Boardgaming Q3 2025

 

I wrote earlier in the year about how one member of my regular boardgaming group had been named Lemon Curd champion of Otley. Subsequently one of the others has been crowned Fruit Scone king of Addingham. What a talented bunch they are. I'm pleased to say that when we are not stuffing our faces with their baked goods we are still able to find time to play a few games. Here are some of them:

Azul: A very good game, which I have played remarkably few times.

Bomb Busters: I really enjoyed this cooperative deduction game in which players seek to collectively defuse a bomb by 'cutting' various wires using mechanisms that are a bit Hanabi meets Trio. I've only played a couple of the training scenarios, but apparently there are 66 in all. It's much less frenetic than the similarly themed Fuse. Do you know, I might actually have to put my hand in my pocket and buy this one.

Calico: A tile laying game where the aim is to lay out patterns and colours in certain combinations in order to create a quilt which cats can lay on. Like many such games it gets really annoying when the right piece doesn't turn up at the right time and I spent the game thinking that it was all luck However, the two players who had played before absolutely thrashed the two who hadn't, leading me to believe that there must be some strategy in it. I'd certainly play again.

Canvas: A drafting game in which what the cards drafted are mostly transparent, but with a small amount of screen printing. Three of these are combined in a special sleeve with a background card to create a 'painting'. It's a gimmick in search of a game, but plays very quickly so doesn't particularly outstay its welcome.

Distilled: Highly thematic and way too complicated game about making various types of spirits. There are something like half a dozen rounds. As we completed scoring for the first of these the person teaching the game gently told me that I had misunderstood what I was supposed to do and had in fact ended up with nul points. "Never mind" I thought, I understand it properly now. However, the same thing happened again at the end of the second round when I once more didn't trouble the scorers. I did manage to break my duck later in the game, but ended up being so far behind the eventual winner that, despite my being teetotal, I was sorely tempted to turn to one of the drinks we had been distilling.

Flamme Rouge: Astonishingly it had been eight years since I last played this excellent cycle racing game, although I have played the closely related Heat: Pedal to the Metal many times since. Nothing about my performance had improved and once again both my riders failed to cross the finish line.

The Gang: A cooperative version of poker. Just think about that for a moment. It's as terrible as you would imagine. The worst game I've played in a long time.

Lancaster: I had to teach this again, and once again that wasn't ideal. Still, this time it had only been 18 months rather than ten years. It's a good game, but I need to find someone who owns the expansion. Apparently that introduces a mechanism which can penalise those players who don't do their duty and  fight the French.

Let's Make a Bus Route: The Dice Game: I've never played the original, so can't say whether this matches my usual rule of thumb: dice/card versions of games are usually worse than the game they are based on. I thought that this was over-complicated, but possibly repeated playing would make things clearer. There are two maps to choose from. One is a random city (in which every tourist attraction is the Eiffel Tower) and the other is Mars. Odd,

Mountain Goats: A perfectly fine filler about climbing up mountains and pushing other goats off the top.

Northwest Passage Adventure: Clever enough game about racing through snow and ice. The rule book is terrible so I'm not clear how correctly we were playing it.

Prey Another Day: Eat or be eaten in  a sort of Citadels combined with Love Letter. Quick and fun.

Project L: A polyomino tile layer where you get to choose difficulty level of the puzzles you try to solve. It was OK.

Scythe: I had a disastrous first game of this a couple of years ago and it's taken this long for me to be persuaded to try it again. It went much better, but I still don't see why it is so highly rated. 

War of the 3 Sanchos: When I mentioned this last year I said that, while obscure and probably hard to find a copy, many wargamers would enjoy it. I still think so. Hopefully it won't be as long before El Cid rides out again in Otley.

Western Legends: Another game that might appeal to wargamers is this one. Take on the character of a famous figure of the old west and swan around either rustling cattle, robbing banks and shooting people or alternatively arresting those who do so. Add in prospecting for gold, playing poker and visiting the bordello and you have all the ingredients for a lot of fun. I got arrested more times than I would have wished by the NPC sheriff, but perhaps I'm just not cut out to be a black hat. Great fun.

V

 I need to mark the death of Leeds born poet and translator Tony Harrison, a working class boy made good who kept his radical politics his whole life. 

Let's have a few lines from his most famous poem, which are sadly still as valid today as they were in 1985:

These Vs are all the versuses of life
from LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/White
and (as I’ve known to my cost) man v. wife,
Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right,

class v. class as bitter as before,
the unending violence of US and THEM,
personified in 1984
by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM,

Hindu/Sikh, soul/body, heart v. mind,
East/West, male/female, and the ground
these Fixtures are fought out on’s Man, resigned
to hope from his future what his past never found.

The prospects for the present aren’t too grand
when a swastika with NF (National Front)’s
sprayed on a grave, to which another hand
has added, in a reddish colour, CUNTS.

There is going to be a reading of the whole poem on October 12th at Holbeck cemetery, site of his parents' vandalised grave which prompted the writing of the poem.

We Wear The Mask

 We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

       We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

       We wear the mask!

                  -Paul Laurence Dunbar

Broken Nose

 Regular readers will understand that I am always on the look-out for excuses as to why I haven't posted for a while. Well, I have found a new one. I think I have broken my nose. The circumstances need not bother us here; suffice it to say that they weren't as exciting as the last time I did it, a mere fifty years ago. On that occasion interventions were necessary from the London Ambulance Service, the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital and the Metropolitan Police, and I was by no means the most injured person following the, er, incident. As a good indication of how tame my life has become in the meantime all that seems to be required now are a cup of tea, some paracetamol and an early night.

Here's some music from the mighty Family:

'Rhythm in her arse' indeed. This next one is most certainly not suitable for work:

 

Accipiter nisus

 Poetry has been somewhat absent from the blog recently, so let's rectify that. The spark for this is a sparrowhawk who decided yesterday that my garden was the ideal place to eat his prey, a chaffinch I think. It's the circle of life.

It's a bit blurry, not to mention showing that the wargaming annexe could do with a coat of paint.

This is what Ted Hughes had to say about the visitor:

Slips from the eye-corner - overtaking
Your first thought.

Through your mulling gaze over haphazard earth
The sun’s cooled carbon wing
Whets the eyebeam.

Those eyes in their helmet
Still wired direct
To the nuclear core - they alone

Laser the lark-shaped hole
In the lark’s song.

We find the earth-tied spurs, among soft ashes.
And maybe we find him

Materialised by twilight and dew,
Still as a listener -

The warrior

Blue shoulder-cloak wrapped about him,
Leaning, hunched,
Among the oaks of the harp.

PotCXXVIIIpouri

"Nowadays Roman numerals only exist for things which powerful people want to look permanent, but which are actually very impermanent indeed." - David Boyle

Firstly, I'm still getting twenty thousand hits a week, and it's still annoying me; much more so that if none were being registered at all, and that would be substantially closer to the truth. I saw a statistic yesterday that 80% of all website hits on the whole internet are currently being made by bots of one form or another. However, that figure came from an AI source, so who knows.

Secondly, there has been some wargaming, so hooray for that.

It was game of To the Strongest! using James's Crusades figures. He thinks it's his best painted collection, which means it's very, very good indeed. The plan is to switch next week to possibly his least colourful period - although they're still lovely models - with some early WWII North African action. Will it be Sidi Rezegh? Let's hope so.

Various cultural activities have started up after the longish, hottish summer. I went to the Proms, something I had never done before. Also uncharted territory was a visit to a Rugby League match. I went to see the Leeds Rhinos, courtesy of Leeds Building Society who are their main sponsor. The pre-match meal etc was all rather good; the game itself left me uninspired and I didn't come away with any regrets for having given it a miss over the decades during which I've lived in the North. The outcome wasn't in doubt once the legendary Leeds ex-player brought on before the start to tell the assembled corporate guests what he thought would happen forecast that Rhinos would win at a canter by thirty or forty points. Inevitably the Catalan Dragons took an early lead and pulled steadily away as the game progressed. 

George Macaulay Trevelyan

 I've been doing a little bit of research about the collection of model soldiers at Wallington in Northumberland. Unsurprisingly perhaps I discovered that this wasn't the first wargames blog in which the figures have featured. There's a bit more detail and a lot more photos on a post on Tom's Toy Soldiers from October 2013. The eponymous Tom seems to have found some notes about the collection, which is more than I did. Maybe he was extravagant and bought a guide book. It's interesting to note that the Trevelyan brothers seem to have bought whatever figures happened to be available and then used them to represent whatever they needed them to be; it seems nothing much had changed between the 1880s and when I started wargaming in the 1960s. It also explains why I thought there were figures from the Risorgimento.

I hadn't come across Tom's blog before, but it looks like it will be worth reading. In another of those happy coincidences which always intrigue me his post from last Monday also concerned model soldiers at a National Trust property.

The George mentioned solely by Tom in terms of his role as a substitute for dice rolling grew up to be the distinguished historian George Macaulay Trevelyan. This fact was picked up by an even earlier, and with all due respect to Tom, even more celebrated wargames blogger. In his Wargames Newsletter #114 (*) from September 1971 the late, great Donald Featherston says that Trevelyan credited this early study of war games with his ability to so vividly describe battles in his own writing. Among Trevelyan's major works is his trilogy about Garibaldi; I wonder if that interest was also inspired by the figures in the collection.

* This edition also contains a letter from Gary Gygax and the exciting news that Airfix are to release a set of French Napoleonic Infantry.