Working away on the OASIS test suite again. My numbers are now 2742 run, 1549 failures, 53 errors. Progress, I'd call it.Getting better all the time :) 2742/1492/30 [added 23rd Mar 2007]
2742/1486/30. Yay [added 23rd Mar 2007]
2742/1483/30 [added 23rd Mar 2007]
2742/1477/30. I really should get on with my conference slides. [added 23rd Mar 2007]
2742/1421/30. Should really be in bed now. [added 24th Mar 2007]
2742/1409/30. Ok, that's it. [added 24th Mar 2007]

[Add a comment]

asked Hal when I got him up this morning. "I want to play that game with them. Not the complicated game you were playing the other day. The game that goes in the chest. The snakes and ladders game."

"Sorry, little Hal" I replied, "they went home yesterday."

"Will they come back again?"

"Yes, but not for a while, but I'm maybe we can play a game with them next time." By the time they do come again, we'll probably be able to play something a little more advanced than snakes and ladders.

The friends in question were my Warps chums Andy and Anton, who had been over for the weekend. Our fourth man, JD, was unable to make it due to rather thoughtlessly knocking his wife up even thought he knew the date and everything. At University, we were all pretty solid role-play games. As grown-up occasional gamers, it's board gaming all the way with beer drinking and curry on the side. Yes, beer drinking and curry, get lost.

For some time our game of choice has been Carcassonne, which is a terrific game, clever and subtle. Daniel joined us for a game, got a racing start and very nearly won it. Little git. We also had a Tom Wham double bill of Awful Green Things From Outer Space followed by Kings and Things. Probably means nothing to most of you reading this, but I'm sure someone somewhere will be having a little nostalgia moment. The surprise hit was the Dungeons and Dragons board game, which Andy had picked up for a few quid in a remindered bookshop. It's published by Parker, who make family boardgames that you buy in places like Toys'R'Us, and so as seasoned gamers we our expectations weren't high. To our surprise and pleasure, it's really quite a neat game and when we reconvene at Anton's place in September, we'll play it some more.

We first clocked onto Carcassonne more or less by chance. We were having our second Warps get together, at Anton's place. On a whim, I made my first visit to a games shop in probably 10 years, Dungeons and Starships in Digbeth (now defunct I think). There was a game going on around a large table in the back half of the shop. They didn't look up. If you've read High Fidelity, you might recall the description of the record shop and how it's kept deliberately gloomy to deter casual trade. Dungeons and Starships had that feel, but nonetheless the chubby, bearded young chappy behind the counter, resplendent in purple shirt, was friendly and polite. I told him I want a game for gamers who hadn't gamed for ages. He went over and consulted briefly with the gamers, and pointed me at Carcassonne.

And they were right. Carcassonne is a top game. It's rules are simple, but subtle. I've played it with four, three, and two players and it works equally well in each case, although what makes good strategy changes. (That's not always the case, a game like Cosmic Encounter, for example, stinks up the place with two or three but comes alive with five or six.) You can play the game with a variety of strategies, there's a balance of luck and skill, and it rewards cooperative play at least to a certain extent.

Carcassonne is a tile laying game, so you build the board as you go and it's different every time. Each player, in turn, draws a tile from the box. Each tile features some combination of a road, a field and/or a city. You play your tile next to the tiles already on the table, matching up the features. You score points for completing a road or a city, or controlling a field. When all the tiles are placed, the game ends. A variety of expansions add extra tiles or add new rules - increasing the score of a city, say, but increasing the risk of not scoring at all.

If you're a lapsed gamer, or you want something more interesting to play with your kids, give it a look.

I've started playing Carcassonne with Daniel. If he pays attention, he stands a reasonable chance of winning. On a tip off, Uncle Al bought Daniel Carcassonne - The Castle. It's a version of the original game reworked and tweaked for two players. Instead of building up an unbounded landscape, the tiles are placed within the bounds of a castle's wall. The scoring track runs around the edge of the board, and as you progress you can collect special counters which give extra rule variations. We have a good time with it. It's fun.

I'm in the middle of writing a conference presentation which talks about some of what Mango does, I'm struggling for an example, and bam! There it is, what I need is an iterator that traverses a list in reverse order. So I wrote a test, wrote an iterator, then wrote it again in under five minutes. It's in subversion now.

You can pull the Mango code from

  svn co svn://jezuk.dnsalias.net/jezuk/mango/trunk

First ice cream van of the year. It was extremely loud but I didn't recognise the tune.

Previous years:

• 21 March 2006
• 14 February 2005
• 13 February 2004