More games, and a Visitor from Down South

Elizabeth came up from Oxford on Sunday to give the Geometry seminar on Monday afternoon. She was speaking about her DPhil work, which is fairly hard-core algebraic geometry (specifically, she's using geometric invariant theory to construct coarse moduli spaces for stable maps). None of us were very familiar with the background material, and so she'd put in some explanation of the ideas used: it was all clearly presented, but there was quite a lot of it, so the pace was a bit fast. I got quite a lot out of it, though. After the seminar, we went to dinner at Balbir (seriously posh Indian restaurant on Church Street) with susoeffl and the seminar convenor, then Elizabeth, susoeffl and I returned to my flat to drink gin and bizarre Welsh slivovice/whisky and to eat cheesecake that the lovely wormwood_pearl had prepared. Then we played a couple of rounds of Carcassonne until it was time for Elizabeth to get her train back to Oxford. It was excellent to see her again, and to hear her explaining her thesis topic at length and while I was sober for a change :-)

I'm increasingly impressed with Carcassonne. The game mechanics are wonderfully simple and elegant. It seems like it would benefit from more depth, but maybe there's depth there that I'm not seeing yet. And there doesn't seem to be much incentive to cooperate: maybe playing doubles (a la croquet) would help.

Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about games of that sort recently, and this morning I came up with an idea for one.

( Tobacco Lords of Glasgow (working title) )

I mentioned this to wormwood_pearl, who immediately suggested a better idea:

( Escape from Cessnock! )

If either of these get off the ground at all, I'll post some more here...

¹: Buckfast tonic wine, the preferred drink of Scotland's disadvantaged young folk.
²: The aforementioned disadvantaged young folk. The Scottish equivalent of chavs. (spits, disinfects mouth after using foul classist word)
³: The upmarket, overpriced halls favoured by students with more money than sense.
⁴: As any student will tell you, the parks are full of gangs that will gang-rape you if you venture in after dark. the_barlow informs me that this is bollocks, though some of them are used as cruising spots by gay men.