Third quarter reading

Another quarter ends, and I've not forgotten how to read, but haven't maintained much of a pace.

Richard Coles - A Death in the Parish

I mentioned [here] that the reverend Richard's first novel had rather too much about what a vicar's life involves, but I was hoping he might have got that out of his system and settle down to focus on a whodunnit.  Sadly for me in his second novel he doubles down on the ecclesastical side, by adding a second vicar to the story.  This allows for plenty of discussion about different kinds of vicar with differences in their beliefs and different views on how to serve their parish.

In contrast, the whodunnit aspect seems even thinner than the first novel.  There are two deaths in the parish (or in the next parish), but Canon Clement seems to form no theories and follow no red herrings.  It probably depends what you look for in a crime novel, but I was expecting a number of plausible suspects with motives and questionable accounts of their whereabouts, and a smattering of false or inaccurate statements, so that the reader can play along and try to work out the culprit before the detective collars him or her.  Thank goodness there's a real police detective in the story to sort things out.

Randall Monroe - What If?

I'm a big fan of the XKCD web comic [xkcd.com].  Even after such a long time, Randall Monroe still manages to find new laugh-out-loud humour for geeks like me.

The book was a mixture.  There were surprising questions like how long could you surprise in space if you were inside a nuclear submarine.  There were fascinating ideas that had not occurred to me, like the rule of thumb for how many pronounceable combinations of letters can exist in a particular length of word.  On the other hand, there were some very odd assumptions between the question and the answer: what if the world stopped spinning?  The answer assumes that the planet stops suddenly but the atmosphere continues to rotate, which raises the question of what kind of action could cause that?  Would it be more likely for the planet's rotation to slowly decrease to an eventual halt, and the atmosphere with it?

So a mixed verdict, with brilliant moments and frustrating ones combined.

Robert Thorogood - The Queen of Poisons

This is the third in the series of Marlow Murder Club novels.  We've had a story with airtight alibis, and a locked-room mystery.  Now we have a murder where all the suspects were in the room and nobody saw it.  It's great fun and my only gripe is that the amateur detectives spent too much of the novel bouncing from one suspect to another and being wrong each time.  I know it's a trope of cosy crime, because my friend David was moaning about it at the reunion, but it felt like the old saying "at least a clock that has stopped tells the right time twice a day".

Robert Thorogood always plays fair by the reader, and the murder scene contained all the clues to questions that puzzled the amateur detectives for the first half of the book.

Greg Costikyan - Uncertainty in Games

This wasn't the book I was expecting.  It was mentioned in a discussion about game design, and appeared to be a recommendation for people who fuss about what kind of randomness to use, percentile dice, buckets of six-sided ones, different shapes for different units (with bigger dice effectively adding as plusses) and so on.  But that's not what it's about at all.

Costikyan's point is that all the interest in a game is about the unpredictable outcome (or in a few cases an unpredictable route to the inevitable outcome).  That's why nobody over the age of about 10 plays noughts and crosses (or tic-tac-toe in the USA).  Some games rely on a player's skill (e.g. throwing darts at a board), or the fact that there are too many choices to analyse fully (like chess), or random factors like cards or dice, and this book is a survey of what kind of uncertainty applies to each game.  It covers board games, computer games, a broad range.  I found it interesting to read, despite being nothing like what I expected.

Tom Hindle - Murder on Lake Garda

This was a birthday present and the location (Lake Garda) was somewhere I've been on several holidays, so the description of the setting brought back memories.  There are several crimes in the story and the connections between them create an intriguing situation.  Something out of place is a clue, but to which crime?

Disappointingly for me the novel jumps about from one character's point of view to another, using maybe half of the key characters to tell the story.  It's a way for the author to tell us about the history of the characters' relationships when they reflect on how they find themselves in this situation, without having to contrive a conversation where they might talk about it.  Unfortunately, when the character wonders who could have committed the murder it becomes a way of removing suspects from that crime, which is a shame.  As a result, even with important information only being available late on, I was already shouting the solution at the main amateur detective and wondering how she could fail to see something so obvious.

In fairness the story maintains interest even after the culprit(s) are identified, because there are still armed criminals on the loose for the other characters to deal with.  But I still can't recommend this one as whole-heartedly as I'd hoped.

Until next time, health & happiness to you all.

Gaming reunion 2024

It's been quite a long time since a bunch of people met at university, discovered a shared interest in games and became friends.  This week one of that group has kindly hosted another six of us to spend a week at his place, playing boardgames, Dungeons & Dragons, eating and drinking too much and generally having a good time.  It's great to catch up with people that I now only see on Zoom conferences or a couple of times a year face to face.

The antiques roadshow - old geezers

Midsomer Norton is a surprising town, with the biggest Wetherspoons in England (hidden behind an unimpressive front door).  There's also a model shop, so I picked up some more static grass, since I'm running out and my local shop has gone.

big 'Spoons

Before Dafydd arrived on Friday we got in a quick game of Diplomacy (Dafydd hates that game), followed by a very long game of Citadels (billed as a quick card game, but soon wallowing in analysis paralysis).  Trevor pulled off a very close victory by playing the card that causes an early end to the game with 7 districts instead of the usual 8 when he was just a couple of points in the lead.

Saturday dawned bright and sunny, although I was suffering from a hair of the dog.  Literally.  Matt's dog Rufus had been in to inspect the visitors on Friday evening.  I react badly to all furry creatures, and was sneezing with my eyes watering and generally feeling pretty poor.  As is traditional, a few of us spent the morning at the local shops to forage for provisions (and in my case enjoy some fresh air).

Lunchtime saw a first game of It's a Wonderful World, a kind of variation on Seven Wonders.  As a new thing, we all missed the point of how to play well and performed poorly.

It's A Wonderful World

In the evening, Darrell cooked pork chops for us, followed by a seriously extravagant cheeseboard (Baron bigod, Vacherin, High Moor, aged Gouda and a dozen other smelly delights)

pork chops flambée

Sunday morning we revisited It's a Wonderful World now we know how to play.  To my surprise, I came first on 61 points, followed by others on 60, 59 & 58.  It could hardly have been closer.

Then we moved on to D&D.  Massive trouble was stirred up when the party visited a friendly elf noble in Larston.  We stayed at his town house, but one of the Chaos faction raised an angry mob, supported by hired mercenaries and spellcasters.  There were people breaking in on the ground floor, fireballs cast through the windows on the first floor, the rear wall partly disintegrated, and earth elementals summoned to undermine the foundations and demolish the house around us.  Never before have I heard the expression "abandon house!"

D&D - fighting on a floorplan

Chinese takeaway for dinner, home-made Irish coffee, filler games (The Mind and Maior, see notes at the end of this post), time for bed.

Irish coffee

Monday we played a "quick" game of Starfarers of Catan in only 4 hours - not a great choice.  I languished in last place with dreadful production until one strange turn at the half-way stage when I jumped into first place and was the first one to be too successful to receive charity resources on my turn.  It still felt like I was last, right up to the final turn when Matt was in first place, needing only one more point to win.  Matt rolled poorly, couldn't score.  When it came around to me, I scored another leap forward and won.

Starfarers of Catan

The problem with the Catan games is that a bad start just gets worse, while early success allows a player to build villages and then gather extra resources each turn and push further in front.  It can be so disheartening to keep going with a bad position.  Although obviously I don't get to moan about this particular game, since I found a way to buy the victory (with fame rings, using one of the alien trade cards).

Another game of It's a Wonderful World, which Darrell won by a landslide with 93 points.

Dafydd cooked ragu with penne for dinner, followed by more cheese and port.

Then a game of Obsession, a social climbing game with worker placement for the servants and also the family.  I'd describe it as multiplayer solitaire, with very little scope for any player to affect the others.  Only one player is doing anything at a time, so the game grinds to a halt while David decides what to do.  It's not possible to all play in parallel, because we're all trying to by improvements to our country houses from the same pool of available options until one is bought and replenished.  We called it a night and resumed on Tuesday.  I'd guess that a 6-player game took us something like 6 hours, including teaching the rules, eating lunch and other faffing about.  It probably won't be back on the table very soon.

Dafydd won narrowly over David, Trevor & Darrell, commenting that he had felt like he was doing badly the whole time.  Matt almost managed a negative score.

Tuesday afternoon's D&D started at 5pm, delayed by the long boardgame.  There was a break for dinner, coq au vin by David with some serious wines and then chocolate fudge cake, after which the group were somewhat low on energy for serious gaming.

fudge cake

Wednesday - another Wonderful World (Dafydd won this time), then the new Kingmaker.  This was a great trip down memory lane, with all the usual shenanigans.  I had Scrope (as archbishop of York) & Percy with his troops, so spent my first turn travelling to York, grabbing Richard and getting him crowned.  My ally Up North was Matt, who spent his turn grabbing Durham, only to get caught by the plague straight away.  Dafydd grabbed Henry VI when we was called away to meet a papal emissary.  We had about 5 turns of fun, most people were getting nowhere, then Matt made nachos and we decided it had been fun, but we'd had enough.  Exactly how I remember it from school days.

Knights with nachos

Then we moved on to more D&D.  The party made a hasty departure from Larston and went to see the Blue Witch at the far end of the island.  She told us that Saratak had been waiting a week to speak to us, but if we had time she would like to speak to a goblin somewhere in the nearby desert, so could we find him and bring him to see her?  She's busy trying to control the growth of the desert, which is only there because she had a fight with another dragon rider, creating a mana storm and a spreading region of dead sand.  We couldn't resist, so we spent some time faffing about at the edge of the sand trying to work out why there was an army of ghostly goblins in the desert.  Faffing about letting the ghosts possess one of the party so we could ask them what was going on.  Also, faffing about trying to discover any weaknesses in the 48' tall sand elemental thing that seems to tour the desert.  No progress.

I cooked a kedgeree for dinner, the first time I've ever cooked for this number of people or in a professional kitchen, followed by more chocolate fudge cake.  People were polite enough to eat up and Dafydd even had a third helping (as well as left-over kedgeree for breakfast on Thursday).

That's a seriously big pan

We faffed about some more in the name of D&D, before deciding to go to bed before the big combat starts.

Thursday's game of Wonderful World was David's turn to win.  This has clearly become a favourite with the group.  Like Seven Wonders, each player chooses one card to build and then passes the rest around the table.  There's an additional complication that each card can be cashed in for a resource to be used for the building.  Dafydd ordered a copy today.

Dafydd also filled our downtime with The Big Knights [link here].  Highly recommended, hilarious.

The Big Knights

More D&D.  We attempt to defend the surviving goblin in the desert, while he performs a ritual to open a gate and go back to the Void along with all of his dead clanfolk (the army of ghosts we saw).  During the ritual he can not maintain the wall of fire around his camp, so the scuttling, acid-spitting beetle-things and dust dervish / sand elemental things can get in and attack him.  We would have to keep them out for three hours.  

The party has its back to a wall of ice (or cutlery) as two large sand elementals (disguised as beer cans) bring the damage. 

We fought for about an hour, when the remains of the other dragon rider turned up.  Like the sand elementals, it seemed to be made of sand & stones in a human shape.  He could throw Cone of Sand (like cone of cold) and a sand stome (like an ice storm), and when we took down all of his hit points he dissipated into a pile of sand.  Three rounds later we saw him coming back out of the dunes.  We did this a couple of times, before Dafydd has the bright idea of using holy water to cause damage that he can't regenerate.  That's another week we've kept Saratak waiting...

Friday - sad partings, with an arrangement to meet up for a pair of rock concerts in London next year.  Two of our favourite bands will be appearing on successive nights over the spring bank holiday and the tickets went on sale this week, while we were together.  It's like someone was sending us a message.

Footnotes on games

The Mind is an odd game.  The players have hands of cards from a deck numbered 1 to 100.  Without any communication, they must play the cards in order.  As the game progresses the hands become bigger (starting with 1 card each).  There are some lifelines to be earned, including regaining lives on completion of every 3rd level.  Our best score was to complete level 7 (4 players with 7 cards each) and then fail on level 8.

Maior is a bluffing game.  There are 2 dice in a box.  Each player has 3 lives.  The first player shakes the box, opens the lid to look at the dice, calls out the roll (higher number then lower) and offers it to the next player around the table.  The next player can challenge the call, in which case the box is opened and one the two loses a life, depending on whether the score was as good as the call or not.  Or the player can accept the box, may shake it some more (optional), may take a look inside (optional) and must pass it on with a call that is higher than the last call.  The order of the calls is: 31, 32, 41, 42, 43, 51, 52, 53, 54, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 11, 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, 21 (called "maior", the highest call).  The calls keep rising until there is a challenge and someone loses a life, after which the challenger becomes the first player and starts again.  Any challenge on a call of maior or a roll of maior in the box costs 2 lives.

Crafty players like Darrell may under-call the roll, e.g. roll 65 but call 64.  After the box has passed right round the table, he can then pass it on again as 65 without shaking or looking.

Chaotic players like Dafydd do things like accept a box with a call of 61, shake the box, don't look inside, and pass it on with a call of 62.

Until next time, health & happiness to you all.

Joshua, a druid in 1/72

You know how sometimes people decide to gloss over why they were trying to do something a particular way.  There's even a phrase "because reasons" that seems to mean "for reasons that I won't go into just now".  Well, I've got some old D&D figures in some scale that probably wasn't even named at the time, it was just the size that Citadel and other manufacturers made D&D models.  Nowadays we might call it 28mm.  Almost everything else in my collection is 1/72 scale.

The new Joshua

I settled on just one scale, because I couldn't face collecting separate buildings, bridges, fences, trees etc in a handful of different scales.  I even have 1/72 fantasy figures from Caesar and Light/Dark Alliance.  So the last time our D&D group got together face-to-face I brought a bunch of models to use and they were 1/72 with just a couple of exceptions.  The biggest exception was an old Citadel druid for David's character Joshua.  Not only is it as tall as Umar the giant, but in 40 years I'd never bothered to paint it beyond an undercoat.

We're getting together again soon, so I was talking to David about models to use.  By the way our DM typically relies on theatre of the mind for Zoom sessions, or uses spare dice for the bad guys.  Those small dee-sixes are goblins one to six, the dee-fours are ogres.  The pile of paperbacks is the cowshed and the big cardboard box is the tavern.  The figures on the upturned tumblers are still flying down from the top of the tower.  

You can probably see where my inspiration comes from when setting up a wargames table.

Anyway, I told David I'd get a proper coat of paint on the old druid model.  Which I did, just a simple base coat.  Then I picked it up for a closer look, dropped it on a hard floor and the druid's sickle snapped off.  David was very understanding.  "That's fine", he said, "Joshua doesn't use a sickle anyway.  He's got this special Rod of the Druid that was a gift from the Elven empress after we raided their temple and ..."  You don't need the whole provenance.  But this has become a serious piece of crafting now, with a weapon to be built and attached securely to the model.  On a metal figure that's a job for a pin drill and superglue and other stuff that I never use with 1/72 plastics.

At this point it occurred to me that a conversion like this may as well begin with a 1/72 scale figure, so that it fits with the rest of the party.  So I grabbed an old Airfix Robin Hood figure and got started.  There, now I've explained why I would do such an odd thing, when D&D models are readily available in larger scales, and not just "because reasons".

Airfix outlaw

The actual conversion was surprisingly simple.  I cut off the original's sword (including the hand, so I've got something to put in the spares box).  The new shield was cut from cereal box card, with planks cut from 80gsm printer paper on one side.  A new hand is cut from a piece of sprue (white) and stuck to the shield.  The "rod of the druid" is a length cut from a paper clip, with toilet paper wrapped around the top and soaked in PVA to make the head piece.

Conversion work

Then I gave it the usual treatment of a plain base coat in each area, with a wash of burnt umber on the hair, raw umber everywhere else, to fill in the creases.  Bish bash bosh job's a good 'un.  Can't wait to get it on the table.

Druids old & new

Until next time, health & happiness to you all.