What are your hobbies?

When it comes to board games I'm stuck WAAAY in the past. Risk, Monopoly, Scrabble, chess, checkers, etc. More recent games I've played with friends and enjoyed were card games. Cards against Humanity, Apples to Apples and Munchkin are the ones I remember enjoying the most.
 
My, my wifey's, my best friend's and many of my other friends's favourite board game must be Codenames. It's one of the single most ingenious things I've ever seen (but maybe it is inspired by something else as well?)

The game itself works mainly with what the players bring in, but it's also infinitely replayable even with the same people and probably the most fun I ever had with a board game. (And it was invented by a Czech, heh)

You get two teams of two (preferably) - one always give clues and one guesses during a single game. You have 6x6 (I think) cards on the table, on every one is a single word.

The giver of the clue sees the plan, there are several blue and red agents - for each team, several civilians and one black card. The giver of the clue should give a clue so that the guesser picks the agents of their team, but not the other one (because that would be helping them), not civilians (because then the turn is over) or the black card (because then the game is over for them). The clue look like "word + number" - so the guesser picks the words he associates with the word up to the amount specified.

The giver should connect as many cards as possible, so they should connect as many words as they can, but without including some of the wrong cards.

The cards with words can be combined with the other versions of the game and there are hundreds of them, so you get almost infinite number of combinations. It also gives off different vibes according to how much everyone knows one another, who is the giver fo the clue and who the guesser and when the teams break up and switch (especially with married pairs who have vastly differing thought processes it can be a lot of fun when they switch.

There's also a duet version, for only two players, where they go against time (or, well, the limited number of rounds) and somehow it works both ways, so that they both give clues to each other with two different plans.
 
Onhell said:
When it comes to board games I'm stuck WAAAY in the past. Risk, Monopoly, Scrabble, chess, checkers, etc. More recent games I've played with friends and enjoyed were card games. Cards against Humanity, Apples to Apples and Munchkin are the ones I remember enjoying the most.
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Risk was what got me into the hobby. Munchkin was what got me to explore more modern games.

Still love those two and will happily play them. Sure they are flawed - but they also captured my attention & imagination from the start, and that isn't something I easily look past.

This weekend I played Star Wars: The Clone Wars for the first time. Enjoyed it and will play again. Also played three rounds of Memoir '44.

I also ordered Horrified (2019) and Alien: Fate of the Nostromo (2021), two light but pretty well regarded recent co-op games which I'm really looking forward to playing.
 
I strongly dislike Munchkin, and always have. Horrified is really good, especially for people who are new to co-op options. My girlfriend has it and we've played it pretty aggressively.

Last night we played a fair bit of Web of Spies. I didn't get into any of the other games that hit the table, we had a few drinks and chatted for hours.
 
My hobbies are quite normal:
- Reading (somewhere around 2 books / week) - mostly fantasy and books about psychology / data / disinformation and political warfare,
- Programming (at the moment mostly in Python, JavaScript, SQL and C (just starting)) - also I'm thinking about learning a little bit more about C++ to be able to toy with some game engines to create something of my own,
- Computer Games - mostly boomer shooter like Quake & Quake 2 or best game ever - Black Mesa with mods,
- Cooking
 
Cooking? My hobby is at the other end of the spectrum: eating.
Making a meal is a chore for me and honestly I can´t understand how people can get joy out of it.
 
MindRuler said:
Cooking? My hobby is at the other end of the spectrum: eating.
Making a meal is a chore for me and honestly I can´t understand how people can get joy out of it.
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I understand you, once I was thinking the same. Actually washing dishes is the worst. Cooking is great fun - planning dishes, preparing for them and then cooking so that the taste matches what you have in your head.
 
MindRuler said:
Cooking? My hobby is at the other end of the spectrum: eating.
Making a meal is a chore for me and honestly I can´t understand how people can get joy out of it.
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Shhhh, you can weed out the geezers who weren't raised on Pixar this way

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Jokes aside, I really like how the movie is about sub-creation and art in general, but picked cooking as the emblem, I might actually say that it has helped me appreciate cooking as a distinct form of art.
 
I don't love cooking, but I have been finding a little more joy in it of late, mostly in trying new things for me. My roommate is an incredibly bland eater - everything is some combination of meat + potatoes - and I get very frustrated, very quickly.
 
LooseCannon said:
I don't love cooking, but I have been finding a little more joy in it of late, mostly in trying new things for me. My roommate is an incredibly bland eater - everything is some combination of meat + potatoes - and I get very frustrated, very quickly.
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Same here, that's why I started cooking - mexican food was quite easy to begin with, same with czech food. Now i'm more into india flavours (butter chicken is amazing with home made naan bread) but nothing beats chech beer goulash made with light beer and served with dumplings made from yeast dough and steamed.
 
Meliegree said:
Same here, that's why I started cooking - mexican food was quite easy to begin with, same with czech food. Now i'm more into india flavours (butter chicken is amazing with home made naan bread) but nothing beats chech beer goulash made with light beer and served with dumplings made from yeast dough and steamed.
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I have my first attempt at butter chicken marinating in the fridge right now.
 
Meliegree said:
Same here, that's why I started cooking - mexican food was quite easy to begin with, same with czech food. Now i'm more into india flavours (butter chicken is amazing with home made naan bread) but nothing beats chech beer goulash made with light beer and served with dumplings made from yeast dough and steamed.
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My general appreciation of cooking and my occasional excourses into the art are pretty much ascribable to the fact I married my wife - who, in another life, could and should have been a chef. To her, cooking comes naturally, effortlessly, she tries out complex recipes and gets them right the first time, she's just as at home cooking Italian and Czech dishes as the French or Middle-Eeastern ones or sushi. She usually can improve the recipe if there is a mistake or omission (like not exact or correct ratio of ingredients) and she can season and altogether finish the meal to true excellence. More than once I actually went to a supposedly "classy" restaurant and I was disappointed, because I realised my wife could literally do the dish better or, in fact, already had before.

I am much more limited in my capabilities, the most complex food I've ever prepared is probably a shepherd's pie (but a very good tasting one, at least), but I can handle myself in the kitchen, mostly, and I can prepare the Czech and the Italian basics, so that I'm not a blight in the eye of my ancestors.

Also, I too am in love with Indian cuisine - and surprisingly it doesn't stir my various intolerances and everything I have now as a result of long-covid, or at least not much, so I've been enjoying it quite a lot, lately. However it's way too expensive to prepare at home here, as compared with going out - the Indian and Nepali restaurants are rather cheap and good around here, plus me and the middle kid are the only ones who really like it, so it makes no sense to prepare it at home.

LooseCannon said:
I have my first attempt at butter chicken marinating in the fridge right now.
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Butter chicken is one of my absolute favourites, not just in Indian cuisine, but in general!
 
I used to enjoy cooking quite a bit, but life got in the way of me developing my skills and now I'm happy when my pasta doesn't get too soggy.
 
I was a casual cooker but competent in a basic kinda way, good with the meat. Then the aul covid came and my wife began working from home so by the time I came home from work she had dinner either planned or executed and I've never properly recovered. Shame on me but the chat in this thread inspired me to get a stew on the go for tomorrow and the house smells pretty good right now yo.

In terms of other hobbies, the thing I do with most regularity is to go see live music of many kinds then have phases of outdoor rock climbing, indoor bouldering, surfing, rowing old boats. Then theres reading, seems a common hobby round these parts. Some fantasy, some travel/exploration, the odd rasome tales of military gallantry and whatnot. In among all of this I drink lots of Pints, obviously.
 
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