Conquest of the Empire

 Now that Dad is back from Europe, strategy gaming has returned to the household. Right now we're playing Conquest of the Empire, about the battle by various factions for the control of the Roman Empire. The four factions competing are controlled by Purple Zebra, Swirls (a tiger with swirls instead of stripes), Puppy, and Piggy. Daddy controls the last two and has the Roman centurions greet each of their orders with

Ave Puppy!

or

Ave Piggy!

Ave, I've now learned, means "hail" or "praise be to" in Latin, the language of the Romans. My Romans mostly just talk in Mario accents. It's still early going, but Purple Zebra and Piggy are in an alliance against Puppy and Swirls. We'll see how things play out.

Viral

A recent visit to my Youtube library revealed that one of my movies went a bit viral recently. Railroad Crossing of Doom now has over 11,000 views. This is especially surprising since it is not even the best of the Railroad Crossing of Doom series. The sequel, Railroad Crossing of Doom II, is better. For old times sake, check it out here:

Playmobil Survivor

For the most part, I don't play much with my Playmobil guys. Sometimes they come out when friends come over but rarely will I pull them out myself. Well, this weekend I decided to pull them out and discovered how amazingly fun they are. They have so many different things they can carry and outfits they can wear. Of course, since most of my playmobil guys are knights, these additional items mainly consist of weapons. Anyway, what made them so much fun to play with is that Daddy and I conducted a game of Playmobil survivor. There were 16 contestants divided into two tribes. They had to participate in many different events including shooting watermelons from a catapult, sword throwing, and so on. One of the tribes had a big advantage since a coffee drinking barbarian built his own catapult. Anyway, it was great fun. There was a tie in the final vote, so the million dollars was split between Yellow Ice Climber and The Black Knight. The Black Knight had to leave the show earlier in the season for medical reasons but then got to come back later in the series. Yellow Ice Climber also had a difficult path. In one tribal council, all the votes but his own were cast his way; however, he played the immunity idol to nullify those votes thus resulting in the ejection of Rock Star from the competition.

Chimes Concert

On Friday, the end of the year concert was held at my school. I played the chimes. Relive the excitement here:




The best part about playing the Blue Danube is that *I* picked it out. I asked my teacher if we could play it as I thought it would make a good chimes song. She agreed and arranged it herself for us to play. She gave me a big shout-out for the suggestion at the concert.