It runs in the family!

Family breaks, either in a restricted or extended format, mean games. They have always meant! Filling afternoons or evenings, sometimes afternoons and evenings, more rarely mornings.

One bag from one branch of the family, another bag from the other, full of boxes exhibiting signs of wear, testimonies of good use, and some brand-new boxes as well, still waiting for the première. Inside the boxes some light, medium or heavier games, with short or long duration. An array of options, to fit in between meals and walks, considering the availability of the big table, and the number of players.

And so it was, in this Christmas season! This time with more premières than repetitions.

Michal Golebiowski, Jetpack Joyride, Krakow: Lucky Duck Games, 2018

From video games to the tabletop. A real-time race, where players don’t take turns, aiming to be the first to get out of the labs. Take a tile and put it in your lab rooms, to guide Barry in his way out. Fast! Collect coins, avoid obstacles, fulfill missions. Eye, hand, route. Faster than the others. Freeze! Everyone stops for a moment, except who gave the order. Unfreeze! The race resumes. Pressure is the name of the game. Fun guaranteed. And one of my last collaborations of 2019, making the rules available in Portuguese.

P. Vojtech & J. Pavlásek, Whales Destroying the World, Liberec: Time Slug Studio, 2019

From one of the last to the first translation, when this card-based game was still in the Kickstarter campaign. Whales are forming armies to invade and destroy the world. It's up to the super-spies to avoid it. But who's who? Identities are secret! The bluff reigns. Groups of whales are formed, but they can also be dispersed. There are superheroes helping spies. There are pacifist turtles. A card game that allows you to gather up to 6 whales, I mean, players around the table.

Jean-Louis Roubira, Dixit, Poitiers: Libellud, 2008-2012

Illustrated cards. Imagination on the loose. A narrator per turn, saying a phrase, a word or even a sound, associated with the card he secretly chose. Which will be mixed with the cards selected by each player, based on the same motto. Who will guess the narrator's card? Who knows him best? But beware, if everyone gets it right, or if everyone fails, the narrator loses! One need to measure well the clue to disclose. And who will be able to get others to choose their card instead of the narrator's? Always a favorite for group playing.

Poker

Tradition says there will always be a long session featuring Risk or Poker. In the summer, Risk was the one. Now it was Poker's turn. An elimination game, trying to read your opponents. Small blind, big blind. A patience game, where you must practice the waiting. Pass. A game in which one must resist temptation to always be under the spotlight, in which one must resist curiosity. Fold. Observation, calculation, probabilities, potential and real gains and losses, position on the table. Vary, improvise. Feel the chips, their sound on the table. Raise. The moment of truth, confronting hands, learning, drawing conclusions when winning, losing or even drawing. A lucky strike. Bluff. Fear. Caution. Risk. Certainty. Call.

M. Kiesling &A. Schmidt, Heaven & Ale, Hamburg: Eggert Spiele, 2018. Mas Que Oca.

Another première, this game of beer crafting monks. Making the best beer requires a capable master brewer, prime ingredients and, above all, a well-balanced mix. It's unworthy to have an excellent barley when the water is low-grade. It takes money to acquire ingredients, more money for better ingredients. Then one must know where to best place them in the fields, either in the shade, to raise money by selling it, or in the sunlight, for them to develop, improving our beverage. You also need monks working in the fields. And, further still, to collect barrels. A nice bunch of options to choose from, each turn, while competing for the very same resources, and where placement and timing are paramount. To play again soon, no doubt, since a single match serves only to learn the basics and grasp the subtleness! And, then, there is an expansion waiting, in which, in addition to everything else, we must distribute the beer, by wagon, to the taverns.


There are a few more games waiting for the first time, one more just arrived, and many more to repeat, in upcoming sessions. And I think I should get some games for player counts over six!

A quest for knowledge - Ep. 10: Home again

Back home. After a journey with many names. After this quest in search of knowledge, in search of more knowledge. On the outside but also inside myself. About this world and about other worlds. About what we see and what we can merely devise.

I look at the bookshelf, now fuller of books, telling part of the story, being also a part of this very same story. Carrying the knowledge transferred from masters to pages, and from pages to other masters, to apprentices, to the learners we will always be. Across the earth and across time. Made present and made memory.

I look back, and I see, in the distance, the point from where I set sail.

This place, to which I now return, it still is the same but also a distinct one. Yes, it still is in the same location, there are streets and houses that look unchanged, perhaps just a little bit older. But the city has changed, the people have changed, the uses and fashions are no longer quite as they were before. And I also have changed, I believe even more, in the ways of looking, understanding and being in this world.

Consequence of the travels, the meetings, the conversations, the experiences, the readings, the thoughts, the companies, the loneliness. The result of the knowledge I came across with, of the knowledge that became part of me.

I look back, and I see the long way I covered.

This trip ends here. At least as far as it concerns roads, carriages and inns. There is another journey that continues, as long as the mind allows it. In search of knowledge. To unveil mysteries, to share knowledge, to make use of it. In search of more knowledge. Still.

The end.

This was a journey, riding with Newton, a game of Nestore Mangone and Simone Luciani, Ediciones Mas que Oca (2018) under license of Cranio Creations. 

PAW in Croatia

Nemesis on the table, in Croatia, by Una Montag

Playing in Croatia.
Or in outer space.
Trying to survive the Invaders.

Thanks Una!


Step in and leave your PAW print - Playing Around the World - and follow the PAW tag.
Send a photo of a gaming session, the game title, your name, city, country (and, if you feel like, a short sentence about the game and or a photo of the city) to gamesinbw@gmail.com.

Behind the camera

Quoridor

Cluedo

Concordia

Carcassonne

Just some photos, from yesterday's Boardgame Meeting, hosted by Centro Universitário de Fé e Cultura, Aveiro, Portugal. With some classics on the table.

A quest for knowledge - Ep. 9: In the presence of masters

Their names and faces swept across my mind, as old acquaintances. We have, indeed, met. On a library bookshelf, in a book, in a lesson, in a conversation, through a disciple of theirs, in the drafts scribbled and scattered all over my desk. Nights and days, months, years, decades, centuries of knowledge. Created, disregarded, recreated, denied, developed, accumulated, built upon, transmitted. Across time and geographies. Until reaching us. Until reaching me!

Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, who you probably know best by his pseudonym, Paracelsus. He learned from the monks, studied at my Alma Mater, Basel, traveled, also him in search for more. Crossing disciplines, medicine, alchemy, physics and astrology.

Galileo Galilei, who, from Pisa, Padua and Florence, saw much further away. He observed craters on the Moon, satellites orbiting around Jupiter and spots in the Sun.  A sidereal messenger, Sidereus nuncius, as in the title of one of his works. And he saw differently, trying to put the Earth, and the earthly ones, in their proper place in the Universe, far from the center, despite the established system and beliefs.

Blaise Pascal, entangled in mathematics, in calculus, in the calculation of small parts. Theorizing about probabilities, seemingly because of some friends and some questions about games. Luck and bad luck, outcomes, gains and losses, the good and the optimal. Combining mechanics and calculus, in a new machine, La Pascaline. Continuing the works on pressure and vacuum, on Torricelli's wake.

Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. A pioneer woman in this men’s world. The first woman ever to be invited to meetings at the Royal Society. Naturalism instead of mechanicism. Taking us to other worlds, to her Blazing World, a futuristic work of fiction with a woman as leading protagonist, the North Pole as a gate, talking animals and submarines.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who began by dedicating himself to the study of mathematics and physics, but whose interests and contributions are so vast that it is difficult to enlisted them all. You may not know that he also worked as a librarian, living among books, seeking to broaden collections, and to make them more orderly. Rationally, philosophically, he believed that this world of ours, created by the Master, is none but the best of all conceivable worlds that could have been created.

Maria Margarethe Winkelmann, Kirch by marriage, passionate about observation and astronomy, at a time when much of the study and science was not accessible to women. She discovered, herself, a comet, during the work with her husband, a reputed astronomer and mathematician. In his own words "Early in the morning the sky was clear and starry. Some nights before I had observed a variable star, and my wife wanted to find and see it for herself. In so doing she found a comet in the sky. At which time she woke me and I found that it was indeed a comet ... I was surprised that I had not seen it the night before.".

Fahrenheit. Daniel Gabriel. Between science and technology, physicist and creator. Developing, testing, perfecting. Shaping the glass, which he knew how to blow. Making instruments, seeking the rigour of measurements. Having become aware of works on the properties of mercury, he envisioned how to best measure temperature, replacing alcohol with this material, in thermometers.

Names, among many others, who came before these or along with them.
Names, to be followed by many more.

(to be continued)


On a journey, riding with Newton, a game of Nestore Mangone and Simone Luciani, Ediciones Mas que Oca (2018) under license of Cranio Creations. 
.
(*) In https://thelifeofmariawinkelmann.weebly.com/a-comet-is-discovered.html
References: Wikipedia.

PAW in New York City

Union Square, Manhattan, NYC, February 2012, by Miguel Coutinho

From a chat around games to the blog's name.
From the name of the blog to a travel memory.
In colour. And in Black and White.

Thanks Miguel!


Step in and leave your PAW print - Playing Around the World - and follow the PAW tag.
Send a photo of a gaming session, the game title, your name, city, country (and, if you feel like, a short sentence about the game and or a photo of the city) to gamesinbw@gmail.com.

A quest for knowledge - Ep. 8: At the desk

The materials I’ve been using in this quest for knowledge were claiming for a space of their own, all over the desk’s top and inside its drawers. Sometimes, with a sense of order, priority, urgency, novelty, among those piles. In others, a mere consequence of dumping the contents of my bag, at the end of another day. Others still, resulting for a search of a physical evidence of some memory of mine, a glimpse, a hint, an unexpected connection. Mornings, afternoons and nights, almost indistinct from each other, under the heavy skies out there, under the fading lights, in here.

In some distant arcade, a clock tower calls out six times and then stops. The young man slumps at his desk. He has come to the office at dawn, after another upheaval. (…) In the dim light that seeps through the room, the desks appear shadowy and soft, like large sleeping animals. (*)

The books, recipes and potions, from the latest lessons, still waiting for a fresh look, more attentive and long, occupy the top for good measure. Some scattered coins, on the right-hand corner, fruit of my afterhours work. Inside a drawer on the left, the notes for the next classes I will teach, and the income register. Study notebooks, inside two others. Still in the top row, a drawer containing the letters exchanged with my students, discussing their progress and discoveries. Further down, the travel journal and the itinerary of the paths to follow.

(to be continued)


On a journey, riding with Newton, a game of Nestore Mangone and Simone Luciani, Ediciones Mas que Oca (2018) under license of Cranio Creations. 
.
(*) Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Ligthman, Vintage Contemporaries, 2004.