Aluminum Gnat can be cool?

Out of Cosmere knowledge (or knowledge about any fictional book, for that matter), my knowledge about Scadrial and the magic systems on that planet is by far the greatest.
I know a lot about Mistborn.
It is my favorite series, after all, so it's not all too surprises. Plus its magic systems are, like, the coolest.

I could be wrong about this, but I'm assuming I'm not because this makes sense to me, and it's fun.

When you burn aluminum, it gets rid of the metal. It does not matter if you can burn that other metal or not, it just has to be allomantically relevant. Now, I'm assuming this also includes metals that a mistborn could burn, but they would get sick (or die) after doing so. (That's important because it adds a ton of potential metals an aluminum gnat could get rid of. (aka, they're not just stuck to pure allomantic metals. If the metals not pure, it would still get rid of it, etc.)).

In order to burn a metal, it does not have to be directly in your stomach. If a dagger made of (good) pewter is stabbed into Vin, for example, she could actually use that dagger as an allomantic reserve.

Let's say I'm a twinborn, with alminum allomancy and gold feruchemy. It would be cool. I get stabbed by a sword/dagger; I burn enough aluminum to make the sword/dagger go away, and then I use health to heal myself. It would be a great time. And it wouldn't work in a lot of scenarios. But it could work in some scenarios, and that's what's fun about it.

Making people's weapons disappear after they stab you is fun in general.

Temporary Answer for Misting Choice

So I did have minor plans to do a thing with misting similar to the thing I did with ferrings. That's fine that I didn't get to it. Especially since I'm pretty sure the choice is fairly easy for me.

There's pretty much one of two options: Steel or Pewter.
And I think I'm going to go with Pewter. It's just so much more useful in my everyday life. Plus I'm k of scared of heights (although I'm sure I would get over it if I was a Coinshot)

Being a Pewterarm does seem to be the most common choice when I ask people what kind of misting they would want to be, but for good reason.

Temporary Final Answer for Ferring Choice

Written 11/2

So I never fully finished my ferring thing. There were some updates to some things I learned that I never wrote about. Mental Speed works slightly different than I thought it did (it does make you smarter, as well as giving you more time to think).

Regardless, if you asked me to choose one right now, I think I would choose Tin for senses. Which surprises me. I was originally going to say Bronze for wakefulness. But I think I'm going to go with Tin. Probably a lame choice in many people's eyes, but there you go.

Obviously that answer will probably change at some point in the future. It could even change tomorrow for all I know. But it's the one I'm going with.

Scheduling Things

So I'm being set apart tomorrow morning. That'll be wild. I'm not fully ready, but no one really is. I think I'm ready to be made ready to be made ready, though, if that makes any sense. I'm going to write a whole bunch of small posts and schedule them because I can. Most of them will probably be this length and I don't know how many I'll write, but we'll see.




11:31pm update: I only got a few months of posts written (with a few being once every two weeks). That's okay, though. It's better than none.

A few things I like about Tuscany

It's in Italy, and I'm part (1/8) Italian, so that's pretty cool.

Oh, wait.

The Tuscany I was actually referring to is an expansion for Viticulture. Sorry if you came here thinking I was talking about the place. Side note: For some reason, now that we've gotten the expansion, we've been referring to the game by the name of the expansion. "Do you want to play Tuscany" instead of "Do you want to play Viticulture". Which is interesting.

Anyway, I wanted to post something, but didn't know what to talk about, but this popped into my head, so I'm just going to talk about it.

First off, I wanted to state that I really do enjoy the base essential edition of this game. It was really enjoyable. But I'm never planning on not using at least the new board expansion that was added in Tuscany. If I'm teaching a new player who's not super duper adept at board games, I probably wouldn't use the structures or new workers. If I am teaching a new player who I know has played lots of games in the past, I might include all three modules at once, I wouldn't be surprised.

I really really enjoy how many good options there are that I want to take. In the base version of the game, all the actions weren't very exciting. There were many action spaces that I just didn't care about. I never felt excited about going to a lot of the spaces on the board. I felt exciting about some of them, sure, but a lot of them felt like they just never got used (imo).

In the expansion, however, there are tons of things I want to do, and I'm not able to do them all. I love that. Every action space I take feels rewarding and enjoyable. I want to do train a worker and build a building and build this other super cool building card, but I also really want to plant and I probably need more green cards, and trading twice is just so cool and good. There are just a lot of exciting things going on, more than I just listed.

And the action spaces feel tight. Adding two seasons means there are less actions in each season. Which means more fighting over those action spaces when the time comes. You have that suspense hoping that your opponent won't take that space you really really want. You feel rewarded when you take a risk and do something else first, but still get the spot you wanted (that's now even better because of your previous action) and you feel crushed when they harvest two field and you just really really needed those crushed grapes. It's enjoyable.

The new wake-up chart is sooo cool. And it just feels exciting. The base game one was pretty good too, but the new one is better by a decent chunk. I love how it gives you exciting options that you want to pick. In Fresco, it was the opposite. Almost all (if not all, I haven't played it in a while) of the wake-up options you have in Fresco are negatives. Everytime you wake up in that game, you're sad. Everytime you wake up in Tuscany, you excited about how many cool things you get this round. Even if you take the top spot and only get a coin, you're instead excited about how you'll (most likely) be going first and you get to take two green cards before anyone else, and then plant twice before anyone else has the chance to get the spot etc.

Another reason why I like it is because it values winter visitors over summer visitors. We played the base game a couple times right before we got the expansion in the mail. And my mom even commented, "Is it just me, or in Fall do I almost always seem to be picking up Winter visitors?" It wasn't just you, Mom. I almost exclusively picked Winter visitors in the base game. Maybe a couple of rounds in the beginning where I would pick Summer ones, but other than that I would get Winter visitor cards. And Tuscany addresses that. You have to wake up later on the wake-up track in order to get Winter visitor cards, and I think that's awesome. Because they do feel more valuable (imo).

The star mini-board off to the side is pretty cool. We've played a few two-player games and two three-player games. In two-player games, it suggests you don't score the victory points, and so we didn't. So the star mini-board is only alright in a two-player game. I still like the variety of choices you get when placing a star, though.

But in a three-player game, it was really cool. It was this strange area-control aspect that actually seemed to fit well into the game. It was cool to see how the spots on the board would shift. When I was ahead, she abandoned her fights with Eric. Thus giving Eric free points at the end of the game, but hopefully stopping me, the person she targeted as being ahead of her in score, from getting a few extra points. My mom doesn't care if Eric gets a few extra points as long as I don't get a few extra since I was ahead. It was cool. I like it.

The structure cards add a lot of variety to what you can do with your money and I love it. And the card all feel cool and exciting.

Special workers are probably my least favorite out of the modules, but they're still a super cool addition. It's fun to have new workers that can do a cool thing that other people might not have. And the fact that you only use two per game means there's a good chunk of replayability in that, which is great. Having different workers each game changes the way everyone plays and it make it more dynamic and interesting.

I love how there are bonuses on the two-player spots now. I've played Viticulture as a two-player game more than any other player count combined, and it's always sad when you can't go on that super cool version of the action you're taking. Now you can in a lot of different scenarios, which is amazing. This also adds a cool thing when you play with more than two people as well. This is because you have to choose between which bonus you want, which is another little interesting choice to think about.

This post was longer than I thought it was going to be, but that's fine. I didn't realize how many new things in the expansion I enjoyed. It's a really good expansion.

I'm so excited to play it and other games with Andrew soon!!