For my birthday this year M. gave me Shadows Over Camelot, a card based board game produced by Days Of Wonder, and I’ve been totally thrilled with it. A review over at Board Game Geeks will give you an explanation of the game play, but let me add my experiences for good measure.

Things I liked:

This game is hard, I’ve played three times and haven’t come close to beating it. Even with such a slim chance of winning I find it incredibly fun. The cooperative game play element is refreshing, keeping everyone playing invested in the game, while the element of a traitor keeps you on your toes. The turns are quick and everybody’s luck is the same - because it’s cooperative nobody ‘wins’ while everyone else loses.

Things I don’t like:

The first time set up takes a long, long time. This is balanced by the quick game play, but when you’re introducing a new player (or worse, a group of them) it can be a task to explain the rules and get everybody up and running. I would like explanation to take less than ten minutes. Also, with only one positive action per turn I feel its hard to get things done. This might be a problem in the strategy we’ve been using, but it seems that it is too easy to lose quests. But maybe thats what keeps it fun, I’m still debating this point. My last complaint is the figurines and their somewhat low quality. I’ve got a couple who don’t stand up straight or feel a little delicate, but this is a minor complaint.

Overall I think the game is quite a bit of fun, challenging, well made and its certainly going to provide many more enjoyable hours of game play.

To help speed up the re-familiarization process with the rules I’ve compiled an abbreviated list, the quick play set of rules (see below the cut)

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I’ve been taking a computer architecture class where we’ve done some MIPS development and while there’s an IDE available (MIPster) I’ve preferred to do most of the my development in vim. As most of you know Vim is Vi Improved, a text editor that allows you to do all of your editing through keyboard shortcuts and the command line.

I recently ran into an error while using Vim on my university shell account:

E667 Fsync Failed

It turns out that the error was caused by Vim’s inability to write to disk. I had a core dump that was using up most of my disk quota which prevented vim from allocating space to save the file. Once I deleted the dump, freeing up some space, I was good to go.