Rowan Tree and Red Thread

After the various adventures of Christmas and my daughter's illness standing in for New Year's Eve celebrations I've managed to drag myself back to work for the first time in 2005. The holidays provided me with much entertainment, anxiety and indigestion; no great change there.

I didn't read as much as I had hoped I would during the holidays, though I did read the newest edition of Ars Magica, that queen of medieval fantasy role-playing games. I was very favourably impressed with this, the fifth edition of the game and the second from publishers Atlas Games. David Chart, the writer this time around, has done a good job of paring back a lot of the rules accretions, and the whole reads much more clearly than the last edition. It's also helped by a much nicer job of the layout and presentation, with adequate artwork, pleasing borders and clever use of muted colours. My only gripe is one common to many hardbacks: the hard covers of the book seem to be warped and I've placed the book under several years' worth of Alarums & Excursions in an attempt to flatten it. I think my second edition Unknown Armies had a similar problem; does this happen a lot with Atlas Games hardbacks?

I should admit at this point that I have 4 different editions of Ars Magica but I'm yet to play any of them. Ah, the shame of the obsessive collector.

In other gaming news, I got Sam a copy of Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers for Christmas. That was a good buy. We've played it two-player about four times now, and it's perfect for the two of us. We knew from previous experience (with a friend's copy) that it was a good game for four or five, but I think it's probably better as a two player game. For anyone who knows the original Carcassonne, I think H&G is at least as good, with the hard choices of building points for the end game, blocking gains of your opponent(s) and scoring immediately to keep your points from poaching well balanced in play. The lovely paleolithic theme and art work are the icing on the mastadon cake.