Comic Gong 2022

Back again after three years! Wollongong's very own comic and pop-culture event took place once more this past Saturday, and once again Catherine and I were there, costumed up and ready to enjoy it. It was nice to see it as busy as ever, and it's even expanded into a new location (partially so the hall with the traders/artists wasn't so packed, which makes sense in these diseased times).

Anyway, I don't have many photos to show off this year; once again Catherine and I volunteered and, once again, we spent the day registering entries for the various cosplay competitions, which kept us pretty busy. We enjoy doing it, though, as we get to so most of teh great costumes close-to, and chat to some lovely people.

We did low-key cosplay this year - Sherlock Holmes and Joan Watson from 'Elementary', which has been some of our favourite viewing so far this year. Despite my love of all things Holmes it's the first time I've attempted a cosplay*, although Jonny Lee Miller's look is pretty easy to do.

Since we didn't feel our costumes would be obvious to the casual observer, even one that's seen the programme, we added a prop. Once advantage of sitting at a desk all day is that we could have a static prop that would otherwise be a pain to carry around. And here it is - Clyde the tortoise.

A lot of children asked if he was real, which makes you wonder if they've ever seen a tortoise before ...

Maya cosplayed as well. I can't remember the name of the character they did, but it's someone from the game 'Animal Crossing'.

I didn't get any other decent pictures of the other cosplayers - as I say we were pretty busy. We were thrilled to see someone doing Stede Bonnet from the pirate comedy 'Our Flag Means Death'; that's been another favourite of ours recently, and I've very much admired his glorious outfits. I suspect that the bigger events coming up in Australia over the next couple of months are going to see a few costumes from that series.

And if you haven't seen it, there's a trailer:

*I did portray The Nihilist Klopman for ten days in Switzerland back in 1991, of a society trip there. And even a brief weekend as journalist and duellist Isadora Persano back in 1992 - a name and ID that I've since repurposed ...

Codes And Clues

This week we have mostly been deducing things.

For starters we've been playing a bit of Codenames. 

In it players form two teams. One person in each team (the spymaster) 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.

Here's the grid laid out. 

Two of the team-members have access to a card like this; they can see it at all times. This 'maps' the agents onto the grid of words. The colour on the outside of the grid tells you which colour goes first.

(If you applied this card in this orientation to the grid above, for example, 'Scale' would be a Blue agent, 'Kangaroo' a Red one, 'Round' an innocent bystander and the card at the very top right that's got too much glare to read the Assassin.)

Here's a game on the go (not using the grid card above). Currently Red and Blue are evenly matched, having found four agents apiece. The spymasters guide the other players by giving a single word clue and a number of cards to which it applies; for example if both 'Kangaroo' and 'Australia' are Blue then the spymaster could say 'Antipodes-2'. The agent(s) then tap the card(s) they think the clue relates to, and they are covered up by a card relevant to their true nature. Your turn ends if you find an enemy agent or a bystander. If you choose the Assassin's card then the game ends and your team has lost.

In fact we've been playing it with three players, which is interesting. In the three-player game, you have two spymasters who can see the board and who give clues, but the third person in the field agent for both; they play in both turns trying to interpret the clues. So the field-agent will always be on the winning side. They are encouraged to do their best for both spymasters. So essentially in a given game the two spymasters are competing against each other and the third person is 'neutral'. Obviously we rotated the roles around the table, and all picked up wins.

After spending the week finding secret agents, today we headed into town to play an interesting detective game - CSI Wollongong, run by a company called CluedUpp. Basically it's a scavenger hunt run across the city-centre, and managed by an app we all installed on our phones. Teams of up to six people set out to solve a number of murders. We did this last year, and had a good time, so thought we'd give it another go.

Teams are encouraged to dress up. So we did. We've started working our way through 'Elementary', so we allowed our costumes to be inspired by Holmes, Watson and Gregson.

The app running the game shows us various points on a map of Wollongong where we'd could find witnesses or useful locations. When you got within a certain distance of the point it would show the character's details and you could pick up a statement and maybe interrogate them using a limited supply of questions. Sometimes, though, you'd have to solve a puzzle first and sometimes one would give you an object which you could take to a forensics lab to gain more information. Some points awarded penalties (usually time penalties) and some offered rewards (a time bonus or extra questions).

Here's the clues laid out on the streets of Wollongong at the start. Some clues open up new ones, which may require you to rethink your route.

Here's a sample witness, although I have blurred out their statement (in case one of you ends up playing the game).

Once you have interviewed a few witnesses you could guess the killer at any time, but there was a massive time penalty if you got it wrong.

At the end of the day the winning team would be the one that solved it in the shortest possible time, but there was also prizes for best costumes, best team name and a few other things as well.

Last year we worked out the case very early on, but were too cautious and then spent ages verifying our solution before submitting it. This year's mystery was harder, and took us a couple of hours. In fact we'd ended up getting tired, it was raining and one of our team wasn't feeling well, so we opted to call it based on the evidence we had so far, and just call it a day if we got it wrong. We were lucky - our guess was, in fact, correct. So at least we went home with a win.

Both Codenames and CluedUpp count towards my 52 Games project as well.

52 Games - Game 6

52 Games - Game 7

Quick Watson! To The Library!

It's no secret that I'm a bit of a fan of Sherlock Holmes. Indeed as I may have said here before, it was through our mutual interest in the Great Detective that Mrs Kobold and I first met. So we were very excited when Wollongong Library announced that they were having a Sherlock Holmes Mystery Event. At first we thought that it would be a quiz night, such as they did for Doctor Who a few months ago (we came fourth), but when we signed up we found that, in pairs, we would be expected to roam the library on a Friday evening, doing puzzles and gathering clues to solve a mystery.

And what we actually ended up doing was playing a live version of the classic '221B Baker Street: Master Detective Boardgame' (pictured above). We'd both played this years ago, so were really keen to see how this version worked.

In the original a case is selected from a deck of 40 or so, and the players move around a board, Cluedo-style, visiting locations. At each location a clue can be obtained from a book with numbered paragraphs, the case card telling you which paragraph to go to for that particular location. When a player thinks that they have the answer to the mystery they race back to Baker Street and check their conclusions against the solution in the book. If they're right, they win, otherwise they're out.

The library ran it fairly straight. Each pair was given a different case, and the locations were spread around the main part of the library. Each location had a task to be completed - a logic puzzle, or task involving skill or dexterity. When you completed the task, you found one of the librarians running the event, and they gave you the paragraph for your case relevant to that location.

Suffice to say we had a great time, and actually visited and completed all of the tasks to collect a full set of clues. What this told us was that we'd actually solved the case about thirty minutes before we decided to try our luck with the solution; our hesitancy cost us a probable second place, but we finished fourth (despite a librarian colluding with our daughter and her boyfriend to convince us they'd beaten us).

It was a great way to play a favourite old boardgame, and an excellent social evening as well, with people of all ages having fun together (I say 'all ages' - the event was 18+, as that allowed us to have alcohol in the room where the food was being served. They'd done an under-18 event a couple of weeks earlier.)

Here's the gathered detectives

(Picture via Wollongong City Library)

And here we are completing one of the tasks - the easiest one, which was to take a picture advertising the event and load it to social media:

I have no idea what Catherine's face is all about.

Here's my lovely daughter and her boyfriend, doing the same task

So, once again, many thanks to Wollongong Library for organising and hosting the event. We are blessed with a very nerd-friendly library service in this city, with events like this through the year. They even had an actual games day the other week, but it wasn't well advertised and we missed it. Next year we will have to do better.