Thursday night I left work and went straight to the Sharpstown Mall – Houston’s Premier Urban Mall (mostly out of a need to avoid the Galleria – the other mall on the way home from work). I had quite fun with the cultural experience. Did a little shopping, and have been humored by the people who literally think i was in imminent danger by going there.

From there I went straight to Greg’s house for game night, where he Peter and I were the only attendees. (Paul showed up as I was leaving – and I think he and Greg continued gaming).

We played 4 games. Race for the Galaxy (2007) was ranked #31 on BGG! An interesting colonization themed card-based game. It takes most of your first play to get the mechanics down enough to pay attention to any strategy. I wasn’t wowwed, but would certainly play it a few more times to determine if I liked it or not.

If Wishes Were Fishes (2007) GBB Rank 988 – a very light fish market themed game. I liked it more than I thought I would. It would be easy to tech to kids, and has nice fun purple worms as part of the game.

Hansa (2004) BGG Rank 159 – TG recently acquired this at an Internet fire sale, but I hadn’t yet played it. So, Greg taught this one and it is a nice shorter length game but with some interesting mechanics providing for some definite strategies with a variety of levels of antagonism. I have sine played it with two-players (with TG) and with three again. I definitely like it. Minimal, but good.

Aqua Romana (2005) BGG Rank 638 – This was a nice closer to the evening. Not too long, interesting mechanics. Building aqueducts with tiles that are determined by men moving about the field of tiles. Definitely worth a place in the rotation.

I got home around midnight to find my DSL disconnected. The phone repair guy had come to fix the dead phone – which had fixed itself already – but he saw there were “wiring problems” from outside so the disconnected the “upstairs line” so the other phones would work. What he actually did was disconnect the DSL.

Many days talking to many idiots finally payed off and this morning a competent repair man replaced many parts of the 10 year old DSL wiring – and hopefully it will remove the static I’ve had on my phone for over a year.

I also get DHCP directly fed from AT&T/SBC. Apparently no one else in Houston is like that. I was one of the first ADSL customers to get hooked up (working software design out of my house – paid by the company) and they’ve maintained it for those who have stayed. I’m one of the last.

I remember when it used to feed an unlimited number of IP addresses (because they didn’t know what they were doing). That lasted a few years, but they finally figured it out and now will only feed one IP address per DSL connection.