Good day gamers,

Had a semi-successful Bethpage Library game night on Friday night on Zoom. Game Master Ginger and I demonstrated Quoridor and Takenoko. We only had a few people join, but it was a lot of fun. My Mom even listened in by phone. Join us the 2nd week of July for a similar event. I’ll advertise it here.

Black Lives Matter: Ginger found information on Facebook about a Black Lives Matter Protest march in Farmingdale, NY this weekend. I invited a few people and we went, meeting one of our friends there. There were between 300-400 people that attended and it was a great, peaceful event with chants and showing solidarity. We all wore masks. There was plenty of free water and Gatorade. Many people made awesome signs or had great t-shirts. Then there was a march down to a local park where there was going to be some speakers. Ginger and I didn’t do the march or hear the speakers, but we did the road-side Route 110 protest and we are glad we went. I’ll probably have more links eventually to the organizer’s Facebook page or website.

Consolidated Casing: I was tasked last year by my Union to be an observer for a new procedure that was being tested by the USPS. It was called Consolidated Casing. It was an experiment to see if there was a more efficient way to deliver the mail. The Post Office dramatically changed the schedule of the Letter Carriers and how they would deliver the mail each day. As a Union representative, I observed, took notes and reported my findings to the National NALC Union HQ. To be honest, perhaps the Post Office does need to make some labor saving changes, but this Consolidated Casing was not the way to go. In my opinion, it completely stressed out the staff mentally and physically and in the long term was going to be detrimental to morale, health and retention. The reason why I’m talking about it now is because we just got word that our Union won the National Grievance and the testing program will be ended. This is a big victory for the Letter Carriers and I was a part of it.

Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword: I’ve talked about this game before, but I just played another scenario with my friends last night and it was so much fun and entirely frustrating. I quickly evaluated my position and I noticed I could grab a lot of territory by building ten Settlers one after another and go start a new city. I was winning dramatically by points until…I ran out of money, my technology advancement stalled and I was attacked by the 2nd strongest AI in the game. Ugh. Too much fun getting destroyed. LOL If you play games on Steam with friends, I would love to hear about it. Email me at dave@gamemastergames.com

My friend, Anthony, also started teaching me Empire of the Sun and we are playing on VASSAL.

Apparently Civilization IV was recently on sale. I hope to pick that up at some point.

This Wednesday night’s Facebook LIVE show at 10pm on the Game Master Games’ Facebook page we will be covering Netrunner. Hope to see you there.

Thank you for reading another Game Master Dave’s Semi-Daily Dispatch blog. Give yourself 100 XP and until we meet again across the internet, keep your mice dry, your keyboards ready and your gaming communities strong!

• Game Master Dave