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Martin Rundkvist's blog. Archaeology, skepticism, Sweden. And books and music and stuff.
Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Society, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two.
Category: Gaming
When I was a kid I enjoyed playing the 1984 computer war game Sun Tzu's Ancient Art of War. Last spring I visited Tiger Hill in Suzhou where there is a small temple to the great strategist's memory. The game...
Posted by Martin R at 5:42 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Gaming
When a buddy of mine learned that I keep stats on the boardgames I play, she said, "If I didn't know you, Martin, I'd say you probably suffered from Asperger's syndrome." But hey, Boardgamegeek.com has a nifty book-keeping function, and...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 3 Comments •
Category: Gaming
The game "Place" is a good educational tool since it encourages memorisation of geo-trivia.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 3 Comments •
Category: Gaming
I spent yesterday in good company at the FlemCon 2 gaming convention organised by the S.M.A.S.H. gaming society at Södertörn University College. Juniorette was at a friend's house and Junior is too cool for small cons these days. Left...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Books
I grew sideburns, brushed up on some country dances, learned to play whist, borrowed a Regency outfit and selected some Wordsworth and Coleridge poetry to perform.
Posted by Martin R at 4:01 PM • 18 Comments •
Category: Gaming
My buddy Oscar doesn't like roughing it at gaming conventions, sleeping on classroom floors, eating cup noodles etc. So for two years now he's organised civilised boardgaming weekends where he's gotten a bunch of gamers together and booked a...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 7 Comments •
Category: Gaming
So yeah, Kickstarter now offers you the opportunity to back a card game set in a Lovecraftian girl school. Via Kenneth Hite....
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Gaming
Listening to the Dice Tower and Spiel podcasts and reading forum entries on Boardgame Geek, I've come across two central aspects of US boardgaming culture that have me kind of baffled. One is the ubiquity of open-to-all gaming groups, and...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 17 Comments •
Category: Gaming
Dungeon Crawl as Subway Punk-Gang Standoff Everybody knows what a dungeon game is. There's this underground complex of rooms and corridors, stocked with traps and secret doors, treasures and meanies to guard them. And you are a member (or...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 5 Comments •
Category: Humour
I seem to be on a poetry roll here, kids. When I was 14, Citadel Miniatures put out a small run of a novelty pewter miniature named Sanity Claws: a tentacled menacing monstrosity for the festive season. And now...
Posted by Martin R at 9:54 AM • 4 Comments •
Category: Gaming
Yesterday my buddy Swedepat showed up at 13:30. (That's his name to help distinguish him from Irish Pat.) I hadn't been able to find a third or fourth gamer on short notice. But our plan was to try out the...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 2 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
Peter Prinz is quietly making fun of my whole profession here. Because in Thebes, archaeology's goal is not to find out about the past. It is to become as famous as possible by finding "treasures" among the ruins of past civilisations.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 13 Comments •
Category: Gaming
I spent most of the weekend at a gaming retreat organised by my buddy Oscar. It was like a small exclusive gaming convention. Oscar found a small B&B outfit in Gnesta, a small town an hour's drive from Stockholm,...
Posted by Martin R at 3:30 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Having Fun
Had breakfast guests: a beautifully pregnant old friend and our old boss/buddy came at ten and I cooked us all a full English. Everybody who's into the Gustavian / Georgian era and reads Scandy, read Kristina Ekero Eriksson's new...
Posted by Martin R at 3:55 PM • 11 Comments •
Category: Children
It's like a crowd of kids in front of a gaming console and a TV set, lounging in the living room and watching one kid play a game -- only they're all on different continents.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 3 Comments •
Category: Gaming
I spent Friday and Saturday with Junior at a small gaming convention in Katrineholm, a town two hours' drive from my home. (I stayed nearby in May of last year with my wife.) With less than 100 participants, not all...
Posted by Martin R at 5:34 PM • 6 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
Like everything else we make and use, gaming pieces form part of the archaeological record. Now I have seen a set of 20th century mah jong pieces go into the ground.
Posted by Martin R at 12:56 PM • 5 Comments •
Category: Bronze Age
Reiner Knizia is one of the board-gaming world's greatest celebrities, famous for a long string of hit games. According to the members of Boardgamegeek.com, the best of Knizia's games is Tigris & Euphrates (1997), which is #11 on the...
Posted by Martin R at 12:06 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Gaming
My two days with Junior at the LinCon gaming convention in Linköping turned out even better than I'd hoped for. I had lots of fun myself, and as a geek dad I was extra happy that Junior took to...
Posted by Martin R at 8:40 AM • 6 Comments •
Category: Having Fun
Joined Jrette on her first bike ride for the season. Had to raise the saddle 5 cm. Emceed at the Swedish Skeptics' first full-day conference. We felt that it was time to have a bigger event to make it worthwhile...
Posted by Martin R at 12:55 PM • 5 Comments •
Category: Books
Weatherwise, last weekend was thawing and misty and overcast, so I didn't feel like doing much outdoors. I finished reading Daryl Gregory's new novel (didn't do much for me) and started Douglas Adams's fifth Hitch-hiker book. When it appeared in...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 5 Comments •
Category: Having Fun
Friday night I unexpectedly found myself looking at dinner all alone. So I quickly arranged for a visit with friends to a Jamaican restaurant (I had jerk chicken), and after our meal Swedepat beat me and Dr Sandy at Race...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 13 Comments •
Category: Humour
The Web helps you check if your ideas are original. Recently I've come up with two puns that proved to be unoriginal but still surprisingly uncommon. Ronald McDonald is the Lord of the Fries. The famous fantasy role-playing game should...
Posted by Martin R at 4:43 PM • 8 Comments •
Category: Gaming
My old Tolkien Society buddy Indûr and his wife rents an extra room in their apartment building. It looks like it used to be the caretaker's office. Now it's a gaming room....
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Gaming
I suddenly came to think of my first character in a role-playing game. His name was Gildor, he was an elf and a "fighter" -- I suppose he must have been a soldier actually -- and he came to...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 8 Comments •
Category: Gaming
[More blog entries about Sweden, photography, manor; Närke, Askersund, foto, herrgård.] I was headed for a lonely November weekend with wife & daughter abroad and son with his mom. So I rounded up three friends (though Paddy K was kept...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Children
We spent Friday afternoon and evening walking in the sunshine, eating like kings, listening to some pretty far-out and eclectic music and playing the Swedish 70s board game Marinattack.
Posted by Martin R at 10:12 AM • 5 Comments •
Category: Gaming
I never was much of a game console nut. My video game crazes mostly played out on the PC. But I did play the Atari in the 70s, the C64 in the 80s and the NES and SNES in...
Posted by Martin R at 3:13 PM • 7 Comments •
Category: Tree House Ruins
One of these men is an extremely zany comics artist and celebrated wit. The other is a stuffy scholar in an abstruse field. We've had a three-day holiday thanks to Friday being 1 May -- a red-letter day in...
Posted by Martin R at 3:20 PM • 3 Comments •
Category: Photography
13 September: Samuel and Ludvig play the piano at Ludvig's aunt's house in Viggbyholm. 12 October: Playing Pandemic at a gaming convention in Gröndal. 21 October: A mechanical excavator is delivered to my dad's property to start work on...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 2 Comments •
Category: Gaming
The Swedish language has produced three truly great fantasists. Two are internationally reknowned: Astrid Lindgren (with Pippi Longstocking) and Tove Jansson (with Moomin). The third, Erik Granström, is almost exclusively known among Swedish gaming nerds like myself. From 1987 to...
Posted by Martin R at 4:37 PM • 12 Comments •
Category: Gaming
I'm reading Steven L. Kent's engrossing 2001 book The Ultimate History of Video Games, and of course it reminds me of a lot of games I played as a kid. My first real video games were played on the...
Posted by Martin R at 9:09 AM • 11 Comments •
Category: Gaming
My son just played me a song he can't get out of his head, "Still Alive". It's the closing-credits music of the 2007 computer game Portal, sung by a heavily vocoded Ellen McLain. As it turns out, the song...
Posted by Martin R at 7:13 AM • 7 Comments •
Category: Gaming
With kudos to Mattias who sent me the link, here are Stephen Lynch & Mark Teich performing a fine song about being a 14-y-o D&D-playing young man. To those of our readers who currently fit that description, let me...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 4 Comments •
Category: Gaming
Continuing our military theme from the other day, I regret to inform you, Dear Reader, that the Axis won World War II. After Pearl Harbour, the US couldn't decide whether to concentrate its efforts in the Pacific or the...
Posted by Martin R at 2:50 PM • 9 Comments •
Category: Gaming
I got my driver's licence late, at age 22, because I wasn't interested in cars and didn't want to support automotive culture. When I finally did get myself a licence, it was because I was starting to feel embarrassed...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 6 Comments •
Category: Gaming
Scrabble was first published in 1948. Shortly thereafter, it was ripped off for the Swedish market by a firm named Lemeco, under the tell-tale Anglophone title Criss Cross. The main difference between the ripoff and the original is that...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Gaming
Anybody got a copy of Chaosium's 1980 game-rules booklet Basic Role-Playing? And the 1982 Worlds of Wonder boxed set, specifically the Magic World booklet? I'd love to have a look at them (photocopies or a brief loan would be fine),...
Posted by Martin R at 2:17 AM • 2 Comments •
Category: Gaming
You discuss among yourselves who goes where to whack-a-mole infected cities.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 7 Comments •
Category: Gaming
Played a fun card game with a somewhat off-colour name today: Spank the Monkey from 2003. The object of the game is literally to catch a monkey and whack its little hairy behind. Why? Because all the players are employees...
Posted by Martin R at 11:04 AM • 3 Comments •
Category: Gaming
Lately I've been playing more board games, thanks to gaming friends moving to my area, and also to my son and his buddies reaching an age where they can understand and enjoy games. I have a number of good board...
Posted by Martin R at 5:49 PM • 13 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
In 2005, a team led by myself and Howard Williams excavated a 9th century boat inhumation burial at Skamby in Kuddby parish, Östergötland, Sweden. The finest finds we made in the grave were a collection of 23 amber gaming...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 6 Comments •
Category: Gaming
Now and then I like to play board games: mostly Blokus, Drakborgen (a.k.a. Dungeonquest), Scrabble and Roborally. The latter is an award-winning 1994 game where each player programs a robot to move through a treacherous obstacle course and tag...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 6 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
Lore Sjöberg at Wired celebrates the achievement of recently deceased gaming wizard Gary Gygax with an entertaining look at what it would be like if Dungeons & Dragons characters behaved like archaeologists.May 16 We have nearly finished our initial survey...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 4 Comments •
Category: Gaming
If you talk to present-day software you soon become aware that there's no intelligence in the box.
Posted by Martin R at 8:50 AM • 22 Comments •
Category: Gaming
I've got to check out what kind of text adventures people are writing these days!
Posted by Martin R at 8:50 AM • 15 Comments •
Category: Tech
"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike."
Posted by Martin R at 8:50 AM • 7 Comments •
Category: Gaming
I've even played it with house rules and a home-made alternative map.
Posted by Martin R at 8:50 AM • 23 Comments •
Category: Gaming
... innumerable somewhat younger and even more enthusiastic gamers ...
Posted by Martin R at 8:50 AM • 25 Comments •
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