Christmas Haul

Once again it's time to remember that day John McClane saved the Nakatomi Plaza hostages.

Yes, It's Christmas.

Here in Australia the big day has been and gone, and this year I got a decent gaming-related haul. First up is the most recent in Bob Cordery's Portable Wargame books, 'Gridded Naval Wargames'. I'm not sure I have any immediate plans for this - I already have too many projects occupying my time - but I've skimmed through it and there's a ton of useful stuff in it.

I thought that it was about time I backed up my English Civil War gaming with a bit of background knowledge. I don't really know the wider history of the conflict - my reading has been focused more on battles and the troops - so I decided to rectify that. I wanted a simple, single-volume history that would give me a basic overview of why things were happening, and settled on these two, mostly because they were cheap. 

I got two boardgames. 'Codenames' is one some friends of ours have which we've enjoyed a lot, so I was very happy to find myself the owner of a copy. In it players form two teams. One person in each team has to guide the others to a group of friendly secret agents hidden in a grid of words (the Codenames) whilst avoiding revealing the enemy agents, the innocent bystanders or, worse, the deadly assassin. It's a simple game that you should be able to get most people to play, but the large number of word and different grid layouts give it a lot of replay value.

I played 'Citadels' at the library a month or so ago, and wanted a copy. My son got it for me, and as a bonus it's the full-fat deluxe edition. Players compete to build the best Medieval city, aided by various characters and their special abilities. Each game has a particular set of characters, but which character a player has changes from turn to turn - do you select the Architect this turn to get in some serious building, or is it more important that you use the nasty Warlord to destroy part of a rivals city?

 We played a couple of games of it yesterday  (one before and one after Christmas dinner) and had a great time.

The artwork is gorgeous.

My daughter got One Night Werewolf, and we played a few rounds of that as well, laughing gleefully as our neighbour, a non-gamer who'd joined us for dinner, was revealed to be a werewolf and was marched off to the gallows.

My top present of the year was this wonderful action figure of everyone's favourite movie Avenger, 'Fun Telephone'. Seems legit. 

Of course it was a time for family, although owing to his work-shifts Cei couldn't be with us (we had a pre-Christmas dinner with him last week). Catherine spent part of the day as an elf.

And our newest family member, Miller, enjoyed the festivities as well.

Hope you all had a great time with your friends and family, however you chose to spend it.