Friends

yay Sundays! First we visited boardgames friend, where Miss R plays with their kid, and we play board games with M. This time we played Rise and Fall which was lots of fun. I lost by a lot, but there's a lot of cool interlocking mechanics that makes me want to play it again. Or rather -- there *seems* to be a lot of cool interlocking mechanics. I think I'll have to play it again to get the sense of whether the various systems feed into each other, or just create a lot of resource spaghetti to keep track of. I'm kind of tempted to buy the game, except that apparently it's out of print, so the only way to buy the game is to spend $100+ to get it from Europe. Bleh. The other option is to make my own copy of it. Honestly, it wouldn't be super hard to make the board plates -- just some foam board and some hexes. The board pieces can probably be 3D printed. But really, I mostly just want to try the game a few more times to see if I like it??? So maybe I shouldn't invest this much effort into it?

But also, I am often interested in playing board games with spouse, but really the only time we play is when we're at the Boardgames household, so maybe it's not super worth it? I feel like oftentimes I want to play either board games or TTRPG with spouse after child is asleep, but by then it's 10:30pm and really we just have an hour before it's bedtime, and that time is mostly spent decompressing, doing our own creative projects, or doing light activities like Quordle* or watching some Dr Who. I guess the question to consider is how much does moving some pieces around and doing resource management actually contribute to the feeling of "hanging out with spouse"? Like, where on the scale of spousal activities does it rank? (And I'm sure spouse would rank the activities differently?) There's also the question of whether ranking in terms of "quality time" vs "intimacy" vs "spousal connection" might generate different results?

Like, here's a quick sort:
- walk-and-talk, or drive-and-talk (good connection, but need fodder to talk about)
- co-working at boba shop (not talking a lot, but good relaxed vibes, and getting to be creative. Generates fodder for talking later)
- watching media while doing our own stuff (co-working, but also generating fodder for later convos. Less intensely creative but still relaxing)
- playing ttrpgs (brain intensive, connecting on a deeply creative level, but not really relaxing)
- doing "the dle's"*, etc (light-hearted fun, good way to decompress)
- cooking together (good physical partnership, mostly relaxing, but we don't do it much because inefficient use of time)
- playing card or board games (good brain use, but not particularly "connective")

So I guess board games are mostly for playing with other people? :thinky:

And looks like the actual axes are "how relaxing" and "how creative", or maybe "creative connection" vs "physical connection"?

Anyways, the great thing about Sunday afternoons is that we get a bit of time to ourselves, since Miss R is with grandma, so we walked to boba, did some work, and then walked back. I think I have most of my Ozawa edits figured out, which is exciting -- maybe I can get those pages properly blocked out with dialogue tonight or tomorrow night, and then be able to start working on the drawing part! The good thing about the drawing part is that I can work on it while watching something.

Oh, and tonight I finished crocheting the flower hat for Spouse that I started a few days ago. :3 He looks very cute in it! Yay!



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* our usual round-up is Connections, Quordle, Waffle, Whodle, with occasionally Worldle and Geogrid, and ending with cuddles