The Dog Days

Happy xmas (to those of you who celebrate it)! Believe it or not, amongst other gifts I received was a game - Settlers of Catan. I know it's been around awhile and that many of the regular readers of this blog will have played it, but I haven't and am sure looking forward to it. Though the boardgame we are planning to play sometime in the next week and a half (when the world here stops for summer dogdays* holiday) is a six or seven player game of the old Avalon Hill classic, "Civilisation". That'll take about 12 hours to play. Is pretty cool how can usually get folk together to play it once or twice a year.

A few days before xmas i got myself a 'little something,' one of those computer game magazines which has a game disk with it, "Age of Conan". It sounds like a megagame, and suffers from a lot of the commercialisations that come with these things, but I was grew up reading the original Conan stories and can't resist having a look at the world of Hyboria for thirty days before the free period of this online game expires. With holidays in front of me, hopefully I'll be able to advance enough to travel a bit and have a look around. Who knows, I might even like it?!

* The dog days is a term from the roman era referring to the sliding number of days after the solistice to correct the calander each year (I think). I use it to describe the null days between xmas and new year.

East Front again

Wayne has started up another scenario of Talonsoft's East Front II that we play by emailing turnfiles. Again, he is the russian and I the german in this WWII tactical hex based comp game. I think we're about one all in the present run of scenarios. This one seems to be a russian cavalry divsion trying to swarm over some isolated german outposts on the steppe, but that will clarify itself as the turns progress (we always play it with fog of war 'on').

5 player LOTR

Had a five player game, with Jess and Jarrad being the two first timers. We got further than in any other game (though still didn't reach Mount Doom before Sam the Ring Bearer (me) was corrupted by Sauron - along with all the other hobbits except for Merry). The dynamic was a bit different as one would expect with five players, with 'advantages' to the group and 'disadvantages' to the players, as I put it. Again, took about two hours (including a snack break).

The ring has now been taken from our home for a week to be used elsewhere. Little doubt that the young ones will soon have optimised their playing strategies and will be keen to show us 'oldies' how it is done when the ring one day returns.

Session 5: Sauron starts on 15. Shaun, Nancy, Jessica, Jarrad, Mark. Scored 57.