RogerBW's Blog

SpringCon 28 April 2018 30 April 2018

Back, on a wet Saturday, to this small quarterly boardgames convention in Watford. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.

We began the day with five-player Lovecraft Letter, at which I did quite remarkably badly. (Usually I'm all right at Love Letter, but I wasn't quite in tune with the day yet.)

We went on to recent acquisition Homeland, with six players. Things may have been a bit too chaotic at this player count, and we started with several Severe threats which meant we were always trying to catch up… but the terrorist mole (not me) played very well too.

On to old favourite (though not of mine) Alhambra, which is very much an abstraction gap game for me (paying attention to the theme makes your gameplay worse). In spite of this I ended up only in fourth place rather than at the back.

Four plays of Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, first with six then with eight as we snagged in other players. I'm a fairly decent clue-giver, it turns out.

Finally as I was waiting to go I sided with the smaller team for a couple of rounds of Codenames: Pictures; it's still not a game I particularly like (and it's better with cards from Dixit or Mysterium), but it has its moments.

The venue has been redecorated and now has Fashionable Lighting (those low-wattage incandescent "vintage" hipster bulbs), but the organiser's planning to fix this for next time.

[Buy Lovecraft Letter at Amazon] [Buy Homeland at Amazon] [Buy Alhambra at Amazon] [Buy Deception: Murder in Hong Kong at Amazon] [Buy Codenames: Pictures at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]


  1. Posted by Owen Smith at 01:24pm on 30 April 2018

    You may find on closer inspection the light bulbs are LED. They're made to look like vintage incandescents but they're not. So they do reduce power consumption as well as having unnecessary trendiness. I tried to check in the last photo what they actually are, but that part of the image is unsurprisingly whited out.

  2. Posted by RogerBW at 01:44pm on 30 April 2018

    I'm not saying they can't be, but the filaments look an awful lot like these, and they get hot in use.

  3. Posted by Owen Smith at 02:08pm on 02 May 2018

    These look very similar visually though, and yet are LED (damn Amazon and their stupidly long links):

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0752DFNK4/ref=sspa_dk_detail_3?psc=1&pd_rd_i=B0752DFNK4&pd_rd_wg=IjVYw&pd_rd_r=0KGZWXHE3FZYPHAES03Y&pd_rd_w=Digy6

    And at 7W they will get hot, my parents filament style LEDs get hot. If the bulbs are hot to touch or just a bit too hot to permanently hold, they're probably LED. If the instant you touch them you hear a sizzling flesh noise and you scream in agony (or suppress it), then they're filament.

  4. Posted by RogerBW at 03:37pm on 02 May 2018

    Everything from the /ref= onwards is dispensable. The rest just helps Amazon track you. Note the length of the link I posted above.

    And yet many people insist on sending the whole Amazon link. And utm tracking parameters. And… but that is another rant for another time.

  5. Posted by Owen Smith at 11:35pm on 03 May 2018

    I shouldn't need to work out for any arbitrary web site which bits of its URLs are important and which I can chop off. I might break the URL chopping off more than is necessary. The web sites themselves should present sensible URLs not a pile of crap.

    I think the issue here is web sites now assume that no-one uses URLs directly as text and everyone just clicks on links found by google or emailed to them in spam.

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