Dreamwidth posts

I don't seem to have been very organised about this. If you want to read my friendslocked posts on dreamwidth, you can either (a) log in to dreamwidth using yourname.livejournal.com as your openid or (b) add me to your friendslist-equivalent on DW, in which case I will probably get a notification and reciprocate within a few days (or instantly), at which point you should be able to view the post logged in with a dreamwidth account.

I very very rarely make posts filtered to a subset of my friendslist, and I'm basically happy for anyone (especially anyone I've ever friended in any medium, or met) to read them, so almost always automatically add someone if they ask, or if they add me. However, I'm not very organised at noticing someone has an account, so the lists are often out of sync. I'm sorry that makes people feel awkward (I always feel the same way -- did they not bother to add me? or not bother to remove me?)

Is there any way people do this more organisedly? Is there anyone else who's noticed they'd like to read comments on one journal, but can't?

I've debated turning off comments on one or the other to centralise discussion, but I'm not sure how many people would still be unable to follow to the other -- what do you think (both people used to dreamwidth, and people completely not)?

Board game: Trias

I have recently played a quick succession of games of Trias with Liv online (link goes to yucata.de).

The game is based at the end of the Triassic era, when the supercontinent Pangea was beginning to drift apart into separate continents. The mechanic is simple but enchanting to me. You have an array of cardboard land hexes around a central hex (the south pole). The hexes represent land; the area not covered by them represents water.

Each turn, you choose a hex at an edge, and then have to move it (a) such that it borders the same island it came from, (at first there's just one) and (b) it ends up further from the south pole hex than it was before you moved it.

A new island is formed whenever two parts of the original island are joined at some point by only a single hex, and you move that hex. (It can go to either of the newly formed islands.)

The net effect of this is that the original supercontinent breaks up and drifts away, as an emergent property! Because each time a hex moves further away, the original island is likely to break up, and once there are separate islands, they always move slowly further away. An island can completely change shape, since all the hexes in it move around, but it retains the same number of hexes (unless it gets thin enough to be broken into two).

Scoring

You also have little dinosaur cubes which each turn move between hexes, or breed a new dinosaur. At the end of the game, you score for each island where you have more dinosaurs on it than anyone else (1 pt per hex) or half as much if you have the second-most dinosaurs.

In three or more player games, whenever a new island is formed, the player with the most/second most dinosaurs on it scores 2 points/1 point.

Little details

There are three colours of hex, and each turn you can only move a hex of a semi-randomly determined colour.

The game ends when the random-colour-determining cards run out and instead you draw a GIANT EARTH DESTROYING METEOR card instead. This obliterates the south-pole. (So you only ever score for islands which are NOT connected to the south pole.)

You typically try to move away hexes your opponent's dinosaurs are standing on[1], and form a large island where you have more dinosaurs than anyone else (or ideally, you have 1 and no-one else has any, because then you get all the points and don't have to keep fighting over it).

[1] Or, at any rate, Liv and I do :)

How it played

We played half a dozen games which is just the wrong number for determining how a game will be long-term. So far, it's been very fun -- the rules make it sound like settlers, but it plays more like one of the simple logic games, especially with two players. But I don't know if it will have lasting appeal.