Sunday, September 06, 2009

Genealogy

One of my interests is family history and genealogy. I've done some research including family interviews and even had a subscription to Ancestry.com for a year. I've been able to get some good info but had never done any serious research at libraries or a family history society.

Well, today I finally took the plunge and joined the Queensland Family History Society Inc. When I visited today the library assistant was very helpful and gave me a tour of the premises. They appear to have a wealth of information and I can't wait to get started.

The entrance to the library - image courtesy of Queensland Family History Society Inc.

The library is located at Gaythorne, a suburb on Brisbane's northside, and is conveniently only a 5-10 minute drive from where I live.

Saturday, September 05, 2009

Gaming with Grandma - 102

Another Saturday morning gaming session with my mother (AKA Grandma) and daughters Maddie (8) and Georgia (3.5). We played two games today and they were both new for us all.

First up was WobBally published by Invicta Games. WobBally is a bright, colourful and ingeniously designed dexterity game. It is similar to Jenga in that on your turn you are trying to remove pieces (marbles) of a teetering tower. In this instance it's a tower made of marbles sandwiched between seven plastic rings in seven layers. A coloured die and a numbered die determine which coloured marble from what level is to be knocked out with a short plastic rod.


The trick is to use short, sharp, horizontal jabs to dislodge the marbles. Make sure you have some way of containing the many marbles that will fly everywhere when the tower collapses. WobBally is quite a fun dexterity game for up to six people. It has a very slight luck element but overall does reward skill and precision.


Georgia was the first knocked out and Maddie was the second knocked out. That left a showdown between Grandma and me. We played ball for ball until I eventually won when Grandma made the tower come crashing down.

Our second game of the morning was a board game version of Hangman. Maddie revealed that she really enjoys this game as her school class sometimes plays Hangman on the blackboard against their teacher. We played Grandma/Maddie versus me. I won 4-0 but did use some tricky words - Sandwich, joints, salves and syringe, trying to keep away from the more commonly used letters of T, R & E.

I was obviously hungry when I was thinking of an eight-letter word to use

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Reinforcements for Patton's Best

Back on 24 May 2009 my wife picked up some board wargames for me at a garage sale. Among them was one in particular I wanted to play. That game was Patton's Best, a solitaire wargame in which you command a solitary Sherman tank and it's crew during WWII. Unfortunately the game was missing some counters.


So I contacted Ken Miffitt (BGG user BostonKen) from Connecticut, USA, who had recently uploaded a nice scan of the backs of the counters to the Board Game Geek site. There was already an image on the site of the front of the counters from another user but unfortunately the image was of a lower quality than Ken's image. So I sent a message to Ken to ask if he could provide me with a scan of the front of the counters. Although Ken had already punched the counters he was happy to oblige.

So once again a big thank you to Ken and I was pleased that my GeekGold (GG) tip to him, combined with the GG he had already earned, allowed him to purchase a GeekBadge.