Tag Archives: San Francisco

Nov21

Beats and Boardgames

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So I planned on meeting my friend Erin on Thursday night for a group meetup called “Beats and Boardgames” over at a place called Langton Labs down near the Mission district. The last time I had been to San Francisco with my buddy Mike we had hit B & B and it had been a really good time, so I was really looking forward to heading over again. Unfortunately Erin had to bail out at the last minute, so I resigned myself to heading over alone. Not necessarily a bad thing, but not as fun as having an ally waiting for me, you know?

Fate intervened at the last minute though, and talking with my friend in New Zealand led me to discovering that one of his San Francisco friends was planning on going to B & B as well. Perfection. So after eating at Off the Grid with Emma and her friend I stopped in at a supermarket to buy a six-pack to bring as a donation and then headed over. (Ed note: Pro-tip to any travelers. Bring a six-pack everywhere. Seriously… it may burn a little bit of extra money, but I personally believe that nothing’s better than a few beers to put you in a good position with the host and help make a new friend or two. Hell, even if you don’t drink bring ’em along as a gift.) Once I arrived I found the guy I was meeting (Jacob), donated my beers to the bar, and jumped into a game of Apples to Apples.

Apples to Apples is a fun game, don’t get me wrong. But I can only take so much of it before it gets boring, and so Jacob and I excused ourselves from the ever-widening circle and headed for newer board game pastures. Seriously… when we left Apples to Apples there we 13 people playing. Clearly a few too many in the opinion of this engineer. Anyways, we looked around at the games already going and the games available, and started a hearty debate as to what to play – Ninja Burger, Zombie-death-mall-thing, or a simple game of connect-four. We actually ended up doing none of the above, and climbed upstairs to join an already-going group playing November Games.

Last time I had been at Beats and Boardgames we had played a few rounds of November Games (see rules below for details), so scarily enough people remembered me from, literally to the week, a year ago. The reason for this was that everyone used a “glyph” to represent themselves. Last year I had been feeling rather un-creative so I had stolen a symbol from an old comic strip that I loved, and so from that point on (in the eyes of November Games) I had become “Fanged smiley face”. Cool.

We only ended up playing one round before Jacob headed out to meet up with some other friends of his. For his defense each round lasts nearly 45min, give or take, so I definitely couldn’t blame him, seeing as it was creeping up on midnight at that point. I stayed for nearly another entire round before finally throwing in the hat and heading home.

I headed out from Langton around 12:15 or so, just in time to catch the last bus heading back to Emma’s place that night. The ride was clean and simple, I have to give San Francisco props for having a very clean and simple bus system… although I’ll admit that it seems amazingly complex at first glance. Take a little while to get used to it though, and its actually a very nice little set up that they have. Anyways, get home I did, and I had my sleeping bag out almost immediately, and was sawing logs like a champ barely an instant later.

 

Rules of November Games –

 

Materials needed:

For every four people you have one “Frisbee” rotating around (round down; 8 people = 2 Frisbees. 11 people = 2 Frisbees)

Each Frisbee is just that… a Frisbee. But with five 6-sided dice inside.

 

Rules:

  • Roll the dice, and award yourself points based on the below values.
  • You can re-roll as many dice as you like, up to four, and continue re-rolling as long as you get at least one scoring dice out of all the dice you roll.
  • As soon as you don’t get a scoring dice, your turn with that Frisbee is over.
  • You may also choose to “Hold” at any point and willingly stop rolling, keeping however many points you have at that time.
  • If you get no scoring dice on your first roll, then you have rolled a “Brick”, and don’t get any points. You also must hold onto a Brick (yes, a real brick) and “feel its weight” until someone else rolls a Brick. That means you MUST hold it, no putting it down on a chair or table!
  • If all five dice show scoring values, then you MUST re-roll all five (keeping the points they previously had given you)
  • “Warps” – Every 1000 pts you earn, you get a “warp”. Whats that mean? That you got a warp!
  • Winning – First person to get over 5000 pts wins. This person gets two “winners warps”.
    • HOWEVER, after someone breaks the 5000 pt barrier everyone else gets one chance to beat them. If the original winner gets their score beaten, they are SHAMED! And, the one who beat them gets five extra “winners warps”.
  • “Perfect” and “Wimp” – if you miss a “Warp” by 50 pts (ex: land at 2950 pts) you get a “Wimp” point. This means… that you got a wimp point. However, a “Perfect” is when you get 4950 pts, since that is the best you can get without exceeding the 5000 limit.
  • MOST IMPORTANT PART!!! All scores are kept, recorded, and archived online. Thus, your glyph is for life, and you’re score will grow as you play more games. Thus, only sanctioned November Games events count as real games, and if their not recorded, then it… never happened… wooooooooooo mysteeeeerrrriiiiooouuuuss….

 

Scoring Values:

  • 1’s = 100 pts
  • 5’s = 50 pts
  • straight (1-5 or 2-6) = 1500 pts
  • three-of-a-kind = 100*face value (ex: 3 2’s = 200 pts, 3 5’s = 500pts)
    • Exception – 1’s… 3 1’s = 1000 pts
    • Addendum – four or five of a kind. In actuality, only three are actually the correct number. The others are… IMPOSTERS!
    • Exception to the addendum – five 1’s = win. Instantly. You just win. That’s it. Congrats!
  • Note on the above – a straight or three-of-a-kind must be rolled all in one roll. Nothing else counts
Nov21

Off the Grid in San Francisco

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Emma and I met up with Abby, her old roommate, early in the evening on the 17th. It had been one of those lazy days where no one was really sure what we wanted to do, and we didn’t really have too much energy to go adventuring thanks to the incessant rain that had been beating down on the city since the mid morning. We had a mission though, one that we weren’t going to give up on – a meeting of some of the cities best food trucks called “Off the Grid”.

Emma had told me about this gathering of awesome, and since I spent most of my lunches at Boston food trucks when I worked back in Cambridge I felt an almost-obligation to check it out. You know… compare cities, see how they do it out West. Well… they do it pretty well, if Off the Grid is any indication. There were 10 or 12 different trucks, running the gamut of all types of food. We had out Mexican, we had our vegan (eww), and we even had our cupcake truck. But most importantly, we had our BBQ truck. And, as though challenging the BBQ truck, we had our BACON truck. Thats right… an entire truck dedicated to serving bacon in all of its myriad forms. From “The Burger” being a simple hamburger to “Grilled Cheese, but with Bacon” and even “A salad, but with Bacon”. I was most impressed with “The Bouquet”, for which the description simply read “Bacon, Bacon, Bacon, Bacon, Bacon”. Though I have to admit, the “Chocolate-coated dessert Bacon” scared me. A lot.

As should be expected, I went with a good old-fashioned bacon-burger with fries. The Burger was amazing, and I have to admit that the fries were spectacular… easily better than most burgers on their own, but fitting perfectly with the fancy of this burger. It was a strange thing, I’ll admit, having an actual gourmet burger served to me out of a food truck, but you’ll never hear me arguing about anything besides the price… I definitely paid for the awesomeness that I was consuming. Meh. Totally worth it though.

Baseline? If you’re ever in San Francisco on a Thursday night make sure to check out Off the Grid. Clearly worth it. And lets be honest… even though what I ordered was really expensive for a food truck ($16 total, burger + fries + on-tap root beer, vs $5 for two enchilladas + beans, rice & chips in Boston), it was easily cheaper than getting it at a restaurant. And honestly? It was better than most burgers I’ve gotten at restaurants.

Nov16

Climbing in San Francisco!

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So I landed. Finally. I had napped a bit on the flight, but thanks to my adventures with evil hotel ghosts (maybe not evil, but at least mean and scary) I was exhausted and desperately needed coffee. Or maybe meth… something to wake me up. A lightening bolt would have been perfect, actually. But thankfully I was smart enough not to try licking the third rail on the train, and safely navigated myself to meet up with my cousin and her boyfriend in the Mission district of San Fran.

Once I got there Emma proved herself to be an awesome cousin by not only meeting me with a car so I wouldn’t have to carry my pack up the insane hills, but also serving coffee and granola yogurt breakfast! I had eaten my BLT already, but I figured that some more fuel for the Ben-Engine wouldn’t be a bad idea, especially considering the lack of sleep, so I drank and ate up while we waited for the other folks to show up. It took a little while, but after about half an hour the whole crew was at Remy’s (Emma’s boy) house, so we packed the crash pads into the car, topped off our chalk bags, and headed onto the open road.

We headed onto the open road a bit quickly though, apparently, because a cop appeared to show his displeasure with our rate of progress down the highway. In short – Remy got a really BS speeding ticket. In long – the cop pulled us over for going 82 in a 65 zone, while we were actively being passed by tow trucks. Seriously. A tow truck had just passed us like 10s before the cop started rocking the lights and bullhorn. And let me tell you, that bullhorn messed with me… I am not used to hearing a cops voice while still driving. Anyways, Remy got the ticket, we pulled back into traffic, and were able to get to the climbing spot without further incident.

By the time we actually arrived at Vacaville, the bouldering spot about 1.5 hours from the city, we had already met up with some of Emma’s other friends and picked out a pretty good spot to climb – everything from V0 through V6 was in this one small area. And the area itself… wow. I mean, wow. I am not used to rolling open hills like these, but I really think that I could get used to it. Especially when said open rolling hills are strewn with amazing climbable boulders like these. We spent the day climbing and moving around between spots, taking a quick break around one to have a relaxed lunch.

The climbs themselves were a really good and diverse lot; Vacaville had just enough of everything to keep me very happy. The rock itself was Basalt, and reminded me a lot of the pudding stone of Hammond Pond, though it lacked the many small stones and plethora of foodholds. Instead the Basalt gave us some really good rails that led to long horizontal traverses, and a few pretty easy jug-hauls up to the top. We even tried one high-ball crack climb that got the best of me; I made it up about 10 or 12 feet before bailing off… I don’t mind heights, but high bouldering problems just mess with my head, especially when I’d be trying to land on a tiny little crash pad. I blame my broken arm – that one accident drastically increased my caution… I’m still on the fence if its a good or bad thing though.

Once the sun started setting we packed up our crash pads and backpacks, changed back into our normal shoes, and started the short trek back to the cars. I couldn’t help but remember that scene from Lord of the Rings when the Fellowship is walking through the mountains, and I got a few really nice pictures showing the line of climbers hiking through the rolling hills… damn but I can’t wait to go backpacking in New Zealand! Anyways, we packed up the cars, washed off our hands, and started the drive back to the city itself in record time, though our efficiency really wasn’t too helpful once we hit the traffic into the city… I ended up napping through a good portion of the nearly-three-hours-long drive back in.

Once we got back to Remy’s place the rest of the folks in our car went their separate ways home, and Emma, Remy and I started the debate as to what to do for the rest of the night. In the end we went with an amazing Mexican place for dinner (yay Taco’s and strawberry smoothie!) and Howl’s Moving Castle for the after-dinner entertainment. It’s a movie that I’ve been meaning to see, and I can definitely understand why people hold it in such high regards. The plot itself was really… Japanese, for lack of a better word, but I actually enjoyed it a lot, especially the cool animation and crazy machinery. A mechanical engineer to the end, thats me. Heh. Emma ended up crashing about midway through the movie, and I’ll admit that I passed out pretty quickly too, less than 20min after the movie was over.