Weekend Writeup

[major_clanger]

Friday evening was one of Mike A's boardgame evenings - one of the many benefits of living in Cambridge! I think we had a total of eight along, including bohemiancoast who'd specially made it up from London. I'd brought along our copy of Alhambra, a game we'd played at the most recent Stabcon and had enjoyed so much we promptly bought. It's easy to learn and fairly quick to play but nonetheless the strategy is by no means trivial and it's often not clear who has won until the final totting up of the scores. There are apparently two expansion sets, although only released so far in German (but I'm sure translations are available). After two fun games we switched to the extremely silly Greedquest, which rather like Munchkin is a game that allows you to indulge in all the fun of role-playing gaming without the tedious actual role-playing.

Saturday afternoon took us down to London, mainly for swisstone's birthday meal but first for the Mac Expo in Islington. We managed to do surprisingly little immediate damage to our wallets but I suspect that it's just a matter of time before we succumb to some of the purchasing urges that assailed us. I'm very tempted by the Sennheiser noise-cancelling folding headphones, which really do perform as advertised (and it's even more impressive when you turn the music off and just switch on noise cancellation on its own). The new iMac is really, really pretty but the coolest gadget has got to be the solar iPod charger. No longer do you need to fear being marooned on a desert island with 7,000 albums but only a single battery charge!

Out of the expo and off to Holborn, where we quickly popped into Playin' Games on Museum Street. I was delighted to find that they had Creatures and Cultists in stock, a Call of Cthulhu inspired hackfest card game in which players take the role of nefarious cults trying to wipe each other out whilst summoning their pet Great Old One. Newly re-issued, C&C now features artwork by John Kovalic (aka muskrat_john) of Dork Tower fame, including the truly wonderful 'Suck The President's Brain' card...

Meeting up with swisstone in the pub was a little more complicated than planned :-) but it all worked out in the end, as did the subsequent very nice meal in Prezzo. Good food and even better company made for a very pleasant evening out - thanks again to swisstone for arranging it.

The highlight of Sunday was definitely the cinema trip to see The Incredibles. There's no shortage of reviews explaining just why this is one of the best superhero movies ever made, but I think Harold Waldrop's probably sums it up best. I sincerely hope that there's going to be a special edition DVD as chock-full of extras as the one for Monsters, Inc, and in particular that it features a walkthough of the incredible sixties-spy-caper-movie island base. It sounds ridiculous to say that the best set design I've seen in years is for sets that only exist as datasets and pixels, but after seeing The Incredibles that's pretty much my view. Everything about this movie is a treat: the story, the characterisation, the script, the design - all of it is superb. There's going to be a strong field for next year's long-form Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo, but to be honest I think Pixar pretty much have it sewn up.

MC

Comments

[maviscruet.livejournal.com]

I found Alhabra rather hard to get my head around, stratergy wise. When I played it was less about long term stratergy, and more about... what can I do with whats avallible right now.

Could just have been us of course...

With respect to greedquest, <lj user="selis" expressed almost the opposite view with regard to Runebound. If I've got time to play that, I'd rather roleplay.....

[watervole.livejournal.com]

CAn you tell me more about Alhambra? I'm always looking for new games and I'm a bit out of the loop when it comes to hearing about them now. There's no decent games shop in Dorset (as far as I know) and no games magazines anymore. I used to get review copies to play with, but those days are long gone.

More on C+C would be good too.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

The idea behind Alhambra is that you are trying to build the finest pleasure palace in early medieval Spain. You buy tiles that have various sorts of buildings or landscape on them (pavilions, towers, gardens etc), which you use to add to your Alhambra subject to some rules on how tiles can sit together. There are three scoring rounds during the game, at roughly the 1/3 and 2/3 points and then at the end when all the building tiles have been dealt. Scoring depends on who has the most of each sort of building (and second or third most in later rounds). To make matters more complex, there are four different currencies in play and you may not have the right sort of money to buy the building you want...

I find Alhambra to be nicely balanced in that there are several reasonably obvious strategies, all of which have their merits and weaknesses. It is tempting to try to get as many as possible of one or two types of building, but you can find yourself falling behind in overall construction as you wait for enough of the right sort of money to be dealt to you to buy what you want. It is also worth buying some of the sort of buildings that other players are collecting, as that way you ensure a more even spread of points during scoring rounds. The way the scoring system works ensures that about 10% of the points are allocated at the first scoring round, 30% at the second and then the remaining 60% at the end of the game, so things can be wide open right up to the last minute.

Creatures and Cultists has each player running a cult worshipping (and seeking to summon) one of the Great Old Ones. By a mixture of magic (summoning up evil servitors), violence (the .38 Special, Keg Of Dynamite or the Honking Great Truck) or sheer nasty manipulation (drop the NSA - or PETA - on your opponents) you seek to wipe out competing cults and be first to accumulate enough Fuggly Points to summon the world-crushing deity of your choice. As you might gather, this game is not very serious...

MC

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

Once again, I seem to be a minority voice in that I didn't much like The Incredibles. For one thing it went on too long; I kept looking at my watch. Howard's right about Edna though. I want to be Edna.

MKK