Tash Hearts Tolstoy

Tash Hearts Tolstoy by Kathryn Ormshee is about a web series production company run by friends Tash, Jack and Paul, who get more attention than they bargained for when their Anna Karenina adaptation is recommended by a prominent YouTuber.

Tash is the book's narrator, so the story also deals with issues related to her parents and sister, her college prospects and her love life.

It's fun and engaging and explores some interesting aspects of modern teenage life. I liked Tash as a protagonist, even though she makes quite a few mistakes in her interactions with people. I had no idea how the romance plotline was going to work out and was happy with the result. I liked a lot of the other characters, and was interested in the story enough to read the whole book in a few days, while on holiday.

I think my only gripe was that the proper pronunciation of 'Tash' is only discussed around page 300, in relation to her criticising someone she meets for saying it wrong. As I had been saying it wrong in my head the entire book, it made me feel like the book was also crticising me.

Hey ho! A minor issue in an otherwise entertaining and interesting book.

Mid-Gaming Holiday Reviews

New games I have played so far while on holiday:

Exploding Kittens:
I had heard of this before, but never played it or even knew what it was like. It's a card game whereby you need to avoid ending up with an exploding kitten and no way to defuse it. Not normally my kind of thing, but entertaining enough to fill a gap between longer games. I wasn't very good at it.

Bang!:
Another type of game I'm not normally a fan of. This is one where various roles are assigned to the players at the start (sheriff, outlaw, deputy, renegade) and each has different victory conditions. Only the sheriff is open at the start, so everyone else has to try and achieve their objectives without alerting their enemies. I never know how to play these games, and I wasn't very successful here, but it was a fun mechanic and entertaining watching the others try and kill each other.

Railroad Ink:
In this game, you get a wipeable playing mat with a grid printed on it, and you have to draw connecting roads and rail tracks, based on the symbols rolled on a set of dice. I didn't think I was going to be any good at it, but I actually did really well. It was fun and interesting trying to figure out the best use of each set of symbols, and satisfying when I got them to match up successfully.

Glass Road:
A more complex game, involving managing a complicated resource allocation wheel, in order to be able to build structures on an individual player board, to enable a greater range of actions to obtain points. It took me quite a while to understand how to play and I'm not sure I ever really figured it out properly. So, perhaps more brain power needed than I had available at the time, but it was an interesting learning experience.

Tindahan:
This is a trick-taking card game with a twist. As well as using your hand of cards to try and win tricks amongst several suits of different fruit, you can also change the trumps and place tokens on the fruit carts to gain additional points. It's all about balancing the points you get from the carts with the negative points from cards left in your hand. Reasonably simple to learn and not too difficult to play, and pretty fun.

Indian Summer:
My favourite new game of the holiday so far. You have an individual player board and a set of tetris style pieces, which you need to place on your board in order to cover it completely. There are also special bonus items you can collect to give you special actions, and it's all themed around a woodland with leaves and furry creatures and nuts and mushrooms. It's very pretty and lots of fun.

Space Cadets:
This involved nine of us each taking a role on a spaceship on a very difficult mission to collect crystals, while trying to avoid and/or defeat enemies. The various actions that needed to be taken were mostly timed and involved a huge amount of doom. I took two different roles during the game, neither of which were too difficult, while others had to perform tasks that seemed nigh-on impossible. It was very much a team effort, and had a hilariously satisfying conclusion whereby we worked out an ambitious plan and executed it to perfection to be able to collect the last crystal and teleport away just before our ship was going to explode. An interesting combination of fun and stressful, with perhaps not enough varied gameplay to warrant a repeat experience.