Today was another Community Day in Pokemon Go, this time featuring Bulbasaur. From 11AM to 2PM my time Bulbasaurs had increased spawn rates and increased incidence of shiny versions appearing, and if you evolved a pokemon up to the Venusaur level during the event it would get the special Frenzy Plant move.

On the last community day I didn't do anything special because I forgot to schedule for it. Normally I take my pokemon walk early in the morning, and I try to do my long walks early in the week so I can get the “stretch days” in the walking app I use taken care of. This time I wanted to actually head to a park for community day. Because the park I like to go to for events is a bit of a trek from my apartment it counts as a stretch day, so I changed up my routine earlier in the week so I'd still need to hit a stretch day today, and instead of heading out before sunrise like I usually do I waited to leave my place until ten.

I caught a lot of Bulbasaurs

I started the day with 83 Bulbasaur candies. I had plenty of Pinap Berries saved up before the day, so I used them for almost every Bulbasaur I saw during the event to get extra candy, except for the shiny ones since I wanted the better catch rates for those. Overall I caught four shiny Bulbasaurs and a bunch of non-shinies. I did two full Bulbasaur → Ivysaur → Venusaur evolutions, which cost 125 candies each, and finished the event with 95 candies. Because one of the shinies I caught had good IVs I evolved that (although I think my app didn't have the right textures loaded for the shiny Bulbasaur and Ivysaur when I took the screenshot):

And I evolved a non-shiny with good IVs and a high level, so I could get another one with Frenzy Plant:

It was a pleasant experience

I did notice some other people playing Pokemon Go as I was walking around on the paths at the park, but I didn't approach anybody, I'm not really much of a social player. It was a nice spring day. I noticed a lot of little flowers had bloomed in the grassy areas, and a lot of geese.

From a game-design perspective I think the Community Day stuff seems well put together, there's a nice mechanical bonus and the time constraint would make it easy for organized groups to build local meetups around, but it's not really a good fit for the way I play. If I want to take real advantage of it I need to disrupt my normal routine like I did today, which I don't enjoy. I'm not sure whether I'll make the effort to get out to a park for the next one or not, it might depend on the featured pokemon and the mechanical bonus.