Boardgames: Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Rise of the Runelords

Over the past year, a regular feature of our week has been sitting down, myself, Zoe and Ewan, to play a scenario from the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Rise of the Runelords, or to shorten it here, PACG. The very fact that this has become a thing we can all do together (once Robert is in bed, unfortunately for him) means that I suspect that I would have warm feelings about the game no matter what, but as it turns out, PACG is a pretty solid co-operative experience, with some interesting that can do a pretty diverse range of things over the course of 6 adventure decks, of 5 scenarios each. 

TV Review: Game of Thrones, Series 5

I think it's fair to say that I was approaching Game of Throne's recent fifth season with a slight sense of foreboding. It's third and fourth seasons had covered events of only one of George R R Martins's novels, and at time struggled with the compression required, whereas the here we were getting ten episodes to cover events of two books, and finally bring the TV series into a position to overtake the books. They're also books where the shine started to come off A Song of Ice and Fire for me, as the narrative discipline of the early books started to fail and we got a lot of meandering around world as things fell apart slowly, with little hope of change. Room for compression, then, but also a lot of sharp cuts to do so. In the end, they (mostly) manage it, but not without some bumps on the way. 

Movie Review: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

I must admit that I am one of the people for whom a little bit of me died when they announced that Peter Jacksons adaptation of The Hobbit would become a new epic trilogy. Two films, I could see, but three, with a load of extra stuff added to make it a "true" prequel? I'm not sure I signed up to that, in my heart. But you know what? I enjoyed An Unexpected Journey, when many didn't, for all it was overlong and meandering. I liked the smaller scale, the bumbling, un-epic nature of it's Company. And then The Desolation of Smaug fixed a lot of those problems anyway, with more pace and focus and maintaining a sense of fun and intimacy that made it easy to ignore the more earnest stuff over in Dol Guldur. Going to the cinema just after Xmas to see a Hobbit film has become a tradition too, so we were always going to go see The Battle of the Five Armies, and to be honest I was looking forward to it. It's a shame then, by my review can be summed by a long, disappointing sigh. 

Siiiiiiiigggghhhhhhhh

Movie Review: How to Train Your Dragon 2

We've had a bit of a debate in our house recently about what age to start taking Robert to the movies. After all, he's only 4 (and a bit!) and his attention span isn't brilliant at the best of times, but he's at the age when we started taking his brother and we only had to leave a couple of films before he got the hang of it. Going to the movies has always been a big part of our family life (from before we had a family!) so we'd been looking for an opportunity to really get everyone one - even bouncy little monkey-beasts - involved in cinema trips. Ewan's taste is pretty solidly 12A nowadays, but he did want to go see How to Train Your Dragon 2, and so we leapt on the opportunity for a family day out, albeit one where I was braced for having to leave after an hour or so. But I didn't, and so this review is brought to you courtesy of a very well behaved little boy who really enjoyed his first cinema trip.