Pastboard and Plastic XVI

Another Essen Spieltage, the biggest cross on the board gamer's calendar, finished last weekend and various members of our group, and the wider games community returned with cases and cars full of new games, cheap older games, promotional items, and expansions.

A year or two ago it dawned on me that if the third and last "Pasteboard and Plastic" games day of the year took place soon after "Essen" it would give the owners of all this new game treasure a chance to play it and show it off. It would also give us stay-at-homes a chance to see what was shiny and new in the word of brettspiel.

Yesterday saw Pasteboard and Plastic XVI, organised as ever by Crabro and held in the Scout hut at Saltdean, raising funds for the 42nd Scout Group.

In view of the fact that I no longer run a car and would have to travel by 'bus I carried only a few fillers and a game to add to the raffle prizes and set off a little earlier than usual with the intention of also leaving a bit earlier than usual.

The event runs officially from 10am until around midnight but Crabro is there earlier setting up and the last games are usually still being finished while the furniture is being moved around them.

The first thing that struck me on arrival, around ten-thirty, was how busy it already looked. There was a noisy hum of gamer's conversations in the air and the raffle prize table and the second-hand games tables were already well-stocked with goodies.

The other thing it was impossible not to notice was the tables groaning with shrink-wrapped goodness from our friends at Board Game Club. No-one could complain that there was nothing to buy!

New games for sale

I spent some time looking at all the new and second hand bargains before I remembered to sign in and make myself a tea (unlimited cuppas being included in the entry fee).

Before too long I was asked if I was up for a game and I found myself with Crabro, MaOldie and Waaru, together with a couple of young gamers I hadn't met before, playing the new game by the man with a passion for the letter F and the colour green. Our friends had met up with Friedmann Friese in Essen and had the photo to prove it. Their purchases of his games and add-ons to his earlier games should keep him in green hair-dye for some time to come.


The game this time was Power Grid: The First Sparks which has a lot of the flavour of the classic Power Grid in the gameplay but is a stand-alone game, set far back in the mists of time when men were men and mammoth meat was on the menu. I must say I struggled a bit as the light slanting low in the window made the far end of the board (where the available technology and intelligence cards were) impossible to see without standing up and moving.

As it was just a "learning game" I wasn't too bothered about being competitive anyway and proceeded to take what came my way. In the end I was assumed so far behind that no-one even bothered to check but since I clearly hadn't been in with a chance of the win I didn't worry too much. The winner by tie-break in the end was one of the aforementioned youngsters whose name (something like Rav or Raf?) I'm afraid I didn't get.

The game was very attractive, with nice, coloured wooden pieces for the hunted (or fished) food and I liked it very much. As an owner or Power Grid I think I would still be happy to add this one to the collection as well, and I think it would be popular with the Goldstone Gamers, as it clearly is with the Saltdean Gamers.

At some point I found myself chatting with some other Essen raiders from our group: MrWendell and Petra Pan, although they had actually spent the whole week in Germany and much of their plunder had come from ordinary shops. It seems shoe shops are a popular board game outlet in that very game-aware land. MrWendell had brought me back a couple of promotional cards to add to my Power Grid game with which I was very pleased.

He then asked me if I was available for a quick two-player game and produced a rather beautiful abstract game composed of silver and blue metal rings, rods and cylinders with which to make three towers on a triangular board. I proved rather a dismal failure at this on my first attempt but perhaps I will get another crack at San Ta Si sometime.

Meanwhile it was already lunchtime and the drawing of the raffle had been anounced. After quite a nice win several years ago I had settled into a pattern of winning nothing so I wasn't taking too much notice as I went backwards and forwards to the kitchen to make some tea to go with my sandwiches. On one of my returns to the hall it eventually sank in that Crabro was announcing one of my numbers. There wasn't much left on the table but I was just happy to win something. I selected Fire Team an older two-player game of hex-and-counter modern warfare. I was very pleased with that and it turns out to be an interesting looking game in excellent condition.

Raffle prizes-my win second from right

I then spent a considerable amount of time in internal debate about whether to buy a second-hand or new game. The temptations were huge. One of the second-hand games I had been interested in disappeared into Mike's huge bag at a knock-down price, which made me jealous but took away part of the dilemma.
In the end I was asked if I wanted to play Lords of Vegas and left the decision for a while. As it turned out, BrightonFoxDave, one of my opponents, was the seller of a couple of absolute classic games on the second-hand table and I did a deal for the two which left me free to put purchases out of my mind and concentrate on gaming.

I don't frequent the Brighton games club but I'm always happy to get a chance to play against the members at these events. Playing against BrightonFoxDave and Thrudd was guaranteed to be fun and I was even more sure of this when I saw that the game was full of brightly coloured dice. It took me some time to grasp the game-play of this game of casino ownership, although to be fair that was more to do with my tiredness than complexity of rules.

The game allows a lot of backstabbing in taking over others' casinos, which is fine in company such as this where fun is the main concern. I was actually doing very well throughout the game, much to my surprise, indeed actually in the lead or joint lead.

Of course it would be no fun if I didn't have an opportunity to whinge about being robbed though and with my casinos being ripped from under me by Thrudd and then by perpetual last place man Mike, whose luck had suddenly changed, I went from the lead to last in the final stage of the game. Nevertheless, a lot of fun and a game now on my wishlist in the hope it might turn up at a good price in future.

The remainder of the afternoon saw me playing a couple of lighter games with MrWendell. The first was Bausack, an extraordinary cloth bag full of odd wooden shapes in three colours. Intriguingly it also contained a clothes peg and some string but these didn't feature in our game. Petra Pan had been lucky enough to pick up this bag of goodness earlier from a fellow gamer, having nearly bought it in Germany for considerably more. She definitely got a bargain because it is a fascinating and flexible bag of goodies. MrWendell and I played a variant involving increasingly difficult tower-building with unlikely shapes. At one-all I suggested we have a decider and was surprised to find myself the winner, my shakey old mitts not normally being ideal for games of dexterity.

Petra Pan then joined us for a hand or two of Sticheln, a popular trick-taking game which is not new but is one we enjoy. This resulted in a win for Petra Pan with MrWendell and I tying for second. Since we were on negative scores and PP's was well into the positives it was a clear win.

At this point those people who were staying to the end began to head off to the local fish and chip shop, or more exotic "take-aways", for some nourishment to sustain them for the final four or five hours. I decided it would be a good time to take my leave. My conscience insisted that I did a bit of clearing up and washing up first though. I do appreciate all the organisation that goes on and it was one of the few times I was not going to be there for the midnight task of stacking chairs and stowing folding tables away.

I began to question the wisdom of having bought two large games (El Grande and Tigris) as I headed for the 'bus but got home fairly easily, looking back on another very successful Saltdean Games Day which, hopefully, has raised a nice chunk of change for the local Scouts.

Smiley and Hollywood Endings

This week's Friday film choices were the final two parts of the television adaptation of Smiley's People and the one Woody Allen film we had never seen: Hollywood Ending.














Image by cdrummbks via FlickrI should perhaps warn of potential SPOILERS ahead for anyone who hasn't seen these works despite their age.

We are sorry to say goodbye to George Smiley, played by Alec Guinness. This was a real TV classic and one which could probably not be made today as its pace is slow, it doesn't have a lot of violent action and the plot is fairly convoluted. The cast is excellent, from Guinness to Hepton, and gives us a silent Patrick Stewart, before the knighthood, as the series' overall villain: Karla. With Karla finally coming over we bid farewell to "The Circus" and Moscow Central and wonder what we will find to take its place.

Image via Wikipedia

A recent interview with Woody Allen reminded us that there was one of the canon that had never had a proper theatrical release here and that consequently we had never seen. I tracked down a cheap copy on-line and we made it the main feature of this week's notreallyfilmnight. Bizarrely this copy was in a double bill with Jeepers Creepers. I'm not sure what that says about the target audience (it was a Swedish copy) but I could not, for the life of me, come up with a logical reason for this combination.
Image via Wikipedia





Hollywood Ending turns out to be typical old school Woody, with himself cast in the lead and getting the girl, something that even he has finally had to acknowledge is no longer popular with his audience.

The premise here is that he, a film director fallen from favour, has a chance to redeem himself and save himself from financial disaster by directing a New York film: On the face of it right up his street.

The problem is that the producers are his ex-partner and the man she left him for. Nevertheless Woody gets the gig but on the first day is struck blind albeit with psychosomatic blindness.



Most of the rest of the film is taken up with his trying to continue to make the film despite the handicap and without letting anybody know so that he isn't removed from the job. In the process he re-bonds with his ex and gets involved in a number of slapstick set-pieces. There are some nice lines and a few good gags despite the unlikeliness of the premise. There are some interesting autobiographical references from our "auteur", rather a slap in the face for his devoted French fans included. Despite the best efforts of his foreign cameraman (in real life Woody has sometimes used his idol Ingmar Bergmann's cameraman Sven Nyquist) unsurprisingly a film made by a blind director is a mess. Nevertheless his French audience hail it a masterpiece of art and salvage his career. Making fun of his French audience, who in real life really do seem to appreciate his work rather more than domestic ones, struck me as a bit risky and it just occurs to me, probably completely fancifully, that there could be an element of apology in his recent homage to Paris.

Hollywood Ending perhaps harks back a little to Deconstructing Harry. We were of the opinion that it was typical old school Woody. Not of the first rank but far from the level of his worst work. We enjoyed it in fact.

Then there were two...

Thursday games evening and the Professor was detained by work commitments while the rest of the group were still in Germany playing games after Essen "Spieltage" which left me and Crabro again.


We decided not to play Dominant Species as planned but to go back to the list of games recently acquired from The Works and try some more.

We first played Oregon, which I had played with the Goldstone Gamers but Crabro hadn't seen. Like me, Crabro was taken with the simple fun of the game and we played it twice before moving on to an unplayed game from the list: Airships.

As expected it was simple and quick to play and perhaps a filler more than a meaty main game.

We both enjoyed the novelty of buying the opportunity to use different combinations of dice (in red, black and white) by using dice scores to buy cards (enhancements to our airship factory) offering more dice or bonuses and eventually acquiring airships and victory points by the same means.

It was attractive and fast. We agreed that the two games were "keepers"

Wednesday Wonders

Tuesday games were moved to Wednesday again this week and it was decided to have a look at some of the new games acquired lately. Crabro had produced a list of them with ratings and suggested that we work up the list from worst to best (as decided by Boardgamegeek rating).

We first had a look at Highland Clans (a.k.a. MacRobber) which languishes at a sub-5000 rank with a rating of 5.73. Probably not a terrible game by any means but it really didn't appeal to either of us so we decided to move on.

The first one played was Ming Dynasty (current rank 2741). Although we agreed that it was not a bad game at all, by lunchtime we felt that we had been working hard rather than having fun.

This is a game with nice wooden components and a straightforward mechanic but appeared to us to have no particular feeling of theme at all and consequently we had been playing quite a complex abstract. Not in itself a bad thing perhaps but the fact that "hard work" had entered both our minds was enough to make us decide to "move this one" also.

After lunch we continued with Utopia which is at an altogether more respectable sub-2000 rank. First impressions as we began to "punch" it was that the components were gorgeous. It was certainly a winner on wow-factor.

Having played it we were both agreed that it wasn't a bad game either. Coupled with the likelihood that our other gaming friends are likely to want to play it at least once when they see the nice bits, we decided this one was, at least for now, a keeper.

Neither of us were very sure that we had totally grasped the nuances of the rules and both resolved to read up some more before playing again. As it stood though Crabro was the winner by, I think, eight points having won Ming by a much greater margin.

We Need to Talk about Real Tin

..tin. Yes, today I have been attempting to justify the expense of an unlimited card by what is known as a cinebinge. This is one better than a double bill, which after all is just what we used to expect at every cinema visit.

Today's films were: (The adventures of) Tintin, Real Steel and We Need to Talk about Kevin.

As it turned out, this was a corking day's entertainment, but there couldn't be much more contrast than that between the first and last of the programme.

Spielberg seems to be intent on reviving old style entertainment at the moment and making films of which one might say "they don't make 'em like that anymore". His take on Tintin, while clearly a loving homage, is not in Hergé's famous ligne-claire style though and in fact is a kind of live action cartoon using the now quite familiar "mocap" technique whereby actual actors' movements are "motion captured" and digitised. Rather a modern version of "rotoscoping" which uncle Walt was already using way back in the thirties.

He chose an interesting group of writers, currently at the top of their game: Edgar "Hot Fuzz" Wright, Steven "Dr Who" Moffat and Joe "Attack the Block" Cornish.

The actors are pretty unrecognisable in their cartoon guise but this will be familiar territory for Andy Serkis who plays the irascible Captain Haddock. The Captain likes a drink and has a nice line in oaths and as anyone who has read the books must agree, is an absolutely necessary foil to the rather po-faced boy reporter and is what makes the tales a lasting joy.

I have read them all at one time or another either in English, French or both and I suppose I should be unhappy with what has been done to George Remi's work (he took the sound of his initials and reversed it to make his famous pen-name). Actually though, I found it a joyful adventure and, though the faces are rather grotesque, the action and all the references to spot, make it engrossing fun. Milou/Snowy, along with Idéefix/Dogmatix, probably the most famous cartoon dog in the world has been well recreated too.

Clearly Spielberg is hoping it will do well enough to justify a sequel because the ending certainly appears to be a new beginning just as in the books Red Rackham's Treasure continued the story of the Secret of the Unicorn.
 Image via Wikipedia
If I have any criticism I think it would be that Frost and Pegg are rather thrown away as the Thomson/Thompson twins. I saw the 2d version so I can't comment on whether 3d added anything. It doesn't seem a very natural thing to do to an old comic book but I suppose that's not a very logical way of thinking in the face of all the live action versions of the Marvel and DC comics.

By the way, if anybody thinks that they really don't write (or draw) things like this anymore, take a look at "The Rainbow Orchid" by British writer/artist Garan Ewing. It wonderfully evokes the Tintin-esque world of thirties comic adventure and has a gripping plot spanning several episodes.

Image via WikipediaAfter a lunch while poring over the cinema's magazine I returned to see Real Steel. This is basically a corny old boxing picture but in place of men knocking the stuffing out of each other they use giant robots. Yes, it is the film of Robot Wars but the robots are several orders of magnitude more awesome. It would be easy to take the metal mickey out of the film but it was actually fine entertainment. The father/son bonding is predictable and familiar but not boring and is well acted. Hugh Jackman does his hunk with a heart but not using his head thing very well. The kid acts his role nicely. The love interest doesn't try and upstage huge metal men beating seven kinds of sparks out of each other's hydraulics. The important thing is that it is a boxing picture with huge metal men. ...and I'm all for it. How soon can we have the technology to actually do this and stop men having to smash each other up? I've long since stopped watching boxing but I'd happily watch giant robots thumping each other, especially if they did dance routines first. Great fun.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

The final film, We Need to Talk about Kevin was a complete contrast to the old-fashioned adventure and morality tale that went before. I overheard a middle-aged couple's response afterwards: Man - Well that was fun (with heavy sarcasm). Woman - What were you expecting? Bambi?
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Indeed I should have known what to expect, given all that I had heard and read about Lionel Shriver's book and reviews of the film (directed by Lynne Ramsay). In the first five minutes I did actually ask myself whether I wanted to stay. Not that I ever walk out on films actually. I always find something interesting. [The only exception was Chesty Morgan's "Deadly Weapons back in the seventies but that's another story]. 

Anyway I'm glad I stayed because, despite the subject matter and the non-linear treatment, it is a fascinating and very well shot and acted film. All the cast are excellent, with a stand out performance by Tilda Swinton and great support from the reliable John C Reilly and a mesmerising turn from the psycopathic Keven played (in his teenage incarnation) by Ezra Miller.

An outstanding, if difficult and harrowing, film. I rather wish the day had finished with the more upbeat  Real Steel but nevertheless a great day at the cinema.

Oregon or The Way the West was Lost

I was asked by Paultro if I could arrive earlier than usual for a Saturday games session, in order to give him a steer on one of his new games: Martin Wallace's two-player "A Few Acres of Snow". His is not the limited edition version that I play with Crabro but he has "pimped" it very nicely with wooden pieces from elsewhere and tiny period cannon as the siege markers.

Inevitably, not only had Paultro made the right assumptions about the rules he was unclear about but knew how to use them to good effect, so my mentoring was largely redundant and, yes, I lost my fourth straight game as the British. I can see I will never play the French but according to all I have read, if the game is "broken" it is in favour of the British which is fueling my growing conviction that it is not the game for me.

This time I tried a more aggressive military strategy but failed to make any impact in sieges, always playing catch-up to the French who start ahead in military terms. Paultro's French expanded all over the place, reducing my spending ability with regular piracy and even sieging and capturing two of my early gains.

He ran the game out by using up all his villages. This was delayed slightly by another failed siege on my part but invevitably I lost by a substantial margin. It's a fascinating game to play, and I very much enjoyed playing it with Paultro, but I think I have had enough of it now or at least next time I lose I would prefer it to be for the blues for a change.

...It was 1846 and the farmers were moving into the rich lands of Oregon...at least it was sometime after six o'clock anyway. There has been a large influx of new games into the groups in recent weeks with some games appearing at attractive prices in remaindered book store chain The Works which are quite well rated on "The 'geek". Next week should see the arrival of yet more as half of the Thursday group return from their visit to the biggest game event on the planet: Essen "Spiel". Saturday saw us play one of the recent acquisitions from The Works though: "Oregon"

Paultro's partner fed us to bursting with her usual culinary skill and together with Paultro's brother "Simtro" we turned to Oregon. This turned out to be a very simple game as far as the rules were concerned but the decisions became much more complex as the game wore on and the board filled up with buildings and "farmeeples".

A turn sees you simply playing two cards (either both landscape or landscape and building), placing a farmer or a building and scoring. The only problem we had in the early stages were with the two sets of scoring rules for farmers or buildings and initially we were flipping backwards and forwards through the rules. This could be avoided with a little player aid but it quickly becomes second nature anyway and as the scores are printed on the buildings, as well as the special powers of two of them, rule referral was fairly quickly a thing of the past. Each player also has two reversible tiles which give her either an immediate second turn or act as a wildcard replacing a landscape card. The power of two of the buildings is to refresh these tiles which are turned over to the exhausted side when used.

I did pretty well in the early stages as I grasped the basic rules pretty quickly. In the end I lost, partly because I failed to get my farmers next to many gold mines and it didn't hit home to me until the end how much different this would be from the coal mines. Proximity to the mines gives the farmer a chip with a hidden number on the reverse which is only revealed in end scoring. The coal ranges from 1 to 3 points but the gold from 3 to 5. Yes, it is obvious when you think about it but I didn't.

After Oregon, which had actually ended fairly closely with Paultro in the lead, we wound down with a very light filler I had played recently: Viva il Re (aka "King Me!".

For some reason, what to me is the ultimate in simple games, took a while to sink in with my opponents, perhaps understandably tired on a work day or perhaps just still thinking of colonising Oregon. By the second round everyone was up to speed though and ruthlessly offering royalty for the chop. By luck or judgement I was doing rather nicely but in the final round Paultro overtook me by a couple of points to achieve his hat-trick for the day.

We wound down with chat over delicious home-made cakes and tea but after the chef had retired for the night and "the lads" settled in front of the footer the talk was still mostly of games, game designers and "Cons"

Max and Jake

This week's "not-a-real-film-night" Friday began with two more episodes of the BBC series Smiley's People and Alec Guinness giving us his other signature role, completely making us forget the iconic but apparently shameful (to him) Obi-Wan Kenobi (well almost).


Smiley's is a classic, the like of which could not be made any more and goes down easy with our Friday beer (Spitfire). One episode was not going to be enough and at this pace we will be watching the finale at the next "notfilmnight"

The feature film was not so easy. What did we want to watch? More importantly what would my friend want to watch as he is rather more fussy than me about his viewing. In the end we settled on another 1950s Western: The Law and Jake Wade. 

This was a solid John Sturges effort with some regular saddle-tramps, Henry Silva and DeForest ('Bones) Kelley amongst the bad guys. The lead was Robert Taylor, the eponymous Wade. Like many in real life I believe, his career saw him coming at the law from both sides, after learning the looting trade in "The War" and a period of successful crime (in the days when people robbed banks rather than the other way round). A terrible incident had seen him learn the error of his ways and settle with a good woman and a job as town Marshal.

He feels obligated to go to the rescue of his former side-kick Clint Hollister (Widmark) though, and once he has let that evil genie out of the bottle he proves very hard to put back.

On the way to the inevitable showdown we meet some rather lacklustre Commanche braves, possibly the only people in the universe worse than me at throwing the javelin. They serve their purpose in whittling away some of the film's dead wood, however, leaving the way clear for the main characters.

The backdrop is gorgeous, some of the characters suitably hissable (De is very angry and Henry rather creepy but both are rather thrown away) and Richard Widmark is his usual charismatic self but somehow this one never makes the first rank. Partly it's because Robert Taylor is not a terribly likeable lead and one half-wishes that Widdy or another of the robber band would get the girl. Widdy doesn't seem to like girls too much though and feels that he was cheated out of a lifelong loving partnership with Jake. Not that there was anything Brokeback being suggested in 1958 I suppose but his manly love of Jake is heavily underlined.

Someone on imdb has mentioned the music dragging the picture down. Personally I think that given the poor stunt work and acting in the indian scenes it was always going to be a good "b" rather than a classic but I must say we did notice the music when probably we should have just felt its effects. My friend said "...but how did they know that was the last of them" and I replied "Because the music changed".

Another good notfilmnight. Roll on the next.

Dungeness and Dragonflies

Yesterday I was kindly taken to Dungeness again by my birding mentor and his wife.

We arranged to meet a couple of other friends there, which was lucky as they had a spare pair of binoculars with them and I had spent half the journey feeling very fed up and angry with myself for forgetting to put my own in the bag.

There were one or two particular targets of interest for the day - Penduline Tits had been seen and Dotterels. In the end, despite two visits to the ARC pool and a great deal of vigilance we didn't see either of these but it was a beautiful, if slightly chilly, day and we saw many other species so we had a glorious day and went home very happy via some excellent fish and chips.

Among the species we did spot were Kestrel, Sparrowhawk and Marsh Harrier above and Gadwall, Widgeon, Pintail, Tufted Duck, Grey Heron, Cormorant, Little Egret, Dunlin, Redshank and Little Stint on or near the water and Stonechat, Meadow Pipit, Green Woodpecker and Great Tit in the trees and shrubs.

Two of the more memorable images are that of a fox being "stalked" by a group of ducks and a Moorhen feeding off the ground on part of a bird feeder. The fox was at times very close to the ducks which would have made an amazing photograph. For some reason the fox did not seem interested in the group of ducks that swam slowly along beside her, nor did the ducks seem scared. At one point the fox trudged through some very shallow water incredibly close to the swimming ducks. Eventually foxy disappeared into some undergrowth but the image of the fox changing direction to walk back and all the ducks doing the same will stay with me.

There were also a lot of insects about, sadly mostly midges but including one or two Red Admirals and a large beautiful dragonfly who hovered around for some time. There were also a number of unidentified creatures on whose species opinion was divided my birding mentor offered Caddis Fly but others thought them moths. At any rate they were not shy and one is pictured sitting on a friendly hand.

It's a pity "Dunge" is such a lengthy drive from here because it is always a wonderful day out with lots to see.