Italian feasts and prize giveaways

So I and seven other members of our Yahtzee family (Pinksushi, MysticShores, Spartan, Sheila, GregRulz, DiceDominator and Xray) have organized "teams." The seven members noted are team captains, and it's up to the captains to reach out to players directly and remind them that we are using a delay tactic in playing the Family Feasts. Our goal is to delay the start of the Feast by at least 18 hours in order to get into an easier pool of teams, which ultimately costs us less dice rolls to compete in. Whether you buy rolls, or rely solely upon earning free rolls, the fewer you have to spend, the better. Simple economics, right?

So our message of delaying the start of the Feast didn't get to everyone, despite our efforts. Not everyone reads private messages, I have learned, and not everyone follows the group chat. Nonetheless, the delayed start of today's Feast, which seemed to begin without warning, helped us get into a less competitive field.

If you haven't heard, it appears that there's a new pricing structure for playing Feast games. Not sure if it resets daily, as it's still day one, but GregRulz noticed that after so many games, the cost to play another game of Feast went up from three rolls to four, and others are reporting that the cost increases again to five.

Yahtzee is trying to find ways to increase the spending by those who pay to play, of that I have no doubt. People spend money to buy rolls in order to help their team win a Feast, that's a fact. (The prizes aren't worth a buck, if you ask me.) Yahtzee is testing how much it can earn before driving people away, a common tactic used by many companies in many industries. It sucks, but that's commerce.

As I always say, play what makes sense for you. If you're playing free games of Feast only, that's good enough for me. I'm not interested in building a super team. I want active players, but that'a all. I don't give a DARN about how you earn or spend your DICE. When the game becomes a part-time job, it's not a game. I'm active daily, and it's still fun, because I refuse to let it become a job, no matter how many prize climbs they dangle in front of me. Honestly, I need to spend a lot less time playing games on my phone and more time pursuing my many writing projects I'd love to make time for, like blogging. But I digress.

Special thanks to Greg for helping coordinate and police our Feast status. He didn't volunteer for the gig, yet he did. And it's super helpful to have a person available for that job when a Feast starts. Thanks again.

And thanks to all of you who continue to contribute, through good times and bad. Not everyone chimes in on a regular basis, and I don't have communication with some of you, but I hope you enjoy having a group that does and will chat or socialize from time to time.

You're always welcome to submit something for this blog to share with all of our team. Contact me privately if you have a contribution.

Self-serving note: Season 3 of my podcast ended recently, and the episode was initially streamed live via YouTube. You can see that at tr.im/izzy. And the audio for the episode, and all others, is at cantturnitoff.com.

While season 3 ended and we're about three months away from the launch of season 4, there are "bonus" episodes coming up. The first should drop Monday, Aug. 26. Each season I do bonus episodes, known as "hiatus spectaculars," and at least one hiatus spectacular this year will deviate from the format of the past two seasons. That's episode 40, and it might not be of high interest to you if you haven't listened to many of my past episodes, but here's a spoiler for you folks only: Episode 40 will include updates on several past topics/guests. (Therefore, it's helpful to know the original story, but I will provide a simple summary of each story in presenting the updates. That summary may spoil the "twist" in the story that I withheld when I initially presented it, unfortunately. You've been warned.)

Finally: I have prizes coming in on slow boats from China, and I'm trying to get a few worthy, easy-to-mail prizes in the prize closet. I have some good secondary items, but not the greatest primary prizes. Keep in mind, I spend a buck or two on prizes, generally, but I aim for unusual, quirky and/or nostalgic. I have some fun stuff coming, someday, thanks to cheap foreign labor. The stuff I'm buying, by the way, is hard to find anywhere, let alone in bulk for a reasonable price anywhere close to my home. I'm all for buying American, but I'm not sure some of the things I'm looking at even have a local manufacturer. It's a weird world we live in.

I have two people awaiting prizes from the last two contests: azjim and MysticShores. I'll have a new contest when my next podcast episode drops. We haven't done that since June. And Google won't help you answer the question, whatever question I pose!

Behind these numbers is a puzzle

Can you solve it? (If you can, don't comment with the answer. If you can't, message MikeVegas72 directly.)

Camping party

We have the nieces and nephew gather together at our house each summer for a camping party, with themed activities. It was a rainy Saturday last weekend, so the camping was indoors rather than in tents in our backyard. Here are photos and video from the gathering.

And the dance song I have some of the kids hooked on: 

Funny story

This story has nothing to do with Yahtzee. I'm only going to correct obvious spelling errors tonight. I'm tired and meant to tell this story last week. 

There's a local bar/restaurant that runs contests on its Facebook pages for prizes. A lot of times it's restaurant gift cards, occasionally it's tickets to sporting events. The contest usually involves guessing the score of an upcoming sporting event, and sometimes something else. In a baseball game it might be predict the score, winning team and one Minnesota Twins player to get a  hit. 

It's not easy to win. First of all, picking the final score of a sporting event is rare, and then you have to pick the correct team to win. To top it off, you may have to name a player on the team that will meet whatever the criteria is for that contest. I've picked the score correct a few times, but often more than one person does, especially when it involves baseball or hockey. They'll have a drawing if there's more than one correct answer, and sometimes I've had the right score, but picked the wrong player for the final question. I did win a $20 gift certificate to the restaurant once for being correct but not winning the random drawing. They don't always have consolation prizes, but occasionally they do, and I won one. 

So last Thursday they had a simple pick the winner/score contest for the first night of a big four-game series between the hometown Twins and Cleveland Indians. Knowing most people will pick the Twins, I picked Cleveland. I figured if I was right, there'd be less people who might pick the same score as I did. I was going to pick a final score of 7-4, but I was inexplicably moved to type 7-5 as the final score. 

It was 6-5 in the ninth inning and Cleveland tacked on a run, making it 7-5. The Twins had one last inning to at least tie the score. They put runners on, threatening to score at least a run, but the Indians got out of it without allowing a run, and the final was 7-5 Cleveland. I had picked the correct score! 

Often there are 500+ entries for these contests, all entered in the comments of a Facebook post. For this contest there were only about 300, so my odds were already a bit better. I saw several people picked a final score of 7-5, but they picked the Twins to win. Unfortunately two people had picked a score of Cleveland 7, Twins 5. So I had a one-in-three chance of winning the prize, two "good" seats to any remaining Twins game. 

They don't announce the winner after the game, typically, they do it when they get around to it. When they post the winning announcement, they do it in the contest thread, so I get an alert that they've announced a winner. I went to see the winning entry and learned that some woman was the random winner. I was so disappointed, but for this contest I was getting a $20 gift certificate, so at least my correct guess wasn't for nothing. 

Since Facebook was showing "relevant" replies to the contest thread, mine was immediately under the contest winner's announcement. And the winning woman's entry was listed immediately below mine. Then I noticed this: 

See how it shows "edited" after it denotes she typed her pick 22h earlier? Yeah, I noticed that, too. And I happen to know you can see the edits that were made by clicking on the "edited" denotation. So, did Carrie edit her pick because she misspelled Indians? Here's what her edit history showed me:

It looks like Carrie made a lot of changes to her picks in a short period of time. And, funny, her picks reflected the score at different points during the late innings of the game. This was about noon on Friday, and it was a long game on Thursday night, lasting until nearly 11 p.m., as I was watching the final inning on my phone after 10:30 p.m., hoping my 7-5 prediction would hold up. And what time would it have been 14 hours earlier? Sometime between 10 and 11 p.m.

So I privately messaged the restaurant and sent them unedited screen shots, noting it appeared she changed her score multiple times, which they've policed in the past, because people have tried to get away with doing that in order to win. The Facebook admin for the restaurant noted that s/he usually looks for that, but obviously missed it. (My theory, s/he scrolled through the entries on a mobile phone, looking for any entry with the correct score, and as soon as s/he found one, that person was declared the winner.) 

After pointing out obvious cheating by Carrie, whose Facebook profile seems to show her to be a married mother of three teens and pre-teens who have enough money to afford plenty of life's luxuries, the restaurant told me I could have a pair of tickets to any game I wanted. 

I didn't note on the Facebook thread for the contest that the winner appeared to have cheated, and I told the restaurant they could handle it however they saw fit. I was told by the admin that s/he didn't want to call out Carrie on the page, and I didn't care that I wasn't declared a winner to the Facebook world. I can only hope that within a couple of hours of telling Carrie she won, they revoked her prize for cheating, but I don't know, and never will. 

So I'm a winner, and Carrie is a poor example of sportsmanship to her children, although they'll never know it.