Game Night: Mystery of the Abbey

Last Friday, we pulled out Mystery of the Abbey to play with Leigh and Dave. We started to explain… “It’s like Clue for grown-ups.” Then Dave admitted he’d never played Clue either! But for the rest of you, that one sentence should be helpful.

Mystery of the Abbey is a deduction game by Bruno Faidutti and Serge Laget, produced by Days of Wonder. There are 24 residents of the Abbey - fathers, brothers and novices - each depicted on a separate card. At the beginning of the game, the cards are shuffled and one card is slid, face-down, under the game board. That suspect is the guilty party - he pushed Brother Adelmo off a cliff and must be punished. You need to deduce his identity.

The cards are dealt out and you use a full-color checklist to mark off the monks you have seen. You can move two spaces in the Abbey each turn, and certain rooms give you extra actions - taking cards from other players, asking questions, or drawing cards to give you extra turns or special actions. After each set of 4 turns, Mass is called and the players return to the Chapel. Cards are passed and a Mass action occurs - both of these things reveal more and more cards each round.

Eventually, one player will deduce the guilty party and make their way to the hall to make an accusation. Unlike Clue, however, in Mystery of the Abbey players also have the opportunity to make revelations throughout the game, declaring one characteristic of the murderer. (The murderer is a Fransiscan. The murderer is a Novice.) These revelations give you points, or negative points if they are incorrect, as does the accusation. The winner of the game is the person with the most points at the end, so it’s not always the person who makes the final accusation.

Personally, I love deduction games! I’ve always loved Clue, Clue: Master Detective, Alibi, 221 B Baker Street, Guess Who?, Spy Web, Mastermind - and who can forget the delightful camp of the Clue VCR games? I love to puzzle out the solution, and this game has enough flavor and interesting rules and special actions to make it distinctive. This was our first Days of Wonder game and I’m always up for another round!

Halfway Down the Stairs

Halfway down the stairs
Is a stair where I sit.

There isn’t any other stair
Quite like it.

It’s not at the bottom,
It’s not at the top.

So this is the stair
Where I always stop.

Halfway up the stairs
Isn’t up and isn’t down.

It isn’t in the nursery,
It isn’t in the town.

All sorts of funny thoughts
Run round my head.

It isn’t really anywhere;
It’s somewhere else instead.

Turned the Corner

I definitely feel that we’ve turned a corner. The last two weeks, or two months even, my family & friends have been plagued by illness, going all the way back to Dave’s appendectomy in early January, right up through BabyGirl’s eye injury last week. Today the sun is shining - both literally and figuratively - and life feels lighter. No one that I know of is sick or injured today!

We spent Friday night gaming with Leigh and Dave (Mystery of the Abbey, Munchkin Fu, Zombie Fluxx) and Saturday night with Jer, Mark and Teresa (Squint, Zooloretto, Colosseum). We had a calm Sunday, and even spent part of the afternoon beginning to update our games list. If you click on the “my collection” link on my “Game Shelf” widget on the left, you can get to my collection - around 625 online, and we have about 25 obscure games, mostly kids’ games, that aren’t on the site yet and we’ll have to enter all the information and add some pictures ourselves.

That’s why I didn’t update the blog - all the computer time was spent updating the collection! And now my baby is sleeping in the same room with my camera, but soon I’ll update with the cutest pictures of BabyGirl and CousinC from Saturday.

It’s Somebody’s Birthday

Today is a double day for our family - on 2-22, both Grandma and Gigi (PisecoDad’s mom and his paternal grandmother) are celebrating birthdays.   We can’t be with them, but we’re thinking about them!

Here’s Grandma with BabyGirl and JediBoy in Guatemala last October.

This is the giant card that they made for her today!

Snowy Day

Today would be a snow day. Except we’re homeschoolers, so we don’t care. And the public schools are all on vacation anyway. So I don’t think any kids around here are all that excited - just a few inches of powdery, not-good-for-much snow, enough to make the roads slippery and keep us home.

That doesn’t mean that my kids won’t ask for me to take them outside, which involves six boots, two pairs of snow pants, three jackets, three hats, four mittens, two gloves, and a lot of patience. But it’s worth it to see them smile in the sparkly snow.

A Place in the Choir

This is one of JediBoy’s favorite songs, mainly because it’s on Seamus Kennedy’s kids’ album. We love the exuberance and this clip includes great photos of the animals. When JediBoy heard the first strains of the song, he ran into the room. We had to watch it four times through, and then he told me, “You really should put this on your blog, Mom.” So here it is. (HT: Melissa)

Is It Friday Yet?

This has been one of those unending weeks. I know you’ve all been wondering where PisecoDad decided to spend the afternoon on Monday, when all the fun places were full of vacationing public school kids. Turns out, the ER was just as full. Yep, his GI virus kicked back in and he was dehydrated and in some serious pain. He spent the afternoon at a walk-in clinic and then was transferred by ambulance to the ER, where they were so busy they had him in a wheelchair in the waiting room for about three hours. Finally they gave him something for the nausea and tried to get him to keep down some contrast so they could do a CT scan. They were thinking it was his appendix, but that came up clear on the scan so they sent him home at 2:30 am. He spent Tuesday napping and recovering, and was basically recovered by Wednesday.

Not my favorite way to spend time.

Last night, as you can see from my previous post, we enjoyed the eclipse. But it was cold - about 10-15 degrees F - and the kids only lasted about 45 minutes. We were at the park from about 9:30 (halfway through the partial stage) until 10:15 (fifteen minutes into totality). I enjoyed the chance to test my camera, but the tripod I bought wasn’t super stable in the wind, so a lot of the pictures have shake. JediBoy was excited to see the partial stage progressing, but once it reached totality we didn’t get any spectacular color, just a soft burnt red, and he decided the time had come to go home and get warm!

JediBoy has been amenable this week to my pushing of math activities. He’s even been willing to work through some addition facts with the help of Math-U-See blocks. But yesterday he told me that he really doesn’t want to learn math until he’s 7 and that he’d rather do spelling instead. So I have to work out a way to help an eager reader who doesn’t like to write learn to spell. Hints?

We did get out to the thrift store yesterday and picked up a stack of kids’ books, including William Tell, a retelling of the opera. JediBoy loved that and decided that “William Tell will evolve into Robin Hood.”

BabyGirl has learned a sign (not the ASL sign, but one she made up) to stand for poop. The problem is that she only makes the sign after she has pooped, and then proudly walks to the toilet and puts her potty seat on and expects to sit on the potty. In the rare times when she makes the sign first and we rush her to the toilet, she just sits there, investigating the bathroom, and then poops standing up when we put a diaper back on her. She’s definitely a standing-up pooper. Why don’t they make potties for that?

This morning, BabyGirl had been up for about ten whole minutes when she stumbled, hit a chair, cried for a moment and got up to keep playing. When she wandered back to me, I saw that she had a cut near the corner of her eye. Cue mother struggling to hold bag of frozen broccoli cuts (we’re out of peas!) to toddler’s face.

Wordless Wednesday Night

Our Busy Social Life

The past two days have been a whirlwind of activity… a soccer game, a hockey game, a birthday party. PisecoDad has today off, and we’re trying to choose how to spend the day considering that many of our usual favorite haunts will be filled with vacationing public school kids! Wish us luck!

Lunar Eclipse

I’ve had my digital SLR camera for a month, and it only now dawned on me that I could finally use a camera with my telescope - you know, for Wednesday’s big lunar eclipse. Only now, when it’s too close to order the parts I’d need - an adapter for my telescope and then a T-adapter for my camera. Well, okay, the time is too short and the parts are too dear - I’d need some lead time to save up for those. The next big eclipse is in 2010…

In the meantime, you can read here about why in general, binoculars are your best bet for this eclipse. Most telescopes have too narrow a field of vision. I’m lucky enough to have a wide field telescope - the Astroscan pictured above. It did dawn on me this morning that my telescope is more than half as old as I am. I bought it in high school (I think in 1989-90) when I saved up birthday money, baby sitting money and spare change to make half the total, and my parents thankfully chipped in the other half. I can still smell that money… I saved it in a Folger’s can!

So, if I had an adapter for the telescope and an adapter for my camera, I could hook my nice new camera up to my faithful old telescope and get some marvelous eclipse photos.

For now, I’ll have to make do with a few wide field shots, and pictures of my family using the telescope! Let’s just hope for clear skies.

This is the official graphic from NASA showing the times and phases of the eclipse, created by Larry Koehn at shadowandsubstance.com, where he also has a good animation and lots more information.

Over the next few days, I’ll be sharing this with JediBoy, using sites like Lunar Eclipses for Beginners and this lunar eclipse animation or this two perspective animation. If you’re interested in a more scripted way to teach your kids about the eclipse, try this discussion and demonstration activity. I’ll be spending time poring over sites like this one that have more tips for photographing the event.

I’ve also swapped out our book basket for kids’ books on astronomy. I’ll try to find the time this weekend to make a separate post about those books (I found 16 in our office, without digging hard), but for now they should be appearing in my Book Basket in the sidebar.