Tuesday, 26 November 2002

Foo Trouble and Games

There must be some kind of law that whenever we need the car for a longer distance something breaks. On Wednesday we wanted to start our journey around 19:00h. It happened to be the first day with temperatures below 0°C (we had around -3°C). This is important to note because when we were ready to go Foo (the car) wouldn’t start. We tried about 10 times but it was no good. Fortunately we are members of an automobile club that sends you a mechanic for free in case of a breakdown (I learned the hard way that this is essential if you drive an old car).

Anyway, so we called them and they told us they’d send someone as soon as possible and we should stay where we were and wait. So we waited. It started to get pretty cold. Our feet started to freeze. An hour later we were pretty fucking frozen. I went back home and made hot tea so we could warm up a bit. We called them again and they said the guy had been dispatched and should be there any minute now. An hour later nobody had shown up. We called them again. They said the guy said he had been there but hadn’t found us. Right. We had waited in front of the car for two fucking hours and there was definitely no yellow car with bright yellow flashy lights in that street during that time. We told them that. They said they’d send someone as soon as possible. Half an hour later a yellow car with bright yellow flashy lights arrived. The guy appologized for his colleague, checked everything, found out that apparently some of the glow plugs were broken, sprayed some gas into the carburetor and Foo started. We were on our way by 22:00h, 3 hours later than planned, our feet were ice blocks and took another hour or so to defrost.

The drive to Michi’s family was fortunately uneventful. The next day we brought Foo to their trusty mechanic. Of couse our car needs super special glow plugs that he didn’t have in stock and the car parts wholesaler wouldn’t deliver them until the next day. Which was bad as our gaming weekend started Thursday and we didn’t want to miss a day. So we drove there ourselves to pick up the plugs. When we came back the mechanic didn’t look happy. One of the old plugs wouldn’t come out. Aparently the screw thread was broken. He tried to brute force the glow plug out of there but it took an hour and lots of brute forcing to get it out. Of course, as the thread was non-existant after that, the new plug wouldn’t stay where it was supposed to. So the mechanic used an old screw to tap a new thread. I’m very, very happy that we trusted this particular mechanic with the repairs. I’m sure the mechanics we go to here in Berlin would have told us that we needed to buy a new cylinder block (which is around €2000)…

Nothing bad happened afterwards. We arrived safely in France, just in time for dinner, and then proceeded to play games, which we did until sunday, only pausing to eat and sleep a bit. I got to play a bunch of new games. Most notably Sid Meier’s Civilization - The Boardgame which …well… sucks. It looks great and sounds great at first but it just doesn’t work out. They adopted stuff from the computer game that just didn’t work as well in the boardgame. And they also left out stuff from the computer game that would have helped balance the boardgame. Currently it’s a game of pure luck. So much so that even in the first round there are people who get 30 gold and some who get only 10. A couple of rounds later, some people get 70 gold while others still get only 10. Anyway, I’ll probably try this game again in a year or so when people have worked out good rules for the game. I also played Witch Hunt/Werewolf/Mafia for the first time. That was quite fun but would have been more fun if certain people hadn’t played. But I guess that’s always the problem with this type of game….

I’m sure this report is already much too long and nobody read it this far so I’ll stop now. But as you can probably tell I am already looking forward to the next gaming weekend in Spring…

  Posted by Edda at 16:49 CET