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Two games and a novel
May. 13th, 2019 10:50 amOver the weekend, we went up to Chester for a friend's birthday gaming event.
I played two games I had never played before:
Patchwork:
This is a quick, two-player game with more complicated strategy than we were likely to grasp fully on a first try. It's a tetris-style puzzle game where you have to manage your currency and plan ahead to be able to obtain the pieces that best fit your board. It has an interesting mechanic whereby you can take several turns in a row as long as you don't overtake your opponent on the time track. You also have to pay attention to when opportunities arise to obtain useful single-tile pieces to fill awkward gaps. Definitely a good game to have around as it takes less than half an hour but requires some concentration and careful thought.
Cosmic Run - Regeneration:
This is basically Yahtzee in space, which is rather fun. You roll a set of dice, assign one or more to spaces on the board, then reroll the rest and keep going until you've assigned them all. Difference combinations of numbers allow you to move your spaceship towards various planets, obtain alien cards with special abilities, or accrue crystals to allow dice manipulation. I did very, very poorly, but that was due to sleep-deprivation and bad play rather than the game being too difficult. I would definitely like to play this again.
Possession by AS Byatt:
A couple of years ago, I ran out of reading material on a writing retreat and borrowed The Children's Book by AS Byatt from my host. I finally got around to reading another novel by this author over the weekend. I was looking for a sprawling, lyrical, literary experience and I definitely got it from Possession. It's about literary scholars in the 1980s researching a secret relationship between two Victorian poets, which doesn't sound that exciting, but there's something vital and somehow urgent about it that draws you in. I thought partway through that none of the female characters come across very well, but then I realised that none of the male characters do either. They're all deeply flawed and multi-layered; in other words, very real in an understandable and largely sympathetic way. The gradual uncovering of the Victorian relationship is interesting (and actually gets very tense towards the end), but it's the inter-relationships of the 1980s characters that kept me gripped. There are lengthy excerpts from letters, critical analysis, journals, etc, which I found quite dry and tedious in places, but the main thrust of the narrative was deeply involving.
I played two games I had never played before:
Patchwork:
This is a quick, two-player game with more complicated strategy than we were likely to grasp fully on a first try. It's a tetris-style puzzle game where you have to manage your currency and plan ahead to be able to obtain the pieces that best fit your board. It has an interesting mechanic whereby you can take several turns in a row as long as you don't overtake your opponent on the time track. You also have to pay attention to when opportunities arise to obtain useful single-tile pieces to fill awkward gaps. Definitely a good game to have around as it takes less than half an hour but requires some concentration and careful thought.
Cosmic Run - Regeneration:
This is basically Yahtzee in space, which is rather fun. You roll a set of dice, assign one or more to spaces on the board, then reroll the rest and keep going until you've assigned them all. Difference combinations of numbers allow you to move your spaceship towards various planets, obtain alien cards with special abilities, or accrue crystals to allow dice manipulation. I did very, very poorly, but that was due to sleep-deprivation and bad play rather than the game being too difficult. I would definitely like to play this again.
Possession by AS Byatt:
A couple of years ago, I ran out of reading material on a writing retreat and borrowed The Children's Book by AS Byatt from my host. I finally got around to reading another novel by this author over the weekend. I was looking for a sprawling, lyrical, literary experience and I definitely got it from Possession. It's about literary scholars in the 1980s researching a secret relationship between two Victorian poets, which doesn't sound that exciting, but there's something vital and somehow urgent about it that draws you in. I thought partway through that none of the female characters come across very well, but then I realised that none of the male characters do either. They're all deeply flawed and multi-layered; in other words, very real in an understandable and largely sympathetic way. The gradual uncovering of the Victorian relationship is interesting (and actually gets very tense towards the end), but it's the inter-relationships of the 1980s characters that kept me gripped. There are lengthy excerpts from letters, critical analysis, journals, etc, which I found quite dry and tedious in places, but the main thrust of the narrative was deeply involving.
