Back to the Masonic Hall for a damp and muggy weekend.

Friday

Lots of traffic on the way out, but we made it in reasonable time thanks to the navi coming up with side routes on the fly.

A dialect word I had not met before!

The games got started with Hanabi, which I haven't played for a while. Good fun for one game, but I wouldn't want to go back to it as a regular thing.

On to The Climbers, at which point it became clear that I was more tired than I thought. Good fun even so!

Then Xenon Profiteer, in which I got a full set of pipelines at the cost of achieving basically nothing else.

My Expo copy of Kabuto Sumo: Sakura Slam (now there are corner posts!)

And finally Tinderblox Sunset, possibly the highest I've seen it go.

(Photos for that one by Gus; thanks!)

Saturday

This is a memorial to James Conway, who died after being captured during Operation Frankton, but I'm afraid I couldn't help but parse it as a memorial to the Mersey Shark Attacks of 2012…

(And I have now added it to OpenStreetMap.)

A role-playing session in the morning, which as usual didn't produce much in the way of photographs. The Blade Runner system seems interesting; not sure it has much to say in terms of raw mechanics, but it does have some good ideas for side notes in an investigative game (e.g. the way you get a data search or lab result back is "wait till end of shift").

I continued to do quite badly in Xia: Legends of a Drift System, a huge sprawling game that was nonetheless great fun.

On to Kluster, which I played once a while ago (and more recently with a very old set). The trick, I think, is to use your magnetic stone as a probe without causing too much disruption below…

One of us had bought Square One, by one of the designers of Project L and sharing some of the rules and visual grammar. It loses the shape element completely; you can use pieces to fill the top row on a card, which you have to complete all at once, and the idea of a master action is still there from Project L. White-backed cards now only give you pieces, black-backed cards only give you score, and if you use a master action to finish two or more tiles at once you get a bonus.

I enjoyed it, and I'd like to play it again, but it's so very close to Project L that I wasn't sure I could justify owning both.

And to test that theory we went on to play Project L… which ended up feeling not at all the same. I enjoyed this more, but is that simply because I know it better? I do like the shape element. (No pictures for this one.)

On to Nova Luna, where we suffered from a very poorly laid-out rulebook (I have now written a better one). An enjoyable game even so, but I'm in no hurry to play again. (In fact, for all it has a Terribly Famous Designer in that Uwe Rosenberg shares credit with Corné van Moorsel, I think I prefer the previous year's Realm of Sand.)

One of my current favourite light games, Flip 7, in which each of us had the lead for at least one round.

Last one for the evening, SCOUT, in which I fell apart comprehensively. (No photos.)

Freemasons. If they had any imagination, they might aspire to blasphemy.

Sunday

Just the one game this morning, Imperium: Horizons, with Taino, Vikings and Egyptians. I thought I was doing fairly well, but evidently not. Still had a great time though, as I always do with this.

And then the drive home; not too bad, but I was quite tired having just got back from holiday on the night before Stabcon started, so took several breaks.