Fairy Tales, Wasps, and Popovers

Fairy Tale by Satoshi Nakamura 

(Original Post on my table to blog)

Fairy Tale is a rare kind of card game where the gameplay is based upon "Drafting" a hand of cards to play.  To give a history, "Draft" gameplay began with Magic the Gathering.  You would buy several booster packs and pass them around the table.  Everyone would open a pack, choose a card and pass the pack until everyone had a pre-determined amount of cards to build a deck from.  The skill was in the knowing and utilization of the entire expansion's set of cards, and a little luck.  Fairy Tale emulates this.

The story is about leaders of Kingdoms as they rise in power and are manipulated or opposed to one another.  It has lots of "theme" to it for being closer in Euro style gameplay.  There are dragons, knights, wizards, fairies, elves, armies, demons and tricksters.  There is a story going on here if you're diligent enough in looking at the artwork and inferring the cards to see the easter egg of a hidden plot.

The players draw a hand of 5 cards from the main, randomized deck.  Each turn they take 1 card and pass the hand to the next player.  Everyone does this until they have 5 cards.  The more players you have, the more mystery surrounds what everyone is playing.  The cards in the deck work together to perform point accumulating combos.  There are 4 colors, three of which are identical and 1 that focuses on forcing the other colors to flip their cards, or having you trade points for desired effects on your own set of cards.  It takes a little while to figure out how things work, but it is somewhat simplified in that 3 of the colors work virtually identical  to each other.

Once everyone knows their stuff, its a quick game to play and quick to tally up at the end.  Its smaller on the player interaction between cards, but if you play black you CAN mess with the other players. It can be had fairly cheaply on Amazon.  The cards are better than Munckin and Fantasy Flight quality, but nowhere near as nice as Flying Frog's card stock.  If you loved Draft in Magic the Gathering(as I did), you'll love the mechanics.  Also it is self contained, it is not a collectible card game, you do not need to buy expansions.

17th of Thrimidge 2014

Its open season on wasps around here.  This year they are not keeping to their end of our truce.  They are invading the insides of my home, endangering my pets and people I care about, so they've violated the contract and will now pay by being on my "too dangerous to leave alive" list.  Its harsh because only venomous snakes and two types of spiders generally live on that list, but they overstepped themselves this year.  Dirt Dobbers are not yet out, and it'll be at least a few weeks before they start showing themselves, so the wasps did their transgressions at the wrong time, its easy to not confuse them when only wasps are out and about.  I took a crappy little sly swatter and I improved it for wasp killing.  I don't know what laws made all fly swatters to be created as shitty as possible for their use, but I fortunately have the wire bending skills to reinforce the hands, and enough tape to ensure weight on the flap.  I want "one slap, one death" with this thing, so so far my results have proven themselves.

Alton Brown is a sort of mentor of mine.  Before I got real training at working in a restaurant, it was Alton Brown that was teaching me to cook.  His popover recipe is something I've always enjoyed doing, but had two flaws.  First is the insistence on using a blender or machine to get air into the batter.  I have considerable whisking skills thanks to having to hand whip cream every morning while I did work at my first restaurant.  So I tried them without the whisk this week.  Second was the milk.  Its only a cup of milk, but when you combine it with the kind of foods that go well with popovers, you start adding up the calories.  So I tried it with water.  Both were an astounding success(I use large muffin pans as well, but I already knew they worked).  There is very little change in the flavor of the popovers for using water(use filtered water).  If you did not know, popovers are a style of Yorkshire pudding made for 1.  They are sort of like crispy, hollow pancakes.  Some people cut the tops off and fill them with mashed potatoes and roast beef.  They are tricky like souffles, and if you're a friend on Facebook or G+ I can tell you the tricks to get them right.