Today on my normal long morning poke-walk I noticed a distinctive moon-shaped silhouette on the “nearby” interface. Other than the region- and raid-exclusive pokemon my pokedex is mostly filled out, but I had never seen a Luntone in the wild before, only once as another player's gym defender. I decided to divert from my normal route and head toward the pokestop where it had spawned, nervous all the while that it would despawn by the time I got there. But my luck held out, and it was still there when I arrived.

I managed to capture it and add it to my collection. I expected this morning to be a pretty standard exercise in just hitting my normal pokestops and gyms so this while side-trip and new acquisition was quite a pleasant surprise.

And a summertime Pichu, too

And on my way back home one of my 2k eggs hatched and I got a summertime Pichu, which is very cute.

Family raid team for Articuno Day

Earlier this month was Articuno Day. I haven't really been involved with the raiding aspect of the game since I'm more of a solo player, but my niece, nephew, and brother have recently gotten back into the game and we all went to some parks together to try the Articuno raids. (They had accounts from back during the initial post-launch period but hadn't been playing for a while, so it has been kind of fun to vicariously enjoy their excitement at seeing all the content that has been released between when they last played and now). I've been playing since near launch so I'm a pretty high-level player, and I was able to field a team of five Tyranitar with the rock fast move from Larvitar Community Day, but at they time they were still in the mid-20s in terms of level and didn't have access to all the optimal counters. The raid-guides I read suggested that a 4-person raid crew could do it, so we used the new trading feature to help them fill out their teams with some that I was willing to trade away. The four of us working together were able to win the raids (one where my nephew wasn't able to join immediately due to the app crashing on him was tight, so I think we needed all four of us), and we all got several Articuno, and one of my niece's was even a shiny. It was a lot of fun, and the process of strategizing things out and helping them field the best teams possible was enjoyable, too.

Zapdos Day looked grim at first, but turned out well

This past weekend was Zapdos Day. My niece and nephew are vacationing on the east coast right now, so we couldn't field a four-person family raid team like on Articuno day. The raid guides I read said you generally needed at least three people to take on a Zapdos so I didn't have high hopes. My brother and I went to the parks anyway on the chance that we would opportunistically bump into some other people playing. We weren't having much luck (although my brother was able to catch at least one pokemon he hadn't before, and got enough candy to evolve a few others, so that was good). The last gym on the route we were walking looked pretty deserted, and I was just going there for the sake of spinning the stop, but as I brought up the gym interface I noticed that there were actually people in the raid lobby -- we realized people were playing from cars in a parking lot up a small slope and behind some trees from the way you get to the gym by foot. We won the raid and my brother and I both caught the Zapdos (mine is actually a shiny). Since I had mostly been braced for the day being a disappointment my expectations ended up greatly exceeded.