Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Moving

I hate moving house. No, to be accurate, I hate buying and selling houses that you intend to live in. Conveyancing, it’s such an innocent sounding word.

My family and I have been in our new house for nearly a month now, and the horror is just beginning to fade. It’s like waking up from a nightmare. You know it’s over, the terror is fading, but you’re damned if you’re going back to sleep just yet. 

The actual move itself isn’t so bad, just work and expense. Putting your place up for sale is expensive but reasonably simple. Finding a place to buy is exciting, almost enjoyable with its initial hope and optimism. The pain begins just after the joy of finding your buyer or seller, when the lawyers get involved. From there it’s a rapid descent into hell, and you soon realise that this rollercoaster is just a bit too scary for you.

I work in process improvement, and if there’s ever a process that needs improving, conveyancing is it. The whole thing seems to be a cobbled together gentleman’s agreement, where each buyer has their vendor’s testicles in an inescapable grip. If everyone is nice and calm then we can all pretend to be friends, but as soon as one person squeezes, the pain chain begins. Meanwhile the solicitors and estate agents sing softly to each other, telling you not to worry as your sanity unravels. 

If a political party pledged to throw the whole system up in the air and start again, they’d get my vote. Unless they were Conservatives, UKIP or racists of course. 

Still it’s done now, and we’re in. I now have a front room to sit in and write, or listen to the radio, or hide when it took me an hour to notice a new hair cut. It almost seems worth it. One woman told me moving house was like child birth. You swear never again, but soon forget how horrible it was. Before you know it you’re planning your next one. 

I’m surprised there aren’t more books about moving house, or stories with a move as a backdrop. There’s drama, intrigue, uncertainty, stress, arguments, hope and despair. If anything would push someone to the brink of murder, this is it. 

I don’t think I’ll write it now though. I’m still too traumatised. I should fill a notebook with everything that happened and how I felt about it. That way I’d have something meaty to work from, or should the urge to move ever return, I can use it to cure myself of the notion.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Tsuro Of The Seas

Things are just getting started
A few months back I was persuaded to have a clear out of some of my old gaming material in preparation for moving house. With a heavy heart I handed some old 2nd Edition Dungeons & Dragons references books and adventures to my mate Malcolm, who worked in a local independent game store. These items went into the second hand boxes for people to browse through. They proved more desirable than anticipated, and a few weeks back I found that I had some in-store credit to spend.

I was keen to find a game that I, my wife and 10-year-old daughter could play together. I am hoping that in a few years, daughter will be up for trying a Role Playing Game, but for now a good board game was the target. I interrogated Malcolm, and with his help we selected ‘Tsuro of the Seas’ (TotS) from the shop’s wares. This is apparently a sequel to ‘Tsuro’, and I found out later that TotS was funded through Kickstarter.

Malcolm’s recommendation was spot on. The Allsop game night is a regular occurrence again, mostly driven by TotS.

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa - Hokusai
For me, opening a new game is one of life’s pleasures, and TotS is absolutely lovely. The art is inspired by ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’ by Hokusai and the whole game has a Japanese theme. The ships are junks and you have to avoid monsters called DaiKaiJu. The box alone looks good on the shelf. The DaiKaiJu themselves would make respectable tattoos, and there’s even a lovely cover sheet designed to look as if it’s printed on rice paper. All this magnificence comes at a cost of course, and it isn’t a cheap game. You wouldn’t let your kids play it with jam covered fingers. Having said that the board and counters are of a good thick quality, so I think it will prove durable.

Hard a port! No PORT!
So it looks good, but how does it play. Well the first word that comes to mind is ‘quickly’.  All of our games have been finished in less than 20 minutes, usually with another round immediately following. The rules are nice and clear, and I had it ready to go in no time. I refuse to allow anyone else first go at the rule book, so it’s always me teaching a new game to everybody else. Everyone picked it up quickly. The aim of TotS is to be the last one left alive. You start at the edge of the board with three square wake tiles in your hand. You choose and place one, each of which has two entry and exit points on each side joined by wakes. All tiles are different, so depending on the tiles in your hand you could go straight ahead, left, right or even double back on yourself.

At the start of the game you can go pretty much anywhere you want and staying alive isn’t a problem. However you very soon have to start avoiding the DaiKaiJu, which are randomly placed on the board and wander slowly about. Once you’ve placed a wake tile it can only be removed by a DaiKaiJu, so the board soon fills up. If you get cornered and are forced to enter an existing wake, then you have to follow it wherever it leads. This could be off the edge of the board or straight into a monster. It’s a simple game but everyone soon ends up staring at their tiles, trying to figure out how to stave off death for one more round. If you can manoeuvre the loved one besides you into sealing their doom at the same time, then so much the better.


Tsuro of the Seas is a game that looks great, plays well and will not be left to gather dust. Not cheap, but worth the price. Go and buy it.