Friday, June 29, 2012

Tsuro - still denied - Thanks Wil!

We popped back into Game Knight to see if Tsuro and Get Bit! Had come in – but they were still on backorder. They only had the Mayfair version of Hey, That’s My Fish – with the wooden pieces. They did have a bunch of the Castle Panics though – I may have to pop back and pick one up.


My wife, who loves me, had bought me a Deluxe Hey, That’s My Fish from Kite and Kaboodle. It’s the Mayfair version but comes with the painted plastic penguins instead of the wooden shapes. She paid a bit more for it than I would have but she was annoyed at not being able to get a Tsuro or Get Bit! At least this way I won’t have to paint them – my painting vs buying total isn’t so good lately.

My daughter and I have already played it a few times. It seems simple enough with a fair amount of replayability. The penguins are a good size and the hexes make a board that fits nicely on our coffee table. The only odd thing is the rules mention to shuffle the tiles face down but our tiles are double sided – with fish on both sides. This doesn’t really affect play as you have to adjust the board anyways if the higher-fish floes clump together.



If I can’t find a Tsuro or Get Bit! I may have to make a temporary copy for us to play until they finally restock. Both games are pretty simple to replicate and the rules are basic enough to remember.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Quick - draw condiment gun

For Father’s Day, my daughter picked out a Condiment Gun from Avon for me. I had never seen one before. It looks a bit like a ray gun and has two triggers – one for ketchup and one for mustard. When you open it up, there are two containers – each of which is compressed by a trigger.

I haven’t tried it out yet – but it looks pretty keen.



Here is a picture from the Avon.com web site - the Avon.ca site doesn't have it listed.

Friday, June 22, 2012

dial of the times

Back in the day, the odometers on cars used to actually be a series of dials. As the lower dials rolled past nine back to zero, the dial to the left would increment one as well. This became more fun when you ‘rolled it’ or went from 99999.9 to 00000.0 (as they didn’t show hundreds of thousands).   I remember seeing it happen a few times from when I was a youth and it always left an impression on me.



So on the old car, when we came close to rolling the odometer, we piled the kids in the backseat and drove around the Safeway parking lot a bit until it rolled over so they could see.




 
With the van, I recently ‘rolled it’ from 199,000 to 200,000. 


With the new digital odometers, it’s not nearly as cool.




Wednesday, June 20, 2012

My Fish - bigger or smaller box?

After Keycon, I had popped into Game Knight to check out some games that we had played at the convention. Game Knight had been a sponsor and had a table of games that you could borrow to play. They had Lascaux but did not have Tsuro or Get Bit! in stock. They said that they had both on order and took my name to call me when they came in.

It’s now been a month and I haven’t heard from them.


I finally managed to pop into Kite and Kaboodle at the Forks over the weekend. They have a facebook page and when I asked if they had Tsuro they said they too had it on order and it might have come in but it hadn’t.

While I was there I did see the box for Hey, That’s My Fish. I had heard a bit about this game as well but the box was smaller than I thought. In checking it out online at BGG, I find that there were 2 versions – one a bit bigger than the other. The bigger one also has painted figures instead of merely colored ones. I’m not sure it’s worth the extra money for the bigger box – but we’ll see.