Day 140. Last night I went to a games night, and thus played my first new game in a while (A lot of Nanuk, Monopoly Deal, Star Munchkin and iPhone games have been ongoing, of course). What new games was this? Pass the Pigs. A die-rolling game where the dice are little plastic pigs. I consistently rolled many “pig outs,” however (the two pigs lie on their sides, but opposite sides) which results in zero points and ends your turn. For about a quarter or my turns, I rolled a pig out on my first roll. Tragedy.

It turns out that this game is of interest mathematically. My friend Oliver brought the game to the party, and admitted that one night he estimated the relative frequencies of all roll results, to try and arrive at a closed-form optimal policy of when to stop and bank your points vs. keep going (at the risk of rolling a “pig out”). He said that approximately 25 points is where you should stop and bank your points. I only had one round that even approached 25 points (it was 21, I think), and you can be sure I banked them. Interestingly, there is a professor at Duquesne here in town who uses the game to teach Bayesian inference on Dirichlet-Multinomial distributions (link)! Crazy. I have to admit, since I am messing around with reinforcement learning more these days, I was tempted to write a simulator based on these statistics to see if a learned roll-vs.-bank policy would end up mirroring the “optimal” policy. As if I don’t have enough side-projects going on already…

Day 106. I guess this is my first athletic game entry. While I bike and run regularly, I guess I don’t really play sports all that often, but a group of friends who live in Highland Park invited Natalie and I to play with them and their kids. We ranged in age from six to folks in their forties. It makes it a little rough to run after a ball alongside a kid half your height, because you really don’t want to plow them over. ;) There were several injuries. We played two games: my team lost in sudden death overtime, and the second game we called off at 4:30pm so folks could retreat in finish their taxes. I scored one goal, which is surprising since I don’t think I have played soccer since elementary school gym class.

Day 86. I broke down and donated to this year’s Humble Bundle project today. This is a fundraiser for charity which packages several indie games together for name-you-price donation. One of the games this year is Snuggle Truck, a silly driving/obstacle course game by which you try to safely deliver several snuggly animals to “the zoo” via several dangerous courses full of boulders, cliffs, and the like. I only played the first few levels, but it was a fun little diversion from paper-writing. Now, back to work.

Day 80. Caught wind of this new iPhone game that’s temporarily free as a promotion. Letris is a hybrid of Scrabble and Tetris, where letters fall from the top and you have to spell out words to clear them from the board. It’s pretty addictive, but personally I think it gets too hard too quickly. Part of the joy of Tetris, Dr. Mario, Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, and other such games is that they can just keep on going for a long time. Letris, though levels up pretty quickly and gets frustrating. That, and the dictionary is incomplete: “METHODIST” AND “LATERAL” are two words I tried to spell which it rejected, resulting in a letter pileup at the top and my loss!

Day 79. I got an email today announcing the latest Humble Bundle, a suite of indie video games that get packed up and auctioned off on a name-your-price basis for charity. While I haven’t decided whether or not to get this bundle, it reminded me of some of the games I got and enjoyed from the last bundle, including Crayon Physics Deluxe. I imagine it’s even more interesting with a tablet interface, but it is fun with trackpad clicks as well. The goal is to “draw” elements like bridges, levers, and boulders that help navigate a little red ball across an obstacle course. Some of the levels are easy, but some of them make things much harder than it sounds.

Day 78. Pop Cap Games to the rescue again! I have not played this one in ages. Zuma’s Revenge is, more or less, the same as the original Zuma, but with somewhat sexier graphics. The mind is a funny thing… I associate this game with the Cold Spring Harbor Labs Biology of Genomes meeting (which is where I was introduced to it three years ago by fellow conference-goers). Another highlight of that trip was seeing Francis Collins playing guitar and singing Eagles covers with a band made up of fellow NIH researchers.

Day 77. This week was Carnegie Mellon’s spring break. Natalie and I spent the first part of it in Kentucky burying my grandmother, worked our butts off on Wednesday, and then spent two nights (Internet-free) at a Bed & Breakfast in Myersdale, PA. We brought along several games but ended up not playing any of them. Instead, we biked part of the Great Allegheny Passage and walked around through this once-hopping industrial era boomtown (and read books and napped).

However, the proprietors of the B&B had a slew of board games on offer… one of their sons is apparently a game designer and donates his surplus. They had, for example, a newer addition of Fluxx which I had not seen (Natalie hates this game, although I think it’s fun). Another game we had never seen before was Dirty Minds. It’s a guessing game à la Taboo or Mad Gab, but in this case the clues are sexually suggestive phrases that describe innocuous everyday words. For instance, the clues:

• I’m a four letter word
• I’m a name for a woman
• I end in u-n-t

Are all clues for the plain and harmless word AUNT. Other clues like “I need to be blown or I go limp” and “a stiff pole gets me up” describe a FLAG, and so on. Natalie and I had a fun time with this game, but after a while we stopped keeping score and got bored because it kept using the same gags over and over. Still, a change of pace. It’s amazing how many of them were really hard to guess…

Day 74. 8pm and still at the office. Working. On Wednesday night. Of spring break. Took a break from writing code to take a break from writing prose to play a few rounds of Dr. Mario. Speed: High. Music: Chill. Level: 15 through 19, before dying. Yup, I have a life.

Day 72. My grandmother passed away on March 2, and we spent the weekend in Kentucky to be with family and lay her to rest. After the funeral, after driving back to Lexington from Bardstown, and after many of the family members boarded their planes to go back to Texas, Oklahoma, DC, Florida, and the like, I sat at my parent’s dining room table with Natalie, my folks, and my aunt Denise to play a couple of rounds of Monopoly Deal. It was good to laugh, pretend to be all cut-throat (at least I *think* Denise was pretending), and just be family for a while. I think grandmother would have felt honored by that.

I also inherited a handmade wooden Tic-Tac-Toe board, magnetic travel Scrabble, and a travel solitaire game over the course of the weekend.

Days 64-69. I am pretty sure I have played Monopoly Deal, Tic-Tac-Toe (both 2-player against Natalie) Bejeweled, and Flood-It! (while communting by bus) since my last entry. Maybe more, but I haven’t really been keeping track except for games that are NEW or involve a particular effort to play (e.g., scheduling a get-getting together with friends). But I have been keeping up…