Holiday games

Since I've listed a few board games recently, I might as well continue the trend by listing the new ones that we played on holiday.  These were brought by calum and puzzle .  Most of them are fairly quick card games.

Quiddler is a word-based card game.  It plays like rummy but you have to make words rather than sets.  This is fun for adults and is also highly suitable for kids too.  Unlike most card games, you don't necessarily have to make long words to win.  Saddly, it doesn't seem to be available in the UK.

Turn the Tide is a bidding game with a simple twist.  Each turn, the players bid on two value cards.  The winner takes the lower valued card, the person in second place takes the other, and everyone else doesn't get a card.  Then, whoever has the highest value card in front of them loses a life.  So the aim is (generally) not to come second in the auction.

In Loot, you have a hand of merchant ships and four colours of pirate ships.  Merchant ships are worth points and can be captured by pirates.  You play a merchant ship in front of you to bring it in to play.  You can play pirates on merchant ships in front of any player.  To win them, you need higher value pirates (of one suit) than any other player.  It's a simple mechanic but works well.

A similar mechanic is found in James Ernest's Totally Renamed Spy Game.  Here, you play cards to build a mastermind's lair, then play spies into the lair.  The aim is either to destroy an opponent's lair or to catch a spy in your own.  Once you catch a spy, you can increase the value of your victim by playing taunt cards on them.  The fun comes largely from the silly quotes on the cards.  It's not a game you should take too seriously.

Spooks is a simple card game in the style of Uno.  Players take turns to play cards.   The cards you are allowed to play depend on what card was played immediately before.  E.g. you might have to play a number one above the previous card, or the same number or suit.  The winner is the player who gets rid of their cards first.

Dutch Blitz is more unusual in that all four players play simultaneously.  It's basically a variation on Racing Demon, given a special deck. Each player plays a game of patience, but all players share the building piles in the centre of the table, so you have to watch what other players are doing in order to get rid of your own cards too.  It requires quick thinking and observation and therefore I am rubbish at it!

A meatier game was provided by Civilization: The Card Game.  This game free with a boxed set of the computer game and is similar in theme.  It plays well and offers a number of different ways to win.  (In a previous post, we confused this with Through The Ages, which was also tagged as "Civilization the card game" but seems to be a different beast).

We tried out Bazaar, which I bought at Manorcon.  This is quite a simple game in which you trade up different coloured gems until you have the right combination to buy one of the top cards from a deck, and repeat.  There isn't much player interaction, except that you are competing for the same cards.  Like many of the games here, it makes a good quick game.

We also played some of the games that I mentioned earlier.  Hare and Tortoise is a classic and works well for all the family. Guillotine is short, silly and fun.  Citadels is a good city-building card game.  On one rainy afternoon, we even played an 18xx game - Steam Over Holland.

From the above list, you might think we did nothing else all week, but most of these games were short and played in the evening after supper.  They all added fun to our holiday.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone

We have all heard of the mistakes made by the USA occupation of Iraq.  The disbanding of the army, which caused unemployed soldiers to join the resistance.  The inability to enforce security.  The failure to put Iraqis themselves in charge.  Antagonising key groups and failing to understand who was important.  Failing to reestablish health care, electricity supplies and basic security.  But it's very different to read a well-written book that describes how these bad decisions came to be made. 

If Rajiv Chandrasekaran's reportage is accurate, then the sheer level of incompetence, verging on negligence, is jaw-dropping.  He describes the work of the CPA (the civilian USA administration of Iraq) during the year following the invasion.  He describes the lack of planning beforehand, the fairytale approach to imposing new structures on a completely non-american society, and the infighting between the various government agencies.  He shows how some of the people appointed were massively underqualified.  And he does so in a clear, easy-to-read style that eschews polemic.

Some caveats apply.  This is journalism, not historical analysis.  It follows some of the people involved in the CPA, which gives the book a good set of storylines but does not give a complete picture.  It only follows the civilian administration, without covering the military efforts.  There are times where Chandrasekaran seems to criticise all possible options, for instance suggesting at one point that a stricter curfew after the invasion might have been welcome by Iraqis, yet suggesting elsewhere that the presence of American troops encouraged dissent.  Also, he doesn't consider whether perhaps the occupation was doomed to meet high levels of insurgency, whatever the Americans and their allies did.

I highly recommend this, although possibly not if you suffer from high blood pressure, as many of the events described could generate feelings of outrage and anger.  I found it fascinating to read and hard to put down.  There might well be other good books about Iraq, but for my first book on the topic, this was an excellent introduction.

Imperial Life In The Emerald City won the 2007 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction.