Ticket to Ride, Sweetgrove commissions, and done with animation project for now

We tried out Ticket to Ride last night. It's fun (we were playing the Europe expansion version) but Danny and I both found the game's play a little awkward.

How the game works: Each player has a set number of train cars. Routes are marked by color and a number of spaces; a route marked in red that is four spaces long requires the payment of four red cards (or any number of red cards and wild cards that comes out to four). You get points accordingly for each route you claim.

However, players also start with between two and four 'route' cards (the tickets to ride, as it were). I say between two and four because you may discard up to two if you want. However, you're stuck with at least two of these for the entire game, and if you fail to make a continuous route between the cities on your ticket, you lose points equal to the route's value.

How we think it should work: tickets to ride are optional, with five or ten of them kept out face-up at any given time ala the five non-random color cards. Players can take one of the face-up routes if they complete the route in question, otherwise the game is played the same.

Or, remove the tickets altogether-- and you still have a perfectly feasible game.

Sometimes boardgames are better off not trying too hard in the vein of strategy. Compared to Carcasonne, I'd have to say Ticket to Ride is slightly lacking. It's more fun to build a city or road, etc., than it is to follow an existing one.

What I really hate when playing board games is when there's basically no decision to be made, but turns take two to five minutes of agonizing about what to do anyway. I'm fine with people taking two to five minutes if they insist, but I want them to be doing it because they're trying to pick the best spot to build the next city, or because they're trying to figure out how they can play all seven letter tiles to get triple word score. Not because they're trying to decide between drawing a card, and putting a card down on a pre-determined route that they're following due to the card that will penalize them if they don't. Just boring, that.

I recently commissioned Melissa to draw the characters of Sweetgrove! She's done Alice and Fletcher so far, which is pretty awesome. When they're all done I'm looking forward to using them on the Sweetgrove forum to ID characters!

Yesterday night marked the cut-off for Round 1, thank goodness, so I'm done for now with my crazy animating ways, I promise. Though I did receive a request from a random brony on DeviantArt to do storyboarding of his project to make a MLP Ghostbusters knockoff. Pretty neat! I said sure, because I figure practice can't hut.

Grabbed this on tumblr: What would you be in an RPG?

dev_chieftain: Lv.7 Samurai.
Special trait: can resolve any conflict.

What about you?

Oh, little generator. That would be a pretty cool trait.

EDITED TO ADD:

Female bodies as 'distracting': another quick thought by Jessica Valenti.

To this I have to say, 'sh'yeah'. I always found it pretty messed up that dress code violations could be called over things that certainly weren't keeping ME from learning. As a young woman who was attracted to other young women, I think society might do better to put some effort into teaching young men-- and teachers-- to mind their own business. I certainly wasn't being distracted from my learning by what other people wore.

I keep seeing shit about the new Tomb Raider game

I sincerely hope nobody buys the game. It's fucking ridiculous. You want to know HOW ridiculous this is? Let's play a game of our own.

Here's a list of all the things that the writers COULD have threatened Lara Croft with, instead of rape. Feel free to comment in with your own suggestions:

-cannibalism
-death
-broken limbs
-broken fingers or toes or a combo
-water torture
-being left to die of exposure on a cross
-flogging
-menial labor carrying heavy shit around for lazy rich people
-menial labor making things for people (shoes, clothes, license plates, forgeries, car parts, whatever)
-menial labor scouting out important artifacts (you know, HER JOB) for someone who is forcing her to do so at gunpoint / knifepoint / the threat of killing her friend
-imprisonment in a remote location
-abandonment in a prisonlike natural location (such as at the bottom of a well, or on a cliff with no obvious way down)

But no. Instead, they're threatening her with rape. Because she's a woman. There is pretty much no other reason. (I'm not exaggerating here either. That's the exciting challenge we can look forward to for conveniently meek, submissive, weak, beaten, and violated Young Lara Croft.)

No fucking way.