Weeknotes 11 Apr 2020

Bunkered in for another week. Not going outside often. Life with COVID-19.

The government and health officials want us to wear face masks when we venture out now. So my wife and I have been doing our duty. Feels weird, but why wouldn't it be.

While we can't really keep any local business's afloat by ourselves, we are still making a point to be good, ongoing, customers of our favorite local places.

For restaurants and coffee shops, that's pick-up orders. For my favorite theater, that means renting some films online to support them.

Movies

• Crawl was pretty fun. Trapped in a house, in a hurricane. And you happen to live by an alligator farm of ravenous gators who've now escaped. Alexandre Aja's films are style over substance mostly, but so far, every one I've seen has been fun to watch.
• Onward, Pixar's latest film was just released on Disney+ so I was able to catch it there. All Pixar films are good. This was too. Definitely better than the ho-hum Frozen II was. Not sure it is going to launch a franchise though.

Board Games

Some friends and I have been playing some board games online at https://www.boardgamearena.com over the past few weeks.

I've come across a few tools for playing boardgames virtually which do nothing more than give you the game board, pieces, cards and dice you need to play a game, but it's up to you to follow the rules. It's quite literally like setting up the physical game itself. Only you can start with the game already set up.

Boardgame Arena, however, enforces rules. There's no AI opponent. You would have to play against other people, but it has hints when you hover over areas of the board and won't let you make invalid choices.

Plus, a lot of games have some complicated scoring methods and it also takes care of that for you.

We started off getting the hang of the interface playing games like Carcassonne, 7 Wonders and Saboteur. One or more of us already knew how to play all of them, so at least we knew the rules pretty well and could focus on how to use the site.

We then decided to try one none of us had played, but looked interesting to learn: Tzolk'in, a game based on the Mayan calendar.

I think we're in our fourth game. We seem to have the rules down, but still trying to figure out strategies. Mostly whoever wins seems like an accident. At least helping us pass the time.