a catalogue of artistes

For the steampunk enthusiast: Gilded Age Records. Features many of my favourite bands and some I look forward to tatsing.

mini reviews and meandering messages

Brain went vague playing Thebes tonight. Kept mixing up the colours at the end of the game session. Worrisome, especially since I wasn't hypo. Must remember not to try to do stuff where I am required to use my brain two times in a row. Thebes was an interesting game. You are turn of the last century archaeologists from Warsaw digging up the treasures of Crete, Egypt, Palestine, Greece, and Mesopotamia. To do so you have to do research in the libraries of Europe. The more research you do, the more treasure chits you can take out of the appropriate bag. Of course, many of these treasure chits are just dirt - and they go back in the bag. Actions are measured in weeks to obtain gossip, knowledge, or fellow experts, and you decide how many weeks you want to spend digging at a site (which results in drawing more chips). But you can only dig at any one site once a year. 10 days In Africa is a game where you draw chits/cards and place them in an ordered rack. You have to construct a continuous journey lasting 10 days through connecting countries. Special car cards count as wildcards whilst plane cards allow you to jump be identically coloured countries. The main problem with the game was that I had forgotten most of my African geography (it was out of date anyway), especially looking at the board orientated in a W->E axis. Plus it wasn't explained all that well and so my initial set up was atrocious. Would be interesting to play without a map and with a judge who judged you journey as correct or not. There are also 10 Days in America and 10 days in Asia sets with similar style. Could make a possible party game, but lacks a lot of the fun quotient methinks. Lost Ticket To Ride Europe because I forgot to keep my long distance journey. Must remember to keep it, but somehow I've gotten in my habit of not doing so, and thereby losing. And I even set out as if it were still my journey, so was trapped in the Alps (all those tunnels are expensive). And I can't even remember the games I played yesterday, although one was quite fun. Brain fog. I do remember someone else played Space Trucker and actually survived. I suspect the expansion (which I got in order to have 5 players), contains the difficult pirate attack cards that tends to trash your ships and upset my old gaming group. And telling someone where to find the information he needs to set up his new router, but the actual game I played - completely and utterly blank. Then again I was so exhausted after Sunday I slept most of Monday away. Definitely need more than 48 hours warning about Things Happening, methinks.