I recently went to a friend's house and we played a card game called BANG!
It's like a more in depth and legit version of the card game Mafia.
You get assigned roles:
The Deputy, Outlaws and Renegade are unidentified so it's quite fun because the Sheriff doesn't know who's truly on their side and you're trying to determine who you need to kill!
And you also draw two character cards and you need to compare their features to choose which character you will play with. You will choose depending on the initial number of lives the character has and any special abilities that can be used throughout the game.
In each round, each player takes a turn in drawing a card. These cards may give you lives, bullets, weapons, larger distance range and other cool things.
My brother also bought two expansion packs, one of which comes with the bullet case you can see in the picture. These expansion packs allow you to play with more players (by adding more of the assigned roles) and add some extra crazy features such as weird scenarios every round (for example, one of the scenario makes everyone switch roles with each other).
It's really fun! If you enjoyed playing Mafia I guarantee you'll love this game!
Another game my brother bought was Settlers of Catan.
This game is interesting in the fact that you can make up the board game yourself, creating a different scenario and different strategy each time you play. The board is made up of individual hexagonal pieces as you can see in the picture. The aim of the game is to get 10 victory points, and you do this buy basically expanding your land.
So each hexagonal piece correlates to a specific terrain (e.g. forest or mountain), which correlates to a specific resource (e.g. forest= logs, mountain= rock) and a number is placed on each terrain. Players at the very beginning place a settlement on the board and get whatever resources their settlement is placed on.
Then the dice is rolled. If, for example, you roll a 9 and there are two 9's on the board, one on a forest and one on a mountain, then whoever's settlement lies on that tile will get those resources. You can then use resources to build roads, buy more settlements or convert your settlements to cities. You can also trade cards with the bank or with other players.
The blue border in the picture is the sea. Some areas of the beach have bays where you can trade with ships at a lower cost (e.g. instead of needing four of the same resource to trade with the bank, some bays let you trade 2 rocks for any resource you want and other bays have other trading schemes).
The rules are a bit more complex than that but that's the general gist of it.
The picture is a board we made up and it's part of the 5-6 player expansion pack, so the normal basic pack is smaller and it goes for 3-4 people.
There's also a version where the board is only half completed and if you build a road towards the incomplete half, you draw a hexagon tile from the deck and place it there, which is really interesting but I haven't done that version yet so I don't know how well that would turn out.
I also really want the Game of Thrones board game, but I think i'll dedicate a whole blog to the series because there are other things I wanted to talk about.
Now moving on to...
AGES ago (like a few years I think), my mum bought me PIXARPEDIA for a present.
I got about halfway through, forgot about it, then just picked it up a few days ago and finally finished reading it!
It's so interesting to learn about all the behind the scenes things that go on, all the technicalities with each movie and all the fun facts about Pixar.
The majority of it (the middle section) does get a bit tedious though because it's just a very long list of like ALL the characters in each film and a lot of it I found quite unnecessary.
But the beginnings and endings were really good.
Did you know:
They also talk about all the Easter Eggs, such as A113, the Pizza Planet Truck, The Luxo ball etc.
It's so exciting and fun reading about this stuff I love Pixar!
Unfortunately the book was published in 2009, so it goes to UP and a second volume is probably going to take its time to be released! =[
My brother also bought the Simpson's World: The Ultimate Episode Guide for Seasons 1-20.
It's got details on all the episodes, all the little Easter Eggs and references and all the characters and stuff.
It's HUGE and SO HEAVY I am not likely to read it, ever.
My brother has been reading it a bit and he hasn't even gotten about an 1/8th of the way in, but it does look interesting for die hard fans.
It's really nicely bounded, unlike my Pixarpedia book.
For TV, I wanted to just make a really quick observation on The Voice Season 2 which just finished recently. For those who didn't follow, this won't mean anything to you but anyway: Harrison Craig won. Actually, Danny was my favourite but I did suspect he would come last and I did predict that Harrison would win. I was so thankful Luke Kennedy didn't because his original song was shockingly bad!
But anyway my weird observation was...
Did you guys realise that the order of the winners was the same order as the First Season?
Fourth place: Team Joel (Sara De Bono/Danny Ross)
Third place: Team Delta (Rachael Leahcar/Celia Pavey)
Second place: Team Keith/Ricky (Darren Percival/Luke Kennedy)
First place: Team Seal (Karise Eden/Harrison Craig)
ISN'T THAT BIZARRE?!??!
Anyway, I thought it was bizarre.
Now for movies...
The Great Gatsby!!
Ugh, even that poster for it looks amazing!
I never read the book (I know, shocking!), so I was really confused at the beginning. It felt like too fast paced and all over the place but it was actually really good that they made it like that, because it reflected Nick's (Tobey Maquire) confusion as well.
I LOVED Carey Mulligan's acting as Daisy. My favourite line is when she says, "Gatsby? ... What Gatsby?" I don't know why but I just found that line AMAZING!
Leonardo DiCaprio of course as Gatsby himself was amazing, but I don't think it was that great to have gotten him an award (missing out again Leo). But yes, actually the entire cast was really good.
I can't really explain much about what the story is without giving anything away, but it's pretty much the main character, Nick, and his story about how he met Gatsby. The rest I can't really say but trust me it was pretty good!
I'm just in love with all the costuming and all the props, they were amazing! And the dancing looked sooo cool!
And then there's
Despicable Me 2!!
HOW.
ADORABLE.
IS.
THAT.
GAAAAH!
The minions are seriously adorable! I remember laughing in maths class because Sangavi and I were watching the Despicable Me 2 trailer on repeat and we kept saying "BABABA BABANANA POTATONAAAA".
But anyway, that brings me to my next point...
This movie wasn't as good as the first movie, and I suspect that the main reason this series was so successful was ONLY because of the minions. If you look at the plot line, I mean it's good but it wouldn't be that famous without the minions. If you look at the humour, it's funny, but the minions are a very big part of the humour (and also the Despicable Me 2 humour was trying a bit too hard, but nonetheless I laughed because I'm secretly a three year old inside).
So I'm not actually sure what I make of this.
I might not have even watched this film if it weren't for that fact that Despicable Me was the first film Diwan and I watched together (okay who am I kidding, I probably would have watched it anyway).
But yeah, the film focused on how Gru is now trying to juggle being a dad and leading a normal, non-villainous life now (which obviously he struggles a bit with because he misses playing with all the fun gadgets).
They also bring out a different, eviler side to the minions that are TOTALLY NOT CUTE! But that's all I can find myself to say.
Last week I was at towers and I bought this lovely fish teapot from Simbala, which is on level two near EasyWay, for my ex-English tutor (she was really nice and lovely to me even though I only had her for about a term).
The teapot is from a brand called Britto and I am absolutely in love with their stuff! They have other teapots in the shape of dogs and cats and the designs are so clever! They also have collectables like mugs and signs and dog/cat/animal figurines. They also have a Disney line!
How cool does that look! I'm totally in love with that brand. I would buy EVERYTHING if I had the money, but they're relatively expensive. The fish teapot was a small teapot and cost $45. The larger-sized teapots are about $100 and I think that's the same price as the larger figurines. But the colours and patterns are so clever!!
ANNNND that's kind of it for my reviews! The end of this blog is nigh!
I'll end on a video. It's 23 minutes long, so if you have the time it's really worth it!
A warning: The guy is a bad speaker, he's really out of breath and talks really fast and it's a really high sort of whiny voice but it's good!
It's a TED talk so you know it'll be amazing.
