Heng’s Gaming Blog

Am now switching to a new address:

http://aikyong.com

All my posts from friendster and blogger have been transfered and am now in process of customising the look. For the moment it’s pretty much up and running.

This past weekend just did a trek to Gunung Irau, the famed "green mossy forest trail" in Cameron Highlands.

A rather tough trek, the whole journey took a total of 10 hours, from 9.30am in the morning to 7.30pm in the evening.

We had checked in the dorm the night before at the Malaysian Nature Society’s cosy abode in the middle of the Boh Tea Plantation.

The next morning, we started with a drive up Gunung Brinchang. There we met our first obstacle with the cars having difficulty going up the steep uneven road:

With some hassle, we managed to get moving and then proceeded into the forest.

Some truly unique sight found in certain parts of the world can be seen here in Cameron Highlands, Malaysia: The moss-covered forest.

Plenty of steep slopes to challenge the trekkers’ physical endurance.

Lots of large rainforest tree trunks to step around/clamber on.

G. Irau Jungle trek:- total 2.35km one way.

As we climb on, we find ourselves surrounded by mists/fog/cloud.

It’s peaceful here.

Jungle walk no#14. It takes 30mins just to do 0.4km.

Darling Li Li during one of the rest breaks. We were given various biscuits and chocolates for consumption during breaks to keep our energy up.

More steep slopes and tree roots. Some tree roots need to be passed underneath.

As we go deeper into the forest, the moss starts to become thicker and more dense.

Unlike other mountain treks, there is a strong emphasis on using hands to grab tree branches/roots to hoist oneself up the path, or to let oneself down.

There are moss covered trees all around. The ground however is muddy like heck.

This sign here had suffered some sort of burn.

The cloud obscures the view of the sky and the mountain side.

A typical path, roots below, branches above. Sorta like a tunnel.

Some eerie tree formation with cavities between the trunk-roots.

Trees covering the path.

Another weird formation:- a tree stump sticking out from the ground, covered with moss and seaweed-like-coral-kinda greenies.

Nearing our destination.

Some places required climbing over rocks… ouch, sharp! bring your gloves!

Another green tunnel, moss-covered branches above, tree roots below.

We’re here! The peak’s a little underwhelming. Not much of a view, it serves rather as a sort of marker signifying the limit of the climb. The journey’s more interesting.

A typical participant’s shoes when reaching the peak. Three words: MUD! MUDDY! MUDDIER!

(Bubbles: hhmmm… did someone say MUD?! I am a pig, I heart MUD!)

Going back is faster since everyone did not stop for photos anymore. Overall still ~9 hours climb though.

Verdict: The green moss-covered forest is special and the best part only comes near the end, so no skipping the rough and long climb early on. The green moss-carpet has been destroyed by constant trampling by too-many tourists. The last part of the trail is the portion still in the better condition because presumably less people made it that far. Bearing this in mind, there’s another trail I recommend to see the moss-carpet which me and my ex-schoolmates encountered. It is near G. Beremban at Tanah Rata. It has less moss-covered trees, but more moss-covered ground.

Last
night’s session was a rousing success, guanranteed by
Boardgamecafe.net’s three stooges: namely Jedi Council jack208, Jedi
Knight ayheng and Jedi Padawan-Knight-to-be-coming-soon lostboyz.

The
session was dealt a terrible blow early on as people started dropping
out like flies and ayheng was delayed by urgent work. lostboyz and
jack208 soldiered on at 8pm at OTK with a starting meal.

9pm and
an urgent message was sent out: where are you? ayheng finally made it
to OTK and the three power figures started discussing the serious
business of the (boardgaming) FORCE. (yeah well, we talked mostly about
upcoming and favourite releases while I ate my curry chicken rice
dinner).

10pm thereabouts we adjourned to OTK and enticed laiwah to a game of Formula DE!

This fun racing game uses dice in a creative way, namely, you get a
progressively better dice with higher numbers as you shift gears up,
until you are in a lean-mean-unstoppable racing machine flying down the
straight at gear 5!

gear 1 - yellow, gear 2 - orange, gear 3 - red, gear 4 - green, gear 5 - purple, gear 6 - blue OMG! black dice = damage dice.

(of course, that is before you realise the wicked
corners that are coming up and you burn rubber and metal to slow down
frantically)

Each player got 2 cars and as a result, there were
8 cars racing on the board. This game amazingly can handle 5 players
with 2 cars each, or 10 players with one car each! A good game to have
for the occasion of having 8+ players.

Lots of reckless drivers
abound as the newbie racers went neck to neck into the corners,
scratching paintjobs and occasionally, doing damage to their own
bodywork.

In a car that’s designed for two races, some of the
(shall-not-be-unnamed-to-protect-their-identity) players limped past
the chequered flag in the first lap with a badly damaged car.

The
corner mechanics are pretty neat as it forces the racers to stop a
requisite number of times in the corners in a low gear before shifting
up for the exit. The lane changing mechanic is also quite inspired as
it often creates a situation where the front driver can benefit from an
open lane to change lanes according to how fast his car is going.
Whereas the back driver will find himself putting the brakes on his car
when confronted by the blocking maneuver of the front car. Definately a
game to play for the experience of car racing.

The game comes
with two tracks and lots of expansion tracks to bid on ebay. The tracks
that came with the game are quite good as it features the technically
demanding Monaco circuit and the (comparatively) more relaxed Holland
circuit.

The game’s a bit longish as it took the 4 of us about 2
hours to finish 1 lap. The rules are not particularly tough and the
main strategy is in trying to get out of a corner fast enough to outrun
the rest.

In our game, lostboyz’s first car on the starting grid
ended up finishing second last due to his prudent taking of the corners
while his last car ended up finishing first due to his risk taking on
going into the corners. jack208 also did well with one of his cars,
showing us how to go into a corner fast and then take a minor fuel
penalty to fast-downthrottle rapidly. I did okay with both my cars
finishing consistently in the middle. laiwah took too many a safe
approach and was thus left in the dust by other maniac
pedal-to-the-metal drivers. Although, to be on the fair side, she would
have won if we did two laps like we originally promised to

One game down, one more to go. Round 2 started at 12am with jack208 explaining the rules of Wallenstein
to ayheng and lostboyz. rhyen temporarily got the boyz’ hopes up by
declaring that he was making his way from Mages to Boardgamecafe. Which
however he did not turn up. And so we settle into a three player game.

The
game’s a area-control game with some wargaming elements settled by the
infamous cube-tower!

How it works is like this: you take your army
cubes, you take your opponents army cubes, shake it up in your hand and
throw them into the cube tower! some cubes will get stuck, and other
cubes got stuck there before might come unstuck! So what happens is an
interesting result which favors the person with the more cubes… MOST
of the TIME. Not always. Sometimes your cube just don’t want to drop
out.

Cube
towers aside, there’s some planning to be had each round which
seriously causes some mind-f going on. Players start guessing and
second guessing other people’s actions. As all actions are put down
first and then revealed simultaneously, this will cause some serious
screwage to happen as players’ plan are thrown into wreck by unforseen
moves. Glorious!

jack208 seems to get the strategy on this one
as he finishes a respectable 2nd after losing precious points in the
first year to a peasant riot. Myself did badly as I didn’t manage to
get building majority on many provinces. lostboyz with his
devil-may-care attitude went on a province grabbing spree managed to
finish first as he was able to put down his rioting-starving-peasants.
Nice game.

The night finishes with more talk and finally a lite game of Pompeji
to intro to lostboyz.

This game is very lite and is right up
‘litegamer’ lostboyz’ alley. Another satisfied
tossing-meeples-into-da-burning-volcano customer.

Woo hoo! three games in a nite, we finished at 4-ish. Highlight for me tonite was Formula DE. But I don’t recommend anyone to get it because I WANT IT (wait till my next budget, sigh).