Boardgames June-September 2023

 This is the usual mix of new-to-me and, well, some not new-to-me at all games:

7 Wonders Duel: I hadn't played this in quite a while. It's a really good two player version of the original, which achieves the difficult feat of replacing the card drafting with something just as good.

Canal Mania: Sort of, but not exactly, Ticket to Ride with canals. There's an added element of pick-up and deliver, which was the bit I failed to get to grips with and so ended up way behind. I'd like to play again, just to prove I'm not completely useless; or possibly just to prove that I am.

Clank! Sunken Treasures: I'd never played this version before, but it was fun, with an 'inability to breathe' twist. I also played Clank! Catacombs, and that's still the one I'd recommend.

Dogfight!: Rule the Skies in 20 Minutes!: Yet another lot of exclamation marks! I'm undecided about this, mainly I think because we made the mistake of playing the introductory scenario too many times without moving on to one of the more advanced missions. It's also fairly abstract.

Earth: Meh. I could see this possibly being popular in a world where Terraforming Mars didn't exist.

Expeditions: I have gone on record as saying how much I disliked Scythe, so I was surprised to rather enjoy this 'sequel'. Of course it's no such thing, simply a different game with similar setting and artwork. I never take any notice of theming for Eurogames so that was fine by me. There's very little player interaction so it can be a bit dull when it's not your turn.

Faiyum: A game of draining swampland as advisors to Amenemhet III. We played it two-player and I'm keen to see how it might differ at higher player counts.

Flashpoint: Fire Rescue: I don't generally like cooperative games, but this one's not bad. The roof fell in and killed us all, as it generally does in my experience.

Heat: Pedal to the Metal: I'm going to keep including this one in these lists, just to reinforce how good it is.

Hey, That's My Fish!: What is it with the exclamation marks? I'd never played this filler before, but it's quick and it's fun.

Joan of Arc: A draw and write version of Orléans. After we'd finished we all looked at each other and said "I'd rather play Orléans". Not helped by very small and cramped iconography.

On the Underground: A pleasant game about building tube lines in London, where my local knowledge sadly failed to give me any advantage.

Planet Unknown: Great game, highly recommended. It's basically a multi-player solitaire polyomino tile laying game, except that tile selection is via a lazy Susan meaning that most of the time you have to make do with what you're given. There are more things to concentrate on than you can possibly achieve, so full of choices and decisions.

Red7: This light filler hadn't come out for ages, and to my surprise the group to whom I introduced it treated it really, really seriously and it took forever to play.

Shoot for the Stars: An overproduced little game which exposed just how useless most people seem to be when asked to think about well known things in numerical and quantitative terms. How can anyone not be able to estimate approximately the longest age that a tortoise has been known to live to (*)? I won by a mile.

The End of the Triumvirate: A three player game in which you play Caesar, Pompey or the other one. I really enjoyed its combination of military conflict, trying to raise money and the need to retain political support.

The King is Dead: A very good game which also requires precisely three people and therefore doesn't come out too often. Appeals to players who like to sit there and think "If I do this he will do that, but then she might do this, and then....".

Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries: Another three player game; you may be able to guess that the regular group has been a couple of members down for much of the summer. The map was new to me and I liked its tightness.

Truffle Shuffle: The truffles in question are chocolate, but despite that I didn't really care for it.

* As a hint, it is possible, though disputed, that the same individual tortoise was owned by both Charles Darwin and Steve Irwin.

Badahoth/Badajoyce

 The latest game in the Peninsular campaign was a battle near Badajoz, brought about mainly by your bloggist neither understanding the rules nor having bothered to take any account of publicly available information about the size of the various French forces. James wrote about the first evening here, and the second evening saw it reach a conclusion.

I, in my capacity as Beresford on this occasion, attacked from the outset, not so much because I thought it was a good idea, but because in the context of the campaign I thought I should. One has to assume that all sorts of things are abstracted in the campaign mechanics, and in this case it was the reason why the British would be the aggressor against an equal force with large reinforcements arriving any moment soon. One must just assume that there was a good reason why they did. 

Anyway, much to my surprise it all ended in a draw with both sides being very low on morale and not being in a position to do much; indeed the last hour or so of playing was rather dull. Whilst the arrival of the French reinforcements was imminent (*), the British were withdrawing steadily and it was by no means clear that the new troops would be able to cause much damage before nightfall. In the end permanent casualties were fairly light on both sides, although the hospitals will be pretty full with those recovering. I left James (no Mark or Peter this week) to do the paperwork, but overall I think I came out of the affair far better than I was expecting. The main reason for that was, it seemed to me, the resilience against morale challenges which the British in particular benefit from in the rules we use.

Lots of photos were taken and James will no doubt write it up in detail in due course. When I was originally rolling up my army lists one small crumb of comfort was the inclusion of some extremely feisty heavy cavalry. They repaid this faith by destroying two units of French light cavalry and causing the Polish Lancers to think better of it and withdraw. Let's hope we see more of them during the campaign.

* Fortunately for the British and Portuguese the order in which the cards were turned up in the third turn effectively delayed their arrival for a further turn after that.

Product of a Southern Land

 Here, for no particular reason, is Rob Tognoni from 2007:

The Peninsular Campaign - where are we at?

 Over the last couple of weeks we have fought out the second battle in the Pyrenees, at Manresa. James has posted a report on the first night with plenty of photos. That evening's play was as good a game as I can remember, with what ought probably have been a walkover for the French swinging both ways, including a rather feisty counter-attack by the only two average Spanish units (all the others being poor) and featuring a cameo from the militia who, now I think about it, are even worse than poor. The second evening saw the inevitable happen though, with the French finally sweeping all before them. The battered Spanish withdrew down the coast, the winners marched into Barcelona, and James and Mark awarded themselves vast numbers of victory points including some - I kid you not - for refraining from stitching each other up.

We then moved on to the next campaign moves, which saw the end of the turn before anything much had happened. Eventually the British got a chance to move, but sadly your bloggist managed to both misunderstand the rules and misread the likely intentions of Soult. Next week will therefore see Beresford's Portuguese attacking a French force of approximately equal size with an even larger force under Soult himself poised to arrive, although thankfully quite late in the day.  Part of my misunderstanding of the rules has been deemed understandable after all and an appropriate adjustment incorporated therein. Unfortunately my misjudgement of the likely size of the French force remains and next week could be quite hard going.

Dorothy de Kansas

 Some scepticism has been expressed as to my reading of Piazzolla's opera 'Maria de Buenos Aries' as being a metaphor for the rise, fall and rise again of tango. Indeed there was one suggestion that I may have spent too long outside without a hat in the unseasonal sunny weather we are experiencing (*).

"What do we want? The free creation of silver money alongside gold! When do we want it? Now!"

In my defence can I point to another example of the use of artistic metaphor. L. Frank Baum's 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' was written as a satire on the presidential campaigns of William Jennings Bryan on a Free Silver platform. The Wicked Witches are the East and West Coast bankers, the Scarecrow represents the farmers who were too stupid to avoid getting into debt, the Tin Man is the industrial workers who didn't have the heart to take action in support of the farmers, and the Cowardly Lion is politicians who were too afraid to intervene. Given that we're speaking of bimetallism the Yellow Brick Road and Silver Shoes need no explanation (**), not does it need pointing out that Oz is the abbreviation for ounce. I am less persuaded of the idea that Dorothy was meant to be Theodore Roosevelt, which seems to have been put forward on the somewhat tenuous grounds that their names are nearly anagrams (***)

* For those who don't me I am, although it is barely visible to the naked eye, starting to go a bit thin on top. 

** I know they were Ruby Slippers in the film, but they were Silver Shoes in the book. The change was made, I believe, to look better in Technicolor.

*** It does, however, allow me to include something tangentially related to wargaming.

Maria de Buenos Aries

 And so to the opera. In my recent review of 'Frida' I forgot to mention that it was the first opera I had ever seen which was originally written for an orchestra which included an accordion (*). I have now seen a second, sort of. In fact Astor Piazzolla's 'Maria de Buenos Aries' was written for the bandoneon, but I defy even the most passionate rivet-counter amongst this blog's readership to spot the difference between the noise made by those two things.

That's an accordion

Obscure instrumentation aside this piece - which I really enjoyed - goes straight to the top of the list as the most bonkers storyline for any opera I've ever seen, and that is of course a very high bar, as realism and opera librettos are often strangers to one another. I shall attempt to provide a synopsis:

Maria is born in the slums of Buenos Aries, but, lured in part by her love of tango, escapes poverty by becoming a sex worker. 

[So far this is is unremarkable, indeed it could be the backstory to La traviata. This section ends with one of the highlights of the whole thing in which Maria loudly affirms who she is, an which is reminiscent in spirit of the party scene in Verdi's opera. However, things are just about to become weird.]

Maria then falls in love with an accordion and yes, I said accordion not accordionist (**). This proves a transgression too far even for those in the sleazy milieu in which she moves, and so they kill her. However you can't keep a good woman down and so she comes back to life, or possibly reappears as a ghostly spirit; it wasn't terribly clear. For reasons that were also somewhat obscure she is taken down to an underground cabal of psychoanalysts. When she escapes their questions - they don't seem to offer much in the way of therapy - she is pursued through the streets of Buenos Aries by three marionettes (***), who have been hired to impregnate her with their seed. This having occurred she gives birth to herself and yes, I said to herself not by herself.

So, what's it about? The director chose to play up the religious elements (she's called Maria, she rises from the dead) and the queer elements (let's face it, there aren't any, but what opera director has ever let something like that stand in their way?). Despite all that it worked a treat. The playing, singing and dancing were all great and, once one gave up trying to follow what was happening, it was a delightful evening.

The most lucid interpretation that I have subsequently read is that the piece is actually lamenting the decay of tango as a form of music and dance. Having been born in the slums of Buenos Aries, it moved to the mainstream where it was contaminated by the accordion (or perhaps the bandoneon) and other foreign influences; commercialised by the US mainstream (e.g. Hollywood), it was eventually influenced by the Avant-garde and was reborn as nuevo tango, whose prime exponent was none other than Piazzolla himself.

Is this a bandoneon? Actually, I don't think it is: 

* Although, for the record, not the first opera I had ever seen which actually included an accordion in the orchestra.

** Regular readers may at this point be reminded of this post from a few years ago.

*** These weren't real characters in the story played by puppets on stage, they were marionettes in the story played by real people on stage.

Berwick

 I've been to the Scottish Borders for a few days. I spent some of that time in Berwick-upon-Tweed, which of course isn't in Scotland and hasn't been since Richard of Gloucester captured it in 1482. I was vaguely aware that ownership of the town had been keenly contested for centuries prior to that, but would have been hard pushed to tell you why, beyond the normal willy waving of medieval monarchs. However, as soon as one sees the place, all becomes obvious. Obviously any wargames blogger worth his salt would have taken plenty of photos to illustrate that, possibly featuring how its Elizabethan bastions allow artillery to dominate the mouth of the Tweed. Unfortunately this blog is written by me and all I've got is a picture of a cunningly disguised secret entrance from which the defenders could launch a surprise attack on unsuspecting besiegers.

The town's museum is in the former barracks, which incidentally may have been designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, and had some interesting exhibits. We haven't had a photo of a gibbet for a coiuple of weeks, so let's start with this:

For those of you wondering about the fish, don't - it's a red herring. This rather fine diorama was in a case with, as far as I could see, not much in the way of explanation. It could be Berwick Castle, but there's not much left of that, as the stone was robbed to build, amongst other things, the barracks.

In addition to the town museum, there is a large exhibition about the British Army from its formation to the colonial wars at the end of the 19th century, which was rather well done. I was pleased to see that it included some toy soldiers. My photo manages to include the colour party, but at the expense of showing either of the flank companies or the battalion guns, all of which are faithfully replicated. The 25th Regiment of Foot became, I believe, the King's Own Scottish Borderers, hence their being chosen for the display.

I did venture into Scotland, mainly for a spot of walking. This is what's left of  Roxburgh castle, which I include only because it was here that in 1460 James II of Scotland paid the price for playing too active a part in a siege. 'Haveng sik plesure in discharging gret gunis' he was killed when one of them 'brak in the fyring'.