All you women, now stand in line...

 ...I'll give you some lovin' in an hour's time

It's a long time since I did some boardgame reviews, and it's even longer since I combined them with a Ronnie Hawkins track. Let's start with the recently departed Hawk:

And on to the boardgames:

7 Wonders Duel: A two-player version of the original, which is equally good. It doesn't really work with one of my regular playmates whose Peace Studies degree - featured here once or twice in the past - precludes her from ever engaging with the military side of things, meaning she loses an awful lot of games by being conquered. It highlights what to me is an obvious practical flaw in being a pacifist, namely that one has rejected one potential solution before one even knows what the problem is.

Bargain Quest: This is a clunker. To start with it's about heroes fighting monsters, which is not really my sort of thing. But the twist is that the players don't even get to take the part of the heroes. Instead you play shopkeepers seeking to lure the fighting men into your shop to fit themselves out with armour, weapons etc. Who on earth thought this would be a good idea?

Carcassonne: Great game for two people, bit slow with more players. We only play with the Inns and Cathedrals expansion.

Cat Café: A roll-and-write game about cats and the ludicrous things that people buy for them. Probably best to visit a mad cat lady to orient yourself before you play it. Not a bad little game though.

Concept: This is a sort of cross between Codenames and Pictionary with no drawing involved. To my surprise I rather enjoyed it.

Cover Your Assets: I enjoyed this one as well, possibly because the winning strategy was obvious to me, but not apparently to everyone else, which meant I won with ease.

Fairy Tale Inn: Despite the theme and the spatial awareness part (it takes place on a kind of Connect Four vertical grid) I like this. It needs a wider variety of characters; given how many fairy tales there are, there should be plenty of scope. It's a two-player game.

Ganz schön clever: A very good roll-and-write game where you try to choose dice in such a way that they give you not just as high a score as possible, but also the best bonus combinations. It plays up to four, but I prefer it with two as you get to do more. The sequel Doppelt so clever is just as good, although I haven't yet cracked the best strategy for the blue dice in that one.

Half Truth: It's a trivia game, but one that caters for varying levels of confidence in one's answer. Not especially memorable though.

Jaipur: A two-player trading game, which is quite unusual in itself. It's an enjoyably tight game in which one has to choose one's moment to collect camels for fear of the next cards being drawn all being jewels.

Lost Cities: This is a cracking two-player card game, ostensibly about explorers' expeditions into the unknown, but actually a challenge to avoid throwing away something your opponent may want without clogging up your own hand with dead wood.

Patchwork: Another good two-player game. Get buttons into your design early is my advice.

Pit: Now here's a blast from the past, 1903 to be precise. I doubt that I had played it for fifty years. Still good fun in the right environment.

Power Grid: Excellent game. We played the China map and I won.

Qwinto: Das Kartenspiel: Not available in English - I think my copy is Dutch - it's a flip-and-write version of a dice game. Despite the cards only being laid out in a two by two matrix I struggle with the spatial awareness aspect. Pathetic really.

Qwirkle: I got this out to demonstrate it to  a couple who were looking for a game to play with their 8 year old grandson. Given that they were completely bladdered when we did so I'm not sure how well they were able to judge it; your bloggist has become very censorious in the years since he last had a drink. For the record, I think it would be a good game to play with one's grandchildren.

Sagrada: A rather pretty game where you lay out coloured dice to imitate designing a stained glass window. The theme doesn't really carry forwards into the scoring, but it's all perfectly light and pleasant.

Shanghaien: As the name might suggest the theme is shanghaiing sailors in Shanghai. Neither the rules nor the scoring are that intuitive, but when you get the hang of them it's a good, thinky, two-player game. It's out of print though.

Splendor: This is the game I have played the most in recent months. It's not a gamers' game, indeed most serious gamers turn their nose up at it, but when playing with non-gamers it hits the spot. No real theme, but easy to pick up and with very tactile components. There are a variety of strategies and the winning one will inevitably be something your opponents are doing.

Spyfall: Not for me, but then social deduction games never are.

Startups: From Oink Games, this is a small but interesting game that was perfectly OK. You really have to put to one side anything you might know about the way that investment in start-up companies actually works.

Trek: Another old game, 1960 this time, but not one that I had played before; mountains not stars. We played with an original copy, with the rules printed in the lid and poorly moulded plastic pieces. It was inevitably unsophisticated, with a lot of 'take that', but also relatively short. I'd have another go in the unlikely event that I bumped into someone who owned it.

Targi: I think I might have mentioned before that this is my top recommendation for those seeking a two-player game. It's excellent. 

Wingspan: One of the best-selling games of recent years. The gameplay is fine, although there isn't a great deal of player interaction, and it's certainly very nice to look at.

Zillionaires On Mars: I'm not generally a fan of auction games, mainly because no group of players ever seems to collectively judge values in a way that makes them work. Inflation on Mars seems even worse than on Earth and all bids are in zillions, which I'm not sure makes it any easier to pitch them at the right level.

Filling Time

 I haven't forgotten my promise to document at tedious length my adventures in London, plus there's the 211th Otley Show to report on (*). However, I have been in the dentist's chair again and am feeling a bit bashed about.

While I'm here though, an update on BT. You may remember they gave me a couple of small, seemingly arbitrary amounts of compensation for a bit of a delay in upgrading my broadband. Well, they've now given me a third payment, and this time it's £619.92, thus moving from the slightly odd to the frankly ridiculous. That amount is more than I will pay during the whole of the duration of the contract whose implementation caused the problem in the first place. Sell your BT shares immediately, they have lost the plot.

* Spoiler alert: it was pretty much the same as the other 210. Still, it was good to be there again after the pandemic gap.

Pot57pouri (slight return)

 I have been absent. In my absence I have been away. Lots of culture was involved, so watch out for a long boring post about it all. In the meantime here's a photo of one very non-cultural site which previously featured on this blog here.

By coincidence I bumped into the same two characters as last time, looking even more grizzled as they came out of the tunnel than they had at the old White Hart Lane. It has to be acknowledged that it's now a very impressive stadium indeed, although it by no means resembles going to the match as I remember it. As if to prove the point we brunched along the Tottenham High Road on organic eggs benedict accompanied by designer sparkling water in an expensively pretentious bottle, the days of several pints and a kebab now being merely a distant memory.

There was no sign of the Costa del Sol Cup. 

Fighting for Mexico - the unboxing

 It is a truth universally acknowledged that a wargamer in possession of more money than sense must be in want of a set of rules for a period for which he has no figures. I have, therefore, bought a copy of the newish Peter Pig rules 'Fighting for Mexico'.

They consist of 132 ring-bound, black and white pages within colour covers. There are a number of photographs, mainly showing examples of suggested unit basing, terrain types etc with only a couple appearing to illustrate points from the rules. A first read through gives the impression that they are easy enough to follow, and they do contain a number of snippets of the designer's thoughts. Peter Pig have a house style which involves those explanatory sections also being used to tell anyone who questions their decisions that they are wrong, which I have always found a bit irritating. The same could be said of their approach to editing and proofreading; pages 31 and 32 for example seem to me to contain exactly the same information repeated twice in pretty much the same words each time. 

They are inevitably gridded - which is good - and I understand that the RFCM rules which these most resemble are PBI and SCW, but I've never read those so can't confirm that. They do have some resemblance to Square Bashing, and many of the differences appear, at first glance, to address things I don't quite like about that set. In particular they allow units to be spread over more than one square, which would sometimes make sense in SB, and for which I have seen house rules on other blogs. It does, however, worry me that units are going to be very difficult to tell apart from each other without some sort of elaborate base marking system. That is, of course, all moot because I don't game the period. While I was ordering the rules I did take the opportunity to buy a couple of packs from Peter Pig's extensive Mexican Revolution range, but that was just by way of a look see...

PotCXVpouri

 Life carries on here much as usual: BT have given me another seemingly arbitrarily precise compensation payment, £26.24 this time; another family of mice have appeared, necessitating more poison to be laid out; I have spent an inordinate amount of time in the dentist's chair due to problems with decades old crowns; and I have ordered another set of rules for the Mexican Revolution, despite it being a period which I never intend to game. I shall no doubt return to the last of those when they turn up.

I mentioned in a recent post that 'The Book of Mormon' contained songs on all sorts of potentially offensive subjects. I have now been to see the much more mainstream 'Sweeney Todd' - by the late, great Stephen Sondheim - and find that much of the lyrical content is about murder and cannibalism, so not offensive at all. It was very good though.

I've also been to see Steeleye Span's 50th anniversary tour. The band are, as Maddy Prior pointed out, a 'Ship of Theseus' with not many original members remaining. Indeed two of those in the official 2022 tour photograph above weren't there. Still, they were also very good. [Note to self: see if you can think of some more exciting descriptive words before writing your next review] Anyway, being folk music, the lyrical content was all a bit grim: cruel killings, seduction and abandonment of innocent maidens who then perish, hauntings by headless monsters etc. There seems to be a bit of theme developing here.

Musicians often refer on stage to others they have interacted with. Recently Nick Lowe spoke about Mavis Staples, which certainly impressed me. Maddy Prior out-namedropped them all by telling us what the Queen said to her, which was apparently: "Such jolly tunes". Still, if my ancestors had carried on in the same way as those of Her Maj, then I might also have a different threshold as to what constituted 'jolly'.

Laon, 1814

 C&C Napoleonics returned to the annexe for the first time since September 3rd 2019. Could we remember the rules? What do you think?

At some point in the last few weeks we had another - and I suspect final for a while - crack at the ancient galley rules. Overall, I think everyone is happy with them. They give a quick, fun, decisive game with multiple players each controlling multiple ships and it all wrapping up in a couple of hours. If I had to search for negatives I would say that the situation where many ships end up locked together and resulting in a mass melee requires an application of wargamers' common sense to make it work. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but it will be difficult to write down and even harder to explain. I don't know if James intends to publish these, so perhaps that point is moot.

Anyway, back to C&C, which is another game that gives a quick, fun game, all over in an evening. We didn't do too badly with the rules really, our main problem being trying to keep track of all the national characteristics associated with the various units. Having said that, we also got the rules for cavalry vs square badly wrong, but it was the same for both sides. We had a go at the Laon epic scenario from the C&C Napoleonic website using the epic rules from expansion 6 and the tactics cards from expansion 5. I really like the latter in particular; they ensure that plans don't always work as intended and do it in a manner which appeals to me. The French won when the Old Guard stormed through the middle destroying everything in their path. The Prussians being a bit too feisty early on was their undoing. We shall have another go next week: Friedland I think.