years ago we also (coincidentally) went to a kart racing track. So I had some experience to bring to the team. It was clear from the introduction that some of my co-workers were far more experienced, but I noticed none of those guys were on my team. Instead we had Tom who has never driven a car before (he has always lived in cities, never had a need to learn, and is from the UK where getting a driving license is not simple nor nearly automatic like it is in Canada and the United States). Everyone was a good sport though and we all wanted to have fun and do well in the race.

After two hours it was clear that our team was the best team on the track. We led the next closest team by four laps and some teams by up to seven or eight laps. We didn’t have the fastest driver (track record for the day went to Luke on a different team with 32.9 seconds for one lap, I had the second spot at 33.5 seconds). But we were very consistent (our average lap time was below 39 seconds over the 180+ laps including pit-stops), we didn’t take penalties for rough driving behavior (which cost time) and we were very efficient in changing drivers.

Driving these karts is very intense and also very strenuous. The track has lots of tight turns and zig-zags that make you turn the wheel very hard. I must have sweated away several pounds! Even the next day I was feeling the pain in my shoulders and upper arms. But it was a lot of fun and the next day at work was filled with everyone reliving every moment of their moments of glory (or defeat) at the track.

I’d highly recommend this sort of event, its not really expensive and the folks at TBC were fantastic. What a great day!