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Recently I acquired the board game from eBay (as it is sadly out of print). The box came and everything is in great condition, it hardly looks used.
I was excited to have a physical copy of the rules (instead of just a .pdf file) and delved right in. Man! there are a lot of rules, the rule book is 40-some pages, and the sections of the rule book refer forward to unread sections and back to sections which I need to reread. However, once reading the entire rule book the rules do make sense, even if you need to refer to them occasionally. I look forward to playing the game with some friends I surprisingly convinced to agree to play with me. (Thank you, friends, I appreciate this.) Some general info about the game: it covers the period from 1517-1555 in Europe. The playable powers are the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, the Protestants, the Papacy, France, England, Venice, Scotland, Genoa, and Hungary-Bohemia. Each of the major powers has their own path to victory. More updates as we play.
Last weekend, we went to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum with some friends. Even after being there several times and living in Arizona my whole life I’m astounded by the amount of plants I didn’t know the name for.
I realized that soon Charles would ask me the names of these plants (and animals) and I want to give him better names than ’shrub’, ‘tree’, ‘flower’, and ‘#£!! if I know’. To alleviate my ignorance, I decided to purchase a general field guide for Arizona: The Nature of Arizona.
The book is a great introduction to the diverse wildlife of Arizona, from the Sonoran Desert to the Colorado Plateau. The book is filled with great illustrations of amphibians, arthropods, reptiles, mammals, trees, cacti, and wildflowers. Accompanying each illustration is a succinct description of the species’ characteristics including colouring and shape. I enjoyed the book, it is a great introductory tool to the wildlife of Arizona.
As an introductory book, of course, not all Arizona’s species are listed. In reading the book I discovered I am more interested in identifying plants (they have less of a tendency to hide) and will definitely have to follow it up with a book on plants of the Sonoran Desert.
