In which there are my most beautiful games

I've made a lot of posts in the past about Playmobil and Lego, but what about the other toys I own.

Since Andy and I met we've loved playing board games together. We used to take our scrabble set down to the beach or play canasta on a picnic table at the caste when we were at university. We also had a few more of the unusual board games: Killer Bunnies and Order of the Stick, for example. As time went on we've collected more and more games. Then when we moved here we became part of a board games club, increasing our collection all the more as we were introduced to everyone else's favourites.

So we do have a lot of games now. In fact our game collection looks something like this:

The drawers have smaller games, and packs of cards. The Lego bricks have Magic the Gathering cards. Oh and the left bottom draw of the set? That's just full of dice! 

What I really love though about the wider world of gaming is the detail in some of the pieces available.There are the most gorgeous playing pieces, beautifully painted boards, unusually faced dice and well designed cards, even amazing storage boxes. So even setting the game out feels like working with art. In this post I'd like to show you my favourite games, in terms of the pieces themselves.

1. Quarriors

As you may be able to see here the box that the game comes in is a patterned tin that matches the design on one of the dice you can use in the game. It wins hands down for best packaging. Then you play the game using some cards (not shown), velvety dice bags, and a fantastic mix of unusual dice. It has beautiful texture. The game is competitive, involving collecting dice from a central pool. Dice can be monsters, spells or the money to buy more dice. You then use your dice to collect points towards winning. There's a nice amount of strategy in it, but it's not overly complicated either.

2. Elder Sign 

Elder Sign is a Lovecraftian inspired co-operative game. You play together to go through a bizarre museum, defeating monsters within and gathering the tools necessary to ultimately defeat the beast from the other world who is trying to devour you all. It comes with a LOT of pieces. There's a clock, little footprint clue tokens, interesting dice and a weird set of monsters. This is one of my favourites games. I like having something less competitive for a change and I love the artwork.

3. Twenty Fives

This is no Fantasy Flight or boardgamegeek game. It's from Past Times, a British shop that sells fake antiques and is on the way to going bust. Despite that, I've had this game since I was a kid and I love it. The game will be far more familiar to you under the title of Ludo. It is very much the same, with the difference being that you play with shells rather than dice. This allows for some unusual bonuses. You count how many upturned shells land for your move, but if all land flat down, no mouths showing you get to move twenty-five. The shells just feel lovely in your hand and make a nice clackety noise as they tumble.

4. Carcassonne

This game is a little more well known than the others and for a very good reason. It's fantastic. If there is anything here I would recommend freely, it would be this one. So much so it has been a Christmas present for many people! The pieces are intricately drawn and the wooden figures are solid and friendly. The gameplay involves drawing pieces randomly and fitting them together to form a map, claiming bits of castle, road and land with your tiny people. It's a competitive game, but not aggressive. The game encourages you to help each other, and the beauty of a finished map of Carcassonne makes it always chilled out.

5. Descent

This game is a cheeky addition as I have only played it once since getting it. The game is huge and heavy. You may get some idea by looking at the size of the box. I only got out a tiny selection of the pieces. It is very basically the game of Dungeons and Dragons (or any other dungeon crawl type game) played out without the role-playing aspect. You have tiny warriors who move through dungeons built out of jigsaw pieces. You roll dice to fight monsters. It is co-operative, except one person has to control the monsters. The game hasn't thrilled us as much but I think it calls for a large group. It does however, have a fantastic dragon piece.

Also, we got all but one of the games listed here for our wedding, so thank you guys! You know who you are. We love our collections and all the evenings of fun it gives us.
Do you play board games? Do you have any favourites I should know about? Do you also treasure pretty playing pieces?

In which I am all diced out

I've just been on a mini-holiday to a gaming convention. When I pause I hear the sound of dice rattling in my head and when I close my eyes I see their shiny marbled sides rolling across a table. When I got up to go to work it was a strange action to leave my dice bag and pencil case behind. For the last four days I have lived and breathed games, and it was So Much Fun.

And that was partly because of one bonus addition to the game set: the sea!

Wheeee!

 I used to live by the sea and, although I am a terrible swimmer, I like to think of myself as some kind of water-baby. I always feel so happy by the sea. I love seeing that final horizon. The straight line that always could be the edge of the world. The feeling that you could get into your coracle and ride ever-East to Aslan's land... or South as it would be in this case. So I got that wonderful thing of combining my outfit pictures with me skipping in the waves. (And wearing my new hat.)

There are a lot of pictures of me just skipping about in the sea like delightful child.

Oh waves? I see you, thinking you will catch my heels. I dismiss you with a glance and a hop.

Also, please pay attention to my brand new hat for the collection. A pink bowler from Camden.

Kiss.

The rest of the time was spent playing endless games. It was a convention for home-brewed games, long fermented in imaginations and finally tapped into four hour chunks. I played six of these four hour games in three days. You see why I see dice constantly? 

My character from Squadron UK, a super-hero game set in Birmingham.

A typical table set up.

It was really good to have a break from it all, and completely abandon the internet. Didn't take my laptop and didn't check my phone for 3 days!

In which I am on a swing without instructions

I have had one of those up and down weeks so far, both from real life instances of upsetness and from spending too much time reading the news. It is hard to keep track of the emotional rollarcoaster in my mind, but the amount of board game time I have had this week counts for a lot of positives.

One thing that has been frustrating is that every day Andy has said he will take outfit pictures of me after work. On Monday we go to the comic shop for games night and he suggested taking photos on the way -but then he got stuck in traffic coming back from work. Tuesday we were having friends round for games again and my train was delayed this time so no time for photos before Order of the Stick the board game began. Yesterday everything in my schedule was changed and I wasn't merely delayed - I had to get a later train and then Andy was off to Orchestra. And you know what? Every day I carefully dressed in something blog-worthy so I've been wearing great outfits, but day after day without recording! Perhaps tonight. :)

In the meantime I have some photos from a couple of weeks ago to share. (I could have just pretended they were recent and avoided all the exposition, but there we go. I just love unnecessary honesty). This dress was a present from Andy's parents from Hawaii and given over a year ago. I wore it about once and never again till now. Because I lost the instructions. Yes. This dress is actually a piece of fabric with two layers and a tie. It doesn't hang in the wardrobe or fold up in the cupboard because it is all slippery-soft. It came with a little card showing fifteen ways to wear it through a series of complicated knots and twists: like a halterneck, like a boob tube, a top, a maxi skirt, a short skirt, a pony, a bicycle and a cape.

I gave up.

But last week I decided to brave the fabric and try and work something out with it myself and this is the result: 

I am very squinty in these pictures because the sun was blinding me.

Wheeee! I like swings.

Frown face kind of ruins this, but you should see how much worse the other pictures were.

Close up of Bow belt and patterns

So I am going to spend some more time negotiating it to see if I can create any more styles. 

In which I discuss board games and cherry buttons

I have a friend who has wonderful luck finding things in charity shops. I have had some pretty good finds in the past (my winter coat for example) but in work clothes, where I am trying so hard, I score nothing. I think there must be someone in her size and style just donating things for her to find. Even this weekend I popped in to the local Oxfam at the weekend and sighed over finding not a single shirt I liked. However I spotted something quite different and just as fantastic as a pair of designer shoes going for £10: A Mah Jong set.

I actually already have one, but a mini version a friend gave me. This set was in a beautiful box, complete amount of tiles and even the little bone scoring sticks. Only going for £20. I have since looked it up online and equivalent sets go for at least £80 so that is my charity shop deal.

To me a Mah Jong set is the definitive item to have in a house. I have mentioned my love of board games very recently so you can see how quickly I amass them, but it is really nice to have something this beautiful. I can’t wait to put all our board games together when we get a place. In our house with friends last year there was quite a collection, but about half were ours! Add to that the ones bought in the last few months and the ones I didn’t take to uni, we are going to have so much entertainment we shall have to throw a board game party. I look forward to photographing the pile to share here.

Behold, photos of my Mah Jong set:

In other news, as I fail to find anything in the charity shops I have been browsing on Asos for interesting work clothes.

I am looking at these shirts and trying to work out whether they are really nice or I am just being tricked into believing they are nice because the model look hot in them. Cherry buttons for instance. Is that quirky, but smart or really just childish and not work suitable st all? Or is it just that the model reminds me a little bit of Amelie in the first photos and I am suffering from a brief girl crush, unable to see beyond her cute surprised look? I don’t know! I sound very fickle, but it is always the problem that clothes generally do look better on a model than in a shop and online shopping doesn’t allow the key element of looking at me in them. I thought I would share these with you and ask for opinions.

Thoughts?

In which I have afternoon tea at Harrods

So here I am blogging again after an unjustly long break. It turns out I am ditzier than I thought I was so I'm afraid the photos are still not mine, but I am going to cope for now. So for now I am going to a blog post about my 3.5 date. My boy and I had afternoon tea at Harrods for our 3.5versary. It sounds beautifully pretentious and is hilarious when neither of us have any money, but it was actually sponsored my boy’s parents who told him to take me out somewhere nice. So we went.

Not a great picture, but best I could find and it does show the pyramids of macaroons

Our tea was in Laduree. It’s like a little café or ‘tea rooms’ within the main part of Harrods that is pretending to be French. They serve French food and have a French menu and a décor that could be French but I’m not really an expert on the insides of French tea rooms.
It is all pretty and pastels to match the macaroons in the main area, but we were put into a little room that was all black and silver with strange blobs of black melted plastic on the wall alongside some statues of semi-naked women without legs. Charming, but mildly disconcerting at the same time.
Well let’s get to the food! This seems to be turning into a review (and it kind of is) but don’t worry, I will also mention Harrods’ toy shop later which will make talking of macaroons totally worth it. The website for Laduree described what we had as their ‘magnum opus’: 6 items of food each and a fancy drink otherwise known as Afternoon Tea.
Oh yes. We paid £25 each, but we did get silverware. Our meal came to us of a three-tiered silver platter. So the meal:
Finger sandwiches, vegetable, ham and cheese
Pastries: croissants and pan au chocolats
Desserts: layered piece of chocolate cake, raspberry tart and a raspberry macaroon.
These all had French names and, whilst I like French, I can’t remember them at all. Sorry!
My boy also had a deliciously thick syrupy hot chocolate that we dipped our croissants in. nom nom.

So it was super posh and pretty tasty. Perhaps overpriced, but hey! It’s Harrods!

Anyway the next stage of our date was the Toy Shop. It may seem strange to you that I and my boy would go to a toy shop for a date, but clearly you haven’t been following my blog for long because I love toys (especially Playmobil). I spent ages looking at every Playmobil set on offer, but then the boy spotted something beyond my dreams.There are little tiny werewolves!

It’s Dungeons and Dragons style Lego! With a board you can rearrange! And weapons! And the thief is even called rogue! There is a barbarian and a ranger! Like in all good fantasy RPGs! Oh how we squeed.
So we bought a set and have already played it many times and invented new rules and I am ready to combine all my other Lego games with this one. I want to buy all the other sets (good marketing guys) and build as many boards as possible. I am truly in love with this idea.

Cakes and toys. I call it a good date. :)