14 thoughts on “July 16, 2023: Root”

  1. So sometimes I will do a box break on Ebay. For those unfamiliar, someone buys a box of some sports memorabilia. Could be a box of cards, could be a single signed jersey, autographed puck/ball etc and auctions off the rights to the team inside the box and broadcasts these on YouTube. Generally for between $5-$20 you can pick a team and you may get something worth something, or you may get nothing.

    Last night I put in a couple of bids and won two teams for two separate draws, the Buffalo Sabres and the Minnesota Twins. The hockey one was first, which I lost. I was watching the stream and I saw the baseball box open. I knew right away when seeing those blue pinstripes and red numbers it was a Twins jersey! Pretty cool, right?

    Who was it? Chuck Knoblauch. At first I was pretty excited. 91 WS, Rookie of the Year, hurt the Yankees. Gave him a Google to check my memory and yikes. Not a great post playing career. Guess I will probably end up reselling that. Oh well, still fun to win.

  2. Trevor Plouffe called that Kirilloff home run during batting practice πŸ˜†

  3. Oh man, how did I miss this topic!

    Yes, board games are getting more and more complicated. For a while, I really liked that. And I do tend to like the thinky type games where there's a lot going on and I need to think about several different mechanisms to score points, and the winner is going to be whoever manages them the best.

    But I'm starting to get to the point where it's a little exhausting to learn new games. I attended Geekway to the West convention in May, and the highlight there is the Play & Win where you can try all sorts of new games. In the past, I'd been excited about reading up on the games, perusing rulebooks, etc before the convention. This year my heart just wasn't in it, and I tended to play lighter games with quicker rule sets.

    I've played Root once and thought it was okay. That's a really tough one to teach because each player uses a drastically different rule set. My gaming group has played the game Oath (by the same makers as Root), and that one also has a really rough rule set even though it's not like Root where we're all different, but there's still a lot.

    1. Yeah, it was hard to pick up. Plus my friend has expansion packs too. I didn't realize I selected one of the more complicated characters/armies/whatever. I think I was starting to get it just as it ended.

      After that we played Dominion, which I vaguely remembered and was able to pick up again quick. Him and his roommate have like 10 different boxes of expansion packs for that one. Seems like a good racket.

      1. Dominion is a favorite of mine, that we've been waiting until our kids are a little older to get them into it.

        I always thought Root looked really cool. Not sure if this makes me want to try it more, or less.

    2. I'm mostly in the same place as you. We've started to get into games where there is some real strategy, but not too much to keep straight, since that's kind of where our oldest kids are (8th/6th grade). Sagrada, Doomlings, and Parks are all favorites right now.

      We're also working on trick-based card games (starting easy, with up and down the river). Will probably try for Euchure and then 500 soon.

    3. In the early 2000s our family got into Killer Bunnies, which was complicated and very long to play. And then there was endless expansion packs that made the game even more complicated and even longer. We still liked it, but yeah people started having kids and we just couldn't do it anymore. Every time we played it took us 40 minutes to read the rules again to remember what to do. And that's not even anywhere near the most complex games out there.

    4. To less complicated games. I think the wife and I are going to create our own versions of Fluxx to hand out as holiday gifts. Including one that is just about our family. The creepers should be hilarious and sad

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