As said in my first post “I’m really not a “constant” one.”

QED.

BTW, in these months I felt like posting maybe once or twice, despite the many “postable” things that happened to me.

I will not make up for these months.

But I think I will begin a “one post per week” policy.

I will rant and babble about everything will pass in to my head.

Hope I will not do this after too many beers.

Bye-ya.

Homebrewing is fun, especially when you do it with a bunch of good friends.

All-grain procedures are longish and difficult but I think it’s the right way to homebrew.

We are trying a new recipe. We wanted to know what spelt will give to the final brew so this is the malt composition:

20% Spelt

20% Pilsner

60% Munich

We had 20 liters and so decided to divide the wort in 4 parts, so that we can then taste 4 different beers with the same malt composition but 4 different kinds of hop.

We used:

- Hallertau Hersbrucker

- Saaz

-Tettnanger

- Styrian Golding

Then we used a SafeAle yeast.

I really had a good time homebrewing. I even found the time to do a little NCAS demo with Rita and Alessandro.

We’ll see in the future if these 4 beers will be good or bad brews.

“Bad things happened to me last year” beats “Good things happened to me last year” really bad.

And the good things were very good ones!

For this reason I need I freakin’ fresh start!

I don’t know what will happen in the next months, I only know that my state of mind has to change quickly or I’ll be stuck in this smelly goo which lately seems to be my life.

Though all this, Janus seems to be moving on a new phase, we will announce the publishing schedule and plans ASAP.

I hope not to dream a rabbit this night…

We are waiting for the printer to give us the books, so right now I can’t shout loud “NON CEDERE AL SONNO”
but if everything goes right we’ll have the books this thursday and we’ll begin demoes and presentations at the Italian AmberCON during the MiniMOD mini-convention.

Meanwhile I’m going to thank Fred Hicks, the author of the game, for writing the game and for the nice words he wrote about us in his livejournal.

I’m one of the guilties for this translation as I’m actually the editor of the project (so you’ll know who do you have to shoot if you don’t like the book). Part of the editor work and much part of the translation work was done by Renato. The copy-editing for this project was done by me and Niccolò, while Ciro and Giulia (my fiancée) did translations with Renato. Simone is the other madman who embarked himself and myself in this project (not actually the DRYH translation, the whole “game publishing” project…)

I think I’ll write some more after AmberCON (don’t have laptop, don’t think that wireless will be available
during AmberCON).

To be correct we obviously came back more than two weeks ago, but I haven’t find enought time to update the blog until now. Family and university were in the middle.

There are many things to say about the journey and the fair, I’ll try to remember everithing.

The journey to Essen was veeery long, 14 hours in a car can be a test to your knees and back, but after all it wasn’t so tiring (I wasn’t driving, of course!), even if we encountered what seemed a car accident and works in the last part, when we where after Koblenz. The journey back on the other hand, was really painful, only 9 hours but I sat all the time in the small space left in the back of the car, after all the baggages and (primarily) games were loaded. My neck and my back and my knees were aching all the way from Switzerland to Italy.

The hotel was really a surprise. We stayed in Dortmund, all the affordable hotels in Essen were complete, and so the city of choice became Dortmund. It was a good choice. We stayed in a NH Hotel, and the room was really nice and confortable. The breakfast was good and generous. Next time I’ll definetly try the sauna at the topmost floor.

The fair was a surprise too. It was really big, a little more than I expected. As soon as we arrived we found Angelo Porazzi and Pierluca Zizzi in the booth they shared with Mario Sacchi of PS Giochi. At the same booth we found Gabriele Berzoni and Guglielmo Ruberti from AmiciLudici.

Wandering through the halls we found other friends, in particular Claudio Gelosa, author of Esagek, had a huge wooden version of his game which was attracting many of the passersby.

We found a booth with Japanese game, Make You Gunfighters , I’ve passed a few moments talking with the designer and the other people in the booth, they were all really nice and I really enjoyed talking to them.

There was too much to see and too much to play, and obviously too much to buy.

As expected I was drawn into purchasing the new games from  Eggert Spiele, Cuba and Hamburgum are now mine availing the obvious “fair discount”.

While Simone went in a “wild buy frenzy”, specially when we passed near any abstract games booth, I’ve made some “wise purchase”: Conquest Of The Empire (18 €) and Bootleggers (15 €) both from the now resurrected Eagle Games.

We participated to the Giro D’Italia Ludico, a very nice idea from our friend Jost Schwider, creator of the website Spielepizza.de.

In the two days we passed at MesseEssen we talked to many people and we were actually inhebriated by the fair. The only regret was the absence of a Forge Booth this year. We have some ideas about it we will put forward with some new German friends.

The icing on the cake of our german days has been the dinner at the Zwiebel Brauhaus. Jost and his wife took us to this really nice brauhaus in Soest, the city where they live not too far from Essen and Dortmund. We learned new things about german food and most important we ate very good german food, and drank very good german beer. The Soester Dunkel Bier we drank was so good we decided to take some bottles in Italy.

In the end, I really enjoyed this journey in Germany and all the things we were able to do, to buy, to eat, to drink and to play.

In my flickr page there are some photos that show how much we enjoyed this experience.

Simone attended it last year and was very enthusiast about it.

This year, though, will not be as we expected. The Forge/Projekt Odyssee Booth has been canceled. And it was one of the main reasons I decided to go to Essen this year.

Probably I will compensate enjoying more of the beer, the food, the demos of the various games…

I have to remember to talk to many people about many things before the two days go off, I don’t know if the beer, the food and the games will help me to rembember…

We’ll see…

Life is a strange thing, I don’t think I’m really changing but in this very moment I feel like having a blog.

Maybe this time I can do this for real and try to not drop it after the second post.

I’m really not a “constant” one.

Snooch to the Nooch