ELOPDGPWOG

That was a fun evening. Interesting and fun games, which I did fairly well with.

It started off slowly, with a game of penultima that was a bit awkward. Perhaps the spectators should have have been more vocal with suggesting the best strategies to move on quickly, but advising people midway through a chess game is always bad, especially when some of the rules are yours. In fact, penultima spectators always seem to need to be slightly too engaged to get a good conversation or different game going, but not enough to be really involved throughout. Maybe one should have two penultima games at once?

Another game of penultima with Ian and aldabra went quickly though. There were many interesting rules, though most didn't get really explored. I managed to think of a couple of interesting though slightly flawed ones -- my pieces ended up being used the most, which either means I made them too powerful or optimally understandable.

Then most people started cancellation hearts, and I didn't feel up to whist variants so jumped ship. Overhearing made it sound fun, but with several digressions into rules, etc, and much mao puns being made.

*I* joined fanf, sonic and Mobbsy playing killer bunnies. I joined half way through, which is entirely possible because advantages come and go, but typically harder to do because other players have build up positions; but may have been annoying (though everyone was nice and didn't mind) because (a) it skews the existing balance a bit, and having to have each phase explained to me as we went through (b) I think I had more than my fair share of very cool cards in my opening hand (c) I quickly caught up with sonic and mobbsy in carrots, and though fanf had most mine won. Yay!

I think it's a pretty fun game. Rules picked up fairly quickly especially if you don't have expansions -- there are many special cases, but all printed on the cards like in magic --; and complicated enough to be interesting but not excessively so; and very funny and sweet cards. The winner is interesting somewhat random with the best position having a big advantage. I'd need to play again to see how well balanced it is, it held up pretty well so far, but most other games of this sort end up with one or two cards being disproportionately powerful and the expert's game revolving round them.

ELOPDGPWOG

Then I played quorridor with fanf, sonic and mobbsy. I hadn't realised that several of the beautiful fun games come from the same company. Gigamic seem to produce several lovely games, I think their website introduction says it fairly well, games: "both useful and ornamental, simple to learn and quick to play,a pleasure for all ages, highly creative with a new concept, challenging, of high quality and attractively presented, Gigamic has invented a bestseller - the ornamental game."

Though if you had to summarise you could say "wood" and "emergent behaviour" :)

Quorridor with four players is very cutthroat, and was fun, though I got misled halfway and ended up behind until we ended up in a fourway standoff position with tony coming out ahead in the end.

And fanf showed me Gobblets. This is very cute: a 4x4 board, and carved wooden cylinders open at the bottom of four sizes so you can play a bigger peice completely covering a smaller one. The manual shows little excited or worried faces on the peices in their how moves work diagrams which is cute beyond words.

I'm getting much better at explaining quorridor rules briefly. Four basics and one more:

(1) Start at the centre of your side of the board.
(2) Moves are one square orthogonally.
(3) Win is reaching the opposite side of the board.
(4) On your turn you can move or place a wall from your supply[1].
(A1) You may not place a wall leaving your opponent with *no* path to the end of the board[2]
(A2) If you are adjacent to another peice you may jump over it. If the jump is blocked you may jump 1 forward and 1 sideways to an empty square)

[1] Walls are two squares long and slot into grooves between squares. You start with floor(20/num(players)).
[2] Rules like this are often fun. Without it the game would be stall every time it happened, but forbidding it adds lots and lots of strategy working out what exactly could be forbidden.

But Gobblets was even simpler to learn, and much more complex to play. I ended up beating tony 3.5 to 0 which amazed me -- I'm normally not good at strategy games with much planning or remembering, and I think he normally is. But I often have a lot of beginners luck at this sort of emergent game-- I've wiped the floor at games evening at blockus for instance, coming from behind. Maybe my intuition is good but I need to practice more.

The first couple of games ended quickly but the last lasted for ages, getting tense as I backed him into a corner where every move left more and more potential lines for me, and less and less he could do, but with one move that could prolong things, and always the chance he'd form a pair of lines I couldn't block without disrupting my layout and reversing things entirely -- initiative as in chess seems important.

At the end the board was almost entirely full, and moving almost any piece would reveal a smaller one underneath that might form an opponent's line.

And we were still thinking of new strategies at the end. Though the depth of the last game stretched me to my limit; many more and I think anyone who's good at looking two moves ahead would overtake me in skill.

All in all a fun evening and fun games.

Jack's Gastropoda Variations

Arian Jack

The saddest sound in all the world
Is when a snail's all cozy curled
Until his little shell all neat
Is found beneath your stomping feet.

Cycling Jack

The saddest feeling in the world
is when a snail all cosy curled
Comes underneath my rolling wheel.
So imagine what I feel.
And then, as your encore,
--imagine what it feels
--nothing any more.

Spring Clean Jack

The saddest sound in all the world
A spider on a cobweb curled
And as you try to clean around
It breaks free and starts to fall
Legs brushed off-- no sound at all.

Doctor Who -- Tooth and Nail

Yay! I liked this one. I hadn't expected to -- Queen Victoria and a Werewolf sound like a cliched recipe for disaster, but I thought it was good. I didn't love Tenant as much as Eccleston, but he seemed normally natural and occasionally glorious this time. It was sometimes funny, and mostly -- amazingly, excluding a few flat jokes -- felt real.

Next time: Woo! GILES!

Also, what's with Opus Dei? This is before the sect, whether you think they're a sinister cabal or not, isn't it? I admit it's cool but why does every pseudochristian masonic assassin organisation pick on Opus Dei as a defining characteristic?

ETD: ETA: I'm not so sure about either series idea of story arcs though. Is this tied in to Bad Wolf? Either way, while I applaud trying to make a story arc, I fear all their efforts feel forced.