Hey I don't think I actually coded anything to display content warnings so Content Warning: Recreational drugs mentioned

Also this should be like four posts, but I'm typing now and not gonna stop

This Thanksgiving Geight and I did our usual, which was inviting Cyn over the day of, and making a not too-elaborate dinner, then spending the weekend at Scrub's

There was slow cooked turkey breast, smashed potatoes, tomato soup, a mac and cheese bake courtesy of Cyn, and a big ass pecan pie for dessert.

The smashed potatoes have become a staple, and are just a recipe from that The Food Lab book everyone I know seems to have a copy of. The tomato soup was an excuse to finally use the immersion blender that we picked up like two months ago now and hadn't opened.

I made the mistake of portioning out huge slices of pecan pie, but we were high at the time and devoured it easily. The trouble was it left me and Geight with half a pie when we got back home on Sunday evening and the choice of four tiny slices or two humongous ones. (We chose the latter.)

I do find that I enjoy cooking, but really struggle with multitasking. Making sure everything was good to go and reheating the mac and cheese and then remembering I needed to make gravy still got me in a really stressful state and I hope to do something different next year. Which I won't be surprised if it's just making something instead of the smashed potatoes that I can get away with just reheating in the oven on the day of.

As for the weekend afterwards, it was also the usual affair of board games and YouTube and Street Fighter 6 and also a bit of UFO 50 including Party House.

We tried Great Western Trail's Argentina variant which I was so-so on. It had been long enough since we played the original game that we all really needed a refresher on mechanics and understanding it's really bad symbols where sometimes "-1" means pay a coin and other times it means "-1 coin discount on this action". Adding in the re-explanation meant it took a long time to get through and I still feel like I have no idea what I should actually be doing to try and succeed.

It's got cows to buy. It's got trains to upgrade. It's got building to build. It's got A whole bunch of people to hire to make things easier. It's a lot!

The main event though was Tales of the Arthurian Knights, a long overdue sequel of sorts to Tales of the Arabian Nights. It does a ton to streamline the original, and while it still is very much a game that you play just to see what weird shit will happen to your character rather than trying to win, there's a lot more control of what happens to you. I started drafting a long post about both games and man, y'all can read Wikipedia if you gotta. The tl;dr is "Roam around in King Arthur times having adventures that get read from a big ass book of scenarios". It's like a choose your own adventure with skills and dice rolls to determine success on each prompt.

Some of the cool shit that happened in the two games we played of it over the weekend include:

Met some trolls in the woods who were partying them and challenged them to a drinking contest which I lost handily. I woke up the next day with a bunch of money stolen to pay my tab.

I was summoned to a dark tower to slay a demon in its dungeon. My escort was a scared woman who admitted it was her duty to go inside even if she didn't want to. It turned out the demon was being sealed inside her and came out when brought into the dungeon. I had to chop her head off to defeat the demon, but it's okay she got better and the demon was then sealed in the dungeon instead.

One knight tried to stop queen Guinevere from being arrested by sir Mordred for treason and failed, forced to flee camelot and assume that the queen was then executed.

One knight got involved in a dispute where a young squire lost his chance at knighthood because he was flirting with a noble's daughter. The noble claimed that he was harassing her and there was no love between them. The knight took the noble's side but fucked up his confrontation real bad resulting in the squire stabbing his horse and holding a blade to him before deciding to let him live.

One knight found a sad giant who had been tricked by a witch into giving her her firstborn and a spell prevented her from harming the witch. The knight managed to break the spell and the giant pummeled the witch into a puddle of blood and black smoke.

Anyway it's a very good game and one I await playing again, even if it is like 4 hours for 4 people.