Like 'Buses...

It seems, you wait ages for a Trajan victory and then two come along together. Not, as you know, that I care much about the winning. It's the playing that's fun for me not the result...but...
having said that...
well...
it was quite satisfying to beat Crabro, MaOldie and ProfMudlark at a game I have so much respect for, on Thursday games night.

I'm not sure what I did right this time but if there was any overall strategy going on, it was simply to maximise the point scoring by trying to get some "ViPs" out of every turn. Whatever happened, it worked and I was well chuffed.

Just as we had the week before, we followed all that concentration with Flutter: a much lighter game...and just to add to the happiness quotient the Prof. had his first win at his favourite game. I think I was last, barely managing to improve on my starting money.

Still I was happy enough with the Trajan win... :-)

Trajan Victory at Last

Twosday games this week featured the same great double bill of Borg and Feld, beginning with both sides of another Battlelore scenario and finishing with another game of Trajan.

What can I say about these two games that I haven't already? They are currently two of our favourite games by two of our favourite designers and enormously fun and satisfying to play.

The main difference this week was that I, at last, won a game of Trajan. It wasn't by much, I have to admit (eight points in it I think), and actually both of us did much better this time, but it is nice to know that I can be competitive in a game I really enjoy playing. I'm not sure what I did right this time and I can still point to a rather chaotic strategy with missed opportunities but I think that I made more effective use of the mancala device at the game's heart, this time as well as exploiting the building and military areas quite well. Crabro meanwhile did better the senate area and in maximising bonuses than I did.

The Battlelore scenario didn't include any of those wretched cowardly goblins or the stalwart dwarves. In fact there were no monsters either so apart from the lore element it was a straight toe-to-toe scrap between infantry and cavalry with a couple of archer units each for a bit of "twanging" or "pinging" as ranged fire is known, and the odd "darken the sky" making them a tiny bit more useful.

BattleLore (Photo credit: Will Merydith)

The scenario didn't on the face of it look massively unbalanced and having lost the first battle 6-3, I initially feared that we would break the sequence of one-alls as Crabro had some lucky rolls and looked very threatening from the outset. With a sequence of decent cards giving me some solid advances though, the tide turned and ended on a surprising 7-1 victory for me, leaving the record of each of us winning every scenario, intact.

This game continues to be great fun for us and exactly my type of game as I let my inner fifteen year old self back out to play with miniatures and dice as on Saturday evenings so many years ago.

What a great day's gaming! Enormous thanks to Crabro for all the fun (and the lunch) as usual.

Moonrise Men in Shadows - Cinebinge

Eva Green (Photo credit: Photogrammaton)

Another cinebinge for me yesterday. Sadly Two Days in Paris has been completely ignored in this area and equally sadly, I failed to notice Raid until too late and missed that too. Meanwhile there were new films by two distinctive "auteur" directors whose work I like and the third outing for a franchise I've enjoyed, so it wasn't hard to find a triple bill.

CANNES, FRANCE - MAY 16: (R-L) Actor Jason Schwartzman, actor Bruce Willis and director Wes Anderson pose at the 'Moonrise Kingdom' photocall during the 65th Annual Cannes Film Festival at Palais des Festivals on May 16, 2012 in Cannes, France. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

First and best was the new Wes Anderson film "Moonrise Kingdom". Another sweet slice of whimsy from the writer and director of The Life Aquatic, Rushmore, Royal Tenenbaums, Bottle Rocket, Fantastic Mr Fox and Darjeeling Limited. This is typically quirky, with every frame carefully coloured and composed and with some oddball characters with their own logic.

It features a very good cast including Bill Murray from Life Aquatic as well as Francis McDormand, Bruce Willis, Ed Norton, Harvey Keitel, Tilda Swinton and others. The two unknowns playing the unlikely lovers at the heart of the story (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward) are also very good. Jared (Sam) is one of an unlikely bunch of "Khaki Scouts of North America", led by well meaning if ineffectual scout leader Ed Norton, and uses his wilderness skills to run away with fellow misfit, Suzy. Meanwhile, the rest of the scouts and the aforementioned adults form a chaotic search party.

There are some stylised touches which echo some of the oddity of The Life Aquatic, in fact our exp

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (soundtrack) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

loration of the Suzy's house at the beginning of the film immediately brought that to mind as the camera pans about, looking through the side of the house and catching vignettes of the characters going about their lives. Here though it never overwhelms the film or distances us enough that the film and its characters are not engaging. This was a lovely cinema experience for me. A delight, which I would like to see again and at the very least will hopefully be in my DVD collection before too long.

After that start, inevitably the rest suffered a bit by comparison. A quick lunch break and then it was on

Cover of Men in Black (Deluxe Edition)

with Men in Black 3. Nothing wrong with the film, and I did enjoy it, but whether for the fact that its "back in time" plot deprived us of a lot of Tommy Lee Jones or for its overreliance on plot at the expense of the inventiveness of the previous films I can't decide. Perhaps it's just that we have seen it all before now. We know to expect big guns and butt-ugly monsters with lots of goo and slime and unpleasant orifices.

Even the always delightful presence of Emma Thompson didn't quite lift the excitement for me. I suppose you can't say that a film featuring giant fish monsters, people jumping off the Chrysler building and the launch of Apollo 11 etc isn't exactly just doing it by the numbers so perhaps it's just me that's jaded. Plenty of fun to be had but less originality I suppose...and why do we always have to be massively high up in every film these days?

English: Johnny Depp at a ceremony for Penélope Cruz to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Which brings me to the last film of the day (because of some cliff-edge teetering and plummeting). This was "Dark Shadows" by another quirky director whose work I love: Tim Burton. Not surprisingly the cast included his best pal Johnny Depp and his missus Helena Bonham-Carter as usual, and also included Michelle Pfeifer, Eva Green (as the evil baddy) and perhaps in a nod to the history of such gothic grand guignol, another Burton regular:  Christopher Lee.

The material is originally from a television series of the sixties and seventies about a cursed family and including vampires, witches and werewolves. Unfortunately I had never seen it so I didn't have the affection for the idea that I might have or spot the cameos by the original stars of the show, so it had to stand on its own as a film.





I must say I enjoyed it, but it is somewhat chaotic, and must be less original seeming to an audience post  Buffy, True Blood, Being Human, Twilight, Addams Family and endless other franchises than it appeared in the sixties.

Ideal material for Tim Burton of course as he is a lover of the fantastick, gothic and  macabre. In its way, often great fun especially if you can relax and go with Depp's camp and over the top performance. I enjoyed it, but both this and MiB felt lacking in originality in the wake of the delicious daftness of Moonrise Kingdom.

Film Night Two - Just as we thought it was safe...

We put in what turns out to have been a "banker" film night on Tuesday as Arthur didn't think he could

The Smallest Show on Earth (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

make Friday this week but as it turned out he was free after all so...why not just have another film night?

Why not indeed but just to make this one a little different we had pizza, salad and garlic bread in place of the traditional pork pie.

There may be SPOILERS below

The programme was fairly traditional consisting as it did of black and white films of the 'fifties and 'sixties. First up was what I jokingly referred to as Britain's answer to Cinema Paradiso - "The Smallest Show on Earth"  from 1957. This continued the theme of Peter Sellers' films amongst other links to recent fare.

Bill Travers and wife (as of this same year) Virginia McKenna play a couple who inherit a run down old cinema called the Bijou and against their better judgement end up running it with the aid of a motley assortment of equally run down staff including Sellers as a drunken old projectionist. Amongst other British celluloid stalwarts of the era we also find Bernard Miles, Sid James, Margaret Rutherford, Liz Fraser and Leslie Phillips in the cast as the Spensers try to run the "Old By-joo" to raise its value to Francis de Wolff the owner of the big "modern" rival in the town.

The comedy character actors are the delight here, while the leads (better known later as the Adamsons of Born Free) have a bit of a thankless task playing against the likes of Rutherford and Sellers. It is also a nice bit of social history with its reminders of the cinemas of my childhood (which were happily mostly more like the Grand

Francis de Wolff (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

than the Bijou). Basil Dearden directed and it was produced by Michael Relph with the famous team of Launder and Gilliat as executive producers.

The short feature played in the interval and accompanied by the pizza, was again a Bilko episode, in which our hero spends the platoon's money on a racehorse with the expected disastrous results and some great comedy mugging from the long-suffering Paul Ford.

After the interval the second feature was a Boulting Brothers comedy from 1963: Heaven's Above featuring another low key (compared to his later Pink Panther work) character performance by Peter Sellers. This time as a prison chaplain mistakenly

Peter Sellers (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

given a parish and as a well-meaning vicar, causing mayhem and an almost complete social meltdown in the town.

The last part of the film justifies the title although it does feel a bit like a different film tacked on the end. Much fun to be had again from an assortment of character comedians of the time as well as Sellers' own role. Bernard Miles crops up again and Eric Sykes, Miriam Karlin and Roy Kinnear have key roles but playing who's who with all the well known faces thronging the screen from Derek Nimmo to Ian Carmichael.

Oh Lore! or A funny thing happened on the way to the forum

More Borg and Feld on Tuesday (apologies for the fact this post has somehow got out of order) for some very satisfying board gaming and a brief break of the losing streak. We played our first Battlelore scenario to involve, not just lore, but a creature. In this case a large but not terribly powerful spider. I put her to good use before she got killed though and finished the scenario 7-3 (6 banners for the win this week).

After lunch though things went downhill and Dick pummeled away at my right flank (full of panic-stricken goblins) until I barely managed to stop it being a whitewash. Things could have been slightly different if my "Creeping Doom" spell had worked but there we are. That's what this game is like: Sometimes the luck is with you and sometimes against. If you play enough you get the triumphs as well as the disasters. I always enjoy it even when losing. Having said that though, I did find this replay disappointingly brief and I didn't even get to see what Crabro could do with a spider as he didn't bother to move it.

We finished off with another game of Trajan, and although I was initially in the lead (at one point by a considerable margin after a 20 point ship etc) I let this slip away steadily, even failing to prevent a full minus 15 malus after the first quarter. My excuse, if I was to make one, was that my head was gently throbbing and felt as though it was full of sawdust after an ill-advised return to beer drinking in the early hours with another friend. I didn't make the excuse at the time because to be honest I was a bit ashamed of the bad play and anyway Crabro's win was well deserved.

Oh no! They're sending us kids!

An early film night this week as Arthur has somewhere else to be on the traditional Friday. Nevertheless

Cover via Amazon

he arrived with the full trappings of a proper film night- Melton Mowbray pie, bottles of beer and a couple of black and white films.

The first of these was "Only Two Can Play" a Peter Sellers film of 1962 and this was followed by another episode of "Bilko" (One in which he meets his match in the delightful Sergeant Hogan). The final film of the day was "The Village of the Damned" a 1960 adaptation of John Wyndham's chilling Midwich Cuckoos, featuring George Sanders.

The first of these was the stand out by a long way, featuring a marvelous performance by Sellers as a Welsh librarian, tempted by the possibility of an affair with the exotic Mai Zetterling as an escape from his humdrum and rather impoverished life, which never quite manages to be consummated. All to the good when you consider that his wife is the lovely Virginia Maskell. Such is the skill and subtlety of Sellers' performance that we do have sympathy for his straying, despite meeting his wife and children.

There is much to be enjoyed and some great supportin

The Midwich Cuckoos (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

g acting. Sellers/Lewis' interaction with the oth

er's sha

ring the lodgings is funny, well-played and well written (by Brian Forbes from Kingsley Amis' novel). It makes one a little sad that Sellers, undoubtedly an extremely talented actor, enjoyed broader caricature so much that his later career moved away from such "straight" performances. Not that I would want to deprive the world of Clouseau I suppose...

Everyone Likes a Flutter Now and then

Thursday games and we were four again without MrWendell or Petra Pan. Not too suprisingly Crabro was keen to play Trajan again and so, despite the losses, was I.

Ma Oldie hadn't played it before but belied her gametag and impressed with how fast she picked up the rules. In fact the two who have played it most often were a fairly distant third and fourth (myself and Crabro respectively) while Ma the newbie gave the Professor a run for his money with a good second.

 Very enjoyable even for the losers. Stefan Feld really is the designer of the moment for me and Mr C.

We finished with some time to spare and went looking for a filler. We emerged from the games collection with the Prof.'s alleged favourite and old Spears game by the name of Flutter. Given that the Prof. has a mathematical brain the size of a planet, it is perhaps surprising that his favourite would be an old stock trading game that is pretty much completely random but I have to admit it was once again lots of fun.

A very pleasant and satisfying evening's gaming