inconsequential ruminations

After around two years of no gaming, mainly due to excessive parental stress, Vanessa has started to play games with me again.

We started on Lost Cities, which was even better than I remembered. I cannot see anyone supplanting Reiner Knizia as my favourite designer.

We also played Carcassonne the Castle, another Knizia game, and it is very nice. It is my favourite Carcassonne so far, even better than Carcassonne the Discovery. Shannon Appelcline’s RPGnet review is excellent – if you skip the rules regurgitation and go straight to the Relationships to Other Games section. He summarises the differences between the basic game and the Castle better than I could.

I really want to try out Carcassonne the City at some point, which is apparently quite similar, but supports more players.

This brought back a few childhood memories.

Three of us played Agricola for the first time last night. Chris bought an expensive, but really nicely made, set of paste-ups from Andy Merritt. I hope that Z-Man sell the cards separately, so he does not have to buy another set.

Agricola is as good as advertised. I see no reason to play Caylus again. I have been thinking about it ever since.

This is the fourth Uwe Rosenburg game I have played (Bohnanza, Babel, Schnäppchen Jagd) and the only one I have liked. I did not think he had it in him.

The rules are simple enough, but understanding how to play well is tough. Luckily Chris had played the solitaire Flash version and several two player games, so he was able to stop us getting frustrated.

As others have said, the best thing about Agricola is that it manages to be both an intricate “system game”, while being very thematic. Frank Branham’s comments about the game are spot on as usual, although I totally disagree with his comments about the Geek.

Some have criticised it for being multiplayer solitaire, which is a valid point, but the competition for actions stops that being a problem for me. Also, Chris Farrell makes the criticism that this is a fixed-fun game, so better with fewer players, but this just makes me think I should buy it so I can play it with Vanessa.

If you want some more (better written) comments and a nice summary of the mechanics, check out the Spotlightongames review.

9/10 for now.

You have probably all seen this, but I am impressed with this list of 103 Age of Steam, Power Grid and Ticket to Ride expansion maps. I hope it is kept maintained.

I went over to Steve’s house last night and played Combat Commander: Europe. Steve has been really keen to play this with me. We played Squad Leader a few weeks ago and this reignited his enthusiasm for Combat Commander. Combat Commander: Europe is pretty good, but I am not sure it is entirely successful. It shares a lot of the mechanics of Memoir ‘44, while attempting to cover the same ground as Squad Leader. Sounds a bit like Up Front?

There is a lot of randomness and chaos that I found jarring. For instance, victory conditions can change randomly during the game and snipers, who might as well be magic fire storms, invisibly shoot at random map hexes and disappear. Randomness is not essentially a bad thing, after all WW2 combat involved plenty of luck, but I wish the luck was more thematic. At least you do not feel like an omnipotent god controlling your men, but more like a real combat commander with imperfect knowledge and control over events on the ground.

On the plus side, the components are way better than Squad Leader, although the maps are slightly drab and the rules are not particularly challenging for a wargame.

I did not find it significantly longer or shorter than Squad Leader. We played the first scenario in two hours including rules explanations.

If you have not read it already, check out Mikko’s concise and thorough review.

I need to try Lock and Load and Tide of Iron, to see if I can finally settle on a tactical WW2 wargame.

So far 6/10, but I am keen to play it more.

I may be years behind the bleeding-edge, but I have been playing St Petersburg a lot recently online at Yucata or against the Westpark Gamer’s offline version.

I underestimated this game. It is true that the only path to victory is collecting aristocrats, but it has subtle strategic qualities that I only recognised after multiple plays.

The offline version has fiendish AI. In two-player games, I now beat it about 50% of the time, but I have played at least ten games. Definitely try it out.

Here are the podcasts I subscribe to at the moment. I change them often, but this is the current snapshot.

I have a lot of podcasts on this list, but I am ruthless about skipping out of them when they get boring. I might still have to trim the list as I now have over seven hours of audio queued on my Samsung YP-U2 MP3 player.

I have linked to the podcasts’ news feeds, rather than the websites themselves.

Games
Moritz Eggert – best bit of the Dice Tower although Gamer Tech is good too.
Point to Point – a little too focussed on competitive play, but otherwise excellent.
Roll 2d6 – rarely updated and focussed on American-style games, rather than Euros, but very well done.
The Aldie Show – Aldie holds his own as a solo podcaster
The Board Gamer – On hiatus. Steve is in my games group.

General Interest
BBC World Service documentaries
The Economist – summary of last week’s news.
The World Next Week – summary of next week’s upcoming news
Military History Podcast
Mark Kermode’s film reviews – my favourite podcast bar none
History Podcast
Radio 4 Choice

Linux, Science and Tech
IT Conversations
Sourcetrunk
Lugradio – Linux podcast. Juvenile, but otherwise good.
Security Now – was excellent, but has recently become at least 30% adverts.
Linux Reality
The Linux Action Show
The Linux Link Tech Show – sound quality is poor and they edit nothing, but these guys do the best interviews
FLOSS Weekly
Science Friday
The Real Deal