My Cheap-o Storage Solution

You know how sometimes when you're under stress because of a looming deadline or the arrival of a significantly life changing event, that you tend to become ... OCD? You start spring cleaning for no good reason, you re-arrange your furniture or you line up your books in alphabetical order. Well in my case, I became obsessive about storing the bits and tiny pieces of my boardgames... particularly the "17 trees worth of cardboard" (Uvulabob, 5:04) chits that comes in Le Havre...

And the mess it makes on the board...

(Pictures are courtesy of BGG users)

After salivating over all the various storage solutions of BGG users out there, I decided to go out onto the world wide web and see if any local Le Havre owners managed to find a solution for themselves and made some oblique mention about how they did it. I read about this place...


on some forum and that they stocked all manner of tupperwares. So I decided to drop by after work. Now before I left the house that morning, in my haste, I grabbed the nearest piece of paper in my wallet and held it against one of the supply spaces of Le Havre, and guess what? Its the exact same size as a Plus Highway toll receipt. There, bet you didn't know that... or wanted to know for that matter. Anyways, so if you pull the CCTV records of Daiso that evening, you would've seen a strange dude walking around the store, holding a toll receipt in his hand, stopping periodically to match it against a tupperware and shaking his head.

[Daiso is located on the 2nd Floor of The Curve next to a sporting goods store aL-Ikhsan]

Yup. No success there. I did manage to get teeny tiny seal-able bags for my other smaller bits though! 75 bags for RM5, that's 7 cents a bag... quite cheap-o oso yah?

Feeling somewhat dejected I posted an online shoutout asking if anyone else has a better solution. An fb friend who uses name card holders suggested the same but the ones I had seen so far, including the ones in Daiso, were slightly bigger than my Plus Highway toll receipt. The very next day, whilst walking to my car I walked past a shop I had passed more than a hundred times and I stopped. It sold all manner of kitchen appliances and cooking utensils. With nothing to lose, I popped in and took a look around.

And they had it! A nice plastic container with cover in colors! Mana tahu only got two left, one blue and one red. And as I recall Le Havre has eight supply spaces not including the francs spaces. It must have shown on my face because the Kakak there immediately offered to show me something of similar size at the back of the store. It turned out to be little plastic cups for jelly which they sell in bulk of 100 pieces. Somewhat skeptical I took out my trusted receipt (cue raised eyebrows of store kakak) and lo and behold! A near perfect fit! RM14 for 100 pieces, that's 14 cents a cup... oso very cheap-o I thought.

[The shop is called QD Shop, located in Pusat Bandar Damansara the shop after KFC heading towards McDonalds on the same row]

Happily I came home and gave my cheap-o storage solution a try and these are the results!

It fits for Dungeon Lords too :)

And here's how it looks on Le Havre

You notice the 80 or so jelly cups I have left in the background...

The leaning tower of resources

It fits in the box too!

And one for RFTG... I found one VP chip stuck to my elbow one day. It had been following me around the house for a day d.

All in all I have to say I'm quite happy with my cheap-o storage solution... Now I just need to play a full game with the bits to see if it works as good as I hope it will be. So all ye out there who are wondering, this is how I got my cheap-o storage solution!

Session Report #1 - My wife tries to understand my hobby

To many board gamers out there, our spouses / significant others / soul mates look at our hobby and probably shake their heads in wonder at our engrossment, intense focus and long, time consuming, sleepless nights devoted to worker placement, resource gathering, victory point scoring and perhaps the most time consuming objective of all, world domination. For some of the fortunate ones out there, our loved ones do take that base-jumping leap of faith and give our hobby a try and I felt it to be such a momentous occasion for me that I had to blog about it.

Session Report:
Date: 14 November 2010, 2100 hours
Location: Home
Games: Le Havre, Dominion: Intrigue

(Sorry no pics of the actual session. The pics are just for those who don't know the games)

I don't have an extensive collection. I own some party games to pass time / break the tension at real parties and the rest are games I truly love (in order of which love came first): Titan, Grass, Race for the Galaxy (+2nd expansion), Dominion: Intrigue, Dungeon Lords and Le Havre. Based on this available choices, I selected Dominion: Intrigue and Le Havre as the test cases for tonight. My wife doesn't have much love for... dare I say it... "normal" board games i.e. Monopoly, Risk, Scrabble, Pictionary. So it really surprised me that she said she would play 1 game with me this weekend. I think she noticed that I'm suffering withdrawal symptoms as my regular gaming group is on hiatus due to 1 member having to study for the dreaded Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia.

We started with Le Havre because I was still busy setting it up when she came to the table. (** Also because I hoped that if she thought Le Havre to be too complicated she might warm up to Intrigue more. So terrible-la me)

Le Havre:
I spent about 10 minutes giving a very summarized rules explanation, there was some hiccups in my explanation of building buildings and ships because she didn't understand "You need to enter a building (Building / Construction Firm) to build another building and enter a building (Building / Construction Firm) to build a Wharf to build a ship." I learned a good lesson here that I shouldn't try to summarize the rules too much for my next group, it can be a bit hard to swallow in a single sentence.

Round 1
The 1st round breezed past swimmingly. My wife took a clay from the offer to build the Charcoal Kiln which is a good deal for 8 quick points. I built the Marketplace thinking to get started on my Grain and Cattle early. She took a franc offer and a fish offer subsequently whilst I began to stock up on other resources.

End of 1st round: My wife has the Charcoal Kiln (8 points) and 7 francs. I have Marketplace (6 points) and 4 francs. I have to mention this because at this point, my wife declares she has won because her score is 15 against my 10. Dismay quickly follows when I explain to her there are 13 more rounds to a 2 player game. She offers to play a few more rounds but I convince her that we can move on to Intrigue and my heart will not be broken if we stop Le Havre at Round 1. I was already quite happy I could have a chance to explain Le Havre and all its wonders to my wife and saw no reason why I shouldn't quit while I was ahead :P Perhaps Le Havre is too big a leap for a non-gamer and I think its a gamer's habit to show off our favorite every chance we get.

Dominion: Intrigue:
I never realized deck building can be such a hard concept to explain to a non-gamer. My current group are all ex-MTG players so I guess I've been fortunate in that aspect. It took some time to explain that coinage is not a one-time use only and that spending 6 coins on Gold is not a loss making investment. The significance of action cards and why collecting victory points cards (buying spree of estates from the get go) is not such a great idea also took some time to sink in.

So I choose some of the simpler Kingdom Cards (i.e. Pawn, Steward, Courtyard, Baron, Mining Village etc.) and we forged ahead. I went ahead with an Mining Village / Conspirator strategy and just suggested to my wife to buy whatever struck her fancy as she was having trouble with the buy phase. And as she played different action cards I explained to her what they did. She seemed to favor treasure, victory cards and the Great Hall and I must admit that I felt a great sense of pride :) when she mentioned that she shouldn't clog up her deck with victory cards so early when she started getting poor draws.

When I heard her say (for the second time) that the game seems to go on and on, I suggested we stop. This would be after approximately 10 turns each, right after we each bought a Province in our previous turn. Her reaction was "What!?!?" when I told her the treasure cards don't count towards her final score. She said it doesn't make sense that a player spends so much time collecting the treasure cards and not score anything for it. Thinking back, that kinda goes against the whole euro-gaming system... we worker place, resource gather, build economic engines... as a means to an end (victory points).

Final Score:
Wife wins for stocking up early on Estates. End score 22 - 12.

Overall Results:
Le Havre (Wife wins)
Dominion: Intrigue (Wife wins)

Hmmmmmm, now I'm beginning to wonder if she made us stop whilst she was ahead......

She was surprised when I commented to her on Le Havre’s ranking on BoardGameGeek while I was packing up. She seemed interested in how the ranking system works and mentioned ranking factors like sales and whether its good money to be a game designer which made me think again about how different the board gaming community is to the corporate world. An industry designed by gamers, for gamers, all for the passion of a little understood hobby. We discussed a little bit about how a game's rank is determined when some really good games have smaller audiences and merely good games that target wider audiences do better in the rankings. All in all, I think this was one of the most interesting sessions I've ever had and I love my wife all the more for trying to understand my hobby :) Hopefully there will be more to come as she has expressed an interest in Acquire which I bought for a friend as a birthday present recently.

Movie Review: Inception

I've decided to start blogging again. I think I stopped because the future occupied so much of my time that I had no time to record the past, and whilst it's probably not such a good thing to keep dwelling in the past, I realize that without a reference point to the past, I find it hard to keep track of how far I've come. Not to be overtly philosophical but I think it's good to document reasons for actions / inactions (think there's no such word), that way I keep track of the growth in my reasoning, value system, ideals and principals. Alright, let's move on to what this blog's going to be about!

I've changed the blog design for two reasons:

1.Durned blogger.com updated their templates to xml so my old Calvin and Hobbes template doesn't work anymore @#$!%*&. If I knew I wouldn't have ran the update.

2.The old C&H template was a tad too small anyway plus I wanted a new design to reflect my current hobbies (i.e. boardgaming)

So what will I be blogging about? I've thought about it and I think it'll be mostly about movies, food, boardgames, outings and special events. As such there won't be a set periodic update, more of an "as and when" kind of thing. I know it’s been a super long time since I last blogged but I won't be doing a recap of the "dark ages" period, suffice to say that a whole load of stuff has happened and that henceforth in the blogging arena, this is my new life.

Cool, so with all that out of the way, today's blog is about a movie I watched last night.

I know Inception came out a l-o-n-g time ago but I was having Tiger Bank on my work schedule at the time so work commitments got in the way of me watching this EPIC movie. I know I watched something else that month but can't remember what it was for the life of me. (Toy Story 3, Killers, Karate Kid?) Anyways watching it last night confirmed how I felt about the movie when I was watching the trailers on YouTube. I think the EPIC-ness comes from two things really:

(1) The graphics were absolutely mind-blowing (talk about bending space AND time)

(2) The way the director takes an idea (stealing information through dream hijacking) and presents it with simple truths of life (i.e. why does it feel you dream days in a single night? why does a dream not make sense only when you wake up from it? dreams within dreams?) and turns it into a good story had me impressed.

Of course some liberties were taken such as there being only 3 dream levels before you hit limbo (huh?) and we have the "storm troopers who can't hit the broad side of a bantha" scenario where there are all these cool machine guns, rifles, grenade launchers and the only guy who gets shot is the Asian tourist (meh?).

Will I watch it again? If it were still in the cinema I would say yes, if only to simply ogle the graphics on the big screen. Or if my wife wants to watch it while I attempt to explain what's going on to her then absolutely yes :) I think she gave up at the 30 minute mark previously hehe. The Accountant teaching the Engineer about concepts of spatial distortion and time compression *woot*.

I did have a fear about the ending. I was afraid that it would end up like this movie...

It wouldn't make the movie any worse but the whole "it’s just a dream" conclusion is quite overdone in my opinion. I know there's been a huge online debate as to what the ending actually means, and I'm taking the side that says it’s actually a happy ending, only because I think it’s screwed up to be so happy in a dream and then... wake up.

I guess that's it for this time. Tune in next time for more… of whatever life throws my way :)