Yesterday, ash and I played Clue -- him for the first time (that he remembers, anyway) and me for the first time in a long while. I used to play a lot of two-player Clue with my dad when I was younger, because I had no friends, but ash and I are both adults and it seemed likely that trying that now would lead to a subpar gaming experience, so I looked up rule modifications and found one that looked like it could be fun. It was! We played two games, by amazing coincidence I was the murderer in the first game and he was the murderer in the second.
The modification we used has you set up play normally until dealing out cards, at which point you deal five to each player and then set aside the rest into a draw pile. When you make a guess (who, what, where), if your opponent doesn't have a card to show you, you discard one of your cards to the bottom of the pile and then draw a new one. In this way, players don't have 50% of all available cards, but both players also slowly work their way through the rest of the clues. It worked really well for the first game, but the second game went on long enough that the pile started cycling, which is an element that I want in the game but not forever, so we're going to introduce a shuffling mechanic -- ideas had were separate draw and discard and shuffle the discard when you run out of draw pile (which eliminates the cycling entirely), designate a space on the board that you go to to voluntarily shuffle the draw pile (introduces strategy to sacrificing turn(s) to refresh the pile), and shuffle whenever a certain number comes up on the dice (leaves it random, so maybe it'll happen when you want it to and maybe it won't). We're going to try the last one next time we play
But yeah, a good time, and I'm glad it was!
Later, while eating dinner, we watched Murder By Death, which I hadn't seen in many years but remembered being really funny. I'm happy to report that it is in fact really funny, though includes Peter Sellers as a chinese man which is less racist than it could be but still very racist. It does also include an actual japanese man playing a japanese man, and some of that kind of homophobia that was homophobic at the time but comes across as actual representation now? Like, the era where "person is gay" is in and of itself a joke, so they don't have to be any more cruel to make a joke out of it? So now the "joke" is "person is gay" and so it just ends up being that, like, there's a gay person. Yay?
All of that aside it was fun to see the ways that this movie clearly influenced some movies that came after, namely Clue and Glass Onion, and also to compare the ways pacing has changed in movies between the 70s and now. Also Peter Falk is adorable
Today I have done some yard work and I plan to shower later in the day, but I'm also quite tired and plan on otherwise taking it easy. I do have some deadline stuff I need to do, but unless my energy levels improve I'm going to get them done tomorrow instead. I'd hoped on yesterday but that was a bit out of my hands.
Didn't go to church today due to aforementioned energy levels, which is a bit of a bummer because it's a sermon I was kind of looking forward to, but I'll catch it on youtube when it gets uploaded.
A game I really like has a new beta dropping next week, so I want to finish achievement hunting the current version of it before that happens, so will probably zone out to that for a while today. There might also be a nap in my future if I can't shake this off any. For now, I'm going to ingest a caffeine and stare at a computer screen for a while.
