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Martin GUnited Kingdom
Bristol
Don't fall in love with me yet, we've only recently met
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New-to-me games
Aristocracy - 1 play - 7
First Published 2019/pic4910471.jpg)
One of the "Reinerssance" games that has gone under the radar, but as with Tajuto, that's not a sign of poor quality. The artwork on this one is far from the best and the setup is fiddly but once we were into the game we really enjoyed the snappy rhythm. It reminded me most of Africa (flipping tiles from a big central display) and Blue Lagoon (multi-faceted scoring with connection, collection and area control elements).
The next three were all online with members of the OG Guild, resurrecting some under-appreciated gems.
Muscat - 1 play - 7
First Published 2001/pic696655.jpg)
Liked the sound of this obscure OG enough to make a playingcards.io room for it. It's one of those opaque shared incentive things and felt like it had a lot in common with Bridges of Shangri-La.
Armadöra (aka Nuggets) - 1 play - 7
First Published 2003/pic2404104.jpg)
I'd played this once before asynch but this was my first real-time game and also first time with 4p, which is played as 2v2 teams. It's a really simple and quick OG in which each turn you either add fences to gradually divide the playing area up or add control markers that will be used to determine who wins each of the eventual areas. The control markers range in value from 1-4 but you play them face-down, which adds unpredictability and bluff. The team version was interesting because you total yours and your partner's control markers when resolving areas, but you don't even know what your partner has played.
Owner's Choice - 1 play - 7
First Published 2006/pic195820.jpg)
A wild and very quick stock market game - definitely keen to play again now I've seen how it plays out.
Joraku - 1 play - 6
First Published 2015/pic7049926.jpg)
Trick-taking plus area-control sounds like a great mix for me, but I didn't love the way you keep interrupting tricks to spend a bunch of action points. Would definitely play again though.
Mada - 3 plays - 6
First Published 2022/pic6980439.png)
A cute little lemur-themed cardgame with colourful art that I thought might work for family and gamers. It's a 'stay alive as long as you can' game where each turn you either add a hand card to a personal pile of ascending numbers, draw a card from the deck, or 'try your luck' by flipping a card straight from the deck to your pile, busting (and ending the round) if it's unplayable. The neat thing is that when someone busts, all the other players score the top card on their personal pile, with the higher cards being worth more points. So you don't want to play it too safe as then you'll end up hardly scoring anything. Playing OR drawing gives it a slightly stilted rhythm compared to the familiar play AND draw and I think it might be just OK, not great.
Sleeping Queens 2: The Rescue - 1 play - 6
First Published 2022/pic6783361.png)
It was Effie's 7th birthday and I'd spotted this in the local games shop as she really enjoys the original. It's pretty cool - shares the charming artwork and minor mathematical element of the original but adds a few more bits and pieces (possibly too many!). A nice feature is that your 'hand' is face-up so it's easy to help out with explaining what different cards do. Oh and I also liked that this time it's the queens who are rescuing the kings.
Other gaming highlights
An online session of the brilliant Doppelkopf and some games with visiting friends, including a very welcome return to Abluxxen. Loads of amazing asynch T&E on BGA. Oh and co-hosting The OG Guild's Podcast!
Reading
Sour Grapes, Dan Rhodes
I've read and enjoyed all of Rhodes' books but this one from 2021 had somehow passed me by. He works out his frustrations with the publishing industry through a very silly parody of a literary festival in a sleepy English village. Fun!
Winter, Ali Smith
This rather confirmed the feeling I had after reading Autumn that while there's a lot to admire in Ali Smith's writing, I'm not sure I really get her.
Listening
A bit of a quiet month for new releases, though there are loads out today that I want to listen to. Favourites were The Reds, Pinks and Purples The Town That Cursed Your Name and Lonnie Holley's Oh Me, Oh My
Live music-wise there was a very pretty gig from Florist and a lively ceilidh dance!
QWERTYUIOP
QWERTYmartin's Unabridged Insights On Play
Archive for playing-reading-listening
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Martin GUnited Kingdom
Bristol
Don't fall in love with me yet, we've only recently met
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New-to-me games
Viva Pamplona! - 1 play - 7
First Published 1992/pic1111577.jpg)
Sam picked up this ancient Kramer roll & move which was a lot of fun. It reminded me a bit of his Midnight Party, in which the players try to hide from a randomly-moving 'ghost'. Here it's a bull, and you want to stay close to it to earn 'courage' points. There's more take-that than in Midnight Party too, if you outnumber other players on a space you can shove them off it.
Vidrasso - 2 plays - 7
First Published 2021/pic7096204.png)
One of Sean Ross's many recent designs, this one smoothly implemented on BoardGameArena. It's a 2p trick-taker with a nice system of more powerful cards being worth fewer points when captured and a tricky 'must either follow *or* trump' rule.
Coupell - 1 play - 7
First Published 2017/pic3931135.jpg)
Designer Bez invited me to an asynch game of this on BGA (which I didn't log) and then I showed it to Sam, as we both have Wibbell decks already. It's a charming co-op spelling game where each player has to help the other make words from their conveyor belt of letters, and ensure that both players get the same score by the end of the game.
K3 - 1 play - 5
First Published 2021/pic6279054.png)
Colourful abstract that reminded me a bit of Knizia's Penguin Party as you're collectively building a pyramid where each piece has to be supported by at least one of a matching colour. But in this one the pieces you get to play come from dismantling a personal pyramid that you have to build right at the start of the game. That felt like too much planning.
Other gaming highlights
Meet-ups with a couple of old gaming friends who were visiting Bristol - one who I hadn't seen for over a decade.
Reading
The Yips, Nicola Barker
This had the zany characters and zippy dialogue I've come to expect from Barker, but I think they work better in a shorter form. 550 pages with no real plot was a bit exhausting, despite all the fun along the way.
An Experiment in Criticism, CS Lewis
(If you've read this, you will probably find the idea of giving it a star-rating as amusing as I do.) Lewis argues for judging literature as great not for how it is written but how it is read. Great literature rewards re-reading, while most 'unliterary' readers are content to read books only once to 'use' rather than 'receive' them. This was an interesting challenge to me as someone who almost never re-reads books, but still likes to think I appreciate their literary qualities as well as their plot. Some of the framing of sex and class is very 'of its time' but his argument isn't as elitist as it appears at times and I enjoyed his defence of sci-fi. The biggest compliment that I can pay is that I am sure I would get more out of it if I read it again (I'm just not sure I'll have time!).
Listening
Loads of good new stuff this month - Young Fathers' infectious Heavy Heavy and Lisa O'Neill's haunting All of This is Chance probably the top picks, but closely followed by Hamish Hawk, Gina Birch, Anna B Savage, MF Tomlinson, Quasi and Yo La Tengo.
Two good gigs too, both with bands that rocked harder than I'd expected from their records: Hamish Hawk aboard a boat on Bristol harbour and Dry Cleaning, supported by the enjoyable Dehd.
- [+] Dice rolls
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Martin GUnited Kingdom
Bristol
Don't fall in love with me yet, we've only recently met
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New-to-me games
Challengers! - 3 plays - 8
First Published 2022/pic7040521.jpg)
I'd been curious about this for a while based on W Eric Martin's write-up and so I was pleased when a friend bought a copy. Curiously it seems the 'theme' is 'auto battler video games', where most of the decisions are about choosing the units that are in your army and then you match up against another player's to see who wins, with few decisions involved at that stage. In Challengers that takes the form of a multi-round tournament, with each round pairing the players off into 1v1 matches, so you have to keep moving round the table following your 'tournament plan' card. Between each match, you get to draw 5 cards from the appropriate deck (gradually increasing in power), keep 2, and trash as many as you want.
The battles resolve very simply - you just shuffle your deck and then take turns flipping cards from the top and resolving any effects. You have to keep flipping until your power matches your opponent's at which point you 'capture the flag' and your most-recently-revealed card becomes the card they have to match in turn. Each time your opponent captures the flag, you have to discard all your previously-played cards to your 'bench', which is essentially 6 discard piles, each of which can only hold one type of card (of which you can have multiple copies in your deck).
There are two ways to lose a battle: one is by running out of cards and so not being able to match your opponent's last play; the other is by over-filling your bench i.e. having to discard a 7th type of card. So there's a tension between having a big deck which won't run and not wanting too many different types of cards. This encourages you to add duplicate cards to your deck and then find other cards that combo well with them. The only decisions you make during a battle are how to resolve certain effects as they are revealed, so each battle is over very quickly - 5 minutes or so.
The winner of each battle receives a trophy which is worth a certain amount of points - these escalate in value each round, which makes sense as the first couple of rounds are pretty random as you haven't had chance to sculpt your deck yet. After 7 rounds, the two players with the highest scores play off in a final with no further additions to their deck (trashing is allowed though).
The first game was just about seeing what happened, but in the second I was able to plan and build a really fun deck. In the third game I tried a very different one which didn't work nearly so well (and sometimes you do just get hosed by the order your cards come out). Lots of fun!
Longboard - 4 plays - 7
First Published 2022/pic6688292.png)
Yet another Knizia in the Lost Cities/Keltis family - as usual we're building sets of ascending cards in different colours, but here your hand is open and other players can take cards from it by giving you cards worth a higher total value (but preferably not in useful suits!). Seems really good with 3 and very interactive.
Excape - 3 plays - 7
First Published 1998/pic440763.jpg)
Another Knizia, this one a simple and fun push-your-luck dice game. I've played with 3 and 6 so far and I think the sweet spot will be between the two.
Who's who - 1 play - 6
First Published 0/pic4943665.jpg)
Another wacky Parlett standard-deck trick-taker. This one's 3p only, and the two players who get dealt jokers are secret partners (or the two players who don't get jokers if one player gets both). The combination of lack of information until a joker gets played and the second-highest card winning tricks left me struggling to have much of a plan.
Terracotta Army - 1 play - 5
First Published 2022/pic6949932.jpg)
We got one of my group Terracotta Army for his 40th birthday present, as he likes heavy Euros and this one sounded somewhat interactive.
On the plus side, most of the focus is on building statues of various types to place on the central board, with a lot of the scoring there involving other players. But each statue can score points in at least *eight* different ways, ten or more depending on exactly how you count things. That's just way too much to consider, even if you weren't having to acquire those statues via a triple-wheel action-selection doohickey.
Akropolis - 1 play - 5
First Published 2022/pic6705097.jpg)
Wow, someone managed to come up with a "take & make" game even blander than Cascadia! The gimmick here is that the "make" part is 3-D - the higher the level you put a tile on, the more points it is worth. But the scoring conditions and the "take" part are about as boring as possible. Sure, it's "smooth" - so smooth you barely even notice you've played a game.
Other gaming highlights
Managed to fit in a full 16-hand game of Doppelkopf online - usually we've ended up breaking off part-way through and then never getting back to it!
Reading
I'm a Fan, Sheena Patel
First-person stream-of-consciousness from a thirty-something woman who's on the wrong end of an unequal relationship. It's an acerbic critique of sexual and racial power dynamics and social media obsession. I'm glad I read it but I'm also glad it was quite short.
Babel, RF Kuang
A scathing critique of colonialism via a historical novel (set in the 1830s) with a dash of linguistics-based magic. I found the story engrossing and the message strong but the hectoring footnotes detailing the real events behind the narrative felt unnecessary. The lectures on translation (as received by the main characters studying at Oxford) were really interesting though!
The Lola Quartet, Emily St John Mandel
I've now read all six of her books. There's no doubt that the later ones are better, but I enjoyed her trio of noir-ish early novels too. This one sees the eponymous high-school jazz group crossing paths 10 years later, drawn together by a mystery and a crime.
The Fell, Sarah Moss
An evocative novella set amidst the most dispiriting period of the pandemic - November 2020 as cases shot up and lockdown returned, with no end (or vaccine) yet in sight. We're taken inside the minds of four characters as a woman goes missing in the moors.
Listening
Really liked James Yorkston, Nina Persson and the Second Hand Orchestra's The Great White Sea Eagle and the Rozi Plain and Meg Baird albums were nice too. And I found the poptastic new Belle & Sebastian single irresistible.
A good month for live (and live-ish) music too. Eccentric singer-songwriter/mechanical instrument builder Thomas Truax in Cardiff and the euphoric 20-ish-years-on reunion of The Delgados in London, plus the new ABBA 'hologram' concert which far exceeded my expectations. An incredible feat of technology, not just the '3-D' recreation of the band on stage but also the pin-sharp big screens, surround sound and lighting. A live band augments the original vocal tracks and the purpose-built arena is surprisingly spacious and less tacky and corporate than I'd imagined.
- [+] Dice rolls
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Martin GUnited Kingdom
Bristol
Don't fall in love with me yet, we've only recently met
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New-to-me games
7 Spots x7 NEW!
Just one this month and it's a cute and fun dice game from Jon Perry, the designer of the excellent Air Land & Sea. Try to roll the right numbers to fill up your dalmatian cards before you go bust, aided by a selection of modular special powers that are drafted worker-placement-style.
Other gaming highlights
I brought Hit, Strike and Art Robbery to play with my nephews before Christmas and they all went down well, with only one serious tantrum
Reading
Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky
A sci-fi epic which alternates between the perspective of a post-apocalypse generation ship and a terraformed planet of intelligent spiders. Both are rendered really well and it's hard not to root for the spiders!
H(A)PPY, Nicola Barker
Got this one in hard copy rather than ebook as it has imaginatively designed typography with coloured words and more. I enjoyed it but it's pretty out there even for Barker.
Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
Sometimes I get the feeling that when literary authors get great reviews for sci-fi books, it's because the reviewers don't really read any sci-fi. This fable of 'artificial friends' wasn't bad, but it wasn't anything I haven't read before either.
God Bless Your Mr Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut
This satire wasn't the best Vonnegut I've read but as always had some memorable turns of phrase, and the critique of capitalism hasn't got any less valid.
Listening
Spent some time with my favourites from the year - I need to get a playlist together. Interesting new (to me) stuff from Black Ox Orkestar, Gaye su Akyol and Lucrecia Dalt.
No gigs in December, but I have the reformed Delgados next month as well as the ABBA hologram show!
- [+] Dice rolls
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Martin GUnited Kingdom
Bristol
Don't fall in love with me yet, we've only recently met
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New-to-me games
8 San Francisco x4 NEW!
This new Knizia is essentially a 'take & make' drafting game, with an interesting 'take' part that I haven't seen before. Like Coloretto, you either flip a card and add it to a row or take all the cards in a row. But each time you take a row you also have to take a contract token, and you can only take rows that have more cards in them than you have contracts. So the more times you take, the longer you have to wait before you can take again.
The 'make' part is pretty interactive too as there are points for being first to finish areas and for (six different) area majorities. There's also a bit of personal network-building and some special power bonuses, so it's a pretty modern-feeling design for a Knizia.
It's also one of those games that has a fixed pot of points which gets divided up between the players, and not very many of them at that. In the first game I managed 4 (four), and other games were won by a half-point difference. Most of the points are gained through direct comparison with other players so you're going to be watching the other players' boards a lot.
There aren't many decisions to make on your personal board. You have five coloured rows, and you have to place cards in the matching one, filling from left to right. So the only time you have a choice about what to do with the cards you've taken is when you have multiple cards of the same colour or a wild card. This means the focus is very much on the central 'take' area.
The game ends when a certain number of 'foundation' cards have been flipped. There are 10 in the deck, and it takes 6 to end a 2p game, 8 for 3p and all 10 for 4p. There is no initial deck-seeding, so this could vary wildly. Our first game was really short, which caught us all a bit by surprise while the second went about as long as it could, with the endgame featuring lots of colours that were 'dead' for one or two players, because they'd already filled that row.
So far, 3p seems better than 4, and I'm interested to try it with 2.
7 Gang of Dice x2 NEW!
And yet another new Knizia, this one a push-your-luck dice game on BGA which isn't a rehash of any of his previous ones. Good fun -- I may homebrew a copy as it's not available at the moment.
7 Ready Set Bet x2 NEW!
This is LOUD (so loud we got told off by Joe's wife). It's a real-time race-track betting game which can have up to 8 players betting plus another one rolling the dice to run the race (or you can use an app). There are a bunch of special bets as well as standard win, place or show, and at a certain point no further bets are allowed and everyone just watches the race play out while yelling encouragement. We won't play it every week but it's unlike anything else in my collection which is great.
6 Oltre Mare NEW!
Not bad - it's kind of like Bohnanza had a baby with a trading-in-the-Med game. I like how you get a small reward every time you trade with the active player. I didn't really figure out the game's economy at all though and ground to a halt in the second half. Possibly a bit too long and a bit too dry, but I'd play it again.
6 Tricky Mixes NEW!
One of DJ's many recent designs, it's a rather baroque trick-taker with rotating trumps, reversing ranks, area majorities and a connection board. I had a good time but may-follow is not my favourite form of trick-taking.
6 Gift of Tulips NEW!
Some nice ideas in this minimalist market manipulation game, but it felt like it all descended into chaos in the end.
Other gaming highlights
Annual weekend away with my Bristol group - about a dozen of us on a farm in Devon with nothing to do but eat, drink and game. Lots of old favourites got played and just one new-to-me. And in the virtual realm, it was the first con for the OG Guild - lovely to play a few live games with friends made there.
Reading
Bournville, Jonathan Coe
A multi-generational family saga told in vignettes at moments of (British) national significance, it was as warm-hearted and witty as Coe always is.
The Man Who Fell to Earth, Walter Tevis
I've never seen the film, but based on reading the book, David Bowie was perfectly cast. More psychological than sci-fi as an alien visitor descends into alcoholism and melancholia.
The Singer's Gun, Emily St John Mandel
I've been working my way through her earlier novels after loving everything from Station Eleven on. They're not quite as good, but still beautifully written with memorable settings.
Listening
I spent a lot of time working my way through Low's many brilliant albums after the desperately sad news of Mimi Parker's death early in the month. I've been listening to and watching them for half my life, most recently in April this year, when they were on brilliant form.
Favourite bands are threads that run through your life, stitched each time a new album came out or you saw them live. Pulling on the thread brings back those memories – who you were with, where you lived, what you cared about – and helps connect all those past yous with the current you; the same person despite everything that’s changed. Hearing the news, I felt like a thread I’d expected to bind me together for years to come had suddenly snapped, and it hurt.
A couple of nice gigs: Canadian singer/guitarist Myriam Gendron, and Darren Hayman playing songs from the first two Hefner albums which I liked a lot back in the 90s.
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Martin GUnited Kingdom
Bristol
Don't fall in love with me yet, we've only recently met
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New-to-me games
8 No Mercy x10 NEW!
Brilliantly simple Knizia push-your-luck which went down well at games night and with my family. It's an iteration of Cheeky Monkey and Family Inc, neither of which I've played, but I love that this one is just a 90-card deck in a small box.
8 Air, Land, & Sea: Spies, Lies, & Supplies x2 NEW!
I really like the original and this is a smart standalone expansion. You can play with just the new cards, which follow the exact same rules as the original but with a different, and possibly slightly more interesting, set of special powers. You can also combine with the base game to play an 'epic game' with 5 theatres to fight over instead of 3, which we found a bit overwhelming, and you can play either the 3- or 5-theatre game as a 2v2 partnership game.
7 Dandelions x4 NEW!
An interesting and very quick "roll & move" area majority game, where you do (almost) all the rolling at the start of the game and then pick a die from your stock to use each turn, with limited opportunities to re-roll. It's done in 10 minutes or so.
7 Hammer Time NEW!
As ever with Haba, this is well-designed and has an amusing gimmick - this time a neoprene mat sits on top of the box, covered in plastic gems. You take turns to hammer on the side of the box, attempting to dislodge some (but not too many) gems to complete contracts.
6 Herd Mentality NEW!
This is kind of inverse Just One - you write one word in response to a prompt and you want to be in the biggest group who give the same answer. It was a good laugh but it didn't seem to have very many prompt cards.
6 Lucha Wars NEW!
This ludicrous Mexican wrestling dice-chucker was a good laugh, despite the vague rules.
6 That Time You Killed Me NEW!
This is a combinatorial abstract played across three boards representing past, present and future. You can move your pieces around on one board and also time travel between them. It also has a campaign-style gradual reveal of additional rules. Ultimately I'm just not a big fan of combinatorials though.
5 First Rat NEW!
I'd heard some good things about this one and it *does* have a shared-board OG core, with a clever movement mechanism along a track and payments to other players for landing on a space they occupy. But *man* does it bury it under layers of subsystems, tracks and about five different kinds of engine-building power-ups. And yeah, we did different things and all ended up with about 90 VP +/- 5. I didn't hate it but I'd have liked it a hell of a lot more if they'd just focussed on the good parts.
4 Next Station: London NEW!
Generic zero-interaction flip & write.
Other gaming highlights
Nice to get together for a live online game with some of the OG Guild gang - hope for more of that next month!
Reading
A slow month by recent standards, and I'm having trouble getting into Chinaman by recent Booker-winner Shehan Karunatilaka.
Burley Cross Postbox Theft, Nicola Barker
My seventh Barker in a row, this one a fractured narrative made up of letters retrieved from the titular crime, and set in a village in my home county of West Yorkshire. I had a hard time keeping track of the web of connections between the characters that is gradually revealed, but there was lots of fun along the way and a surprisingly satisfying conclusion.
The Performance, Claire Thomas
Three women, aged around 20, 40 and 70 watch a Samuel Beckett play in Melbourne, and think about things. Surprisingly engrossing!
Listening
Ground to a halt on the Uncut 300 albums of the last 25 years list, but enjoyed some new stuff from post-punkers Dry Cleaning and Bas Jan, Bill Callahan's latest, Robyn Hitchcock's Shufflemania and Oren Ambarchi's mesmeric Shebang.
Three gigs, all excellent. A friend's band (Careful, Spider) playing for the first time outside their hometown. A jubilant, danceable show by the unclassifiable Swiss 13-piece, Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp. And an incredibly fun time with Canadian indie-poppers The Burning Hell, mostly drawn from their great newish album Garbage Island.
- [+] Dice rolls
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Martin GUnited Kingdom
Bristol
Don't fall in love with me yet, we've only recently met
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New-to-me games
8 Gambler × Gamble! x3 NEW!
I think the quickest way to explain this one is kind of like Machi Koro, only instead of the number that pays out being determined by a dice roll, it's determined by the sum of a blind bid by all the players!
You each start with two pay-out cards chosen from 1, 2 or 3 and two bidding cards (0 and 1). The active player places one of their bid cards face-up, then the other players play theirs face-down. Finally the active player can choose to pay to modify the total by 1 either way before the cards are revealed and totalled. The total determines which cards pay out to their owners.
So that's a neat basic structure. Now come the wrinkles... at the end of their turn, the active player can buy one new pay-out card - they come with values of 1-9, and the higher-valued ones also give their owner a new bidding card (2 and 3 are available). The game is a race to 15 so you need to think carefully about whether it's worth spending money on a new card. But there's another incentive to do so, which is that every time the bid total doesn't match *any* payout cards, the player with most money loses half of it.
Oh and the ultimate gamble is the value-4 pay-out card. It costs a whopping 10, but if it pays out, you just straight up win the game.
This is a *lot* of fun! There's lots to think about when trying to figure out which bidding card players might go with and shared incentives develop as the game goes on.
7 King Up! NEW!
I picked this up second hand as a filler that works with 6 and we all enjoyed it. You're each randomly and secretly assigned 6 of 13 characters (so there's a lot of overlap between players), which you then manoeuvre up a ladder getting closer to becoming king. When a character makes it to the top, everyone gets to vote on whether that character becomes king (ending the round) or gets ejected from the round completely. You can always vote "yes", but each player only gets two "no" votes, and you really want to make them count. Lots of bluffing and hoping other players vote "no" for you.
7 Tiger & Dragon x4 NEW!
Beautiful Oink production based on a traditional Japanese card game, Goita. I wasn't impressed by my first play with 5, but it was much better with 2 and 4. Chunky tiles and simple rules would make for a good pub game.
7 LetterTricks x2 NEW!
Interesting trick-taker/word-game hybrid with competitive and co-op modes that play completely differently. Sadly haven't got to play it at its best count (4) yet.
7 Décorum NEW!
Amusing limited communication co-op in which you're trying to redecorate a house but you each have your own secret requirements, which you can only communicate with passive-aggressive comments on the other players' moves. So far I prefer this to the somewhat similar and better-known Paint the Roses.
6 Schrille Stille NEW!
This 90s Euro about the pop music industry has a great gadget to resolve players' blind bids and a lot of potential for fun. But it's waaaaay too long and repetitive, as well as having some rather suspect artwork. King Up easily beat it as a queue-based shared-incentive popularity-contest and Gambler x Gamble as a double-think player-reading game.
Other gaming highlights
Pretty much a standard month with Tuesday games nights, a 2p night, online games with work and geekbuddies, and a smattering of plays at home. Nothing to complain about though!
Reading
At the end of last month I read a brilliant novella by Nicola Barker, followed by her first novel. This month I just kept working my way through them! This blog post does a good job of explaining the appeal:Quote:This is language which calls attention to itself as an aesthetic object. The description of the bridge itself is inconsequential; the whole thing is shuttered off in a tangent. What this tiny sample of Barker's incendiary flash writing shows is that Barker can write and she wants you to know it. I salute this type of writing. I much prefer ambitious prose to workmanlike scene-setting as if from a screenplay.Small Holdings, Nicola Barker
This was my least favourite so far though it still had some good writing. As usual, focuses on a group of weird characters interacting with each other and not much plot - this time set in a park in North London.
Wide Open, Nicola Barker
Baffling but really good - for a taster, it features a character called Ronnie who changes his name to Jim and another called Jim who changes his name to Ronnie. This one takes place in London and on the Isle of Sheppey in the Thames estuary.
Five Miles From Outer Hope, Nicola Barker
Captivating first-person voice from an awkward teenager living in a dilapidated hotel on a remote Devon island. Very funny.
Clear, Nicola Barker
This one is set around the David Blaine fasting in a glass box stunt in London in 2005. A lot of stuff that will only make sense if you were immersed in British culture at that time, but I was, so I loved it!
6 down, 7 to go...
Listening
Continuing to work my way through the Uncut 300 albums of the last 25 years list. Good new stuff was Built to Spill - When the Wind Forgets Your Name, Daniel Romano - La Luna, No Age - People Helping People, Vieux Farka Toure and Khruangbin - Ali and The Comet is Coming - Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam.
One of my three gigs got cancelled (covid's back
) but I really enjoyed Magnetic Fields (lots of 69 Love Songs!) and Robyn Hitchcock. Three more booked for October.
- [+] Dice rolls
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Martin GUnited Kingdom
Bristol
Don't fall in love with me yet, we've only recently met
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New-to-me games
Strike - 12 plays - 8
First Published 2012/pic5950845.jpg)
This is a phenomenal 'play with pretty much anyone' game.
The box contains a plastic dice 'arena' and 26 dice. You divide them up between the players at the start and the last one with dice remaining wins. Each turn you must throw one dice into the arena, and you're allowed to disturb any dice that are already there. If you make any matches, you claim all of those dice and your turn ends. Otherwise you can decide whether or not to have another go, continuing until you make a match, decide to stop or run out of dice. In addition, one face of each die is marked X and any time a dice lands on that side it is removed from the game, which cleverly drives the game to a conclusion. And finally, if you manage to clear the arena, the next player has to roll *all* their dice in, which has a chance of instant elimination.
I've not quite figured out if it's better to try to disturb the dice already in the box or not! It slightly increases your chance of making a match, but also your chance of rolling Xs. More importantly, it's been a blast with everyone from Effie up to her grandpa.
Sea Salt & Paper - 5 plays - 8
First Published 2022/pic6973911.jpg)
New Cathala card game just out on BGA which I've played live with several different opponents. It's really cool! The basic idea is pretty standard - draw and discard, attempting to form sets which can give you points and/or special powers. But I really like the push-your-luck twist it borrows from Koi-Koi. Once you have at least 7 points you can either end the hand immediately, each player scoring their points, or you can gamble on giving the other player(s) one more turn. If you still win, you get a bonus and they score less, but if you're surpassed, it's the other way round. Seriously cute art too, and colour-blind-friendly graphic design.
Collusion - 1 play - 7
First Published 0/pic4922934.jpg)
Another really neat David Parlett card game - here you're aiming to win the same number of tricks as *exactly* one of the other players (of 4) and have to constantly reevaluate as the hand goes on. Table talk is encouraged too!
Castello Methoni - 1 play - 7
First Published 2019/pic4693006.jpg)
Interesting! Initially it looks like an area majority game - you're placing houses on the board and also dividing it up with walls. But it turns out it's much more of an economic game, and you can earn a lot of points by buying areas cheap and then having someone else buy them from you in turn. It's a little reminiscent of Acquire in that regard but more flexible as your cards only determine which part of the board you can place walls in, not a specific location.
Rumble Nation - 2 plays - 7
First Published 2017/pic5288566.jpg)
A really neat area majority filler that kinda reminds me of Las Vegas in that you roll dice which tell you which area you can place in and how many cubes. On top of that it has a cool dilemma between playing into lower-point areas which resolve early and allow you to spread influence to adjacent areas, versus just playing straight into the higher-point areas.
Cinderella's Dance - 6 plays - 7
First Published 2019/pic6529789.jpg)
Minimalist 21-card climbing game by the brilliant Taiki Shinzawa. After a few plays, I still can't quite work out how much agency there is, but it's always fun regardless!
Sundae - 2 plays - 7
First Published 2022/pic7037169.png)
Carol LaGrow and Sean Ross's reimplementation of Schotten Totten with dominoes is fun. I preferred the smaller "2 scoop" version where you play 2 dominoes to each flag over the "3 scoop" which hurt my head.
Skulls of Sedlec - 3 plays - 6
First Published 2020/pic7007048.png)
Picked this up at a nice games shop in La Rochelle as I had carry-on luggage only and it's very small. It's a pleasant enough 18-card drafting game but not nearly as good as Circle the Wagons. The solo mode (cheap print & play) looks quite fun if I can be bothered.
Sumatra - 1 play - 6
First Published 2020/pic5617417.jpg)
I'll never turn down a new Knizia! Found this a bit disappointing though, not helped by the wretched graphic design. It feels like Ra scoring but a bit more complicated, while the drafting is a lot less interesting than the auction in Ra.
Scrabble Scramble - 1 play - 6
First Published 2005/pic139081.jpg)
Not a bad Scrabble derivative, in which you roll 7 dice each turn to form your hand, play a word and then leave only that word on the board, returning the previous one to the dice pool. Each turn is on a one minute timer and you play first to 200.
Other gaming highlights
My most games played in a month ever (124)! I had a week with my extended family in France (highlights being Cross Clues and Kakerlaken Poker) and two weeks with Sarah's family in the US (Strike was a big hit). In between there was a wonderful weekend getaway with old gaming friends.
Reading
Probably my most reading in a month too! I should take three weeks off work more often...
All The Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
I adored Cloud Cuckoo Land and a trip to France seemed like a good time to read his breakout hit. It had some of what I loved in the later book, but honestly I could go the rest of my life without needing to read another "good Nazi" story.
The Rabbit Hutch, Tess Gunty
A debut that deserves all the praise it's getting. Set in a decaying rust belt town, it follows the lives of the residents of the titular apartment block. It's satirical but heartfelt and reminded me of David Foster Wallace at times.
Tennis Lessons, Susannah Dickey
An intimate, sometimes claustrophobic, second-person telling of the life of a woman growing up in Northern Ireland, in snippets at roughly annual intervals. Definitely want to read her second book now.
The Word for World is Forest, Ursula Le Guin
An understandably furious polemic in response to Vietnam, but that made it a bit less interesting to me than the more ambiguous The Dispossessed which I read earlier in the year.
Elder Race, Adrian Tchaikovsky
A clever novella which alternates between fantasy and sci-fi, depending on which character's perspective we are taking at the time.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Toshikazu Kawaguchi
An interesting premise but it feels more like a play or a collection of short stories than a novel and the writing (or the translation) is awkward. The narratives of the four stories felt quite conservative in their gender roles too.
The Stranger Times, C.K. McDonnell
This was recommended as a Pratchett-esque romp and while it wasn't as laugh-out-loud funny as PTerry (who is?), it was definitely enjoyable.
Industry of Magic and Light, David Keenan
His brilliant This is Memorial Device evoked the post-punk era in small-town Scotland and this sequel/prequel does the same for the psychedelic 60s. The first section is told through an inventory of the unearthed contents of a caravan while the second half is in the form of a tarot deck. A strange trip indeed!
How High We Go in the Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu
This has been getting lots of praise and sounded like my kind of thing but I found it really disappointing. Although it spans multiple interlinked perspectives over hundreds of years, he only really seems to be able to write one, rather flat, character. And at times it felt like he was rushing through a checklist of sci-fi hot topics rather than saying anything meaningful.
I Am Sovereign, Nicola Barker
Meanwhile this novella takes place over the course of a 20-minute house viewing in Wales but the characters jump off the page and burst through the fourth wall. Post-modern and hilarious, I savoured every moment.
Reversed Forecast, Nicola Barker
Loved it so much that I went back to her first novel, with the intention of reading all twelve eventually! This one is not so meta, but just as vivid and fleshy.
Listening
Really enjoyed the sample-heavy and summery Reset by Panda Bear and Sonic Boom.
Also Meridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimento and Sons Of by Sam Prekop and John McEntire.
No time for live music but three gigs to come in September.
- [+] Dice rolls
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Martin GUnited Kingdom
Bristol
Don't fall in love with me yet, we've only recently met
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New-to-me games
Wow, a bit of a splurge this month!
Overstocked - 5 plays - 8
First Published 2021/pic6196059.png)
I backed this a while back and had almost forgotten about it but now I'm glad I did. It does the familiar 'patching' thing with cards each depicting a 3x2 grid of four different types of toys, which you can rotate and overlap in different ways. But the cool thing is that as well as patching your personal 'warehouse' together, you can also choose to put cards into the central 'popularity' area. After 6 cards played by each player, your score is evaluated as your largest connected area of each toy *multiplied* by the largest area of that toy in the middle. But! The toy with the largest area in the middle is 'overstocked' and instead counts negative, allowing for some huge swings. I've played with 2, 3 and 5 so far and 3 was definitely best.
Mismatch - 1 play - 7/pic4927045.jpg)
Always happy to try a Parlett trick-taker and this one is of the silly fun variety. The main thing you want to do is avoid matching a suit or rank already played to the trick, or even worse making a sequence of 3 or 4. As the hand goes on you try to keep your options open but someone inevitably ends up getting screwed!
Jekyll vs. Hyde - 1 play - 7
First Published 2021/pic5316646.jpg)
Interesting 2p trick-taker where one player wants both players to win the same number of tricks in a hand while the other players wants to win as many tricks as possible or lose as many as possible. The special powers are restrained and it's rather nice.
Doodle Dash - 1 play - 7
First Published 2021/pic6102105.png)
A speed drawing game in which the players take turns to be the guesser and everyone else draws their own picture. The first to finish grabs a baton, the second to finish rolls a dice until it comes up 'stop' and then everyone stops. First the guesser sees only the first-finished drawing and tries to guess. If they don't get it, they see the second-finished one too. If they still don't get it they see all the others. Points for a correct answer go to the guesser and to the owners of the pictures that triggered the successful guess. Very funny!
Kiitos - 2 plays - 7
First Published 2020/pic5204795.jpg)
A letter game in which someone states a word and plays its first letter and then on your turn you must add the next letter if you have it in hand or else you must add a different letter and declare a new word to target if possible. I'm pretty sure there's a traditional version of this? 2p was much better than 3.
Free Ride - 1 play - 6
First Published 2021/pic6240235.jpg)
I'd been looking forward to trying Friedemann Friese's TransAmerica/Ticket to Ride-ish route-making game but was a bit underwhelmed by my first impression. We're planning to come up with a way to indicate the available routes on the board though, as it was a real faff having to constantly cross-reference between the cards and the map.
Battle Sheep - 1 play - 6
First Published 2010/pic1887253.jpg)
Hey That's My Fish-like shrinking possibilities abstract. Probably better with 2? (we were 4)
Rear Window - 1 play - 6
First Published 2022/pic6743744.png)
This is new from Prospero Hall and it's basically Mysterium with a cleverly integrated theme from the Hitchcock movie. The pictures feel a bit duller though and there's a weird potential traitor element which I'm not sure quite works.
Organic Soup - 1 play - 6
First Published 2010/pic729476.jpg)
An old and rare Chudyk. No crazy card powers here, just four types of atom (C, H, N, O) which you gradually assemble into larger and larger molecules. It reminded me a bit of Sid Sackson's Monad crossed with Rummikub.
The Ming Voyages - 1 play - 6
First Published 2020/pic5300237.jpg)
Yet another little card-driven war-game. I feel like there are diminishing returns from these as you don't really get much out of them without knowing the deck, but that doesn't tend to happen with so many other options available.
LACORSA Grand Prix Game - 1 play - 6
First Published 2018/pic2840981.jpg)
Like Knizia's Formula One Motor Racing this is a race with only relative track positions. Here you move up the field by playing a higher card than the player in front of you in a blind bid. You seem pretty screwed if you get dealt a bunch of low cards...
Framework - 1 play - 5
First Published 2022/pic6573332.jpg)
A Rosenberg 'take & make' with simple rules but very little interaction. Bring back fun Uwe!
Other gaming highlights
A lovely get-together with old friends in London and a few great 2p sessions in addition to the usual Tuesday night fare. And it was really fun to get a trans-continental table assembled again for online MarraCash.
Reading
London, Burning by Anthony Quinn
Set in late 1970s London and featuring four interesting characters (a journalist, a policewoman, a young academic and a theatrical impresario) whose paths cross in various ways, with a background of strikes, political tension and IRA bombs. The ending felt a bit rushed but otherwise I really enjoyed it.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
The story of a childhood friendship which becomes a creative partnership, in the video games industry. I enjoyed the first and last thirds a lot more than the middle, but in retrospect, the characters becoming unlikable and self-obsessed in their twenties was kind of the point.
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
Interesting parable reminiscent of Jose Saramago in which the residents of a small island gradually have objects removed from their memory, enforced by a secret police. Haunting, but also quite slow.
Your Show by Ashley Hickson-Lovence
A peculiar telling of the story of the first black Premier League referee, made up of second-person narrative and newspaper and social media clippings. I enjoyed the backstory but there was a lot of kick-by-kick narration of 90s football matches which was a bit of an ordeal even for someone who knew a lot of the personalities involved.
Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura
Sweet young adult fantasy in which a group of misfit teenagers find themselves transported through a portal to a mysterious castle.
Listening
Lots of good new stuff, my favourite being the powerful Riderless Horse by Nina Nastasia.
Also enjoyed Gwenno's Tresor, Laura Veirs' Found Light and Naima Bock's Giant Palm. Best older things were the gorgeous The Cloud of Unknowing by James Blackshaw and the Necks' hour-long improvisation Drive By.
Two wonderful gigs by old favourites. I've seen Belle & Sebastian lots of times over the past 25 years but they were in particularly fine form and good spirits at this one, a twice postponed outdoor gig in balmy weather on Bristol's harbourside. On the other hand I'd never seen Dean Wareham, and what better time to rectify that than when he was performing the whole of Galaxie 500's On Fire, certainly one of my top ten albums of all time. Support act Ryder the Eagle was quite something too.
- [+] Dice rolls
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Martin GUnited Kingdom
Bristol
Don't fall in love with me yet, we've only recently met
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New-to-me games
I wasn't really supposed to be playing any new games but...
Mille Fiori - 2 plays - 8
First Published 2021/pic6703416.jpg)
From a glance at the busy board and the rules I thought Knizia had jilted me and run off with Feld, but I shouldn't have worried. Yes, there are several mini-games which combine into a point salad with winning scores in the 200s. But they're all played on the same central board, each with different and interesting player interaction. And the scores aren't of the gentle 2.8 or 3.2VP per action type, they have some brutal drop-offs and you really have to watch what you're passing to the next player.
Keltis: Neue Wege, Neue Ziele - 1 play - 7
First Published 2009/pic446316.jpg)
I'd been interested in trying this for ages and picked up the base game with this bundled as the other side of the map. Fascinating! Instead of each colour of cards driving one pawn along a matching track, the tracks branch, allowing you to switch from one colour to another as you go. Lots more options, lots to think about. It's amazing how much Knizia has wrung out of this system over the years.
Set & Match - 3 plays - 7
First Published 2017/pic4594738.png)
Wimbledon is the perfect time of year for this clever flicking game which really manages to capture something of the feel of a tennis rally. The court is marked with zones giving 0-3 points, and where you land pushes a pawn back and forth along a track until one player manages to get it all the way to the end zone and score a point. There are also bonuses for hitting crosscourt or drop shots.
Schnipp & Weg - 3 plays - 7
First Published 2012/pic6894367.jpg)
This was flicking great too! It takes place on an hour-glass shaped wooden board, each player starting with a row of their pieces at opposite ends. It's a bit like pool/snooker, in that if you knock at least one opponent piece off the board while not losing one of your own, you get to keep flicking. You win a round by eliminating all the opponent pieces, but that means you permanently lose one of your pieces and start the next round closer to the middle, providing a bit of a catch-up mechanism.
Exit: The Game – Dead Man on the Orient Express - 1 play - 7
First Published 2017/pic5320930.jpg)
We hadn't played one of these for ages. As well as the usual sequence of puzzles of various types, there's also a murder mystery to be solved as you go along. Worked quite nicely but we were too tired to put it all together correctly by the time we finished.
Other gaming highlights
Lots of fun with So Clover, Wavelength and Fiesta de los Muertos with old friends at a getaway for Sarah's 40th. A lovely afternoon of Faiyum with Joe and Sam. And hopefully the first couple of a good run of games of Blue Moon with Joe.
Reading
David Annand, Peterdown
I really loved this social satire, but I'm not sure how much of that depended on it having such a huge overlap with my life and interests. The setup is that a new high-speed rail-link is coming to a post-industrial Northern England town, and either the local football stadium or an architecturally-important but unloved housing estate will have to be demolished. A tall tale unfolds across a panorama of the local community and some memorable characters. The fictionalised town is a lot like where I grew up and the football team is very like the one I support. Add to that my dad having spent his career in local government and being an architecture buff/local historian in his retirement and you can see why it resonated with me!
Damon Galgut, The Promise
This won the Booker last year and I can see why. It tells the story of a family across a background of modern South African history, starting near the end of the apartheid era and taking a stop in each decade since. The narrator's voice swoops dizzyingly between characters and even 1st/2nd/3rd person - each of the four lengthy chapters feels like a single-take tracking shot in a movie.
Gwendoline Riley, My Phantoms
This is a vicious and brilliantly-observed character study of a daughter's toxic relationship with her parents. The daughter gets to tell the story but doesn't give away much about her own life. In the end what she doesn't say perhaps ends up telling us more about her though.
Listening
Over on Uncut magazine's Top 300 Albums of the last 25 years my favourite was Charlie Haden/Liberation Music Orchestra's Not in Our Name. Favourite new thing was the Firmer than a Rock We Stand EP by LYR, featuring our poet laureate Simon Armitage, who's from my hometown.
Also went down to London to see William Basinski perform at the Barbican. The first half was him on his own playing his recent album on a laptop plus two tape reels looped around a tuning fork. The second half was the London Contemporary Orchestra playing two arrangements of his Disintegration Loops. It was sublime - repeated string motifs gradually dropping out and brushed drums contributing rising 'static'.
Thu Jun 30, 2022 2:16 pm
- [+] Dice rolls
