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Edited: Jan 26, 2022

Out of the Forest

That's it, lads! I'm back! Internet is flowing again through my place and I don't have to scrape for bits of it anymore!

So, as you all know I have now moved to the strange land of Belgium, and it is indeed a strange land, being divided in two (well, actually, in five?) pieces, all with their own regulations and changes and so on. The twenty minutes of commute (with a very nice and comfortable train) from home to work is really like setting foot in a new country (and I abruptly switch from "I speak the language of everyone in the streets" to "how could I actually order this alluring bakery?").

Yes, for those who don't know, Belgium is divided into two major parts, the French-speaking one and the Dutch-speaking one; I work in the latter but live in the former for convenience. And the Dutch-speaking part is all beautiful and shiny with clean streets and everything works super well, while the French-looking part is a bit broken overall but, hey, at least they are nice (I mean it. People are surprisingly warm and helpful here.)

I now live in a city called Forest (and I can't deny that the name of the city played some role in my choosing to live there). So far I'm a bit disappointed, it's not super nice to live there. There are two big parks just next to my street, but they are basically empty. This is really a letdown, especially with a young kid: here we have parks twice bigger than in Paris with... absolutely nothing to do in it. Well, in the evening, there is a bunch of Peruvian/Bolivian (I can't make the distinction based on the handful of clues I gathered, sorry) that gather in the park, bring an electric generator, put some music on and start playing volleyball, so at least that's a mildly entertaining show. In the meanwhile, my son and I try really hard to play with a shitty plastic slide that some desperate inhabitant must have left here for children to have at least one thing to enjoy in this huge, desolate patch of green in a morose neighborhood.

The move itself has been nightmarish, and I got pieces of furniture stolen by my former neighbors. So, lots of boxes that I can't unpack. The worst has been the games, of course. So many of them. So many. Well, most of them were packed already, which helped, but then, when I started unpacking, it became really oppressing to open box after box, only to see most of them were full of games. And another one with board games. And another one. Oh! Wonderful! This one has DVDs! And that other one... Crappy stuff that we should have thrown away! Not everything is board games after all!

I'll make an official tour of my newly gathered collection pretty soon. All of it, finally collected in one single place instead of being snuffed on all possible nooks of the apartment. It's truly impressive. Intimidating. Daunting. Crushing.

Well, anyway. I'm back to ST now!

7 comments

Comments (7)

Gloomknight

Jan 26, 2022

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Great post! I understand moving can be very hard, and I am sorry about the park situation, but the good news is that kids can be very easily entertained. Sometimes, a barren patch of land that some would call a park can be a wonderful new world in their little eyes. Their imagination knows no bounds. I laughed at some parts about your post (such as throwing out the “crappy stuff you don’t need” aka non-boardgame related! 🤣. I also know how we all have a tendency to collect the things we want in life, only to reassess their value when true changes come into play.

Zerbique

Jan 19, 2022

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Well, actually I ordered and received a few board games related... What can I say, it was sales time on Philibert!

I got:

- Sheepy Time (I was very interested in this one since my ST post about it, and the dithyrambic review by Space Biff; I almost bought it new, but I got a small discount here). For some fuzzy reason, in French, it's called Insomnia (we're very good at translating an English title with a title in English).

- not soloable, I got Micro Robots. A colleague of mine made me discover Ricochet Robots, which I found awesome, and it was actually one of my last purchases of 2021. Well, thinking about it, you could play it solo, but I don't see the point.

- also not soloable, I got Manga Kai, because Reiner Knizia.

Zerbique

Jan 29, 2022

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Replying to

I actually got two more:

- Arkham Horror: Final Hour. I've never been tempted by Arkham Horror (too big, too long), but this one seems nice. I've read the rules already, they are simple enough; the box is small-sized (similar to Elder Sign and Heroes of Terrinoth, I love this format, maybe my favorite one), so, it seemed like a nice opportunity.

- Criss Cross. It wasn't on sale, but it was cheap, and it's Knizia's. I usually cannot stand roll and writes because I can't stand the idea of writing on board game components, especially when they are pretty, with lots of stuff. But here, you write on a 5x5 black-and-white grid, so even if I ever run out of sheets, I can draw mine in a matter of seconds. I can even grab the dice for travel and play it anywhere.

- I also got two non-solo games, The Boldest which has been on sale ever since its release. It looks really great and, after a thorough read of the rules, it seemed like something I could really enjoy. After years of being on the fence about it, I decided to give it a chance. Also not on sale, and also Knizia's, My City, at last! One of my closest friends and his wife live in Brussels, they both love board games, so I have the team to go through the legacy campaign. Maybe I'll finally play my games this year (and it would help if I were to really slow down on the compulsive purchases)!!!

Derek

Jan 19, 2022

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Nice to hear you're all settled in 'Z'. My uncle's last posting was in Brussels for a few years before he retired. How far are you from Brussels?

Looking forward to seeing that game collection when it's all unpacked. 😀 Did the move trigger any desire to purge some of your collection since there's so much? Or did it make you just love it more?

Zerbique

Jan 19, 2022

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Replying to

Brussels is actually two things: the Brussels-Capital Region, which embraces 19 municipalities, and the City of Brussels per se, which is very tiny. I'm living in the Brussels-Capital Region and getting to the actual City takes either a 5 minutes trip by bus or a 15 minutes walk.

Moving made me absolutely hate my collection and despise myself, but still I have no desire to purge any games in particular. The problem is, I have so few opportunities to play. I haven't taken the time to sit and play since the beginning of 2022 (except three short games of Puzzle Dungeon). When I get to try games, it's much easier to part with them (at least to put them on sale, but since the market is saturated, they usually endlessly stay there). I think I would only want to keep two-thirds of my collection if I were given the opportunity to play all games at least once. If I were to play all of them at least 10 times, I would keep only half. Maybe less.

But surely: moving all these boxes have been physically exhausting, it has been a huge cost (we had so much stuff, two trips were needed), and it's hard to face the constant reminder of their physical reality now that they are all piled up in the living room.

Just for the anecdote, usually, when you live in a place with a surface of X m², you need X/2 m3 of volume capacity when moving. We lived in a 40 m², and we needed 40m3 of truck capacity to move. How it's been even possible remains a puzzle to everyone.

Jan 18, 2022

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Welcome back! I hope you'll be able to speak Dutch soon.

Zerbique

Jan 19, 2022

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Replying to

Well. I wouldn't bet on it. Dutch is hard!

Also, I know both English and German (the latter to a much lesser extent), so it gets mixed with both. And I would deem Dutch one of the most impossible to pronounce languages ever (true, it's still far behind Chinese, but tones are a killer). But, yes. I'll have to. If only to understand what my colleagues might be talking about.

I went to the theater the last weekend to see the last Spider-Man movie (I try to see all Marvel movies), and I was extremely surprised to see that the movie, in English, had two rows of subtitles, one for French, one for Dutch!

(I rather didn't like the movie, by the way. This is clearly my least favorite 2021 Marvel release, and I've now seen all four of them. According to me, the best was The Eternals, then it's a tie between Shang-Chi and Black Widow, Spider-Man 3 lagging far behind).