The Valley Nerd Watch!
Happy American Thanksgiving, everyone! It’s this week, in case you were not aware. During this holiday, Americans come together to eat things. In many ways, all of our holidays are about coming together to eat things. In this particular iteration we collectively dare each other to eat a whole turkey. Most people give up on the dare early, and just have friends and family come help out. Thus, a holiday is born.
Remember, Friendsgiving is also a thing! We know there are a lot of grad students out there in the Valley who might not have the resources to make it back home for a holiday on account of the atrocious rate of pay that grad students endure. What? Were we formerly grad students? Why would you ask? Anyway, if you too want to save some funds, invite over friends for a potluck of “whatever is tasty”. You don’t have to take the Turkey Dare if you don’t want to.
Finally, please no one reading this go shop on Thanksgiving or Black Friday. For real, do you need to? There’s basically nothing out there that’s getting more than like a 10% price drop in real terms. And when you go to a store and you see a real human who was forced to wake up at 3:00am to work the worst day of their year for $10 an hour, it hurts you in a manner that a few percent off a big-ticket consumer item cannot heal.
Do your deal-hunting on the appropriate day: the week after Christmas, when retailers are desperately offloading their stock.
Not a ton of events out there this week, for pretty obvious reasons. So in addition to events, we’re going to give you all a few recommendations for fun board games to play with people who maybe don’t have a ton of experience with board games or whatnot!
For one-on-FUN (one-on-one) we recommend Breaker Blocks! We got it at Topatocon, and it is good. Bit involved but no more so than any card game, and it’s about 15 minutes per match so that’s nice too.
For bigger games, we had a lot of fun with Mysterium recently. The rule book is a bit tough to figure out sometimes, but the basic game is simple. One player is The Ghost. One to six other players are The Mediums. The Ghost is attempting to communicate the Who, What, and How of a murder to the Mediums. But being a ghost the ghost can only do this via Ghoooostly Visions!
The gameplay amounts to the ghost player just going wild with frustration as they think “aaaaah these cards are so mysterious and hard to figure um uh er okay this one has some green in it and that person wears a bit of green maybe that will communicate it!” and it’s a real fun time of frustration and venting for all.
Also, try Cosmic Encounter, it’s impossible not to enjoy Cosmic Encounter.
As always, be sure to check out the Weekly Events page! There are a lot of fun things happening this and every week! And don’t forget to check out the updated Book Clubs List! And take a look at the Valley Creators page! It’s great!
