Happy Christmas!

OK, it's a day late but yesterday I was busy with a mix of having fun, relaxing and cooking. No time for blogging.

I hope you all had, or are having, a great Christmas and that Santa (or whatever functional equivalent thereof) brought you plenty of gaming goodies.

My haul this year was small, but that's OK. I got a dice-tray (something I've needed for ages, but never got around to getting), as well as 'Grand Tour, the most recent expansion for Flamme Rouge covering new specialist rider types, some weird new track pieces and full rules for running multi-stage tours.

I also realise that I'd missed posting about the Wollongong Wargamers Christmas Get-Together, which was a week ago now. As ever we went to a local RSL for a meal and a chat. But we also did the annual trivia, competing for the coveted Golden KV2. Last year's winner, Peter, set the questions, and in a tight competition Dave emerged victorious. Once again I ended up in second-place. Story of my life.

Christmas Games

I hope you all had a great Christmas! Ours was exhausting; my wife's birthday the day before always makes it hectic and, once again, we hosted my son and his family as well which, whilst nice, is a lot of work for us and makes for a very full and very noisy house.

Our guests had to leave late in the afternoon, though, which left the three of us time to play some games. And a few new games have entered our house this year, mostly through Catherine getting some. We played two of them yesterday.

The first is Nekojima, which is a tricky dexterity game with a peripheral cat theme (always an excuse to buy a game in this house). It can be played co-cooperatively or competitively. On a small island with four districts you are in charge of erecting the power-poles. On each turn you get given one or two districts via a dice roll, and must then place one of the 21 power pole pieces between those districts. Each piece consists of two wooden dowels linked by a piece of string. You can stack them, but the strings can't touch either each other, the poles or the ground. If it falls down, you lose.

The added wrinkle is that sometimes you must also hang cats from the strings.

There's a couple of cats in play here, and you can also see the variety of poles on offer. 

At the bottom of the picture you can see the scoring mechanisms; as you draw coloured cubes from the back (which tell you what coloured string you have to place) you put them on a grid. Four cubes complete a level and there are seven levels. The best we managed in four games was Level Four.

Two seconds after this picture was taken the whole structure collapsed.

Catherine also got an escape room game (we played one a few weeks ago, and really enjoyed it) and Hive, a two-player asbtract game with an insect vibe (it has bees in it, which is why I got it for her).

I got two games. One is 'No Thanks', a family card game I played and enjoyed at our work Christmas party (because who doesn't play games at their work Christmas party?). The other was Flamme Rouge: BMX.

This is a children's version of Flamme Rouge, but has the advantage of being smaller and quicker than the original. Instead of professional tour cyclists you are a bunch of kids racing around a backyard on your BMX bikes. The course is a simple circuit, although the track pieces are double-sided and have a basic track on one side and a variant on the other. There's an optional ramp you can add too to get a movement boost. Instead of cards you draw three numbered tokens from a bag and choose one for the turn (which is then discarded for the rest of the game). 

Slipstreaming in this game is random, with a dice being rolled at the end of the turn. You might get the basic one-space Flamme Rouge slipstream, but there's also the possibility of no slipstreaming that turn (bad) or being able to do it across two spaces (good). For a game aimed at children this is a nice mechanism that helps anyone who has fallen badly behind to catch up.

This game lacks the depth and versatility of the full version but it's a great quick game to take on holiday and play in a pub or whilst camping.

I did get some figures as well, for a club project a couple of us are looking at for next year. We'll see how those go, given my current lack of interest in painting anything.

I hope you Christmas saw lots of gaming goodies added to your pile.

Christmas Meet-Up

As is now traditional the Wollongong Wargamers skipped one of our December wargames meets in order to get together at the Woonona Bulli RSL for an evening of food, drink, trivia and chat.

Hawaiian shirts were required. Not everyone got the memo.

Ralph did the quiz this year. It was heavily based on the games that have been played at the club over the past twelve months and was written multiple-choice answers. It's all getting a bit sophisticated these days. Peter and I had the joint top scores, but Peter won the tie-break question an so got to take home a big bag of flock and the coveted Golden KV2 trophy. He also has to set next year's quiz. I got a bag of dice as a consolation prize. 

After the quiz, and after we had reviewed our game-planning policy for the year, we played ... Top Trumps! The last time I did that was some 45 years ago. Caesar had bought a new pack just for the evening. It was based on tanks, but we never got to grips with how the ratings worked. Back when I played it you would have stats like Speed, Weight, Armour and so forth. Actual measurable numbers. This deck had ratings (Protection Rating, Firepower Rating and so forth) which just seem to have been pulled out of the designer's bum. 

So, anyway, this is me complaining about how Top Trumps were better when I were a lad.

And here's a picture of me playing a master-stroke!

Thanks to all who came for a great evening. We have one regular club-meet left in the year.

Pictures by Caesar and Ralph.

Happy Christmas

It's almost the end of Boxing Day here. Hope you all had a great Christmas and that Santa (or equivalents) added to your collections in some way.

Me? I was very mature and decided that i didn't need any more figures or books cluttering up the house, especially since I'd spent a lot of time earlier in the year getting rid of things when we moved. However family eventually insisted that I had to ask for something, so I decided to complete (as far as I am concerned) my Memoir '44 setup by getting the Mediterranean and Pacific Theatre expansions.

I got some time yesterday evening to have a quick play with the Mediterranean set, using the British figures in it. I had a go at the first two scenarios - Hellfire Pass and Sidi Rezegh.

As the first scenario in the book, Hellfire pass has quite a big setup, and uses several of the special rules in the game. The German and Italian troops are well dug- in on ergs (like hills, but they slow movement), and are protected by wire and minefields. The attacking Commonwealth troops have no artillery support, but do at least have Matilda tanks, giving them four-figure armour units.

The Allies made a strong attack in the centre and on their right. The attack in the centre was stopped by artillery fire and by a German armoured counterattack. On their right, however, the Allies did OK, taking the German positions and pushing beyond them.

The game went to the wire, with both sides one medal from victory. But German artillery attacks in the centre gave them a narrow victory; on their next turn the Allies could have potentially existed troops from the Axis baseline to give them a win.

Sidi Rezegh is a tank battle, which uses the extra Desert War follow-up rules, making for a fast-moving and deadly fight.

In both games I played the Germans were able to press the British close to their baseline, making retreats harder and destroying units quickly.

The Germans won both games. But I can see how this one is could be very much influenced by the cards; in the first game the Germans got the armoured Assault card, which is very powerful in this set-up. If the British had got it instead, things would have been a lot different.

I was pleased to see that Days of Wonder have the Memoir '44 Scenario Archive back up and running, so I will be looking through it for fun battles with which to try out my new toys.

We did play a couple of games on Christmas Day. Catherine added to her collection of cat-themed games with Fat Cats (a trick-taking card game of little skill) and Cat Crimes (which is a set of logic puzzles with nice components to help you visualise the situations. Neither were great games, but they do have cats in them.

Christmas Meetup 2023

Last night was the club's annual Christmas get-together, where we went to a local RSL for food, drink and a good chat. and we had all three of those, despite the place being rammed full of humanity escaping the heat (and hoping to win the meat raffle).

We spent a lot of the evening chatting and putting the world to rights. But we did have the annual Christmas Quiz, with people competing for the coveted Golden KV2 trophy.

I'd written the quiz during the year, and it was intended to be in the traditional 'people shouting answers out until someone gets it right' format. However late in the day I had a request that maybe we could have written answers instead, so switched to that. However I didn't rewrite the quiz, which had a lot of questions written on the assumption that there would be loads of guesses until someone stumbled on the right answer. This long preamble is to justify the fact that the winning score was a mere 5 out of 20 - it was quite hard.

On the plus side, everyone went away having learned stuff.

How would you do? No Googling. And I'll post the answers in the comments.
(I fact-checked the answers as best I could. I don't guarantee they are correct.)

1 - In which sea-battle in 32BC did Mark Antony and Octavian square off to decide who would rule Rome.

2 - Which country has an AK47 on its flag?

3 - If you were a medieval knight, what part of your body would be protected by a poleyn?

4 - The Knights of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta operate as a unit in the army of which country?

5 - The battle of Poltava saw the end of Sweden as the dominant power in Northern Europe. In what year was it fought?

6 - The British defeat at Majuba Hill in 1881 occurred during which war?

7 - Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä, known as The White Death was claimed to be the deadliest sniper ever. In a career that lasted just around 100 days in 1939-40, how many kills was he claimed to have made with his rifle? (Up to 10% each way)

8 - The victory of the indigenous Mapuche people at The Battle of Curalaba in 1598 halted Spanish expansion in which modern country?

9 - Which conflict was ended by the Peace of Westphalia

10 - When first written this piece of music had a title which translates as ‘War Song for the Army of the Rhine’. By what title is it now known?

11 - The so-called Pastry War of 1838-1839 was fought between France and which other nation?

12 - In the American Civil War the 1864 battles of Sabine Crossroads and Pleasant Hill were part of which campaign?

13 - In Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter books, what name do the Martians give to their own planet?

14 - Who was the British nurse executed by the Germans in 1915 for assisting more than 200 Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium?

15 - On the 9th August 1942, during the Siege of Leningrad, the Russians launched Operation Squall, a coordinated bombardment of various German artillery positions. This was to prevent the Germans from disrupting what?

16 - After WW1, the mother of Italian flying ace Franceso Barraca presented the personal emblem his plane carried to a car company, who have used it as their emblem ever since. Which car company is it?

17 - What is believed to be the first example of an attack coordinated by synchronised watches took place in which conflict?

18 - With 11 kills (8 confirmed) what nationality was the most successful F14 Tomcat ace of all time?

19 - Which campaign is the central feature of the first Flashman book?

20 - The US WWII armoured vehicle designated T17E1 was known by which name?

(If question 20 seems a bit specific - it is. It was thrown in as a nod to one of the club-members)

Anyway, Ralph relinquished the trophy at the start of the quiz and then went home with again at the end. He's setting the quiz next year as well.

Bryan then revealed this lovely cake with a spectacular WWII Christmas Cheer cake-topper he'd printed and painted. We all rolled dice for it - lowest won. After five exciting rounds, Bailey's 4 pipped Dave's 6 to make him the winner.

Christmas Games

I hope you all had a great Christmas! And especially hope that your figure, rules, books and gaming collections were expanded in a way that was satisfactory to you.

I only got one game this year, but that's fine because really I have too much of most things these days. However my wife got a few new games, so we had plenty of stuff to try out over the break. 

First up was Calico, which Catherine decided to buy with some birthday money she had. We got this out on Christmas Day. As you can see, it has a cat-theme, and was therefore designed for Catherine.

In Calico you are making quilts, using a selection of hexagonal tiles which come in combinations of six patterns and six colours.

Grouping together sections of the same colour allows you to add buttons. Grouping together sections of the same pattern attracts cats to your quilt who will sleep on it. Both of these things earn you points.

Attracting a real cat doesn't earn you any extra points, although the first player is the person who most recently petted a cat, so Aloy got some frantic attention early on ...

Each board also has three bonus score tiles, which look complicated, but aren't. These reward you for setting up combinations of patterns and/or colours around the particular scoring tile. You can score for the combination in just colour or just pattern, or go for the extra points of doing it with both pattern and colour.

Part of the way through the game, and I was feeling confident.

My finished quilt. It all went a bit wrong towards the end, when (naturally) I needed tiles of particular patterns and/or colours and they stopped appearing from the bag. That's my excuse anyway. I came last.

Maya won it, by managing to get maximum points of all of her bonus scoring tiles.

I think Maya got a score that was almost equal to mine and Catherine's combined. 

The game has a special 'Master Quilter' tile you get to hold as a trophy if you win. You are then obliged to have your photo taken.

Catherine and I then had a go at another of her gifts - a word-game called 'A Little Wordy', from the people who brought us 'Exploding Kittens'.

This is a fairly simple two-player game. Both players draw eleven letter tiles from a bag and secretly construct a word, of any length, from them, making a note of it. You then hand the tiles you drew to your opponent, and take it in turns to guess what word they might have constructed using them.

So here's my word (FONT) and my notes on what I know about Catherine's word - it ends in 'E', it's not GLEE or EXILE, it contains an 'L', it doesn't contain an 'H' and it's more than four letters in length. But how do I know all that?

I knew those things because on your turn you can either guess the opponents word, or activate one of eight clue cards that are dealt out at the start of the game, and which require the other person to give you certain pieces of information about their word. Each card you use gives the other person victory points, however (as does incorrectly guessing their word). And the winner is the person who not only guesses their opponent's word, but concedes the fewest points doing it.

It's a quick and simple game, and we enjoyed it. Catherine also played a few rounds with Maya whilst I cooked Christmas dinner.

Our neighbour joined us for dinner, and we played a couple of games afterwards. The first was Kitttins, which is a very quick and simple game involving the stacking of cat meeples into shapes determined by a drawn card, and was another of Catherine's gifts. It's very much a dexterity game.

Here's a winning stack. You play a round until someone completes the pattern shown on the card. The first person to win three rounds wins the game.

That entertained us for a while, but we decided to get out something more cerebral, and opted for 'Rear Window'. Since our neighbour hadn't played before we left out the murder, so it was a simply a matter of me (the Director) leading the players to the correct solution with no subterfuge involved. They still failed to guess the correct occupant/attribute selections, though, although to be fair my inability to convey that the lady in Apartment D was an Athlete contributed to this.

So that was Christmas Day done with - our neighbour went home, we did two video calls to family in the UK and our son and his wife who are currently in Indonesia, and then went to bed.

Maya had asked to play the buddy-cop RPG Partners at some point over the holidays. This is designed for two players with no GM, but we decided to do it with three - Maya and Catherine would actually play and I would manage the mechanical side of things, tracking who led each scene, making notes and drawing cards and random words.

They created a detective series set in a shopping mall called the Sunnyview Retail Village, and called 'Village People' (the theme song was Village People's 'Hot Cop', naturally). Neither of their characters were actually official detectives - Catherine's straight shooter was a retail worker in a department store, whilst Maya's wild-card ran a cat-grooming service (yes, MORE cats) and operated MLMs on the side.

The mystery was the death of the mall's head of security, who was found drowned in the ornamental fountain in the main atrium. Naturally the police were investigating in the background, but we ignored that - our two intrepid amateur sleuths were also on the case and quickly uncovered a sordid network of affairs. However despite them looking to be the key to the murder, it actually turned out to be the victim's hairdresser who had killed them (albeit accidentally) with the motive being something to do with the upcoming prestigious 'Clippies' awards, and some illicit back-street hair-dressing operation that the security guard was threatening to expose.

And so onto the final game of the holiday - Scattles. Some friends of ours had recently been to Europe on a camping trip and had mentioned a game that involved throwing a baton at a group of skittles. Catherine tracked down a set (in the local Target, so not much detective work required) and bought it for me.

It's fun - we played for a good chunk of Boxing-Day evening (until the mosquitoes woke up)

The rules are simple. You throw a wooden baton at skittles set up about six feet away. They are numbered 1-12. If you knock down one skittle then you score its value. If you knock down multiple skittles then they are worth one point each. Knocked down skittles are stood up again, at the point where they ended up, so over time the targets get spread out. You win when you reach exactly 50 points. If you exceed 50 points then your score is reduced to 25 points and the game continues.

Sometimes our game was interrupted because of the appearance of (you've guessed it) a cat.

You can see how the skittles are getting spread out here.

Anyway, I think we all won at least one game.

Phew! So that was it for Christmas Day and Boxing Day for us. I added five new games to my 52 Games total for this year.

How did your days go?

52 Games - Game 71-75

Happy Christmas

I've not seen this Far Side cartoon before, but it plays to my wargames interests, so I thought I'd share it today.

It's just turned midnight, so it's Christmas day here. I wish you and your families a very Merry Christmas, and hope you get all the gaming goodies you wished for, even if they do get delivered by a Mexican general.

Christmas Meetup

In lieu of our normal club meeting last night we had a pre-Christmas meetup at a local club for a meal and some drinks. 

Following on from last year we had a military history quiz which I somehow found myself volunteering to set and run. So twenty questions on a random assortment of (military) subjects it was. Surprisingly a couple stumped everyone at the table. I also put together a trophy from some spare 3D print bits - the prestigious Golden KV2

It was a fierce contest, but Ralph eventually got far enough ahead that no-one else could catch him, and claimed the prizes - in addition to the trophy, Drew from Slave2Gaming donated some dice. Ralph gets to keep the trophy for one year, but will have to defend his title next year (or maybe we should have him set the next quiz).

Towards the end of the evening, when the venue had quietened down a little, we played a few rounds of One Night Werewolf.

Most people involved hadn't played a hidden role game like this before, but Caesar kept it all moving and, aside from a few hiccups, it all went fairly smoothly. Honours were about even between villagers and werewolves, which was good.

So that's it for Wollongong Wargamers for this year. In theory our venue is free next Thursday, but I'm not sure anyone is going to avail themselves of it. But first week of the New Year? Maybe.

52 Games - Game 70