Well, it’s been a while since I wrote my last Civ VI leader post about Amanitore of Nubia and there’s been a whole host of new leaders and personas added to the game since then. Among these the number of Chinese leaders has increased from two to five. Therefore it’s probably a good time to start writing about one of them, and where better to start than the OG himself, Qin Shi Huang.

Amanitore of Nubia is available in a base game DLC. She also has her own scenario “The Gifts of the Nile”, which like most scenarios has unique tech and civic trees. You need to assert your dominance over the Nile by building seven temples. The scenario combines faith and military tactics in a satisfying way and you can also play it as Cleopatra for a different perspective. Civ ability Ta-Seti +50% Production toward Ranged units.

Alexander of Macedon is available in a base game DLC pack alongside Darius of Persia. He also has his own scenario “The Conquests of Alexander”, which is both fun to play and instructive in how to use the formidable benefits of his bonuses and unique units. Civ ability Hellenistic Fusion When capturing a city, receive civic boosts for each holy site and theatre square, and tech boosts for each campus and encampment.

Civ ability Meiji Restoration Districts receive a +1 adjacency bonus for each adjacent district, instead of +0.5. Leader bonus: Land units in Coastal tiles and naval units in Coast tiles receive +5 Combat Strength. +50% Production towards Encampment, Holy Site and Theatre Square districts. Units are immune to Hurricane damage. Civilisations at war with Japan receive +100% unit damage from hurricanes while in Japanese territory Unique unit The samurai, a high combat strength unit that does not lose combat strength when damage and gains an extra 10 combat strength against anti-cavalry units.

Ingrid and I love playing Civ VI. It’s a fine game that improves on previous versions, adding many layers and mechanics that mean you can vary your playing style. In fact, with the recent Gathering Storm expansion there’s now an incredible variety of ways to play. The 39 leaders to play with both reflect and provide the game’s increased complexity. Each leader has a slightly different mechanic that influences how you play the game, and of course the leaders you are up against also affect your game play.

In recent weeks I have worn a suit to work. I bought a new furry woolly suit a few weeks ago and have alternated between it and my old one. I also bought new shoes that gave me blisters and made me cry. Enough time has passed that by now it feels natural rather than silly and those shoes don’t eat my feet as much as they used to. I think I feel calmer before I go to work as a result of wearing the suit.

The shiny app embedded below allows you to explore the number of packets you need to complete the Panini sticker album for this summer’s Euro tournament. This builds on the results I presented in an [earlier post](link to earlier post) and allows you to explore how many fewer packets you need to buy when you have more friends to swap with. You can also vary the number of runs performed because the model runs considerably slower with more swappers involved.

Envelopes containing swaps that have arrived in the post in recent days. It is nice to get letters from all over the country, even if they do just contain a selection of panini stickers. As I mentioned in a previous post, I have used the sticker swapping website to share my swaps with people all over the UK. I have sent swaps off to London, Bristol, Cornwall, Lancashire, Wales, and Gloucester.

The Minions got their own movie, just as I predicted in my review of Despicable Me 2. I went to see it this week and I enjoyed it a lot. Here’s a short review. Don’t worry, there are no spoilers here that aren’t in the trailer. It’s very funny. Right from the opening credits you get the minions and their anarchic fun-loving slapstick humour. There’s always been something delightful about they way in which they innocently bumble around.

The other weekend, beset by insomnia, I decided to follow my own advice and get up to do something instead of wallowing unable to sleep. I pulled my emergency jigsaw out of the cupboard and set to it. I should stress that I mean a jigsaw puzzle and not an actually jigsaw: DIY at 2am is not such a good idea! I’d forgotten how interesting jigsaw puzzles actually are. As I sat there contemplating the 1000 pieces and wondered exactly what I’d let myself in for, I found myself thinking about a number of things.

Although I have put off finishing my UNO game for over eighteen months, I thought I would get started with another pet project of mine: making a Carcassonne game. This is not a serious affair, there is an excellent app of Carcassonne available for those of you who have iOS devices (it works particularly well on the iPad). The game just strikes me as having the right level of complexity to be a taxing yet attainable project.

What’s your favourite number? I was ambivalent on this issue until a few months ago until I came across the following quirky result: if you start with the prime number 41 and then add 2 you get 43, which is also prime and then if you add 4 to 43, you get 47: also prime. And this continues to produce prime numbers if you add successive multiples of two to your running total, UNTIL… you get to the 41st number in this sequence, which is 41 squared.

The other day while writing some rather self-pitying notes in my blog book (yes, I handwrite all this rubbish before I go to bed at night!) I came up with some useless superheroes, or rather the only superheroes that a washed-up guy in his early thirties could hope to be. Because I haven’t got any ideas for “five things on the fifth” this month, I decided to flesh out a few of these.

As I mentioned before I am re-reading the novels of Iain Banks and this weekend I managed to finish Consider Phlebas. A little post about it will be coming up soon. One of my favourite things about the Culture novels is how the ships are named and having found a list on Wikipedia, I thought I would share ten of my favourites with you! You’ll Clean That Up Before You Leave Ravished By The Sheer Implausibility Of That Last Statement All Through With This Niceness And Negotiation Stuff Prosthetic Conscience Of Course I Still Love You Size Isn’t Everything Hand Me The Gun And Ask Me Again Dramatic Exit, Or, Thank you And Goodnight We Haven’t Met But You’re A Great Fan Of Mine Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival, The Great names all I am sure you would agree.

It turns out that programming the UNO game is not that complicated once you start designing the thing. This post will get the rules and game elements clear. The deck An UNO deck consists of four sets of coloured cards (red, yellow, green and blue) together with eight wild cards. The non-wild cards are marked with either numbers or special symbols. The numbers range from zero to nine with two of each number except for the zero, which is unique.

A new year, a new hobby I don’t write about programming enough. This is a shame because it is a very interesting subject and I find that the problem solving aspects of programming are very satisfying. Keenly aware of the need to do more hobby programming and to get up to speed on areas of software development that I’ve been neglecting, I have decided to give myself the project of creating a computerised version of the UNO card game.