On the Microwaving of Bagel Bites

OK. I love Bagel Bites. These things are great. If I'm looking for something to eat for lunch, and we have any in the house, I *will* eat them. But whoever makes them needs to learn that different sizes of boxes are different.

The directions on the back say to microwave it for 4:30 on medium, placed on top of the empty box. Normally this is not a problem. However, today I found that my mom had not the usual 9-packs, but special 18-packs, each twice the size and containing two little trays of 9. I looked at the directions on the back. They were exactly the same.

So, were I to follow these instructions, I would be microwaving my Bagel Bites on a platform of twice the ordinary height, with another thing of Bagel Bites inside, which I would certainly not want to have microwaved (although I suppose I could remove them and put them somewhere else during the microwaving).

In truth, this is not the first time this has happened, so I did what I always do, which is to assume that the height doesn't really matter and microwaved them with no support at all, and, indeed, they turned out fine. But they still need to learn to put appropriate directions on the different boxes.

-Sniffnoy

This weekend is yayness

Les Mis last night was awesome! I'll skip over any details and go back to the night before, when I went to gamenight at Gil's. I played Balloon Cup, Falsche Fuffzigers, and Coloretto before I left, the second of which is really neat, and is what I really wrote this entry to describe.

It's a bidding game, where you play as a counterfeiter/money launderer/rare coin collector. You can get the rare coins (which are your victory points) using fake money or real money, but to buy your counterfeiting presses you need real money, because obviously the people who make them can tell the difference. You also get a rare coin bonus for having the most real money at the end of the game. To turn your fake money into real money, you have to either bid for money laundering cards, or you can just launder it at the ordinary rate (though of course you won't get as much that way).

Now, while you can make change with real money, you can't make change between the different denominations of counterfeit bills. There are two reasons for this: one is the weird mechanism of the rare coin auctions, and the other is that as the game goes on, the money inspector finds out the different denominations of counterfeit bills, one by one, starting with the lowest and working up. When he finds this out, all counterfeit money in that denomination is burned, and you have to sell any presses you have that print it at their scrap rate. The game ends either when you run out of money laundering cards, or when the money inspector finds out all the different denominations.

The way the money inspector works is that you have a deck of money inspector cards, some of which show counterfeit money in a specific denomination being burned (but it only takes effect if all lower denominations have already been burned), and some of which have a rare coin auction on them, and you turn over two each turn. While their order is somewhat randomized, when you run out, you just flip the deck back over, so after the first time through, you know when the different denominations will go out. At one point, though, Gil misremembered and said the 100s would go out a bit before they actually did, and none of us quite remembered either so we all believed him, and we all dumped our 100s early, and were stuck with just 150s!

So, yeah. Really neat game, though obviously not if you don't like bidding games. That's all.

-Sniffnoy