It’s lockdown time again in the UK, which is making me a bit sad, and I want to do something to alleviate the pain. I don’t have a lot of time or energy, and nor do any of my friends, so it has to be something simple. For my birthday this year, my wife made me a schedule of heist films to watch week on week, and I absolutely loved it, so I thought I’d do the same for lockdown and make it public. I’d pick a theme and put together a list of 4 films, one a week, based around it. Everyone’s busy, so there’s no scheduled viewing, no scheduled discussion: just watch the film, if you like, and talk about it, if you like.
I picked this game up on Nintendo Switch after The Computer Game Show recommended it a year or two ago, and it took a while, but I finally got round to it. It’s a short game, 2-3 hours or so, and it’s pretty simple. It is described as an “exploration adventure” game, which is definitely true, but it doesn’t tell you what makes it special - Far: Lone Sails is a game that manages to be about exploration when you can only move in one direction.
Well, we’re half way through 2020, so this is rather late, but here it is!
2019 was a fantastic year in board games for me. My wife and I got into the habit of playing most Sundays, and I tried hard to get out to the Witney board gaming club as much as possible. I haven’t written about every game I played (there are over 50 in the list), but here’s a selection of things I wanted to write about.
I wrote down all the games I played in my diary this year, so this is a complete list of everything.
I’m sure this is very few games in the grand scheme of things, but it is a lot for me. I completed 8 games, and played quite a few hours of multiplayer games. This year I re-discovered that I’m much happier digging into things in depth rather than playing as many games as possible - I cancelled all of my gaming podcast subscriptions and just got on with playing what I wanted. The Nintendo Switch has been a huge enabler for me - playing on my commute has been a delight.
A long time ago I did a bit of martial arts. The art that I learned practiced pushing hands, which is a very slow, controlled kind of “fighting” - it is a way of being in the moment with another person, focused entirely on their next move and the flow of the battle. It is meditation in motion. My teacher said he grew up reading about masters of the arts fighting for hours and, as a young boy, he believed they were locked in fierce combat, but as he grew up he learned that they were, in fact, moving slowly, pausing to consider their movements, consider each other, slowly choreographing the entire meditation together.