Culinary Expeimentation

Hi,

So a friend mentioned that she loves root beer floats, but dairy problems prevented having them. Well you know me, I like ,,helping,, so I thought about how to fix that.

So the ice cream is easy, you just get coconut milk ice cream in vanilla bean flavor. Coconut milk ice cream is, quite possibly, better than real ice cream. Obviously, the coconut flavor always comes through not matter what flavor it's supposed to be, but a strong vanilla bean flavor holds its own.

So now we're done right? Just get some high-end froo-froo root beer and you're good to go.

Yeah, that works, but I was thinking about this float idea while drinking an Angry Orchard Cider. This is my new favorite hard cider -- just incredibly tasty. Comes in a couple of different flavors including a ginger-laced variant that has a real apple pie taste.

Huh...apple pie...and ice cream...I wonder.

And so was born the Dariy-free, hard-cider float.

She really liked it. I have a bigger sweet tooth so it wasn't quite the pie a la mode I was hoping for. But it's still two great tastes whether you have them together or not.

later
Tom

Saturday Gaming

Hey,

So this weekend there was a Jiffycon out in Northampton. Jiffycon is a one-day DIY gaming convention where people show up and play various games.

In the morning I ran the introductory adventure from Over the Edge. Over the Edge is a roleplaying game set in the fictional island of Al Amarja and heavily influenced by Kafka and William S. Burroughs. It's a fun little game with a rough-and-ready game engine. It's also 20 years old...and man does that make me feel old.

The players were a team of oddball spooks sent to protect a courier who would be exchanging information at various points on the island. The team consisted of a smooth-talking con man, a burnt-out NYPD cop, a bodybuilder, a narcoleptic pilot, Indiana Jones with a heroin problem, and an expert in propaganda.

I didn't do enough prep for this. The adventure is mostly a series of short fights one after the other. It showcases the system mechanics and if you were going to return to the island you could dig into the weirdness, but I really need something better. People seemed to have a fun time, but I should've come up with a better adventure that exposed the characters to the high weirdness of Al Amarja.

In the afternoon, I opted for board games. In particular, I wanted to play with my shiny new copy of Wiz-War from Fantasy Flight Games. Wiz-War is this great little board game from Tom Jolly where, as the title implies, you play a wizard who wanders through a maze-like dungeon trying to steal treasures from the other wizards or flat-out kill them. Basically Magic: The Gathering stole all their best ideas from this game, but forgot to steal the bit where you have fun. The problem is that the game has barely been in print (Chessex held the license in a death-grip for years) and the previous versions have all been pretty low-tech affairs. The FFG version has solid components, miniatures for the wizards, glossy, full-color cards, and a solid review and re-write of the rules by Mr. Jolly. Purists have decried the re-writes, but it does appear as though the game is now much more coherent.

So we have a full game of 4 people, I hand out the cheat sheets and we sit down to play.

The first game was...a first game. We were all learning so that was to be expected, but the game just didn't have the pop or sizzle that I remembered from college when I played it last. In the end, I was held up by the Red Wizard who foolishly pursued a vendetta against me while Yellow strolled about and simply stole the two treasures he needed without much of a fight.

But there was plenty of time so we had another go at it. This game, this game was much, much better. You deck of spell cards gets customized each time you play. There's a base group of cards plus another three "schools" (out of a possible six). I think our first game suffered from a deck of spells that were usually personal in nature. This time around we had more active spells that littered the board with objects and items and actively screwed with other people.

So here's my Wiz-War story: I've got one treasure secured and I need one more. I walk up to a opening, cast Destroy Wall so now I can see Yellow's home base and the Green treasure he left there. Then I cast stretch which lets me reach halfway across the board, and snatch the treasure away. On my next turn I've got the card I need to walk back to my home base, dump the treasure and I win. Victory is assured!

Green's turn, he's got nothing.

Red's turn, he rotates my board segment so now I'm staring down the hallway at Green and Yellow.

Yellow's turn, he walks up, casts Strength so he can rip the treasure away from me. I Counterspell. He Anti-Counterspells my Counterspell. So his Strength goes off and he pulls the treasure away from me. Then he rotates my board away again.

On the next round of turns, Green tries to kill Red with a treasure chest, but it gets bounced back on him and he almost dies, then Yellow punches him and he definitely dies.

On the final round everyone has 1 VP and a treasure so it's a race to home. Red eats his way through a wall and makes a shortcut. Red wins.

And THAT'S how a game of Wiz-War should go!

So I want to get in some more plays of this because I think it's going to be a real winner.

We still had a little time left so I broke out my Decktet. Decktet is a deck of cards, but the wrinkle is that there are six suits and most cards have two suits showing on them. There's a book that goes along with it detailing various game people have invented to play with it. We played a game called Gasp! which is a trick-taking game. Win a trick and you get a token of one of the trump suits. The idea is to get two tokens of each suit. It was fun. The cards are very evocative and fun to play with so hopefully I can break that one out a bit more too.

So yeah, it was a fun day.

later
Tom