What an incredible new smell I've discovered.

Saturday night was another first for me, but I'll get to that. Saturday we went and got some sushi at my favorite most ugliest Japanese restaurant Otani (Map). An ugly Japanese restaurant, that's almost a contradiction of terms in my mind, I mean most of the time when you think Japanese restaurants you think trendy, upscale, zen like simplicity, something.. Right? Otani may have been that about 20-30 years ago when the Japanese first started appearing in Columbus due to Honda, however it doesn't look like Otani ever updated their decor since they opened. This is a sad because they have some of the best sushi in town, and the best variety of specialty rolls along with a nice sushi bar. Most Japanese restaurants have things like California rolls, Philly rolls and spicy tuna rolls but Otani has the big papa pump of them all the "Dragon Roll". This thing is a bunch of California rolls set on their side and then topped with barbecued eel set in the shape of a slithering dragon, TASTY! Well at least tasty if you like barbecued eel (Unagi) nigiri.

After dinner SG, Ratz and I went to the bowling alley behind Otani called Capris Lanes. Bowling like the board games I have come to realize is actually a pretty great thing. Why? Well unlike a bar where more times than not you'll stand around in tight clustered groups attempting to fend off some unseen predator while shouting at each other in nearly incomprehensible conversations bowling is social. You get a lane, get a table, purchase some pitchers and start bowling while hanging out and talking. It's laid back, there's generally not a long line to get more booze and for whatever reason hair bands never sounded so good. My only complaint for which I'm sure some people will grumble about (freedom to stink up my shit or something) is that walking into a bowling alley was equivalent to smoking a years worth of cigarettes. Not anymore, apparently the smoking ban that passed in Columbus also affected bowling alleys. Do you have any idea the smells you will smell when you walk into a smoke free bowling alley? It's really disconcerting. Think thirty years of sweaty shoes, throw in a hint of old cigarette, shake with the smell of greasy pizza and bar food and you my friend are smelling a bowling alley in it's RAW unadulterated majesty.

Capris Lanes itself is a nice little bowling alley much like the one I used to go to in Highschool. It's tucked back behind Otani off of 161 and you only see it from the freeway if you are heading south on I-71. By it's appearance and location you would assume that it would have some sort of crime related issue, or at least a cop on duty inside. There's none of that though it's a friendly place with a great mixture of people due to it's location right between Worthington (suburban mostly white area) and Columbus (made up of a more blue color demographic). Something I also like is that it has about twenty or so lanes and the only frills are that they have machines that score for you. Some people may not like that but I think the high tech bling that you might find at other places like say Columbus "Ghetto" Bowling Palace or Sawmill Lanes to be an overkill.

On a side note something I found amusing was that Capris Lanes has these amusing murals on the walls. One is of a football player taking a bowling ball to the crotch while a cheerleader stands to his side holding two bowling balls at chest level, chest level.... The other amusing one was of a another football with his arm torn off after he attempted to catch a bowling ball. There was no blood, just this arm much like a mannequins arm laying on the ground clutching a bowling ball and a football player looking down at it with a shocked face. EXCELLENT! Anyway I have a feeling I will be going back to Capris during the week if I can round up some people to go as Monday's and Wednesday's from 9pm-1am all games are $1 a piece along with $1 hotdogs, Coke and pizza slices which sounds cheap and fun.

If you have not played Carcassonne then you can ignore the rest of this but if you have you may be interested to learn about "Hunters and Gatherers".

After bowling SG and I played "Carcassonne Hunters and Gathers" over at Tito's house. Hunters and Gathers is a game much like Carcassonne however "Hunters and Gatherers" takes place in prehistoric times thousands of years before the city of Carcassonne was founded. Your "Meeples" instead of being knights, thieves, monks and farmers are gatherers, fisherman, and hunters.

Hunters are placed in the fields/meadows and are played much like farmers. You score them at the end of the game by counting up the number of deer, orak and mammoth that are in the meadow that your hunter is in (2 points per animal). The only catch is that if there is a tiger in your meadow this negates your ability to count a deer (It's a one to one thing, one tiger eats one deer, orak and mammoth are immune though). Other players can lessen the worth of your hunter by placing tiles that will put tigers in your hunters meadow.

Gatherers are analogous to knights and are placed in forests. The forests in shape resemble the cities in the original game. While cities are relatively easy to finish forests are harder to complete and you do not score incomplete forests at the end of the game. When you finish a forest your score it like you would a city and if there is a gold nugget in your forest then you can take a special resource card which have various special landmarks on them.

The last aspect to "Hunters and Gatherers" is the river systems and the fisherman and huts that you can place on the rivers. A river system starts at one spring/lake and continues until all it's ends are finished with a lake, in a way rivers are like roads in the original game and meeples placed on a river score it just like thieves do. The only difference is that any fish that are in a segment of the river that your fisherman is on count as one point in addition to the one point for ever segment in your finished river segment. Where it gets interesting is that at any time when you lay a tile down that has a river you can place a hut on the river (as long as no one else has done this on that river system) which then gives you ownership of that river system. This can be important at the end of the game when players with a hut on a river systems get to count up all the fish in that system and add it to their final score.

If you haven't ever played the original game then this is all meaningless but if you have what's really nice is that the underlying gameplay is the same but there are little differences that put together make it enough different that it is worth buying and playing. I ended up losing in part because I placed meeples on forests that did not get finished and ignored the rivers which ended up being more important. In the original game roads give you little piddly points but usually don't decide a game for you.