Thursday, I went down to Melbourne to see my brother and his new house. He’s bought a small house in Hawthorn, where he is living with his wife and their two dogs. The weather was mostly fine – one pretty bad rain shower as I was leaving Mind Games, but it was fine in the afternoon when I reached him, and then we spent an hour or so walking the dogs through the rather pretty streets and parks around his place.

I bought two new games in Melbourne: A Touch of Evil and Rum & Pirates, each of which I’ve now played twice: once each with Jeremy, and then a further game each in Ballarat. The links above are of the session reports I’ve written for them on BGG.

Friday was mad: Get into Ballarat and go to Good Games. Play boardgames and Magic. Go to Martin’s, run our Greyhawk campaign. Then go back to Good Games for the Zendikar midnight prerelease… in which Sarah opened a revised Tundra. Those “priceless treasures of Zendikar”? They’re real – randomly inserted really old and valuable cards. Pretty rare though, the Tundra was the only one we saw.

D&D was good, although a relatively short session. With Adam’s new character (a bard, Maximilian) joining us, I wanted to introduce a few new NPCs so that the group – and Adam – have people to relate to. So, the group got invited to a noblewoman’s party, where they met Adam’s PC’s brother, the daughter of the noblewoman, and a couple of other NPCs. These will – with any luck – give a lot of roleplaying opportunities in the future and also point the way to the PCs becoming more important in the scheme of things as they reach the Paragon Tier. Then bandits attacked the party, stole some jewelry, and the party entered the sewers in search of them.

I managed to leave out a lot of detail that I’d intended to use in that session. Thursday had ended late (the train was delayed on the way back) and so I was tireder than I wanted to be. Still, good things happened.

I only stayed for one round of the prerelease, opting to go home and get some sleep. The next day, I went back to Good Games Ballarat for the actual daytime prerelease. As normal, this was Grand Final day, and I was not surprised to find that only 10 people turned up for the day prerelease as opposed to 20 for the midnight one. (It surprised a few other people). I was surprised to find Sarah and Daniel there, but I was very glad to see them. This prerelease, I lost the first round and ended up coming 2nd or so. My deck was nowhere near as good as the one I played the previous evening, but neither were tourney-winning quality.

Then we had a Zendikar booster draft, in which Daniel drafted a killer white/blue deck that won the game. My deck wasn’t bad, but it couldn’t deal with his 2-cost 2/3 fliers. No-one could. I had a couple of really good games against Sarah, who, by now, was making a lot of stupid mistakes due to being really, really tired. I ended up equal second in that tournament.

After that, a wiser fellow would have gone home, but I’d bought Chicago Express on Friday night (didn’t have any change, needed something extra to get to the minimum EFTPOS transaction to buy a Coke and a chocolate bar, and exceeded it by a lot), and Laurie, upon learning this, wanted a game. So, Laurie, Torin and I had a game of Chicago Express, followed by one of Talisman. Both were a lot of fun, and I finally made my way home and fed the cat.

Sunday dawned, and still with not quite enough sleep, I made my way in to Nathaniel’s place where our D&D group finally slew Skalmad in P1: King of the Trollhaunt Warrens. We only played two encounters – at that point, it was a natural point to break and, as we were missing Adam, it was worth ending there. So, Josh, Nate and I played A Touch of Evil and I finally went home to bed – after watching a few episodes of House. I slept for about nine hours before getting up the next day.

Back to work this week. Tuesday night will be wargaming at Randy’s: I think we’ll play the next ASL SK#2 scenario, and some other short wargame.