Toy fair in Ostrava

The Czech National Championship was held in Ostrava at Veletrh hracek (annual toy fair). My free time is somewhere between limit of 0 and 0 but I decided to attend the tournament and see everyone from the Machine Dance community. I hoped that I could spend some time with them and find out how everyone is doing.

The Fair

I went to Valmez with my parents to see my grandmother. During the trip I started reading a new book - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Men Who Hate Women is the original title). The author is Stieg Larsson, a Swedish author. He was disgusted by sexual violence. He witnessed a gang rape of a young girl when he was 15 and that changed his life. He never forgave himself for failing to help the girl, whose name was Lisbeth - like the young heroine of his books, herself a rape victim, which inspired the theme of sexual violence against women in his books.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a first book of a trilogy and I have to say that the book is really good. (I will write about it later on this blog)

The next day I arrived at Cerna Louka where the Fair was held. I have to say that this was the smallest fair I've ever been to. There were stands with clothing for children, children toys and brick boxes and such. There were few things that caught my eye though. Just in front of our (Rare-Items) stand there was LaQ stand.

LaQ is a building toy from Japan. The actual brick box has 7 different types of parts. There are triangular and square bases that can be connected with any of five different edge connectors. The box contains a limited amount of pieces from which objects (resembling real objects) can be formed. It is quite a challenge to build an object you want to. It takes time and quite a lot of thinking and planning how to do what you want. But its awesome^^.

The other stand that caught my interest was entitled Tantrix. Tantrix is a game originating in New Zealand in the year of 1988. The game evolved a lot and now we have a multiplayer strategy game out of it and several puzzles for 'individual players'. I tried a Discovery Tantrix which consists of 10 tiles with three different colour curves. You start with 3 tiles. From those you have to create a closed curve of a given color (in my case yellow). That was pretty easy to do. Next you take another tile and you continue in doing another closed curve. The 'game' has one more basic rule. That says that ALL the curves on the tiles have to of the same color. You can't have one curve that consists of parts from two different colors.
I got pretty fast to number 9 where I found out that my curve (having the right shape though) is not the solution. I was trying to figure out what is wrong when I realized that the solution is the same curve but mirrored. Everything was correct after I mirrored all the tiles. I got the same problem with no. 10. Creating the correct shape was pretty easy. Figuring out the right colors for each curve was what took me more time.
The Discovery series has an advanced version Xtreme version which is harder.

The next stand I spend some time was showing a pedagogic tool used to 'enhance the use of logic in individuals'. The tool/game is called Pyramid creator it has a 2d version and a 3d version. You have a certain pieces and a grid in which you place the pieces. For each puzzle (of a certain level) you have a starting point. Than you add the rest of the pieces and you have to fill the whole area of the grid. It seems simple but I have to say that this was far more "difficult" than the Tantrix puzzle. It required me to think of the only solution for the base pieces. When I got this right I got the rest as well. Again it showed me that I have problems with mirrored shapes. I got everything right according to my brain but it was incorrect for some reason. After mirroring my thoughts I got the right solution. Hm...well I don't know what causes this. Anyway it was fun.

The last interesting stand for me was with RC models^^. Anyway there was also a WeyToy stand which was showing a magnetic based games. I've seen these products at bigger game fairs (in France and Germany for example) already so it was nothing new, but still I was surprised to see it here in Ostrava.

The fair was really small but it there were some interesting things after all. Being in a different 'position' (having a child) I would most probably appreciate more of the stands.

The tournament
There were about 14 participants. 5 random songs were chosen from which we could choose 2 songs. The scores of the two songs would be added and the 8 people with the highest total would continue on. I played Determinator (hard), chose a wrong speed mod and even managed to miss one note. After that I tried My life is so crazy (hard) with the same speed mod which should be the right scrolling speed for me. The stepchart showed to be actually quite tricky. I won the qualifier and continued to top 8.

I won the whole tournament but I have to say that this time being 18kg heavier than last time and not actually doing ny physical activity showed on the results and my stamina.

Thank you everyone for playing and spending time with me^_~.