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Rough Cut New Year
Saturday / 01.03.04 / 11:00PM / Joe
In retrospect, it was fairly risky to plan out an 8-person week-long trip to upstate Pennsylvania in winter. Boy howdy. But thanks to an exceptionally mild and pleasant week of weather, our mini-getaway to the Rough Cut Lodge in Gaines, PA, was lots of fun. Of course, our kind of fun is of a very distinct brand: playing games. In essence, that's all we ever do, and it's only the venue that changes.
The Rough Cut Lodge is a cabin rental outfit, situated in beautiful mountains and forests and creeks... as well as a complete cell phone dead zone. Hence no Hiptop pics or mobile weblog updates! The cabin didn't even have a phone, so my plan to fabricate a temporary AOL setup was abandoned. Sort of ironic since the Pennsylvania College of Technology was right down the road, but maybe that was just somebody's idea of a joke.
Our cabin had a massive dead deer head in it. I don't begrudge the decorators; they know their audience, we're just not it. Aside from the profound sadness I felt whenever I looked at the mounted animal, the rustic wooden beams and walls were gorgeous. We also had a pretty decent sized television, so our video games could stroll to center stage (we achieved the modern generation trifecta - GameCube, PS2, and Xbox - plus two GBA SPs.) There was much Mario Partying, Beach Spiking, EyeToying, Double Dashing, WarioWaring, and even a little MechAssaulting. Just remind me again never to buy from Radio Shack. I had packed an RCA cable and RCA router so we wouldn't have to keep unplugging our consoles, but the damn ends were literally falling off in my hand.
Most important item I forgot to bring: Some among us may say it was the soy milk (we picked up some at the Wegman's in Williamsport on the way there), but I say it was the GBA/GameCube link cable. Therefore, no Pac-Man VS., which sucked because I fully expected that to be the hit of the trip.
As for other, non-electronic games, we availed ourselves of Cranium, Lord of the Rings, Icehouse, Constructionary, Doomtown, Pokemon, Cityscape, and Fluxx. Mike requested several games of TaleSpin, and there's really no greater complement to a game you designed yourself than to have someone ask to play it. We dealt Scott in for a game of it, and he uncovered a few dangerous rule interpretations. X >< 0. Welcome to the playtest list, Scott!
Rhon and I did learn that our Fluxx deck is completely... fluxxed. We've been playing it for a couple years now, unaware that we had twos of some cards and nones of others! So I just bought a new 3.0 deck at Border's today. I'm sure Looney Labs would replace it free of charge, but I'd just as soon support them even more by buying it again.
 
Men with Icehouse. Women with GBAs.
We did manage to spend a lot of the week being sick with colds, so I suppose all eight of us will be sniffling for the next week... thanks to germs shared over Cranium clay and Wavebird controllers. |
