Frugal date nights: Board Games

With winter well and truly set in frugal dates like fishing, picnics and hikes are few and far between. Mr. FIRE and I are still looking for ways to spend quality time together and while they largely involving building a nest on the couch, enjoying the wine and cheese and projecting a movie straight onto a wall sometimes we like something a little more intensive.

We play board games. Somehow we're still together....

Board games have been pretty integral to our relationship since it's early days. The first time I met Mr. FIRE's friends was over a long weekend and a game of Munchkin. It was also the first time I yelled at Mr. FIRE's friends, insulted a couple of them and did my absolute best to sabotage their game. Munchkin is a vicious backstabbing game that largely consists of bending the rules as far as possible and picking on whoever is in the lead. It was great fun.

Unfortunately Mr. FIRE and I are both the kind to bend the rules as far as they go, and our regular gaming group isn't particularly willing to break up our arguments. Many a game has ended with someone throwing cards down and leaving the room in a huff. We aren't allowed to play Munchkin anymore - in four years it's the only serious argument we've ever had. That and Betrayal at House on the Hill. Anything where the rules are wiggly and open to interpretation doesn't end well in the FIRE household.

However we still love gaming. We have friends over at least once a month to eat like teenagers, play Offspring too loudly and swear over dice rolls. We're all an introverted nerdy bunch of weirdos and having some structure to our interactions is great.

On top of playing with friends, Mr. FIRE and I like to game together occasionally. Unfortunately most games are made for 3+ players. Oh, they might say 2-4 players on the box, but they're pretty dull with just two people (looking at you Takenoko, with your cute panda and terrible gardener).

However there are some games that play brilliantly with two people. Paired with a small glass of mead or port, and some home baked snacks, they make for a brilliantly frugal date night.

Disclaimer: All the links to Amazon in this post are affiliate links. If you go on to buy the game I'll make a little bit of money at no extra cost to you. Click a link and feed a starving blogger? :) 

Lords of Waterdeep

This is a favourite in our household. In Lords of Waterdeep: A Dungeons & Dragons Board Game you don't play any lowly adventurers seeking glory - you play the Lords sending the cannon fodder adventurers to glory. Of course you take a cut of their glory.

Lords of Waterdeep is a worker placement game. In each round you can take a certain number of actions to do things like visiting places in town to recruit adventurers to your cause, building new stores in town and collecting quests.

The game is brilliantly balanced so that building new stores brings you ongoing benefits - if people visit the store, and certain quests give you extra abilities moving forward like bonus points. Halfway through the game each player is given an extra action each round - if no one has built a building by this time, then there won't be enough actions available each turn.

Playing this game in our house is reasonably quiet as you try and plan each move, and build up fallback plans in case something goes wrong. Most actions can only be done by one player each turn (for example, only one person each round can visit the plinth and recruit a priest) so certain spaces are a hot commodity. While we plan in near silence, there's always a little friendly abuse if Mr. FIRE takes the space I needed to finish a quest.

To add an extra twist to the game, each player is assigned a Lord at random at the start of the game. Lords receive bonus points for completing certain quests, for example Brianne Byndraeth earns an extra 4 points for each Arcana and Skullduggery quest, while Mirt the Moneylender earns 4 bonus points for each Commerce and Piety quest. These aren't revealed till the end of the game, so while you can take a guess at the bonus points, you never quite know where your opponent is up to.

Side tip: There is also a Lord call Larissa Neathal, aka 'The Builder'. She scores 6 points extra for each building. While this is great in a multiplayer game, in a two player game there isn't really enough competition for spaces to make her worthwhile, I suggest taking her out.

Photo credit: deskovehry.com

Lords of Waterdeep is a rather deep game that takes around an hour for a good solid play through. The first game may take a while as you work out all the rules, but you won't play much faster as you get more familiar because there are plenty of intricacies and plans to be made and games often come down to one or two moves.

If you already have Lords of Waterdeep, I strongly recommend adding the expansion Scoundrels of Skullport into your collection. It's actually two expansions in one, the 'Under the Mountain' expansion, and the 'Skullport' expansion. Under the Mountain is a simple 'more stuff' expansion that creates more town spaces, and gives you a couple more Lords.

The Skullport expansion introduces the concept of corruption. There are quests and town spaces that give you a lot more money and units than usual, but they also give you corruption tokens. These cost you points at the end of the game, and the more in play the more costly they are. The spaces are oh so tempting though, and it's hard to keep a clean slate.

The Skullport expansion has a lord call The Xanather who gains 4 victory points for each corruption token. Unfortunately he still has to take the penalty for having the corruption, so he's pretty worthless. I'd suggest removing him from the game.

Carcassone

Lords of Waterdeep is a big intimidating game with a 24-page rulebook and at least 15 minutes set up on your first game. By contrast, Carcassone has a trifold pamphlet that you can skim read in five minutes or less. There is also zero set up for the game, you can play straight out of the box. All you need is a big open table, put the box within arms reach, and you're ready to go.

Our version came with a mini-expansion called 'The River' which gives us 30 seconds of set up time, and a bit of structure for starting the game. Once again, all you need is the box within arms reach and a big open table. To set up The River expansion, grab the river tiles out of the box and play them first, then go on with the rest of the game.

Carcassone is beautiful, relaxing and deceptively simple. You can your friends (2-5 players, and good with any number) and slowly putting together a countryside by laying tiles. With the river expansion you start by placing the source tile (the start of the river) and lay out the river one tile at a time before ending at a small pond. After that you can expand out into building more of the country side.

The rules are pretty simple, pick up a tile and place it down. You have to place your tile against an existing tile (which is why The River expansion is so nice, it gives you somewhere to build from) and your placement has to make sense - for example there are roads, towns and open fields. When placing tiles roads must touch roads, towns against towns, and fields against fields.

Photo Credit: The Board Game Family

Whenever you place a tile you have an option to place down a meeple (cute little person shaped tokens) on the road, in the town, or in the monastery. Each feature scores points, once it's completed. For example roads start and end at towns or villages, once a road is completed you score 1 point for each tile. Towns are worth 2 points per tile, and need to have a complete wall. Monasteries are worth 1 point for the monastery, and 1 point for each surrounding tile, scored when the monastery is completely surrounded.

There is also the option to play a farmer - by claiming a field the farmer scores 3 points per adjacent completed city at the end of the game. The field stops at any road, river or city - to be honest we've never played with farmers. We treat it as an optional extra and have enjoyed the game without it plenty of times.

In the game you have only 7 meeples, and you don't get them back until they score so it can be stressful committing your last meeple to the board. You can also force and opponent to share their hard earned points by connecting your road or town to theirs. If you have an equal number of meeples, you both score the full points, however if one player has more then they get all the points and the player with less gets nothing.

Other than that, Carcassone has very little opportunity to back stab your opponents, it's largely a peaceful game of building a beautiful countryside. Beautiful isn't an exaggeration either, the artwork in this game is wonderful, with plenty of cute little details, but still simple to understand at a glace. It's a wonderful, easy to play game that even Mr. FIRE and I can't fight over.

Pandemic

Finally, sometimes it's nice to work together on a board game. Pandemic pits you and your friends (2-4, more players makes the game harder) against four virulent diseases that have broken out worldwide. You take on various roles of CDC researchers and you travel the world curing breakouts and trying to research a cure before mass panic breaks out and everybody dies.

This game is brutal. Absolutely horrendously evil. At the start of each turn you draw from the player deck, what you hope for is cards that will help you develop a cure. Sometimes your turn up an Epidemic, where all hell breaks loose.

To understand why Epidemics suck (apart from the obvious implications of the name) you have to understand the 'infection phase'. In a normal, not horrible round, you draw from the player deck, and then run the infection phase. In the infection phase you flip cards in the infection deck and place disease tokens on a city as instructed by the card. The harder you've set the game, the more cards you flip. Once you've pulled a card it goes into the discard pile, and you don't have to add diseases to the city again. Unless...

If you've drawn an Epidemic then you first grab an infection card from the bottom of the pile and place three disease cubes on that town. You then shuffle the discarded infection cards and place them on top of the infection deck. Then you draw your infection cards, piling more diseases onto the already sickened cities. If the game asks you to add more disease cubes to a city that already has three, you have an Outbreak and you need to place disease cubes in every adjacent city. If one of the adjacent cities already has three disease cubes, then other Outbreak occurs, and the disease keeps spreading.

It is nasty. You then have four actions in your turn (move, heal, research a cure) to try and mop up the damage.

To win at Pandemic you need to research all four cures. Thankfully you don't need to wipe the diseases off the board, just figure out how to do it. The mop up happens post game.

To lose at Pandemic... well, there are so many ways! If you run out of disease cubes and cannot place them on the board when required, you lose. If more than seven outbreaks occur you lose. If you run out of cards in the player deck, you lose. In each case the in-game explanation is that the people of the world have panicked, rioted, and probably died. Yay!

Despite this, Pandemic is a great couples game. I suggest playing with cold drinks and cold snacks, because you'll be so engrossed in planning saving the world that any warm food will go cold before you remember to eat it. Pandemic isn't really played a turn at a time - you'll map out your plans for the next three to four turns, agreeing on an action plan to save the world. And then, halfway into your plan you'll draw the wrong card and have to start all over again.

When we first played Pandemic we lost horribly and constantly. After about twenty playthroughs, we actually started to win consistently. So we bought the expansions.

We have two of the expansions and since we have never beaten the second expansion, we haven't bothered to buy the third (State of Emergency, if you're curious).

The first expansion is On The Brink. It comes with two ways to make the game harder, Mutation events or the Virulent Strain challenge. In Mutation events one of the diseases mutates (surprise surprise) and you now have a fifth purple disease to cure. In the Virulent Strain challenge one of the diseases becomes extra bad with horrible rules like 'put down two disease cubes instead of just one'. We've beaten both of these challenges, but not at the same time. This game is hard, did I mention?

The second expansion is called In The Lab. You can't just wave your hands and research a cure anymore. You need to collect samples of the disease and process them through the lab. This is impossible. Losing still makes for a great date night, but we've never won this game.

(Technically, Mr. FIRE won this game once, but I wasn't there so it doesn't count. He was playing with a guy named Jesus - miracles are required to finish this game!)

Frugal wins?

At a glance board games are expensive. I bought mine for $60-$80 each. The current prices seem to be sitting around the $20-$40 mark, which isn't so bad. It all comes down to how much you play the games. If you only play them once or twice then they are a huge expense, but you can easily play them enough that they come down to a $1 an hour dollars to fun, or even less.

After the initial outlay for games the only cost for a date night is dinner and wine. Since you eat every day anyway (I assume) date night can be 'free'. However to jazz it up a bit Mr. FIRE and I play games with a glass of wine and a bowl of snacks. Depending on your budget this could be a fancy antipasto platter complete with stuffed olives, or a name brand packet of potato chips.

Whichever way you choose to go with dinner, you can knock out a wonderful date night for $20 or less. You have to interact with each other, probably yell at each other, and you'll have to focus on each other - no one wins a game with a phone in their hand. And winning is the most important thing. Right..?

Date night: Gon' Fishin'

Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish and he'll sit in a boat and drink beer all day. Teach a FIREy Lady to fish and she'll inside on dragging you out to the beach on a sunny afternoon to catch a million tiny fish, throw them all back and call it a brilliant date.

I remember going fishing with my granddad as a kid. As a very small kid. I'm sure my memory is pretty skewed by I remember sitting in a little tin boat smaller than your average car with my pop, mum and brother. Four of us, teeny tiny boat. It was dark, the waves were big, and the rod was huge. I remember pop trying to get me to balance the rod on my finger, but I was A. too scared to let go of the boat, and B. convinced the rod would fall in the water.

In short, my first fishing experience was not exactly positive.

For years after that I told all the typical fishing jokes about sitting in a boat and drinking beer, and imagined that 'going fishing' was an excuse to sit on a beach with your mates. Or a boat. It was definitely something men did that pissed off their wives, and the running joke for taking a sick day.

I was wrong. So very wrong. Fishing is awesome. Here's the post about fishing as a great date that I promised to write way back at the end of March.

There are a few things you need to know to go fishing, and it really helps to have someone with you that has done it before and knows their way around a tackle box, how to attach fish hooks and weights, how to pick the right bait. I'm that green at it that I'm sure I've got all the terminology wrong, but I'm still going to take a stab at walking your through your first fishing trip. For me, it's an excellent excuse to go out in the sunshine (or rain), it's both really exciting and really relaxing, and you absolutely never have a hand free to drink a beer.

First, get some gear

Mr. FIRE and I own one fishing rod. Between two of us. We can still have a kickass fishing date, because I use a hand reel. It's literally a coil of fishing wire with a hook and a weight on the end. Give it a swing and toss it in the water.

Of course, you probably want a real rod right? Fair enough, I don't blame you. Swing by your local and ask for a basic, beginners rod. Put your foot down and don't let them sell you anything specialised or fancy, you're new to fishing, you just need an ugly stick with some line on it. 

You can also pick up a tackle box - it should come with some weights, hooks, a few bits of line, maybe even a knife. Again, ask the nice person at the shop for a beginners kit.

If your tackle box doesn't come with a knife, make sure you grab one. You'll need it to cut up your bait, and maybe your fish! In fact, grab two knives, a cheap one for messy work, and a top notch filleting knife for cleaning your catch.

Finally, grab a measuring tape and a big bucket - you need to know how big your fish are, and you need to be able to carry them back!

Second, find somewhere nice

Remember this is a fishing date! Don't go to your mates secret spot under the bridge by the burnt out cars (no seriously, someone suggested a place... that's what we found). Anywhere the river meets the ocean can be nice, or a bay, or a river. Ask google, or your friends, and check it out on google maps before you go there. Try and find somewhere with a low mosquito population.

Third, go at the right time

Fish don't just hang out waiting to be caught. Turns out that if you go around high tide as the water is rising the fish will be coming in to have a feed. This is how Mr. FIRE and I ended up pulling fish in constantly. 

Fourth, shop again

So you've got all your gear, you know where you're going and you're about to walk out the door. Now is the time to get your bait - no point in buying it earlier when you don't know where you're going and what type of bait you need! Mr. FIRE and I use cockles for beach fishing, and you can generally find a bait shop on your way.

Now is also a great time to find a phone app that lists the species of fish where you are going and the size limits. If you can't find an app, you can generally find a website devoted to fishing in your area that you can load up on your phone. Otherwise, popular fishing places tend to have signs detailing the common fish you can catch in that area and your size limits. Snap a picture with your phone on the way past and you're good to go.

Okay, I'm here, now what?

Fish! Squish some bait onto your hook and toss it in the water. If you're fishing for small stuff you'll want to get a little bit of tension on your fishing line. Then you need to zone out for a bit, find a zen space, and feel what is happening on the line. If you're using a rod, slide your finger along the line near the reel, if you have a hand reel, just run the line through your fingers. If you're fishing somewhere quiet, you'll very quickly start to feel the difference between the hook moving in the current, and little fishey's nibbling at your bait. If you're fishing in the ocean or on a windy day it takes a bit longer to get the feel for it.

Mr. FIRE and I mainly fish using cockles as our bait. They're cheap, easy to find, work for most little fishey's and are easy to thread onto the hook. But they fall apart, so you can't just wait for the fish to swallow the hook. When you feel the fishey's having a good nibble (not a gentle nibble, but a good nibble) give the line a quick tug. If you're lucky, you'll have a fishey!

Reel him in, and pull out your phone app to figure out what he is, and if you can keep him. Mr. FIRE and I went beach fishing and caught a fish every few minutes, we only kept one. Everyone else was too small to take home. That's okay though, actually getting dinner is a bonus! Fishing is fun!

A few things to keep in mind - fish aren't super keen on being pulled out of the water with a hook in their mouth. First thing you need to do when you get them out of the water is take that hook out. Check your fish you spines before you grab him, and make sure you have a good grip when taking the hook out. I once caught a puffer fish... It took a couple of minutes to safely get the hook out and flip him back into the water using the flat of our bait knife. I was not touching him with my hands.

If you have picked a good time and a good spot, you won't really have a moment free to drink a beer. And your hands will smell like fish pretty much straight away, so unless you like Eau Du Fish permeating your beer, just skip it.

But seriously, date night?

What makes a great date? Spending time together, enjoying beautiful weather, engaging in a shared activities, celebrating each others successes. Fishing does all these things.

Fishing also forces you to do something we don't often do in our high-speed high-tech world. It makes you slow down, focus, and stop fidgeting. In a world of fidget spinners and endless mobile phone games and apps fishing forces you to disengage from those things. Your hands are busy the whole time. You can also to talk to your partner for added entertainment. Isn't that the definition of a great date? No one is playing with their phones, everyone is relaxing and you are talking to each other.

And if you're lucky you'll also be having a wonderful seafood dinner after.

DTF: dollars to fun ratio

What is your DTF rule? Do you have a pretty loose DTF ratio? Or are you super tight when it comes to DTF?

No, I'm not talking about the Urban Dictionary definition, I mean the Dollars To Fun ratio.
As part of the Financial Independence and frugality movement, I think a lot about the value of my spending. Does buying the expensive name brand bread increase my happiness enough to justify the extra dollar on the price tag when compared to the sad floppy home brand stuff (Hint, it totally does).

There is a huge difference between cost and value. Cost is what you pay for it. Value is what you get from it. Put simply, a loaf of bread costs me $3.40. I value it because I'm hungry, and it goes well with soup. When it comes to the DTF ratio, I use it to consider whether the cost of something is worth the value I got out of it. Specifically, I use the DTF ratio to look at entertainment.

Before I stumbled across this whacko idea of retiring early, I would look at home much I earned per hour and I decided that I would pay about half that for an hours entertainment. I should probably clarify that this was back when I was living at home and I could afford to blow every dollar I made. This rule worked out great for me! Movies for $10 fit well within the DTF rule. I could buy a video game at $80 because it was easily going to consume every night for a few weeks. Gigs met the DTF rule because I had to listen to all the music before I went to the live show (yes, even factoring in the cost of the album, it was still DTF-approved).

Thankfully this hasn't come through to my adult life, but for many people it has. That motorbike I'll hardly ever ride is $2,000 but I make $100,000+ so it's DTF-approved. A yacht spends most of it's time tied up at the dock, but I'm rich so DTF. I've had a lousy day at work earning $30 an hour and these shoes are only $50 and so cute, DTF!!

Consumer spending has got to be the number one cause of debt in Western society. We are constantly advertised at and told we deserve bigger more expensive things. In my quest for FIRE I have tried to move away from this.

My ideal Dollars To Fun ratio is a mere $1 an hour. For $1 an hour I'm DTF.

Amazingly, a dollar an hour goes a really really long way. Mr. FIRE and I went fishing on the weekend. We spent $7 on bait and spent five hours down at the seashore. We would have had dinner from it but it turns out we need to learn to fillet properly, but my hens got a good feed of fish scraps!

A dollar an hour pays for most books of the Amazon Kindle store. Assuming you read them more than once, and don't buy books the day they are released. My favourite author has a new book out for $17.99, but the one she released last year is a mere $6.99. By employing the magic skill of waiting, I can have the book and still meet the DTF ratio.

Video games used to be my biggest wealth thief. A new release console game sells for around $80 to $100. Despite the hours of game play they swear they have, most games fizzle out for me around 20-30 hours, and then the cost of buying the console on top of that means that I don't buy or play as many games anymore. However I still play all my old games, some of which have over 200 hours play time across two or three different play through.

According to Steam my most played game is The Sims3 (I'm not proud of that) for 68 hours. I bought it for $12. On the other hand my library is full of pointless games that I paid a dollar or two for and only played for 10 minutes. Even worse is the collection of games I bought in a bundle and never touched. Frugal fail.

Of course, not everything can be bought for a dollar an hour. I love rock-climbing. I play roller derby. I've been wearing a True Grit wristband for years even though I've only been on two events (I should really take that off...) These things weren't even close to meeting the DTF rule. Rock climbing is about $5 an hour, plus gear costs. Derby is $80 a month for 24 hours worth of training. Rather than berate and guilt myself for these 'expensive' pleasures, I simply crowd out other expenses with low cost activities.

I might spend $80 a month on roller derby, but slacklining is free (apart from the initial purchase of the line). Fishing was $7 for two people for a few hours, hiking is free and if you know what you're doing both of them give you a chance to pick up a free dinner.

In my quest for financial independence, if the balance is right, I'm always DTF.

Thanks for letting me write a blog entirely devoted to DTF. I'm looking forward to the google traffic for this one! Leave a comment and let me know what you consider a fair price for entertainment.