My Goodreads comments on "Half Blood Blues"

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of the best of my 2011 Booker shortlist reads. This book totally engrossed me and the characters live on, as if real, in my mind. This is no mean feat considering that they are black, mixed race, Jewish and for part of the book at least living in Berlin and Paris in the 1930s and 40s. They don't have my experiences or speak my language but they are as familiar to me now as if I had really sat down with them and talked.

Possible Spoilers Ahead!

While we are sadly familiar with the fate of Germany's Jewish population under the terrible reign of the nazis, the black German residents' experience of the era is less well documented. In this case we follow the members of an above average jazz band in Berlin in the repressive era of nazi rule. The band includes Germans and some of American background. Some are white, some mixed race, some from financially privileged upbringing. They are united in a passion for jazz. In particular we are concerned with drummer "Chip", "Hiero", an extraordinarily gifted trumpeter, and our narrator Sid the very good but less angelicly talented bass player. Along the way we also discover the fates of the rest of the band but our main interest is these three and their hopes,fears, loves and jealousies. The narrative alternates between Berlin and Paris at the beginning of the war and Germany and Poland in the 1990s as Sid, believing Hiero to have died in a nazi camp, and Chip travel to a festival commemorating the work of young Hieronymous Falk and the premier of a film of his life including revelations about the band and Hiero's fate.

I don't want to give too much away but another key figure and the object of the love of members of the band is Delilah who is close to one Louis Armstrong, a strong incentive for the band to try and get out of Germany to Paris where they are to get the chance of cutting a disc with the satchelmouthed legend. The love of 'Lilah and the desire to record with Armstrong exerts a powerful effect on our Sid.

The novel is about betrayal, or perhaps betrayals of more than one sort, and ultimately perhaps about redemption and forgiveness. I found it a stunningly gripping read and the bringing to life of these unusual protagonists, as well as the realising of a believable jazz musician's Berlin and Paris of the era, is a great achievement. One of the best of the short list for me, perhaps second only to The Sisters Brothers in giving me a pleasurable and satisfying read.

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My Goodreads comments on "Hombre"

Hombre by Elmore Leonard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I knew what to expect of this for two reasons: One it's by Elmore Leonard who is one of the world's best known writers of thrillers and perhaps to a slightly lesser extent and earlier, of westerns. Many of his books have gone on to be films and he has a huge amount of experience in film and tv writing although he allegedly has a tendency to dislike the adaptations of his work. The second reason I knew what to expect is that, in this case, I've seen the film. In fact the book was for once to my mind an exact reflection of what appeared on the screen. I'm bound to be wrong about this as my memory isn't great but perhaps the perception is more important here anyway. It seemed the same and I read the book seeing Paul Newman's blue eyes where John Russel's similarly described eyes where mentioned.

To anyone who likes well written "classic" westerns, like myself, I would recommend this AND the film. It has all the excitement, action, jeopardy that you could want and is thought provoking to boot. Not perhaps as controversial as its anti-discrimination message might have made it at one time. For me the enigmatic "Hombre", raised by whites and Apaches is one of the classic western heroes perhaps fit to rank alongside Shane, Will Kane, Lyn McAdam and the man with no name. I once enjoyed several of Jack "Shane" Schaeffer's books and if I was aware of more westerns of this calibre I wouldn't certainly be happy to return to the genre.

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A Bit of Light Birding

Earlier on Friday I took advantage of the Spring sunshine for some birding. Quite honestly I'm not really ready to fledge and take wing on my own but as my mentor is birding in the West Country at present I thought I would try to avoid getting totally rusty.

It turned out that the heat I encountered in the sheletered streets on route to the coast was lulling me into a false sense of security and once by the sea it quickly became clear that it wasn't a great day to be birding after all. The sun was sparkling off a relatively calm blue sea but there was a chill Easterly wind which cut through like a knife.

I spent a few minutes at the noisy and boisterous Splash Point kittiwake colony on the cliffs and also spotted  a couple of Mediterranean gulls bobbing in a crowd of kittiwakes out on the sea. As the bare hands holding the binoculars began to hurt in the cold breeze though, I decided that it was probably time for a cup of tea.

Kittiwake with two young chicks in its nest. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'll Be Seeing Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

Friday film night got off to a late start but as Sarah Vaughan sang in the background I quickly cut up the pie and poured the beer while we debated what to watch. The double bill this week included another black and white film of the forties I'll Be Seeing You but first, and arguably the "A" film, was Wonder Boys.

This is a film we have both seen before and indeed we have both also read the excellent book. Arthur leant it to me in fact but it was quite surprising that he needed to given that I was already quite a fan of the author: Michael Chabon.

Neither of us are particular fans of the work of Michael Douglas however but he displays a great talent for comedy in this film and the rest of the cast is excellent as well. Tobey Maguire of Spidey fame is a rather enigmatic student of Douglas' burnt out writer/professor Grady Tripp and turns out to be both an inveterate liar and a talented writer himself.

Frances McDormand (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

The rest of the cast is also excellent and includes the wonderful Frances McDormand and Robert Downey Junior. The plot unfolds over "Wordfest" at the university where Grady has tenure and involves Marilyn Monroe's wardrobe, an unfortunate dog, infidelity, drug and alcohol abuse and the fate of Grady's massive "difficult second novel". Along the way hilarity and chaos ensue but it is in the subtleties of performance and writing that this film, a little gem, excels. When I first saw it, it blew away my preconceptions of what a Michael Douglas film would be like and it is one of those rare things a film that does justice to a great novel.

Movie screenshot of Ginger Rogers from The Thirteenth Guest (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I also enjoyed the second feature though I wouldn't call it a classic. The cast is interesting, including as it does the always watch-able Joseph Cotton and Ginger Rogers. Alongside them is the to me sometimes rather irritating presence of miss good ship lollipop herself Shirley Temple. To be fair she is probably only as irritating as the plot calls for, being the precocious cousin who accidentally blabs the big secret - that our Ginger is on leave from clink. It is made clear that she is in for manslaughter and that it came about as an unfortunate accident. Personally I would still be rather wary of anyone who had brought about the death of someone by propelling them through an open window.

Shirley Temple (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

The sad sack that falls in love with her during her 8 day furlough is of course Cotton who already has enough problems of his own. He's been bayoneted and generally battered in the South East Asian theatre of operations and is somewhat of a basket case. Encountering the prisoner with the least likely convict hairdo in the world he immediately begins to stalk her by lying about his destination and getting off the train at her stop. Twitchy and uncoordinated, he suffers from panic attacks and is trying to recover from severe psychiatric trauma or shell shock. They deserve each other...and despite the blabber-mouthed Ms Temple who do you think turns up at the gate to the prison to reassure our Ginge of his undying love as she turns herself in for part two of her sentence? You've got it.

Frankly it's pretty daft in many ways but it wears its heart on its sleeve and has a good cast so it's not hard to like. I thought it was a very nice second feature and thoroughly enjoyed it, although there were times when I wanted Ginge to turn serial and defenestrate La Temple.

Bets and backstabbing

This Thursday we were five, with the Professor absent and there being no need to split this week we all debated what to play together. Despite some games having been brought along by MaOldie and Crabro, for some reason I can't remember, we ended up playing two old favourites from my own collection beginning with Citadels.

This was a favourite with the Goldstone Gamers too, incorporating as it does some nice opportunities for backstabbing. Each turn players adopt a character and either take money or cards and "build" one or more of the cards in front of them if they wish. The game ends when someone builds their eighth building and then score the value of their buildings plus a bonus for having all the colours represented and one for being first to build eight. Complexity is added by the powers of the adopted characters who can, for instance, do extra builds, rob or assassinate other characters or destroy an opponent's building.

 

I spent a rather frustrating time with only duplicates of buildings I'd already built, in my hand (you can't build more than one of one type) and only red and green buildings. Eventually I did manage to build eight including all the colours but still came last (I think Mrwendell won, with Crabro second, Petra Pan third, and MaOldie fourth).

I could have managed one place better if I had finished the game one turn sooner. As it turned out allowing the game to run this extra turn did me no good at all. Despite last place I enjoyed the game and for once didn't get robbed or assassinated. I wouldn't mind playing this one more often.

The same could be said of the second game "Winner's Circle", a game by the famous Reiner Knizia which I had only played once before despite it being simple and fun.

Once of the reasons is the choice of realistic colours for the horses in this race betting game. The range is white to black via grey and several very similar shades of brown. In some lights this makes the horses frustratingly difficult to distinguish from one another. This was not a particular problem at my table and the game moved at a good pace, fitting the remaining time nicely.

 I had a terrible first two rounds, in both cases backing, and being penalised for backing, the last horse. I made up considerable ground in the third race ending up with about seven hundred and fifty dollars...everybody else was by now on over one thousand, however.

A golden oldies evening that I enjoyed a lot. I hope some more of these games we haven't played for a while get the chance of an outing in coming weeks.

Call that an Onslaught?

A return to Battlelore for more Borgy joy this Tuesday-Games-on-Wednesday. Two aging lads returning to gleeful schoolboyhood and unable to stop grinning as they set up another battlefield scenario from the exciting toybox of miniature soldiers.







This second scenario was still lore-free and somewhat historical although, unlike Commands and Colors: Ancients, the "Historical Notes" are sketchy at best and simply for some tongue-in-cheek flavour.

First side of the scenarios saw defeat for the English (me) who struggled to take three banners in the time the French achieved the necessary five. The second phase looked to be going the same way as I (as the French this time) was down to three very feeble looking units on my right flank (two at least down to their banner figure) facing some solid looking medium and heavy English soldiery.


Unfortunately, as I had in the first phase, Crabro ran out of cards for use on the appropriate flank. allowing me a surprising re-surgence including, finally, some success for my bowmen who had managed to fail to score a single hit with their "Darken the Sky" card at the start of the game. The cards were not ideal but did at least give me a chance to get some use out of what I thought of as moribund and unsaveable units. Thus two successive foot "onslaughts" each consisting of a single one figure unit miraculously turned the tide despite some hopeful calls for battleback by unsupported troops etc. The end result was that Crabro got none of the three banners I was expecting to finish the game in his favour and the score ended at 5-2 to me, giving me the overall win and demonstrating that sometimes lady luck suddenly turns her back on you in this game and you are sunk.

This system is the origin of my "whinging for Carthage" of course and I regard it as part of the fun to see a seemingly finished unit suddenly knock out a whole heavy unit in one go etc. Play enough games and the luck turns around. We seventy games of CandC and have every intention of hammering the Battlelore board in the same way. We are impatient to get going on the "lore" aspect of the game though so might skip some scenarios.

After lunch we decided to try another Stefan Feld game after being favourably impressed by Macao and more recently In the Year of the Dragon. This time it was Castles of Burgundy and it wasn't quite the love at first sight we had experienced with his other designs.

After a fairly lengthy rules learning session we attempted our first play and while we quickly found the flow of the game to be simple and fast the game felt much more "fiddly" as a result of each of the different building and knowledge tiles having different uses. The player boards, of which there are a number different versions, cleverly have a lot of the necessary information printed on them but it takes a while to assimilate the iconography in use necessitating repeated returns to certain pages of the rule book. The result was a run away win for myself but in the process I had missed at least one of the rules for a time so the score has to be taken with the pinch of salt usually required of a "learning game"

Our conclusions had an air of disappointment after how we had taken to Feld's earlier offerings and Crabro was already contemplating putting it up for sale. It seemed a bit soon to be thinking in those terms however and I think we will give it at least another chance before that. We were in fact happy with the concept and game flow as well as the mechanics of the game. The problem was only with the complexity added by the number of different tiles. This may well be taken care of by a good player aid which Crabro has now found and printed out. I look forward to giving this another crack.











28/2/2012

Herzogala 2012

For the second year running I headed for London for a day with my cinephile niece, leading up to a screening of a new Werner Herzog film in the presence of the great man and culminating in a Q&A.

Director Werner Herzog at a press conference in Bruxelles (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The day started with a visit to Brixton Poundland to see if I could acquire a DVD to equal the wonderful Brian Blessed King Lear I bagged last year. This year's haul included the promising "Midgets versus Mascots" which I may review at some point if I can bring myself to watch it.

Following a delicious Thai lunch in Brixton Market and a requested return to Federation (Best Coffee Evah!) for a coffee and cookie dessert, we set off to Hyde Park for a stroll along the Serpentine and across Kensington Gardens on a perfect Spring day.

On the way we encountered a number of excitable squirrels, ducks, geese, rails, Americans, parakeets and a tame Heron posing at the Italian fountain. I also saw the iconic Peter Pan statue for the first time.

After stocking up on ginger beer we entered the attractive auditorium of the historic Gate cinema in Notting Hill where "Into the Abyss" was introduced to us and the wider audience in the various cinemas which were taking the Q&A live.

"Abyss" is the documentary which Herzog mentioned last year at the Ritzy when we watched "Cave of Forgotten Dreams". It is based around the consequences of a multiple homicide in Conroe, Texas. The footage includes interviews with friends and relatives of both the victims and the killers as well as the two men convicted of the crime. One of the killers Jason Burkett, convicted of two of the three murders had his death sentence commuted, while Perry, the killer of the first victim is on death row with his execution about eight days off at the start of the film. He does not seem particularly phased by this and is apparently still hopeful of reprieve although neither are vociferously protesting innocence.

This is a very thought-provoking film because, although Herzog is against the death penalty and the lads concerned clearly came from families and backgrounds which made the odds of them becoming the next Brian Cox or Mother Theresa infinitesimally small, the apparent lack of any kind of remorse or sympathy for their victim's families make it hard to care greatly when the state eventually does away with young Michael. When one of the relatives of his victim tells us that at the end (Herzog avoids the unnecessary sensationalism of filming or attending the execution) he forgave them (the victim's family) it would be easy to share their anger.

The most interesting characters in the film are not really the murderers, who are hard to understand or empathise with, but the father of Jason Burkett who, himself serving a life sentence, had made the emotional appeal in court which apparently resulted in the commuting of his sentence from death to life and an ex-member of the "tie-down team" at executions who had a "road to Damascus" moment after a close professional involvement in over a hundred state killings. In the end he simply stopped, at the cost of his own pension.

Burkett's father, unlike the son, was the one person to show regret and take responsibility and however we might dislike Jason it's hard to imagine that he was going to turn out to be a nice young man given his background. In fact Conroe and nearby Cut and Shoot are not communities that appeal as a holiday destination after meeting some of its illiterate and apparently amoral citizens.

Ultimately, Herzog's film is interesting and surprisingly life-affirming. Herzog makes the point that the subtitle of the film is A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life and it is clear that the life part is most important to him despite the mortal abyss of the title.

Herzog's Q&A illuminated some points which in my opinion make a difference to the perception of the film. The most important of these for me is his condemnation of the puffed up hypocritical minister at the opening of the film. I immediately feared that Herzog was taken in by the self-aggrandising tosh this idiot was spouting (although there was a clue, I subsequently realised in his leading the Minister into showing himself by requesting the "squirrel anecdote"). In the Q&A Herzog made it clear that he had seen through the man and indeed cut most of his responses out.

In the end this film was never going to change my opinion on capital punishment as I have always been against it anyway, but it is a fascinating piece of quirky Herzogian cinema which makes you think about education, religion, family relationships, friendships, greed, morality, community, law, justice and indeed death and life. ...as well as 'gators, squirrels and monkeys.

Once again Herzog (despite his reputation for shoe-eating  craziness) came across as a very humane and rational man. He describes his career path as more of a "wild slalom" but it has produced a remarkable body of work and the audience seemed in the main to be very respectful. Herzog himself appeared very happy to give his time and could be seen long after the filmed Q&A, surrounded by, and deep in conversation with, members of the audience.

In fact we left before Werner in the end, as I wanted to dash back to Victoria and get a train as soon as possible to avoid complications with connections into the sticks. All went well until towards the end of the journey when a broken train blocking the line caused everything to grind to a halt and a lot of rail officials to run around moaning that nobody ever tells them anything. Despite the lack of information, some of us did telepathically intuit that there might be a bus outside at some point and sure enough, eventually  Harry Potter's night bus (at least it was as fast and scary) replaced the train and got me home just after midnight.

It had been a great day out and finding a strawberry liquorice and white chocolate stick in my bag made the rail delay pleasant enough while I amused myself by watching some of the public working themselves into a self-righteous lather and taking it out on the equally bewildered station staff. These self-appointed V.I.P.s having loudly made the point that they were something special went off to spend their riches on 15 mile taxi rides, something which my pocket rendered not even worth considering.

I suppose it's too much to hope that that nice Mr Herzog can come up with another interesting film by next March and arrange another q&a in an attractive London cinema. It would be nice though.



Tuesday 27 March

Billy, Lew and something new.

Studio publicity portrait of the American actor Paul Newman. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

After some fish and chips, Friday turned from games day to film night at the "Rooftrouser Rialto" and Arthur arrived with the now traditional Melton Mowbray pie and a couple of bottles of Shepherd Neame's Spitfire. He also had a large number of DVDs mostly of Paul Newman's oeuvre.

BEWARE POSSIBLE SPOILERS BELOW

We settled on another of his Lew Harper private eye films: The Drowning Pool (1975). This time Harper heads down to the deep South to help out an old flame (Mrs Newman - Joanne Woodward). Almost as soon as he arrives he is in trouble, being arrested for a range of crimes from statutory rape to carrying a concealed weapon. Most of these he is innocent of, having been set up by a young girl played by Melanie Griffiths whose identity we, and Harper, shortly discover to be very significant. I won't try and explain the plot mainly because after it finished it transpired that neither of us had fully understood all of its complications. As I often finds with such stories, that is not of huge importance as long as the characters and dialogue are good. Well, you can't go far wrong with Paul Newman can you? It was engrossing and full of enjoyable performances from the ladies and the "baddies". I was none too sure of Tony Franciosa's southern accent but perhaps its just that I'm not used to him talking like that. He played the cop who was somewhat more sympathetic than Franks (Richard Jaeckel) who arrested Harper in the beginning and continued to be a thorn in his side. Broussard (Franciosa) was to turn out to have more involvement in the case than was at first clear...and caused me more confusion at the end. Very enjoyable anyway and I'd be happy to continue with the Newman season for a while.

In the intermission there was a new feature as the "Rialto" played a CD of "Mighty Wurlitzer" music and some period Pearl and Dean advertisements for the authentic old cinema flavour. The other new aspect was the addition (thanks to the generosity of my gaming friend "Crabro") of a second-hand media centre based on Windows XP which enables not only DVD recording and playing (which have been somewhat erratic of late as my old DVD recorder is in its death throes.) but also the possibility of streaming content from the internet. As Arthur arrived, the Rialto was in fact showing YouTube video of an old acquaintance from my college days who is (and was even then) an excellent guitarist.

Meanwhile I served up the pie and beer and we decided on the second feature:
more Newman.

The Left Handed Gun (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

This time it was a younger Paul in "The Left-Handed Gun" from 1958 which is a fairly straight re-telling of the story of "Billy the Kid" (aka William Bonney aka William Henry McCarty aka Henry Antrim aka Kid Antrim) who, despite being known to have killed a number of people, is something of a folk-hero. The plot seemed to follow pretty closely the familiar aspects of the legend if not the actual facts of the case, while glossing over the complexities of the bloody "Lincoln County War" and the actions of the "regulators" and probably exaggerating the relationship with Sheriff Garrett.

Sheriff Pat Garrett (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Baby-faced blue-eyed Newman made a good Billy Bonney giving us enough complexity to make him interesting if not entirely sympathetic. In fact Bonney's nemesis Pat Garrett is perhaps treated with a bit more sympathy than usual (even at the time he was condemned for what was perceived as an underhanded killing and later wrote a book to put his side) and while Billy's motivations are shown to be fairly laudable at the start (revenge for the unjust murder of his unarmed boss and father figure Mr Tunstall) this is allowed to be strained at times. Tunstall as portrayed here presents a sympathetic but odd figure. He is supposed to be English and indeed the historic Tunstall was an Englishman while his rivals were of Irish descent, he appears to be putting on some kind of accent however and at one point is described as from "Ayrshire". All the more strange because the actor Colin Keith-Johnston was born in London (a mere fifteen years after the Kid's death in fact).

Old Lincoln County Courthouse and Jail, where Billy the Kid was tried (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Mention is made of the notorious amnesty offered to the protagonists of the "Lincoln County War", including Billy, by civil war-veteran New Mexico governor Lew Wallace (author of Ben Hur) but he is not condemned for reneging on it as he often is and Billy (or rather one of his cohorts) is shown as breaking the terms of the amnesty. In reality this is still controversial and in recent years supporters of Billy have pushed for a posthumous amnesty, opposed by descendants of Wallace and Garrett amongst others. This claim was turned down by the then governor of New Mexico as recently as 2010.

A grave marker indicating that the deceased was killed by Billy the Kid (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am very interested in both the myth and the history of the brief period of the "Wild West" so I was fascinated to see this spare re-telling of a classic western legend. As always one is in safe hands with Newman though perhaps his later portrayals have more depth. I enjoyed seeing John Dehner's portrayal of Pat Garrett too. Sometimes vilified as a friend-killer and as is Jesse James' nemesis "that coward" Robert Ford, and popularly supposed to have bushwhacked Bonney in darkness and then having been to afraid to veryify who he had shot, here Garrett is shown to have reason to try to stop Billy and even then to take him alive before being tricked into believing him to be armed as he shot him.

Billy the Kid. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Incidentally the title is probably erroneous. At one point in the film Billy is shown as posing for a photographer and indeed this photo (or rather Ferrotype) still exists and changed hands last year for 2.3 million dollars. It would appear that this image is reversed which has given rise to the assumption that the Kid was left-handed. The detail would appear to make it clear that Billy was right-handed (or possibly ambidextrous as one acquaintance maintained) and probably not a quick-draw specialist, perhaps using the "Winchester '73" he is holding, as his main weapon.

Not that any of that detail detracts from an enjoyable re-telling of the essentially fictional legend of Billy the Kid. I just find it rather interesting...and I'm sure the Kid, often characterised as having a good sense of humour, would be amused that his likeness could command millions of dollars.

Billy the Kid (1860 – 1881). Image mirrored on vertical axis to correct widely-seen flopped tintype. Cartridge loading gate on Winchester Model 1873 lever action rifle is on the right side of the receiver. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was most happy with another excellent programme and the Rialto looks forward to welcoming Arthur's next pie, beer and Newman extravaganza.

Doughnuts, Deadwood, Digging and...Uruk

On Friday, Crabro and I did join in with the games rather than escape to the outdoors, and the first thing we came across was one of the organisers sitting outside in the sunshine having a coffee with the manageress of the hotel while looking out across the calm sunny Sussex sea. Meanwhile inside, the moles sitting round various tables under artificial light were already earnestly engaged in discussing, learning, punching and playing board games.

There were a huge number about and one of those in the early stages of play was the game I had played the night before: Village. I immediately noticed that the pieces feeding into the market were face down and queried this to find that we had played it wrong. I don't know if this would have made a significant dent in Ma's score but it would have given her slightly more of a challenge at least.

The first thing Crabro and I did, was meet up with a representative of Heron Games and collect some recent purchases from their March sale, thus avoiding postage. Crabro had acquired another Stefan Feld game: Trajan, while I had bought Deadwood, because I love the worker-placement mechanic and the western theme. I had also bought a couple of little aeroplanes to go with my Wings of War: Dawn of War game at a very good price. I now have a little WWII Stuka and a tiny version of Douglas Bader's Hurricane to go with the little Wings of War First World War 'planes I already had.

Crabro and I had a nose around at what was being played and said our good mornings and then decided to break out my new toy. Having shared the joy of punching and what Crabro rather indecently likes to call "furtling" the new game, we set it up and started to try and get to grips with the rules. It proved to be quite simple in essence (a simple choice of two actions each turn - retrieve your cowpokes or put one onto a building) but we were still learning when a third player turned up, which was nice.

The game went fine except for one rather odd thing: The tag line on the box says "A game of Wild West duels" and we didn't have a single one. This might change with better appreciation of strategy and with four players but it did feel rather odd not needing to have a single shoot out. Still on my losing streak, I came last while our friend the organiser, from the seat in the sunshine, who was the player that joined us, came a convincing first after making a lot of useful income from a hotel.

Although it didn't play as I imagined, it has a good theme, nice solid Fantasy Fight cardboard and may yet play well with the Goldstone Gamers as a four, so I was far from disappointed.

For our next game Mike produced Uruk: Wiege der Zivilisation, and our lunches arrived. Mike held off on eating while he patiently explained the intricacies of the game but I'm afraid I was too hungry for good manners and tucked into my crisps, salad and sandwiches while Mike taught.

I wasn't entirely confident in the game and was still learning some of the cards at the end but the first game was enough to convince me that I like it and will put it on my (huge) wishlist. I won't go into detail but it involved using combinations of cards and cubes to place a settlement (of cards) and improve it: Final score being the current total of card scores but each one potentially modified by a multiplier of how many cities (piles of white disks) you have against each card. The details are here


Cakes came round as we chose what would turn out to be the last game of the day. I decided on a doughnut and we picked Pergamon a 2011 Stefan Dorra and Ralf zur Linde game themed on archaeology. Once again Mike had to teach but he did it very well and despite the fact I was beginning to feel rather tired I grasped the rules easily. In fact I couldn't quite believe I hadn't missed something and snatched a quick read of the rules while Crabro left the table for a few minutes. It was exactly as I had understood from Mike and is really a very simple Euro. I felt at home with this one immediately, being simple myself, and proceeded to break my losing streak with quite a convincing win having been quite confident for most of the latter half of the game. I suppose this one ought to be on that massive wish-list too.

A very pleasant day and I had been enjoying myself so much that I'd forgotten that we were missing another beautiful Spring day. We emerged from our geeky darkness to a beautiful seaside evening to remind us of a lost Spring day though. Oh well you can't do everything.