Top 5 Worst Board Games

Games are, at least in principle, a true joy, something which I have argued before is fundamental to human nature. It's generally a healthy and enriching pastime. But that's not universally true, and there is nothing quite as frustrating as being stuck playing a bad game. So here are my top 5 worst games. It should go without saying that, as with any list like this, this is all ill-informed and fully-biased opinion, and while I've tried to justify my selection in each case, your mileage may vary.

Trivial Pursuit

Okay, I'll admit, this one is a bit of a stretch. I've not got that much against Trivial Pursuit per se, and I do enjoy playing it. The problem is, I feel that quiz-based tabletop games are flawed, and this happens to be the most prominent example. Two of the most obvious flaws are limited replay value, as people get to know the questions over time, and the way in which the questions become dated (though that is a great way to release and sell new versions of your game every year! It's as if Hasbro know what they're about). 

Above all, though, my problem is that this type of game depends entirely on what you bring to the table. While all games to an extent reward learning and repeat play, I think quiz games are not learned activity in and of themselves, nor, really, is there much strategy. It's based on what you have in your head combined with the luck of the questions; there's no room for development within the game itself.

Scrabble

This one definitely comes from personal bias. I've never liked Scrabble, as much as I love messing around with words. However clear the guidelines, I find this is a game that does little more than spark endless small disputes, which take up a disproportionate amount of game time to resolve. A 'casual' game should not require a 674-page book to play effectively! Again though, a good way to sell more stuff (Hasbro again...).

The draft of the next Scrabble Dictionary.
Photo credit: Jacob Bøtter, Licensed under Creative Commons

Cluedo

Ah, now we get to the juicy stuff, where I get to start stomping on people's beloved childhood games. I know this is a game for kids, really, and that it's supposed to teach deductive reasoning, but it's just so dull. It has relatively little interactivity, player elimination (which in games that can run for longer than an hour is generally a bad thing), and builds to a usually unsatisfying conclusion.

Ultimately, it's a game where you could guess randomly on your first turn and still stand a chance of winning. If you don't do that, it essentially becomes a giant game of Guess Who, with no real lines of play or satisfying strategy. It's a game that I think you could play on your own with almost no loss in quality and tension, treating it as a logic puzzle, which begs the question, why spend your valuable time with friends and loved ones playing this when there are many finer choices?

Also, can we talk about the terrible theme/mechanics matchup is here? You're walking round a house filled with potential murder weapons with an actual murderer, essentially walking round pointing at people, asking 'was it you?', rather than worrying about the fact that there is a murderer in this spooky house with you. What's more, if your character is the murderer, you still win the game by accusing and outing yourself as the killer. In what world does that make sense?

Risk
This will be a divisive one, I'm sure, much like the game itself. I personally dislike Risk, but accept that there are those that enjoy it. The main reason I'm including it on this list is because the length of play is disproportionate to the depth of the game. Even if you enjoy Risk, there are other games out there which can give you an similar-but-better experience and play in about the same time. Game of Thrones springs to mind, whether you're into the setting or not. Heck, even Twilight Imperium would be better if you have 10 hours to spare (and if you were thinking of playing Risk, you had better!). 

Pictured: Actual Risk players.
Photo credit: Tambako The Jaguar, Licensed under Creative Commons

Those who know me well know that I have no problem with long games (hell, they're usually the ones that I enjoy the most), but I just think if you're going to invest that much time in a game, you want to have enough depth to match, and Risk is a little too one-dimensional and swingy for me, but maybe that's just down to personal preference. Also, for that length of game, I prefer I different approach to player elimination. While in games like Game of Thrones and Twilight Imperium, it is perfectly possible to eliminate other players, doing so is not necessary for the game to end, and doesn't seem to happen all that often. This means that there is more sustained interactivity for everyone who is putting the time in.

This is weirdly apt for the time, but should also 

be the fate of all Risk players everywhere.

Monopoly

This is it. The big one. 

I know I'm not alone in my hatred of Monopoly. It's another one that people often seem to love as a holdover from their childhood. But no, it's a horrible game in just about every way. If I weren't making this list, I could still write a whole post on everything that's wrong with Monopoly and feel like it was time well spent. If you are a parent, or close relative of young kids, please please please don't play Monopoly with them. There is a vast number of more worthy, rewarding, and educational games out there.

Where to start? First, the simple one; as with Risk, the playtime is waaaaay out of whack with the depth of the game. Speaking of depth, here we have Monopoly's big flaw - playing it is absolutely no fun. If you play it 'optimally', it is stagnant - almost entirely non-interactive. You buy every property you land on, do not, under any circumstances, sell them, and only trade them if it's significantly beneficial for you. If everyone's playing that way, it's quite hard to get anywhere. Outside of your turn, there is little or nothing for you to do, leaving you with lots of downtime.

What about strategy? Well, if I told you that the orange properties were the ones which were landed on most often (thanks to their placement in relation to the Jail area), what would you do with that information? Well, nothing really, since you can't control where you land, and you should be buying every property you can anyway. The game is totally lacking in meaningful decision points, which makes it, if you'll pardon the pun, 'strategically bankrupt'.

So say we all...

Then there's the little things. So many variant house rules for this game seem to exist, putting fine money under Free Parking being the most prevalent. Though here's the thing - while that seems like a cool thing to do, making a generally dead space on the board more meaningful, it just makes the game run longer by increasing the amount of money in circulation among the players, and can either bring someone back from a losing position (prolonging the game even further) or further polarise the game by increasing someone's leading position. Way to make a bad game even worse.

I think I've got most of my bile for this game out of my system, for now, so I'll leave you with this gem. According to Hasbro, the longest game of Monopoly every played lasted 1,680 hours. That is two and a third months, or approximately 210 games of Twilight Imperium. Just remember that next time someone invites you to play.

What would you put on this list? Which of these games do you still love? Why do you hate Monopoly? Sound off in the comments.

What I'm excited about from E3 2014

Edit: I blatantly missed one of the big ones
Evolve

How this one slipped me by yesterday, I don't know, especially since I had been following all the news. The newest title from the team behind Left 4 Dead, Evolve looks pretty interesting. It's a 4 v 1 multiplayer game with a team of hunters versus some giant, hulking monster, with the added bonus that the planet's flora and fauna also seem to be trying to kill you. This looks genuinely exciting, but I feel it will have the caveat that most of these games have - the ceiling for fun will be strictly reserved for when you can fire this up with 4 friends, and I don't think that that will be quite often enough. It might also get repetitive, but Left 4 Dead generally managed to overcome that.

Rise of the Tomb Raider (2015)

Scant few details on this yet, but I'm pretty stoked. I found Tomb Raider (2013) to be unexpectedly brilliant, and it held up magnificently when I replayed it a few weeks ago. Plenty of room for screw ups, I guess, but I have high hopes, bolstered by the fact that, as I infer from Twitter, at any rate, Rhianna Pratchett will be returning to write it.

Alien: Isolation

I haven't been following this one too closely, but we're about due for another decent Alien game. Seriously, it's such a great IP, it's difficult to imagine how any competent studio couldn't produce at least a passable game from it if given half a chance (*cough* cheap shot *cough*). It looks innovative enough it it's approach it will at least be interesting to watch as it develops.

Batman Arkham Knight

No colons here. This is an easy win for me. I've loved every instalment in the series so far, including Arkham Origins, produced by a different studio. At worst, if they just clone the gameplay from any of the previous ones, I'll still be happy, so don't necessarily trust my opinion here. The gameplay teaser trailer was interesting, though the (admittedly extremely narrow) snapshot of the writing and voice acting sounded a little off to me. Still, can't go too far wrong. Let's just hope it doesn't live up to my recent pedigree regarding delayed games.

Mass Effect 4

Again, the details are basically non-existent, but I have almost total faith in Bioware, assuming EA don't get their grubby paws too far into the honey-filled genie bottle.

Grand Theft Auto V

...on PC. Most of the news outlets have been focussing on the 'on PS4' angle, but I'm a PC purist when it comes to GTA. One of my greatest regrets about Rockstar is that they may never publish the unparalleled Red Dead Redemption on PC.

Grim Fandango Remastered

I never got to play the original, but any case where old LucasArts games are being remade is an automatic win, as far as I'm concerned.

What's Wrong with Watch Dogs

Okay, so I made a mistake. I let myself get excited by a game. I told myself I wouldn't, not again, the pain just wasn't worth it. But nothing quite compares with that siren-song lure of flashy marketing blandishments designed specifically to appeal to my geek brain. What better time to be reminded of this than during E3?

So, a couple of weeks ago, my mental train became the rhythmic judder of 'WatchDogsWatchDogsWatchDogs'. I pre-ordered it, I took a day off work so I could play it at launch, and went to some lengths to pre-load it so it was set to go on release.

Launch Day Expectation

There were two things that should have set off alarm bells from the start. Firstly, the review embargo - the date before which journalists are barred from publishing their reviews - wasn't until launch day. That bothered me. The obvious deduction from this is that the game publishers have concerns about how it is going to be received and are running damage limitation on their day-one sales and pre-orders. But this isn't a universal warning sign - there are plenty of great games which have held their reviews until launch day. So, hope against hope, I wasn't too put off.

Launch Day Reality

Much has already been written about the second alarm bell (which, in retrospect, was more of a biohazard containment failure warning klaxon), which was that the game would be delivered digitally, on PC at least, through UPlay, Ubisoft's carbuncle of a games platform. Needless to say, to the surprise of literally no-one, there were many, many problems extending from launch day into the rest of that week (some of which are still issues for me - read on). You can read plenty about this elsewhere, but needless to say, f&#! DRM and its criminalisation of legitimate users.

For anyone not familiar with what Watch Dogs is, you play as Aiden Pearce, hacker extraordinaire, blasting his way around a hyper-connected Chicago with pretty predictable, revenge-based motivations, unsurprisingly rooted in the death of one or more close friends or loved ones.

Snark aside, I had high hopes for the story. It struck me that a game about a morally-grey hacker going toe-to-toe with the seedy immoral underside of a hyper-connected, near-future Chicago, backed by a major studio ploughing AAA-level dollars into a game for which they've been driving the hype train for months sounded like it would be anything but boring.

Yeah, about that...

Early on, I was lulled into a false sense of security by a pretty engaging if slow-paced start. I was hoping this would be a nice slow build into something increasingly pacey and far-reaching, much like the 'classic' generation of 3D GTA games (461 words before the inevitable GTA comparison). What I got was something that slowly devolved into an increasingly formless mush.

For reasons that I shall explain below, I can't actually comment on the story in its entirety, but the 60% or so that I made it through was punctuated with weird tangents that didn't really go anywhere or mean anything on their own. There was a sort of meandering feel to the missions where none of them were that interesting in isolation, and I found myself waiting for a payoff that never really came.

The worst example that I played was at the climax of the first act. For reasons that don't entirely merit going into, Aiden decides that he needs to sneak into a prison to intimidate a potential witness into keeping his identity a secret, citing fears of risk to his family.

Partway through the mission, the situation changes when another group drag off the witness in question, ostensibly to kill him. Aiden reacts roughly along the lines of 'oh no, I have to get to him before they kill him'. I may just be a heartless bastard, but this made absolutely no sense to me.

You can play Aiden as a freedom-fighter style hacktivist, or a self-interested criminal - that's an intentional-if-meaningless choice the developers have given you. Here, his reaction didn't quite jibe right with either. While Aiden might feel a genuine sense of horror that this street thug is about to get killed (notwithstanding the scores of people Aiden himself kills throughout the game with far less provocation), he didn't exactly sneak into a prison to save him. What's more, if the thug does die, it solves Aiden's problem anyway.

I say 'solves the problem', but it actually doesn't. Nor does Aiden's 'Tryhard of the Year' intimidation attempt. Because by this point, there is already a clear threat to Aiden's family, and throughout the game Aiden's real identity as the vigilante hacker is repeatedly advertised on the radio with a repetitiveness seemingly designed to make me intentionally slam my car into a wall. What you are left with is a mission which does not advance the main plot, does not make an interesting climax for the first act, and which is ultimately pointless. This is one example, and a particularly egregious one, but it's not alone.

The story is best summed up as 'filler', something on which to hang the gameplay, which left me waiting for the real beat to drop and the pace and tension to ratchet up. I'm still waiting.

While, for me, the story is what usually makes or breaks a game, I accept that this is far from the only thing that matters, and games are many things to many people. I can forgive a weak story where there is excellent gameplay that carries the experience, particularly in an open-world environment which lets you to inject your own narratives.

My overwhelming reaction to Watch Dogs' gameplay was - it's fun. It was consistently enjoyable for the 23 hours I've somehow rack up so far. That said, it's nothing groundbreaking, which in itself, is fine - not everything can be truly new and exciting, except that, in the case of Watch Dogs, that's precisely what was being hyped as.

Hacking is the obvious 'innovation' here, and it makes you feel empowered in exercising control over the environment. For the most part, though, it is just hitting buttons at the right time, and when driving, it often doesn't work quite as responsively as it needs to. There's also a pretty limited range of things you can hack. In close-quarter encounters, it generally didn't feel all that impactful compared with using your guns.

I actually found the gunplay more satisfying than the hacking. It's very well implemented, and one of the stronger sides of the gameplay. The obvious problem with that is that the game is meant to be all about hacking. Shootouts are all too often unavoidable, and there generally isn't enough incentive to use your phone over your guns.

Beyond the main storyline, the map is packed with other things to do. And I mean packed, like a rush-hour tube full of sardine tins, to the extent that the icons on the map seem to be trying to crowd each other out.

Many of these side-quests and activities were very diverting, and I sunk a lot of time into them, with the attitude of 'just one more' again and again (and again). But given the choice between a better-developed story, one that grips me at my very core and leaves me trembling at the knees and coming back again and again (I'm looking at you, Bioshock Infinite), versus crawling around a map from location to location completing yet another flavour of 'find the thing', I think it's pretty clear which I'd choose. One of these I will happily experience over and over, repetitiveness be damned, while the other, well, I'd be unlikely to do it even once. Watch Dogs, sadly, falls firmly into the latter camp.

So, a good way into the plot, I found myself a pretty deflated. Not wholly disappointed, but disillusioned about so many 'almost good' things in the game that hadn't quite come to fruition. So now, we come to the big roadblock, rising from the ground in front of us as if guided by some unseen hacker; the giant red rubber stamp over my whole experience with the game.

My Watch Dogs experience. Sadly, I'm the car in this scenario.

While playing the online mode where you invade another player's game (where the game comes closest to brilliance), I died, and came back to my own game world, finding myself with...nothing. None of my unlocked weapons, skills, nothing. This was distressing, to say the least. Apparently, I was not alone. While everything remained tangibly unlocked in the games menu, it effectively blocked me from doing very much, and certainly from continuing with the main story. Astoundingly, this still appears not to be fixed, more than two weeks on. This from a game that was delayed for more than six months to get it right.

This was the defining test of the game for me. With no easy fix in sight, I was faced with starting over if I wanted to continue the story in the near future, and, confronted by that prospect, I discovered that I just wasn't excited enough to do so. Up to that point, I had been enjoying an admittedly flawed game, but this brush with a near-enough game-breaking bug was jarring enough to remove the last of the gloss, and I've barely been back to it. Disappointingly, I haven't even found myself craving to fire it back up, instead burying myself in tried-and-true alternatives, and that realisation was pretty disappointing.

The bottom line? Watch Dogs is a fun game, but it could, and should, have been so much more. The prospect of a fun game alone would not have been a good enough to draw to get me to content with UPlay and launch-day disasters, but that's just a testament to the power and success of the game's marketing engine (if you want an idea of how hyped this game was, when the delay was originally announced, Ubisoft shares dropped 26%). Would I still recommend it? Just. But only if you find it at a significant discount and, ideally, if you can somehow avoid using UPlay at all. Just wait for the bugs to get fixed first.

The Real Watch Dog

Context Is Everything

It's amazing the difference a small piece of contextual information can make. I'm not sure precisely what reminded me of this this morning (when I get up early, my mind tends to jump around between things with no particular direction. There's just no stopping it.), but this is something that struck me with one of the books I read towards the end of last year, Neuromancer, by William Gibson.

I had it in my head that Neuromancer was one of the classics of science fiction, the book that dragged cyberpunk kicking and screaming into the light, biofeedback wires still attached and throbbing. As I started, I checked the published date via Amazon (since they provided the esteemed vehicle through which I would be reading it). 2011. Huh. I guess I must have been thinking of some other seminal piece of future-looking fiction.

So I read it, and it was fine. Good, but not the amazing book I had been led (or, perhaps, had led myself) to expect.The style was oddly confusing, and a lot of the concepts seemed stale, or poorly handled. Then I reached the end, and found the actual copyright notice. 1984. Well, that makes more sense. The concepts seemed overused because they have been aped by just about every instance of the cyberpunk genre in every medium since. The style and aesthetic felt a little jumbled because it wasn't projecting technological advances of the next 20 years, it was preempting those of the last 20.

Now, that didn't make me enjoy the book more in retrospect, as such, but it did provide an important piece of missing information which made me re-evaluate how I viewed the book. To put it another way, divorcing a book from its context can fundamentally change how we experience it (as does adding our own contexts), which, now that I say it, seems bleedin' obvious. But Neuromancer was one of the places where I've been able to observe this specifically, rather than continuing to bask in contextual ignorance after the fact.

What pieces of information have radically changed the way you view things? Not just limited to books, but to all media; I think music is a particularly good one for this.

-----

Now for some general updates. Clearly, I haven't been blogging much on here, to the surprise of no-one. As ever, busy busy. I have been reading a respectable-enough amount, though understandably not at the rate I did last year. I'm still working on a spidering number of writing projects, though, I seem to have been for a while without producing anything finished. I'm in a bit of a 'sprint' right now with a bunch of first drafts, and them am going to endeavor to turn out something shareable in the near future. Blogging shall continue, as far as is practical!


Above image taken from Wikipedia; using book covers to illustrate a piece about the work should constitute Fair Use.

Journey's End

Well, it's officially done. I have just set down Patick Ness' A Monster Calls, which you must read (you will cry), which makes 52 for 52. I was dimly worried that I would finish this one just in time, only to count up to find one missing and have to spend New Year's Eve powering through something else...

The blogging certainly got a bit lax towards the end (okay, a lot lax), but the reading continued, and that's what matters. I want to share some more thoughts on a couple of them, and highlight the best books of this year, but that's for another time.

Though this had better not be the end! The last thing I now want to do is go back to not reading. If nothing else, I've amassed a large number of recommendations to work my way through, and reminded myself of many other books which I've read previously that I'd love to revisit, but haven't for reason of GRaBaW metrics. So, this is not so much the end of the journey, as a breathing point at the end of the first leg.

So, I wish you all a very happy New Year, and leave you with the full, final list of books.

Fragile Things - Neil Gaiman (2006)
The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern (2011)
The Revolution of Saint Jone - Lorna Mitchell (1988)
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - John Le Carré (1974)
I Can Make You Hate - Charlie Brooker (2012)
Looking For Jake and Other Stories - China Miéville (2005)
The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett (1989)
The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter (1979)
Jobs* - Walter Isaacson (2012)
The Plague - Albert Camus (1947)
Ready Player One* - Ernest Cline (2011)
Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ - Phillip Pullman (2010)
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (1931)
Storm Front* - Jim Butcher (2000)
Anansi Boys - Neil Gaiman (2005)
Fool Moon* - Jim Butcher (2001)
Iron Man: Extremis - Warren Ellis (2006)
Ultimate Thor Vol.1 - Hickman, Pachego & Vines (2010)
How To Eat Out - Giles Coren (2001)
How To Be A Woman - Caitlin Moran (2011)
In The Garden of Beasts* - Erik Larson (2011)
Pirate Cinema - Cory Doctrow (2012)
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury (1953)
The Long Earth - Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter (2012)
The Illustrated Man* - Ray Bradbury (1951)
The Long War - Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter (2013)
The Player of Games - Iain M Banks (1988)
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card (1985)
Stardust - Neil Gaiman (1998)
The Knife of Never Letting Go* - Patrick Ness (2008)
The Ocean at the End of the Lane* - Neil Gaiman (2013)
Facing Violence - Sgt. Rory Miller (2011)
The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins (2008)
Terra* - Mitch Benn (2013)
Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins (2009)
Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins (2010)
Fables vol.1: Legends in Exile - Bill Willingham (2002)
Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader - Neil Gaiman (2009)
Feed - M T Anderson (2002)
Oryx & Crake - Margaret Atwood (2003)
Carrie* - Stephen King (1974)
The Android's Dream* - John Scalzi (2006)
The Graveyard Book* - Neil Gaiman (2008)
Fortunately, the Milk... - Neil Gaiman (2013)

The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula Le Guin (1969)

Boneshaker* - Cherie Priest (2009)

Reading Like A Writer - Francine Prose (2012)

Altered Carbon - Richard Morgan (2002)

Celtic Fairy Tales - Joseph Jacobs (1892)

Consider Phlebas* - Iain M Banks (1987)

Neuromancer - William Gibson (1984)

A Monster Calls - Patrick Ness (2011)

(Bank)notes for women!

You may have followed the Women on Banknotes campaign earlier this year (led by Caroline Criado-Perez - who received a lot of abuse on Twitter for her successful campaign). She started a petition (which garnered 35,000 signatures) to appeal the decision to replace the only representation of a woman on British banknotes currently in circulation (Elizabeth Fry, prison reformer) with yet another man (Winston Churchill). The campaign was successful, in that old WC (£5) will still be replacing Lizzie F (in 2016), but in, turn, Charles Darwin (£10) will be replaced (in 2017) by a new female person, Jane Austen.

So why am I complaining? There’s still going to be a woman on a banknote!

The thing is, including those two new, yet-to-be-released notes, there have been seventeen people on British banknotes, since the introduction of putting people on ’em, in 1970. Three of whom have been or will be women (Florence Nightingale did a long stint on the tenner 1975-1994; Elizabeth Fry rocked up on the fiver in 2002 and is still in circulation). That means that, overall, between 1970 and 2017, 17% of people on banknotes were female. Now, that is a totally stupid and useless statistic, I’ll admit. As any able-minded person can work out, from the information here given, for eight years there wasn’t a single woman on a bank note!

So I say: let’s have eight years where it’s only women on ’em!

(And then another four decades where seventy-five percent of the folk represented are women.)  After all, it’s only fair. Speaking of being fair, let’s try to steer clear of stereotypically acceptably-feminine professions such as nursing and writing Romance novels. I’ve stuck to British (obviously) and deceased as well, as, somehow, putting someone who’s still alive on a banknote feels a bit too ‘Cult of Personality’ for me.

Here are my suggestions:

The one to ease us in:

James Miranda Stuart Barry (c. 1789-1799 – 25 July 1865): after graduating from University of Edinburgh Medical School, James Barry had a fantastic career which spanned five decades as a military surgeon. When he died, the year after he retired, it transpired that he was actually a woman. Margaret Ann Bulkley had disguised herself as a man in order to get into medical school, so that she could fund her family, who had fallen on hard times. She managed to keep up the charade for her entire life. (She even snuck off to Mauritius to have a baby at one point!)  No woman before her had graduated as a doctor.

The intersectional one:

Mary Jane Seacole (1805 – 14 May 1881): the child of a Scot and a Creole, Mary Seacole, basically did what Florence Nightingale did, whilst simultaneously battling the prejudices of her peers (including Florrie N), which were aroused due to the fact that Mary was not entirely white. The British War Office refused her offer of assistance when the Crimean War broke out, so she took herself out to Balaclava and set up her own hospital (“hotel”) independently. (Okay, I said I’d steer clear of nurses, but she was awesome, and she also would be a useful play in terms of recognising that not everyone who did good stuff for Britain was an upper- or middle-class white dude or dudette.)  

The mathematician:

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852): the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine. Originally charged with translating someone else’s work, she ended up developing it as well. She wrote the first algorithm intended to be read by a machine - she was the first computer programmer.

The early proponent for racial equality, AKA the one who, as she said herself, was definitely not a feminist:

Mary Henrietta Kingsley (13 October 1862 – 3 June 1900): an ethnographer who, at a time when the only women visiting Africa were the wives of missionaries, set out to explore Africa on her own, producing two works - Travels in West Africa (1897) and West African Studies (1899). She worked to raise the notion that there should be no hierarchies based on skin colour, and she died whilst volunteering as a nurse during the Second Boer War.

The Wild(ing) card:

Emily Wilding Davison (11 October 1872 – 8 June 1913): a militant activist for women’s suffrage , Emily Davison died due to injuries incurred by being trampled by King George V’s horse at the Epsom Derby, whilst attempting to promote votes for women. Once, whilst serving time in Holloway Prison (for arson - though Suffragette arson was responsible, in that they took pains only ever to damage property, not people), she threw herself down a ten-metre iron staircase in an attempt to divert the guards who were force-feeding her and her hunger-striking sisters. She also, in 1911, hid in a cupboard in the Palace of Westminster, so that she could legitimately claim, on the census of that year, to live in the House of Commons.

The jitsuka:

Edith Margaret Garrud (1872–1971): trained the Bodyguard - a thirty-woman-strong group of suffragettes charged with protecting high-profile members of the Women’s Social and Political Union once the Cat and Mouse Act had been passed. Mary was one of the first, Western, female instructors of martial arts, and practised a form of (my own, much-loved) Jiu Jitsu. She was introduced to it by Edward William Barton-Wright (founder of Bartitsu), and she, with her husband, co-ran Sadakazu Uyenishi’s jujutsu school in Soho, teaching the women’s and children’s classes, once he had returned to Japan.

The musician:

Alexandra Elene Maclean "Sandy" Denny (6 January 1947 – 21 April 1978): Sandy Denny, after a brief stint in nursing, started out performing folk songs (and accompanying herself), including appearances on the BBC. She joined the folk band Fairport Convention to stretch her vocal talent and to write her own songs, including “Who knows where the time goes”. She, later, formed her own band, Fotheringay. Sandy sadly died young, as a result of substance abuse, so perhaps is not a perfect candidate if we’re looking for a role model, but since that isn’t necessarily the case (I wouldn’t suggest anyone follow Emily Davison’s example either), I thought I’d put her on the list. I was going to add Evelyn Glennie (the profoundly deaf, virtuoso percussionist) but, happily, she’s still alive.

So, those are some of my choices, but we’re certainly not going to populate banknotes for the next forty years with only seven options; who would you like to see on our paper currency? I’d love to know of some more recent women who should be celebrated! Go on! Have a think, and let me know!

Short, Sweet, and Aliiiiive!

"Igor, fetch me a syrette of the revivication serum and the electrodes. The big ones."

"Yes, mahthhter. Will you be requiring anothher tethht subthject athh well?"

"No Igor. Tonight, I will be attempting to rethherrect...er...resurrect...the blog!"

"No mahthhter, thhurely it can't be done!"

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So, I've been bouncing back and forth from this blog like an indecisive spacehopper. The problem is, as are problems, to do with time. Specifically, not having enough of it. But there you go. I'd like to think that, in the new year, when I'm reading less (or, at least, less draconically), I'll dedicate more time to blogging. But we'll see. 

Reading still all on schedule. Despite a few very long trips last week, I got nowhere near enough reading done (despite having raved about the productivity of flights before), but should make up for it at Christmas. Most recently, I read a book of Celtic Fairy Tales, prepared and collected by Joseph Jacobs. As a part of myth I haven't really touched before, it was fascinating, and thoroughly enjoyable, full of fantastic imagery, outrageously bold heroes, and plots that were equally informative, educational and disturbing, as, indeed, all good fairy tales should be. It you fancy brushing up on your Connlas, your Gruahachs and your Jacks-of-varying-trades, it's pretty inexpensively procured from Amazon or any other faintly disreputable seller (or, now that I think of it, probably free from copyright at this stage). 

Outside of that, I'm working, albeit eeextreeemly slowly on a couple of writing projects (what fun! Remember you can read Winter's Tale here, and the shorter and more whimsical Wordmarket here), and we're getting stuck into the second 'season' of my D&D campaign. Since I've raved about the possibilities and pleasures of such a game before, next time, I might recap some of the more intrepid adventures of the first season... 

Sound interesting? Know any good Celtic folk tales I may have missed? Have a 'best word when pronounced by Igor'? Let me know in the comments.