Thursday, October 27th 2005

by the Writer's Guild of Wunderland

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This is a picture of my nephew Eric, with his dog, Toby. We spent last weekend hanging out with them, and Leslie and Howard, at their cabin in the mountains.

Howard's cabin is literally on the edge of Shenandoah National Park; he managed to buy a lot that actually borders on one of the park's boundaries. (There are NPS signs and markings on the trees right behind his cabin.) This is obviously a primo spot to have, and Howard is always encouraging us to join him during his retreats there. Usually we're too busy, for this weekend we took the time out to relax a bit, and it was a nice break.

Unfortunately, it was raining on Saturday, so we just hung out at the cabin, talking (and playing EcoFluxx). But the weather was beautiful on Sunday, and we went hiking up and around the mountainside behind Howard's Cabin.

One nice thing about the previous day's rain was the fact that the often-dry miniature waterfall, seen in the photos below, was gurgling delightfully along.

In other news, the card files for the 3rd Printing of Chrononauts have finally been sent to the printer! Yay! Thanks as always to Mar, who did most of the file processing work, and special thanks to Bill Martinson, who provided us with some timely editorial feedback. Bill volunteered to help us out by doing the File Separation task mentioned on my list of Things to do for Chrononauts 3rd Printing, which it turned out didn't need doing at all, since Mar had done it last year during the production of EAC and we'd all just forgotten about it. But Bill, who used to work for Decipher doing card production work like this, was still able to be helpful, by providing us with a long list of minor tweaks and corrections, most of which we decided to use.

What were all those little changes? Too numerous to list here, they were mostly little grammatical things that only perfectionists would notice or care about. But his suggestions did lead to a couple of noteworthy changes, most significantly relating to the Jade Statue of Tirade.

Firstly, with Tirade now being included in the game, I've decided I liked his idea of adding the Jade Statue to the list of items you can win with when your mission is "Stuff From the Future." Also, he pointed out that the re-written, more generic operational text for Tirade now leaves room for a few words about the statue itself, raising the question: What is this statue, anyway?

So, after some deliberation on the history of the Jade Statue and the future world which places value on it, I came up with this statement: "After it was destroyed, this sculpture became widely regarded as the greatest artwork of the 5000th Millennium."

"If your only exposure to Looney Labs has been through Fluxx, you are doing yourself a disservice by not exploring the world of Icehouse. It is a world full of analytical, calculating games and Martian Chess is one of the best. It is a game that will change the way you look at abstract strategy games, chess boards and pyramids." -- Lowell Kempf, "A Game of Changing Pieces and Shifting Ground"