HEALTH UPDATE: It's A Wash Out!

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

This week's planned walk (and tree safari) was washed out by the good ol' British weather. We were getting ready to leave but the rain started to bucket down and (according to Alexa) was here to stay for several hours.

I don't mind being caught in the rain while I'm out, but voluntarily leaving the house when the rain is this heavy just seems daft.

And to be honest, this weekend my guts have been misbehaving in ways so disgusting that I don't want to share. Rachel, kindly, attributes it to my body adjusting to my new diet.

It's probably safer that I stay in today (close to the toilet). I'm not a bear after all!

This shock to the system comes at the end of a particularly rough week. My regular nerve/muscle pains - largely in my chest and arms - were back early on and it was the worse I've endured for a very long time.

This was the closest I've come to crying off Biscuit Club, but I soldiered on and went anyway. However, this year's first scheduled meeting of Monopoly Club did have to be cancelled as I was in no state for a riotous evening of capitalist-driven board game fun and frolics.

I also couldn't escape the inevitable pain-induced black cloud that washed over me, and I found myself unenthused by anything I really should have been doing, instead collapsing in front of the television, bingeing nihilistic documentaries about outlaw biker gangs on the History Channel.

Thankfully, both the pain and the depression passed within about 36 hours and I was much more upbeat by the time of this week's medical appointment: to get the results of my recent blood test and learn the state of my blood sugar count.

The news, unsurprisingly, wasn't great - yet the nurse was wonderfully positive and upbeat. Between her and Rachel's input, I came away feeling this problem might not be as insurmountable as I'd initially feared.

As the nurse put it: my diet had been so bad that it was very easy to see where to make changes.

Yet, changes have consequences... as my body has been demonstrating today and yesterday.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Before The Tuesday Knights

After my aneurysm and stroke, I was looking for ways to keep myself entertained and so Nick, Pete and I started our Formula Dé League, playing monthly motor races and eating a lot of very hot curry.

As the Tunbridge Wells Formula De League we would race little plastic cars around boards representing a variety of Grand Prix circuits from across the globe.

The game uses the very clever mechanic of having the vehicle's different gears represented by different polyhedral dice. 

A moment of high drama during the Chinese Grand Prix

As with our current gaming we didn't always stick to the monthly schedule that we had drawn up in advance, but we still managed to rack up enough races for a couple of years (2006/2007) to give our league a sense of verisimilitude.

We each controlled a stable of two racers, competing for both individual and team glory.

Pete was Team Clover (Paddy O'Doors & Muhat Mecoate), I was Team Zerro (Damien Dash & Brian 'Whitey' Whitehouse) and Nick was Team Flamer (Antonio Wasp & Nick Nastily). Nick's Nick Nastily retired during the '06 season and was replaced by Jock Saway.

Press coverage of Nastily's retirement

During 2007, Steve joined us as Team Classic Rock for one race.

As well as creating newspaper clippings of key race-related stories, we even held "prize giving" ceremonies at the end of each year in local restaurants, handing out trophies and wooden spoons to the winners and losers.

A third year's racing was scheduled for 2008, but a resurgence of interest in roleplaying games led to the creation of the Tuesday Knights and that overtook our toy car racing exploits.

The TWFDL: Pete, Nick & I

The release of the Hollow Earth Expedition pulp adventure system had reignited Nick's enthusiasm for roleplaying games and he ran a short and sadly unfinished Edwardian campaign for Clare and I.

But it was the publicity around the publication of the Fourth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons that got me thinking about starting our own broader gaming group, replacing our board game nights (we also played the collaborative Lord Of The Rings games) with regular roleplaying sessions.

And so was born The Tuesday Knights. In the end we didn't play Fourth Edition, opting for the more old school Castles & Crusades, which was then replaced by Labyrinth Lord, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Regular board game meet-ups resumed in 2023, with the launch of Monopoly Club, where Pete gets to show off his ever-expanding collection of themed Monopoly boards for Clare, Rachel, and I.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Nick's Traveller Campaign

Until the formation of the Tuesday Knights in 2008, our longest running campaign was Nick's Traveller game, which began when we were still in school.

It followed the intergalactic adventures of Jamus Dirkson (a suave, big game hunter, Roger Moore-wannabe and ladies' man, played by Steve), and his stunted, ne'er-do-well comrade, Marcus DeChambre (a psychotic, trigger-happy, bargain basement-Wolverine, mercenary/scout, played by me).

As much as I enjoyed the gun-fu, hack'n'slash of Marcus at the time, in retrospect I realised I role-played the character very poorly and Nick was extremely tolerant of my juvenile violence obsession - no matter how much it must have screwed with his carefully plotted adventures.

Pete made guest appearances every now and again - but always playing different characters as was his M.O. during that period.

This campaign ran for years and years and only came to an end because 'real life' got in the way and meant regular gaming meets were exiled to the waste bin of history.

After Dungeons & Dragons, Traveller was the first game system of any substance that I played regularly, thanks to Nick. I would hazard a guess that, with substantial breaks, this particular campaign ran for about a decade.

As a side-project Nick also invented the Grav-Ball boardgame (kinda American football in zero-G), which in later years of school became a mainstay of the after-school games club, when we created a league. I'm not sure if we ever finished a season of that, though!

Years before Eden Studios suggested framing games of their Buffy The Vampire Slayer RPG as a television show, Nick was presenting us with Traveller adventures as on-going seasons of futuristic vid-casts.

Back in 2007, Nick kindly unearthed his log of our various adventures over the years, with annotations where appropriate.

Season 1

• 1. Loggerheads (an old Journal of The Travellers Aid Society adventure)
• 2. Rumpus on Ranther
• 3. Yo-ho-ho (river pirates in Apocalypse Now-style boats)
• 4. Wheel of Fortune (the first appearance of the Corsair Casino, a popular haunt, and Grav-Ball)
• 5. Hot Spot (archaeology in Vargr space...)
• 6. March or Die (... results in 'volunteering' for the Vargr Alien Legion)
• 7. Night-time on the Khanate (... from which I believe you ended up deserting!)

Season 2

• 1. The Mission (captured by Claw, the Ho Chi Minh of Vargrdom)
• 2. The Shooting Party (hob-nobbing with the local nobility)
• 3. We're Leaving on a Jet Plane (making their getaway...)
• 4. The Night After the Morning Before (... back to the casino)
• 5. Age Concern (a spot of big-game hunting)

Season 3

• 1. Unlucky for Some (fighting the Vargr invasion on an iceworld)
• 2. Dirkson's Dogfight Demise
• 3. Royal Dirk (in which Jamus becomes King of Andrex...)
• 4. King Kang: The TV Movie (a diplomatic mission to a mad Vargr ruler, which also involved rescuing the Marquessa, Jamus' recurring romantic partner [although he had to keep dodging the Marquess] from the harem)

The Mini-Series

• 1. Adventures in Baby-Sitting (a luxury liner - Pete was B'zarr, the head of security - escorting the Archduke's young niece and nephew home)
  
• 2. Day of the Knight (a hijack attempt - well, there had to be really)
• 3. Farewell to Arms, Hello New Order (the all-time quote of the game from Marcus de Chambre: 'I grab a beermat and rush into the toilet..' Dirkson is knighted on Deneb, Marcus deChambre gets proper bionic arms, aahhhh!)
• 4. Dirkson's Dirk (into the desert; velociraptors are mentioned)
• 5. Bungle in the Jungle (possibly some big game hunting to finish off?)
  

What I always loved about Traveller - besides the character generation system where you could kill off your creation before he'd even got to adventure - was the simplicity of the whole system, something sadly lacking in many of the modern inspired systems.

You had a handful of skills, rolled 2d6 for task resolution and your physical attributes were also your "hit points"... it really couldn't have been any easier.

Game For A Laugh

Looney Tunes Monopoly, which we played earlier this month, was one of the best

What some of you may not realise about me is that my gaming interests aren't limited to just roleplaying games and skirmish wargames. Rachel and I also host an (almost) monthly Monopoly Club.

Joining us at the table are Clare and Pete, making this a kind of spin-off from the Tuesday Knights (our roleplaying group).

Pete is a collector of the many, many themed-Monopoly sets and so every time we get together we play a different iteration of Monopoly.

In the two-and-a-half years we've been going, we've traded property and bankrupted each other in the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons to Harry Potter, James Bond to The Simpsons, and Indiana Jones to Scooby-Doo.

Our little group not only keeps a running league table of our various victories but also a table of our gradings of how well produced and how innovative these reskins of the classic game are. 

If you want to learn more about our adventures in board gaming (or just check out some of the eccentric hacks of the classic original board game), then please visit Don't Talk About Monopoly Club (it's the first rule of Monopoly Club).

All this talk of board gaming, reminds me of the recently announced documentary: The Hobby - Tales From The Tabletop.

This fascinating dive into the culture of board gamers "explores the passionate world of modern board gaming, following enthusiasts who find community and meaning through games".