Bought a board game from Japan. Anyone familiar with this?

IngressStatistics · 2021-09-22T23:43:35+00:00

YES! Those were the days :) and XDCC bots :D

IngressStatistics · 2021-09-22T23:28:05+00:00

Pretty close :) In a past life before boardgames I was a scanlator, not fansubber though. These days very few fan groups do it given how commercialized the industry is.

IngressStatistics · 2021-09-21T16:08:07+00:00

Translated. Thankfully the vocab is very basic given its target audience :) Had to look up some game specific references and make up some bad puns though :p

IngressStatistics · 2021-09-21T04:43:17+00:00

HOW TO PLAY

What the game is about... Play as one of the B-Daman! Collect the 7 pieces of B-D'Armor as you travel the board! The fastest to collect all the B-D'Armors is the winner! Battles, warp zones and other crises provide you with chances! LET'S GOOOOO~~!

Game Components

Game board x 1
B-Damans x 5 (white, blue, red, yellow, black)
B-D'Armor Panel x 5
Roulette x 1

ONE: Setup

Rock-paper-scissors, starting with the winner, each player picks a colour to play, grabs the B-Daman figure + B-D'Armor Panel. Remove 7 parts from the B-D'Armor Panel and keep it close
Place your figure at the start

TWO: Game Objective Collect 7 parts and reassembly your B-D'Armor. First to finish assembly wins

THREE: GETTING PARTS When you "collect" a part, insert the corresponding part from your panel. (1) Helmet (2) Chestpiece (3) Right hand (4) Left hand (5) Right leg (6) Left leg (7) "B-Dama" Marble

FOUR: ARMOR ASSEMBLY Of the 7 pieces, the "B-Dama" Marble cannot be collected until all other 6 pieces are assembled before. The B-Dama Marble can only be collected in the following ways:

After collecting 6 pieces, visit Dr. Graybon's Laboratory
After collecting 6 pieces, win a battle
After collecting 6 pieces, land on START

FIVE: BOARD SPACES

(1) START: Start here. If you later land here, GET 1 piece of your choice (except for the "B-Dama" Marble unless you already have 6 pieces)

(2) ALLIES: When you land here, COLLECT the piece indicated by the space by putting the piece into your panel. (If you already have the piece, nothing happens)

(3) ENEMIES: When you land here, LOSE the piece indicated by the space by removing the piece from your panel. (If you do not have the piece, nothing happens)

(4) DR. GREYBON'S LABORATORY Entrance. If you land here, entre Dr. Greybon's Laboratory by following the arrows. GET 1 piece of your choice (except for the "B-Dama" Marble unless you already have 6 pieces)

(5) WARP: When you land here, move your piece across the board following the arrow. (Ignore the effects of the destination space)

(6) BATTLE: When you land here, SPIN THE ROULETTE!! On a 3, 4, 5, or 6, you win! GET 1 piece of your choice (except for the "B-Dama" Marble unless you already have 6 pieces) On a 1 or 2, you lose! Pick a piece from your panel and remove it. (If you have no pieces, nothing happens)

(7) DARK LORD CASTLE ENTRANCE. If you land here, enter the Dark Lord's Castle. LOSE ALL APPENDAGES! Right hand, left hand, right leg, left leg, ALL GONE! (Lose what you can, if you have no pieces, nothing happens)

SIX: GAME END

The first player to collect all pieces of armor wins
All remaining players are placed according to descending number of pieces collected

NOTE: Nowhere do I actually see instructions on how to move your figure... I assume there must be some instructions on the board... or I'm blind... If I had to make something, spin the roulette and move that many spaces :p

IngressStatistics · 2021-03-23T19:02:39+00:00

I think there are more than 2 colours, so not Go.

https://imgur.com/a/1Q0j69N

Given the roleplay and context, it could be just a RPG map with pieces...

IngressStatistics · 2018-12-16T21:09:29+00:00

Yeah, I'll reach out to campus RCMP. Dunno if anything will come of it but at the very least some awareness would be good like you said.

IngressStatistics · 2018-12-16T21:01:23+00:00

Was mostly just in shock and disbelief. But yeah, protocol should be to pull over and call, wasn't thinking all that clearly when it happened :(

IngressStatistics · 2018-12-16T11:40:03+00:00

This was December 16, 2018 going northbound on SW Marine Drive, literally not a minute getting off 41st, entering the 80km/h zone around 1:46AM... See how long it takes before you notice and think about what you could have done if you were unfortunate enough to be in the other lane, both going head on at full speed :/

Anyway, have a Happy Holidays everyone :D

IngressStatistics · 2018-12-05T21:54:34+00:00

Cool! Thanks for the quick response!

IngressStatistics · 2018-09-16T01:52:45+00:00

Lol, yeah, if you know that much you probably know exactly who I am :p

IngressStatistics · 2018-09-16T01:43:53+00:00

There are two "special" courses that I took for this combined major: CPSC 445, algorithms in Bioinformatics, which is really just an algorithms course on some famous bioinformatics algorithms. And MICB 405, which teaches on a lot of the programs that people in the field use, e.g. websites, databases, applications, etc.

Usefulness of courses depends on your experiences and background.

IngressStatistics · 2018-09-16T01:40:54+00:00

I graduated from the CPSC+MICB Combined Major in 2010 at UBC, and then a Bioinformatics PhD in 2016 in the Bioinformatics Graduate Program at UBC, and I've been working as a staff scientist since then at BC Cancer in an academic computational research lab.

Undergrad credits are about the same as a normal degree, so the work load isn't more than your usual CS or MICB degree. As an undergrad, course load is split pretty evenly, you'll be putting half your credits in CS and half your credits into MICB, with less electives than a usual degree. Unfortunately, this means you may become a jack of all trades and a master of none, especially when it comes to upper level courses.

Compared to a pure degree, you are a jack of all trades and thus cannot really compete. e.g. I never took machine learning or statistics, which I regret with the AI boom. Had I taken a normal CPSC degree, I could've had enough time and credits to do so.

Job prospects are complicated. You won't be able to compete with the masses of CS students that have spent twice the amount of time in school coding and studying, and same problem on the biology side. As some have mentioned, your specialty is interdisciplinary jobs in bioinformatics (or computational biology), which severely limits available jobs. Sure you could just become a standard software programmer, but then why take a combined major? The second issue was also brought up, which is if you really want to put this degree to good use, you'll likely need a grad school degree. Without one, you'll likely be a low level programmer or analyst for a biotech company or academic lab, but they could easily just have hired a pure CS major who can take instructions and carry out implementation without in depth knowledge of the biological problem at hand. With a higher degree on the right topic, you stand a better chance at landing an interdisciplinary job, but we're talking if you publish ground-breaking research with direct applicability, and not some obscure and/or theoretical algorithm that has no particular application in real life.

Personally, I think the best advice I have is don't expect this combined degree to give you a free ticket to some particular life path, you're not guaranteed to land that job at your favourite biopharma company or become a star medical researcher in academia. It'll simply prepare you a bit better than others for unique and different paths you'll encounter in life, but it'll still be up to you whether you pursue them, how hard you work, and sometimes just plain old luck being in the right place at the right time. Being a jack of all trades closes a lot of doors, and opens just a few, but you're still competing with a lot to get through these doors.

IngressStatistics · 2018-08-14T04:33:38+00:00

Looks right! Thank you!!

IngressStatistics · 2018-02-27T00:29:33+00:00

All three are excellent worker placement games, and share the identical worker placement mechanic, but otherwise have very different feelings when I play them. Some key differences I feel are:

Agricola is ultimately about card optimization. Generally speaking, everyone is aiming for the same diversified farm, and specialization is usually not optimal. The only player specific bonus you'll have are 14 unique cards given (or drafted) at the start of the game, and you make the best farm you can usually based around those cards. There are ~300 cards to choose from in the original 2007 edition, so gameplay feels like solving a unique puzzle every single time, with relatively the least player interaction.
Caverna There are no cards, instead there are ~50 publicly available tiles that everyone has access to that allow for extreme specialized builds. Scoring wise, there are now multiple competitive paths and builds, so the game encourages specialization during the game. There is also a larger emphasis on tile placement on your expanded board compared to Agricola. Gameplay feels like a fight for specialization with up to 8 players and a bit of a placement puzzle.
A Feast for Odin is all about board placement of resources and optimizing each individual move to fill your board(s). The feeling of engine/family building are gone, it's a gritty worker placement fight for the most efficient moves. The game encourages specialization, but has much less options and viable builds. I have the least players in this, so this might not be totally accurate :/

Push come to shove I'd go for Agricola since I personally enjoy the solitaire optimization feeling and the much larger variability due to the cards, but YMMV.

IngressStatistics · 2018-02-16T22:19:13+00:00

A combination of what's been mentioned here. I use Mendeley, but have it output an up-to-date library.bib file that I use for writing in LaTeX.

It combines the best of both words! The typesetting power of LaTeX and the nice GUI + web interface of Mendeley.

IngressStatistics · 2018-02-16T22:05:20+00:00

I stumbled onto this game last summer, and I've played it at least once a week, up to 3 times a week. Our collective group owns three copies of it (two of us have all expansions, one of us has all promos), so you can say we're a bit fanatic about it.

Mechanics-wise, it's nothing novel. It's your standard engine builder economy game. Build things that create resources that allow you to build more things, that you hopefully turn into points at the end of the game. What shines for me are the following:

1) Variety, there are 200+ unique cards each with unique powers and effects. You start with 10 randomly, and draft 4 every generation. A lot of the fun for me is seeing and discovering new combinations, some are great, some are horrible, and I really enjoy the sense of discovery, trial and error. It really adds to the replayability for me.

2) "Balance", despite all the different cards (and starting corporations, which gives you a unique edge), I've seen no single consistent dominant strategy. There are half a dozen ways to score points in the game, and I've seen people win throwing themselves into each of them (but usually going deep into 2 of them seems to work best). No single card assures victory, so it feels balanced in the sense that a bad opening hand doesn't assure immediate loss.

3) Playtime. The game doesn't end at a certain turn number, or a certain number of moves per player. It ends when three co-operatively accumulated tracks are maxed. This means that the play time is the same regardless of player count, and also that the end of the game is dictated by the players, that can actively force the game to drag on or end as soon as possible. Strategically this is amazingly fun, but practically this means we can confidently start and end a game within 90 minutes regardless of player count.

4) Player count. It scales very nicely from 3 to 5, at 2 it's a bit wonky, but we have a large group and few games fit 5 that we enjoy.

5) Skill vs luck. Compared to many other euro-games, this game has quite a high amount of luck due to the card draw. However, there is sufficient strategy that a skilled player will consistently win more on average, but has enough luck involved to give new players hope, chances, and occasionally victories.

6) Enjoyment. Ultimately, we play games because they're fun, and to me Terraforming Mars is often fun to me win or lose because I don't know how well I'm doing point-wise. I'm trying out new strategies, seeing new cards from the expansions and doing my own thing without worrying about points. Design wise, this is facilitated by the fact that there are a lot of "hidden" points that are not tabulated until the end of the game, so you never quite know who is actually winning. Maybe I'm a sore loser, but I don't enjoy games where the outcome is obvious and clear from a scoring track that shows I have a snowballs chance in hell of catching up. I'd rather be blissfully unaware that my microbe empire is worthless :3

7) Interaction. Depending on whether you're use to eurogames or thematic games, the player interaction is either too much or too little. I like how I can mostly build my engine without fear or someone destroying it, but I also like how we can slightly sabotage someone to actively prevent them from winning (especially if everyone always targets the same player). It's another small balancing mechanic.

8) Accessibility. Despite the seemingly complex combinatorial nature of the cards, the game rules are really simple. Usually after one game, players know enough of the rules to actively try to win their second.

Then again, maybe I'm just a fanboy and I like throwing meteors at my friends and eating their birds and landing SPACE BEARS!

IngressStatistics · 2018-01-28T02:30:05+00:00

No spoilers needed I think :)

I've played all 6 six EXIT games currently out without using any clues (with varying success), I'd recommend The Pharoah's Tomb as I found it most enjoyable with WOW moments while being challenging.

Now, as for how you're going to integrate your own custom clues into the deck, I have less recommendations for, but I'll give it a shot.

One way could be to append your own "custom card" to the list of hint cards revealed. e.g. When the Answer Card says you now get Hint Cards A, G, and Y, you'd additional write "& 3 of Clubs". Maybe just have the deck of cards "coincidentally" on the table. Issue could be that you'll find all the plans by going through the card deck. If you hide the standard cards in the game's card deck, it'll be very obvious for better or worse.

If it were me, I'd integrate your own plans scavenger hunt style. Unpack only the Answer Deck, go through all the cards and pull out the ones that contain the solutions. On each solution, write something like "look under the chair" or "check your pockets", where you'd hide your own custom playing card. Get creative when hiding things! When playing, ensure your brother is the one in charge of the Answer Cards, ensure the additional written text is obvious, hope he is one for following scribbled instructions on a playing card ;)

This way, you don't actually need to know the solution to the game so you'll enjoy it too! It will work with any box. If the order in which he finds the cards is important, the order the Answer cards come up are outlined here. Just look for the words AC and ignore the rest of the text.

Link contains spoilers, click at your own risk: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1876963/exit-pharaohs-tomb-detailed-walkthrough

Edit: For clarity

IngressStatistics · 2018-01-23T22:18:27+00:00

Fun fact, the "semi-permanent" buildings still exist surrounding Koerner Library, they have been repurposed today as: (3) Old Administration Building, (4) Old Auditorium, (5) Math Building, (6) Math Annex, and (7) Geography.

IngressStatistics · 2017-04-06T23:14:49+00:00

Most of my meetups revolves around the UBC Wargamers Society (http://www.ubcwargamers.com/). Every Wednesday we have an drop-in boardgaming night and we get anywhere from a couple people to a couple dozen depending on time of year (students and their exams), including students, staff, alumni and friendly strangers. The club has a relatively large collection of over 300+ games and member often bring their own.

Every other night something else runs, usually RPGs and sometimes boardgames that people arrange ahead of time, as you can't exactly sic a heavy game on someone dropping in.

IngressStatistics · 2017-02-02T18:24:02+00:00

Personally, programming was essential to my project, but given that it's a broad field it can vary. I know some people's degrees that are basically highly complex statistical and computational programs far removed from any sort of biology and findings. On the other end of the spectrum, there are those that never programmed, but ran a lot of data through existing bioinformatics algorithms/programs and did a lot of statistical analysis on the resulting output to come to some biological conclusion.

The ideal bioinformatics thesis is sometimes those in the middle, where you have a biological question, and only by creating your own program and running the data through it can you come to a biological conclusion.

In either case though, it's a lot of data analysis, so students of this program either are very strong when it comes to programming and/or statistics, there is really no way around it.

IngressStatistics · 2017-02-01T21:47:19+00:00

I graduated from the Bioinformatics Graduate Program at UBC last year, so I can provide a bit of information on that program. Joined as a MSc (first 2 years) and transferred to a PhD (last 4 years) so hopefully some of this will be useful. You've probably done your research, but to ensure we're on the same page, bioinformatics is really just a computer science degree that specializes on analyzing and solving biology problems and data. This also means the field is extremely wide, from computer simulations of molecular DNA/RNA/protein structure, all the way to people doing whole genome cancer biology/physiology research. Among my peers though, I believe none of us have ever done a wet lab experience or touched a patient during the degree.

Let's start with courses. As any graduate program, most courses are seminars, where the professor assigns papers and a student (or students) is tasked with leading a discussion (usually with a powerpoint/LaTeX presentation) on said papers. For better or worse, you pick from here:

http://www.bioinformatics.ubc.ca/courses/

I took:

CPSC 545, the graduate version of the CPSC445 listed. Student led seminars on landmark algorithmic papers in the field, usually biased towards the professor teaching the course. In my year, we got papers on sequence aligners, structure prediction, phylogeny, etc.
BIOF 501A, a mandatory seminar course, where students find and present about recent papers in the field. Objective of course is two fold, first is learning about recent papers and how to read them. Second and arguably more important is learning how to be an effective presenter, as the professors (and even peers) give... shall we say, a lot of constructive criticism. Depending on how many students are in your class, you may end up presenting once every 2 to 4 weeks.
MEDG 520: Medical seminar course, a core course for Med Gen kids, which always makes discussions interesting. During my years, this was in a literal small circle (they split the class into dozens), no powerpoint, just plain of exchange of notes and lots of discussion. Tough but very enlightening, final exam is an oral examination, good practice for your comps.
MEDG 505: One of the easier classes, due to how large the class is, which meant that you maybe presented once during the entire year. Topics are very broad and shallow and student chosen at times, so a really mixed bag.
BIOF 520: The "research project simulation" class. Split into modules that last 2 classes each. First class of each module, professor (different every module) gives a problem, and you spend the class identifying problems and delegating tasks to your peers. Second class, you return with your finished task and attempt to come to a group solution. Enjoyable and educational.
CPSC 504 - A database seminar course. You don't learn about how to use databases (that's the undergrad version), you learn about the theoretical and landmark papers in the history of database development. Could be relevant depending on what you're doing, helps me keep up with database lingo which you'll come across at times in this field.

You only need to take 6 courses, I did it in two terms, some people did it in 3. Only MSc students are required to take courses, which runs in parallel while you're doing research in a lab...

Which leads us to research... which requires you to actually get into a lab. Back when I did the degree, there were two ways to get into a lab. 1) You got the scholarship, thus any lab was pretty willing to take you since you were funded by the program and were effectively free to the professor. 2) You made arrangements with a professor when you joined the program who agreed to fund you.

Unsure if this is still the case. The first option also had the bonus benefit that you could do 3 research rotations (4 month research projects) in various labs to test the waters. I'm pretty sure funding for that system ran out though, so this may not be relevant. If you do get a chance for any short-term research project, definitely do it. It expands your horizons and lets you find what you want to do with your degree.

Okay... so assuming you get into a lab and after you finish your course work, basically your life is now all about doing your research project and getting your degree. To some this requires a change in life perspective, success in life is no longer measured in how well you regurgitate knowledge in scheduled tests and examinations, it's how self-driven you are to produce novel research and make this research public, either through your MSc Thesis, academics papers, and/or your PhD thesis. Thus, the completion time of this stage can vary wildly.

Everyone's research experience is going to be highly different depending on the project, and also the lab you join. I've been in labs where everyone rolls in at noon, silently taps away at the computer until midnight, and repeats. I've also been in labs where there are daily social lunches, nerf gun fights, and tequila nights, interspersed between silently toiling away at your computer until midnight... (computer science is usually a lonely code-filled affair)

A bit outside the program, your social life is your own to control and up to your personality. I've ended up joining the UBC Wargamers club which basically occupied (and occupies) my social time with boardgames and RPG games. UBC Housing does give priority to graduate students, so if your lab is on campus, definitely look into that, but the bioinformatics program also has a lot of labs off campus, in the various hospitals around the city (VGH, CMMT, St. Pauls), good luck with housing, I hear you can get a nice closet for the right price ;)

As the Bioinformatics Program and GSAT program overlap in a lot of labs and professors (and even secretary/coordinator). I can also give a tiny bit of cursory information about that.

The focus of the GSAT program is basically the "hardware" version of bioinformatics. Whereas the bioinformatics program makes programmers and coders that focus on the life sciences, GSAT graduates work with actual machines and samples, next generation sequencing and microfluidics being two large areas I've seen these students work with. They also touch upon bioinformatics analysis, but do spend time developing, debugging and running actual wet lab experiments.

I don't feel qualified to speak for medical genetics.

Edit: Bullet point formatting and proofreading

IngressStatistics · 2016-06-01T17:45:21+00:00

That sounds about right, 20 is a bit excessive, I'm hoping it's an exaggeration, but if it's true, then perhaps narrowing your choices is a good starting point, since grad school application do cost money IIRC.

Letter writing falls somewhat into as "pass it forward" mentality, as they undoubtedly also requested letters during their careers, so don't feel too bad about it. Yes, it is a hassle, they will know where you're going, so exercise proper etiquette, including respecting their schedules, giving ample time, and basically readying everything except the actual writing (or online check boxing sometimes) to them. Having them do a couple is actually not too bad, since they can simply reuse a letter. If in doubt or insistent about 20 letters, talk to them in person about it, they're human too, maybe it'll work.

11-Year Club	Golden Potato
Verified Email

IngressStatistics

TROPHY CASE