Beth’s Comments (group member since Aug 12, 2014)

Beth’s comments from the Nothing But Reading Challenges group.

OK, I'm going to try to finish my thief book but then I'll work on my #3 series book. If I get traction on that I'll roll on to the #4 in my Mercy Briggs reread.

It's probably a regional thing. They sound alike to me. I googled "raise rays raze" and found as the first link:

http://homophonesweakly.blogspot.com/...

so at least one person who likes homophones enough to make a blog about them thinks they sound alike!

Go Team Tapirs! We leveled up!

Raze/Raise would work for homophone, if someone had a book with Raise in it. Or Rays.

I've got H is for Hawk and Alpha something or other. I'm going to finish the Thief book for card 12 and then see if either of those are still needed. Cards 12 and 16 are the hottest things in our hand right now.

Gold=Health. We can buy health through the heal potions. Level-ups get harder and harder as we go higher. If we want to fight the Kindlecorn, let's just suck it up and do it. Go TAPIRS!

Buy 3 heal and 1 minor heal, then buy the heals and damage potions needed to fight it. Fighting it levels us up, and the cards we are working on will give us a big boost towards the next level.

I have consulted with experts for this strategy (my sons run a D&D campaign, and are experts in monsters and card strategy.) Being cheap at the beginning doesn't pay off, because it's when our levels are low that potions are real boosts. Using them now to get our levels up is better than waiting until we are strong on our own and the potions are only marginally helpful. (I think I'm paraphrasing them correctly.)

We have to buy 3 Heals and a Minor Heal to get up to full strength before fighting, of course.

OK. If we really really want to kill the kindlecorn, which is not the best strategy but we Tapirs are always game to battle, we can do it like this:

Use a Milon bonus to get another Greater Heal Potion.
Buy 2 Damage Potions (we already have 1 and we need 3): 4 gold
Buy a Heal Potion. 3 gold.
We already have a Minor heal potion.


Take Damage Potion #1 (+5 Damage)
Tapir (35 health) Attack: 17+5 =22.
KC (80-22=58 health): Attack: 20
Tapir (35-20=15 health): Take a Greater Heal Potion (15+15 = 30 health)
Take Damage Potion #2
Attack: (17+5) = 22
KC (58-22=37 health): Attack: 20
Tapir (30-20=10 health): Take a Heal Potion. Take a Minor Heal Potion (10+15=25 health).
Take Damage Potion #3.
Attack: (17+5 =22)
KC (37-22=15 health): Attack: 20
Tapir (25-20=5 health): Attack: 17
KC (15-17 = -2) : Dies.

We want to finish cards. I've been working my way down the spreadsheet. Card 12 is almost done, and worth a lot -- do you have a book that starts with H? Miranda hasn't started hers, so you could grab it.

Wait, I think we can't buy greater damage. That makes the kindlecorn way too expensive. And the store also doesn't have greater heals, so we can't buy those anyway. We have to earn those through quests. It's definitely not worth hanging onto the card until we earn two greater damages and a greater heal.

Get rid of the card. Definitely. Then when we level up we'll deal with the next monster.

Once per round or once per fight? If it's once per fight then the Kindlecorn is definitely not worth it.

So Carmen, if we haven't finished 7 XP points worth of cards by the time you get home, I say buy everything and try the fight again. Then we'll be ready to fight if the new card is another monster.

I'm going to go work on a thief book to back up Ang for Card 12.

Then we'd get the heal up after fighting the Kindlecorn because defeating it would level us up.

I think we have 63 XP points so we need 7 to level up. The STRAW card is only 6 -- we need either both the STRAW card and the flower card or to finish Card 12.

Why not just buy three more greater heals? Two to heal us up before the fight and one to heal us during the fight. But we need TWO greater damages as well.

Found one -- Susan Wittig Albert writes mysteries about an herbalist so she grows St John's Wort.

What are we concentrating on? Do we need the stone/mushroom/flowers to refight the Kindlecorn? I was working from the top down but I can jump ahead. Somebody direct me -- I hate making decisions!

I know I've read books where people take St. John's Wort as a supplement, and it shows up in fantasy books with herbalists and stuff. I'll look around to see what I've got.

Carmen, we needed 2 Greater Damage potions to kill the monster. One for the first hit and one for the third hit. It looks like we forgot to use the first one. A possible strategy is up in 6106.

From the rules:

◈ Every day at 11 am London Time the spreadsheet will automatically draw cards until you have five in your hand.
◈ A card may be dismissed at any time if it is not wanted but will not be re-drawn until the daily draw time.
◈ If a card is completed, it will be immediately redrawn.

So the penalty is that you don't get the next card until 11 AM GMT. The penalty is that you only have 4 cards for the rest of the day.

But why? We won't be able to fight this monster without potions for several weeks, if ever. Why not use that time to either plan quests or fight other monsters? It's like having one card sitting in the penalty box for half the game.

If we want to hoard our money and potions for later, then get rid of the card. If we want to fight the monster, let's fight! Both are fun strategies.

Also, if we have more cards out, that's more options for slower readers. I can turn around a book in a day or so, so I'm comfortable grabbing a spot, but I feel like if we had more cards then people can pick spots on the bottom of the spreadsheet for book they will finish in a week or so. We can always read for series books or just to bank things, but it's fun to have a chance to help with a quest. More cards = more options.

I guess I'm just in a mood to argue -- my book The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do is all about how boys and girls are completely different and schools need to let boys be boys. Girls can do art and have neat handwriting while boys get recess and fun free-wheeling science labs. I keep wanting to grab a coffee with this author to see if she's really never met a quiet boy who liked to draw, or an athletic girl who hates sitting still. Wild girls need recess too! Boys who like to read do exist! The problem is that I agree with a lot of what she says, but I think she's coming from a really bad place -- schools need recess for everyone, not just boys. Kids have different learning styles, and you can't always tell what they need by looking between their legs.

Can you level in the middle of a monster fight? I wasn't even sure you could drink potions during it. That would save us the Greater Heal. We'd still need the Double hits, though.

But card flow! I still think it doesn't make sense to sit on the monster cards for 5 days. Knowing what to read makes things much calmer, so I think we should fight monsters almost as fast as they show up so that we always see the quest cards.

I'd be excited to fight everything (I'm always one to check off the lists, even if it isn't the cleverest thing strategically), but not at the cost of letting a card sit there uselessly for days. That's both bad for our score and (more importantly) no fun.

No discussion of the Kindlecorn card? Anyone object to discarding it? If we do it now I think we'll have a new card in the morning.

We can beat anything; it just costs more when they are tougher than us. But having a card just sit there is definitely the worst strategy, in my opinion.

So, we can either spend three potions (we'd have to buy some of them with our gold store) and beat the monster (and instantly get a new card), or we can discard the card so we get another tomorrow -- either a quest to read books or another monster which we either battle or discard.

I'm not even sure we can use potions in the middle of a monster fight; the rules explain how to do it in a tournament but I'm not sure if that applies to monsters as well.