Weekend Recap - Seating Chart Madness

Not a terribly exciting weekend. We did a lot of wedding planning once again. I am sounding like a broken record but what can I say? This time around it was mainly seating chart and program design. Program design was ok although I get a little frustrated dealing with Word's idiosyncracies at times. The seating chart was actually a lot of fun though. We had little strips of paper with everyone's name and it was like a big fantasy draft. Do we go for big laughs by seating my ultra-conservative Catholic brother in between a Protestant minister and a libertarian? We could construct a pregnancy table with the several expectant mothers in attendance - and then seat Lauren there too and really set tongues a'wagging! We're still tracking down a few lagging RSVPs so we couldn't completely finalize things, but we're pretty close.

Saturday night Lauren and I played battle 13 in our campaign of Memoir '44. I made some bad choices in my bridge crossing, and her artillery tore me up. I had some terrible rolls but she played really well, I'm not sure better rolling would have mattered at all. She won the scenario 5-3. That puts the series at 10-3 (there are 16 battles total), with Lauren on a roll, having taken 3 of the last 4. The expansions are coming out in about a month and look pretty cool, between that and an eventual replay of the campaign on different sides (I've played Axis, she's played Allies this time through), I'll have gotten plenty of use out of the game. Oh and we still need to replay the Battle Cry campaign at some point. The "Command and Colors" system is really a lot of fun, but I'm not sure that I want to experience the added complexity and lesser components of the upcoming Command and Colors: Ancients.

My Wallenstein game is going quite poorly. I am down to a measly 3 provinces. As of this writing, there have been 11 player-on-player attacks in this game. 7 of them have been against me. At this point I am the easiest target ever but some of those I have won, and I have also lost at least 2 battles that I had the majority in, it's not like I was always the runt of the game. 64% of attacks going against me, what am I supposed to do, anyone would be a weakling after that! Anything other than a last place finish is going to feel like a moral victory at this point, and I think even that is an impossibility at this point. I can't blame people, nobody else built anything worth attacking in year 1, but still it is not much fun being a punching bag. I'm no longer the leader guys, maybe your time would be better spent attacking someone who has a chance to win the game!

My Pikmin game is going quite well though. I've been trying to go for two parts per day which has added a nice level of challenge. Right now I have 8 or 9 parts to go, and 15 days to do it, so I have plenty of wiggle room if I need to spend a day just sprouting new Pikmin or something. I know how to get about half of the remaining pieces so at this point it's just a matter of sitting down and doing it. The question is will I manage it before my redeye to NJ on Friday night, or will I have to pack my GameCube for the trip home!