Home safe
Had a good trip. WisCon; Chicago; Swarthmore. Good to see people. Am unlikely to write up a full report of any of those sub-trips, but suffice it to say all of them were good.
On downside, picked up a cough, probably from M (I figured if she's had it for this long it probably wasn't contagious, but looks like I was wrong); spent much of plane ride home coughing. Luckily, I still have some cough syrup with codeine.
Thanks to Naomi for airport ride!
Oh, and speaking of health issues, I taught Pandemic to various people. Had two games with M: in the first one, we lost by one card; in the second, we won despite the fact that I completely forgot I was the Medic so I didn't use Medic abilities at all. This is not the first time that's happened; I think I need to start asking other players to remind me to use Medic abilities. Later in the week, had two Pandemic games with Annie. In the first one, we were about to win when there was suddenly a triple outbreak that we hadn't noticed was impending, and it left us one blue cube short, and thus we lost. In the second, in which Prime joined us, we won very quickly and easily; no outbreaks, no problems, only two epidemics; just bam bam bam bam, one cure after another.
In all of those games we were playing with only four epidemics in the deck, of course.
Hey, while I'm on the subject: those of you who play Pandemic, what do you think about the Operations Expert role? It seems to me that having more than about three research stations is rarely helpful, so when the O.E. is in the game, they tend to wander around the board building research stations that never get used. That role seems to me significantly underpowered compared to the other roles. Have y'all had the same experience? In at least some of the games this past week, at my recommendation we took the O.E. out of the set of roles cards before assigning roles; I'm inclined to do that from now on, but maybe I just haven't seen O.E. used to full effect?
(In other game news, I played Thurn and Taxis for the first time today; pretty interesting. Didn't love it, but liked it, and would like to try it again.)
Okay, this was meant to be an entry about having arrived home and being tired and sick and heading for bed, so I'll stop here.
