Benny’s Weblog

Silence That Gun (ASL14): Played against Steven on VASL. I took the Germans defending the gun because I wanted to get some idea of how a more experienced ASL player would carry out an attack. Steve started out with a frontal attack with three massive kill stacks. I had a lot of luck breaking up his troops but failled to kill any of them. In the end Steve managed to flank me with a few half-squads and got one into the gun hex ending the game in the 5th turn.
A made some errors such as not CXing one of my units to surround a stack of broken enemy and cause failure to rout. It also seems like a good idea to use half-squads to chase broken units around and force them to DM continually.
Also, I saw the power of assault movement. Especially with assault capable troops it can be advantageous to drop smoke, move into the smoke hex then during the AFPh go ahead and shoot up the enemy. Overall it was a great game and a very good learning experience.

The Guards Counterattack (A): Played against Ryan Saturday. My Human Wave appeared ineffective at first but managed to take the entire building almost at the conclusion of the first turn. When it appeared the middle building would also be taken, Ryan conceded.

Silence That Gun (14): Played on Saturday. A really good scenario, Ryan was on the attack with most of my guys camping close to the gun and up in the fortified building. He was having trouble grasping the LOS rules and spent a little too much time Prep firing without making enough progress to take the objective in time. The final turn was a mad rush toward the gun with a demolition charge but his troops all broke in the residual.

War Of The Rats (S2): Played on Sunday. A really good scenario in my opinion. We played with the full ASL rules but because Ryan is only starting out he is having trouble timing his attacks. He didn’t deploy any squads at the start and concentrated his forces at the far end of the map making it impossible to take all objectives in time. Still, he has picked up the game amazingly quickly, it has only been a week.

Clearing Colleville (S5): This time I took the attacking Americans. Again played with full ASL rules. Unfortunately they begin the game with very low morale troops (6). Midway through I re-read the scenario and realised the objective was much different to what I had expected. I thought I had to take only one building but it turned out I had to clear all Germans from the designated area so I conceded and gave it to Ryan.

Our game record is now Ben 3 - Ryan 2.

Advanced Squad Leader Starter Kit #1 (S1): For myself and Ryan this was our first live game of ASL. I had played only via VASL.
A great game that I ruined at the start by running my squads across an open field straight toward the objective. I thought maybe 5 turns would not be enough to take a building. In hindsight I should have treaded carefully and moved around from the Southern end of the board where there are many more buildings to cover the approach.
Because I only needed one good order unit in any of the four objective buildings, in the final turn I just rushed each squad and leader individually in the hope to secure a spot. Needless to say they all got chopped up before getting any where near it!! Even if they had they still would have been chopped up when Ryan started his last turn.

So much fun I can’t wait to play this game again. In fact I may end up playing ASL to the exclusion of all other games.. it’s just that satisfying. Ryan has the rulebook to study up on and we will be playing again on Sunday.

Ryan 1 Ben 0

Monday night at Games Village.
Ned Kelly: I played this abstract against Tim. The strategy is interesting but we didn’t really know the rules well enough to play the game to its potential. There are so many better abstracts out there that I’m unlikely to want to play this again. Full marks for having a shot at Australian game design though!!
Acquire: Love this game. Nicely won by David but Ryan has a very good grip on keeping track of shares traded.
Manhattan: I won this myself. Manhattan is a good game but I’m of the impression the winner can be decided by a losing player in the end game.
Modern Art: Won by Zoltan with myself in second and Ryan third. Games of this seem to be getting closer as we become more aware of the relative worth of the paintings. We also played this last week (my first time at Games Village) with Ryan taking the win ( partly due to myself handing out cheap paintings and him snapping them up! ).

Got together with Lauren and Co. for some boardgames on Sunday. Played Attika with only 4 players and the rest with 5.

Attika: Something I’ve had on the shelf for quite a while. Played once with four and not a bad game. I think it’ll take a few more plays to get a better idea of whether I’m going to want to play more of this. Bill won accidentally after seeing a late opportunity to take the game.

Princes Of Florence: We started out on this game trudging through the rules. Quite a bit to take in but after about 5 turns we were right into it. It appeared there was a good margin and a runaway leader but at the end of the game 3 players were tied for first place! As it turned out Lauren won because she had the most money at the end. Our first play but definately a game we will play again, it seemed to go down better than Puerto Rico. A very very good game and certainly in my top ten.

Princes Of The Renaissance: OK, this was a difficult game to grasp. We thought we had the rules nailed but one hiccup in the scoring caught us by surprise. I kept forcing battles between other players throughout the game in an attempt to force the city I had a majority in to increase in status. The rules state that the winner of a battle gets one victory point chip. So by game end Belle had amassed 6 victory point chips. We all thought she had 6 points but in actual fact she had accrued 21 additional points through battle! i.e. 6+5+4+3+2+1 = 21 So at end-game she had almost doubled the rest of our scores. A really good game that I think would improve with further play. I don’t think it left a lasting impression on the rest of the group though. I’ll try and bring it out next time and see what happens.

Coloretto: After Princes we needed something lighter and Coloretto fitted the bill. A nice fun light game with little concentration needed. Not a great deal of strategy but still good for breaking up the heavier games. We played 4 rounds. Lauren won the first, Simon the second and third and myself the fourth.

High Society: Another excellent Knizia game. It’s very light and easy to teach but appears to have a lot more depth than the theme and simple mechanics would suggest. I just can’t work this one out. Kind of a Modern Art lite. Lauren won the first game by a comfortable margin. Bill won the second. I’m looking forward to playing more of this one!

We started at 11:30am and went to 7:30pm. It felt like 5 minutes, a great day and everyone had fun.

I caught up with the gaming group at Chaddy last night.

Power Grid: We played a 6-player game of Powergrid which I thought was great fun. It’s a great game that I’m sure I will enjoy more and more with further play. The power plants went very cheap and I made the bad decision to buy plants which added up to 19 when I should have kept enough to only power 14 as the game ends at 14 plants built with 6 players. Craig won the game followed by Gerard then myself. It took about two and a half hours.

David and Goliath: We then played a 6 player game of David and Goliath. A fun game but probably not something I would play again. For a light game it went far too long as we had to play six hands. Craig won yet again!

San Marco: I then participated in a three player game of San Marco. Wow, I love this game with its unique card splitting mechanism. I think I’ll be picking this one up when I can. Brian won by a fairly comfortable margin.

Taj Mahal: My first game of Taj Mahal then followed. I only really started to grasp what was going on near the end as the scoring and card play is quite subtle. I love the game though.. many ways to score and tough hand management. We finished up at around 11:30pm. It was a fun night.

War Of The Ring: I picked this up today from Military Sims. I’m looking forward to having a two-player game at first opportunity. I might have to get some more Camomile Tea to get Bren over for a game.

I lured Brenno over Saturday night with Camomile Tea then used the ancient chinese boardgame torture on him. I then proceded to muck with his head by beating him at Zertz. I pulled out Samurai and the whinging subsided. He beat me. I love the game. Knizia is God. Blue Moon… another Knizia game.. didn’t go down so well. Partly because I couldn’t stop laughing long enough to read the rules and partly because we had run out of tea.

Ah well, next time…

A great game.
I was lucky enough to get in on a four player game last week. I felt I didn’t enjoy it anywhere near as much as I would had we played it two-player. It just drags too much as a four player game.

The system appears to work really well. The fellowship is encouraged to take the path followed in the books. There are other options but they appear to be riskier and probably best left to more experience players.
As the shadow player my partner and I had to make decisions on how to concentrate force without leaving any of our strongholds vulnerable. With the action dice system you need to balance out being able to move some of your forces with putting pressure on the fellowship. If you allocate too few dice to the hunt for the fellowship they end up moving much quicker to Mordor. The key seems to be attacking the enemy strongholds while always allocating some resources to hunting the ring bearer to slow them down enough to give you time to concentrate your forces.

Really looking forward to trying this two player. The board is HUGE, it’s going to be hard finding table space!

( Posted to atease.web.com Radiohead Forum on 16-Jun-2004)

hi all.

I’m not sure whether this has been discussed a great deal on the forums but I just want to share an experience I had yesterday with listening and re-visiting RadioHead. I don’t normally post on forums but this is such a huge deal for me I need to know if anyone can relate.

The first three albums I loved but when I heard Kid A I was disappointed… very disappointed in fact. I still listened to the album but I bitched and moaned to people about how crap and self-indulgent it was and how half the songs were just noise. My opinion is that if they wanted to be self-indulgent they should do it in private and still produce the sounds everyone knows and loves. I liked only about 3-4 tracks of the album and my disappointment continued through Amnesiac and Hail To The Thief. I loved their guitar-centric pop sounds and missed them dearly.

Anyway a few months ago I joined a DJ friend of mine at a psychedelic trance rave called “Alien Earth”. I struggled to get into the music and by the next day the sound was just plain annoying. Electronic music has always been something that I have only really mildly enjoyed when out and getting on it and even though I’m open to new things generally, techo was not music to me.
My mate however only ever listens to psi-trance and I quizzed him about what it is that makes the music really grab him. He told me it was about the subtleties in the sound, the deviations from the common pulse. And because they can be sometimes far apart.. that’s really the key. It makes the impact from when the sounds hit much more profound.

So with that knowledge.. a few months later I went to another psi-trance rave and enjoyed it more because I knew what to look for and appreciate. The next day my mate left a whole CD case of trance at my place and that night I listened to 3 CDs he recommended about 3 times over. I got to sleep at four because I was getting so much enjoyment out of looking for and anticipating the different sounds interspersed in the heavy bass beats.

Now to be perfectly clear, techo and trance etc. is still not my thing and probably never will be because I like pop so much.. I need vocals and depth of meaning and I still feel that it is a little too hard to listen.

So the very next day I opened Winamp at work and added Radiohead’s last 3 albums from Kid A to HTTT. Now when I hit the songs I had previously hated and sounded like fingernails on a blackboard… I suddenly heard stuff I hadn’t heard before… and friends… it blew my *f…ing* mind. It was the single biggest jump in musical appreciation I’ve had.. EVER.

This experience has elevated Radiohead to easily one of the greatest bands I have seen and in my opinion second only to the monolithic Beatles.

These three albums are revolutionary in my opinion. They are purely music lovers’ albums and for experienced ears only please. If you have invested the time to get into pop and have never explored electronic music then you will *not* fully appreciate these albums. If your thing is techo and you don’t get a buzz out of the melodies and vocals of pop then you won’t “get” these albums either.

But for the rest of us who are open minded and have invested time into understanding the appeal of lots of different styles and genres of music these albums present a new level of entertainment. They are way WAY ahead of their time. When I listen to them now I see the future and it’s so amazing it scares me. I now know what the future looks like and so many others don’t.

Just thought I would share that with you people and I’m looking forward to seeing your own different experiences.

BennyB

Update: I’m still listening to Amnesiac, the best album I’ve heard in years.