Magyar Kartya

Whilst in Budapest, last week, I saw an interesting sign in one of the restaurant bars.
It was a picture of three dice and had the legend "Fortune Dice" in bold letters across the top.

Further inspection revealed that for 250 Hungarian Forints I could roll the bones and, if I scored three sixes, my meal was free. How cool is that ? Of course, I had to have a go - even though my food and drink had already been paid for by the conference.

I tried to find out more about Hungarian gaming culture but it is so hard when you are a tourist and/or business visitor. I found a bar called "More Dice" but there were none to be found (although I suspect an illegal gambling den may have been out back judging by the clientele).

The tourist shops all seemed to be selling Hexagonal Chess sets, which seemed somewhat odd, but I could not find a Gorky Park full of old men playing it. Rubik's cubes seemed popular, too, with a number of variants on offer (a 2x2 cube for novices and a 7x7 for puzzle freaks).

In the market I did manage to find some Hungarian playing cards which seemed to be composed of four suits ('baubles', 'acorns', 'leaves' and 'hearts') of eight cards - but the lady, on the stall, could not tell me what games I could play using them.

Of course I bought a few decks - partly for curiosity but mainly because Magyar Kartya ('Hungarian Cards') sounded like "Magna Carta" and I fancied a game of Caylus.

Anyway, I will be Googling their usage over the next few days. Or, more likely, getting Stephen at the Spiel to do the research for me as I sent him a deck too.

Sauna

Yesterday the sauna was full of nubile Hungarians. Today it is full of fat German businessmen. Of course this leads to competitiveness - and we attempt to out sweat each other.

I swear I hear the word gormenghast in their cheerful chat to each other. I'm wondering if I've been rumbled.
And if they'd like a game of Tigris.

The irony of it all

Generally speaking, I am more into games than I am into puzzles - but I do enjoy having my brain stretched and tortured by the odd cryptic conundrum. The more mind bending the better as I bore easily with Suddoku, Word Search or the more pedestrian coffee time puzzles so much beloved of my beloved.

Of course, this clearly singles me out, not just as a gaming snob, but as a puzzle snob too.

For Christmas, the pikelets bought me a "Lift-a-flap" Hangman desk calendar. Each day I am challenged to find another place, thing, fictional character, occupation etc before my little stick man is hung by his neck 'til he chokes.
(When did capital punishment become an acceptable source of merriment to the word finding populace?)

So, anyway, I laugh in the face of the vocabularic noose. Even if there is no such word.

But today I got stuck. Today the stones of Gormenghast came crashing down as the walls of shame crushed me beneath their unforgiving weight.
The category was "A THING" and I got this far:

_ _ A R _ _ A _ _

With C, I, P, S and T chosen I had one guess left, before the sneering face of the executioner could kick the virtual chair away from underneath me.
I chose "N".
I chose wrong.

And then I read the answer and it was so obvious and so ironic.
I can only assume that someone cast the Enfeeblement Mantra, on me, whilst I was playing Ghost Stories a few days ago.

Ghostbusters

My birthday seems to have been somewhat extended this year - as if the Monkey King himself has blown magic across his tail and elongated time.

Of course, it has helped that the Lady Fuchsia has been away for most of the week, so I've been over at Poodle's playing my birthday present and his 'overflow' present. That is to say that he found himself unable to enter a games shop and buy a single game for me, for my birthday, and ended up getting one for himself, too.

So, in the shakedown, I ended up with Dominion and he ended up with Ghost Stories. A fantastic result for both of us, and our kin.

It has meant that, over the course of the last few days, I have had to throw myself on my sword a couple of times in an effort to kill Wu-Feng and his dastardly minions, but that's cool. Anything to get an extra dice roll. Ghost Stories is a great game and potentially my favourite co-op right now - but then we do need to get Battlestar Galactica back to the table with a full compliment of toasters.

Dominion is fantastic, too, though I already knew that having played it a number of times on BSW. Not so fantastic that Poodle is catching on to it fast and had the bad manners to beat me today.

Steerpike Jr bought me Archaeology: The Card Game which we also dug out to celebrate the ageing process - a very neat bonekicker game which I can see getting lots of plays given my little stone chipping's love of card games. (Dominion will scratch that itch too - he put in a pretty good showing in the four player dads and lads).

But the festivities are not yet over...
I have ordered the Dominion expansion cards - Black Market and Envoy - from Boardgamegeek and have also managed to snag a copy of Ubongo, which hopefully is in the post by now.

Trouble is, I'm off to Hungary for a few days so I may miss their arrival.
And I'm not sure if Poodle will be able to survive the ghost onslaught without me. (Though it is a cooperative game, we continue to be needlessly competitive and see who manages to exorcise the most evil spirits. It would seem rude not to)

I ain't afraid of no ghost.

Bike

In his wonderfully atmospheric song, "Back at the Isa", John Williamson sings the insightful line:
"Just over the hill in his own backyard, the landscape becomes a picture postcard".

Sometimes I, also, forget that there is life beyond the stone wall of the castle and that, in actual fact, it is nestled in an area of "outstanding natural beauty". Or so the English Tourist Board would have us all believe. It is certainly a rather pleasant area, within the home counties, and doubtless the kind of Shire that Prof Tolkien had in mind when he was writing The Hobbit just up the road.

Anyway, I'm not sure that I really make the most of my environs, spending far too much time huddled over a game board or surfing the internet for random shards of information to win a set of Spiel dice. I keep promising myself that one day, while the family are down at the House of Groan, I will start walking up the Thames path and just see how far I can get in a day. Just for the hell of it.

I was going to do this yesterday afternoon - but, instead, I decided to hop on my bike and see if I couldn't shed a little bit of my Middle Kingdom, which seems to have expansionist tendencies right now.
I have a hybrid bike which means that I should be able to ride off road, as well as on, with equal ease. Yeah, right, after about ten minutes of bouncing down a rock hard bridle path my knees were pretty much shot away and my rear shock absorber (aka Gluteous Maximus) was demanding a pit stop.

Still I soldiered on, as I had a Geocache to sort out (with a travel bug to return), and a feeling that it was quickest to press on to the next road than to turn around.
I say a feeling because the map function on my Crackberry is PANTS - but don't get me onto the ongoing 'phone wars' between myself and the Lady Fuchsia, suffice it to say that I am in the process of repossessing my iPhone. (It's a long story and the subject of many Tweets. At the crux of the matter is whether keeping an iPhone purely for texting your friends is a valid use of the technology. Argh, I told you not to get me onto this subject !)

Where was I ? oh, yes, gone "walkabouts" on my bike.
So, anyway, ten miles later, I am left with the over riding realisation that I need to get a proper mountain bike. Or spend more time with my games. Act my age.

All Quiet on the Western Front

The halls of Gormenghast are quiet and brooding - as Lady Fuchsia has taken the pikelets down to the House of Groan for a few days.

Silence is golden. Well it would be if I didn't have the iPod on full blast. All those wonderful songs that do not see the light of day when the, somewhat musically conservative, family are around.

Yesterday was anything but quiet, as the trouble and strife bustled around the castle cleaning the toilets and dusting the musty surfaces. When I enquired as to the reason for this unusual behaviour the response was along the lines of "it's in case you have anyone around while I am away".

So, two possibilities here.
The first is that the Lady Fuchsia is concerned that I may have a lady friend around, for some extra marital activity, and she would rather die than have my mistress (and/or random pickup from the local pub) believe that she does not keep the house clean.

Or, secondly, she suspects that I will be having friends around to play a few games while she is away. Whilst this is not beyond the realms of possibility, it does seem to imply that your average gamer is interested in the clinical cleanliness of the house in which he finds himself playing.
Possibly one of the bizarrest notions I have ever come across.
I really must take her to a games convention sometime and set the record straight on that one.

Of course, a few games while the cats away is virtually a requirement - but having said that it's already been a busy Easter weekend of gaming.
I was around Poodles after work on Friday night, and that went well into the wee small hours, and then back again on Saturday with the whole family which pretty much ended in Dads and Lads at the gaming table (Battlestar Galactica) and the wives and girls... well.. somewhere else. Doing something else.

Virtually 36 hours of gaming with a brief sleep in between. Oh, and some wine. and Port.

So perhaps I should have a short gaming hiatus while I pop down the local in search of a nice young lady who does not object to overly clean bathrooms.

wet

According to the AA there will be 10 million cars on the UK roads over this coming Easter weekend - with approximately 2.5 million of them attempting to get out of the country.

 

I won't be one of them. Weather forecasters are promising lots of rain and generally dismal conditions. 

A perfect excuse to stay inside and play some games. 

Game Over

My Diplomacy pbem game has finally ground to a halt.

After 822 sent emails, 457 received, and 26 blog posts I have finally agreed a truce with England and Germany. A three way draw.

It's a funny old game, Diplomacy. In many ways it reminds me of test match cricket. (Five days of play and the final outcome a draw)

The end of an era.

What on earth am I going to do with myself and all this spare time I'll have ?

Diversion

What is it with carbon based life forms and their over reliance on technology ?

Just a few days ago some numptie drove his car down a ditch because his Sat Nav system told him to - and then, yesterday, when I arrived home (three hours late - bloody Aer Lingus) from Dublin my taxi driver, from the airport, insisted that his GPS device knew the way better than me.

Now, it's not that I'm technophobic or anything - but having spent most of my life in the computer industry I know well the old, though somewhat dated, axiom "garbage in garbage out".

So the trip from Heathrow to Gormenghast took an hour and a half instead of 45 minutes (hour max). It turns out that the taxi driver still had his base coordinates in the system so it was taking us via his home town. Nice.

Sometimes I feel a bit like Will Smith in "I Robot".
I suspect that there is a conspiracy by the SatNav systems to take over the world. At a predesignated date, the day of the GPS-revolution, they will simultaneously instruct mankind to drive into walls, off cliffs and into the McDonalds drive through. No one will be spared.
I will be the only survivor, as I seem to be the only person left on this planet with an AA road map and a good sense of direction.

Although, clearly, no sense of perspective.

interlude

Is there anything more civilised than sitting in a Dublin Hotel bar with a pint of Guinness and free Wifi ?

 

Well, yes, there probably is, but right now it is good enough for me. Increasingly, when travelling with work, I find it exhausting having to go out for dinner in the evening with my work hosts - whilst the food is always good (often excellent), I can do without the continued shop talk well into the evening. So after a day being bombarded with the technical nuances of meta-data and associated philosophical endpoints, I really appreciate a bit of downtime surfing BGG and twittering with meta-acquaintances.

I'm resting my metadatametatarsels and blogging into the ether instead.

 

I'm a little bit concerned about the security of the connection, though, given that it is open access wifi, but I can't imagine that there are many people trying to eavesdrop in on my garbled one way conversations with the blogger application. I blame Cryptonomicon. It's a great book- which I've finally managed to break the back of during the flight and early evenings  - but it does lead to a certain degree of digital paranoia. Now that MI5 is tracing my Facebook account I ought to be careful.

 

Of course there's always the possibility of someone trying to post on my behalf. Undermine the exalted wisdom of the ex-kitchen boy.

I need another pint.