July Games

For anyone paying attention that noticed there was no June games post... that's because I didn't play any games in June... The first week of June was a made rush to get things ready for our European Vacation... and then the rest of the month was the European vacation... during which we did not play any games. At least during June! 

At the beginning of July we were still on out European trip. The first three days of July Amanda was at the conference in Paris (which was the "REAL" reason for the trip...).  On the fourth we loaded everything up and got on a train that took us to Carcassonne... 

 

Sunday, 5 July 2026

Playing Carcassonne... in Carcassonne... with the walls of Carcassonne in the background!? 

It was crazy hot while we were there. Sunday was only 35°C, but it wasn't too bad in the shade of the rooftop terrace of our AirB&B... which afforded a spectacular view of the walls of the medieval city of Carcassonne, for which the game is named. 

We had hauled our copy of Carcassonne with us on the European Adventure (well, just the base game...) 

In the tourist offices, they actually SELL copies of the game! And a lot of the expansions AND a tile you can apparently ONLY BUY IN CARCASSONNE!? (obviously we bought one...)

(note; I later found the tile on BoardGameGeek, and there was no mention of it being ONLY available in Carcassonne... Ah, well...)

Monday, 6 July 2026

The following evening, after another day of exploring the city, we played another game. This time Amanda won! 

Amanda had been a bit grouchy about losing the previous evening and had made a comment about wondering if she EVER won games and if I just won all the time... THIS is the reason I log games on BoardGameGeek! So I did look it up. I did look up the stats…

Over the last twelve years, we have played 52 games of Carcassonne.

I have 19 logged wins

Amanda has 16 logged wins

In one game we were tied for first!

In four of the games someone other than Amanda or I was logged as the winner (Finnegan or Morgan - which does not reflect on their ability or win rate, they’ve just played very few games!). 

In twelve games, I did not record the scores or who won. 

Initially when I started logging games on BoardGameGeek, I did so just to keep track of how many games we played... (hence twelve games where no scoring data recorded) but after hearing a lot of complaints of me "always winning games" - and did NOT feel like that was actually the case - I started to track the wins and scores). There are some games that I tend to win more. Usually ones requiring pattern recognition or geometry.. Amanda tends to win a lot of others - generally ones that require executive functioning skills and planning, worker placement, task management, short-term memory, etc...  

Tuesday, 7 July 2026

in the morning we walked all over downtown Carcassonne again and took in the festivities around the start of the fourth stage of the 2026 Tour de France... and then walked up into the fortified city again and by 5 pm we were EXHAUSTED... so we went back to the apartment and ended up playing Carcassonne SIX MORE TIMES!? 

Still in cheery dispositions...

Amanda started getting tired of losing...

At this point it was apparently five games to one...?

I'm fairly certain she won at least one other game... I'd have to go check BoardGameGeek again... the whole vacation was a bit of blur at this point!?

and one more made NINE games of Carcassonne played in Carcassonne (with the walls of Carcassonne in the background!?

(and just like that, Carcassone became our most played game of the year, so far... With ten plays, that is more than double the next more played game - Sagrada - at five! I mean, we still have five and a half months to go this year and plans to get playing Warhammer Quest again... so that could change!) 

In some of the pictures it almost looks like a mural or background that would drop in with zoom... but I assure you, we rented a place with a rooftop deck that overlooked a square with a church and the walls of Carcassonne behind it...  

After this it was onto a train the following morning to get back to Paris and then flying home to Canada the next! 

Check out the Art Blog to see some of the doodles I did while I was there: 

Sketches from Carcassonne

Friday, 17 July 2026

Friday morning I rolled out to the Warhammer Store to play a game of Blood Bowl with Vera! I'd hoped to get there before it got too hot (and hoped it would be quiet there - as it often is on weekdays... Alas, there was another group setting up a game of 40K when I arrived. It ended up being not TOO noisy and I got through the game without too much troubles! 

Vera brought the Halfling team she's been painting for RJ - who I was to play on Monday! It was a bit of a preview of what COULD happen, I guess, if RJ couldn't make a successful dice roll to save his life... It was... wow... the game ended with the Gnarly Gobbos winning 4-1 - the solitary goal the Halflings scored was a pretty epic ONE TURN TOUCHDOWN where EVERYTHING went right. If things had gone right for Vera all game, it could easily have been the complete reverse! 

Read all about the game here:

Blood Bowl - Another Pre-Season Exhibition Match - against Halflings!! 

Monday, 20 July 2026

Monday I played my first Blood Bowl League game. I was pretty anxious about this. I was playing against someone I never met before and... you never really know with these open leagues that anyone can just join... but it ended up being a super good time! The fellow I played against, Ryan (or RJ, as goes by in the league, because there are two other Ryans in the league of 16 people!?) was a super friendly and fun opponent! He looks kind of serious in the picture above, but it was 90% laughs and 10% "Wow... How do I unfuck THIS situation!?" 

It was definitely the fastest first half I've played yet! I don't think there was a single turn in that first half where either of our teams got to activate more than half of the team before some idiot self-downed themself or tripped over their own feet, fumbling the ball  and ending the turn!? 

It was absolutely EPIC in it's absurdity! Hilarious and ridiculous. These are the games I remember over the years; where just DUMB STUFF happens and we just can't stop laughing. This is the very best of Blood Bowl! I look forward to when we meet again on the fields of astrogranite (Where Leon Cankersore will have his REVENGE against those trees that wronged him so! I mean, there are splinters in there that will just NEVER come out!?) 

My MVP absoloutely SHOULD have been #16 S. Maulfart... who was thrown by a troll (and was NOT eaten), landed on his feet without shattering his knees, dodged through THREE tackle zones and rushed twice to score that ONE goal in the VERY LAST turn of the game... only using ONE re-roll (from his Dodge skill!) 

Instead the MVP went to Lil Bopper, the Goblin Pogoer, who, while not actually scoring any goals or beating anyone up, was probably responsible for the most forward movement of the ball during the game, having gained possession of it one multiple occasions and running it up the field before, ultimately, being brought down by those sneaky, nasty halflingses (or... as was often the case... his own HUBRIS!!)

For more pictures and some brief commentary...

Blood Bowl League: Match #1 - Gnarly Gobbos versus Los Sicarios (Halflings!)

Thursday, 30 July 2026

I have to admit... I'm not a huge fan of Uno... But I am a fan of Shepard Fairey... and after seeing his work at the Moco Museum and the Beyond the Streets Exhibition in Paris, so is Amanda! Soooo..... 

We ended up buying a copy of the Uno Artists Series featuring his art work... 

It arrived on Thursday... 

So we somehow managed to convince the kids to try it out!

Morgan dropped out after one round, when they found out that a proper game involves keeping score at the end of each round and playing until someone got to 500... We ended up playing over a DOZEN rounds before someone scored over 500... 

Will we EVER play is again...!? I don't know. 

I know a number of the people Finnegan plays D&D with love it. Finnegan despises the game... but put up with it to play with us... so maybe he'll play it with them sometime.. 

Amanda will probably suggest it. We have friends that would play it... I don't mind it so much when I'm looking at fun art on the cards...

Friday, 31 July 2026

I'd had my second league game scheduled for the last day of July - but then my opponent got unexpectedly called into work!! Hopefully we'll get to play some time in the next week! 

Euro Warhammers (and other Game Stores)

While in the Netherlands and France I stopped in at two different Warhammer Stores. I wasn't planning on buying anything as I fully expected they would have the EXACT SAME STUFF as my local Warhammer Store... but there were two in the neighbourhood of places I was going to be in Amsterdam and Paris, so I thought I'd check them out, just to see how different (or the same) they were! 

This is the first of the photo-dumps of pictures from my recent European vacation. This is probably not the most interesting for most, but it was the easiest for me, so I thought I'd just get this one out of the way! 

Amsterdam

We found the Amsterdam Warhammer store (or, at least, ONE of them) on our first full day in Amsterdam (and Europe!). Like EVERYPLACE in Amsterdam, there was a HUGE pile of bikes locked up out front! 

The manager was friendly and spoke English (like EVERYONE in Amsterdam!) and there were two others sitting and painting with him when we visited. Amanda spoke with them briefly, while I kind of just had a quick look around... 

As expected, it had basically all the same things the Warharmmer Store in Saskatoon had... and everything was in English. 

displays for Warhammer Quest and Kill Team and other games.. 

Age of Sigmar: Spearhead... 

The only thing that really varied was the contents of the displays of painted miniatures... 

Yeah, that's a Hierophant Bio-Titan, which was pretty cool to see! I like how they dealt with the basing. I know Ian had trouble with those spindley little legs bending where they contacted the table. I'd seen others that put theirs on GIGANTIC bases, which made it difficult to maneuver around a table full of terrain. These little individual bases for each leg that also seemed to support the legs a bit, seemed rather ingenious! 

some cool terrain they had. I liked the clear tanks they'd made and the Forge World cargo carrying variant of the Valkyrie was interesting to see! 

Paris

The Paris shop we found on our second or third day in the city... temperatures had soared to 39°C... I feel like maybe it was air-conditioned... I'd been walking all afternoon and was pretty dehydrated and veering wildly into Heat Exhaustion territory, so everything is a bit of a blur... 

The Paris store was on a pedestrian-only street with lots of cafes and other retail. It seemed super small at the front, but stretched a bit of a way back into the building. Still... smaller than the Amsterdam store... which was smaller than the Saskatoon store. 

It seemed rather busy in there - maybe it was people seeking the refuges of air-conditioned businesses. I feel like there were two or three clusters of two to three or four people painting together at a table...? It seemed like there was a few staff...? I want to say three? but again... memory is pretty foggy at this point. 

As with Amsterdam, it had all the same stuff as the Saskatoon store, but laid out in a wildly different fashion, because of the layout of the store. I feel like there was probably MORE stock in this store than the one in Saskatoon - like there were WAY MORE Blood Bowl teams. 

Everything was in French. Well... mostly... 

As with Amsterdam, the thing that differed, and was of most interest to me, was all the painted miniatures. 

Stormcast Eternals army of Age of Sigmar and an impressive Imperial Knights army for Warhammer 40,000

Some Big'uns for assorted games. 

More Big'uns

Giant Warhammer and Bolt Gun

This was pretty cool to see - new minis for the Old World Grand Cathay faction! I had not seen these before! If I didn't already have far too many armies for far too many games, this might have convinced me to jump into The Old World and build a Grand Cathay army! 

Brand new Cities of Sigmar Cog Fort, expertly assembled and painted! 

A really cool looking Hedonites of Slaanesh army... unfortunately my phone would only focus on the Myrmidesh Painbringers, fabulous glory-hogs that they are... 

One last look at the window display - the Standard Age of Sigmar Skaven versus Stormcast Eternals from the Skaventide box... and some Lord of the Rings miniatures below. 

Other Game Stores

I did not come across any stores that had any historical miniature games... I did find a board game store in Amsterdam with a lot of neat stuff... mostly English games that I could get at my FLGS, but a few Dutch ones...

Including a Dutch version of Munchkin!? 

and Werewolf!

And something called Forest Shuffle, which Amanda thought looked interesting enough she suggested I look for an English copy when we got home...

I kind of regret not getting the Vincent VanGogh cards... (or the Rouseau or Carvagio ones... I think they might have had a pack of Rembrandt cards elsewhere in the store...) I don't OFTEN play games with regular playing cards... but I do like ART and having cards that each have a different painting on them from would be fun... 

In Paris I stumbled onto a Wargame Cafe...

"French Wargame Cafe" 

It wasn't open when I walked by... peering in the windows there were a lot of displays of painted miniatures, which I tried to take pictures of, but being dark inside and bright outside, all I got was reflections of what was across the street... beyond the display cases of minis it looked like it was just tables for playing games on, no actual product being sold. 

I'm sure there has to be some stores selling historical wargaming miniatures in Amsterdam and Paris... they probably just weren't located centrally where I generally was! 

We'll Always Have Paris...

And... maybe Amsterdam...?

So... plans have changed and it seems we may not be travelling to England after all... I've been kind of bummed out about that, as it was the part of the trip I was MOST looking forward to... 

This kind of came about because Paul from Wargaming and Other Distractions (who has been posting lately about a recent Mordhiem campaign you should really go and check out!!) was kind enough to point out that the UK had had some very recent policy changes that we might need to look into regarding dual citizens and entry into the UK... The VERY short version of a long and ridiculous story ends with Amanda being Amanda and deciding to get to the bottom of it, which ended with her speaking to someone in the Home Office in the UK and after GIVING THEM HER NAME AND PHONE NUMBER explained the situation and they said, 'Oh, yeah, you are for sure a dual citizen and will need a British Passport to enter the UK from now on"... 

Unfortunately, Amanda does NOT HAVE a British Passport and we weren't 100% sure she was going to be able to get one in time... so we decided to drop that leg of our planned journey... 

We are still heading to Paris (for Amanda's conference!), and Amanda, not wanting to be short-changed on her vacation time, has decided we need to tack on a visit to AMSTERDAM!? (and a couple MORE days in France!) 

In other news... I am finished school for the term, so hopefully there will be more hobby happenings and a bit more activity on this blog! 

If you want to read about how school went, head on over to the Art Blog:

English Robin on a Brake Cable - a post on the Art Blog about a final project and things I've been up to for the last little bit! 

(I have a couple more books about Canadian battlefields in the Great War inbound, but I'm not sure I'm going to make it to too many... Vimy, for sure, though!) 

Jaunt to Blighty?

Amanda and I are planning a little trip to England later this year... She's been there many times before (she has lots of family there - aunts, uncles, cousins, etc). I've never been anywhere overseas, so this is all new and exciting (and maybe a bit terrifying!) for me! We'll mostly be in London, but making a trip to Nottighham for a day or two. 

Amanda actually has a work conference on the continent, so we're also crossing to France and travelling to Boulogne-sur-Mer (where my great uncle is buried), and Vimy Ridge, and Paris for a few days before the conference!

So, dwellers and travellers of the Green and Pleasant Land... and France... my question you all is:

WHAT ARE THE MUST DO/SEE THINGS?!

(in London and Nottingham and Paris)...?