Dominion

I went to games evening and mostly played Dominion all night. I'd seen it before, and it was very popular, but always want to pick up new games slowly, so hadn't tried it. However, it actually is easy to pick up.

It's is hard to describe[1]. You have a deck of special cards consisting of money, action cards (eg. "draw 2", "play another two action cards," etc), and victory cards (that have no in-game effect, but at the end of the game you win for having the most of them). You repeatedly cycle through your deck. Each turn you draw five cards and play/discard them[2]. When you've drawn everything, you shuffle your discards (and new cards you gained) back as your new deck. The first two turns, this happens exactly every two turns.

The aim[3] is to play money cards to get more interesting cards in your deck, which hopefully synergise with each other a little bit, eg. to allow you to repeatedly draw more cards until you have a hand full of money, play something else useful, and then buy something expensive (one of the big victory cards).

Because you start with five cards each turn, you need a sufficiently high density of interesting cards, or you'll fizzle by drawing a few victory cards that don't do anything, and a few small amounts of money.

Each game starts with a different selection of ten possible action cards available to purchase, so each game you have a slightly different strategy, and sometimes it's more interactive and sometimes not interactive at all.

[1] Unless you're a Magic player, when it's "like building a magic deck, but interactive and fun" :)
[2] Non-respectively, for pedants :)
[3] That's the aim. The justification is to score points with expensive victory cards. A pedant might have said "means/end" not "aim/justification" :)

New books

This evening I came home to find my doormat covered in new books. One had a message from the seller saying she hoped I liked it as much as she did. One had my favourite cover, despite having no cover shown in the listing.

What is this computer game?

I have a vague memory of a computer game that goes something like this:

* You play a cute demon who was cast out of the underworld to go and fetch... something
* You walk around in 2.5d, half-way between a side-scrolling adventure game (like monkey island) and a side-scrolling platform game
* Each level starts fighting some sort of boss, the first is a big demon guarding a bridge. You don't get hurt, but can't win one-on-one and have to use some kind of lateral thinking strategy every time to get past the obstacle.
* You walk from one screen to another, not quite linearly. Each has some sort of combination action/puzzle, eg. move from stepping stone to stepping stone, not quite in real time, but not too slowly.

Does anyone know what that is? I remember seeing a couple of sreenshots, and playing it somewhere completely random, but I can't remember any of the proper nouns.

Armageddon Rag

When I started going out with Liv, we pressed on each other some of our favourite books, many of which became instant favourites. Unfortunately I absorbed so much new material so quickly, most of it never got blogged about at the time.

It's notoriously hard to describe why Armageddon Rag is so good. I generally say something like "You know how many books attempt to cash in on the vague connection between rock music and the supernatural, and describe music so evocative you can practically hear it and it makes your spine creep? And use that feeling to subtly suggest that, maybe, just this once, something supernatural is going on behind the scenes? And those books generally fall far short, because describing what music feels like with text is really hard and no-one can do it? Well, Armageddon Rag does do it. It makes you want to run out and buy the records, and be horribly stricken that they don't exist!"

The band are called the Nazgul, but it's not heavy on Tolkien rip-offs. They were massive in the 60s, until the lead singer was assassinated. The main character and others were mostly active in counter-culture then, writers for alternative magazines, etc, but are all grown up now, and looking back on who they used to be, and who they expected to be now. I really can't do it justice, but it jumped instantly into being one of my favourite books. (You may also want to read Liv's and Rysmiel's reviews, as Rysmiel originally introduced it to Liv.)