March Wrap-Up

 

March was an odd month, especially with Easter being at the end of it. Not as many segments in the post, but it was still a pretty productive month overall with some good stuff to share.

Blah Blog Log

• February 2024 Wrap Up - Great television, a podcast live show, and "The Cracken".

Bored Board Games

March saw an uptick in number of plays and the same number of unique games of the year as played in February. I logged 64 plays across 32 games, 19 of those being new for the year. That brought me to 34.83% of the way to part one of my goal (600 plays) and 50.67% of the way to part two of my goal (150 unique games). There are four or five games that I wanted to highlight from this batch, but two really stuck out and both happen to be new games (one isn't even published yet):

Let's Go! to Japan - I don't own this game, but my friend Eric from our game group got this recently and I liked it so much after the first play that I requested a second play the following meetup. It's a relatively straightforward card drafting game with a theme of visiting various places, events, shops, etc. in Tokyo and Kyoto. In the base game you draft three cards for each day, Monday through Saturday. Each card has different symbols and points on the top and then an objective with more points at the bottom. The trick is deciding which of the objective should be showing on each day because only one of the three cards can have an objective showing. One of the other things to always keep in mind is the locations, if you want to draft a Tokyo card, but your last card on that day (or possible the previous day) was from Kyoto, then you need a train token to travel there. You can earn them but if you don't then you will lose points at the end of the game. It's pretty simple but forces you to make some tough decisions throughout. All of the art and flavor text really immerses you in the game and makes me want to go to Japan even more.

River Valley Glassworks - This game is currently on Kickstarter and easily surpassed it's goal to be published. I was able to try it out already because the publisher had someone develop a digital version on my favorite board game platform, Board Game Arena. I was able to get a couple of games in towards the end of the month and could have played many more because it's so fun and plays incredibly quickly (especially at two players). This is definitely a family friendly gateway style game that is being beautifully produced with lovely art and high quality components. I backed the deluxe version which comes with dual layer player boards and some other upgrades, but the retail version even comes with acrylic river rocks. Gameplay is fairly simple, either add a rock to the river and take rocks from adjacent spaces or take 4 stones from the lake. The hook is the scoring mechanism, where you're scoring your highest two columns on your player board and any rows where you have rocks starting in the first column. It's akin to Azul but has a lower entry level I think, although the expansion and extra modules probably ratchet up the complexity some. I'm looking forward to many more games of this.

Enjoyable Eats

I didn't get a picture but I had a great meal at one of our favorite places to go when traveling to/from NY. There isn't much in Kinsley, PA aside from a gas station and two small strip plazas, but right off the Lenox exit coming south on Route 81 is Bingham's Family Restaurant. It's basically a diner with a huge bakery menu. The menu is multiple pages long, but most breakfast options aren't available for lunch or dinner. We like it because the food is good, the service is friendly, and they have great options for the kids that they like. 

As you can see, they have a slice of pie in their logo and rightfully so. They always have dozens of homemade pies available for purchase and the line for pickup around Thanksgiving is always out the door. They had a special when we stopped on the way up for Easter, it was a full turkey dinner that included a slice of pie for only $14.99. The slice of pie on it's own is normally $5.79, which is kind of expensive, but it's close to a quarter of the pie. I had to get strawberry rhubarb because it's my favorite, even though neither rhubarb nor strawberries are in season. We've been there over a dozen times over the years and we always wave when we aren't stopping.

I'm Watching 👀

The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live - If you know me then you know that I love all things The Walking Dead and that has not changed. I wrote a few wrap-ups back that Christine and I were hate watching the last season of Fear The Walking Dead and thankfully the new spinoffs of the original show have been fantastic. That didn't change with the newest one which brought Rick and Michonne back. The first season follows their stories from *spoilers* them leaving the original show to present day. Since the show is so new, I don't want to get into any real details, just that we've enjoyed this season very much and are happy to see that AMC is putting a lot of money and effort into the new spinoff shows.

Resolutions Update

A mixed bag with the goals, but overall doing pretty well.

• Goal #1: Cook More Italian Food - I made a pan meat sauce served on cascatelli (a newish pasta shape created by the host of one of my favorite podcasts). I never make a quick red sauce, but this one turned out pretty good.
• Goal #2: Log 600 Plays of At Least 150 Games - As of March 31st, I've played 76 unique games 209 times total.
• Goal #3: Write at Least 3 Blog Posts Each Month - Only had the one wrap up post in March for February. I couldn't get into writing about anything specific until the end of the month and then a travel for the holiday delayed that. I hope to make up for last month in the coming weeks.

Wrap It Up

Please comment below with any thoughts or comments on anything I've covered. Thanks for reading!