Rachael

The Tipping Point

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:46:53 GMT

I am fairly relaxed and confident about tipping in restaurants, apart from occasional practical wibbles about not having the right change. But there's a whole penumbra of other similar circumstances in which I have a vague idea that tipping might be expected but I'm not sure, and I worry about getting it wrong. Is it normal to tip all these people and I've been offending them if I don't? Or is it just for exceptional service? Or is it not customary at all except overseas? Please help unconfuse me.

View Poll: #1477011

Catsup

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:20:04 GMT

Cats

Look at this wonderful birthday card my sister drew for me, featuring cartoons of Pepsi and Tango!

Up

We went to see the new Disney/Pixar movie, Up. It is fantastic. Probably their best yet. It's laugh-out-loud funny and cry-real-tears moving. It's also a huge amount of fun, featuring some delightfully cool ways to fly, including a zeppelin, the house held up by lots of helium balloons which you'll have seen in the poster, and (minor spoiler) a person held up by a few helium balloons, sitting astride a leaf-blower like some kind of roaring broomstick/motorbike hybrid :))

Go and see it!

Divers alarums

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 09:42:05 GMT

In two of the last three films we saw, people got up as soon as their alarm clocks went off. I know films aren't noted for realism in many respects, but I wondered how widespread this was. So, a poll:

View Poll: #1442004

(I wondered whether to phrase it as "wake up" or "get up". I mean "become fully conscious so that you could get up if you felt like it", I think. Sitting up in bed and reading counts.)

I don't like wasting an hour of each day snoozing, but I'm not sure what to do about it.

A few months ago I got a SleepTracker, which is a watch with an accelerometer-thingy in it, so it can tell when you move in your sleep. It reckons movement corresponds to the shallowest points in your sleep cycle, or "almost-awake moments". So you give it a window, like 8:00-8:30, and it beeps to wake you up at the first "almost-awake moment" in that window, on the grounds that waking from that should be easier. It worked well for a month or so - it would wake me and I'd feel fully awake. But now it's no better than a normal alarm clock. I sleepily silence it and fall back to sleep. I suspect its success owed as much to the placebo effect, and the slightly-increased cognitive load of silencing an unfamiliar device, as to sleep cycles.

So I think novelty helps. If I had lots of alarm clocks, and a different random one went off each morning, that might work, at least for a while. Waking up for something outside the normal routine is also easier - not just fun things like holidays, but also annoying things like answering the door to cold-callers or having to break up cat-fights in the landing.

Communication also helps. A silly idea that occurred to me this morning is that if I had a Chumby like simont has (or I could just do it on my PDA) I could write an alarm that could only be silenced using a piece of information derived from a passphrase I have and a passphrase Alex has, so we'd have to wake up enough to talk to each other. (Obviously we wouldn't use that alarm if one of us was away.) Although you can have a conversation while semi-conscious and fall back to sleep and forget about it, that's probably less likely if the conversation topic is something real like how do we shut this blasted thing up?

I've also heard about someone who locked his alarm clock in a trunk and put the key in a bucket of icy water. Never tried that one yet, but to gain an extra hour in each day it might be worth it...

Monkey Island

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:22:09 GMT

Yesterday we downloaded the first chapter of The Tales of Monkey Island, Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, and finished it this afternoon. It is excellent :D

I'd been looking forward to it, but been slightly apprehensive that it would be an inferior ripoff by some people who'd bought the rights to the original series and slapped them on their own unrelated games, or a graphics-fest at the expense of gameplay and fun, but those fears were completely dispelled. It's a delightful, extremely fun game in the spirit of the originals, with at least some of the voices from #3 and #4. The puzzles are intriguing and are pitched at a good level of challenge. The dialogue is excellent, with witty one-liners, cheesy puns, and occasional amusing innuendo ("Release my wife at once, LeChuck - she gets a bit tetchy if she's tied up for more than an hour"), which I hadn't noticed in the previous games, but maybe I was too young. There are the obligatory references to the previous games and to Indiana Jones. As well as the main three characters, the Voodoo Lady makes a reappearance, and there's a hint that Stan might be involved later, or it might just have been an in-joke. The relationship between the no-longer-newlywed Threepwoods is entertainingly depicted. Elaine treats Guybrush with a mixture of patient amusement and annoyance that reminds me of Susan from Coupling.

I give it 9.5 out of 10, and the missing 0.5 is all interface niggles. You have to click and drag to walk anywhere; and you can't combine inventory items by clicking on one with the other, but you have to drop each into a special area of your inventory and click a "combine" button. And it took us until nearly the end to find the button to skip unwanted dialogue (e.g. that you've seen before), that was always mapped to the dot key in LucasArts games (it's right-click now).

We've also bought the remastered Secret of Monkey Island - Special Edition. We haven't started playing it at all yet, but from the screenshots, it looks as though they've stayed very faithful to the original - the scenes look very familiar, drawn from the same camera angles, just with improved graphics and (presumably) voices. And it was only £6.99 - I thought it might be full game price. And it includes the original un-remastered version, and you can hot-swap back and forth between the two renderings at any point.

So we're going to play that next (well, Alex will play it, because he's never played it all the way through before, and I will sit and watch, squee with nostalgia, and offer cryptic hints if required).

Switching Sides

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:58:51 GMT

I recently played an adventure game in which you play character A and have to lock character B in a room, and then in the next chapter you play character B and have to escape. It was a slightly unsettling shift in perspective: I'd been playing character A and identifying with her, and agreed with her that character B needed to be locked up because he was a danger to himself and others. I didn't want to help him escape.

alextfish plays a lot of Starcraft, and he says you get the same phenomenon in that, but even worse. At least the two characters above were ultimately on the same side, but in Starcraft you play the Terrans and build a base, and then you play the aliens and destroy the base you just built.

A good developer needs to be at least a reasonably good tester; and a good tester needs a certain quality which, in normal life, is usually bad. I might even call it malevolence, or at least scepticism. It goes beyond just the destructive desire to try to break things; you have to try to break things which other people have just created, which they've put time and effort into, which they might have invested a part of themselves in. You have to assume those creations are flawed, and make it your mission to expose the flaws.

I am not very good at writing robust code. The testers find even fairly obvious bugs in my software. And I think this is because, on some subconscious level, I'm being precious about the thing I've just built. I don't want to prod it until it falls apart; I don't want to look for the flaws in it.

To be a better developer I need to apply this perspective-shifting, side-switching trick to my work. I need to look for ways out of the room I just locked; I need to bomb the base I just built.

Fighting the Bootleggers

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:48:00 GMT

I ordered a computer game from Amazon Marketplace as a present for a friend.

The seller, games4u-uk-net, sent me a bootleg copy. The cover was printed in low quality, like from a home printer, and with no logos or branding, and there was a badly-spelled note on the back saying that the game was free software (it's not) and you're paying for the disc and the emulator.

I looked at their feedback page. They had mostly very good feedback, but the few negative ones were a bit suspicious-looking: they didn't sound like honest mistakes, like sending the wrong product. They were from people who'd ordered consoles described as new, and received them in unbranded plain white boxes. All the negative comments were followed up by indignant, not very polite, not very grammatical replies from the seller asking why the buyer had left negative feedback rather than contacting them.

So I decided to be nice and contact them, asked for a citation for the claim that the game was free software, because I hadn't been able to find one, and tried to explain the difference between free software and abandonware, and said if I had wanted abandonware I wouldn't have paid £10 on Amazon for a legitimate version of the game. I said they were misrepresenting what they were selling, and if they're going to sell discs and emulators they ought to make it very clear that's what they're selling.

They replied, reiterated the claim that the game was free software and that they were only charging for the disc and emulator, and claimed outright that the original producers of the game were an outfit called Classic Gaming Presents (who, as far as I can tell, are an abandonware download site: they have the moral high ground over games4u because they a) have a link inviting the real owners of the game to request they take it down, and b) don't misrepresent what they're offering). They also said they would refund me only if I didn't leave negative feedback.

I was particularly appalled by that last bit, and went into righteous-indignation mode, and reported them to Amazon and to the Federation Against Copyright Theft, and told them so[1], and told them I would certainly leave negative feedback now, and did so (including the bit where they tried to buy my silence).

Amazon replied to my complaint with long complicated instructions of what I should do to claim a refund. I didn't get around to doing anything for a couple of days, and then they sent my money back anyway, without me having done any of the stuff in the email, which surprised me.

Interestingly, games4u now seem to have dropped their price by £2, and have also added a comment to the product page, saying "This is NOT the Whit Label vresion. what we sell is the modified software which enables the game to be run on XP and/or VISTA, the game is distributed for free with the software." [sic]

I've written this for the benefit of two groups of people:
* Those who, like me a few weeks ago, naively think that Amazon Marketplace is something more official and vetted than it really is. Be warned. Treat it like you would eBay. Research the sellers.
* Those who cynically accept that receiving bootlegs is an inevitable part of buying stuff online, and who just shrug and play the CD/DVD/game anyway, or stick it in a drawer and forget about it. Stop it. You're enabling them. Complain, get your money back, get them to start being a bit more honest.

[1] The downside of this is They Know Where I Live. I should have used my work address for the original order.

Joke

Mon, 18 May 2009 08:05:27 GMT

"Daddy, Daddy, you know you're always saying pigs might fly? They actually did! I heard it on the news."
"Huh, really?"
"Yeah, they keep saying swine flew."

The Freedom Bill

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:08:31 GMT

The Freedom Bill is a bill drafted by the Lib Dems to "restore civil liberties and democratic rights in Britain". It would repeal things like ID cards and the National Identity Register, the restrictions on protesting near Parliament, and 28-day detention.

Its website is here, and there's a petition here you can sign to support it.

Carols

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 21:45:10 GMT

Our church is having a carol service next Sunday evening: Sunday 21st December, 7-8pm. Alex and I are singing in the choir. There will be free mulled wine and mince pies afterwards.

The church is here, in a big blue building called Brickfields, on Cheddars Lane, near Newmarket Road Tesco.

Come along and sing carols :)

Maligned characters in fiction

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:19:04 GMT

It annoys me when people use Uncle Tom to mean a member of an oppressed group who disloyally sucks up to the privileged group, perhaps to get better treatment from them than his fellows receive. Tom in Uncle Tom's Cabin was a good, brave and loyal man: when a fellow-slave escaped to make a better life for herself and her baby, Tom knew where she went, but refused to tell his master, in defiance of a direct order, and was beaten to death for it.

Similarly, I've heard people use Little Lord Fauntleroy to mean a stuck-up, overprivileged young man with no idea about the real world. But the actual Little Lord Fauntleroy is a down-to-earth, fair-minded boy from an ordinary lower middle class home, who discovers one day that, due to the deaths of a series of relatives he didn't know he had, he's inherited a lordship. At first he's horrified, because he's a staunch little republican and egalitarian, and thinks the aristocracy are bad. Later, he uses his influence to make life better and fairer for the poor tenants in the neighbourhood.

You could probably also make a case for Pollyanna, whose name gets used to mean someone who is optimistic to a pernicious and destructive extent, refusing to face up to the existence of problems, as opposed to someone who chooses to improve her life by trying to find the good in everything; but that may be just different value judgements about optimism, rather than factual error.

What others are there?

Roast dinner poll

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:14:23 GMT

You are cooking dinner for friends, in a fairly casual trays-on-laps-in-front-of-TV context, rather than a formal dinner-party context.

View Poll: Roast dinner

(For clarity, I think of a roast dinner as including a roast joint of meat, roast potatoes, at least two kinds of vegetables, and gravy.)

EDIT: By "elaborate" I meant effort for the host, rather than showiness for the guests.

Poppies

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 13:29:04 GMT

I've been wearing a poppy in the run-up to Remembrance Day. No one else among my friends and work colleagues seems to be.

You get articles in the Guardian saying that poppies are bad because they glorify war, and we should choose not to wear one, or perhaps wear a white poppy for peace. I don't really get this. The Poppy Appeal uses slogans like "Because the war to end all wars didn't" - isn't that an expression of sadness and regret, and determination that it won't happen again? And "Lest we forget", which I think is either more of the same, or gratitude, but not glorification.

When I was a kid the poppies used to say "Haig Fund" on them. I gather Haig is thought by many to be a nasty piece of work who sacrificed lots of his men's lives unnecessarily, so I can understand people not wanting to wear anything with his name on; but now the inscription is the much more innocuous "Poppy Appeal".

I guess, for of a lot of my friends, it might just be a case of not having noticed it's Poppy Day soon, rather than any kind of deliberate statement. But I'm curious. So, a poll:

View Poll: Poppies

Wall-E

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:49:23 GMT

Went to see Wall-E last night, with alextfish and isa62v4. I'd been very much looking forward to seeing it, and I'd heard it had good reviews, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I expected to. It was quite fun, but I much preferred all the other Disney/Pixar films.

First, the good things. I was very impressed with the quality of the animation, especially in the early scenes with Wall-E wandering around the rubbish tips and playing with his toys. Because there weren't any obvious cartoony people (or fish, fluffy monsters, or egregiously anthropomorphic cars) and everything on screen was man-made, I found myself forgetting for occasional moments that it wasn't live-action. A computer-generated dirty Rubik's cube looks much the same as a real dirty Rubik's cube. The real live-action footage Wall-E played from videotape didn't look silly or out-of-place, like it probably would have done against a very cartoony background.

I also liked - well, maybe liked is the wrong word - the people on the Axiom and their way of life. That was done well - both disturbing and plausible. It reminded me a bit of Brave New World - they're happy, but you don't want to end up like them[1]. And I liked the captain and his rebellion against it all.

[1] It just occurred to me: I know someone whose view of Brave New World is "what's wrong with that?" I'm really curious to find out whether he'll have the same reaction to life on board the Axiom.

Now the things I didn't like. Maybe I'm more of a verbal person than most, but I can't engage with characters who don't talk, or who only have a vocabulary of three words. Wall-E communicates about as much as Abu, Aladdin's pet monkey. Both have expressive faces and bodies, and both vocalise in a wide range of tones of voice, and both occasionally approximate real words, but you can't have a conversation with them. This works fine for a hero's sidekick like Abu, but Aladdin is primarily about the human characters, and would have been severely lacking if it were called Abu and followed the adventures of the monkey as he scavenged in the marketplace. As would Finding Nemo if it had consisted of Marlin swimming around going "Neee-mooo! Neee-mooo!" and not having interesting, funny or moving conversations with Dory, the sharks, and the sea turtles.

The non-verbalness reminded me of a Tom and Jerry cartoon, or perhaps one of Pixar's own shorts. (isa62v4 suggested it might have begun life as a short, and got expanded into a feature-length film.) Both of these are cartoons I enjoy - they're very entertaining ways to spend five minutes. But I'd get bored if they went on for an hour and a half.

Analysing this further, maybe I'm just being a bit of a linguistic chauvinist, finding it hard to believe that anything that doesn't use language can be sentient or be a person. Compare Johnny Five (who Wall-E looks very similar to - I wonder whether Disney/Pixar bought the rights to do that?) He talks, and I find it much easier to empathise with his emotions than with Wall-E's.

Another issue was the scientific and technological goofs, like getting the plant out in outer space and it surviving the exposure unharmed. It feels a bit churlish to quibble at these in a Disney film, but they did grate a bit. alextfish made the ingenious suggestion that the robots should be thought of not as programmed pieces of electronics, but as genetically engineered artificial lifeforms. This would make many things more plausible: their development of personality (obviously this on its own could be excused, since it happens with all fictional robots ever), their tendency to mimic things they see and hear (which creatures do naturally, but which is difficult to program machines to do, so wouldn't be programmed without a reason), and the way they communicate with each other by sight and sound and typing on keyboards, rather than some kind of direct networking.

There were definitely subtle, clever, and funny moments (and plenty of digs at society and comsumerism, yay). But I didn't feel they were enough to carry the whole film: as well as the non-talking issue (which I realise is probably just me) I felt it dragged at times and seemed a bit thin in terms of plot.

Meaningless conversational interjections

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 13:14:11 GMT

I think all foreign language courses should devote a significant amount of time to teaching and practising these. I mean the sort of relatively meaningless, idiomatic things you say when someone else is doing most of the talking and you want to indicate that you're still listening and still interested, or to express agreement, surprise, sympathy, etc. Examples in English include:

Right
Oh, I know
You're kidding!
No way!
Don't they just?
Totally
Gosh
Really?
I know what you mean

I speak French to roughly A-level and German to roughly GCSE level, but I just don't know how to say these things in either language. (I mean, I could translate most of the above list literally into both languages, but they almost certainly wouldn't be idiomatic. I want to know what speakers of those languages actually say in those situations.)

As well as needing to know what expressions are idiomatic at all, you need to know what connotations they each have and what dialects they're associated with. A non-native English speaker couldn't know that Totally can make you sound like a valley girl and Oh, I know can make you sound like Sybil Fawlty.

So if I'm talking to a French speaker, and they're doing most of the talking (which is likely, since they, you know, know more French than I do) I don't know what to say, and feel awkward and inarticulate, and just nod and/or say Oui.

(I actually know one such expression in German. A friend who spent a year actually living in Germany used to say Echt? when German speakers talked to him. I think echt means "genuine", so it's the equivalent of English Really? but obviously I couldn't have come up with it from first principles.)

An anecdote: an acquaintance, L, who speaks Spanish to perhaps GCSE level, asked a friend, P, who speaks it very fluently, if he could practise speaking Spanish with him. P obliged, and L went on to tell him about his favourite subjects and how many siblings he has and so on. P, the fluent speaker, was reduced to nodding and going "Mm". It looked to me as though he kept starting to say "Really" or something, and then stopping, and realising that no Spanish equivalent came quickly to hand.

These things need to be taught. An awful lot of real-life conversation consists of one person telling something that happened to them recently or giving their opinion on something, and the other person listening and interjecting occasionally. This isn't a model of conversation that happens in the language classroom. Either the whole class listens while the teacher talks (in which case you're not supposed to interrupt) or you have an equal, two-sided conversation with a classmate about how to get to the station or whatever. Language learners need to do exercises in which one talks and the other listens and interjects; or, failing that, the teacher talks and you interject.

We can has kittehs!

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:18:43 GMT

We're getting two kittens! We're picking them up in four weeks' time from a friend of toothycat, whose mother's cat has recently had a litter. There's a ginger boy kitten and a black girl kitten.

*bounce*

The Grand Duke

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 15:00:27 GMT

Alex and I are singing in the chorus of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Grand Duke. The performance is next Wednesday, 18 June, at 1pm, in Queens' College Chapel. (Unfortunately that's the only performance. Yes, I know, but it's a student society and weekday afternoons are as good as weekends and evenings to them.)

"Telling the story of a humble actor who decides to take over the world and ends up with four wives in the process, with the help of sausage rolls, statutory duels and the game of roulette, "The Grand Duke" is definitely not to be missed!" - Cambridge Uni G&S Society website.

By the mystic regulation of our dark Association
Ere you open conversation with another kindred soul
You must eat a sausage roll.
You must eat a sausage roll, a sausage roll.
If in turn he eats another, that's a sign that he's a brother
Each may fully trust the other - it is quaint and it is droll,
But it's bilious on the whole,
Very bilious, very bilious on the whole.

Come and see the show! It's lots of fun!

Unread books meme

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:04:15 GMT

I saw this on the LJ of someone I don't know at all, and thought it looked interesting.

From the link:
"What we have here is the top 106 (which is an unusual number, but it's not my meme) books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicise the ones you started but didn't finish."

There are a lot of books there that I'd like to read, so I'm posting it as much for the purpose of keeping a reading list for myself as because I think it's an interesting LJ meme. In addition to the official formatting I'm adding asterisks to the ones I intend to read.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (well, I read the first few pages to see if I'd like it and didn't)
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude *
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose *
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies *
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged *
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales (but not all of it)
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula *
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons (as in Dan Brown? That looks a bit out of place in the list)
The Divine Comedy: The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things *
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon *
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything *
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter *
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed *?
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita *
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth *
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

18 read, 2 read for school, 10 started but not finished, 76 unread.

GamesAfternoon

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 14:19:09 GMT

Yesterday we had a GamesAfternoon, focusing on playing people's home-made games. angoel was there, who created On the Underground, and he'd brought some more of his games. They were quite professional-looking for unpublished games, each in its own plastic box with colour DTPed boards and rules and box front. I got to play four of them: Top Banana, which was good, and Rally Car, Captains of Piraeus, and Colour Clash, which were excellent. (Colour Clash has changed its name, but I never fully caught the new name.)

Top Banana is a light, fun, quick game featuring cute plastic monkeys. It's a dice-rolling game, but because you get to re-roll any number of your dice, twice, it involves more skill than a dice-rolling game otherwise might. There are quite a few win conditions and quite a few conditions that allow you to move, and it's difficult at first to spot all of these when they occur.

In Rally Car you have to race your cars to the end of a track made from different types of terrain. There are movement stacks relating to each terrain: you can build these up, so that you (and also probably the people coming after you) can travel a long way on that terrain, or you can wipe them out and start again with a card which only allows you to travel a short distance. I think there is more psychological and diplomatic subtlety in this than I fully explored. You also get to change some terrain, to help your own cars or obstruct other people's. I played a 5-player and a 2-player game, and I preferred the 5-player because there was more interaction, especially at the end when all the cars clustered near the finish and got in each other's way.

Captains of Piraeus is a game of auctions and shipping. I found it reminiscent of Goa. It has a very interesting reverse-auction mechanic: you take turns to buy lots containing ships and/or goods at a given price, until one player chooses to reduce the global price instead of buying anything (for which he receives some money), and then you all carry on buying lots at the lower price, and so on. This creates an interesting tension between buying things early to ensure you get them and waiting until they become cheap. Each ship requires a certain combination of goods: if you get the ship and the matching goods, you can ship it and get points. There are also captain cards, which come with some of the auction lots, and can be played to get extra points if the set of ships you manage to ship fulfils certain conditions. I also played this 5-player and 2-player, and it worked well at both extremes, which is impressive.

Colour Clash was probably my favourite, and I wish I'd got to play it more than once. There are cubes in four colours distributed around a map of six rooms, and there are cards with target configurations (an example card might indicate that room A should contain mostly red cubes, room B should contain mostly blue cubes, room C should contain as many different colours as possible, and so on). Each player has two different cards, kept secret, and the players go round taking actions which allow them to move or swap cubes between rooms, each trying to achieve the configuration on one of their cards. At the end of the round you get to choose which of your cards to score for, and get points corresponding to how closely it matches the target configuration.
On an abstract level, this game reminded me of Cityscape. The flavour and even the mechanics are different, but in both games all the players have secret goals, which coincide in some ways but conflict in more ways, and they try to manipulate the shared board to match their goal, while trying to be subtle about it so that their opponents won't figure out their goal and sabotage it - or, better still, try to fool their opponents into helping them achieve their goal.

I hope he gets them published. I want to buy copies.

We also played alextfish's game Castles in the Air, and between us we came up with a change which simplified the rules and turn structure while also making the game much more fun to play and giving players more choice, so that was excellent. Alex is now putting together new rules sheets incorporating the change.

Rudeness

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 20:51:47 GMT

Which of these things do you think are rude? Assume the context is when you're visiting family.

View Poll: Rudeness