Blaugust 26/31: Wednesday Quiz - Kill A Breadbox?

It's day 26 of 31. It's time for the final push for Blaugust 2015.

Citizen! Why haven't you voted on the ties, yet?

For anyone struggling with Blaugust fatigue, I heartily recommend throwing a quiz out there. A quiz is can be pretty easy to write, allows you to explore fun ideas, and be as clever (or not) as you feel like being. This week I had a quiz all written, but then I saw a fun idea over on Murf's page and decided just steal his idea wholesale instead. If you're not a keen gamer type, I have to apologise, as this got a little...specialised, but just sit back and revel in the strangeness of what's coming to you and I'm sure you'll still have fun.

One other things that I liked was that Murf used an embedded google form instead of having people respond in the comments. I guess that's the sort of thing that you need to do just for administrative reasons if you have readership like Murf's instead of having a lone reader called Gladys like I do, but it seemed like it would solve the problem of accidentally (or deliberately, I guess) seeing other people's answers. Would you be more interested if I moved to such a system for the quizzes, or would you prefer sticking with the current system, which has its own charms?

On to the main feature...

Video Game / Literature Mashup Quiz

Anyway, this week I require you to provide mash-ups of a the titles of works of literature and video games based of their descriptions they would bear if such bastard children were spawned in some kind of hideous cloning machine. For example: 'In this Australian arcade game considered the most important fighter of all time, two very different families move into the same house and must battle each other and the four mysterious "Grand Masters" for supremacy' might describe 'Cloudstreet Fighter II'. As always, points shall be awarded for creative or amusing but incorrect answers as well as the intended ones.

1) Leo "Blizzard" Tolstoy's biggest and most famous game pits five families of humans against French-speaking orcs during the 1812 invasion of Azeroth.

2) In a departure from the usual format of the series, this title for the Game Boy featured the protagonist falling through a rabbit hole into a strange world populated by flying stone heads, aliens, Cheshire cats and exploding Koopa shells.

3) This Louisa May Alcott platformer explores the romantic lives of four sackgirl sisters, with a focus on the production and sharing of user-created levels (mostly in a US civil war setting) through the Playstation Network.

4) In this free-to-play MMO game created by the benevolent rule of The World State, tanks are built specifically to fulfil certain combat roles, and the lower tier units are made deliberately inferior. All tanks are separated from their factories immediately after production, and immediately destroyed once they've given 60 years of service.

5) The first-ever graphical MPORG [citation needed], this Bioware RPG was set in the world of Middle-Eastern and Arabic folk tales inspired many other games, including Pokemon and Disney's Aladdin, and retained much of its popularity until AOL pulled the plug in 1997.

6) One of only three legitimate reasons to own a Gameboy Advance to Gamecube link cable, this Orwellian classic pits a team of players against the forces of Big Brother, dictator of Hyrule. Playing with the maximum number of players requires a LOT of broadband adapters.

7) Another Orwell classic, this dystopian farming simulator was the most popular social media game for a long time. Players plant crops and raise animals until those same animals rise up against them with the slogan "all animals are equal, but some animals pay more to play than others".

8) Supposed to be the killer app for the Xbox One, this Edgar Allen Poe short first-person shooter game features a family of gravity-defying hypochondriacs whose battle-tank exoskeletons are regularly destroyed due to a series of self-fulfilling prophecies. Depending you you talk to, it's either a masterpiece or "a bit too weird, really".

9) Named for a roman à clef inside a roman à clef (à clefception?), this Margaret Atwood open-world stealth title won the Booker Prize for Best Action Game in 2000. Through the course of the story, the protagonist interweaves memories of both her own past love affair and the lives of her ancestors, members of the ancient sect of Hashshashin.

10) Yann Martel shot to fame with this Man Booker winning first-person shooter. Most of the story involves a physicist fighting aliens while trapped in a small boat with a Bengal Tiger. It's better than it sounds.

Video Game / Movie Mashup Quiz

I didn't feeling like stopping, so here's some movies too:

11) Once the highest-grossing game ever made, this Francis Ford Coppola masterpiece chronicles the transformation of Kratos from Spartan warrior into a ruthless Mafia boss (though the word never occurs in the script) according to a fine family tradition.

12) There are many games based on the classic Alexandre Dumas tale, but I've always been fond of the version that features Douglas Fairbanks as Link. Nominally a sequel, the story features an older, wiser Link and his quest to rescue Epona, the true King of France, from the clutches of the evil Louis XIV the Skull King. The mechanics require the use of a number of disguises that provide transformations giving the protagonist wide-ranging powers.

13) Distributed on a huge 24-megabit cartridge, a first for the SNES, this classic side-scroller follows Samus Aran as she attempts to eat nothing but fast food for a period of 30 days. In a thrilling finale, having experienced mood swings, sexual dysfunction and fat accumulation on her liver, an 11-kg heavier Samus faces and defeats the 'Mother McBrain'

14) Subtitled How I learned to stop worrying and love the pill. After a mad Surgeon-General prescribes the wide-spread carpet bombing of pharmaceuticals for the treatment of all known viruses, this puzzle game portrays the attempts of the President of the Italy and his advisors to prevent the development of a potentially civilisation-ending drug-resistant superbug.

15) Widely considered the greatest videogame ever made, this Orson Welles simulation game was originally published in the heady days of the Commodore 64. The player attempts to build up the city of Xanadu and supporting infrastructure and defend it from natural disasters. And monsters. And Rosebuds.

16) Orson Welles again, this time as the compulsive self-medicating. pulp-fiction writing hero of the archetypical game noir. Notable for its soundtrack and atmospheric graphics, the most famous scene depicts the hero being chased by ghosts on the iconic Vienna ferris wheel.

17) Licensed games are never a sure thing, and musicals are more likely to flop than make any money, so the success of this flight simulator set in a Paris nightclub must have been a great relief to LucasArts and the developer, Factor 5. The voice acting talents of Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, as well as a host of secret and unlockable craft including the Naboo Starfighter, may have been a significant factor in the game's enormous popularity

18) In this FPS-RPG first released in 2000, a nanotechnologically augmented Antonio Salieri tells the story of his rivalry with, and plot to kill, fellow composer Mozart for his part in a plan to infect humanity with a deadly virus contracted through hearing his Requiem in D minor. In the end it turns out that Mozart was an AI all along, or something, I don't know, I haven't even played the game.

19) Features Charlie Chaplin in his famed "007" role on the Klodike minefields, this game remains an icon of the silent game era, with a number of scenes such as the "roll dance" and the "Trevelyan reveal" admired and paid homage to this day. Some people say that Pitch Perfect Dark is the definitive Nintendo 64 first-person shooter, but they are sadly misguided individuals.

20) In this 2D co-operative beat-em-up by Hayao Miyazaki first released for Xbox 360 in 2008, up to four players act as knights attempting to rescue four princesses who have been abducted and transformed into 90-year old women by an evil magic user. It's a Miyazaki game, so of course there's a happy ending.

Some clever person should totally make up some screenshots of these.

Last Week's Quiz Answers

And finally, we reach the bit where we award prizes for people's efforts last week.

1) Christopher Monck's butcher won the day. Bad luck, chaps.

2) Pope Benedict X, opposing Pope Nicholas II was not the real deal. There were three Avignon anti-popes ( Benedict XIII, XIV(i) and XIV(ii) after the Roman restoration, but there were legitimate Benedicts of those numbers too, so the answer we wanted was 15!

3) Monks was Oliver's evil half-brother.

4) There have been 13 Dalai Lamas prior to this one. As far as I know, there are no Anti Lamas.

5) Diablo III has a Barbarian. Because one character class always hails from the frigid Northlands.

6) Rafiki is supposed to be a mandrill, though I'll accept baboon, as the canon is in disagreement on that point. He may be a baboon that just looks like a mandrill.

7) Smashmouth played a strictly inferior version of I'm a Believer.

8) The Monk Islands are in the Southern Ocean, just off Antarctica, and are disputed by the UK and Argentina. A little misdirection on the behalf of the quizmaster there, I'm afraid. The South Orkneys are like New South Wales.

9) I was looking for Jainism. Vaishnavism is a fancy name for the Hari Krishnas, though, so I'll award half points for that.

10) The fellow in question is Tony Shalhoub.

11) Monachus are, as John correctly surmised, Monk Seals.

So, this winner once again is John, with 4.5 points again! Can anyone unseat our returning champion this week? Can I finally learn to make the quizzes easier? Tune in next Wednesday to find out.

Blaugust 11/31: Wednesday-ish Quiz - Prime Considerations

This post is part of Blaugust, the blogging festival might be getting its own convention.

We hope you'll forgive the change in plans, but since it's 11:30 PM and I've just got home, and content doesn't grow on trees, we're going to switch up the schedule a little and run the Leaflocker's first Wednesday Quiz in Exile on Tuesday, and with any luck we'll catch up on the reading project tomorrow.

There was a general feeling amongst the downtrodden masses that are the quiz-takers here at the Leaflocker that last week's quiz on Italian powers throughout history was a little like a hobnail boot stomping on a face forever, so with that in mind, this week should be a little kinder and require a slightly less...focused...approach.

Unfortunately, I'm racing against the clock here, so the quiz answers from last week will be available tomorrow as usual, which means that you still ahve 24 hours to enter and stop John's gloating in his moment of triumph! :)

Onto this week's quiz, then. The rules remain the same as always and our theme for today is:

PRIME!

(1) An Abecedary is a form of primer, or introductory course to a topic, that prior to the invention of the printing press was regularly found in churches and monastaries and are generally regarded to have been used as a teaching tool. Disregarding the religious use for now, what did an Abecedary teach?

(2) The last few years, we've heard a lot about sub-prime lending, the practice of lending to borrowers with a high chance of defaulting on their loans. This is all linked to the somewhat outdated idea of the Prime Rate, which is what, exactly?

(3) In the Star Trek universe, the Prime Directive is the guiding principle of the Federation. What is the Prime Directive?

PRIME!

(4) The 2005 romantic comedy Prime, featuring Merryl Streep, Uma Thurman and some other person who I guess is kind of pretty, is generally considered by critics to have been a bit of a stinker (and reading the plot synopsis I can see why), but it has considerably better Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes ratings (though much lower box-office takings) than the Antonio Banderas film released the same week. Which swashbuckling sequel are we talking about here?

(5) Prior to the Second Vatican Council, when it was mercilessly scrubbed from the books, Prime was one of the canonical hours, but inexplicably, not the first one. It fell before Terce but after which major liturgical hour?

PRIME!

(6) The prime symbol is an important element of the notation used to describe the movements involved in the manipulation of the eternal fad puzzle, the Rubik's cube. In this context, what does the ' mean?

(7) Despite a name that would appear to indicate that it was the first in the series, how many Metroid games were released in Australia prior to Metroid Prime, the best-selling Gamecube title generally considered one of the finest games of all time?

(8) Prime TV is also the name of one of the television networks that services rural and regional Australia. From which of the major national broadcasters does Prime TV source the majority of their content? [For Americans and other aliens, the answer to this question is a number between 7 and 10].

PRIME!

(9) In many countries with Parliamentary systems including our native Australia, the head of government is known as the Prime Minister. Though the term is thought to have originated in France, which Briton is generally considered to have been the first 'Prime Minister', though he always denied holding such a position?

(10) A prime number is a natural number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. But that's too easy for a Leaflocker Quiz question. Instead, can you tell me what the first pair of co-primes are?

 

PRIME

(11) It's a generally agreed convention that the Prime Meridian of the world more or less passes through the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and that the anti-meridian of this line approximates the International Date Line. However, the IDL is a bit wonky. Which island nation, independent from Britain since 1979 and whose inhabitants speak a language known as Gilbertese, is the cause of that odd Soviet-style hammer shape in the IDL on the map?

(12) Primary Beams, the super-powered lasers that burn out their beam projectors in just a single use, were one of the first steps in the absurd line of military developments that characterises the trope-naming intergalactic arms race that features in which classic science fiction series?

PRIME!

(13. Because we couldn't stop on a non-prime.) Great Primer is the antiquated name for the 18-point font size, also known as Bible Text, as it was most prominently used in the printing of bibles and other large-print books, or Double Bourgeois, because the Germans (yes, the Germans) have to be different. Which prominent printer was the first to use Great Primer?

Please leave your answers in the comments. They will be graded this time next week. WE reserve the right to award a bonus for any particularly fine prime questions asked in the comments to which we do not know the answer.

Phew....11:56... Blaugust lives!

Last week's answers:

Ok, this was stupid hard. Sorry. Thanks for trying.

As is right and proper, no-one really knows where the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies fits in. I wanted to include them, but since they're only around in generally unstable areas, I skipped them.

(1) is Italy during WWII, B is Allied territory, A is occupied by the Fascist Germany, and the surprising section in red is the territory held by the Italian monarchy. John gets a point.

(2) is Italy during the 400's AD. A is the Lombards and B is the Byzantines. 

(3) is Italy following the Garibaldi era in the 1860s. The last bulwarks against unification are Venice and the Papal States. 1 each to Mark and John, and 2 to Michael.

(4) is Italy in the 1450's prior to the French and Spaniards moving in. The various areas approximate the reach of he powers of the various city-based states. A is Genoa and B is the kingdom of Naples, at this point controlled by the Aragonese, for some strange reason. One each to John and Michael.

(5) is Italy in the Napoleonic era. A is French controlled, B is Naples (but I'd have paid KotTS here, as it's close), and the section in Blue is the Kingdom of Italy. Two points to John.

Correct order: 2,4,5,3,1 (1 to Mark and John, 3 to Michael).

Bonus: To quote Michael: First into Eritrea! Last outta Libya! Two points, sir. The other players got the right answers to the wrong questions.

And the results:
On 8 points, this week's champion. Michael5000!
With 6 points in second place, just pipped on the bonus question, John!
With 2 points having only guessed "A Venice", but still infinitely ahead of everyone else. Mark!

Blaugust 7/31: Just My Schtick In A Box

When we set down our plans for Blaugust I listed Fridays as the day that I would describe the process of packing the important contents of Parliament House into three suitcases. Unfortunately, I've been so focused on the important things like posting every day in Blaugust, my actual packing has been somewhat stilted. Since the confirmation for flights came through yesterday and we have officially only 47 days remaining in the country, we'd better be getting a move on.

One thing that we have started packing away is our collection of board games. Our little collection might not be much by the standards of some of our friends, and even starting to look a little dated by modern carboard standards, but they're very dear to us, so we've decided to try and pack up a selection of the games we love to take with us. Unfortunately, this little collection of cardboard boxes could pretty much fill one of our suitcases all by itself, and we do need to take some clothing and similar items with us, so things need to be rationalisd somewhat.

The first thought was the creation of some kind of custom multi-purpose gaming set, but though it seemed to be potentially possible, since that seems like a big project for two busy people trying to pack up their lives we decided to just cut back on the unneeded pieces and see how small we could make the package. Here's the contents of those boxes that didn't make the grade.

Dixit

When we play Dixit, a beautiful art game that plays like a mix between Balderdash and Apples to Apples, and deservedly won the Speil Das Jahre award back in 2010 against some stiff opposition, it's generally because we're playing with a large number of people. We never use the rabbit tokens. And if you're not using the rabbits, you don't need the scoreboard either. The game works fine just writing your guesses on the the back on an envelope. We're just taking the cards, the rest can sit in the box for the next three years.

Fun Fact: We once stole the portfolio of an artist friend of ours (conveniently known as Flix) and made her a personalised version of this game.

Finca

It used to be that I knew nothing about Majorca, but now I gave a game about farming fruit there, so...now I guess it know that at least in some part of its history is had fruit on it? This one comes with a lot of space-filler cardboard that we don't need, but I couldn't possibly play it without all those gorgeous wooden fruit counters, so almost all of this stuff has to come.

Fun fact: It is possible in a very rare and probably contrived situation to break this game in such a way that no-one can ever move their meeples on the windmill, which makes it impossible to gain more than one type of fruit and near impossible to reach the end of the game. We consider "fruiting the moon" the Holy Grail of Finca, and will award a full victory with ivy leaves and a place in the history books should anyone ever manage to pull it off.

Seven Wonders

If you've never played the drafting card game that has taken over as the gold-standard game to beat, do yourself a favour and find a friend or a local board game club or cafe that owns it, and give it a try. It's a beautiful, well executed game that so often turns out surprising results, and I can never work out who is going to win except that it's not going to be me. Even when it is. Taking everything but the cards for two-player, because that ain't never going to happen. Even taking the score-sheet, because it's not big and it's just so darn handy.

Fun fact: We don't own any of them, but there are four expansions to the game, each of them adds something new and exciting, and you can combine them with excellent results. This is how you design a game, people.

Settlers of Catan

This one's an old family favourite that we've been playing since I was a kid. The older versions of Catan pack down a little nicer, but the modern versions with the large water tiles are kind of unwieldy to downsize...we could go without them and just use the land hexes and the movable ports they provide in this version, but it could get pretty confusing, so I guess we take it all. Leaving behind three of the purchase cost cards and just taking the one, if we're playing with new people that need them they'll just have to share.

Fun fact: There IS an expansion to Catan that doesn't suck. It's not the one you think it is.

Carcassonne

Introducting new people to board games that aren't monopoly, scrabble or trivial pursuit? Nine times out of ten, the classic tile-placing game Carcassonne is my go-to. The rules are simple enough to understand, you can play it friendly-like or go for the throat, depending on the company, and there's enough chance to ensure that you don't have to worry about having to find a way to deliberately throw the game to make sure that you don't win by a huge margin. Again, this is a game that you can play without the scoreboard, but it's just BETTER with it, so we're taking everything but the ludicrous cardboard space-fillers and the rules of Mayors and Abbeys, and expansion that we don't even own.

Fun fact: My nemesis and I once made a Carcassonne puzzle for the LoAP puzzle hunt, and I'm still pretty confident that it's the best one that we've ever made.

Ticket to Ride: Germany

I love Ticket to Ride, but we've pretty much played it out amongst our regulars, so I have fond hopes of finding some newbies to play against on the other side of the world. We have the superior Marklin German set, and in accordance with my long-held prejudices, we've never even popped those tokens out of the sprue, and we certainly won't be taking them with us. We will, however, be taking the passenger tokens, because they make fine stations if you want to steal a rule from the Europe map (they're from Europe, right?) to play a nice calm, friendly game.

Fun fact: I once won a five-player game on this map in which I was the only player to score a result in the positive numbers.

Ticket to Ride: Africa

Along with Germany, we also own the African expansion for TTR. If you've not played it, it's a vicious, vicious little bastard of a map with some different mechanics, and that gives more opportunities for tactical play than most of the others, but in which I always feel luck plays a greater part, as there is much less flexibility of route choice. There's not a whole lot in the box to leave behind.

Fun fact: We often try to use the Team Asia rules on the other maps (indeed, we were going so long before anyone we knew even owned a copy...), with varying levels of success. According to pretty much everyone, though, this is a terrible map for it. Just don't.

San Juan

San Juan is the card-game of the hit board game Puerto Rico. We have both, but if you were to ask us to pick between them then San Juan would win every time, which is why we're taking it with us and Puerto Rico will be staying home. It's a rare wonderful example of a game that preserves all the spirit and flavour of the original but strips out all of the clumsy mechanics right back to the bone. Beautiful and elegant, this has been a favourite of ours for a long time.

Fun fact: I'm leaving the scoresheet at home in the hope that people will forget to score points for the Palace. I hate the palace.

Veritas

As you'd expect from a Cheapass Game, this one doesn't come with anything you don't need. Unfortunately, as you'd expect from a Cheapass Game, it doesn't come with everything that you do need either. As I didn't have enough appropriate tokens, I've also got to pack this big bag of poker chips. Which will at least let me play poker if I ever had the strange compulsion, but does weigh quite a lot, and leaves my poor Raumschach set without all its pieces. One day I'll find the perfect set of tokens, Alice, one day.

Fun fact: Cheapass games has a lot of their older games available for free or donation on their website. They're not the best games ever made, but in my opinion there's a lot of amusement to be had in there. Take a look.

King of Tokyo

Some games are brilliant in their simplicity. This one basically boils down to a deck of cards, some dice and some score tokens, but it's all the gumpf that really makes it. Who doesn't want to play at being a rampaging monster and crush a city and some rival monsters every now and then? Unfortunately for packing purposes, all this peripheral gumpf is so good that we're going to have to take it all...

Fun fact: In most games, I don't care what colour or token I am, it's all the same to me, but there are three exceptions. In Tantrix, I play red (like everyone else that's ever read the rulebook cover to cover). In Monopoly, I play the boot. In King of Tokyo, I play the King. If the King wore boots and had bright red fur, I might never stop playing.

Samurai Sword

This is a remake of the classic western game BANG!, set in Japan. The sherrif is an emperor, the deputies are samurais, the renegade is a ronin and the outlaws are ninjas. It's very similar, except that nobody ever dies and gets forced to go make the tea. We play a lot of this, and shouts of MANCATO! often fill the air long into the night. As you'd imagine for a card game, there's not a whole lot of extra stuff here, but we'll leave behind the Italian rulebook.

Fun fact: Our copy of Samurai Sword features swapped portraits on two of the cards. Which is irrelevant if you're not familiar with Japanese folk tales, and incredibly unsettling if you do. I like to not tell new people and watch which ones squirm when they notice.

Playing Cards

For good measure, I figured I'd better stick some cards in as well. You can never have too many cards, right? A canasta deck seems logical. As does my much prized Mao deck. I can't leave my hideous bohemoth of a frankenstined Uno deck behind (I've never counted how many cards there are, and I hope never to have to), either. And of course, one of my patented 'custom' 500 decks. Maybe you can have too many cards after all?

Fun fact: The Chinese Gong-Fu Poker deck is staying behind. I intend to have it Creepily Sweep my storage shed while I'm away.

The result

Well, it all fits (or it did before I went rummaging...) in THIS handy box that we got with our soup pot, with just enough room left over for my folding chessboard if I can ever find it. All we'd need would be some little colour-coded cloth bags to allow us to have a slight chance of actually FINDING the pieces for any particular game. I suppose that we COULD put the whole thing in a suitcase...but maybe a more tightly controlled cull is going to be required if we're going to be able to pull this thing off....

Fun fact: I like big pots, and I cannot lie.


And finally, just for those of you that don't believe there can be a Blaugust Friday with a goofy picture of me in a tie, here's what I was wearing while packing that box. In case you can't quite see, the star attraction features technicolour Australian animals and landscapes drawn in indigenous-style dot and line art styles. I happen to think it's pretty rad.

A writing prompt or two for my fellow Blaugustinian gamers of both the cardboard and the electron variety short of an idea today:

1) Do you agree with my choices?

2) If you had to go away for a few years, what are the five games you'd have to take?

3) When was the last time you saw a brand-new mechanic in a game?

4) I value efficiency and flexibility in a game. What are your priorities in game design?

The Wednesday Quiz: Bus Stop

The Wednesday Quiz, pop quiz of the ages, refuses to be put on a bus!

Name these eight movies (or a subset thereof) featuring these buses to win points for your team.
No googling, references, or putting your cursor over the pictures and reading the urls ;)

Tie of the Week

I don't remember why I started doing the tie of the week feature on Fridays. It seems like an odd choice given that Friday is the one day of the week that I don't wear a tie to work, it being casual day, and also that come the end of the week I'm generally wearing the daggiest (Australian for 'least good looking', named after a sheep's bottom) and least matching of my work shirts, but we don't mess with tradition here at the Leaflocker, so here you go. I know you've all be waiting with bated breath.

This one's an old favourite that I bring out for special occasions (like the relaunch of tie Fridays). I call it the Magellan because it's wide and blue, like the ocean that Magellan traversed. Other people did too, I guess, but Magellan just has a nice ring to it, and since he's out of favour as a map projection these days, he might as well get a cool tie named after him.

Tie Number: 010
Designation: Magellan Blue
Provenance: Ian's Stash
Manufacture: Austico, Australia
No. of Comments: None unsolicited, people don't comment on my ties any more
Most Favourable Comment: Not applicable
Least Favourable Comment: Not applicable
Observations: It's kind of hard to tell (probably since I'm a bit wider since last time we took tie photos all those years ago), but this tie is crazy wide. Appropriate, since it is of eighties vintage.

And yes, I know that: 
1) As always, I need to cut my hair
2) Green shirt doesn't go with blue tie. There's a reason for the combination, but it's kind of a long story and it involves vomit, so let's not go there.

And while we're on work-ish topics, it's my turn to supply lunch for our work soup club today. Decided to play it safe and go with pumpkin, but just to blow my own trumpet for a while (something I should do more often, it just sits there, taunting me), it's actually pretty good. Now to get it down the hill without spilling it everywhere...

Chaturangaraja

The world of chess variants is a weird and wonderful place, full of curious boards, exotic pieces and no small number of nutters capable of thinking in three or more dimensions, but the most popular chess variants are, and have always been, games that are only a little bit different to the chess of the common people. Strange chess variants come and go, but those that last have only small and elegant differences to the normal game. In this way modern FIDE chess grew from medieval chess, which grew from Shatrang, which grew from...let's not get into the whole India/China chess origins thing today, except to say that chess has been growing and changing for as long as there has been people with the time and cranial capacity to sit down and play games against one another.

It's with this in mind that I sat down a few months ago and designed two modest chess variants that I was fortunate enough to be able to subject a couple of friends to at the second of our occasional chess variant tournaments earlier this year. I've designed chess variants before, but these were actually playable and actually interesting, belonging to the family of chess variants distinguished by pieces inheriting their powers from others, one of the simplest and most common types of variants. They're not better games than chess, if such a thing could even be imagined, but I feel that they're interesting while still being very familiar to the chess player, and they certainly seem to have some replay value, at least amongst amateur players such as ourselves.

The first of these games, which am identical starting position to Orthochess, is a little something that I call Chatarangaraja, which I, in my utter ignorance of foreign languages, believe might translate to something like 'The Game of the Quadripartite King'. This is a play on the name of the postulated first ancestor of chess (depending which school of thought you belong to). The rules are the same as those of orthochess except that:

A) The King has no movement powers of his own, but instead gains the powers of all the pieces remaining in his army except the Queen. 

B) There's no castling, as the increased powers of the King makes it unneeded.

In the beginning of the game, the King has the movements of a Rook, Bishop, Knight and Pawn, becoming an incredibly powerful offensive piece (an Amazon, in fairy parlance), but loses power as his pieces are taken. In the example below, though the white King may appear to be exposed and is down a Queen, White retains the full movement of the King while the Black King has lost his bishops and no longer has his diagonal movement (except for one square while capturing, like a pawn). A queen sacrifice for a minor piece in order to use a more powerful King more effectively to check the opponent is a common tactic in this game, as the other pieces have a value greater than their orthochess counterparts.

The game is easy to pick up and play passably well, but many learnt chess positions and strategies no longer apply. The powerful King means that an all out blitz straight away is almost certain to fail, and the King moving as a knight has been a trap for many an invading force. But as is typical for games with strong pieces, the game is typically over faster than orthochess, and the play seems to shift more easily too.

Perhaps more properly this game should be called Chaturangaking, with the -raja version being reserved for the same concept in a game of Shatrang, rather than modern chess. But hey, I like the name better like this, and due to the glacial pace of Shatrang and its variants I'm unlikely to play it anytime soon, so we'll call that version Chaturangashah and be done with it.

That's it for today, except to say that I'd recommend this game to those of you that like chess and would welcome any comments that you'd care to make on it, and any games of it you'd care to play against me if you happen to live nearby or can devise a way to play it online. I had intended to leave you with a puzzles that I've devised to demonstrate the game and give you some concept of the ideas of this little variant, but I've made a fundamental error that I can't think how to solve this early in the morning, so that will have to be a post for another day.

Keep on Chooglin'

Blaugust 2012

So it's that time of the year again, when AVCon has passed and we go looking for things to do with all our miraculously free evenings, but instead of doing something constructive we turn to rambling incessantly about unimportant things on the internet, keeping spouses awake with our rattling at the keyboard and generally making a nuisance of ourselves.

In keeping with this fine tradition, here is a list of goals for the month, some of which will get done and make interesting content for this here blog, some of which will get done and not make interesting content, which will be posted regardless, and most of which won't get done at all and will be discarded with only this buried post floating in the ether to remind the world that sometimes people aren't very good at following through with their promises. To help me with this last point, we've set the bar high, and fully expect to fail many if not all of these goals, but that is what Blaugust is for, after all.

Leaflocker: Post five times a week, on a variety of topics, including one a week touching in some way upon religion. Actually keeping an posting answers for any quizzes that ensue. Encouraging others to attempt to meet ludicrously unrealistic posting schedules as well. Try not to be bothered if nobody reads it.

Wesnoth: While I wait for inspiration on Habemus Papas, I have fallen back on my old Wesnoth hobby, this time focusing on maintaining and restoring the Imperial Era and associated bits and pieces. If this means nothing to you, dear reader, don't worry about it, as you're unlikely to see much more about it here unless I get really desperate for content (by which I mean 'until early next week) and for the sake of your sanity do not type 'Battle for Wesnoth' into your search engine and download this excellent open-source fantasy turn-based strategy game. It really is the TV Tropes of the gaming world. Anyway, I intend to update the old 1.6 campaign 'Alfhelm the Wise' to be compatible with version 1.10 in the coming months, making it to at least the end of chapter two by the end of the month.

Domesticity: There are some projects that need to be done around the house this month. They include reattaching the door to the cupboard under the stairs, finishing cleaning the gutters, actually mowing the lawn, cutting the ivy that is attacking the upstairs window, buying and fitting a new lock for the shed, building the barbeque and deadheading the roses. Once all this is done, I can reward myself by re-organising the library to my heart's content.

Library: Read and report on at least four books for the month. To get this one done, I may have to choose small books, as my current reading rate would be considered glacial by many garden snails.

Setting Alarms: Getting up earlier in the mornings to have breakfast, do a series of stretches to prevent my neck and shoulder muscles from seizing and turning me into a hunchback, and spend time either reading or working on my new Diatessearon project, all things that I have been neglecting in recent times.

Internet: None at all at work. Work towards winning current game of Diplomacy.

Sleeping: Nah.

Seems like a sensible list to me. Tune in at the end of the month to find out how we did. If you want to follow other Blaugusty peeps, check out the clever folks at www.chenonetta.com.

Read: Confederate Vampire Tales

I set myself the goal of reading and reviewing a book a week this year, for some crazy reason, and so far I've read five books (and am thus four books behind) and reviewed, a grand total of none. Thus the reading posts for the next couple of weeks will be double-barrellers while I struggle to clear the backlog.

For some curious reason, the last book that I read last year and the first book that I read this year were both vampire novels set in the American Civil War. Given that I'm neither particularly into vampire novels or war novels, this is a little bit strange, but it does give me a chance to kill two birds with one stone.

Read: Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahame-Smith

First up, the quasi-biographical Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, finally the truth about the 16th US president as presented by the author of such classics as Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. How his grandfather and mother were killed by vampires, he became an adept axeman in order to better hunt and kill vampires, how Ann Rutledge was murdered by a vampire...basically, each and every notable event of Lincoln's life was actually inspired by vampires. Why did Lincoln hate slavery? Because it gave the vampires in the South an accessible food supply. There's a lot of vampires in this book. I'm a fan of historical mashup novels like this, and I'm not adverse to vampires, so you'd think that this one would be for me, wouldn't you?

As always when I read a book on an American topic like this one I'm saddened that I and many other Australians are more familiar with the biographies of men like Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson than the men who shaped my country, but in the moments when I can supress this regret I have to grudgingly admit that this book was a lot of fun, and an interesting way to find out a little more about a man who must have been very interesting, even if in reality his every waking thought wasn't about vampires.

The book itself is suposedly written by Henry, a reformed good-guy vampire of the type so often seen these days that makes those that take their vampire lore seriously shudder (most people that take their vampire lore seriously made me shudder), and it's a nice mix of his prose and entries from "The secret diaries of Abraham Lincoln", in which Honest Abe tells of his adventures in his own words. The device is used well, but the diary entries lose their charm after the first few chapters and quickly become wearing, if not as wearing as the photoshopped pictures sprinkled around the book as evidence of Abe's vampire huntin' ways (which amused me greatly the first few time, then just seemed a weak excuse for a cheap joke).

Page 123:

I cursed aloud most of the ride home. Never in my life had I been so
embarrassed or made such a drunken error. Never had I felt like such a fool. If there was one comforting prospect it was this: soon I would finally be free.

The start, Abe's childhood, his coming of age, and first vampire encounters; and the end, the climax of the war and Lincoln'sassassination by the maddened vampire John Wilkes Booth, are the standout sections. The long central section in which Abe hunts a bunch of vampires and kills them in exciting and extremely gorey ways didn't maintain my interest, but it may have been more accessable to the American audience that is no doubt more familiar with Abraham Lincoln than an Australian that's just picked up snippets here and there, mostly in other fiction.

In short, I wouldn't exactly recommend this book for most, but it gave me a few hours light entertainment on some rainy days at the end of last year, it's well paced and very readable, with the faint feeling of despoiling someone's grave and legacy that is a little bit disturbing to someone thinking of doing much the same thing (though with fewer vampires) to a bunch of dead Italians in the near future. I gave it two decapitated vampire corpses.

Read: Fevre Dream - George R. R. Martin

More satisfying was George R.R. Martin's Fevre Dream, which is devoured with all the eagerness of his blood-frenzied vampires. One of the nice things about one of your favourite authors becoming more popular is the availability of their back-catalogue, and I eagerly snapped this one up when I discovered it while looking for Christmas gifts for my family.

This one also features evil vampires supping on the blood of slaves in the South and building armies of like-minded vampires and thralls, and good vampires (or at least, good vampire) at war with them for the sake of mankind, and has a similar historical setting, but there the similarities end. The story doesn't flow quite as well as his later work, dragging a little in the beginning, and the characterisation is not as good as one comes to expect from Martin, but this is his formative stuff, and there's more than enough here to satisfy me.

What I've always liked about Martin is his ability to set the scene, his stories work well because he drops you in a location and you feel part of it. He can tell a big story, build up to the big reveal, without dropping it on you like an anvil. Well before the vampires appear in this story you're emotionally invested in Abner Marsh, steamboat captain, his dreams and his love of the river, for this could just as easily be a story about steamboats as about vampires. Then he's approached by Joshua, a mysterious stranger with a lot of money, and asked to build the finest boat ever built, covered everywhere with mirrors and running mostly at night...

Page 123:

Marsh did not cotton to Joshua's new friends, he decided in short order that they were as queer as Joshua's old friends, keeping the same night hours and all. Raymond Ortega stuck Marsh as a restless, untrustworthy sort. He was polite
enough in a haughty, indolent fashion, but Marsh got a chill off him.

Yeah, there's a good guy vampire and a bad guy vampire and they fight for control, but the scenes between them, the conflicts of their differing philosophies, are written like a vampire novel should be, pregnant with tension, mysterious, lustful, dark and brooding. Not the best vampire pathos stuff I've ever seen, with not quite enough depth to it, but it's pretty good. Martin was able to take his skill at building conflict in short stories and transfer it here to a full-length novel and it's success spurred him on to greater things.

Well worth reading in it's own right, but perhaps made even more interesting as it, alongside his anthology of short-fiction, shows the building blocks in G.R.R. Martin's career as he worked towards the Song of Ice and Fire series that has made him a household name in recent years. I gave it four hulks of once-magnificent riverboats. And of course, I have a copy I'd happily lend to you if you're keen.

Reading List Progress:
Number of Books read: 8
Australian dividend: 1.045
Science Fiction dividend: 2.5
Fantasy dividend: 3.5
Biography dividend: 1.5
Mystery dividend: 0.5

Probably Next Up: Morris West, Shoes of the Fisherman/The Devil's Advocate/The Salamander
Probably Not Next Up: William Gibson, Neuromancer

Remember, it's your last chance to score points for the last week's quiz. Results will be posted at noon ACDST tomorrow.