'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

The occasional church board game group met up again this afternoon to have a crack at Game of Thrones! JR picked House Stark, S picked Greyjoy (squids!), Other S went for Lannister (lions!), my sister chose Tyrell (Tudors! - because they have the rose as their emblem), and that left me with House Baratheon. After watching an unintentionally hilarious Youtube tutorial (fork!) we felt we had enough of an idea of the rules to give it a go.

Things very quickly settled into three separate areas: S and Other S dueled over the western side of the board, JR steadily conquered all of the north with little opposition, and my sister and I quickly realised that fighting for lands in the south would not end well for either of us and agreed a truce. This lasted for three rounds, with I think my sister in the lead... and then while planning the fourth rounds, I realised that if I broke the truce I could claim a win! Well, this is Game of Thrones, so with her encouragement House Baratheon sent a seige engine via four ships to flatten one neutral force, strolled into a second area, and waltzed into a House Tyrell land which had been left undefended in an earlier round to claim 7 castles for the win!

Naval power turned out to be surprisingly effective - I had ships throughout the entire southeast of the map which meant I could launch attacks to/from any of the coastal areas. I think a single siege engine ended up responsible for destroying three sets of neutral forces. The truce with my sister also helped, along with always bidding high on the Iron Throne - if she'd been able to move before me, she could have heavily reinforced her lands to prevent my win.

After skipping last week due to a PCC meeting, it's pasta night again! With all four of us who could make it tonight (such is the ebb and flow of pasta night).

Since there were only a few of us, we dug out some games with smaller player limits and settled on Dominion. It was a strange game - in the random card selection were hardly any +1 Action cards and only one +2 Action (the Village card), so very little happened in each turn. But at the same time two of the action cards affected all players (Spy, Thief) and so there was still a fair bit of activity.

I bounced around a few possibilities before settling on a game plan of buying Silver to buy Gold, and then using the Remodel to turn a Gold card into a Province. It worked... but not as effectively as I'd have liked - I should have started on that sooner, and converted more Silvers into Duchies. Beth managed the win mainly through buying lots of Duchies.

Driving back, Bury Hill provided amusement again - this time not one but two cars thought they could climb the hill faster than me. Which they did on the straights (only because I was holding to 50mph), but not round the corners (which again, I take at 50mph because the Alfa can)!

After Messy Church elemnar and I got together with a couple of church friends for pizza, cake, and board games!

First up was Ankh-Morpork, a favourite of ours partially because of the Discworld theme and partially because of just how bonkers it is (after all, what other board game has a dragon landing on the board as a random event?). Sharon very nearly managed a sneaky win as a Lord in it - the only thing that spoilt it was her being new to the rules and so having to check with us if she'd met the win condition, at which point elemnar and I predictably spent the next turn bumping off her minions. I've found it's not actually all that hard to setup a win in Ankh-Morpork, but holding on to it is where the challenge is as you only win if you meet your win condition at the start of your turn. Anyway, ultimately elemnar pulled out a surprise win as Dragon, King of Arms!

Afterwards I dug out the Super Mario Bros power-up card game and we played several rounds of that. It's a nice quick game to play and easy to pick up the rules for. The win condition on that is last-person-standing, and somehow Other Sharon won one round without losing a single life token!

Posting things a little out-of-order here

Pasta night is back! It went on hiatus for a month or so due to the usual hosts being sidetracked by a twinpocalypse (as jonners99_uk called it), but now that things have settled down a bit it's back to normal (in as much as pasta night is ever normal).

This week was mostly spent catching up but we managed to fit in a couple of rounds of King of Tokyo. It's basically Godzilla meets Highlander - each player plays a typical B-movie monster (such as a kraken, giant gorilla, or MECHA DRAGON) and takes it in turn to either attack the monster in Tokyo, or if they're in Tokyo then attack all the monsters not in Tokyo. Whenever the monster in Tokyo is attacked they have the option to leave Tokyo, at which point the attacker enters. Last monster standing is the winner!

That's basically it - actions are determined by rolling a handful of dice (with results of punch, heal, gain energy, or gain victory points) and there's cards that can be bought with energy to gain bonuses, but at the end of the day there can only be one King of Tokyo!

I also explored a different route to pasta night - on the approach to Emsworth the radio was warning of dire traffic along the A27, so I took the A3(M) towards Petersfield and picked up the A272 following half-remembered routes and bits of family trips. Time-wise it took about 10 minutes longer than usual, probably due to encountering a tractor somewhere around Midhurst. Fortunately the bit of the A259 between there and Petworth has a couple of short bits of dual carriageway for passing such things, and if I drop the MiTo down to 2nd gear (!) I've got plenty of acceleration to play with. I did the same route on the way back to familiarise myself with it, and aside from a couple of awkward junctions around Petersfield it's a reasonable route, if more likely than others to contain tractors.

While on the topic of gaming, St John's Fareham held a pancakes and board games evening on Shrove Tuesday. elemnar came along as well and we joined a group playing Zombicide (wherein you try to escape from a zombie-infested city while not getting eaten by zombies - so basically, Shaun of the Dead). We had the weirdest luck with zombie spawns - on the very first turn I drew the abomination spawn card (high-strength zombie, hard to kill) and so we spent a chunk of the game carefully avoiding it. For the scenario we picked we had to collect three food items, get the green key, use it to open a door to the blue key, and then escape. Of course the blue key and the exit were at opposite corners of the map.

Over the game we put together a very silly strategy: elemnar proved very good at rolling well on the hit dice and mowed down zombies with a pair of sawn-off shotguns, which caused all the other zombies to head towards her (the game mechanics are that the zombies head towards the most noise).



We took advantage of that, and her character ended up aggro'ing the zombies by emptying the shotguns in an empty room (our record was 6 noise counters). This did then result in her being chased by the entire zombie hoard...



...while another group snuck round the back to retrieve the blue key. We then all made our way towards the exit, leaving all the zombies (and I do mean all - we ran out of zombie figures!) to congregate in the middle of the board as we leapfrogged through already-cleared buildings to reach the exit. Somehow we all survived!

Discussing Smash Bros at pasta night...

Kyle: ...so you know wavedashing?
elemnar: No, I just know how to use Jigglypuff.
Kyle: O_O

Ph34r elemnar when she puts on her "kid sister" face and plays Smash Bros - she will pick the girliest pinkiest character and utterly destroy you.

Today's voteamabob was very close, but placed Machi Koro (with the Harbour expansion) and 5 Minute Dungeon as joint winners. So as there were 7 of us and those games max out at 5 players, we played both! I played Machi Koro and managed to do a lot better than I have done with previously games of it at SWARM. I don't think I had much of a strategy to begin with, but ended up going heavily in on red cards (take money from the active player) and blue cards (gain small amounts of money from the bank on anyone's turn) - these initially gave a very low income and it took me a lot longer than everyone else to construct whatever card lets you roll 2 dice. However once I managed that and got a Tax Office card my deck suddenly started raking in money and I managed several rounds where I had about 25 coins to spend (and usually lost it all during the round to regain it on my next turn). I was left just needing to get the final victory card and just could not quite get the 30 coins needed for it, and ultimately Kyle manage to grab it before me. Still, second place is not to be sneezed at and I got to the about-to-win point first!

Potholes encountered on the A27 between Chichester and Bedhampton: 33. Yes, I counted them (the ones I drove over/through at least) - well, there's not much else to do and I'm convinced they're getting worse daily, let alone weekly. I'd swear that on the way to pasta night I found potholes that weren't there two days ago...

Anyway, didn't I used to update a blog here or something? Somehow it's been over a month since the last proper update. I keep doing blog-worthy things and going to blog-worthy places while just never getting round to actually typing up any of the drafts I start writing in my head. But I'm back from pasta night, in front of the computer, and talismancer has updated more recently than me... so here's a semi-random pasta night post!

Not sure what I'll do with other older half-written posts - there's a few that I ought to complete and will probably backdate to whenever the events therein occurred.

We were a bit thin on the ground tonight because of various reasons, so tonight we only had one game going: Colt Express, as being one of the few games we had that tops out at 6 players (Forbidden Desert was suggested, but vetoed as it officially tops out at 5 and probably isn't balanced for 6). With 6 bandits running up and down the train there was much chaos and thwarting of plans, not to mention an angry sheriff and rebellious passengers. I played Belle who has the special ability to not get shot or punched if there's another bandit that could be targeted (and just now, typing this sentence I've realised that I completely forgot that for the final round and really should have done the complete opposite of what I did - should have stayed in the crowd instead of trying to get out of punching range. That probably cost me the win in the second game).

We played two games of it. In the first round Matt stormed ahead with a very successful tactic of heading for the carriage full of jewels while leaving everyone else to squabble over the rear couple of carriages, then continuing to the end to try for the briefcases. Beth on the other hand (playing as the Ghost, who gets to play their first action card face-down) went for maximum chaos and scuppered several plans. The second round became more hilarious - Matt and I both went on top and headed for the front of the train. I tried to head down and discovered the sheriff, who opened fire, forcing me back to the roof. The sheriff then got moved by someone else and Matt headed down, collected the briefcase, returned to the top... and I punched him to force him to drop the briefcase, collected it, and then legged it towards the rear of the train. However it was not to last - the end-of-round action moved all players to the top of the rear carriage, I made the mistake of moving instead of staying put, and Jonners very successfully second-guessed my actions and managed to swipe the briefcase through persuading everyone else to move the sheriff to his advantage. Cheeky!

It's a game that requires decent visualisation skills - to really succeed at it, you have to keep track of which visible actions have been played, where all the players (and sheriff) could end up, and what they could actually do (as while you have to decide what action you will take in the card-playing/programming phase, you get to pick the direction/parameters of the action while resolving it. So someone playing a move action gets to pick the direction after all cards have been chosen). Each round involves everyone going round about 4 times to select an action, and to mix things up some turns have the actions played face-down so you have to guess what the players might do. I find I often lost track by the final turn though as long as you can keep track of a few players it's usually possible to not lose all your loot.

The voteamabob once gain threw up the traditional pasta night games of Ticket to Ride and Dominion, so jonners99_uk did a bit more number-crunching and instead selected Scotland Yard and Galaxy Trucker as being the two games with the most first-choice votes. Perhaps the voteamabob app should take rankings into account when we eventually get round to writing it? Anyway, Sarah, Vicky and Martin played Scotland Yard with Matt leading them on a merry dance around London (and managing to get to the end without being caught!), while myself, Paddy, jonners99_uk and Beth played Galaxy Trucker.

We started off with a practice session to try and get to grips with the rules, then reset the scores and tried again for real. In the first round I think we all were on fairly even scores, but then it all went horribly wrong for the second round - the very first card Paddy drew was Epidemic which wiped out most of my crew (including my purple alien which I'd picked up to try and bolster my firepower). Then a few cards later we turned over a Slavers card, and without the alien I couldn't present enough firepower. So the slavers took the rest of my crew, and I was then out of the game with a crewless ship on all of 8 credits (having not managed to collect any cargo, and also having lost a chunk of my ship due to a pirate attack). The others made it through to the end with scores of 30-something credits, and we called it a night rather than add insult to injury with the third round.


On the way to pasta night I was listening to Radio 1's 10-minute takeover. The first track picked was Gorillaz's Feel Good Inc., and for a brief moment instead of being stuck in a queue on the Chichester bypass I was transported back to my degree at Sussex University all those years ago. In particular it reminded me of that common area tucked away at the top of the EDB building (now called Silverstone) - it had WiFi, power points, and was a good place to settle down with the laptop and bash away at a bit of coursework (when I wasn't playing Worms Blast or completing random LiveJournal memes). There used to be one of the many little cafés tucked away as well, and a computing cluster that was always deserted and so handy if I needed to be on the main uni network. Sussex was full of odd little common areas and cubby-holes - I found a good number of them (Mantell common room, Pevensey I, Pevensey II (I spent so much time there along with talismancer and ptristan that the porters joked about placing a "reserved" sign on one of the tables), Essex house, loads throughout Arts A/B and the Library, and of course the Pevensey Bridge) and I'm sure there's just as many elsewhere in the campus still waiting to be discovered (I never did find the ENG 1-3 tunnels that pewterfish once described).

It's odd how an apparently random snippet of music can remind me quite strongly of a given place and time.


I know I keep saying this and yet do nothing about it, but I do miss Sussex University and I do want to go back there and study again one day. Returning for a Masters or even a PhD is actually possible, and is not a completely bonkers idea. The trouble is I'm torn as to what to do as while Brighton is an amazing place to live and study in, I actually quite like Fareham and don't want to move away (and that's without contemplating moving to Cornwall...). Wait, that's not quite right - it's more I don't want to move away from the friends I've made in Fareham, and in particular church and housegroup. Two years ago I'd have happily moved, but over the past year-and-a-half I've finally set down roots here.

Perhaps I could commute to Sussex? Again, not totally bonkers although it would involve either a daily drive along the A27 past the bottlenecks of Chichester, Arundel, and Worthing, or instead the joys of Southern FailRail and an east/west change across Brighton station (which is just slow because the timetables don't line up). Actually, no, that's not an option thanks to the RMT's contempt for passengers - the train journey I could deal with (have 3DS, will game), the unreliability makes it completely impractical. Perhaps I could move a bit of the way along the coast and be within a reasonable travelling distance of both Fareham and Brighton?

Or I could even not go to Sussex and instead continue my studies at another university. Southampton and Portsmouth both have major universities, and those aren't the only ones within a reasonable distance of here. Except Sussex is a campus university, sitting in the South Downs and surrounded by the countryside, while Southampton and Portsmouth are city universities and that's just not quite the same.

In any case July's a bit late to be suddenly applying for a 2017 course. But for 2018... hmm...