I’ve given in and bought a Wii. I could be sensible and hold off writing about it until I have a bit more to say (and am a bit less tired when I’m trying to write it), but I’ve been neglecting this blog of late so I’ll … stop talking meta.

In brief though:

• It is a lot of fun
• Super Mario Galaxy is well deserving of its Gamespot score of 9.5, and an excellent single player game that challenges the Wii’s reputation as a party game machine
• Mario Kart is seven shades of awesome for multiplayer racing, but the battle mode is a let down when compared to the GameCube version. I’ll write more on this later.
• Mario and Sonic Olympics is quite fun, but mostly revolves around waving the sticks in various ways. It does result in good videos being filmed though.
• The downloadable games are fun, and I’m sure I’ll get a lot more entertainment out of Bomberman ‘93 and Bubble Bobble

So that is a quick summary of first impressions, I’ll probably go into more detail later, but it is approaching 0130 and I need some shut eye.

I’m going to have a go at writing a campaign manager for Mongoose Publishing’s Babylon 5 war game - A Call To Arms. I spent some time this evening going over the rules with Jim and working out what data needed storing. This entity relationship diagram is the result.

Complicated system, isn’t it?

The production values of the set are pretty high. The cards feel decent, with (usually) amusing captions and nice photographs, all of which keep with the theme (20s crime).

The main let down is the rules, which are a little unclear in places and fail to cover the second of two ways that a hand can end (this way is spelled out in the FAQ on the website though).

On to the game play. The objective is to collect case files (numbered one to five) in each of the three suits (Mafia, Hollywood, and Politics). Each suit has five ones, four twos and so on.

When you play a card, it is worth its face value, but you can’t play a card if you haven’t already played a card with a value of one less in the same suit. (So given a hand of Mafia 1 / 3, Politics 1 / 1 / 2 / 3, you could play all four Politics cards, but only the 1 in the Mafia cards).

The hand ends if anybody plays the 5 card in a suit (which also scores them double points for the hand), or if the draw desk is exhausted.  Cards left in hand at the end count against the score.

The game is spiced up by a number of cards with a face value of 0, which have a special effect such as allowing you to draw extra cards, or preventing the hand from ending if someone completes a given suit. This makes the game rather more interesting.

Murdero is a pretty quick game, which makes it good for killing the second half of a lunch hour, but it high on luck and doesn’t have a vast amount of strategy, so I don’t think it would suit frequent play.

Overall, I’d give it five out of ten.

Much of the rest of this post will make little sense if you don’t know the game. If you are unfortunate enough to be in that situation, make it a point to learn to play. It is an excellent game, and you can play online.

I started out the day with two wins. The first was a very tight game which I only managed to scrape a win thanks to my development card draws turning up two Monopoly cards, a Year of Plenty, three victory points, and just two Soldiers.

My second game saw me going last, on a really nasty board. In desperation I put my starting settlements on a triple grain space and a triple ore space, with only one 6/8 between them. Somehow, this managed to pay off, quickly netting me two cities before I built to a 3:1 port.

We then broke for lunch, with me floating on something of a shocked high.

The first game of the afternoon saw me in a game including the infamous Markus Welbourne (who usually wins this tournament). I was quite happy to come away from that game in second place.

The last two games, were not ones that really qualify as “bad”, but they weren’t great either.

Despite that, my earlier results managed to pull my score up, so I finished a very respectable 7th out of 32. My one regret is that in the last game I held a Soldier card back as I was getting close to winning and feared being attacked by the Robber. If I had played it, I’d have won Largest Army and scored enough tournament points to bump me up to position 6. Unfortunately, another player managed to grab Longest Road (which I’d already convinced myself that another player was going to get) and build enough to jump him from behind to 10 points, and I ended the game with 6 rather than 8.

The winner? Markus Welbourne.

The 15 to 1 quiz, on the other hand, was a lot of fun, and I certainly did better then last year.

Between the two organised events, I managed to squeeze in a game of Traffic Lights. It was enough to convince me to never play it again, and certainly not buy it. It is a glorified game of noughts and crosses, with the objective being to be the last person to get too bored to concentrate on the play area (and thus fail to spot a move that needs blocking).

As usual, there were a number of games for sale, so I’ve taken note of a number which I shall be checking out on Board Game Geek before deciding which to splash out on.

Amazon have just released their new eBook reader, and it isn’t as good as one might hope.

It costs a (relative) fortune and is heavily laden down with DRM, an issue which Mark covers in some detail (including some nice references to a couple of works of SF - see, I said it would be on topic for this blog).

I’ve been reading eBooks, on and off, for several years. Previously on my trusty old Palm OS machines, and more recently on a Nokia 770. My main source of material has been the Baen Free Library, which has a hefty collection of sci-fi and fantasy.

Giving away books doesn’t sound like a way to make much money, but having read a couple of eBooks, I promptly went out and bought as much of the two series they were from in paperback as I could. Another one I ordered for a friend one Christmas.

They might not have made money directly, but they made plenty indirectly, and they didn’t need DRM to do it.

If you want an eBook reader, then I encourage you to get yourself a Nokie 770, which can be found for under £100 these days, (or one of its successors) and pull some content down from Bean. 1632 makes a good starting point.

If you aren’t interested in eBooks, then you might want to get hold of a paperback copy of 1632 - it is a very good book.

Still, we got there in the end and Adam was pleased to receive the Xbox 360 that Simon had collected for him. We were saved from suffering through people playing on it all night by virtue of the absence of any games for it.

Saturday dawned.

Several hours later we got up and found some breakfast before recapping York by Night. The trouble with late starts is that lunchtime arrives before you know it, and the pub is far too close to places which sell video games.

Andy prompted fled to retrieve his jumper from the pub, while the game was played.

WoD began in earnest when he returned. I won’t provide any details, since I know Andy is working on a proper write-up, but suffice it to say that it was a lot of fun, and we players were driven sufficiently insane.

Sadly, it was the last session of York by Night, but we’ll be kicking off York Unveiled sometime next year so we spent a fair chunk of the weekend tossing around character ideas (and playing Halo 3).

Sunday was a relaxed wind down with a number of games of Infernal Contraption and a little bit of fighting over Mage: The Awakening books. We finished off the day with Ingenius! but came to the conclusion that we were playing it with too much focus on scoring points and not enough on blocking other players. According to the rulebook scoring 18 on every track should happen “very rarely” but it is how I won the game on my first attempt, with at least two other players coming very close to matching the score.

Sadly the trip home was less than fun. The weather turned so the drive back to Kent took so long that I was stranded in Tonbridge for the night. Happily the commute to the office from there is only marginally longer then from my current address so the major consequences were a slightly more expensive train ticket, and turning up at the office with a large rucksack full of my gear for the weekend. I think this is scuppering my plan to collect some times to take home tonight - I’ve too much to carry already.

Photo credit: Jumping the ‘phant by Neil Crosby, Ingenious! by Jon Bristow

Hopefully I’ll be able to put together a group and give it a run through.

The flat I’m buying has a fair amount of open space nearby, so this might just be a possibility.