Cold City: session zero

Following on from my recent review, I have now started Cold City with my regular Monday night online group. Regular players Thomas and Terry have been joined by Becky. So now we are four.

Situation creation

My plan is to run Cold City as per the book, so we started our session zero at the beginning.

1 Open/Closed game: open.

I prefer open games because betrayal feels less personal when you can see it coming and lean into it. It also suits Cold City's collaborative nature. So I suggested we have an open game, and nobody objected.

2 Tone: Noir-ish

We talked a bit about tone, and we weren’t really sure what we wanted other than for the game not to be comic or pulpy. (I’m not sure what the difference is between Arthouse and Noir and Dark Horror – I’m not sure I’d run the game any different.)

Anyway, we’ve picked Noir-ish. Whatever that means.

3 Structure: Filmic

I expect to run this for 4-5 sessions, so it'll have a filmic structure.

4 Keywords/phrases

Keywords and phrases flummoxed us for a few moments because we weren’t sure what to do at this stage. We ended up with these:

• Tension
• Moral compromise
• Occult science
• Rain
• Cabinet of curiosities
• Black market
• Smoky nightclub
• Blinds creating light and shadows
• Surprise

5 What are we doing?

This step is a bit odd. I didn’t notice how odd it is when I first read Cold City, but when we came to this step, we struggled to understand its purpose. After all, in Cold City, aren’t the PCs hunting Nazi monsters and twisted technology? And if they aren’t doing that, what are they doing?

Cold City itself offers only two suggestions: hunting down monsters and investigating missing Nazi personnel connected to twisted technology – and I struggle to see much difference between the two. If Cold City thinks we can play different kinds of games, it needs a comprehensive list.

Anyway, this question puzzled my players, and we decided we were investigating the whereabouts of missing Nazi personnel with connections to twisted technology.

6 Antagonists

Now the players say what kind of villains they want to face. Isn’t that Control’s job?

Anyway, they told me they wanted to see sinister organisations stealing and continuing border science (including private owners via the black market), perhaps recruiting Nazi scientists to continue their work.

Oh, and reanimated soldiers. 

7 Who else features?

As I mentioned in my first-impressions review, this is too soon to think about NPC contacts. Still, Thomas liked the idea of having a creepy artist somewhere in the game.

8 Scenes and 9 Locations

These two steps merged into one. The scenes became locations…

• A smoky nightclub
• A maze (could be underground tunnels, or might be a large, confusing office)
• Superscience laboratory
• Bombed-out underground
• Sewers
• Massive and soulless administrative block, slightly too big for humans, with endless corridors. Soulless. (Thomas described a place in Germany he had been to which seemed to be built for oversized people – where everything seemed bigger than normal and door handles were at shoulder height.)

And that was the end of situation creation. I have to say, it didn’t feel very complete.

Character creation

With situation creation finished, we worked through character generation and ended up with the following characters.

Alexandra (Sasha) Popov

Terry is playing Sasha Popov, a jaded Soviet military engineer working for GK-11. Their hidden agendas are:

National: Report back to GK-11 on all the actions of my fellow team - and their successes/failures.

Personal: Make sure any border science technology is lost or destroyed rather than recovered.

Gustave Galliard

Thomas is playing Gustave Galliard, a French military scientist excited by the possibilities suggested by the German experiments and working for Departement B. His hidden agendas:

National: Keep the other allies from discovering the Lac Noir project. (We’re not quite sure what the Lac Noir (the black lake) project is, but it seems to be something that the French are up to…)

Personal: Find out what became of Marie Oswald (a botanist colleague of Gustave’s – possibly a Nazi) and her files.

Nancy Miller

Becky is playing American Nancy Miller, an Extractions Officer for the USAF 515th Intelligence Wing. (We’re not quite sure what an “Extractions Officer” is – but we’ll figure it out.) Her hidden agendas:

National: Find the defector agent Jean Bernard, who has stolen the somatic grid (a device featured in Miller’s draw scene) and return him to Tempelhof Airbase for questioning.

Personal: Find Jean Bernard and help him get out of Berlin, and if he has it, return the somatic grid to the 515th, not ISLAC. (It appears that Bernard is a close friend – so a nice tension there.)

NPC contacts

At this point I asked the players to create three NPC contacts each. I’m sure they will be useful.

What next?

I’ve got plenty to work with, but sadly Cold City has no advice for moving from the end of setup to the start of play. 

There’s an assumption that the PCs will probably investigate a situation – but there’s no advice (or even an example) on the best way to incorporate the PC’s hidden agendas into the game.

But maybe I am overthinking it. Maybe it will be obvious.

Cold City 2e: First impressions review

Following a recent Kickstarter delivery, I now own the second editions of Cold City and Hot War, and so I’m turning my attention to Cold City. I’ve had the first edition for years, but for some reason I’ve never got it to the table.

I plan to run Cold City soon, so these are my impressions based on reading the book. Once I’ve run it, we’ll see if anything changes.

What is Cold City?

Cold City is a ttrpg of monster hunting, trust and betrayal written by Malcolm Craig and published by Handiwork Games. It is set in 1950 Berlin, in the ruins of a city shattered by World War II.

During the war, the Nazis experimented with “border science” and created twisted technology and monsters. Now the victors are picking over the spoils.

What do the PCs do?

The PCs are members of the Inter-Allied Scientific Liaison Commission (ISLAC), an international body investigating leftover Nazi technology and border science. So basically, the PCs hunt monsters and twisted technology in 1950 Berlin.

Each PC belongs to one of the four Allied powers: Russia, USA, Britain or France. And none of them truly trust each other, as everybody has hidden agendas – national and personal.

So it’s monster hunting, with a layer of betrayal and distrust. Lovely!

Who are the PCs?

Typically, they are military intelligence personnel seconded to ISLAC. PCs have three attributes: Action (physical stuff), Influence (getting folk to do stuff), and Reason (thinky stuff). I like this; that’s more than enough, and I find many games have too many. (In Traveller, I find it’s never clear when to use EDU rather than INT. I’d much rather have one stat.)

Attributes rank from 1 to 5, and players have eight points to spread among them.

Traits are talents or quirks and might be positive or negative. Characters typically start with four – two positive, one negative and a fourth which might be either. (“Incisive mind, at home with quick reasoning, terrified of monsters.”)

PCS then have two hidden agendas, one national and one personal. (National: “I have been ordered to build relationships with the American agents on my team, suborn them, and turn them to our side.” Personal: “I will perform such a great service to the Motherland that I will be made Hero of the Soviet Union.”)

Finally, characters have Trust with each other. Again, these range from 1 to 5, with a higher number representing more trust. For each level of trust, you must state a reason for that level (eg “He gave me a pack of cigarettes when I had none. He saved me when I was attacked by a creature in the U-Bahn.”). So that helps create bonds and backstory between the characters.

NPC contacts

NPC contacts (“friends, allies, old enemies, family members, lovers, or colleagues”) are created during situation setup (#7 Who else features in the game?). Unfortunately, this happens before players have created their characters. That doesn’t make sense – players don’t know who their characters are yet, so they don’t know which NPC relationships they might want.

While step #7 might help identify interesting NPCs players want to see, Cold City needs a separate step in character generation for connections the PCs already know.

(The worked example even calls this out – as one of the fictional players suggests that they create contacts after they’ve created their characters. I’m not sure how this survived development/playtesting.)

How do they do what they do?

In Cold City, you roll dice to resolve a conflict. Conflicts work as follows:

1. Set goals – each side decides what they want out of the conflict.
2. Create dice pools – each side assembles their dice pools. PCs use their relevant attribute and add dice for appropriate traits, trust and tools. (The GM, or Control, takes dice from a central pool.)
3. Roll the dice – identify the highest dice on each side. Then count each die on the winning side that is higher than the losing side to determine successes.
4. Consequences – the winner has narrative control over the outcome of the conflict, and there are mechanical effects such as gaining or losing traits or attributes.

The rules also include a few special rules, such as using negative traits in conflicts, adding extra characters, and what happens when an attribute reaches zero (a crisis occurs).

My first impression from reading the rules was that conflicts didn’t happen too often. I thought this for two reasons:

• First, there are no re-rolls. If you fail the conflict, the narrative moves on, and you deal with the consequences. You don’t get a second go at fighting the monster – at least, not in the same scene.
• Second, consequences can be character-changing (and Control can run out of dice).

So my impression was that you don’t roll dice too often in Cold City. However, after watching the Unconventional GMs’ video, it’s clear you shouldn’t be afraid to roll the dice. (Note that Unconventional GMs is a playtest – it looks like some rules changed in the published game.)

1950 Berlin

Cold City includes a chapter with information on life in 1950 Berlin, the tension between East and West, and a timeline of events since the end of the war. The game also includes details of notable locations, including the U-Bahn (underground), huge concrete flak towers, Spandau prison, and more.

Cold City also includes details on the organisations PCs might work for or encounter, such as the British Experimental Rocket Bureau, CIA, Gehlen Organisation, GRU, Secret Intelligence Services, French Forces in Berlin, and more. Each has a sample hidden agenda you can use for characters from that organisation.

Cold City’s Berlin chapter finishes with details of key ISLAC personnel – the officers likely to brief the players on their missions.

Situations

And what sort of missions are those? Generally, they involve monsters and border science. Cold City includes five different situations. Each situation consists of several sections:

Tone: Cold City can be played in different styles – my preference is for dark horror, but pulp, black comedy and arthouse are options.

Control dice groups: Identifying which of Control’s dice groups should have the most dice.

Key words/phrases: I’m not quite sure what purpose these serve. As part of set-up, the group suggests key words and phrases to “add definition, nuance, and colour to the wider feel of the game”. But I’m not sure how they help here.

What are we doing? The bulk of the situation: the initial setup and what’s going on.

Who are the antagonists? The characters behind the situation and their goals.

Who else features? Other notable NPCs the players might encounter. (Although see my comment above.)

Scenes: Suggested scenes that might be used by Control.

Unfortunately, the situations aren't particularly detailed. There’s no suggested clue trail, so Control will have to improvise. I don’t mind that too much, as too much detail can be constraining, but my initial impression is that there isn’t enough detail for me to run them from the book. 

And looking at Cold City through the eyes of someone new to the game, I think that’s a mistake. When I buy a new game, I want to run it straight away, and the situations provided don’t give me the confidence that they’re all I need.

Differences between 1e and 2e

While a few terms change between the first and second editions of Cold City (the Reserve Police Agency is now ISLAC, twisted technology is now border science, and the GM is now Control), the main differences are in the system and the look and feel.

System changes

Essentially, the second edition of Cold City is simpler than the first edition.

For players, it’s pretty similar. However, Control (the new name for the GM) now draws dice from five pools: Monsters, Berlin, Internal Enemies, External Enemies and the Cold. 

In first, NPCs and monsters all had stats, and Control built their dice pool in the same way as the players. Now, however, Control simply draws dice from the relevant pool, depending on the nature of the conflict.

(Cold City doesn’t advise how many dice to use, but I’ll get to that.)

Better look and feel

Second edition Cold City is much more polished and professional than 1e.

Cold City is now a full-colour hardback, instead of being a black-and-white softback. It comes with its sister game, Hot War, in a smart slipcase.

What’s missing – an introductory investigation

I think where I struggle with Cold City is that while I understand the rules, I can’t see how it plays at the table. Yes, there’s all the 1950 Berlin background and the hunting for border science technology and monsters – but there’s also the agendas and trust, and I didn’t find it clear how it all meshes together.

What I feel Cold City lacks is a good introductory adventure that explains how it plays.

Yes, Cold City includes example situations, but as I said, none feel developed enough for me to run easily from the book, and it’s unclear how hidden agendas would affect them.

I can also imagine running them with a trad ruleset such as Call of Cthulhu. In fact, I find it easier to imagine running the situations with a trad ruleset. 

What makes Cold City different is trust and hidden agendas, but it looks like they might easily take control of the narrative and pull it away from the investigation. Is that how Cold City is supposed to work?

(Some PbtA books have a section describing what happens in your first session – perhaps Cold City needs something like that.)

I guess I’ll find out when I run it.

Things that made me go hmmmm?

Oddly, for a second edition, some fundamental sections are missing. Such as:

• How many players is Cold City for? It doesn’t say. Apparently the sweet spot is 3-5 players, but why not make that clear?
• What sort of dice do you need? And how many? That's in the book, but it’s tucked away on page 47. (You need lots of D10s.)

(For comparison, both editions of Hot War have a “Stuff you need to play” section early in the book that covers the dice needed, although it still doesn't say how many players the game is for.)

Dice questions

Reading through the new rules also raised questions about dice.

First, it's not clear how many dice Control adds to a contest. Players have a strict formula to follow, but Control just grabs some. They are advised to “play hard,” but there is no guidance as to what that actually means. Control can make things easier or more complicated – but that seems odd when there’s no guidance on how many dice to roll in the first place.

(First edition actually has advice for building a dice pool – three dice for weak opposition, five dice for moderately challenging, seven dice for challenging, and nine dice for very challenging. That will probably be my default starting point.)

(Interestingly, this is something that Gaz struggles with in the first contest in the Unconventional GMs video)

Second, it’s not clear what happens when a dice pool runs out. Presumably, if Control has no dice left in a particular Group, does that end that Group's threat? So if Control has no Monster dice left, are there no more monsters until the dice reset?

Third, how does a one-shot end? In other games, investigations end when the narrative ends. In Cold City, a one-shot ends when Control’s dice start running out. How does that work if you’re not at the end of the investigation? And what happens if you reach the narrative end and Control has dice left?

I assume this becomes clear at the table, but these are obvious questions, and the book doesn’t answer them.

Anyway, I’ll find out because I plan to run Cold City soon.

Overall

So at this point in my review, having read the book and thought about play, I find myself both attracted to Cold City and fearful of it.

The concept of hunting Nazi occult science, technology, and monsters in 1950s Berlin is appealing, but the game's 2000s-era indie storytelling system seems opaque. 

I’m left with a nagging feeling that Cold City is trying for a narrative, player-led story of agendas, trust and betrayal. But it’s shackled to a fertile Cold War backdrop and traditional mission-based horror-investigation mode, which I suspect often smothers the narrative, player-led game.

But I will find out soon.

York Board Games Convention

Yesterday I went to the York Board Games Convention, a lovely little con held at St Peter's Junior School, not far from the centre of York. This is its second year, and I hope it has many more.

Although it’s a three-day con, I went only on Friday. (I only found out a few weeks earlier, and life admin stuff meant I couldn’t go all three days.)

The convention starts at 9 am – which is the same time as the first ttrpg slot that I was booked into. Since I had no idea how busy it would be, I arrived around 8:45 and found three or four gamers waiting to go in. One of the organisers said we could go in as the café was ready to serve, so I had a cup of tea and a bacon butty while I waited. Perfect.

DIE RPG

As it was, one of our players ran late, and we didn’t start until after 9:30 a.m…

I wasn’t disappointed by the delay; it gave us time to get to know Tom, the GM, and the other players. I didn’t know Tom, but it turns out that he had also been at Furnace. 

Anyway, DIE RPG is the game of the comic of the same name – which I haven’t read. But the conceit is that a group of ttrpgers become the heroes of their own nightmarish ttrpg. (It’s wonderfully meta.)

And TL;DR – this was probably the best ttrpg session I played in all year.

The GM played James, the DM who TPK’d our group all those years ago. But James had been provoked, his crush had turned him down, and his other friends had stolen from him. And me? I played his bullied younger brother – and I smashed his prize Warhammer model.

So we spent about half an hour building our “players”- fleshing them out and figuring out their dysfunctional relationships with James and their screwed-up lives. 

The game starts with James inviting us back for “one last game”, and before we know it we are magically transported into a nightmarish fantasy world where we must fight for survival. But first we turn into our characters – I was the Rage Knight, a warrior with anger management issues (focused on James, of course).

Then we had a short but extremely satisfying, emotionally draining dungeon that ended with us finally defeating James and deciding to return home rather than stay to live in the fantasy.

It was so good (and draining) that I struggle to imagine how you’d play DIE for much longer.

The Window

After finishing DIE, I perused the rest of the con and saw a “looking for players” beacon at a table where they were playtesting The Window. So I settled down for a game.

According to the site:

The Window is a dramatic football transfers board game for 2-4 players.

You are the manager of a club fighting to survive in the top division, and the transfer window is only open for another week. Scout players, outbid your rivals, hijack deals at the worst possible moment, and get your signings over the line before the window slams shut.

Anyway, it’s an auction game where you build your squad by bidding on players. The theme didn’t inspire me (I’m not a football fan), but I enjoyed the game. Obviously, I didn’t stand a chance – I was playing against the designers. I came fourth, unable to keep my team from relegation. 

The game itself is fairly easy to understand – but the strategies aren’t so clear.

After that, I did look around to see if there were other games I could join. I could have taken something out of the library and tried to find players, but I was tired (and still drained from DIE), so I headed home.

Some thoughts about the convention generally

The location is lovely. The café is nice, and having individual rooms for the ttrpgs is lovely. I was there on a Friday, when it was quiet. I imagine the weekend is much busier. (I wonder what they will do when they need to expand.)

As mentioned above, they might want to review the scheduling for the ttrpgs.

Communications isn’t great. I think there must be a mailing list or something somewhere, but I can’t find a link to it on the website. When I first learned about the con, there didn’t appear to be a way to sign up to the ttrpgs. It turns out you do that through the app – which appeared randomly on the site one day. I’m sure there was an announcement somewhere...

(Now I've bought a ticket, I may well be on the mailing list...)

They have a Facebook group, and while it has some useful announcements, it’s not a place for the community to post reviews or photos. (So I couldn’t work out if anyone was arranging games, for example.)

I hope it’s a success, and maybe next year I will run something.

Yorkshire Tabletop Gamers: A bigger project than expected

So this turned out to be a bigger project than I originally expected…

Where are all the gamers?

So I’ve wondered this for a while, but it’s annoying that there’s no one place to find other gamers.

This came home to me recently when I discovered a three-day board games convention in York (about 10 miles away, as the crow flies) happening at the end of the month. And I didn’t know about it!

So I decided to use Blogger to create a directory of gaming groups/events in Yorkshire, and I called it Yorkshire Tabletop Gamers. Each club or event is a separate entry, and you can use the labels to filter them.

How hard can that be?

So many groups…

So I started with the easy stuff – Furnace and North Star and Demon’s Wake and the East Leeds group. Events and groups that I already knew about. But as I searched, I found more and more groups…

I had underestimated two things. First, how many clubs and events there are in Yorkshire – and how big Yorkshire actually is!

What is a tabletop game?

One of my early decisions was what to include. I originally included larps (and have added the BOX Larp Festival), but although they’re adjacent, they aren’t tabletop games, so I didn’t include them.

And (at the moment), I’m not including chess clubs. Perhaps I should, but for now, no.

So by a tabletop gamer I’m looking at board games, ttrpgs, wargames and social deduction games.

And then I found Boardgameclubs.org

Then I discovered Boardgameclubs.org, a map-enabled site that makes mine pretty redundant. Or it would, if it were more complete. It has filters for ttrpgs, but it’s clearly aimed at board game gamers.

And it covers the world, rather than focusing just on Yorkshire. So I’m not giving up.

Shops and stores

I haven’t decided what to do about shops and stores yet. I will probably include them, as it’s nice to visit somewhere and know where you can buy board games and ttrpgs. It’s harder to support them if you don’t know they exist.

And many game shops host game nights, so that’s a good reason to include them.

Status: now

So right now, I’ve pretty much exhausted all the cons and events that I could find in my immediate part of Yorkshire. 

I still have clubs to add that are on boardgames.org, and I’ll work my way through them. And I also need to share the project so that others can find me. And, of course, add the shops.

Yorkshire Tabletop Gamers.

Furnace 2026

It’s a mid-October weekend; therefore it’s my annual pilgrimage to Furnace, Sheffield's ttrpg convention.

Here’s what I played.

Saturday

Fiasco (Folly and Fortune)

I started my weekend by bringing Fiasco (second edition). I let the players choose the playset, and they chose the Jane Austen-y Folly and Fortune deck. (Hmm, last year I ran Good Society at Furnace. Am I being typecast?)

I pitched Fiasco because, when it was time to decide what to offer at Furnace, I felt burned out and couldn’t face preparing anything. Fiasco requires no preparation – it can be played straight from the box. And of course, I really like Fiasco – and I get to play as well.

I was slightly worried, as one of the few times Fiasco hasn’t worked was when I played the Fame and Fortune playset at another convention. But I needn’t have worried…

I played Lydia Pembroke, who started the game engaged to Sir Edward Henry St John-Hill (played by Daniel), who painted poodles. Sir Edward was secretly engaged to Elizabeth (played by Fergus) and, during the game, proposed to Samuel (Camille) and Harriet (Becky) as well. 

It was a crazy, hilarious game. I ended up married to Samuel (a double wedding with Elizabeth, who married my father), and Samuel ended up trying to murder Sir Henry using an exotic man-eating flytrap.

Mothership (The B Team)

After lunch, I joined a game of Mothership run by James. I played Lt Rook, the old hand, and the rest of the squad was Lt Sutter (Tony), PFC Bridge (Laurence), and PFC Voss (Ric). 

The scenario was a simple rescue mission: rescue a scientist (who we accidentally blew up with a grenade; I’m not putting that in my report), deactivate the comms (because bad things were going on), and set the reactor to safe mode (which we failed to do).

(On Sunday, James ran another team through the situation as we had left it – I don’t know what they did, but hopefully they sorted the reactor out.)

Although Mothership is supposed to be deadly, we didn’t have any PC deaths – although it was extremely close at the end. I survived without a scratch by being in charge and sending the others in first.

As for Mothership as a system, I thought it was fine. I’ve run a lot of ALIEN, so I found myself comparing the two games. My preference is for ALIEN with its D6s and agendas, but I’d happily play Mothership again. (The only thing I really struggled with was the slightly vague setting – it felt ALIEN-esque, but did that mean that motion detectors and smartguns? What about shields or lifeform scanners? And how human are androids? A setting sheet would have gone a long way to help.)

Sunday

Offworlders (Routine Maintenance)

Sunday started with Offworlders, run by Steve. I knew nothing about Offworlders, but it turned out to be a sort of PbtA does Traveller/Firefly. I played a smuggler, Kiva, while around the table were Thwart (a thief played by Simon), Garvin (a fighter played by Andy), Lara (a psychic played by Oliver) and Athena (a hacker played by Tom). Yes, effectively four character classes – fighters, rogues, and two types of wizards (hackers or psychics).

Something about the system didn’t quite work for me, though I’m struggling to explain exactly what I mean. It’s a feeling rather than anything specific, but if I knew it better, I would either get used to it or pinpoint what doesn’t work for me.

Anyway, our ship needed expensive repairs, and we needed lots of money, quickly. So after exploring a couple of options, we found a local crime lord and ran some errands for him. Thanks to a combination of good ideas and good rolls, we succeeded without too many problems. Sometimes a plan really does come together…

Monster of the Week (Red Mask)

Furnace finished with a Korean investigation for Monster of the Week, run by Sue. I played The Divine, and my co-hunters were The Spooky (played by Steve), The Chosen (Elaine), The Expert (Tim) and The Exile (Nox). Our monster-hunting gang were Korean rich kids, with hangers-on. I was one of the hangers-on.

Our mystery involved a creepy Korean urban legend about a red-masked woman terrorising schoolgirls. Our investigation involved meeting and placating toilet goddesses (apparently a real Korean thing), social media and a sad suicide. We put the trouble ghost to rest using Big Money, rather than Big Magic or a Big Fight, which felt appropriate if a little anticlimactic.

Despite the monsters, the scariest part of the investigation was the Korean school system…

As for Monster of the Week, I’ve run it a few times, but I find it’s almost too trad for PbtA. I was interested to see how another GM would run it, but it still seemed more trad than the idea of PbtA I have in my head (which has more inter-player conflict – but that may just be me).

Furnace 2026

And that was Furnace 2026. Good games and of course a chance to catch up with lots of old friends, and make some new ones.

I’m looking forward to 2027, although I have a horrible feeling it will clash with another weekend…

Bad timing

Mrs H has been frowning at me recently because four large parcels have recently arrived – three Kickstarters which arrived within two weeks of each other, and I bought myself something for Mrs H to give to me on my birthday.

Kickstarters

The three Kickstarters were:

Cold City/Hot War 2e

Cold City/Hot War second editions (and the only ttrpgs on this list). I’m prepping a Cold City investigation right now and will hopefully run that in a couple of weeks, when my regular Monday night group completes its current adventure (The Dying Earth).

Having read Cold City, I have Views and there will be a review in due course, followed by an after-action report.

And then I’ll crack open Hot War and run a game of that.

Kavango Lodges

In Kavango, each player has an African conservation reserve and uses card drafting to fill their reserve with animals. It looks gorgeous and plays quickly. Kavango Lodges adds a spatial element the original game lacked.

Since the first edition, the designers have updated almost all the cards, so they created Let’s Go Kavango, a travel version that includes all the new cards but doesn’t use the changed elements. Owners of the original edition can simply swap the LGK cards for their originals, which is a nice idea rather than just having to throw the old cards away.

I like Kavango, but the family don’t like it enough for it to see the table often. It has a solo mode, which means I can scratch my Kavango itch whenever I want. (But that's never as good as playing against a human.)

I’m not sure how often I’ll play Let’s Go Kavango, but we’ll see.

John Company 2e

John Company second edition arrived this week. It’s a monstrous game, quite unlike the board games I normally enjoy, as it’s long and “heavy”. But I was fascinated by the review on Shut Up and Sit Down, and the more I looked into the game, the more fascinated I became.

In John Company, players take the role of families running the East India Company. But you don’t really care whether the EIC succeeds or fails – you’re just looking to extract as much wealth as you can from it and then retire to a fabulous stately home. So it’s an extremely contentious subject, and one I’m looking forward to exploring.

Mrs H has already said she doesn’t want to play it (I would have been surprised had she said the opposite), so I hope to play it at clubs and conventions.

Intriguingly, a roleplaying/megagame version of John Company called The Company Archives is being developed.

John Company has a solo mode, so I can learn how to play it.

The gift

Buying presents is a nightmare. The best advice I’ve heard is, “Ask them what they want and get them that.” After all, I have no idea what gardening/patchwork apparatus Mrs H has her eye on, and she obviously has no idea which games I might be interested in. 

So what we do is when we see something we want but can’t really justify it to ourselves, we buy it for the other to give as a present.

Which is how I know I have Sidereal Confluence heading my way in November.

Sidereal Confluence

Sidereal Confluence is a negotiation game for 4-9 players, with simultaneous play, set in space, and asymmetric powers. It sounds right up my street – lots of players haggling over stuff, alien races that each play differently, and simultaneous play so there’s no tedious hanging around waiting for anyone’s turn.

(And this review from No Pun Included helped.)

I can’t imagine playing this too often at home, so I hope to play it at conventions and clubs. It should be easier to get to the table than John Company…

One-in, one-out

To placate Mrs H, I try to follow a one-in, one-out policy.

I recently sold all my Magic: the Gathering cards, so that gives me a few brownie points for John Company. For Kavango Lodges, I put The Crew into the Oxfam pile (but that was then taken out by my daughter, which I think still counts).

I don’t know what I’m going to do about Cold City/Hot War yet, but at least it doesn’t take up much space on the bookshelf. I don’t think she’s noticed.

Re-reading 20th-century science fiction

I’ve been in a retrospective mood lately, and I’ve revisited several old SF novels that have been sitting on my shelf. They’re there because I wanted to re-read them. And now that I have, how do they stack up? And will I keep them?

(I didn’t plan to read one novel from each decade, so that’s a happy coincidence. I even read them in chronological order – also a coincidence.)

Way Station by Clifford D Simak (1963)

Clifford D Simak is famous for his “pastoral SF” – gentle stories about decent people faced with alien mysteries. For me, Way Station is one of his finest.

Way Station is set in 1963 or so and concerns Enoch Wallace, a US Civil War veteran in charge of an alien “way station,” a stopover used by aliens travelling from one place to another. However, Wallace’s unusual longevity has attracted the attention of the US government…

In a modern-day story, attracting the government would be a bad thing – but in Simak’s world, the government merely watches. Wallace has done nothing wrong, so the government just watches. Except it turns out that they haven’t just watched Wallace; they’ve also dug up the mysterious grave (which contains an alien body), and that causes an interstellar crisis.

Anyway, the story also involves teleportation (Simak gets around the teleportation-is-murder problem by giving creatures a “soul”), alien maths that predicts nuclear war on Earth, “ghosts” that Enoch creates to keep himself company, an unruly neighbour who causes trouble, and Lucy with mysterious powers. It also ends on a deus ex machina, which is a shame.

I think there might be a freeform in there somewhere. I certainly like the idea of a game involving a way station, unsuspecting humans, and aliens. So I’m keeping it for now.

(I picked up this copy in a second-hand bookshop somewhere. I am sure I originally read the Methuen paperback with Chris Moore starships (which didn’t suit the story), but I guess I lost that. Instead I have this 1969 US edition with a baffling cover and “80p” scribbled in pencil on the inside cover.)

Who Goes Here? By Bob Shaw (1977)

Oh my, this hasn’t aged well. Bob Shaw was one of the great SF writers of the 70s and 80s, and is probably most famous for 1974’s Orbitsville, which won the British Science Fiction Award for best novel.

He was also a mainstay of the convention scene, with his hilarious SF talks (I managed to see him once at the Brighton Worldcon in 1987). Most of his short story collections contain at least one humorous story.

And Who Goes Here? is his humorous novel, which concerns Space Legion new recruit Warren Peace. Recruits to the Space Legion join the legion to forget – specifically, to have that part of their memories that they are trying to forget removed. And Warren Peace can’t remember anything.

Anyway, it has one good joke (Warren Peace), and I found the rest painful. Apparently there was a sequel in 1993, but I missed it.

My favourite Bob Shaw stories are Other Days, Other Eyes (about slow glass), A Wreath of Stars, and Orbitsville (before it became a trilogy). And I may find Orbitsville a disappointment when I re-read it.

As for Who Goes Here?, it’s destined for Oxfam.

For Love of Mother-Not by Alan Dean Foster (1983)

I was a huge Alan Dean Foster fan in my teens and twenties. I discovered Bloodhype at the school bookshop when I was 12 or so and immediately fell in love with the Humanx Commonwealth, ADF’s mostly-optimistic future.

I picked up this copy of For Love of Mother-Not on a school exchange trip to California – around then it was getting harder to get ADF’s novels in the UK, and I started relying on Forbidden Planet.

For Love of Mother-Not holds up surprisingly well despite struggling with the writing itself (it’s not a punchy, modern style of writing); I kept wanting to read on. I don’t remember my younger self being critical of the writing style, but I’m more alert to it now.

But the ideas in For Love of Mother-Not reminded me why I loved ADF’s Humanx Commonwealth so much. It’s an evocative universe, with colourful worlds, interesting characters, immense creatures and wondrous technology: the Devilope, mudders, skimmers, needlers, duralloy and much more (including mysterious ancient technologies that I just loved, although this novel doesn’t have any of that).

I noted a few uncomfortable topics that are (mostly) glossed over, such as mindwipe and eugenics. And Flinx, the hero, has a lethal pet that occasionally kills – but only in self-defence, so that’s okay. It’s certainly something my younger self didn’t notice.

However, re-reading For Love of Mother-Not has whetted my appetite for more Humanx stories. I’m keeping it for now.

Clarke County, Space by Allen Steele (1990)

The newest book in this (short) list, and only a few pages in, I can tell it’s an easier read. Clarke County, Space is written in a more modern style and is more to my liking.

Set in 2050-ish, Clarke County, Space is set in the first artificial space colony orbiting Earth. It’s the second book in Steele’s “Near Space” series (the others are Orbital Decay, Lunar Descent, Labyrinth of Night, and A King of Infinite Space), which is an optimistic future where we embraced space travel in the 1990s. (So a similar vibe to For All Mankind – without being an alternate history.)

Anyway, Clarke County, Space is a thriller, with a small-town cop, a mob assassin, a mysterious hacker, Elvis Presley’s reincarnation, and a nuclear warhead. Everything is eventually resolved, if a bit messily and with a high body count.

Inevitably, something set in the near future feels more dated than the other novels. There are videotapes, diskettes – and, of course, no internet.

I imagine the Near Space series will be good inspiration for Mongoose’s upcoming Pioneer game. But if you’re going to do that, I would start with Lunar Descent, which is my favourite of the series.

Am I keeping it? No, I don’t think so. While I found it arguably better written than the other books here, there’s not enough in it for me to keep it.