ISOSAD: The International Semi-Organized ScubUNO Association of Divers

[ClayJar]

Oh, I almost forgot... I played Solitaire, (Quick)War, Blackjack, and Card Yahtzee at Vortex the other day. I'll have to type up a HowTo entry for Solitaire and Card Yahtzee (which was an improvised "Well, what now?" idea).

Progress on the "[thread=212110]ISOSAD: Monopoly Challenge[/thread]" project is coming along. It looks like I'll probably end up using colorized pyramidal sinkers as the houses and hotels, at least for platform games, and everything else is basically set. I have a little more glue left to use, but final board fabrication is trivial -- I'm not going to bother with much artwork, other than the actual spaces. The only other outstanding issue is whether gameplay adjustments need to be made, but that's a topic for the other thread.

(Someone give me a heads-up before the northern ISOSAD season starts up, if you don't mind, so I can get Monopoly to the bottom where it belongs. :biggrin

 

[The Anchor]

Are there any players in BC, Canada? I so want to hit the button that says I am part of ISOSAD, but I can't find any players in my area.

 

[ClayJar]

Are there any players in BC, Canada? I so want to hit the button that says I am part of ISOSAD, but I can't find any players in my area.

Although you're not a fully-vested member until you've played a game underwater, you can be a provisional member without having played any games. The only difference is that, well, you haven't actually played any games.

As for the problem of not having played any games, there are three easy ways to handle that. You can find someone else who will actually play something (which is probably the most fun option, if available). Alternately, you can play a single-player game (solitaire was... adventuresome... but playing multi-player games by yourself is certainly compatible with ISOSAD -- I did it :biggrin. Still, there's a third option... Want to play a split game?

Obviously, something like chess wouldn't really work well, since it would take far too many dive trips to play a split-site game, but other games could work. Yahtzee, for example, has no required interaction between players. We could have an international ISOSAD Yahtzee game (or tourney, if we can get a few people together ).

All each player (or group of players) would need is a small clear-topped dry box -- Otter Box model 1000 is great and good to 100 feet, and Pelican 1010 (*not* i1010) is acceptable to about 50 feet. Grab a pack of five dice and some markers or crayons, and color four of them different colors (or have a bunch of colored dice like I have, but hey). Then it's just a matter of writing the score sheet on wetnotes or your slate and playing the game. After the gaming weekend, everyone comes back and posts their score sheets (I can set up a web form for easy entry, even), and we tally up the winners. (I'll donate a couple Dork Diver and ISOSAD stickers for winners.)

What do you think? Would you (or any other ISOSADers) be up for a Yahtzee tourney? (It seems like it would be a fun way to get some ISOSAD time in without having to all meet somewhere.)

 

[The Anchor]

I would be up (or should that be down) for a Yatzee tourny. Let me know when.

 

[ClayJar]

So, moonbasket got her first drysuit a while back, but because of scheduling conflicts (such as not scheduling "being sick as a dog" *before* "receiving drysuit", it took a while to hit first water. I stopped by Thursday, and we prepped the drysuit (trimming the neck seal, installing the dry glove rings, et cetera) and set up and fit her also brand new DSS backplate and wing. Late Friday evening, we hit the road to Vortex.

The first dive was a drysuit (and BP/W) orientation and training dive. After 75 minutes of bottom time and a max depth of 55 feet, she was quite well oriented with the suit and wing. So, for the second dive we decided to do some gaming. (The first dive counted as getting used to the physics of diving dry; the second dive would give a baseline thermal profile for the suit and fleece when on a very low exertion dive. :biggrin

We practiced a bit of Yacht Sea Dice on the surface interval, but we decided to lead off with a game of Battleship. It worked precisely according to plan, even if the numbers were a bit rusty. (We need to play more often, apparently.) I was surprised at how long a game took. It lasted just over an hour, I suppose. It just takes longer to signal "row 9, column 2" than to say "I2", and so on. If you expect the game to be too long, you can always mark off a number of squares (make it an 8x8 grid, or even a 5x10 -- it doesn't have to be square) and optionally use a lesser number of ships. I'd have liked to play "salvo" rules (where you get one shot per turn for each of your remaining live ships), but we just played a basic game this time.

The retractable grease pencils (china markers) were *perfect* for writing on the laminated US-letter-sized sheets, and the $2 and change Walmart cutting boards were great as "clipboards" (using several redundant rubber bands to hold the laminated pages). We were both wearing big blue drygloves as well, and the significantly decreased dexterity posed no problems with the system as we dove it.

There was, of course, no time remaining to play Yacht that dive, and a slow ear precluded any further dives (discretion being the better part of valor, especially since the purpose of the trip, i.e. a drysuit orientation, had already been accomplished). I need to redo the Yacht sheets to provide a "scratch" area, as that is useful for keeping track of what die values have been kept (we just used some of the rightmost columns as scratch), but it worked quite well. We used five dice: red, yellow, green, white, and black, in that order (i.e. if you were holding three die values going into the next roll, you'd keep the red and yellow die values, and so on, regardless of the original color of the dice whose values you'd previously chosen to keep).

Anyway, it was great fun, and I look forward to more ISOSAD diving soon. :biggrin:

 

[trucker girl]

I'm pretty sure you hold the "underwater gaming with no time limit" record.

The rest of us get cold after about 20 minutes of inactivity!

 

[ClayJar]

I'm pretty sure you hold the "underwater gaming with no time limit" record.

The rest of us get cold after about 20 minutes of inactivity!

Well, for the record-setting 2:47 ISOSAD dive, we were above a very warm thermocline, and for this short 74-minute dive, we were both in drysuits. If you did the same, you'd likely be warm... at least until 30 minutes or so.