2038!

Spent today at ironphoenix's place playing in the first of his "long-game" days. The game of choice was 2038 -- one of the 18xx series, but set in the future. This one is all about being the nastiest and most effective capitalist bastard that you possibly can. We started with the inexperienced players arriving an hour early for a rules explanation, and then game start an hour later. We had 4 newbies (including me), and 2 experienced players -- I pulled out a fairly clear first (5500+ net worth) despite a major rules snafu (misexplained, not misunderstood) that would have affected my late game a fair bit, with the 2 experienced players both in the 4800-4600 range, and the rest below that. If it weren't on the order of 15 years out of print, I just might be looking to get a copy of this game. I'm definitely going to look at playing others in this series.

Hiking yesterday

Due to nobody else joining us, gabriel_le and I hiked to Lusk caves yesterday just the two of us. When we got close to the parking, we found that they wanted $9.00 to go in and park. We chose to park at the gate, rather than farther in, saving the money. Unfortunately, this did make for a longish walk along the road -- which I'd like to avoid for future trips. Also, much walking through the camp site, too. That was, partially, due to not getting a very good read/understanding of the best route in. Still, parts of the walk were quite nice, and we did probably cover around 13km in total. And, going through the cave was quite fun -- we played the "feet dry as long as possible" game, which made it in many ways like a long traverse for climbing. And, the water-carved rock left a lot of interesting hand-holds to work with. I'm thinking I need a headlight -- working entirely by gabriel_le's light did make things a bit trickier, and meant I did have to do a lot more by feel. Though, that did make it feel more like climbing, too.