Month: January 2005

On Sunday, Claire was reading me a BBC News article about a woman who fell from Constitution Hill this Saturday, sustaining a severe head injury.

It turns out that the woman was Nia, the receptionist from the Technium. We found out when she didn’t turn up for work this morning. The Technium manager sent a text to her phone, and the call was returned by her dad.

It’s funny when you read a news story like that and you don’t realise that it’s somebody you know.

I seem to have come into posession of a couple of haggises (or “haggii”, as I prefer). Would any of you Geek Night regulars like to join Claire and I a little earlier this evening for a haggis supper before we get down to the board games? A vegetarian alternative can be arranged for, if required.

If you don’t know if you like haggis or not, it’s also the perfect oppertunity to find out (and I can make sure there’s a backup option in place in case it turns out you don’t). All Geek Night regulars welcome – just drop me a text or leave a comment in advance so I know who to expect. Food at 6; board games from 7.

Grr! Yet another fuck-up by the folks who run the Technium phone system: right now, every sixth call (exactly) to SmartData‘s number is put through to the WDA‘s answerphone (the WDA share our building). It’s a fucking joke.

This is on top of the various problems we’ve had with our voicemail. And don’t get me started on the other things we were supposed to be able to have but aren’t fixed yet (hunt grouping, on-hold music, etc.).

The Aberystwyth Technium is a wonderful building and a great place to run a business. Just make sure you bring your own phone system.

After last Sunday’s Geek Night, I’ve observed that there are a fair number of us (well: Claire, JTA, Ruth and I, at least) who would be interested in an online, one-day-per-turn game of Diplomacy, an entirely skill-based strategy game made in 1959 and based on World War 1. It’s a really, really simple game, but the only way to win is to negotiate with the other players and to make promises which you may or may not keep. And it’s very clever.

But… the only way to truly appreciate Diplomacy is with a full complement of seven players. So – that means we need three more people who are willing to trade about 15 minutes a day (for about a week and a half to three weeks) for a chance to participate in Geek Night‘s own Diplomacy war. All you’ll need is an internet connection and access to e-mail.

You can even play as a pair or a team, if you like, and have several people ‘lead’ one country (which might be useful if, say, you don’t want to dedicate 15 minutes every day – you can take turns). But the crucial point is that I need to find representation for the seven powers of Europe, and right now I have four.

The game will start next weekend, probably.

We’ll be playing by the standard Diplomacy rules (summary), on a standard map. All player identities will be public and diplomacy between players – by both private and public channels – will be encourages. Any questions, or people who want to join our little game, can be posted as comments or e-mailed to me.

Edit: Player List (see comments for discussion):
Player list currently as follows:

• Dan & Claire
• JTA
• Ruth
• Jon
• Andy K & Faye
• Matt
• Andy R & Sian

That’s it. No more players this game.

I’ll explain how we’re going to play this by next weekend. Hang in there.

This is an urgent message for Paul M:

Some of us in Aber are concerned that your original travel plans had you returning to Aberystwyth on Monday 17th January. It is our understanding that you have an exam on the morning of Monday 17th January, and we’re not sure you’re aware of this. We have tried several times to get in touch with you using instant messaging tools and by telephone, but to no avail.

If you know that you either do or do not have an exam on this date, please post to your weblog, or contact us, as soon as possible, so that we Aberites know that we do not need to try to find a way to get in contact with you!

If anybody has an up-to-date phone number of Paul’s parents, please contact me so we can sort this out.

Thanks for reading.

This post is almost entirely about board games. If you’re not interested, stop here.

As some of you will no doubt realise already, I have at long last gotten Chrononauts and War Of The Ring, two board games I’ve been trying to get my hands on for some time. Not being ones to want to wait until Geek Night, this Saturday, Claire and I have played each, once, over the last two days. Here’s our results:

Chrononauts
Chrononauts is a product of Looney Labs, the guys behind the stunning Fluxx. The players are time travellers, trapped in Earth’s “real” timeline and trying to restore key events of the last 150 years to the configuration that will allow them to travel ‘home’ – and win. But they can also win by patching lots of paradoxes (holes made in the fabric of spacetime by the combination of incompatible events) – putting new histories in to replace damaged bits of time, or by collecting artefacts from certain historical periods.

People’s goals and identities are secret, so you need to infer what people are trying to achieve from the distortions in time they seem to be causing. And you might need to keep your own goals secret too – if you use explosives to destroy in advance the iceberg that the Titanic hit, in order to save it, you’ll attract attention from other time travellers who might re-plot the course to make it hit a different one just to spite you!

Players are encouraged to come up with nanofiction (very very short stories) to explain ‘how’ they’re achieving things – don’t just say “I’m flipping 1941″… explain how you’re preventing (or causing) Pearl Harbour to be bombed by the Japanese… then look at the “board” of cards and see what repurcussions it has on the rest of the century…

It was fun – although I think we both found it a little confusing for the first few turns (how am I supposed to achieve these goals, exactly?). It’s easy to dive in to (“Draw one! Play one!” methodology), though, and good clean family fun.

Claire won.

War Of The Ring
War Of The Ring has rapidly climbed to number 4 on BoardGameGeek‘s Top 100 Games list. It’s a sightly Risk-esque board game but with a semi-simultaneous turn structure and funky themic special rules.

This was, to be fair, fucking challenging to get into. The pair of us spent about an hour sorting out the pieces (hundreds of the buggers) and reading all the rules. Claire decided to play the Free Peoples of Middle Earth, so I took control of the Shadow Armies. These two sides can win – militaristically – by capturing the cities and strongholds of the other: and statistically, the Shadow – with a respawning army – will eventually achieve this goal, given enough time.

But the real hope for the Free Peoples lies in the Fellowship Of The Ring – Frodo and Sam, guided by the Companions of the Fellowship, use a secret ‘movement track’ to sneak across Middle Earth to try to get the One Ring to the crack of doom and destroy it. And the more effort Sauron puts into finding it on a given turn and preventing them from destroying the ring, the less resources he has with which to command his armies.

Various special cards make combat variable and allow a variety of techniques to be employed; from quick raids on enemy territory to extended sieges around Middle Earth’s strongholds. At one point, Claire had got the Fellowship successfully East as far as the Woodland Realm, and had started trekking South towards Mordor, before my Nazgul caught their scent and started forcing them to use the ring – and suffer it’s corruption – to escape. This caused the fellowship to seek sanctuary with the dwarfs of the Iron Hills, at which point my armies stormed the Woodland Realm, Rivendell, Minas Tirith and – finally – the mighty Helm’s Deep, and win. Could have been a closer thing, and I’m sure we’ve both learned a shedload about the game.

We thought it’d be particularly useful if we played one such 2-player game of War Of The Ring; so that if we play the 4-player version on Sunday, at least some of us can explain it all (and no – we won’t play on the same side!).

Geek Night This Sunday

Of course, we can play both these games – and the other usual stuff – on Geek Night, if people want. Chrononauts is for up to six players, and War Of The Ring supports 2-4 (in ‘teams’ of 1-2, between whom control of armies is split).

I achieved another success this morning in my effort to recover as much as possible of my personal life online into one place – I’ve managed to rediscover five ‘lost’ (and previously unread) weblog posts from April 2003. Folks who really want to might care to go back and read:

• April Fools Day (1st April 2003) – an account my my 2003 April Fools’ prank against the now-Penbryn Residence.
• A Message From Reb (4th April 2003) – distilled bitterness.
• Claire Goes To Norfolk (6th April 2003) – boredom and horniness.
• Chasing The Paycheque (7th April 2003) – I get paid; Kit and I cook to celebrate.
• Easter Break (8th April 2003) – Reb texts me – more bitterness – Kit and I eat Burger King Tex-Mex burgers for the first time.

It’s getting harder to find sources of old electronic diary entries like these ones and publish them. But I’m genuinely considering trying to dig up some of my old paper-based diaries (the ones that haven’t been lost or burned) and archive them here for you all to see (high school crushes, fun and games at Preston College, eighteenth birthday [three pages or so of it!], starting University, becoming attached to Reb, breaking up with Reb [and all the stuff in-between] – I’ve got it all somewhere!) And where I’ve still got gaps, I might have to make a couple of posts to explain what I was doing in the interim, where I remember.

Doing this, I think I can get a pretty concise history of what I’ve been up to since about the summer of 1998, and perhaps a little further. Which will do.