Holiday Games

Despite living in  country the size of a continent we went for a low-key approach to our holiday this year, travelling a mere 40 minutes down the coast to house-sit for one of my friends whilst they went off to Hong Kong. They got to take their kids to Disneyland. We got to look after their three dogs, four chooks and a cat, whilst living in their lovely house out in the countryside. Easy.

This was the view from our bedroom window

Despite the temptation to just sit and look at this all day, and I did spend a lot of the day doing that, reading Patrick O'Brian and Lankhmar books on the verandah, we did a few trips out and also managed to play a few games.

So here are the games we played.

Tsuro. Although it's got a Chinese dragon motif laid over it it's basically the light-cycle sequence from the original Tron realised as a board game. The two thugs on the right are my children, who freeloaded on us for the week when they could have stayed at home and looked after our pets. However my son is learning to drive, so took most of the driving chores for the week so he could tot up plenty of hours for his log-book.

Treehouse. We played this in a pub-restaurant in Kangaroo Valley, much to the bemusement of the barman.

Carcassonne. We also played this in the pub.

We played a few games of Carcassonne at home as well. My children have definitely reached the stage where they understand the tactics, so they run rings around me now.

I played a coupe of games of Solitaire Caesar as well. This was one of the most successful games I've ever played, with an extensive and powerful Roman Empire reaching its height in 300AD.

Of course the collapse, when it came, was rapid. This was the position in about 600AD, when Rome fell to the barbarians.

And this is where the remains of the Empire clung on for century after century. Heaven knows how, but Rome's might lingered on in Mesopotamia until the 15th century.

Going into the last turn the Empire's capital was all that was left - Babylon, the Rome of the East. It fell in 1485 to the Ottomans.

A second game almost turned into a disaster when Rome fell in about 700AD, to be followed by the whole Eastern empire a couple of turns later. But Roman power lingered on in Sicily, and a resurgence in the 11th and 12th centuries saw the whole Italian peninsula recaptured. Once again the Empire fell to the Ottomans in 1485 - the last turn of the game - but it was Rome itself which fell. A very unusual game.

My daughter and I were scheduled to play Hellas as well, but she got word that she'd been offered a place at university, so passed on the game in favour of sorting that out.

I also did some work rebasing my Napoleonic ships. That will be covered in another post though.

Oh, that view in the first picture? We had a few storms during the week, and I got this photo: