Variations on the same theme

I only played a few slots this year and made them all.

Slot 5: Meanwhile, A Multiplicity of Pirates. Michael and I ran the follow-up to our ACUS cliffhanger by getting the team to find the duplicates of Olary Verrow('s') lieutenant(s). There turned out to be five of them and they were going to hijack the Titanikos, a new steam/sail ship arriving in Amber. We didn't time the play well, which was a running theme this con, and had to roll up a lot of stuff in the last hour of the game. They found out there were five of the duplicates, who were all handed over to Benedict, and the mutinous crew members were offered the option to forget the mutiny and continue to sail or get tried as pirates. They wisely chose the latter and all consequences rested on the one/five guys' head(s).

Slot 7: Meanwhile, At Fortress Tharintide. I was ill and slept through most of this slot but made it in time for the big finale. Again, a lot of stuff was rolled up into the last couple of hours and we still ran over, which meant the next slot started late. The gist of the part I played in was that Brand's long-running feud with Alex played out in an "art project" in which he killed a shadow of Alex in front of Will, Cosima, and Gus, and we might have spotted the substitution if we'd had longer to work on the real problem. A definite lesson for future games. Cosima got mad and called Alex her father. Brand's art project is continuing with "repentance" and Cosima gives exactly zero fucks. She has figured out how to sabotage him and she's going to do it between cons.

Slot 8: Meanwhile, A Contest of Skill. This was a cool and very different slot in which Will got three groups together to make cool stuff. I was in the group that made a physical thing, which was a 40' musical fire-breathing mirrored clockwork lion-turtle; the other two groups made trump stuff (a trump-enhanced puppet play and a trump Experience which was the clear winner). Will gave the shadow where we did this to his half-sister Orlaith, who was the clear winner in the MVP ballot. I thought this was great from a GM standpoint and Cosima is also super happy about how it went down. Also, all slowness could be blamed on a late start after slot 7.

Slot 10: Slough Hearses. A Rivers of London game set in the same verse as the Luscinia campaign. I was Claire Sexey, a bureaucrat who Knows Too Much detailed to the Falcon group in Slough. We had to put together who was drowning people on dry land and once we sorted out the spirit and the curse, propitiate it. Suffered a bit from timing problems but not as much as the first two Meanwhile slots.

Slot 14: A Shaggy Dog Story. Rich ran a Baron Munchausen-esque story game about how we got Dogs for Julian. I played Martin and stole parts of a recent book series I loved as his gweilo ass got confused between foo dogs and dogs, which was hilarious because someone else deliberately chose a foo dog. I messed up my telling a little but was overall OK with it. As a GM I think we needed more instructions on coming with elements of a story and giving other players things to ask the teller about, which I will remember in future.

At the last minute last week we got an email about Uchiko Plano having a Father's Day omokase so I got us a reservation. I documented what we ate on my instagram starting with the special menu.

When we started eating at Uchi and Uchiko when we moved to Austin almost 20 years ago (yikes) Uchi was more formal and Uchiko was more casual. Not that Uchi was ever really formal, just that the level of service was more formal and the menu was a little more upscale. Now that there are Uchi and Uchi variants everywhere, they all have a kind of personality, and Uchiko is the one with the wood grilled bold flavors.

This was our first time at the Plano Uchiko; it's less than a year old, IIRC. Our foodie friends from Austin were not impressed with it for an early try-on. It's still stumbling a little in the service: our dishes arrived out of order, we got an extra dish and a second dessert for the delay, and with a 7:45 reservation we had to rush to get our car out of valet hock at 10 pm. The food, however, was amazing and up to standard. The highlight was the duck confit, but everything was very good.

I would go back to Uchiko again, but I would park and walk so I could get my own car if they ran late and it would definitely be a Monday or Tuesday night kind of thing in the hopes that a slower evening would improve the order of food from the kitchen. That said, we're also very happy with making Uchiba our regular spot in the Uchi kingdom, so it's not a high priority. We have a list of sushi places we want to eat on our list and maybe Uchiko will come back after we've tried some of the ones new to us.