Wake

For posterity, I shall record the (not-completely-traditional) order of my Afmaelisdagr. IIRC everyone but me joined hands, and circled three times widdershins. Then I handed an avatar of the earth (an apple) to a Reeve or Companion, and asked them to hold it aloft while I called on it in the name of maybe twenty aspects, relatives, or parts to aid. This was repeated for five planets.

Some of the names were mildly mangled, as even the kinder rot13 was tongue-twisting, but the kicker was the Aztec-god aspect of the sun.

Five assistants were intended to form the points of jomscarf-pentagram about me, but at the last minute I listen to the baying of the new sun and decided this particular one would appreciate strength of feeling more than ritual.

Then they circled again, I called the names of the five planets and the sun, everyone had a *small* sip of mead from the horn, a libation was poured on the ground, and the sun rose. Just about.

Several people joined us that morning, including davethedog, of whom we still have his mark-signature added to the list of Jomsvikings. Unfortunately I was made to promise not to name him as the next reeve.

For that day the day was beautiful -- crisp, cool, but warm in the sun, and all round a perfect morning. Unfortunately since, it seems to have been uniformly grey, to the extent that I wondered if we were under a nuclear fallout and I just hadn't seen the news.

Games

Blockus

On tuesday I missed Tolkien because I'm too fond of the quiz and went to games evening. We played Blockus, which I thought was a very elegant game. One has board of about 30x30? squares, and each player has pieces, one of each shape of 1-, 2-,... 5-ominos (eg. the one [][][][][] piece would cover 5 consecutive squares of the board). You start placing a piece in your corner, and thereafter take it turns to place a piece one square of which diagonally-adjacent to a square of a piece you'd already placed AND NOT HAVING any square orthogonally adjacent to one. (Winner is the one with the fewest squares left when no-one can go.)

Excusing the slightly awkward ruling, there's just that one rule, but leads to fun consequences. Surround area so your opponents are denied it and you can fill it later. Squiggle diagonally between other players diag-touching pieces and fill other areas of the board.

Lord of the Fries, Villa Piletti, Hogwarts Cluedo

At sonicdrift's on sunday we played Lord of the Fries, a pretty silly, scoring-by-getting-rid-of-sets-of-cards games about Zombies in a fast food restaurant. Also Villa Piletti again, which is nice.

And hogwarts cluedo, which was quite a nice adaption of it. I never used to *really* like cluedo -- I felt if only I could write all the information down right it'd be obvious but tedious to work it out, but that was never practical, and never worked out the best way. Which meant it was never really *fun* to play because I was feeling I should. I've a better feel now, enough to not take it too seriously, though I will look up some strategy at some point. The touch of humanity was people spontaneously ganging up one player with the evil ghost.

It was a nice evening, though I'm not sure if people clashed a bit by feeling like different sorts of games at different times, leading to no-one being completely satisfied.

Penultima

At post-pizza we played penultima again, the game where each Spectator chooses a rule for how type of chess piece should move and the Players try to figure it out during the game. I think it *sometimes* works quite well socially because spectators can reasonably chat while people are thinking and don't have to take it *too* seriously. And I like the working it out, because if the rules are chosen right you have enough of a feel for what they do not to be completely blind, but aren't overwhelmed by strategy as if you knew them all and had to work out a winning combination.

When the rules I was playing against were revealed I was quite pleased how they all seemed to hit the sweet spot of not too obvious before hand, but possible to work with, and obvious in retrospect. And I liked the names. We even developed a bit of an endgame, which was interesting as I had made some lucky guesses and had a fair idea of how several pieces moved -- but had had most of them taken. And then we rushed to finish so we could go home and sleep.