Newcastle Gamers – 8th December

Another Newcastle Gamers session… and another occurrence of the (now-familiar) minor panic when everybody arrives at the venue and we discover we’re locked out for one reason or another. Fortunately, the circus school were using the building next door, and there’s some kind of interconnection between the two buildings, so Chairman John managed to wheedle his way through via that route and open the doors from the inside. ‘Phew. As it happened, Robert turned up moments later with his key, so we’d have got in the venue with a little more patience anyway. But… you know how it is… those games won’t play themselves – every second counts!

Stuff I played this week:

Snowdonia

Snowdonia

First up was a slightly out-of-the-ordinary game of Snowdonia. What made it out-of-the-ordinary? Well… Owain has managed to get his hands on a playtest version of an un-released expansion for the game, and he was keen to give it a spin with 4 players. I’d already tried the expansion with 2 players (more about that later) and was keen to give it another go… and Olly and Michael had also informally arranged to play via the club’s google+ group. As it turned out, Michael couldn’t make it on the night, so Freddie took the vacant seat.

Since I’ve discussed the basic Snowdonia game in a previous blog entry, I’ll mostly concentrate on our experiences with the expansion here. The current version seats up to 4 players, is based on the Jungfrau mountain railway in Switzerland, and introduces two significant changes to the game: Dynamite and Snow.

In the original version of Snowdonia, building the railway is (essentially) a two-stage process. First, you use your workers to clear rubble from the course of the railway… and once the rubble is out of the way, you can put down railway track. The Jungfrau expansion adds a preliminary step to this routine. The (real-life) Jungfrau is basically a 9km tunnel, cut straight through the mountains and glaciers of the Bernese alps … so in this version of the game — prior to any rubble being shifted — you need to blast your way through the mountains with dynamite. You get victory points for performing these blasting operations and also — in another departure from the base game — the number of track spaces between each station is semi-randomized, and only revealed as each segment of the route is blasted open.

Dynamite is a scarce resource … you can collect a single stick (OK… “cube”) of dynamite whenever you visit the “works” action space, and there are some interesting strategic considerations to be made in where and when you use it. In addition to using dynamite to blast your way through the mountains, you can also deploy it as a super-speedy way to clear rubble during subsequent excavations… (though at a penalty of not being able to take any rubble cubes into your inventory — which can impact your contract completion). Dynamite is a really interesting addition to the game — I like it a lot 🙂

Somewhat less-thematically-convincing (but also great to have in the game) is the snow mechanism. In the Jungfrau variant, a weather type of “Snow” replaces the “Fog” of the base game… and whenever it snows, previously-cleared excavations get re-covered with snow. Or, more accurately: re-covered with rubble … since you basically just stack rubble cubes back in the the affected spots. This “replaced” rubble can then be cleared and collected just like any other rubble can. So it’s snow by name, but rubble by effect.

While the presence of “snow” on an underground railway might be a bit thematically strange, its effect improves the game massively. Admittedly, I don’t have a vast amount of experience with the base version of Snowdonia, but I did feel that the original game had a bit of a strange pace about it — mostly due to the way that the white cubes would auto-complete chunks of the railway for you in unpredictable fits and starts. The snowfall seems to temper that a bit; it rolls back the auto-completion from time to time, cancels out the white-cube station-building events, and generally makes the whole game seem to flow a bit more steadily. It just feels better, somehow. It’s hard to explain, but — for my money — snow is a very good addition. Even if it is bizarre physics-defying underground snow.

There are a couple of other tweaks in the current rule-set — surveyors score slightly differently, and contracts have been tweaked — but the dynamite and snow are the main features. And splendid main features they are too!

An enjoyable time was had by all… I scored the most, but sadly I can’t attribute my victory entirely to sharp gameplay. I’d already played a 2p Jungfrau game with Owain earlier in the week, in which we’d come to the conclusion that the special advantages conferred by a couple of the trains were maybe a bit overbalanced in the Jungfrau variant — and I was pretty much using this second game as an opportunity to sanity-check that theory. Sure enough, the owners of the “suspect” trains came in first and second place. Still, that’s kind of the point in playtesting, right? (and word from the game designer — Tony Boydell — is that one of the trains has now been neutered, and the other is possibly being removed from the variant completely. So all’s well that ends well).

I’m really impressed by what I’ve seen of the Jungfrau expansion so far… in fact, I think I already prefer it to base game(!). If you like Snowdonia, mark this one down as an essential purchase 🙂

Next: Hanabi

Hanabi

A few club members had arranged to go out for food together, and we needed a short-ish game to help make all the arrangements synch up … so out came Hanabi. Hanabi is the weird co-operative firework-themed card game that I’ve written about pretty extensively here… so I’ll spare you a repeat explanation. Suffice to say, the club record remained steadfastly un-broken; we scored a decidedly average 15, ranking the show as “Honorable, but nobody will remember it”. Boo!

Dixit Oddysey

I’m surprised I haven’t written about the Dixit family of games before… but, I guess I’ve never played it at Newcastle Gamers, so that’s probably why.

Dixit is an unusual game. Its main component is a deck of cards, each containing an unusual / whimsical / somewhat surreal illustration. A ladybird with a telescope… A man being chased by a venus flytrap… A chicken in a police uniform… That kind of thing. When it’s your turn to play, you pick a card from your hand and invent a clue to allow the other players to identify it (the rules say the clue can be verbal, or a mime, or singing… pretty much anything goes. Though I’ve never seen anybody do anything other than give a verbal clue). Next, each other player has to donate one of their cards to a central stack, and your original card is shuffled in amongst them. Your opponents then have to try to identify your card.

If another player guesses correctly, they score a point, and you (the clue giver) get 3 points. However, there’s a catch: if everybody guesses your card successfully, you score nothing. Therefore, you’re trying to give a clue that is sufficiently oblique to only be guessed by one or two of your opponents. Aside from another scoring rule or two that I’ll not bore you with here, that’s pretty much the whole game. It’s simple, but clever.

Here’s the downside: I find Dixit to be a game that’s a little bit difficult to play against a bunch of opponents that you don’t know very well. For me, the game shines when you have a certain degree of empathy or commonality in the group… and you know what sort of level you should pitch your clues at or what sort of nuances you can get away with. More of “friends & family” kind of game — it never seems to work so well for me when played with relative strangers. I suppose if I played it a lot at Newcastle Gamers — or against the people there that I know a bit better than most — I’d get a better feel for giving clues in that particular context… but there’s usually other stuff around that I’m more interested in playing. So I don’t.

As such, Dixit was probably my least-favourite game of the night. Still, other folks were keen to play it, enjoyed it, and it filled a gap. But by the end of the game, I was keen to get back to some cube-pushing eurogame action…

…so out came: Village

After having a bit of a hiatus from playing Village, this turned out to be my second game within the space of a single week! They were both very different experiences too… the previous game had gone at a fairly leisurely pace — I managed to bag every location on the travelling-the-world task, and scores were pretty high across the board. This game, by comparison, flew past very quickly. Deaths came thick and fast (the residents of this particular village clearly had far harder lives than the people living in the previous one!) … and I think we only managed to play three full rounds. I was making a blind play for the world-travelling task again (never a good idea in a short game) and barely managed to cover half the available destinations… in fact, I didn’t really get a decent points engine into play at all; even my family deaths were badly-timed and failed to get any significant presence in the book of remembrance. Hmmm. A good lesson in the perils of taking the pace of the game for granted!

Skull and Roses

Skull and Roses

Another filler… and a game I’d read about but hadn’t played before. Skull and Roses is a very simple bluffing game; basically, each player has a set of 4 beer mats… one of which depicts a skull on the flip-side, while the others feature roses. Each turn you either add a card (/mat) to the stack in front of you, or make a bet that you can flip x amount of cards over without encountering a skull. Then the other players can either raise or call your bet. The clever bit being… you must flip over every card in your own stack before you’re allowed to flip anybody else’s cards, so there’s a big double-bluff thing going on; you can deliberately bury a skull in your own pile, then open the betting (trying to entice somebody into raising the bet) — but if you’re actually called on to play that bet, you’ll lose.

As bluffing games go, it’s elegant, and very very clever — probably one of the best bluffing games I’ve played (though the genre, as a whole, doesn’t usually attract me). It’s a bit of an oddity though, and I’m kind of surprised it exists as a “published” game — the rules are simple, and you could easily play it with a regular deck of cards. The “biker gang” beer mats do add a certain atmosphere though. And it worked great as a 10-minute filler 🙂

Finally: Revolution

Another new-to-me game. Revolution is a light-ish title concerning hidden bidding and area control. Each round, you get a number of tokens to use to gain influence on various characters within the town… there are cash tokens (for bribes), envelopes (blackmail) and fists (for violence!). You make your bids in secret, using a mini-board hidden behind a shield … then bids are simultaneously revealed, and whoever made the highest value bid on each individual character gets various benefits — these might be support points (i.e. victory points), bidding tokens to use in the next round, or the ability to place (or re-arrange) coloured cubes in the various areas of the town. At the end of the game, there are bonus points awarded depending on who has dominance in each section of the town.

The game can get a bit nasty towards the end, as people compete for the last few spots of dominance. I fell into the trap of making tit-for-tat attacks on Jerome’s areas, as I’d earmarked him as my most dangerous opponent. This ended up backfiring, as both we ended up in 3rd and 4th place… (in a field of 4 — oops!). Meanwhile, Lloyd (the only person who had played before) coasted into a significant lead. I wish I’d paid more attention to how he did it — he seemed to be accumulating huge reservoirs of influence tokens in the critical final rounds.

Not a bad game; it was easy to pick up, not overly complex, and somehow felt like exactly the right sort of game to be playing at that point in the evening… certainly not a triple-A title, but it was fun and something I’d quite happily play again.

Summary: An excellent evening’s gaming. Two top class games (Snowdonia and Village), and a smattering of perfectly good secondary titles filling the gaps. Even the Dixit session — which I realise I was maybe a bit down on in the tone of this article — wasn’t really that bad; I’ve certainly played far worse.

The next session is scheduled for Saturday the 29th December, and is planned to be an all-dayer (should be a good opportunity for everybody to give their new Christmas pressies an outing!). As an added bonus, we definitely have a key for the front door this time. Looking forward to it already!

CREDITS: Session pics stolen from Ana, Owain and John F. The Jungfrau playtest is mentioned here with the designer’s blessing — though we totally forgot to photograph it (doh!!). Newcastle Gamers meets on the second and last Saturday of the month. Usual cost is £3 (or £1 for concessions), but your first visit is free … check our G+ group for more info.

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Back in the balmy days of May…

I’ve been catching up on my video editing backlog for calendarcustoms.com (some of which go all the way back to May… gulp!). I’m particularly pleased with the editing on this one — Helston Furry Day — it was very crowded, and difficult to get good vantage points (especially during the Hal-an-Tow at the start), but I think the footage from the main dances later in the video flow together well 🙂

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Newcastle Gamers – 24th November

Arrived this week to discover most of the members of the club gathered in a huddle outside the front door; it transpired that a circus school trapeze class was still in full swing (Ha! “full swing”! Did you see what I did there? Huh? Did you?). I don’t think they were aware that we had the hall booked, as they seemed to be planning to hold some kind of extra-curricular aerial training session throughout the evening… but they apologetically started stowing their equipment away when the board-gamers began to arrive en-mass.

Hmmm. I wonder who would win a fight between a troupe of trained circus performers, and a pack of disgruntled middle-aged geeks, desperate for their fortnightly boardgaming fix.

Anyway, it took them a while to hoist all their bits and pieces away, so we started a bit late. Eager to get things underway — and having already pre-planned a game with Olly & Owain — I promptly set up my new copy of:

Power Grid: UK & Northern Europe

Power Grid UK

After a short period of map critique from various passers-by (mostly expressing surprise at the somewhat-creative positioning of many UK cities), we roped in a couple of extra players — Lloyd and Gordon — and the game got underway.

It was the first time that any of us had played this map; it was launched a couple of weeks ago at Essen, and only had its UK release earlier this week. As we played, it struck me as a fairly gentle map; no overly-cruel choke points, and a fairly even spread of cheap bits and expensive bits. The map’s main gimmick — being able to start two different grids (one on Britain, one on Ireland) didn’t seem to have a major impact on the game, but that might be because we chose Northern Ireland to be the excluded territory on this particular outing, possibly making that side of the map a slightly less attractive investment. The most interesting aspect was probably the resource flow for the UK — starting with zero uranium in the first round (though plenty later), and ending with fewer-than-normal fossil fuels in phase 3 (in fact, Gordon was denied a victory opportunity purely due to the fact that the coal market was entirely exhausted at a strategically-critical point).

It was a very close game — Gordon took an early lead of one or two cities and (amazingly) managed to maintain it pretty much throughout the game. He won the game with 17 cities… I was one behind on 16, and I think the other players ended on 14/15.

I don’t think this’ll rank as one of my favourite PG maps, though I expect it’ll get plenty of plays purely by virtue of it featuring the UK… and it does seem to be a fairly evenly-balanced/accessible one for new players. If I played it again with experienced PG players, I’d be tempted to toss in plenty of promo cards to spice it up a bit.

The flip-side of the map — Northern Europe — features some alternative powerplant cards, which seem like an interesting tweak. John Flynn’s copy of this map was being played at a different table; it’ll be interesting to read how the session went.

(…and a third table was playing a copy of Friedemann Friese’s Copy Cat at the same time as both of the power-grid games were going on. 2F games have clearly made a big impact on Newcastle Gamers this week!)

Next: Agricola

Yay! 17th Century subsistence farming!

The last few times I’ve played Agricola, it’s generally been with first-timers, and we’ve mostly been playing with the E-deck (aka the “beginners” deck). This time, most of the people playing had prior Agricola experience (Jerome had only played once, but played scarily well on that single occasion), so we played with a 3/4 mix of E-Deck and I-Deck cards. I think the result was a pretty interesting game.

The “I” in I-deck stands for “interactive” … with the occupations and major improvements tending towards (though not exclusively based on) effects which piggy-back on the actions or improvements of your opponents. So, for example, Olly’s wood trader allowed him to buy a chunk of wood off another player whenever that particular player took a wood-gathering action. My fence builder occupation got me resources whenever somebody added fences to their farm… one of my minor improvements was a special clay pit which other players could visit by paying me food… etc etc. Difficulty-wise, it’s not much of a step up from the E-deck … but it does introduce some pleasing player-to-player transactions.

By some fluke, I got a dealt a hand full of clay-based improvements and occupations at the start of the game… far more than I could practically bring into effect. I settled into a combo that gave me a cheap route to a sizeable clay house. Olly had the baker occupation and a mill-stone improvement, which set him up for a strong bread-baking tactic, and Jerome (whose cards I didn’t really see in detail as he was sitting diagonally opposite) seemed to have an extremely effective vegetable-growing tactic set up (including a special oven that converted 1 veg to 4 food). I suspect the cards had been less-kind to Russell; he played a fairly straight game of ‘gric with a rush for family growth and a 4-room stone house.

Final scores: Jerome and I tied on 29, Olly had 27 (amazingly playing most of the game with only 2 family members!), and Russell ended with 21.

Enjoyable game. Agricola is always an enjoyable game. 🙂

Finally: Survive: Escape from Atlantis

First time I’ve played this, and I *really* enjoyed it. It’s light, it’s aimed at a family audience, and it has a fair bit of randomness involved — so isn’t the kind of thing I’m usually very into — but it’s a cracking bit of game design, successfully balances the luck with planning and strategy, and was the perfect ending to the evening after a couple of weighty, thinky titles.

Survive:Escape from Atlantis is a fairly straightforward “chase” game … you start with a set of meeples on an island in the middle of the ocean. Each turn, a chunk of island sinks into the waves, and eventually one of the sunken bits of island will reveal a volcano which promptly explodes and ends the game. The object of the game is to evacuate your meeples… either by boat, or by swimming… to the safety of neighbouring islands before the volcano appears.

However, the waters around the island are infested with sea monsters, sharks, and boat-destroying whales. After you’ve moved your meeples, you get a chance to move one of these monsters at random, and mess with your opponent’s plans. It’s cut-throat, brilliant fun, and has moved pretty close to the top of my list of “things I’m likely to buy very soon”. Enjoyed it a lot — highly recommended 🙂

Best bit of the night: Survive: Escape from Atlantis… though Agricola ranks a close second.

Worst bit: that slightly awkward moment where a gang of middle age blokes come along and kick a bunch of happy young circus girls out of the playground, ‘cos they want to play boardgames 🙁

Lucky escape of the night: I almost got lured into playing a “Japanese deck-building game”, but I turned it down when I discovered it took about 2 hours to play. It was only later in the night that I spotted a Barbarossa box lurking at the back of the games-people-brought-in table. Most of the artwork in Barbarossa involves imagery of Nazi anime girls, in lingerie, caressing overtly-phalic weaponry, and having extreme difficulty keeping their thighs together. Even if I had a T-Shirt emblazoned with the slogan “THIS IS IRONIC”, I wouldn’t feel particularly comfortable playing that game at a public gaming group. Or, for that matter, “at all”. Kind of glad it didn’t get as far as the table before I had to make my excuses. Hmmm.

Anyway, it’s been a good week for games. Aside from the above gaming sesh, I also managed to sneak in games of Suburbia and Troyes at Owain’s place mid-week (Suburbia opinion: quite enjoyed it, and I’d happily play it again, but it’s not one I’d pro-actively put forward for playing during a session — it just didn’t push the right buttons for me for some reason), and clocked up games of Chronology, Pandemic and Zooloretto while visiting my parents on Friday night. We’ve even managed a few Dectet games on evenings in between (Emu Ranchers = brilliant!). I’ve been spoilt. And it’s not even Christmas yet! 🙂

CREDITS:
Pictures courtesy of Olly. Newcastle Gamers meets on the second and last Saturday of the month. Usual cost is £3 (or £1 for concessions), but your first visit is free … check our G+ group for more info.

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Corbridge Gamers – 14th November

No Newcastle Gamers for me this week, due to the aforementioned explosions. However — leveraging the evening’s fireworks theme — I did manage to get a few family members to join me for a couple of games of Hanabi on Saturday night, which went down amazingly well for an audience of predominantly non-gamers!

Furthermore, Owain popped round last night with his copy of Snowdonia … and I had the new expansion for Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small sitting on the shelf awaiting it’s first outing — so it the week hasn’t turned out to a dead loss for gaming after all 🙂

Snowdonia

Somebody else's game of Snowdonia. Pic credit: Daniel Danzer

Snowdonia is set in the year 1894, and concerns the construction of the famous mountain railway up to the peak of Snowdon. It’s pretty standard worker-placement fayre; you use your workers to clear rubble out of the railway’s path, collect resources, lay track, and build bits of station for victory points. Owain mentioned that when this had an airing at Newcastle Gamers a few days ago, a few people likened it to a “light” version of Caylus … and I can kind of see why — worker actions are resolved in a queue, and you’re trying to set yourself up with batches of goods to contribute to the construction of the railway. When the construction is finished, the game ends.

It struck me as a bit of a difficult game to play on your first attempt … the pacing is hard to gauge; particularly because there’s a semi-random event mechanism which occasionally makes the game complete bits of the track (and stations) itself, leaving the game in a far more advanced state than you anticipated … plus, it’s not immediately obvious — from the wealth of scoring options open to you — where you should really be focussing your point-generating efforts as a new player. I felt like I only got into the swing of things at around the 2/3rds mark … only to then be foiled by the game ending suddenly and abruptly (just when I was setting myself up for a massive points-earning swoop) thanks to one of those aforementioned game-accelerating events. On this basis, Snowdonia certainly seems to be one of those games where you’ve pretty much got to write off your first attempt as a learning experience.

At times, the game seemed a bit thematically…”odd”. This was mostly due to the fact that there was a couple of points in the game that threw up strategic deadlocks; situations in which it would be stupid to excavate any more track because doing so would immediately put the other player into a massively-advantageous position. From a gaming point of view, that was an interesting situation to be in … but from a thematic point of view, it felt like although we were playing a game about constructing a railway, the big decision points concerned the most efficient ways to avoid constructing the railway … though maybe this was just a quirk of the way the cards fell on this particular occasion, and/or a syndrome that the 2 player version is more prone to.

Anyway, it may seem from the above that I’m being entirely critical about the game, and I really don’t mean to be… because it is, at it’s core, exactly the kind of game I like, and it has a few interesting tricks up its sleeve. It certainly played well with 2, and was — on balance — a good game; I enjoyed it.

Finally — for no particularly good reason other than I found it lurking on my hard drive this morning — here’s a snapshot of yours truly looking a bit awkward at the summit (or just in front of the summit) of the real Mount Snowdon a few years ago. (And yes, of course I took the lard-arse option of using the mountain railway to get there…)

Next on the table:

Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small / More Buildings Big and Small

This is the sort of expansion you might be driven to buy purely because it gives you an excuse to use the abbreviation “Agricola:ACBaS/MBBaS” in geeky boardgame blogs. Fortunately, it also happens to be a pretty nifty expansion.

The expansion has 3 parts: an additional farm extension (bringing the total of farm extension boards in the game to a nice, asymmetrical 5), an additional stall/stable tile (bringing the total number of stall/stable tiles in the game to a nice, asymmetrical 5), and — far more interestingly — a set of 27 new “special building” tiles.

At the start of the game, you pick 4 of these special building tiles at random, and add them to the 4 “basic” tiles that you play with in the standard game… giving you 8 different special buildings to choose from, 4 of which will (probably) be different every time you play. Unless my maths is a bit wonky, 4 from a set of 27 gives you 17,550 different permutations. That’s a fair bit of scope for variation.

There’s nothing earth-shattering about the new buildings; nothing that will dramatically push the game in a vastly new direction … but each one introduces subtle new strategic possibilities. I guess they work a little bit like the special buildings in Le Havre; consider them as a little bit of seasoning on an already-delicious euro-gaming sandwich 🙂

Here’s the foursome that we randomly drew last night:

They’re far from being the most exciting tiles in the set… but they give you a pretty good idea of how some of the new buildings are location sensitive, or can only hold certain types of animals, or open up new avenues for accumulating victory points.

I have to admit, this was probably my worst performance at ACBaS *ever*. Owain completely crushed me, despite this being his very first game. I was blocked out of building feeding troughs *precisely* when I really, desperately needed to build feeding troughs… and it’s entirely possible I was being just a tiny bit keen to build the new buildings (I ended up taking three of them – all but the large extension), and possibly not paying quite enough attention to minor things like making sure I had housing for all the animals I was accumulating. And… well… yeah… I guess it was basically a bit like… OH! LOOK! NEW BUILDINGS! SHINY!!

Anyway, Owain enjoyed his first taste of ACBaS, and despite my humiliating defeat, it was good to get an early opportunity to play with the new bits.

MBBaS seems like a really promising expansion — I can’t really imagine ever wanting to play ACBaS without it — though it’s perhaps a touch on the expensive side for what you get — four sheets of 5″x7″ chip-board and a rules leaflet in a small box. Still, boardgameguru has it for a tenner, and that’s hardly going to break the bank 🙂

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Thing of the week: explosives

This week, we held our annual bonfire-night gathering… in which most of my wife’s side of the family gather for eating, playing games, burning things and setting off fireworks. As usual, I was in charge of the fireworks.

I like being in charge of the fireworks — not just because I’m a big kid at heart, and setting off recreational explosive devices is a huge amount of fun — but also because I take great delight pouring over product listings for weeks in advance, figuring out what pieces to buy, layouts, the best firing order, etc etc. Of course, I justify the effort and expense by saying it’s all down to the delight it brings to the faces of my little nieces and nephews… but now that my little nieces and nephews are (mostly) in their mid 20s, that particular excuse is starting to wear a bit thin. They still attend religiously though (despite living 100+ miles away), so it can’t be too bad a night out 🙂

It’s getting harder and harder to pull off a decent show on our (very small) budget each year. With that in mind, this year’s big innovation was these:

Candle fans! Individual cat-3 roman candles are dirt cheap if you buy from the right places – about 60p a tube – so I knocked up a load of wooden frames in the garage, gaffer taped candles onto them, and (with the aid of a family member roped into co-lighting duty) set them off in various cunningly-designed symmetrical patterns, half a dozen of them at a time. It was a really good effect — better, in fact, than many set-piece cakes that cost ten times the price. I only wish I’d invested in more of them… I’ll definitely be doing that next year 🙂

Sadly, I entrusted my video camera to my 13-year-old nephew and his friend for the duration of the firework show. This means the only record of the event is a 20 minute, out-of-focus video of blurry coloured lights, with beavis and butt-head giggling all the way through. The camera managed to pull focus for a grand total of 55 seconds. These are those 55 seconds:

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