Gaming
aardvarchaeology | December 18, 2010
Thebes is a multi-award-winning 2007 German board game by Peter Prinz. I just bought it on a tip from my buddy Oscar, who found a good offer on-line and thought of me because of the game's theme. It's about archaeological expeditions in the early 1900s. The box is big, the production values are lavish, and I really look forward to learning it. But before I can say anything about its qualities as a game, I have to share an opening paragraph from the rule book with you (and I translate from the Swedish version).
The players travel as archaeologists through Europe to gather needful knowledge…
aardvarchaeology | November 14, 2010
I spent most of the weekend at a gaming retreat organised by my buddy Oscar. It was like a small exclusive gaming convention. Oscar found a small B&B outfit in Gnesta, a small town an hour's drive from Stockholm, and negotiated a deal with them. 18 people, two nights' board, two excellent dinners and breakfasts and lunches. Everybody paid about $220 (1500 SEK) for the package (not including drinks).
And we had two days of solid board gaming. We were 15 guys and three ladies, all between 25 and 45, and all boardgame geeks. Everybody was extremely friendly, as gamers are wont to, and I had…
aardvarchaeology | September 5, 2010
Had breakfast guests: a beautifully pregnant old friend and our old boss/buddy came at ten and I cooked us all a full English. Everybody who's into the Gustavian / Georgian era and reads Scandy, read Kristina Ekero Eriksson's new popular biography of Märta Helena Reenstierna, the Lady of Ãrsta! I read it in manuscript, and I loved it.
Played Lost Cities against my wife who is getting worrisomely good at it, and Puerto Rico and Space Alert against gamer buddies. The latter game is highly unusual. It's a cooperation game played against the clock, with a twist I've never seen before: it…
aardvarchaeology | August 14, 2010I used to play a lot of computer games, and 12-y-o Junior loves them. His gaming experience is of course different from mine back in the day, not only because the games look much better now, but also because of on-line interactivity. There are a couple of developments that surprise me a great deal.
One is the Let's Play film clip. These are clips on video sharing sites where someone plays a computer game while commenting on it, and they're really popular with kids. You don't have to be extremely good at the game or record clips of hidden or hard-to-reach areas. You don't have to say anything…
aardvarchaeology | July 31, 2010I spent Friday and Saturday with Junior at a small gaming convention in Katrineholm, a town two hours' drive from my home. (I stayed nearby in May of last year with my wife.) With less than 100 participants, not all of whom were there at the same time, it was a friendly and welcoming con where it felt like our presence made a difference. Here's what I played:
Descent, a dungeon game very reminiscent of 70s Dung & Drag when everything was still combat-centric and no role-playing asked for. Fun game though the underground catacombs full of magically appearing monsters of course have no…
aardvarchaeology | July 8, 2010
Like everything else we make and use, gaming pieces form part of the archaeological record. I once had the pleasure of lifting a particularly fine set of 9th century hnefatafl pieces out of the ground. Now I have seen a set of 20th century mah jong pieces go into the ground.
The site of the burnt and demolished house near mine is now clean and ready for the new building planned there. But, as has often been observed, two important reasons that the archaeological record contains more small objects than large ones are that the larger ones are easier to find when you lose them and they get in…
aardvarchaeology | June 29, 2010
Reiner Knizia is one of the board-gaming world's greatest celebrities, famous for a long string of hit games. According to the members of Boardgamegeek.com, the best of Knizia's games is Tigris & Euphrates (1997), which is #11 on the site's thousands-strong ranking list. I can't really compare against other Knizia games, but I do know that it's one of my favourites.
As you may imagine, I was very happy the other day when I discovered that Boardgamegeek.com actually offers on-line T&E for free, played against real people! The rules are available in many languages on BGG. Let's have…
aardvarchaeology | May 15, 2010
My two days with Junior at the LinCon gaming convention in Linköping turned out even better than I'd hoped for. I had lots of fun myself, and as a geek dad I was extra happy that Junior took to the whole thing with such gusto. On Thursday evening, for instance, he was play-testing a convoluted unpublished sci-fi board game with some guys in their 20s and 30s while I sat at another table some ways off and played simpler games with my friend Hans and others. Dad proud.
Everybody at the convention was uncommonly friendly and open, as gamers often are. Most of us looked pretty geeky, but not…
aardvarchaeology | March 29, 2010
Joined Jrette on her first bike ride for the season. Had to raise the saddle 5 cm.
Emceed at the Swedish Skeptics' first full-day conference. We felt that it was time to have a bigger event to make it worthwhile for members to travel to Stockholm for it. Four talks, a mentalist, the annual business meeting plus lunch and coffee breaks. And a good time was had.
Played Agricola with friends. Had a pretty good combo of a pottery business and a clay delivery job, but what really saved my game was that I managed to become yeoman farmer. Still Swedepat won, that evil son of a Värmland.
And you,…
aardvarchaeology | March 2, 2010Weatherwise, last weekend was thawing and misty and overcast, so I didn't feel like doing much outdoors. I finished reading Daryl Gregory's new novel (didn't do much for me) and started Douglas Adams's fifth Hitch-hiker book. When it appeared in 1992 I didn't bother with it since it seemed too much like flogging an aging franchise, but 11-y-o Junior recently asked me to buy it for him and then he recommended it. So far it seems mildly entertaining.
Had friends over for games: Settlers of Catan and Qwirkle. I was lucky enough to trade my old 80s Junta game for that Settlers box last week. I…
aardvarchaeology | February 22, 2010
Friday night I unexpectedly found myself looking at dinner all alone. So I quickly arranged for a visit with friends to a Jamaican restaurant (I had jerk chicken), and after our meal Swedepat beat me and Dr Sandy at Race for the Galaxy.
Saturday was mainly chores, but in the evening the Rundkvist family (including 6-y-o Juniorette) played Dungeonquest/Drakborgen and of course got their characters soundly killed.
Sunday morning being extremely snowy and bright with sunshine, I went skiing twice, once with Junior and once with this awesome chick who likes to hang out with me.
Then in the…
aardvarchaeology | January 27, 2010The Web helps you check if your ideas are original. Recently I've come up with two puns that proved to be unoriginal but still surprisingly uncommon.
Ronald McDonald is the Lord of the Fries.
The famous fantasy role-playing game should always be referred to as Dung & Drag. It amazes me that I haven't thought of this before. Now I have this vision of greying drag queens in printed dresses and rubber boots, cleaning out the manure, shearing sheep and driving tractors.
aardvarchaeology | January 2, 2010
My old Tolkien Society buddy Indûr and his wife rents an extra room in their apartment building. It looks like it used to be the caretaker's office. Now it's a gaming room.
aardvarchaeology | December 30, 2009
I suddenly came to think of my first character in a role-playing game. His name was Gildor, he was an elf and a "fighter" -- I suppose he must have been a soldier actually -- and he came to a sad end. I knew him only briefly.
From age twelve to twenty-five I was an avid role-player. Indeed, the person I was then would be really sad to learn that I quit playing eventually. But he would take heart somewhat if he knew that I have lately become a board-game geek instead.
It was about the time I turned twelve, in the spring of 1984, that my buddy Ragnar turned me on to the Swedish version of…
aardvarchaeology | November 30, 2009[More blog entries about Sweden, photography, manor; Närke, Askersund, foto, herrgård.]
I was headed for a lonely November weekend with wife & daughter abroad and son with his mom. So I rounded up three friends (though Paddy K was kept from coming along at the last minute by a big meltdown at work), loaded my best board games and a couple of grocery bags into the family car, and drove to Stjernsund manor in Närke.
Our way there was kind of interesting. I plotted a course that would be as close to a straight line as possible yet largely follow major highways. This meant that we spent…
aardvarchaeology | October 11, 2009
I took Friday off from work and drove with my friend Anders to Avesta, an industrial town in Dalecarlia, where our friend Pär and his lovely wife, both teachers, have recently settled. We spent the afternoon and evening walking in the sunshine, admiring their house, eating like kings, listening to some pretty far-out and eclectic music (including Earth, Heino, Om, Demis Roussos and Sunn) and playing the Swedish 70s board game Marinattack. It's notable for coming with an electronic device that replaces dice and outcome tables. They kicked my ass five games in a row. The shame!
Then on…
aardvarchaeology | September 10, 2009
I never was much of a game console nut. My video game crazes mostly played out on the PC. But I did play the Atari in the 70s, the C64 in the 80s and the NES and SNES in the early 90s, when I wrote for Nintendo mags and borrowed the hardware from my employers. The SNES was the last console I paid any attention to.
11-y-o Junior loves all kinds of video games, particularly on-line multiplayer ones like Roblox and Runescape. But he's also installed emulator software on the PC and played a lot of old games that originally ran on machines he's never actually seen. He's got a Wii which allows him…
aardvarchaeology | May 3, 2009
One of these men is an extremely zany comics artist and celebrated wit. The other is a stuffy scholar in an abstruse field.
We've had a three-day holiday thanks to Friday being 1 May -- a red-letter day in Sweden since 1939. Here's the entertainments I've enjoyed.
Went with wife & kids to the local Walpurgis Night bonfire, met loads of neighbours old and new.
Played Abalone, Tigris & Euphrates and Qwirkle with Kai and other friends.
Went to a lovely dinner at the home of my friends Mattias & Lina.
Took a morning bike ride and walk in the woods to log a geocache that had appeared…
aardvarchaeology | April 11, 2009
13 September: Samuel and Ludvig play the piano at Ludvig's aunt's house in Viggbyholm.
12 October: Playing Pandemic at a gaming convention in Gröndal.
21 October: A mechanical excavator is delivered to my dad's property to start work on the new sauna.
21 October: Seminar about Open Access at the Research Council.
aardvarchaeology | December 10, 2008The Swedish language has produced three truly great fantasists. Two are internationally reknowned: Astrid Lindgren (with Pippi Longstocking) and Tove Jansson (with Moomin). The third, Erik Granström, is almost exclusively known among Swedish gaming nerds like myself. From 1987 to 1994 he published a series of wildly innovative adventure and background books for the Swedish role-playing game Drakar och Demoner. Granström's material soared miles above the fare us ex-kobolds were used to, particularly the 1988 travelogue/novella that introduced us to the islands of Trakoria. I game-mastered…