Scoring books

I’ve been keeping track of the books I’ve read since 2010, and I score each one. I don’t use Goodreads or any other app, I just make a note in a Googledoc that I have set up just for that use.

I score each book as follows:

1. I disliked this so much that I didn’t finish it.
2. A real chore to read. Possibly I struggled with the style, and I may have skimmed sections just to get through it.
3. An okay book. Nothing special, but I was happy to read it. Most books end up scoring 3.
4. A good book. I enjoyed it, and would read others by the same author. But just lacked that something special to elevate it to a 5.
5. I really enjoyed this book and didn’t want it to end.

So in 2019 I read 70 books, which is an average year for me. This includes quite a few audiobooks (I have an Audible account) which boosts the number by a dozen or so. (That number excludes all the books I score 1 - I didn’t finish those, so don’t count them.)

Better than out of 10

Of those 70 books, I scored 13 (18%) of them a 5. That’s a satisfyingly high number - life’s too short to read crappy books.

I prefer to score out of 5 than out of 10 as, if I was scoring out of 10, I suspect I wouldn’t only rarely score a book 10. (Mrs H is in a book club, and they score books out of 10 and almost nobody gives a book maximum marks.) So if I’m asked to rate a book/movie/game/whatever out of 10, I use my 1-5 scale and then just double it.

2018 in games

So how was 2018 in games for me? Pretty good, I think. Here’s what I played, wrote and ran.

Freeform Games

Freeform Games had a great 2018, with sales up on 2017. This year I finally finished The Reality is Murder, a game I’ve been editing for longer than I care to admit. We put it through playtesting over the summer and in October it finally went on sale.

Freeforms

Getting theatrical
in Shogun

The weekend freeform this year was Shogun, and I surprised myself by getting involved in a theatrical troupe. I really don’t normally do that, but it was the highlight of the game for me. At Peaky I co-wrote Love Letters: The Crusade and I played in The U-Geneva Convention and The Borden Legacy.

I did a bit of development work on Second Watch, getting it ready for a third run at Consequences (and also into a publishable state). I also started work on volumes 2 and 3 of The Peaky Files (collections of Peaky freeforms).

Daniel Taylor introduced me to Little Leeds Larps (a Facebook group), but our first attempt to run a freeform for them (The Highgate Club) didn’t get enough attendees and we are trying again in January. Still, it was a good excuse to do a bit of development work on The Highgate Club (it’s a game I’ve always wanted to return to).

Tabletop roleplaying

2018 was a great year for me - I ran more tabletop rpgs than I have in a years:

• The Fallen (Fate Accelerated). An Other London investigation that I ran with my online group. I had originally conceived this as something that could be played in an hour - but I failed badly! 
• The Crasta Demon (Fate Accelerated) at Airecon, GoPlayLeeds and with my family. Although I like running the same game over and over again, I am tempted to tweak it every single time. The GPL session was interesting - I had three players, all female. I wondered if they would play female characters (the characters are all set up as gender-neutral), but only one of them did.
• The Bone Swallower (Fate Accelerated) at Furnace (more Other London(.
• The Seeds of Doom (Monster of the Week) at GoPlayLeeds. My first PbtA game, and I wrote about it here.

My character for Megan's game

Also, Megan ran a totally improvised tabletop rpg for me and two of her cousins, which was awesome. She had a whale of a time, which was great to see. It looks like she may prefer running games to playing them.

RPGs played: Starfinder, The Cthulhu Hack, Fate, Blades in the Dark, The Sword, the Crown and The Unspeakable Power and maybe a couple of others that I don’t remember. (All of them apart from The Cthulhu Hack and Fate were new to me.)

Tales of Terror

I published 37 Tales of Terror on the new website in 2018. That’s a little down on 2017, but I have been publishing a lot from the 1996 Tales of Terror collection (ToT#2, as I think of it) and none of these have been published online before.

Boardgames

I have been recording my boardgames on boardgamegeek.com for a few years now. I don’t record games where I’m playing an app, unless I’m also playing another player. (So if I play Ticket to Ride on my own, I don’t record it. If I’m playing it against Megan or Emma, then I do.)

So this year I played 221 boardgames in total, of 48 different games. The games I played most of were the ones I can play solo - so the games I played most were Tiny Epic Galaxies, D-Day Dice and Star Realms: Frontiers.

New games to the Hatherley games library were:

• Set: A very simple pattern-matching game that Megan usually thrashes me at. 
• Impulse: By Carl Chudyk. I really like his Glory to Rome and Red 7, but this hasn’t worked for me and I won’t be keeping it.
• Tiny Epic Galaxies: I really like this, a push-your-luck dice game with spaceships. It has solo rules, which means that I have played this more than any other game this year. (That also means that my family won’t play this with me because I’m too good at it.)
• Rhino Hero Super Battle: An awesome balancing game - very family friendly.
• Star Realms Frontiers: I Kickstarted this and it arrived in September. I really like Star Realms, but it’s always much easier just to play it on the app rather than get the cards out. This is probably my favourite set of cards though.
• London (second edition): Much prettier than the first edition, I’ve not played it enough to work out how much I like it.
• Pandemic Legacy Season 2: Christmas present and I expect to play through that in 2019. More on Pandemic below.
• Crypt: I Kickstarted Crypt and it turned up just before Christmas. I gave it to Megan to give to me. We’ve played a few games so far - it’s taken me a few games to get the hang of it..

Our last game of Pandemic Legacy

I finally played through season 1 of Pandemic: Legacy. I started playing it with Megan, but she got fed up with it by about August. I enjoyed the story aspect of Pandemic: Legacy, but July-August-September was a bit of a grind. The game did then pick up in October and November, with the changes taking place then having a really big impact on the game, which I really liked. (There was a point in my first November game where I considered deliberately throwing the game because of how it would affect later games. Which I guess is a sign of a good legacy game.) Megan then joined me for the finale in December: we lost the first game (on outbreaks), but got ourselves in a good place to win our last game. We ended on 799 points (“Disaster Averted”). Had St Petersburg not had an outbreak in our last game then we would have been at 802 “Legendary”.

Videogames

Videogames were dominated by World of Tanks Blitz (again - and despite trying to give it up a year ago), with Star Realms (the app) a close runner up.

2019 in games

Next year will be more of the same. In no particular order I’m looking forward to Peaky, The Torch of Freedom (2019’s weekend freeform), running The Highgate Club, Furnace, Airecon and there will be more Kickstarters arriving.

Plus Mrs H gave me the best Christmas ever: a promise to play more games!

Best present ever! Tickets to play more games!