I'm sitting here in my basement, surrounded by "stuff" usually in our storage room, which also houses the water heater and furnace/AC. I'm surrounded by all that "stuff" because when we got up yesterday, the house was a toasty 58 degrees F. No heat!
No problem, right? Just get the heating contractor in - probably just the igniter on the furnace. Ha ha ha...not so fast. Turns out that the igniter WAS broken, but there was also a leak at the control valve. Once that was all replaced, it turns out that the main board on the furnace was bad as well. Rather than sink thousands of dollars into a 20 year old furnace, and an AC unit that would run continuously to cool the house to 75 degrees in the heat of the summer, we bit the bullet and went for a brand new, high efficiency unit (furnace and AC). We're also replacing the old water heater, before it buys the farm as well. Increasing it to 50 gallons vs. the old unit's 40 gallons.
I'm looking forward to coming home after a long motorcycle ride in July or August and stepping into a nice cool house, rather than the stuffy one that we'd had the last couple of years. It will definitely be nice to not be calling the heat/ac contractor every year for service as we've had to do lately.
On to a gaming note:
Markers!
I tired of having to dig for a 1, 2, or 3 UI loss marker, so I made a set of markers that have all 3 loss states on them. You just put the side with the current loss so it is touching the command stand. Remove 1 stand of figures and replace with the marker. The musket/rifle is 1 UI (1 musket), the 2 rocks are 2 UI (2 rocks), and the 3 cannon balls are 3 UI (3...well, you get the picture).
I had also wanted to look at different ways of marking units that had fired instead of using the good old reliable white "puff balls". The puffs worked well for many years, but I'm tired of seeing troops pushing huge fuzzy medicine balls around the table. The new markers are a variation of what I use for WW2 games. The fire markers are just round markers with 3 balls on them - you can consider them cannon balls, or musket balls - whatever suits your fancy. I think they look much nicer, and less obtrusive than big white puff balls.
The next post will follow this weekend's game - assuming all the "stuff" is gone from around my game table!
No comments:
Post a Comment