Winston Churchill: If you would know a man's character, only observe how he plays a game.

James Crosfield writes:

Do you fancy going to Salute this year (24th April) I could pick you up on the way to London. I could also call at Salisbury and pick up anyone from there. Quite happy for you to advertise my Salute taxi on Nimrods.

I will order tickets and parking in advance in about three weeks time.

Drop me an email if you fancy going and would like a lift with James. I can't make it this year but had a good time when I went last year ( in spite of selling off my copies of Empires in Arms and Pacific War in the Bring and Buy at stupidly low prices.)

I am soloing Clash of Giants, the Marne scenario, at the moment. Excellent hex wargame, simple rules, big counters, ideal for gaming geezers like me. It's turn 5 and the Germans are running out of steam, and looking nervously at the huge fortified camp of Paris sitting menacingly on their right flank. The BEF have rallied, and are cautiously moving forward again from the deep south where they finally stopped running. Solo gaming, that's what I am reduced to these days. Still, I am going to Baycon with Nick this year, 15th - 18th April, where the guest list includes the legendary Reiner Knizia. Now a game of Euphrat & Tigris with the designer - that would compensate for the weeks of gaming famine!

It's years since I did this, but I've decided to build my own PC again. I've been having a lot of fun with my new digital camera, but my grotty old work laptop doesn't really cut it for processing the photos. These days there are alternatives to the beige tower for the home system builder. You can get huge perpex cases full of flashing neon lights. (Hmmm - not sure if that's me somehow.) Or one of these babies - a Shuttle barebones system, which is what I have ordered. It's a compact aluminium case with its own form factor motherboard built in. Just plug in an AMD XP2500 chip, a 120Gb Seagate Barracuda drive, and half a gig of memory, and you've got a pretty nice system for £350. Plus another £70 for Windows XP which I am buying, yes Gavin, buying as well. Only two slots but it has lots of connectivity and GeForce graphics built in. Should be pretty good for games too.......

Episode 1 of "Dunkirk" on BBC2 last night was excellent. Filmed in the same edgy handheld style as "Band of Brothers", which can deliver real emotional punch when you briefly glimpse shocking events almost out of the corner of your eye. It also used a lot of archive footage intercut with the acted scenes, which I thought might be irritating but actually was very effective and gave us scenes of large-scale chaos and destruction which would have been impossibly expensive to do any other way.

I'm still shocked and angered by the scene where British POWs were crammed into a barn by the SS then massacred with grenades. Knowing that this was a reconstruction from a first-hand account makes it worse somehow.

I also felt a vague sense of shame throughout the episode. The British Army of 1940 was such a shambles - years of disarmament and appeasement had left us totally unable to stand up to the Wehrmacht. And from what I've read of WW2 history this amateurism persisted well into 1942 - Narvik, Dunkirk, Crete, Gazala, Singapore, a miserable sequence of botched defeats, often at the hands of inferior forces.

Anyway, unmissable stuff, I'll be there again tonight for episode 2, with the VCR running too.

Someone just failed to sell a Medieval Castle on EBay!

Alan Emrich, of Totaler Krieg fame, is running an eleven week game design course at Stanford University:

Principles of Game Design is a ‘how to’ course designed to teach you the fundamental philosophies of game design and apply them in a hands-on manner using a step-by-step process that develops your ‘game design muscles.’

Talking of work, I have a new boss now who is actively getting me lots of interesting work to do. Which explains why the blog has taken a back seat recently. Blogging was a way for me to stay sane through months of under-utilization and boredom at work. So don't worry if I don't post much - it probably means I'm happy and busy in my work.

Good grief, I've just returned from a meeting where yet another departmental reorganization was announced, with more to follow. And we're still coming to terms with the fallout from the last two reorgs. As a company we seem to be reaching the point where reorganization is more or less continuous, there are never times when the structure is stable for a while until the next upheaval - it's all upheaval. Maybe I could write a trendy new management guru type book about The Liquid Company and make loads of money so I wouldn't have to work in one any more......

The flat-warming party last Saturday went really really well. Lots of people turned up. Before a party I always have this secret cold fear that no-one will come and I will finally be forced to face the truth that I've been hiding from for so long - that I've become a sad old man with no friends. But no, not yet anyway - the place was full of happy looking folk who had made the effort to come over to Farnham on a windy winter's night.

Phil and Harriet did a fantastic job of the food, they spent the whole of Saturday in a gin-fuelled haze, producing delicious nibbles for the throng.

One game was actually played, at 2am by Nick Phil and me. Nick was desperate to play a game but my collection was locked in a room where a married couple were sleeping, so the only game available was "Formula Carts". You can't get this in the shops, only one copy exists, designed and manufactured by Phil as in infant. It's a bit low in decision points, but it was an exciting race and it only took 10 minutes to complete (always a plus for any game!) I wonder how much it would fetch on eBay?

One of the last things the BBC ever does may be to publish a photo by Gavin: BBC NEWS | Magazine | In Pictures | Your pictures: Britain's cold snap

You have to scroll through 16 good photos, then you get to Gavin's.

Tempting - you can now buy Martian Chessboard Sections.

I am busy preparing for my housewarming party on Saturday (if you think you should be invited but haven't been, please let me know!). Cleaning bathroom, moving all unpacked boxes to one corner, disposing of unironed laundry, putting half-played games away, that sort of thing. Phil is preparing the food for me so I have also been working through his emailed shopping lists of mysterious ingedients - this is a bit like opening a new jigsaw puzzle, I have no idea what all these bits are for, but they look pretty.

You can never be sure how many people will turn up. If half the people who have promised to come don't turn up, there will be about 10 of us - on the other hand if half the people who have said they might turn up actually turn up there will be 40 of us, some of whom will be drinking wine from mugs and using hands for plates.

I've just been made aware of the excellent Taxonomy of Icehouse Games, which lists but also classifies IceHouse games to fit the structure proposed by David Parlett's Oxford History of Boardgames.

Stop posting for a few days and I get more visits than ever! Yesterday in particular was a bumper day. Hmmm - is this pointing to a way forward for making nimrods a more successful weblog?

I can't make it to ManorCon again this year so perhaps Baycon is an alternative, especially as the "already booked" list includes Reiner Knizia!

Gosh I'm tired this morning. Not sure why. I went to the ceramics class at Farnham Malting yesterday evening, which was great fun and also physically tiring - which you would think would make for a good night's sleep. No such luck - I spent the whole night either being pursued by people who wanted to kill me, or waking frequently from these disturbing dreams at ungodly hours. This evening I will follow a more tried and tested route to a good night's sleep - curry and beer followed by a couple of hours hunched over the Europe Engulfed board.

I visited the Alder Valley Games Society last night, on my quest to find new opponents in this area. I made my way to the Union Building in Aldershot for the second time this year, and avoided being mistaken for an ex-para this time. Found the club members crouching over tables in a large tatty hall, and introduced myself. Bit disappointed that the emphasis was very much on CCGs and roleplaying. But on the plus side, the club's Chair is not only very cute but also female. I spent the evening watching a group roll up their characters for a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Not a great spectator sport, but they were very friendly and chatted with me about the club's history etc. Apparently the first Sunday every month is a boardgame special so I will make sure I give that a try soon.

About a year ago I decided not to P500 GMT's Ardennes 44. Rats! Chris Farrell is positively glowing with enthusiasm for the game. :

One last thing, and I think the real reason why I liked this a lot: it's a great game, and by that I mean that the game confronts you with interesting choices all the time, choices that feel like you are really playing a game and not struggling against or gaming a system, as is far too often the case in these things. I played the Germans, and I always felt like I had real options. There were several legitimate strategic choices of where to attack to get the required VPs, and then lots of operational choices as you can re-route offensives to get around traffic problems or take advantage of the same in your opponent's network, allocate your strategic movement capability wisely, budget your critical corps-level artillery, maintain flexibility to take advantage of local opportunities, and decide between blasting right through now before the Americans are reinforced or trying to work around the flank.

I went to see Spirited Away last night at Farnham Maltings, the local arts centre which shows films several times a month. I liked the venue a lot - the rustic and rather tatty Great Hall has well raked seating (unlike many cinemas) so no sightline problems for short people like me. It was also great to turn up at 8 and have the film start on the dot, with no adverts or trailers!

And what a stunning film! This is my first experience of a Japanese anime movie, so I just wasn't prepared for the visual impact of this art-form. Apparently there are even better anime films around - wow, that's hard to imagine!

I've read criticisms (on IMDB) that this film doesn't have much of a story-line. Well, I suppose so, if you have been used to Hollywood type story construction (conflict, conflict, conflict, smart-ass dialogue, action set-piece every 10 minutes). It seems to me that Spirited Away follows the ancient fairy-story shape of a child finding a doorway into another world where she meets archetypal figures, converses with beautiful or terrifying spirits, and embarks on fantastic adventures. Echoes of C S Lewis, E Nesbit, Lord Dunsany, Brothers Grimm and so on back into the timeless depths of folklore.