Today is my 34th birthday, which isn’t cool, I can clearly remember my parents turning this age and I don’t want to be an age I can remember my parents being!
But that aside I am hoping it’s going to be a nice day, Lindsay, Megan and I will be this evening going to visit my nana before heading to either Coop Chicken House or Nando’s, where we will be joined by Paul.

And because it’s my birthday I wanted to share one of my obsessions with you, Carcassonne!

Carcassonne is my all time favourite board game, now I know it’s simple and unsophisticated, but I love it. It’s got very quick gameplay, it’s easy to learn and has a good amount of player interaction, it doesn’t give you too much analysis paralysis, but at the same time does require thought and strategy.

The base game has just over 70 tiles, which you place on the table to create a landscape of the ancient French walled city of Carcassonne and its surrounding countryside, which you then deploy Meeples onto which help score you points. I am not going to go into detail about the rules, why would I need to when you can see the excellent episode of Tabletop in which it featured below!

Now what makes it my obsession, well I own all of the expansions for the base game, that’s right every single tile official tile made for the game over 40 different expansions, though I don’t own the individual release of River II owning it inside Count, King and Robber, nor the Spielbox release of The Cults which I already own through again in Count, King and Robber and Cult, Siege and Creativity.

I even went so far as to pay extortionate sums of money to buy the Die Kornkeise and La Proxada, expansions which are very hard to get hold off, and in the case of La Proxada only 72 of them were ever made.

My Big Box of Carcassonne is rather full as you can see from the picture, Lindsay got me my first copy as Big Box 4 back in 2012, but since then I have replaced it with Big Box 5 in order to get the Wheel of Fortune expansion and the full set of Meeples for Pink and Purple as 7th and 8th player sets. I have a German version of Big Box 5 because unbelievable it cost £32 to buy it and ship it to the UK, whereas buying it here would have cost me £65, so naturally I went with the cheaper option, especially as the game is language independent.

Lindsay and Megan know of and tolerate my obsession with this game, and even allow me to have a few of the variants, those being the Winter Edition, My First Carcassonne (for when I have child guests of course), Hunters and Gathers and Star Wars. But their tolerance only goes so far, in 2014 Hans im Glück, the original publisher, decided to retire the original artwork and relaunch the game with a r refreshed look for a new edition. Now I own the base game in the new edition, but Lindsay and Megan have forbidden me from buying it’s expansions in the new artwork as well. I get where they are coming from, I don’t need the same expansion twice just because it has new artwork, but the obsessive in me is really torn by it, I feel like I “need” the expansions on the new art work, and that probably why it’s sensible I have Lindsay and Megan to look after me.

With the imminent release of Temples in Japan at Spiel next week, it will be the first new expansion in the new artwork, and that’s going to be the real test, am I willing to mix the new and the old together!!!

What I am Modelling

A slow week on this front, I bought a Furioso Dreadnought so I could begin to build an Angels Blade detachment for Blood Angels based around a Blood Angels Demi-Company, so I built that with a Frag Cannon and Power-Fist with built in Heavy Flamer and a Magna-Grapple.

What I am Reading

I just finished up the short stories in Ahriman: Exodus which lead into Ahriman: Sorcerer, and I must say, I am less impressed with those than I was with Ahriman: Exile, but I think it was the protagonist I had issues with. He seemed far too whiney for a sorcerer of the Thousand Sons, too much about how he hated Ahriman when in fact it was he who made many of the choices which put him in the positions he was in.

But the one story amongst them that did stand out was The First Prince which is also available as an audio book, and that’s mostly because it was the first appearance of Be’lakor in 40k literature and he is a very interesting character with motives all of his own, unrelated to those of the Chaos Gods.

What I am Playing

Noting really, most of my play has been restricted to iPad, and that has all bee Ticket to Ride using the India map which is fast becoming my favourite map in the game.

What I am Backing

Another one with only a little bit of time left on it, but it’s Quartermaster General 1914 by Ian Brody and published by PSG, a game set during World War I using the dynamic and quite innovate card mechanic found in the original Quartermaster General. I had a chance to play this at the UK Games Expo in June and it’s quite good, all the Strech Goals have been busted through and it’s already in production, shipping to backers this month! You can back it from £35 and if you are lucky enough to be going to Essen next week you can pick up your copy then for £40 (the extra fiver is because it’s being air freighted from China).

Anyway gontake a look it’s got 2 days left on it!

What I am Spending 

A little too much again!

I bought the Spiel 2015 card for Carcassonne, to keep my collection up to speed, it’s taken me almost a full year to get hold of this tile.

I also bought two dreadnoughts, a Furioso one which I have already built and a standard one which I have yet to build, both are destined for my Blood Angels Demi Company formations for the Angels Blade detachment.

Oh and I got the How to Paint Genestealer Cults book and the Datacards for Genestealer Cults, the Datacards as it turns out are another one of my little obsessions but that’s for another day.!