Beast News, Books for Free, and Game Reviews.

In Beast News, our blogtour is supposed to start today, but with the time shifts, it might not be my today (so you'll be getting the link tomorrow, if all goes well). We do have our first two reviews at Amazon, though, to our great delight, and three more over at Goodreads!

(Reviews really help selling books, so if you like a book and would like to help the authors sell more of it, you can do so by writing and posting a review. Amazon is an obvious place for this, as lots of people check there for reviews even if they buy in brick-and-mortar or at different online shops; goodreads is another good place, but anywhere on the internet will help your favourite author to do better.)

More book-related stuff? Here you go. The book from Jutta Zander-Seidel, "Textiler Hausrat" has been digitised and is available for free at ART-Dok, together with several other titles by Zander-Seidel. (Hat tip to Nicole Kipar from kipar.org, which is a blog you might want to follow as well.)

And now I have some non-work-related stuff for you. Games! Games we played at Essen! Not all of them, mind you - just a few.

Before you read my comments, you should probably know that I tend to be quite critical of games. We've been doing this go-to-Essen-thing for years now, playing oodles of games, and we (that is me and my friends who usually roam the halls together with me and the Most Patient Husband of Them All) have developed quite a good sense for what games we prefer. So we'll often take just a look at a game and go "meh", not necessarily because it is a bad game, but not a type we like. (Those preferences are different for each of our group, but they overlap for a good part, which makes roaming together so pleasant.)

There's so many games out there, and so many new ones coming out each year, that you can either set apart a huge amount of space for all those games you get, or you restrict the amount you're getting. We try to go for option 2, so if we buy a game, it has to really please us and offer a good amount of replayability. We tend to gravitate towards games that are (relatively) quick to explain but still want some brains when playing; with a luck factor involved (so no hardcore strategical/tactical games). We also have a thing for cooperative games and racing games. And now that you know how to put my comments into context, here we go!

We started out with a round of Marvel Dice Masters - which was fun. It's a light game, lots of dice, though some of the rules were not completely clear. We already have several copies of King of Tokyo in our circle of friends, so we really don't need this game. I'd play it again though, happily.

The Witcher. I don't know the video game, but I can tell you that the boardgame is repetitive and boring. Boring and repetitive. Oh, did I mention repetitive? So many tasks to fulfill. Joyless combat. Everyone playing for themselves. We broke off after (or in, I don't remember) the second round of this. Boooooring. (You see the timer attached to the stand? We'd have had 31 more minutes to waste on this game - everyone gets an hour to testplay. Which tells you we spent 29 minutes on this. Which was more than enough.)

This game was called Bastion (as the English rulebook on the table tells you), it was a cooperative game, and we didn't expect much from it. The coloured cubes are the resources you need to collect in order to battle monsters that approach your city gates - you spend one of any colour to get three of the colour marked on the board. Once there are cubes on the segment, you can remove all of them (up to three) by placing a cube on the inner wall, and you can clear all the cubes off the inner wall by hopping inside. A monster you smashed gives you a bonus for smashing another monster, or for movement. The monsters always jump to the next free spot, and when the monster deck is used up, they leapfrog forwards; the very last monster jumps directly to the city gate and you have to smash it there at once. There's not too much luck involved, it is easy to explain and it does require you to think and plan ahead with your mates - we really liked it! Bastion would make a very nice gateway game, and it looks like you can up the difficulty quite a bit with stronger monster cards (that are included).

Crazy Time. You have a stack of cards and flip them over; each of them shows a clock face with a time. You count the time upwards, starting with "one", next player flips a card and says "two", next one flips and says "three"... unless there's a time machine, when you have to count backwards. Or there's a new rule that gets introduced. Fun twist? One of the players does not know the new rule and has to guess it (or gets lots of cards for making mistakes!). Original rules let the winner of a round choose who does not get to see the rules cards; I'd recommend as house rule:  winner of the round does not get to see the rules cards (for a bit of a rubber-band effect). Lovely little game. Quick to explain, quick to get started with, but a really nasty brain teaser.

This was another co-op: Space Cadets - Away Mission. Lots of plastic minis, lots of tiles, different scenarios, different aliens, space in the flavour of 1960s sci-fi. Oh, and girly-glittery dice. We really enjoyed this. Actually, we enjoyed this so much that we bought it. (Our excuse? Well, apart from you don't need an excuse to buy a game you really love apart from "we really loved this", our excuse is that we did not have any space-themed co-op games yet. Also, the minis include brain-in-a-jar figures, and everyone knows you can always use more brains.)

And this is... Lanterns. You place one of your three tiles and each of the four players gets a lantern card in the colour facing them. If you place matching colours, you also get bonus cards. On your next turn, you can exchange colour combinations for tiles with victory points. It's a relatively light game, with an interesting concept - however, luck obviously plays a big part. (Frieder suffered from always just missing the higher value numbers on the victory point tiles, for instance.) We played the "short fair version" with about half the available tiles and already found it too long. Add some players in there that tend towards analysis-paralysis (huh, if I place that tile like this, he gets a green and player 3 gets a yellow and then they have a full set but if I place it like this I don't get a bonus... hm... let me look at my other two tiles... if I place this one like this, ah, or maybe here, or...) and you're in for a really, really tedious game. No thanks.

And that's it for today. If you enjoyed that, let me know - I have a few more games I could tell you about...

Recovering.

Today was work interspersed with liberal amounts of tea, cookies, and naps. Naps are a wonderful thing (and cats are very helpful with napping, always giving a perfect example of how it's done).

Who, me? As if I'd ever take an extra nap. Ever.

With the US release of The Middle Ages Unlocked coming up, Gillian and I will do another blog tour, so the past days have included writing for this. The first posts are already sent off to their hosts. We got a few more interviews this time around, which is lovely - we really did enjoy answering the questions! Watch this space for the tour announcements.

I also stumbled across a website called biblehub when writing one of my posts - you might be interested about what the Bible has to say about spinning, too. I wouldn't necessarily believe all the things the Standard Bible Encyclopaedia has to say, though!

Meanwhile, as a remainder of our last blog tour and to get you into the mood for the next one, here's a post about medieval textiles at the History Vault.

If you read German, here's a highly amusing post about the replacement for a lost knife. (If you don't read German, the piccies are still nice to look at, in case you enjoy looking at medieval knife reconstructions.)

Assorted Links for You.

In spite of all my efforts, I did catch some con crud, and today my head is woozy and I'm not good for too much. So it's a day for drinking lots of tea and resting, and for blogging links that have been waiting for ages to be blogged.

Here you go!

Magistra et Mater has a very interesting post up (has had it for a while) about how men dominate women.

You can find old city plans from Austrian cities here at the Österreichischer Städteatlas.

And for those of you in the States and looking for something to do in the next few days, there's an exhibition running until the 18th: Treasures and Talismans: Rings from the Griffin Collection at the MET.

Finally for something completely different: an Imperial Speeder Bike going on a flight.

Back from a wonderful weekend.

These past few days were wonderful, and very relaxing, and much-needed. I got to spend time with friends, and eat lots of lovely food, and play many, many games, as the big game fair in Essen took place on the weekend.

As usual, we went there and ambled through the halls full of people and games. The fair at Essen is the world's biggest boardgame fair, and they had about 800 new games this year, released at the fair. There's tables with games set up that you can look at, there's usually someone there who explains the rules to you, and then you can give the game a try and play a round or two or even the entire game in some cases to see how you like it.

We spend a long weekend there, with three and a half days at the fair, plus more gaming in the evening, and we usually play (or test for a few rounds) about 30 games. As usual, some of them were nice but not mind-boggling, some were fun, some were really, really bad (mind-bogglingly bad in one case) and some were so much fun that a copy had to travel home with us.

Today was busy with doing things for the shop (all in the background for now, though) and preparing for the next blog tour together with Gillian - the US release of the Beast is coming up!

I'm taking a breather.

The last few weeks were incredibly busy, and I'm proud and happy that they ended with several successful projects or several things sorted out (new book about gold embroidery! new scarf knitting kit! new special colours on thin lace-weight two-ply wool yarn! new gold embroidery starter kit! fair in Weikersheim!). That was exhausting, though, and I'm in need of a little break now.

I've planned several months ago to take the rest of this week off - it was already obvious it would be a very busy time just beforehand, and I'd need some time to relax and get my mind off work-related things. I had also planned to do some blog posts beforehand, though, and to post them on schedule... and I realised yesterday night that this plan will have to quietly slink away and pretend it never even existed.

For you, that will mean blog silence until next week, and I'll be gentle with myself and declare the blog silent until Tuesday. Meanwhile, there's a lovely story over at the Toast - maybe you'll enjoy that until I'm back...

Oops.

You're getting the promised blog post, even though you're getting it very, very late... today was completely gobbled up by lugging stuff out of the car (with plenty of help from the most patient husband of them all) and getting the book-keeping up to date, including sending off the taxes for the past quarter.

That on top of the post-fair exhaustion, and the blog post almost got forgotten!

Sabine and me behind our sales table in the former carriage shed.

The fair, by the way, was in an extremely lovely place, with brilliant weather on both Friday and Saturday. The baroque gardens showed themselves at their very best, the castle staff had prepared special guided tours with more textile information than they give usually, and we had lots and lots of very interested visitors. Sunday was rainy, unfortunately, and thus more towards the drab and grey side of autumn, but it did clear up in the afternoon.

I had a lovely time at Weikersheim, and I've already heard that they are planning to do this again. Not next year (that is already booked with events), but probably in 2017, and if my schedule will permit it, I'll definitely be there again.
 

Nadelkunst!

I'm packing up today and leaving to set up everything for the Nadelkunst, and I'm all excited about it.

If you're going there, you can find me in the "Remise". If you're not going there and only read this blog, I'll be back and writing for you on Tuesday, when I will be able to tell you more about how the fair went and how beautiful the castle in Weikersheim really is...