Visitors; New Furniture; CCG Work; and Potential Gaming

seidl joined us for gaming on Thursday. He visits the Bay Area every once in a while because he works with a programming group out here, and of late he's taken to joining our Thursday night gaming group when he's about. It was, as always, great to see him, though the game didn't entirely work. (That was Mall World which was too badly themed and had too many sharp edges, and generally could have been a much better game; I'll be writing about it in my first board gaming blog at Gone Gaming, which'll be in almost exactly a week.)

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We've also had an influx of new furniture Thursday and Friday.

Sadly, my refinishing of Kimberly's coffee table never took. The finish was still coming up if water was applied to it almost a month later, and a coffee table that you can't put glasses on seemed subpar for our usage.

So we went online last week, and found a very nice looking Mission style coffee table for about $60 all said and done, which was a great deal. We ordered it about a week ago, it arrived on Thursday, and then I had a fun hour putting it together prior to gaming. It's a little narrower than our previous table, which we really haven't gotten used to yet, but much nicer. And there's lots of space for cats to lay on a platform under the table. But Kimberly won't let me cover it with blankets.

The old coffee table went out front with a "free" sign on Friday, and shortly thereafter disappeared. Kimberly wasn't sentimental about this at all, but I was.

Then yesterday when walking home Andrew P., local photographer and property owner, shouted that they were getting rid of some furniture. And, they were, piles and piles of it. A lot of it was nice woodwork, a little worn down, but we really didn't have room for any of that. However, I gladly accepted a cheapo particle-board bookcase. I've been short a few, one for my paperbacks, and a couple to keep things organized in various closets, but haven't gotten around to doing anything about that. This one is pretty large, and will probably organize a lot of my older RPG material currently stored in tupperware containers in the Sun Room closet.

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The CCG work continues. As of last night I had 77 of my 100 cards, exactly on the schedule I'd set.

The troublesome thing about CCGs is working to make sure that the cards are all in good balance. I've got a "point" system which I've been using, but it's been growing increasingly unwieldy as I try and correlate a bunch of different notes. So today I'm going to sit down and spreadsheet it all. And then go back through all the cards.

Tonight my goal is for the last 23 out of 100 cards. Plus that spreadsheeting + clarity work.

Then tomorrow I have to figure out how to lay them all out, probably correcting some language in the process, and then I'll have some decks! With 9 days left before GenCon to make the system really shine.

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Gaming today is up in the air. My local group will either do board games or RPGs, and which is still unclear. I'm going to call Donald in an hour+ to get a commitment. Alternatively Chris is doing games up at his house. But, his house is considerably harder to get from and to given that I'll only have a few gaming hours today before I have to get back to designing.

So I'll figure out what I'm doing in a bit