Uncharted Seas: Initial Thoughts

Last weekend at the Warstore Weekend I picked up the Imperial Humans fleet for Uncharted Seas. I know I swore I'd never buy into this game, but since I got the box for free, I figure I kept my promise. I've only played one game of it so far, so I don't have a complete grasp on it yet, but given my experience with Firestorm Armada, I'd say I have a decent understanding of how the game works.

Unsurprisingly, there are some things this game does better than Firestorm Armada, and some things that FSA does better. Each game, even though it's using the same core system, does feel a bit different in its style and how it plays. I had expected the games to be far more similar, but it's interesting how changing a few things can really change the gameplay.

A few differences:
1. Ships are more effective from range band 1 than from range band 2. This means you'll want to get your ships up close and personal, and won't have to constantly be trying to maneuver to find that "sweet spot" to fire from.

2. Ramming and boarding are incredibly common occurrences in the game, and one of the better ways to take over enemy ships. Ram your ship into theirs and then board them. Also, when you finish killing off an enemy crew, your crew actually comes back to your ship rather than losing them for good.

3. Ships cannot see through each other and cannot move through each other. It's not 3-D space here. Firing through ships is harder, and you have to be a little more careful with your squadrons and positioning.

4. The decks are faction-specific, so each faction will have a few cards that are different from everyone else. For example, my faction, the Imperial Humans, have very little magic and what they do have is priestly magic.

5. Wind is important in the game. At least for some fleets. If you're sailing into the wind, you move at 1/2 speed. Unfortunately, the wind never helps you, so if you're sailing with the wind, you don't go faster. Too bad - I thought that would make an interesting mechanic. As it is, now the wind is just annoying.

6. Maneuvering is a bit different too. Instead of working with 45 degree turns and needing a certain number of inches before you can turn based on your size, each size of ship has a particular turning template which will show how fast it turns. Ships turn much faster in Uncharted Seas. Also, ships have a minimum move of 2" instead of 1/2 their speed. It means fleets with fast and slow ships can stick together a bit easier.

7. The critical hits table felt more punishing. There were a lot of things that simply could not be repaired except by cards.

8. There are far more special rules for different ships, and unfortunately none of these rules are on the cards themselves. You have to look in the book (or the handy download sheet from the website) to find what each of your ships does. Firestorm may reach that point as it expands the R&D ships, but for the moment, there are not nearly as many special rules in Firestorm.



Overall, the game changes out some good things and some bad things. I dislike the wind, the harsher critical hits table, the closer ranges of all the ships, etc. But I like that ramming and boarding are more prevalent in this game too, and I love the faction-specific decks. In the end, the game's no better than Firestorm Armada (and for me, the theme of Firestorm wins out), so I don't think I'll be expanding my ships beyond the starting box. Still, nice to have a different theme.

Warstore Weekend

Saturday morning I woke up at about 3:15 to get ready for the Warstore weekend. I set out everything the night before so that hopefully I could get ready and out the door with minimal waking of the wife. I think I did pretty well.



Jay came by to pick me up at 4:15. I was already exhausted given that just the previous night, I had been up until 11:00 fighting desperately to save the world from the evil machinations of one of the Great Old Ones. We were too slow to stop him from coming in to the world, so we had to fight to put him back where he belonged. Well, we failed. Bummer. So a total party wipe, and the world ended. Good times – we haven’t lost a game of Arkham Horror in a while.

So anywho, Jay and I get on the road, grab Dan by 5, and start heading north to New Jersey for Warstore Weekend. It was set to be a five hour trip, but favorable traffic and nice driving by Jay (thanks, Wookie!) got us there by nine. We decided we’d leave everything in the car to begin with since we couldn’t check in to the hotel yet and stepped out to head to the convention.

I’m going to pause here a moment to briefly describe how foreign New Jersey is to me:
1. They have roundabouts. Not nearly as many as England, but seeing as I just got back from a trip in the mother country where roundabouts were nearly the death of me, I figured it was worth drawing the parallel.
2. They smell bad. Really bad. Not the people, mind you – they seemed to shower and engage in proper odor control, but the state itself was unpleasant to the nose. There was a faint stench of trash with perhaps some soggy acidic tint to it. Inside the hotel, the smell was less, but it was still there somewhat.
3. Rope and twine are foreign concepts. When fastening something together, evidently it is better in New Jersey to use a plastic bag than twine. And no, the article in question (in this case a bed) was not inside the plastic bag. The bag was pulled into a makeshift string and used to fasten the bed together.
4. Driving politely is seen as a weakness, and those with the heaviest horn-hands should receive the right-of-way in all traffic situations for developing their skills at pounding on an automobile horn.

There are certainly other lessons about New Jersey, but I will satisfy myself with those four major ones I learned on my vacation.

So we arrived at about 9:00 at the convention hall inside the hotel in which we were staying. As I said, we decided to leave our stuff in the car for the moment since we could not check in to the hotel and went to check in to the convention instead. They had taken a bunch of the event rooms for the Warstore weekend. Essentially there were four rooms.

The first was a painting room. You could go get someone to teach you the basics (or more advanced techniques) of painting, etc. I had wanted to go to a session they had on conversions, but it was only offered on Friday so I missed it. In retrospect, I probably could have gone in and asked who had done the session and try to get them to offer it again – it was a pretty laid back convention hall – but I didn’t have much time to spare, so I missed out on that.

The second room was a hall with a bunch of tables set up for various demos. They also had a silent auction that I wanted to check out, but nearly everything there was for 40k or Warhammer Fantasy, so I didn’t bother to bid on anything. This room housed pretty much any miniatures game or board game (there were very few of those) that was not Warhammer, Warmachine, or Heavy Gear.

The third room was the Warstore. They brought a bunch of things from their store to sell there, but unfortunately didn’t have anything new I wanted. Both the new Malifaux and the new Firestorm models for my factions don’t start hitting the stores until this week – a week too late for the Warstore Weekend.

The fourth room was down a long hallway and housed a ton of tables for miniatures games. Here is where the Warmachine and Warhammer crowds stuck around, playing pickup games and tournaments. When we arrived, we all headed here first as we were told that there would be a demo available of Heavy Gear.

Dan and I headed up for a demo while Jay went to check out some of the Warhammer stuff. We got paired against each other with two opposing mecha factions. The models looked pretty cool, and the game seemed pretty detailed. And then we got into the interesting parts. Evidently, there are dozens of modifiers (Did you move? What speed? Did he move? Are you in cover? What ammo are you using? What’s your range? Okay, all that comes to 1+1+1-1-2+1-2+1 so you can roll a die against Dan with no modifiers! Dan and I went blind on the modifiers. Then blind on the damage. You hit with four levels between each other? Well, your gun happens to do eight damage per level, which is 32, which compared with his 15 wound threshold means you do… 2 damage to him! Okay, that was your first shot. Your next guy want to shoot?



After remembering high school math (and also learning that guns are no match for a good grenade… He dropped my squad to 4 people and I dropped his to 4 with a lot of shooting, and then we both lobbed a grenade at each other and killed off three people each… why do we even use bullets?) we tried out their gladiator combat game. This was a little more beer and pretzels, they said, though it involved more record keeping and more math. It was just over fewer models, so there wasn’t as much an issue. Fun games, but between all the mental math and the price (the 5-on-5 initial demo Dan and I played would have cost us $90), we decided it wasn’t for us.

The guy gave us each two tickets for playing, and I was a bit confused. I didn’t really want a raffle, but he told me they were for you to collect and trade in later for prizes and goodies at the Warstore. Good deal!

By the time we finished our gladiator combat game, we looked around and realized that we had misplaced a Wookie. No easy feat, so we headed back to the other rooms to see if we could find him. We stopped at the store where Dan found all the ships he wanted to pick up for his Sorylians weren’t available. Someone had evidently bought them out the previous day. I confirmed there were no models I needed, and we headed on to find the Wookie. We found him a little down the hall looking for us. There was a Malifaux tournament about to start, he said, and they needed players.

Now those who know me know I dislike tournaments, but since they needed players and since Dan and Jay were going to play, I figured I might as well. We got our models, tried to argue the merits of playing a 30 stone tournament instead of a 35 stone one, lost that debate, and got paired up. There were six players: Dan and Jay with Ressers, me with Neverborn, and then three other guys – two Archanists and one Guild.



First round I was paired up against one of the Archanists who was playing Rasputina. I had Lilith because the mission was Slaughter. And really, who other than Lilith would romp Slaughter. This game was not all that fun, unfortunately. I had a really hard time hearing or understanding anything my opponent was saying, and even my drawing direct attention to that fact and explaining that I was hearing impaired and having difficulty understanding didn’t change anything. Here’s a sample of the conversations we had:

Him: “Rasputina blasts her spell. Needs an 11.” Flips an 8. He folds his arms and looks at me.
Me: “Are you going to cheat? Or use a stone?”
Him: “No.”
Me: “…Okay.”

Me: (thinking I must have misheard something here) “So you miss?”
Him: “No, I have an 18.”
Me: “Oh, okay. So you’re already hitting me, okay. Do you want to cheat it up or use a stone to make it harder for me to resist.”
Him: “I’m hitting you.”
Me: “Okay, fair enough.” I flip a card 4. “Okay, I have a total of 12 here – I’ll cheat it to a 19. It misses.”
Him: (rolls his eyes frustrated)

Somewhere around turn two I decided I really did not want to play this game anymore and didn’t care whether he was newish to the game or not and wanted to end it as quickly as I could. I spent the next two turns wiping him off the board to a model losing only one of my Younger Nephilims and took full points. I was done in about a half an hour of the hour and a half we had available. I’m glad I finished quick, because if there was another round, I was very close to apologizing and withdrawing from the tournament. As it was, I had enough time to cool down, then we got lunch, and came back for round two.



I was paired off against the second place person at the time, Ed (Guild). He had just beaten Jay, taking 7 points for himself, which put him a half a step behind me. I knew I needed to at least hold even with him this round. I took Lilith again and he took Predita. The table we were offered had a massive open area in the middle with a few fences for a little cover. But against the Ortegas, it was a deathtrap. The mission was something I’d never seen called Get the Stuff or something like that. We each placed two tokens of stuff out there and had to get a model to them to (1) Interact to get some stuff. Each token could only be interacted with twice and then it was gone, and you gained a random amount of stuff when you interacted with it. We each had a token that was impossible for the other person to reach fast and another that was kinda close to the other person too. The basic game would resolve with each person getting their two tokens, and then fighting for schemes. I decided that as fast as Lilith was, I wanted to steal one of his interacts from him. With judicial use of Earthquake, then carrying my Tot, and having him Sprint, I was able to get one of my Tots to his stuff on turn one, but I didn’t interact with it yet. Meanwhile, I nabbed one of my other ones and landed next to the other. I won initiative on turn two and my Tot stole the second interaction on one of his stuffs and proceeded to get blasted apart. With my 5 interactions, I had 11 stuff and with his 3 interactions, he had 4. Knowing if I kept Lilith safe until the end of the game, I would tie him 6-6, that’s what I opted for after my gamble in the beginning resulted in my losing nearly half of my army in the counterattack. I ran around with Lilith, kept safe, and forced a tie on the Strategy. I felt bad doing it, but he shook his head and said it was the smart way to play, and he didn’t take it personally or anything. He was a really good player – outmaneuvered me and killed everything I had but Lilith and the totem, but I was able to play the strategy just a little faster and pulled out some solid points that way.

At the end of the second game, I was in first, Dan and Ed were tied in second one point behind me, and Jay was coming up one point behind them.



I ended up paired against Dan for the last game. Both of us were tired and neither of us wanted to face the other’s killer list. So instead we went to an old standby from our Warmachine days – we made each others’ lists. I gave him Nicodem, two Vultures, two Canine Remains, a Hanged, a Punk Zombie and Killjoy (his only request for the list since he’d never played him). I got Zoraida, Bad Juju, two Slurids, two Waldgeists, and then gave me the option of three more stones or a Tot. I took the Tot. Our mission was to break through to the others’ side with more models. The game was fun on a bun, at least for me. I think Dan got frustrated from the get-go when I Voodoo Doll-ed his Punk Zombie on turn one and had it charge and kill one of his Vultures, then popped out Bad Juju near the second one and killed it. From there, I kept Obeying his models to charge his master and force him to burn through his stones. Finally Killjoy popped out and tore into my Waldgeists, hurting them a bit. I got the Punk Zombie to charge his master once more and force a solid hit. I cheated the Red Joker for damage and flipped a moderate for a total of 9 damage, but he flipped the Red Joker on prevention. Damn! My Slurids jumped into the fight but the Hanged took care of them before they could do more than a couple damage to Nicodem. Finally I got Killjoy to kill off Nicodem. I lost Bad Juju, but at that point he was running out of models and couldn’t replenish them. I booked it to the far side with a Waldgeist and Zoraida while Bad Juju popped back out over there. He had two models, his Hanged and his Killjoy, left at the end. I scraped together full points and he got 4 from me.

In the end, I took first, Ed took second, and Jay claimed third. I won a metal storage case for 200 models, but I have no idea what to do with it. Maybe modify it for my paints and the like. We also got a ton of tickets – one for each hour we played, plus 5 extra for me (first) and 1 for Jay (third). That took our total to 26 as a group.



We hit dinner and then came back for a mega game of Firestorm. Nobody other than the three of us showed up, so we each put out 1000 points, split them into two roughly equal fleets each, and spread them out over the massive table. There were a few planets along the middle strip that we could get points for controlling. I decided not to bother with that and just shoot a lot. The game was a lot of fun, and took us nearly 5 hours to finish. By the end, Dan had taken first, Jay second and me third. We claimed our additional 24 tickets, Dan got his $30 gift certificate for winning (to a store local to New Jersey) and we passed out.




The next morning at breakfast (which had some of the best buffet-style French toast and bacon I’ve ever tasted) we decided to give Dan our tickets because he really wanted to get one of the Uncharted Seas boxes and they were 40 tickets. We finished eating and found one of the guys willing to do a demo of Uncharted Seas. He was a really funny guy, and with the addition of one of his friends who wanted to learn, we had ourselves a nice four player match.



Dan came in with his new box fleet (which was reduced to 30 tickets, so he gave me the rest of them) and we started playing. Dan took an early lead, but Jay ended up outlasting us with his ironclads, I came in strong with the Cruisers and a Battleship near the end with one Frigate trying to outlast them. Jay rammed one of my Frigates and ignited the powder room, blowing up it and my other two Cruisers, plus two of his Frigates and damaging his battleship. Finally, he rammed me and we fought hard, but soon I was overtaken. His battleship sailed away and shot down Dan’s last cruiser. Game over, Jay won. So over the course of the tournament, we each took first in one of the three games. All in all, a good showing. We got our tickets and had enough for me to go and pick up an Uncharted Seas fleet too. I picked the Imperial Navy, the human ships. I liked the way they looked, so went with that as my reason for taking them.




I picked up a few terrain pieces to try to put together a new feature. No idea how it will turn out, but it should be fun. Dan picked up a Sodapop miniature he liked, and Jay got another couple ships for his Uncharted Seas fleet, as well as a few terrain pieces of his own. On the way home, we stopped at the gaming store Dan had the $30 for and he picked up the rules to Uncharted Seas.



We drove home, tired, and celebrated when we heard the Redskins win their game. All in all, a capital weekend.

Disney Princesses, Only Different

I'm gearing up for the Halloween game this year. I'll be running Grimm for the first time for our gaming group. I've been talking with Adam and Josh about some ideas, and Adam just pointed out this website of art Jeffrey Thomas. Fantastic art of some Disney princesses, only a bit... darker. Enjoy!

Malifaux Interview

I haven't written much about Malifaux of late, and that's mostly because I have not been playing many games. Wedding, England, etc. You know how it is. Anywho, I'm still enjoying the game and looking forward to the October and November releases for Neverborn. I should be heading out to the game store tonight to get a game in or so. We'll see how that goes.

Anywho, here is an interview with Dave "nerdelemental" Bowen, one of the Development Team and writers for Wyrd Miniatures. He's got some interesting information in there, and some slight teasers for what's going on in the future. Have to say, makes me pretty excited. Enjoy!

Teaching the Directorate

It’s been a while since I’ve done any kind of battle report, so I’ll toss this one up.

I got a game of Firestorm Armada in last weekend, the first one in about four months, I think. Ryan had picked up the Directorate faction and wanted to learn how to play. So I pulled out my Dindrenzi box set and we took the table against each other. It was my second game against Directorate, though the first time was a long time ago.

We spread out a few planets, asteroid fields, and nebula. Since Ryan was just trying to learn the game, I tossed assaults and wings out the window, and didn’t bother with any of the more fiddly tricks I’ve learned over time (splitting torpedoes, for example).

The game was a lot of fun. I split my forces in two, sending my battleship and six frigates after the bulk of his force and my cruisers along a different path. I started out strong, putting four damage onto his battleship and destroying three of his frigates. But the next few turns went decidedly against me as he healed all the damage to his battleship I had done with two repair cards, bruised my battleship with three damage, destroyed two cruisers and a bunch of my frigates. By the end of the game, I had a battleship and cruiser with one life left and he had a battleship, frigate and cruiser. My battleship got the first turn and put one damage on his battleship and destroyed his frigate, but needing 4 hits on 9 dice, failed to scratch his cruiser. His battleship went and destroyed my cruiser and crit-hit my battleship. I called it there – if I had been able to roll down to my battleship and a cruiser against his battleship, I thought I had a good chance, but at this point it wasn’t looking good.

The loss drops my overall record to just above .500, and is my fourth loss in five games. Maybe I should stick with Malifaux – I think I’m better at that one.

One thing I did find with FSA is that it really is a game that benefits from scenarios. Lining up ships across each other and just flying around and shooting is okay, but the game really takes off, I think, when the missions get pulled in. When your primary objective is not just trashing your enemy but rather maneuvering in such a way that you get to other objectives, the game really takes off.

The Honeymoon

The honeymoon was fantastic. Ten full days in England with a couple travel days tacked on either end. We started in London for two days where we saw the bunkers that Churchill was in during the bombing in WWII, took one of those open-top tours of London where we saw Big Ben, Buckingham Palace (we left the tickets we had to go inside the Palace at home, unfortunately), the London Eye, etc. We hit up 221B Baker Street - the home of Sherlock Holmes and spent a mostly rainy day in London Tower catching all the awesome stuff there. We ran out of time before we got to see everything we wanted, though. Got to see one of our vintage pubs in London. They have old-style kegs that don't have any CO2 or anything in them, so you have to pull on the tap a few times like a well to get the beer flowing. Pretty cool. They don't serve it warm like I feared, but they don't really chill it either. Since it was Fall, I guess it was just naturally a little cold. Not like in USA where they serve a frosty glass of beer.



From there, we got the car (which Laura drove all week) and made our way to Plymouth. On the way we stopped at Stonehenge. That was a pretty cool place. It was smaller than I expected, but I think that's because I ended up having to be so far away from it. We walked all around it and I got a ton of pictures. It looks pretty awesome.

At Plymouth, we had to find a B&B, and it was here that we learned that Garman was only going to be helpful in getting us CLOSE to our destinations. We ended up in a residential neighborhood, called the B&B, asked if they had an address that we could put into Garman and they said, "No, we don't have an address." So they gave us directions instead. We followed them until they led us to a one-lane road. This road was SUPPOSED to have two cars pass by, but there was clearly only one lane. And the sides were hedges taller than our car, so we couldn't pull off in the grass if someone was coming the other way. We did end up finding small points every 50-100 yards or so where you could pull to the side and let someone pass you. Laura, on her first day of driving on the wrong side of the road from the wrong side of the car, was freaking out. We called them back and they said, "Yeah, you're on the right road. Just keep going." We did, and eventually we found the B&B. It was an awesome six-room affair. We didn't end up going out to see the pub in Plymouth because Laura did not want to get back in the car, but we did end up drinking a few beers at the B&B bar and chatting with the bartender about the differences between England and America (he was planning a trip to USA next year).



The next day, we went by Tintagel which, I think, was one of the top two places we visited all week. It's an old ruined castle by the ocean. It's where Uther Pendragon was born, evidently. There was a copse just down from the cliffs the castle was on where trading ships used to come through and leave off their goods. There were massive caves underneath called Merlin's Caves. We did a lot of climbing and hiking to see the whole thing - words cannot describe how awesome this place looked. Just do a google image search for Tintagel Castle and you'll see how cool it was.

After that stop, we headed on to Bath, our next B&B. We took a taxi in to the city to go to another of our vintage pubs. This one was like an old house - it had four or five different small rooms where people could go, and each one had two or three large tables. If you couldn't find an empty table, you'd just saddle up to a partly-full one and take some of that for your own. We ended up sitting next to a couple that lived in the area - the guy was always in Bath and the girl was from Whales. They told us some slang and all about the area (Laura particularly liked Knob-Head). From there we went to another restaurant, clearly intended for college age kids, and ate and drank there before catching a cab back home.

We woke up and tried to find the Roman Baths in Bath, but the city was poorly laid out and the route to Bath was not well marked. So I just typed "Roman Baths" into Garman and we drove 30 miles that way. It took us, evidently, into Wales. We saw the city where the Ryder Cup took place a few days before it got really busy, and then found a set of Roman Baths in Wales. We walked all around those, then headed on to find a bathroom. They were 300 yards that way, the woman at the desk said, so evidently we had to leave the building to find some. We headed out and walked through town until we found them by a soccer/rugby field. On the way back, we saw a sign that said, "Roman Barracks" and so we walked that way. It turns out that just on the side of a bike path is this massive set of ruins of roman barracks. There's no fence around it, no production for it. It's just sitting there with a small wooden sign explaining some of the history. So we headed in and wandered around them for a while before getting back on the road and going to our next stop: Stratford-Upon-Avon (where Shakespeare was born).



That night we went into SUA for dinner and found a long walk of shops and restaurants. We went in one with Shakespeare stuff. We had decided earlier that we were going to try to find matted prints of different things we saw on our trip. Laura saw a print of Shakespeare's home, but I said, "We didn't actually see Shakespeare's home, so we can't get the print". Laura agreed, so we walked out of the store, turned right and walked down the road. Literally the next building from the shop, Laura stopped and said, "I think this is Shakespeare's home." I looked at the building. Sure enough, it was. I said, "Huh. Now we've seen it. You want to go get the picture?" So we got the picture and headed out to dinner.



After SUA, we headed to Rowton Castle. We would have stayed there, but they were having a wedding that day, so the whole thing was booked. I was disappointed by the place - on the inside it was a hotel, not a castle. I just looked like one from the outside. We went on through the Lake District which, if I lived in England, would be an annual vacation spot for me. Absolutely beautiful countryside and perfect quaint little towns. Hills and sheep as far as the eye can see. Of all the places we stopped for the night, this was our favorite (though our all time favorite place of the trip is still to come). We ended up walking all through the town, then down by the lake, etc. Found a bar, had a beer outside and watched people walk by. Overall, fantastic place.

The next day we continued our trek north. Northumberland is to England like the midwest is to us. Empty. Lots of farm. Only they have a lot of mountains and sheep, one-lane roads (by now Laura got the hang of them so they weren't that bad), etc. It was foggy and rainy throughout the drive, which made it interesting, but there were so few people it didn't matter.

Our final destination was Chillingham Castle. It is, evidently, the most haunted castle in England. Also, we were able to set things up so we could sleep at the castle. How awesome is that?!

On the way there, we passed through a village called Wall. If you've read/seen Stardust, that's the English village the main character is from before he crosses into the strange world. It was the movie Laura and I saw together on our first date, so we hopped out and took some pictures.

Garman took us to a different castle than the one we wanted to go to. So I pulled out the paperwork and found no phone number. But it did say we needed to bring our own food and flashlights. So we went to a store to pick those up and ask people if they knew where Chillingham was. One person said he thought it was north and not too far from here. So we got on the highway heading north and found a sign that said Chillingham, 8 miles west. So we took the road it told us to and passed through a small village, perhaps 10 buildings or so.

Here, things got weird.

The road turned into a gravel road, one lane, and had fences on either side holding back all the sheep. Odd. No signs.

Then we found a gate that was closed. I got out of the car and went to the gate. It said, "Public Bridleway. Close Gate Behind You." So I opened the gate, we drove through, and I closed it behind us. Now there were no fences between us and the sheep. Stranger.

We drove on until we reached a crossroads. The sign (I had to hop out of the car again to read it) didn't tell us much. It said, "Public Bridleway" and pointed one direction but said nothing about going straight. So we turned. On the way through, we saw dozens of sheep just crossing the road in front of us. We found another gate, but this one said "No trespassing" so we U-turned and went back to the fork and took the other route.

We passed a farm with no one there.

We reached another gate, and opened and passed through this one, closing it behind us, leaving the sheep farm at our back. We drove on. Still no signs.

I spotted a car through the trees and told Laura to take whatever the next left was. It went into a small car park (not paved - just dirt) that looked like the beginning of a nature trail. There was a large wooden sign with a map of the trails on it. I ran to the map and found the first sign we had that Chillingham Castle actually existed. I took a picture of the map so we could reference it if we needed to.



We drove on another few minutes, hit another highway, turned right and immediately saw a sign for Chillingham Castle! Laura lost it and couldn't stop laughing. We parked and walked through a very spooky set of woods to get to the castle. They told us to go back and get the car, then drive around to the back where we could unload our stuff. We did and the woman showed us our room.

She unlocked a door and walked down a small hallway. On the right was the bathroom and another room with two twin beds. On the left was our room - a queen sized bed. Looks like we have to share the bathroom with whoever has the other room. No issue. Also, there were a set of stairs in the hallway that went up to a loft with a kitchen and living room, fireplace, etc. Really nice stuff. A common room for the rooms below.

Then I realized - the key she gave us was for the door that got to the hallway. We were actually staying in that ENTIRE SUITE! You could fit a whole family in there and have plenty of room to sprawl around.

So we hit up the tour at that point and this is what I was hoping for from a castle. It was all old - had a cool courtyard with all the stone walls all around it. The Great Hall reminded me of 13th Warrior. We went to a small throne room that Edward Longshanks occupied when he came north to defeat Willam Wallace. They had a massive gardens that we explored, and tons of old things. Old weapons, tapestries, documents, etc. The guy who owns the place just goes to auctions and buys whatever strikes his fancy and adds it to his castle. He lives there too, most of the year. He happened to be in London when we were there.

That night, everyone left who wasn't staying the night. Which, by our count, meant we were the only ones in our part of the castle (they had two caretakers who just kept an eye on things to make sure nothing happened in the night). All the lights shut out and there was no heat, save for the small space heaters in our room. We bundled up, got our flashlights, and went out exploring the castle in the dark. We took a couple of videos of us wandering around in the dark talking about the things we saw. All in all, great fun. Our number one best place we were all vacation.

So the next day we headed to York. It was raining, so we didn't do much outside, though walking around downtown York was pretty awesome. We went to the Jorvik Viking Centre - a museum about the Vikings that once occupied this region of England. It was pretty interesting, and out of the rain, both of which were good things. That night we went to another vintage pub and enjoyed more English beer.



After York we went to Sherwood Forest and wandered around. I didn't realize that in its prime, Sherwood occupied the entire region from York to London - about 200 miles. We took a walk through the forest and went to a museum about Robin Hood. We headed on to Nottingham for our B&B and that night found an 80s bar, complete with a guy with a mullet. It was a bit of a shock to us, being in England, seeing West Virginia, but that's okay. The next day we drove back to London for our last stop and visited the British Museum. They had a bunch of mummies from Egypt there, so we saw that exhibit. We went back to the B&B exhausted, then woke up at 4 AM to catch our flight home.

Brittany S. Pierce

Having very little to do with my topic, I wanted to start by saying I think the whole trend of releasing half of a season on DVD before releasing the whole thing is just annoying.



Laura and I have started watching Glee on DVD now that it finally came out (and we find ourselves with a little free time now and then). We're through over half of the season so far and really enjoying it. The music is fun, and the random cheesy high school drama keeps me entertained. But if I had to rank my reasons for liking the show, the very top would be three characters: the principal, Sue, and my personal favorite, Brittany S. Pierce. Simply put, she has all the best lines.

Did you know dolphins are just gay sharks?

I find recipes... confusing.

When I pulled my hamstring, I went to a misogynist.

Since she started talking more in the show, it has just gotten better and better. I love watching Sue's tirades (really - I would love to be on set and see all the other ones she does, because no doubt these have to be ad libbed each take). The principal is just a great bit character to bounce everyone else off. But Brittany takes the prize.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

While I was on my honeymoon, I ended up finding the time to read a couple of books. When I was returning, I was a little over halfway through The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.



The book bills itself as something of a mystery novel, but light-hearted. The main character is autistic, narrating the book through his own view of the world. In some places, this turns out to be pretty amusing and in others, depressing. I thought I would really enjoy this novel, but in the end, I found it unsatisfying.

I had expected to gain more insight into autism, but from what I read, I was very disappointed. The character was portrayed as incredibly dense and unsympathetic to other people around him which, from my (albeit limited) research into autism following my finishing this book, that just isn't the case. Generally, from what I was reading, autism has more to do with a communication issue than with an inability to understand other people. An autistic child might not understand what is meant by certain facial expressions, but that doesn't mean he has no feelings of his own, and doesn't mean that he cannot recognize when another person might be feeling things through other cues.

Beyond that, as I said earlier, the book was billed as a mystery. The main character finds his neighbor's dog killed in the middle of the night and decides he's going to become a detective and find out what happened. Except that particular mystery is resolved about halfway through the book and for the rest of it, the main character kinda floats through the third act. Once the mystery was resolved, I didn't feel the urge to finish the book for any reason other than I like to finish what I start. I didn't care about any of the characters by that point of the book, I realized.

I finished it off, closed the book, and found myself more excited about reading something else than I was about what I just read.

Football Update

So we're four weeks into the season and things are going... okay.

Redskins: 2-2 (2-0 in the division)
Fantasy: 2-2

I'll talk a little about the Redskins first. I have to admit, I'm thrilled with the wins over Dallas and Philadelphia. They don't make the games easy on their fans, that's for sure, what with putting the games within a score and giving the opponents a drive down the field at the end both times, but they managed to win in the end, and that's what matters.

In week 2 we brought Houston to overtime before losing to the field goal. After watching Houston dismantle Indy, I was surprised to see us doing so well early. But once again we weren't able to put the game away, kept Houston in it, and they managed to come back and win. A missed field goal at the end of regulation for us was all it took.

I can't say much about week 3 since I wasn't here - but really? Losing to the Rams? That bad?! It saddens me that we could be 3-1 or 4-0 by now, but at least the two victories were against our Division. That'll help in the long run.

As for my fantasy team, what can I say? At 2-2 I'm sitting in the middle of the pack, and while I'd love to say I should be higher, it just isn't to be. It's always tough to lose a game where, if you had started different players, you would have won, and that's what happened to me Week 3, but what can you do? Just move on. At least week 3 taught me that I shouldn't be so beholden to where I drafted players, nor what they performed in 2009. This is an entirely different year. Players like Peyton Hillis, LT and Austin Collie are worth starting, even over someone like DeAngelo Williams. It takes me a little while to learn, but I do. I think I've got a good team (if I can shore up my Tight End situation - my lack of having a decent one, that is), and could make a run for the top four, but I'm starting at a disadvantage and still have two more games this season against the top two players yet to come.

Three Movies

On the flights to and from England, I managed to catch three movies. One I wanted to see and two I was indifferent about. They served well to pass the time, but I'm sure I did myself a disservice by watching them on the tiny screens available. Since they've all been out for a while, I'm going to ignore the whole plot recap and just talk about what I thought of each one.



The first was Iron Man 2. Second movie based on the Marvel comic, yadda yadda yadda. Most people know the whole story behind it. It was the movie I wanted to see for a while, so I was glad to finally get the chance to see it. In the end, I was... well, not really disappointed, since I didn't expect that much from the movie. But it delivered what I thought it would: not much. To me it felt like it was riding the coattails of the first movie too much, and didn't really do much to enhance Tony Stark's character. We knew he was a playboy, and he did that more. We knew he was smart, and he did that more. We knew he was sarcastic, and he did that more too. I didn't really feel like I got much more out of his character from this particular installment. To me it felt more like an "aftermath of the first Iron Man" than a new movie in its own right.



On the flight back, I caught the A-Team. I was hoping to see Robin Hood, which was available on the flight to England, but it wasn't an option on the flight back. I was not too happy about that, since I had no real desire to watch the A-Team when it came out, but given the option of watch the movie or do nothing in the cramped airplane, I opted to watch the movie.

And I'm glad I did. It was just a whole mess of fun on a bun. I was never a huge fan of the A-Team growing up. I loved the show, but for the life of me, I couldn't tell you anything about it other than the van was black with red, Mr. T was awesome, and Hannibal smoked cigars and had white hair. That's about the extent of what stuck with me. So I came into this movie without any thoughts about what people should act like or what they should do. Maybe that made it easier for me to enjoy for what it was - an action flick with a lot of explosions and completely ridiculous situations. I liked watching this one so much that I ended up watching half of it again later on the flight to pass some more time.



The last movie I saw was the Losers. Once it was over, I realized that all three of them were not really original movies - Iron Man and the Losers were both based on comic books, and the A-Team was a remake of the old TV show. Strange.

Anywho, I got sucked into this one because it had two actors I really like (though have no idea who they are). There's the guy who plays Stringer Bell on the Wire, and the guy who plays the Winchesters' father on Supernatural. Both are good actors, I think, who don't get the attention they deserve. So to see them in this movie made me happy.

Except the movie itself was not that great. It was similar to the A-Team - a bunch of guys who are military and then on the outs with the government trying to stop a bad guy doing bad things who is somehow on the same side as the government/military. Perhaps I would have liked it more if I hadn't seen the A-Team just beforehand, which I think is the superior movie of the two. The characters were flat for the most part, and the action was pretty low-key for a movie of this style.