Last Reviews of 2015

Codenames is a word association team game, which I discovered on New Year's Eve.  Twenty-five cards with random words are laid out in a five by five grid and one person is selected from each team to be the Cluegiver.  These two players have a card that tells them which words are allocated to their team, which are neutral, which are the other team's and which is the assassin word.  They then, in turn, have to come up with a one-word clue to link to one or more of their team's words.  They can also identify how many words they are linking.  Their team then has to guess which are their words.  Guessing a neutral word ends the turn with no other penalty, guessing the other team's words gives the other team a point and ends the turn, guessing the assassin word loses the game immediately.  It's really good fun, and play exactly to my strengths - which is always good in a game!  I'm very much looking forward to getting a copy and playing it with my family.


The Rose Project by Graeme Simsion was the Christmas Family Book Club book, and it sparked a lot of very interesting discussion.  I enjoyed it overall, though I wasn't really sure I should at some points - it often felt as if it was laughing at the protagonist, rather than with him.  I had a few issues with what came across to me as the message - it seemed a bit muddled about whether or not it was okay to be yourself, or if you should try to change to fit in with other people, and various book club members took away quite different things from it, so it was very thought-provoking.  On balance, I thought it was quite good - and it did make me think.


Reality Is Broken by Jane Mcgonigal is a book that talks about the benefits of games and how they can be related to society.  I was completely absorbed in it from the get-go and remained so throughout reading it.  It's very well written and engaging - and has lots of information that's really interesting about what appeals to us in games, and what this tells us about human nature.  It's also (at least for now) revolutionised my attitude to food and maintaining a healthy diet - as it has introduced me to SuperBetter.  This is a website where you can create a secret identity to battle a particular health issue.  You create customised bad guys, power ups and quests relating to what you're struggling with, and you get resilience points and level up when you log daily achievements.  It's tremendous fun, and has completely flipped the punishment/reward cycle I have with food.  To date, I have achieved a perfect record of no sugary things - SIX DAYS IN A ROW - and at New Year to boot!  Trust me, this is unheard of - and it hasn't even been difficult!  I have no idea how long the game will keep me engaged enough to maintain this, but I'm willing to ride it as far as the journey lasts.


Happy New Year everyone!  Stats to follow...

Final Stats for 2015

Film & TV:

Positive – 29 (88%)

Negative – 4 (12%)

 

Books:

Positive – 17 (65%)

Negative – 9 (35%)

 

Live Entertainment:

Positive – 24 (92%)

Negative – 2 (8%)

 

Audiobooks:

Positive – 15 (71%)

Negative – 6 (29%)

 

Games:

Positive – 9 (82%)

Negative – 2 (18%)

 

Reviews total for 2015:

Positive – 94 (79%)

Negative – 23 (31%)

I've watched a lot more new films and read a lot more new books in the second half of the year than the first half - up to 26 books overall, which I'm quite happy with (especially since there's been some re-reading going on as well).  My positive to negative ratio has gone up over the second half of the year, too, resulting in a satisfying 79% positive over the year - yay!