Yasunari Kawabata, The Master of Go (1951)

Author: Yasunari Kawabata

Title: The Master of Go

Format: Paperback

Pages: 189

Series: –

Hi everyone, apologies for the sudden radio silence of the last few weeks. I’m preparing for an exam and cloud characteristics are taking all of my computing power, as well as all of my available time 😉 This situation should be remedied in the next couple of weeks, when I hopefully sit and pass the exam. But till then, I’ll be scarce in the blogosphere, not posting much or visiting much. I’m alive, though, and kicking – just in a different direction ;).

Now, then, onto today’s real topic – Kawabata’s intriguing mix of fact and fiction, a reportage turned into a meditation on cultural change turned into a dirge for the past. I’ll be usin my GR review as the foundation, and I’ll be adding a thought here and there, to explain my admittedly short and slightly whimsical initial impression.

The crux: Interesting, unusual, meditative.

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My Dixit Board

Dixit is one of my family’s favorite tabletop games – especially when the crew for a Legendary session is unavailable 😉

Unfortunately, we left our old Dixit board at home (a pretty heavy thing it became with all the cards!). Faced with an unequivocally expressed need to play Dixit we decided to buy only those extensions we weren’t familiar with yet – and came short of the board.

And so I painted one 🙂

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Game board © AGruszczyk

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A Cardboard Game of Thrones

Second game, third game post, after that – I’ll stop. For a while, at least. Next week it’s back to books, I promise.

A Game of Thrones: The Boardgame is one of my favourites. Another genre franchise that everybody at least recognizes, but the game itself is completely different than last week’s Battlestar: Galactica. It’s one of the backstabbing games Henry Kissinger could enjoy. I did, immensely, dozens of times.

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When you play a game of thrones you win or you die.

Famous GRRM quote sums up the game nicely.

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Battlestar Galactica – the board game.

A follow-up from last week. From time to time a short board game review will replace usual book-related post. It will not necessarily be “easy games for beginners”. But all can be played by reasonably smart people after reading the manual, all are based on popular genre franchises and can provide many evenings of group entertainment each.

I will not concentrate on new games. A board game is significantly more costly than a book and takes up more shelf space. It’s better to establish a collection of a few classics, than just buy something fashionable at the moment.

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A short introduction to board games.

I’ve wanted to add board games to the list of stuff mentioned on Re-enchantment for quite some time. I thought about the best way to do it and decided against detailed reviews. We are, after all, mainly book-oriented and only occasionally venture into other media. So – some basics for now, and a couple tested examples will follow next week (or one after that, we’ll see). If you play a lot and already have your favourite games – move along, back to boardgamegeek.com, where regular players belong. But surprisingly many people need to be pushed in the right direction – I’m speaking from experience here, I’ve (re)introduced some people to occasional gaming and most of them claim to enjoy that 😉

Board games will be understood on our blog rather broadly, as games played on board or not, as in case of some of the card games (and I don’t mean a regular deck of cards, but cards especially designed for a specific game, as in case of (in)famous Magic: The Gathering). The category obviously excludes all kinds of video games (although, interestingly, there are video versions of many board games), and role playing games (for me – the highest form of gaming, one day I’ll write an eulogy of table top RPGs…).

A photo or two are needed for the main page – so I present my games (and a few borrowed) – I’m not bragging here, and it’s not false modesty, I know a few people with vastly superior collections. I’m somewhere between casual gamer and a regular, closer to casual probably, never playing competitively and treating games mainly as a kind of social entertainment.

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