Vanderbilt and the Yeggman. Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder.

Last night I dreamed that I was playing a boardgame, invented by my unconscious. This is not unusual (for me, anyway) -- what normally happens is you wake up excited by having unwittingly designed a new game, run through it in your head, and realize that actually either it's rubbish or else it's based on some existing game. A rare exception for me is Nice One Squirrel, as played by some of you, which does more or less work as a game but is unfortunately pretty dull to play. And even in that, in the original version you were playing cuckoos laying eggs in nests rather than squirrels burying nuts, until I realized that that didn't make any sense at all.

Anyway, to get back to the point, last night's game I think had some potential. It was called "Louis Louis", with the players being petitioners to the court of Louis XIV of France. There are various ministers, mistresses etc who have the ear of the King, and you the players are bidding to take control of these so they can present your various projects for his approval. The idea is that you win by getting the particular projects approved that will score you more VPs than the other players, but it's complicated by the courtiers falling into and out of the King's favour, other players taking control of them off you, etc. I guess it's a Knizia-like game of bidding to assemble a portfolio while having to cash in intermediate parts of the portfolio to make your bids -- although that aspect of the mechanism, ie. the link between what you were winning and what you were bidding with, was not apparent to me in the dream.

Does anyone know of a game like this that exists already? It seems to me that it was likely inspired by that excellent film Ridicule, but I suppose there are also En Garde-reminiscent aspects to it.

And do you ever dream up games? And are they any good?

German gamers face jail for acts of virtual violence

"Politicians in Bavaria and Lower Saxony have proposed a new offence that will punish 'cruel violence on humans or human-looking characters' inside games."

Interesting restriction to human-looking characters -- does that include zombies I wonder? Jumping on the heads of mushroom people? Enticing lemmings off cliffs? And what about Wii Boxing?

The title means I think The Conspiracy, and no doubt it contains all sorts of biting satire on the Mexican political system, but for our purposes it's a nice little Flash game of the "make the little man do X" variety. Well, it wasted me some time. Edit: forgot to say, thanks karohemd for pointing me at it!

In other news, didn't quite get snowed in over the weekend in the Lakes, but had a pretty good attempt.

I have a question for any Americans out there, or people who can pass this on to Americans.

( Cousins: all good fun or all too much? )

Any help, thoughts, experiences and opninions very much welcomed!

Hapland is an excellent little Flash puzzle-game I've just found, although it must have been around for a while as there's now a Hapland 2.

It took me quite a while to solve it, but as I'm normally incredibly prone to giving up in disgust at tough puzzles, it's a tribute to its fun-ness that I stuck it out.

Go on, give it a go, you know you want to.

A lovely sunny weekend over here, which made the garden go completely mad after the extensive rain of the week. All the nicer for sitting out in!

( Murder mystery party )

( Beer and quizzage )

( Kleptomania playtest )