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All my regular social groups have battened down: the brass band has suspended rehearsals entirely, as has the theatre group. I assume the gaming group has stopped meeting too, if not before then when the official shutdowns expanded to include venues like the one where we meet, but I don't know for 100% sure because they're committed to the belief that anybody who needs to know what's going will be on Facebook.

Up until this week, I've still been going to work, where even in normal times I spent all day alone in an office and didn't see anybody except in passing on the way in and out. Yesterday, however, head office handed down instructions that everyone who wasn't already working from home should start, so this is day one of serious hermiting and we'll get to see how much of an effect it's going to have to be deprived of even those brief social interactions. I've been equally bemused by people posting about running out of things to do and by people posting about how now they have time to watch/read/play all the stuff they couldn't before; as an accomplished procrastinator, both of these conditions are unknown to me because whatever I'm doing and however much time I have on my hands I'm always aware of something else I should be doing instead, but now I'm getting into proper hermit mode we'll see if that changes.

Last time, I joked that with the big events cancelled I might have no alternative but to spend Easter with my family; since then, I've realised that even that's probably not going to be an option.

On a more cheerful note, I've been spending a bunch of time playing Alto's Adventure, a mobile game I saw mentioned in a conversation about ways to pass time when hanging out with friends is off the list. It's a free-runner game, in this case involving snowboarding down a beautifully-rendered mountain, dodging obstacles and collecting power-ups. The in-game controls consist only of "tap screen" or "press screen", the trick being to know when and for how long; getting a feel for that requires trial and error, which was frustrating when I didn't seem to be making progress and then very satisfying when it came together. The other denizens of the mountain include a herd of llamas, who are quite cute and especially so when one of them loses its footing on a steep slope and slides to the bottom on its bottom. It's free, for the version of free where if you play it with data active it pushes ads at you between games until you throw a couple of bucks at it to stop; I've mostly been playing offline, so that hasn't been much of an issue, but I'm probably going to throw it a couple of bucks anyway because it's worth it.

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This month with the gaming group I played Dice Forge, Tomb Trader; Antidote, Arkham Horror: The Card Game, Parfum, and Carnival of Monsters.

I particularly enjoyed Tomb Trader and Carnival of Monsters. Tomb Trader is a quick-playing card game in which everybody is trying to sneak valuable artifacts out of an archaeological dig, but you have to negotiate with another player if they're after the same artifacts as you (it's kept quick-playing by there being a time limit before the dig's guards show up, at which point anybody still arguing gets nothing). Each player gets a character card at the beginning of the game, which affects which artifacts they're most interested in. Carnival of Monsters is a much longer and more elaborate game, but come to think of it the premise is broadly similar: in this case, the player characters are running expeditions to find rare and mysterious beasties they can show off back home.

I would also happily play Parfum or Arkham Horror CG again. We only got to play the introductory section of the Arkham Horror campaign, but at the end of it the bloke who owned the game packed our character decks away as-is so we could continue it another time. The character card I chose to represent my player character turned out to have flavour text explaining that she was devoutly religious and on a divinely-inspired quest to smite evil, which seemed like an odd character beat for a Lovecraftian horror game, but it does come with a built-in risk of losing your sanity (if you fail the tasks the voice in your head gives), and of course there's no guarantee she's right about where the voice in her head comes from.


In other gaming news, the roleplaying campaign has progressed. We've mapped out most of the tunnel system now, and had an amusing encounter where we interrupted a group of darkmantles, cave-dwelling critters whose signature attack is to drop on their victim from above and envelop his head, leaving him blind and unable to breathe. What made it amusing was that the character they tried this on was mine, who out of the entire party is the one who doesn't breathe anyway.