To avoid danger of suffocation...

[altivo]

...do not enclose plushies in plastic zipper bags before shipping. That's what I always think those warning labels should say. My new little okapi arrived today, in a plastic bag with such a label. Fortunately I got him out before he was too much discomfited. And here he is.

In the same shipment was the basic Carcassonne game set from Rio Grande. I think it will be easier to play with the okapi than with the game, which looks deceptively simple but has rather confusing scoring rules.

Frost alert tonight. We closed the hot frame up and moved the potted blueberries back into the barn. It is nippy out all right. Now the forecast calls for thunderstorms on Saturday for the bird count. Hope that goes away.

Comments

[avon_deer]

Okapis really do look like a cute chimera of giraffe and horse. :D

[altivo]

I think okapis (okapi?) are adorable. Not only are they colorful and rare, they are incredibly shy. The one or two okapi fursuiters I've met briefly fall into the same categories.

[avon_deer]

I should get to know the one I know of a bit better. Us deer are a tad more gregarious I think...well at least *I* am :D

[hrrunka]

I've never had the opportunity to see okapi in the wild, but I have seen bongo in the Aberdare forest, a long time ago.

[altivo]

Heh. Since I've never been outside North America, I've not seen either in the wild. I have seen bongo in the National Zoo some years ago, I believe. Also a giant panda (they had only one at the time, and all that was visible was his very large rear as he was napping.)

Turns out I was right about Brookfield, though, which is quite near me here. They are in fact one of the leaders of the okapi conservation effort, and have had more live births of okapi in captivity than any other zoo.

[hrrunka]

Cute. We saw two okapi at London Zoo back in January; very handsome in a strange sort of way.

I find BoardGameGeek is a good place to go if there are questions about rules. Carcassonne has suffered from changing rules. The first version scored things slightly differently, which occasionally makes life complicated.

[altivo]

I need to go to Brookfield here this summer. I'm pretty sure they have an okapi or two. I haven't seen a live one in about a decade now, unless you count fursuiters. ;D

I've been playing with the Carcassonne computer version. So far the best I've done is to tie the robot players. No wins for me. There's a good deal more strategy to tile placement and followers than I had first expected.

I don't think the printed rules that came with the US-made set tell you to remove tiles to make the number of turns come out even between the number of players, but the computer seems to be doing that by default. There's an option to turn it off. Is that a customary practice? I can see how an extra turn could advantage someone, but the missing tiles are bothersome.

[hrrunka]

We don't take out tiles to even things up, but then we usually play with quite a few extra tiles from expansion sets in the bag as well, and use one or more of the expansion rules too. Some of them give players an extra tile under certain circumstances, and evening out the number of times stops making much difference as soon as that starts happening.

[bunny_plush]

Adorable! Glad he survived his trip. I always make little air holes in the bags when shipping plush :o)

[altivo]

It's silly really, but the plastic bags always bother me. I understand why they are used and can't dispute it, but eeew.

[merik]

Sweet okapi! Does he have a name yet?

It's silly really, but the plastic bags always bother me

Same here. Not so much because of the air holes, but because it makes me sad to think of plush in a warehouse somewhere, each sealed up in plastic and isolated from its brethren. And some plush, especially big plush, who have arrived at my place recently have been practically vacuum-packed by the manufacturer into airtight plastic cocoons which made them look like big sausages before I set them free. :-P

[altivo]

No name yet. I've been pondering things that begin with "O" and haven't settled on anything. He's presently occupying my windowsill at work along with a rather pudgy gold sequined pony.

Years ago the supermarket where Gary and I shopped at the time had a large display of teddy bears for Christmas. They were the usual cute squishy kind marketed as kids' toys and we bought one each for his nephews (now past college age but then they were about 3 and 5 years old.) The store had put the bears out on display without even removing them from those tight plastic cocoons. One was unwrapped and displayed on a high shelf, and the rest were still trapped in their birth cauls as it were. I guess they thought it was a good idea in terms of keeping the merchandise sanitary when it might otherwise have been mauled by hundreds of sneezy November children, but I had to release both bears even before we got them home in the car. I'm very claustrophobic. Even looking at something like that makes me uncomfortable.

[schnee]

That's such a cute plushie. ^.^

Enjoy the game, too; I never played it myself, but obviously, I must still root for German board games. ;)

[altivo]

The game is deeper than I expected. No doubt that's one reason it has been so successful.

[schnee]

Most likely. I just checked Wikipedia (the German edition), and it seems that the game's actually sold more than three million copies across all editions, not counting the various add-ons and extensions — much more than I expected.