As one may have gathered over the last couple posts, I've been playing a lot of the WoW board game. This post is not really about playing games. It's about art. Or at least graphic design.
As related somewhere, I got the game to aid me in my recent convalescence—mostly to keep me from going bonkers in the midst of my inevitable battle with the dastardly cabin fever. And as related elsewhere, the game's cards and pieces are pretty snazzy-looking. With one glaring exception. The boxes that Fantasy Flight Games designed to hold the game's 1308 playing cards (yes, that's 1308). The reason FFG's boxes are so poorly designed is that they didn't happen to include any. Despite all the work they put into the game's components, they just kind of threw their hands up in the air and said, "Meh. Who cares about keeping the cards together?" Apparently the kids at FFG leave their game out all the time and never have to worry about what will happen when the game goes back in the box, gets shoved into a closet, and then weeks later is pulled down to find thirteen-hundred and eight cards spread liberally throughout the game's box.
So, just before my surgery, I decided to rectify the problem.
Using official (mostly) WoW art and a font that either is the same one WoW uses or else emulates it pretty well, I created nine boxes to hold each class's powers and talents, two boxes for the Lordaeron and Outland dungeon cards, and three boxes for the various kinds of quests (Alliance, Horde, and neutral). It was a lot of work and a bit of fun. I printed each box on semi-gloss photo paper (matte may have been better, but a semi-gloss cardstock would have been ideal) and afixed the various tabs with simple double-sided scotch tape. I still have about five boxes to make (I ran out of time before my surgery), but I should get to them eventually.
Here are some thumbnails of my boxes, each of which one may click to embiggen (and see the whole tuckbox pattern).
The only two boxes that use non-official art are the Priest and Druid boxes (the Priest is fan art that I just thought was cool and the Druid box comes from a fan wallpaper made from in-game images—I used it because there's a curious lack of Druid art out there).
While putting these boxes together, I was able to pay greater attention to WoW art (and fantasy art in general) and I noticed something striking. Fantasy artists either have no idea how to treat female anatomy or they think its funny to lead astray their young teenage victims. Case in point: the art used on my Alliance Quest box—there is something amiss.
That's right ladies and gentlefolk. This poor bloodelf lass has, by artistic license, been entirely stripped of her nickels. Either that or bloodelf anatomy is vastly different from our own and they have just happened to evolve a nickelless frontside in order to appeal to young males and fantasy artists. Either that or the plastic surgeon just kinda shaved them off. *sigh* And geeks wonder why their fantasy environments do not readily advertise themselves to the fairer sex.
Board Game: Euro-Lite
Players: 2-5
Time commitment: An hour or so
Price: $49.99 (retail)
Publisher: Days of Wonder
Official website: http://www.daysofwonder.com/tickettoride/
Way back in September of Oh-Seven, I did a little post called 16 Games—in which I honoured sixteen games that I enjoy playing. Mostly board games. In the post's comments, a certain spartican Mark said: Ticket to Ride. It's all about ticket to ride.
He was, unfortunately, a liar, a lunatic, or the... well, no. He wasn't the lord. The other two choices are up for debate.
My initial concern with the game had been with its theme. Trains. Trains? No really, trains. You can probably see from where my hesitation arose. There may have been an age in which trains were in any way something by which one could be overawed. That time is distant and very much not now.
Still, I never ceased to hear good things spoken of said Ride and said Ticket. It is, in fact, currently the forty-third most highly rated game on Board Game Geek. And! In the intervening months I had been convinced to buy and try Railroad Tycoon—which has been an unquestionably cool sort of game. As I remarked in January, "Quite honestly, it's been a lot of fun. We can't wait to play again."
So, my bulwark defenses against locomotive games laid flat, I asked for and received Ticket to Ride as a Christmas gift. Perhaps I'm just being surly, but I don't really like the game. Certainly I've played worse, but Ticket to Ride will not, I think, ever make it into my heavy-duty play rotation.
Unless there is duress involved. Extreme duress. Or maybe six-year-olds.
So here's the deal, Ticket to Ride has two good things going for it: 1) it's ridiculously easy to explain (which shows itself to be even more wonderful when one considers the difficulty I've recently had explaining games like World of Warcraft or Tigris and Euphrates to the willing); and 2) it's a relatively short game, one that can be played in under an hour.
The game essentially works like so. Players are presented with a game board map of America, its principal cities, and the routes that connect said cities. In a fit of arbitrariness. each route is coloured according to the kind of trains that will take that route (e.g., red trains, blue trains, green trains). From the first, each player receives three random route completion cards, also known as Tickets (signifying routes that should be completed for points), and may keep one, two, or all three of these cards. Completed routes add to one's overall score but uncompleted ones subtract from one's score. Ah, risk!
During one's turn, a player chooses one of three actions: 1) drawing Train Cards; 2) drawing Tickets; and 3) laying routes. Tickets are going to be where the big points come from, but to fulfill tickets players will need to lay routes, but to lay routes players will have to draw the correct colours of trains to complete the route. So, it all works to the same end. Of course, the correct colour of train is not always available and other players might lay route where you had been planning to build, thereby blocking your path, causing you to weep and moan and try a different tactic. If you can.
Really, it doesn't sound all bad and really could have been a pleasant diversion for an evening with friends. But the game is fundamentally broken in the state it comes in. The problem is the Tickets (route completion cards) with which players begin the game. This random assortment of options handicaps the game from the start. A month or two back, we played a five-player game and after receiving my three Tickets, I kept all of them, knowing my victory was assured. Each Ticket built on the others and were to be built around the outskirts of the where I was in little danger of being blocked by players forging opposing routes. I easily completed my routes and near the end of the game drew from the few remaining routes to find that they all coincided with what I had already built as no one else had any need to build there, the cards were always abandoned in favour of Tickets that favoured routes that coincided with other player's rail empires.
In the end, I finished the game a hundred points ahead of the second place player—who herself was far ahead of the other three. But my victory was hollow because I didn't earn it. It was given to me. It was like winning at Candy Land.
In summary, if you find games like Settlers of Catan too complex, you might find Ticket to Ride is more your speed; but for myself, I'll play it again if requested, but I'd rather play any number of other games. I'm glad I didn't pay for the game myself, but also sad I didn't ask for something else too. (Actually, I just looked at the retail price of the thing and Yikes!)
After the excellent Kafka on the Shore and the perhaps much better Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I've been on something of a Murakami kick. I find his storytelling fascinating, both in device and in style. His use of the extraordinary-as-mundane is a tasty joy for me to indulge. Sputnik Sweetheart, while not as wonderful an experience as the two aforementioned works, was quite a bit of quick fun.
Thematically not dissimilar from Wind-up Bird, this short novel revels in questions of identity, conscious vs. subconscious, and the real vs. hidden world, and the nature of sexuality. The book is lean and packed with Murakami-style mystery—that is, both mystery in the detective sense and mystery is something closer to a Pauline sense, a revelation that is baffling to those who don't get it and uncanny to those who do.
Sputnik Sweetheart revolves around three characters: 1) the largely passive narrator, K, a thity-year-old elementary school teacher and passionate reader who is madly in love with 2) Sumire, a former classmate of K's who dropped out of school to become a writer and who has fallen madly in love with 3) Miu (whom Sumire calls her "Sputnik Sweetheart"), a married woman who imports wine, has a hidden past, and holds no ability to care sexually for her husband, Sumire, or really any other creature. All three are tortured by their own lives and despite the plot involving Sumire's abrupt disappearance off a secluded Greek island (a la L'Avventura), the story is less about the disappearance and K's subsequent investigation, and more a discussion of who people are and what is it that both separates and binds humanity from and to itself.
Sputnik Sweetheart is not the best I've read from Haruki Murakami, but it was certainly worthwhile and a book I hope to revisit in a few years.
I had thought of doing a Capsule Review devoted wholly to the works of Satoshi Kon, detailing his complete available collection of films and television. But then i realized I had already reviewed Tokyo Godfathers and Paprika, leaving only psychological thriller Perfect Blue, sentimental ode to film Millennium Actress and his television series Paranoia Agent left to cover.
So, since I just finished watching Paranoia Agent with the Monk, I thought I'd talk about it and hit the other two another time.
I've been following Kon's work ever since seeing Perfect Blue in 2000 and with the exception of that first film,* I have been universally happy with everything of his I've engaged. Paranoia Agent is no exception and curiously, many of the themes Kon explores across the stage of his thirteen twenty-five-minute episodes, intersect well with the content of the novels and short stories by Haruki Murakami I've been devouring over the last several months.
Over the course of the creation of his first three films, Kon discovered there were a number of ideas that he wanted to explore but just couldn't justify squeezing into the stories he had already created. Those ideas find themselves winding their way into Paranoia Agent, which presents an ideal vehicle for such examination as each episode focuses on a different character, allowing for a wide discussion of themes and ideas.
Yet even with Kon's ability here to investigate a greater variety of aspects of his nation's culture and history, the series does follow certain particular themes from start to finish. Just as Murakami finds interesting questions of identity and responsibility, violence and sexuality, so too does Satoshi Kon. Paranoia Agent examines Japan's post-war abandonment of responsibility and visceral need for the peace that irresponsibility offers. In some ways devastatingly satirical, the brief series treats many of the cultural peculiarities that have grown to strength under the shadow of the Atom bomb: kawaii culture and its embodiment in Hello-Kitty-like animal mascots; otaku extremism; suicide cults; youth violence; bureaucratic ineptitude; and the ever-increasing dissolution of the real individual in favour of the technologically removed superself.
In the end, the show offers considerable grist for the thoughtful viewer over which to mull after the series' cataclysmic finale. In the end, Kon seems to be saying that Japan is trapped in its inability to take responsibility for really much of anything and that even its complete destruction can only serve bring the culture/nation back to a point where it can begin the cycle anew.
Huh. I almost forgot to talk about the show's actual premise. In the first episode, the creator of cuddly kawaii icon Maromi is under increasing demands to create a new cuddly mascot to fuel society's need for ever-cuter icons. At the height of her panic she becomes the first of many victims of Shonen Bat (literally, Bat-Boy, but translated as Li'l Slugger on the dub), a juniour-high-aged kid on rollerblades wielding a baseball bat. Gradually, as the number of victims mount, a pattern emerges. Et cetera.
All in all, an excellent series that seems to flag for a couple episodes around the three-quarter mark only to rally again in the last few episodes. Highly worthwhile.
*Perfect Blue, while interesting and somewhat engaging, is not a perfect movie and suffers at times from plot holes that a little tightening might have fixed. It's a film that I enjoy but not one I return to over and again.
Rating:
Operation: Laparoscopic
Surgeon: Dr. Steven Chang
Year: 2008
Operation Duration: Couple hours
Recovery Period: Seemingly interminable.
Despite all the rave reviews, having one's gall bladder out is really not the amazing experience one would imagine. Sure, there's the glamour and allure of several hours of unconsciousness, the signs of stigmata in all the wrong places, the shaved belly, the two weeks off from work, the überhip Dr.-Pepper-coloured splotch of settled blood that stains one's belly subcutaneously, and the newfound celebrity amongst friends and family alike. But to let in on the secret, there are disadvantages as well.
Indeed.
Chief among these, I think would be the freaking excruciating pain one experiences nearly constantly in the days following. Pain killers might be said to dull the pain and they may very well do their job, but if this is the case, pity above all earthly creatures those that endure such surgery without availing themselves to such medicinal remedies. For days after, getting into and out of bed is what is known in scientific circles as a quantum impossibility—a body at rest must at all costs remain at rest and a body at stand must at all costs remain standing. Or terror shall ensue.
The real surprise comes when one comes to find just how deeply the average, non-vegetative person relies upon the abdominal musculature for every aspect of daily living. In the days following such a surgery, do not expect to: stretch while yawning; turn to face a speaker; laugh, chuckle, or chortle; breathe more than the shallowest of breaths; shift in one's seat; shift in bed; survive having one's pillows adjusted; cough. Performance of any of these tasks may render one unconscious for several moments—or at the least make one wish for the Apocalypse. Bowel movements may actually kill. Which is ironic considering that one's surgeon will inevitably prescribe the liberal use of stool softener.
Also, the absence of usable abdominal muscles will cause the performance of urination to well-resemble the accomplishment of the same task performed by a ninety-year-old man with a swollen prostate. A twenty-minute dribble (a.k.a. gradual evacuation) should not come as entirely unexpected. One imagines that a ninety-year-old man with a swollen prostate who underwent such a surgery would really just have to give up on urination entirely.
As well, hot tubs are apparently out of the question for several weeks—a revelation to which all the faithful must assuredly say Boo. Further, spousal caretakers will generally be overwhelmed with frustration of their inability to really do anything to make the pain go away or assist in any way save for providing pitying glances.
Currently there is no reliable data on how long continued pain should last. Of course it gradually recedes and within a week one should find the ability to putter around the house a gratifying experience. Poop no longer stands threat as a mortally feared enemy after five or six days and is merely relegated to an adversarial role. At two weeks one will likely not be able to sleep yet on one's side and rising from bed may still present some challenges.
My personal recommendation is to engage one's mind during such trials on a plane divorced from common levels. This state may be most readily attained through the use of technological substances rather than medicinal substances. Particularly useful in this divorce from reality is the engagement of realtime strategy games such as those cut from the Age of Empires, Civilization, Total War cloth. My personal remedy included much early involvement in Sid Meyer's Railroads! and, as strength permitted, a deep involvement in a solitaire version of the WoW boardgame.
All in all, there are better ways to spend one's weeks.
As the great beast Nefarian heaved a final breath, the ragged forms of a horned bear, her side torn and gaping as a fresh steam curdled from deep within boiled forth, and a skeletal mage draped in frosted glory split the smoke of rubble and dark fires, their heading certain and their victory assured. They had met the terror of the Blackrock and found their courage, mettle, and sense of self tested beyond measure. And yet, as their riches, still-flowing blood, and aching muscles would attest, they were not found wanting. With their skills and prowess, they would soon be hailed as lords of the realm—for fortune and politics often favours the victors of war and the heroes of the battle. Et cetera.
Okay, so World of Warcraft: The Board Game (WoWtBG) doesn't quite ring with so much drama as all that. It probably doesn't even have as much as the MMO.* But that doesn't mean it isn't fun.**
Granted, I haven't played it strictly according to the rules. I'm not even all that sure that my victory over the dragon Nefarian was even legitimate. More on this later.
WoWtBG is an attempt at tabletop simulation of those things that make the orignal so unique and engaging. And to some degree it succeeds. To another degree the boardgame is its own thing and has to be treated on its own terms.
In WoWtBG, players form teams with each player controlling a unique character with a unique set of skills. Each player seeks to develop her character through an increasingly difficult series of quests, killing monsters and looting corpses. While foes become increasingly difficult, culminating in a showdown with one of three overlords (Nefarian, Lord Kazzack, or Kel'Thuzad—or more with the Burning Crusade expansion), characters will grow in strength and ability as they experience the rigours of battle, train to increase their skills, and discover or purchase armor and weapons to aid them in their struggles.
They will also have the opportunity to participate in PvP combat with players of the opposing team if that is their fancy. Or even if it isn't—as it may be the fancy of one's opponents.
All in all, the boardgame presents an interesting facsimile of the intricacies of a highly complex and stratified online world—though highly abstracted, the game is far from unrecognizable. But how 'bout some more detail?
Mechanica
So let's talk details.
Characters
At the start of the game, each player chooses the class and race of character they'd prefer to play. All the playable classes and races of the original MMO are represented. Players may take up the mantle of the rogue, warrior, mage, warlock, druid, priest, hunter, paladin, and shaman. Of course, the more players involved, the more likely players are to fight over which class to play*#8212;because the game only provides the option of one representative of any given class.
Once characters are chosen, they are divided into two teams, or factions, the honorable Horde and the villainous Alliance. It is with those with whom you are teamed that you will conspire and adventure. In fact, interaction with those of the opposing faction will be pretty limited for the rest of the game.
Each player gets a cardboard sheet about 7"x10" featuring handsome art of their character striking Pose Dramaticus. This sheet is the player's primary means of interacting with their character, building and outfitting oneself for their adventures. Each sheet has seven compartments in which players may equip appropriate spells and armaments (as in the MMO, each class is limited to specific spells and equipment—for example, mages can only wear cloth armor and priests don't weild axes). It is through these spells and equipment that a player determines his strengths for combat.
At the top of character sheet is a means of tracking at which level a character is currently situated (WoWtBG allows five stages of level growth) as well as her maximum health and energy (a.k.a. mana, rage, or energy to WoW-heads). The sheet also provides information about one's particular racial abilities as well as providing a place to track one's current health, energy, and purse. Along the sheet's bottom is a place for a limited talent build (one more way for players to customize their characters—and vastly expanded through the customization offered in the Shadow of War expansion).
Gameplay
WoWtBG plays out across thirty turns. Each faction alternates playing turns (e.g. Horde plays turn one, Alliance turn two, Horde turn three, etc.) so that each team has no more than fifteen turns to accomplish its goal. If by the thirtieth turn no faction has defeated the overlord, all players engage in a massive PvP match to determine the game's winner.
In a given turn, each member of the faction whose turn it is gets the opportunity to use two actions. These actions consist of a range of five possibilities:
• A rest action
• A training action
• A town action
• A travel action
• A challenge action
During a rest action, a player may replenish lost health and energy. In a training action, players make learn new skills and spells. In a town action, players may recuperate some health and energy, train new skills, and purchase goods and equipment from the local merchants. A travel action allows players to move up to two regions from one's starting point. And the challenge action is essentially the core experience of the game: fightin' monsters.
Quests The reason why players will want to fight monsters is that they are given quests to seek out such creatures and destroy them. And of course, successful completion of quests means rewards. Gold, experience, and looted items are earned with every successfully completed quest. And experiece means leveling. And leveling means more health, more energy, better talents, better skills, and a wider range of potential arms. Through gaining levels, players prepare themselves for their final encounter with the overlord.
Combat
But quests cannot be completed without combat. I thought about describing combat here in words, but I started getting lost. It's kind of like Risk combat, but far more detailed. Instead of describing it, I thought I'd film a single fight between two WoW characters and a big red ogre. (This is not a short video.)
PvP
And of course, WoW wouldn't be WoW without the possibility of killing the faces off your opponents' characters. PvP (or Player vs. Player) combat runs similar to the above described fight save for a few slight differences. And PvP is inevitable even for players who do their best to keep distance from the opposing faction if no one can defeat the overlord by the end of Turn 30. If Nefarion of Lord Kazzack or whoever goes undefeated, the game ends in a sudden death PvP finale between the entire Horde side and the entire Alliance side.
I personally haven't tried PvP yet so I cannot tell you how well it works.
Session Variables
The reason for my abstinence from PvP is simple. I've only played a cooperative variable on the game rules, where players do not choose opposing sides but instead fight alongside each other. This has been a largely enjoyable alteration on the rules and has vastly diminished the time the game takes to play (from 2½–4 hours down to 1½–2½ hours). One can even play the co-op variant solo if one likes—which is helpful if one does not have friends.
So Then
Really, so far as boardgames go, I've really enjoyed WoWtBG so far (enough so that I sought out the expansions). Fantasy Flight Games has translated many of the more enjoyable aspects of the MMO into the boardgame experience.*** Character building, talent trees, itemization, and teamwork are all represented very well and will be enjoyable for those who enjoy such activities. The storytelling is understandably not as rich, but for those who are already aware of the lore, your imagination is your playground. Initially, I thought that combat was overly complicated (and even blew it on several of the rules—which is why my victory over Nefarian is pretty debatable), but after playing a couple times, it seems to flow pretty easily.
The big complaint I'm hearing across the internet is the duration of games. Game set-up can take anywhere from ten minutes or less (if you have assistance) to thirty minutes if you have no idea what you're doing (I can set it up by myself in fifteen). A game of six newcomers may take up to five or six hours according to several session reports I've read. That sounds pretty plausible with a bunch of people who don't know exactly how things should play out. Or if you have a particularly deliberate player involved (Settlers is a 90-minute game, but I've played some 4 hour (!!) matches in the past due to players with analysis paralysis). I imagine a game with people who have played once or twice would get cut down to two-to-four hours. Which is still a longish game. I mean, it's not Risk or Axis & Allies, but let's not kid each other imagining that WoWtBG isn't time-intensive.
Granted, it's not as time-intensive as the MMO, but...
Additionally, as noted above, a co-op variant cuts down game time drastically. In any case though, players should be prepared for a meandering kind of adventure. A way to pass the afternoon or evening.
My final word on the game is that it really is what it advertises to be and succeeds pretty admirably at that. I have really enjoyed myself with the game and while it's far from accessible and isn't as awe-striking as Cities & Knights (which is the bar against which all games are measured), it's still pretty darned awesome.
Rating:
NOTES:
*MMO stands for massively multiplayer online game. World of Warcraft currently boasts over ten million subscribers worldwide. Of course, you're not playing with all of them at the same time (that would be EVE Online); but you are certainly playing with at least a couple thousand.
**Especially since most ot the drama in the MMO is interpersonal rather than a feature of the game itself.
***Another primary component of the WoW MMO is that it is highly addictive. So much so that it is not infrequently referred to as Warcrack. The boardgame is completely unfaithful in this regard because, while gameplay can stretch to a few-to-several hours, it does actually end. Either in victory or defeat. But it does end. The MMO simply does not—so logged gametime stretches far beyond days, easily into weeks, and often into months.
I've been thinking about what, if anything, I should write about the passing of Gary Gygax. The man had, perhaps, a greater affect on gaming than any single individual before him. Co-creating Dungeons & Dragons with Dave Arneson, Gygax forged a path that would branch far enough to capture the game-playing attentions of hundreds of millions worldwide.
Gygax's influence was not just felt by those who would participate in the '70s/'80s hobby of fantasy role-playing games, but would spread to infect game-players of many varieties. Everyone who ever played Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, or Yu-Gi-Oh! owes that experience to Gygax. Everyone who has enjoyed Final Fantasy IV or VII, Ultima, or probably even Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has done so because Gygax pioneered the system. Oh, and every last citizen of Azeroth* owes their flying mount and countless hours grinding to one Gary F. Gygax.**
Now this is probably obvious, but I did indeed play Dungeons & Dragons. Introduced to the game as a fourth grader (this was 1984), I found it interesting though a bit confusing. I think the GM (game moderator) was trying to kill me. In sixth grade, some friends got the game and I got my own set and we set about playing a couple campaigns. These were all nighters and I had a blast. All told, I think I played the game maybe six times.
Then, the D&D = teh 3vil shtick started circulating the church circuit. Fueled by urban myths of suicides, possessions, and the summoning of spirits, Christian parents were horrified by what they had unknowingly let loose under their roofs. Larry Taylor, Bill Gothard, Jack Chick himself. Everyone was getting into the game of bashing D&D. There were books and articles and BADD (Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons). It was probably just a matter of time before the lies started sounding legit.
My mom, after reading up on the available resources, decided that she didn't really want the game in the house, so she bought me D&D materials back from me (I kept my Monster Manual because it was essential just an encyclopedia mythica and my dice because they were rad), giving me enough money to purchase a SEGA Master System (on which I played Phantasy Star, a sci-fi/fantasy role playing game***). I wasn't happy to give up my toys, but money greased the wheels and I ended up okay with it—though I never respected the lies that she had been sold. Still, how was she to know? It's not like I expected her to learn the rules and then play the game with us. It was common schoolyard thugs and bullies like Gothard and Chick that rained on parades.
These are the same people who harp on the evils of Pokémon, Harry Potter, and Mass Effect. If they don't have some hot button to mash, some controversy to invent, they lose limelight. And if they lose limelight, they lose money. And if they lose money, they might have to get a job. And work sucks, so really, who could blame them?
Well, I suppose I could. In reading some of the touching webcomictributes to Gygax's legacy, I ran across Penny Arcade's Tycho reminiscing about what occured when his mother took away his own D&D:
The first time I ever played Dungeons & Dragons, I was six years old - books with great red demons on the cover that dared us to claim their riches, subtitled by this alien name Gygax. My mother was furious when she found my uncles had exposed me to those subterranean burrows, spilling over with rubies, and tourmalines, and the wealth of old kings even songs no longer remember. As a young man, I began hiding the books I bought inside my bed, which had a vast hollow space I had hidden in as a child. These books were soon discovered, and blamed for everything from recent colds to the dissolution of my parents' marriage. I took the wrong lesson, I'm afraid: I didn't learn to fear them. What I learned was that books, some books, were swollen with power - and this power projected into the physical realm. Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes.
Whether Tycho's recollection is faithful or embellished (he does excel in embellishment), the thing is: wrong lessons can be learned. He may have learned that some books were swollen with arcane power. I learned that certain leaders in the church were liars. Not just in error. Not just mistaken. But liars. Dirty-dog liars. I'm not sure which lesson was less in line with the parental concern.
And the lesson I learned is doubtless the same lesson many kids came away with after having read Harry Potter and realized that despite loud protests to the contrary, the books were harmless. Or maybe they came away with Tycho's conclusion. In any case, good job bullies.
NOTES:
* World of Warcraft boasts over ten million players to its name. That, in layman's terms, is a lot.
** No, that's not really his name.
*** Granted, role playing games on computers are barelyrole-playing at all.
I'm not really sure what to say about this one. I really can't generate strong feelings one way or another on its behalf. It wasn't bad but it wasn't good - and conversely, it wasn't good but it wasn't bad. It had likeable moments and parts that I laughed at. And some of Haddon's descriptions were priceless (e.g., the "chickeny scrotum" bit). But then there was the rest of it. I kept feeling that if it was either good or bad, I would have relished finishing it so that I could relish talking about it.
But it wasn't. And so I didn't. It was, I guess, the most mediocre book I've ever read. Everything works as a perfect counter-balance for everything else.
The characters are almost uniformly unlikeable - as well as being flatly conceived. But then the tone of the book is largely humourous and brisk. Every event in the novel feels contrived and every dialogue scripted. But the things that are said are sometimes funny and the situations make it possible for more funny things to be said. And so on.
In then end, if you ask me whether I liked the book, I'd simply have to respond with a shrug and one of those perplexed looks that doubles for I don't know.
Rating:
NOTE: far more interesting than the actual book is the author's account of the bloody illustration that ended up on newer addtions of the book. Unfortunately, mine was a not-so-endearing cover. I think I probably would have enjoyed the book more had I been properly primed for it by the cover.
We've been playing a lot of (though not enough) Railroad Tycoon lately. It was one of those games that I passed in the store a great number of times while thinking, Trains? That looks pretty lame. Even looking at pictures of the game makes it look kinda dull. But then, pictures of pretty much every game make those games look dull. Board games simply are not meant to be seen and evaluated in static images. Settlers looked lame. Puerto Rico looked dull. Power Grid looked yawn-inducing. Even Tikal, which boasts a beautiful board, looked tedious.
So then, after a little research and some glowing reviews, we purchased Railroad Tycoon (the board game).
Quite honestly, it's been a lot of fun. The strategy changes from game to game as the set up of the board is somewhat random. But here let's talk about how the game works.
RT takes place in the era of the American railrod magnates (the titular tycoons). Each player takes the role of one of these kings of the line (e.g., Gould, Morgan, and Farnam—and each having their own secret goals and ambitions) and works to create the most impressive and powerful railroad empire the Eastern U.S. has ever seen. This is accomplished by building railroad lines between cities and delivering goods from one end of your line to a city that will process a particular type of good. Addtionally, through the course of the game, railroad technology develops and each tycoon will begin using (and paying for) better, more powerful engines in order to ship goods further and make more money.
At game's start, each city on the board is stocked with a variety of goods cubes (each color of cube represents a different kind of good that can be transported). The colour of the cubes placed on each city is random and can vastly affect strategies for the duration of the game. Additionally, the larger the city, the more goods that city has at the beginning (e.g., New York and Chicago have more to ship than Des Moines). Players participate in an auction to see who gets to go first and each player must sell shares of stock in order to begin building—as everybody starts the game with no money. So then, track is laid, goods are delivered, newer engines are built, and money is earned and spent.
(and no, I don't know who these two people are, but it proves that the game is enjoyed by girls with too much eyeliner.)
The game is fun and frustrating and will inevitably involve players cutting each other off in order to gain the best possible railroad lines and move goods before others get the chance. There is, then, a certain level of cut-throat mechanic at play—though not nearly as bad as in some games.
The quality of the board and components is above average for a non-special-edition version of a game. The board is huge, thick, and takes up most of our table (the table is square and seats eight, about 60"x60"). Each player gets a bag of plastic trains—which is cool by any measure. The cardboard chits are thick and sturdy (the game doesn't feel cheap—which is appropriate as it wasn't found in the bargain bin by any stretch). The cards, shares, and money are also very high quality; I've never played a game with game money as nice as this. All told, a very well-put-together game.
In sum, the game is great fun. We can't wait to play again.
Valve recently released a game that I've been anticipating for a long time, but one that I won't likely get to play for some while. That game is Portal. The concept is unrelentingly cool, featuring a gun that shoots, well, portals onto walls, allowing you to travel from one place to another. I know that sounds stupid, but it's actually closer to freaking awesome.
And you should know how loathe I am to use a term like freaking.
In any case, like I said, I am unable to play the game just now. So instead, as something of a stop-gap, I've been playing the two-dimensional Flash version of the game. It's an admirable effort. The game employs a series of puzzles, coaxing players to make wicked sneaky use of their door-shooters.
I highly recommend going right now and playing and having fun. Lots of fun. If you aren't sold, I recorded a slightly longer than a minute demo of how it works to thrill and inspire your jangly inner bits. See below.
The Camtasia Studio video content presented here requires JavaScript to be enabled and the latest version of the Macromedia Flash Player. If you are you using a browser with JavaScript disabled please enable it now. Otherwise, please update your version of the free Flash Player by downloading here.
After too long of being sick for too long I decided that I should write a post that was too long. Et voila:
Animated Film: Sci-Noir.
115 minutes.
When I first started watching Reneaissance, I thought that I was watching the next step in rotoscoping. The animation was much smoother than A Scanner Darkly (which was, incidentally, just rad) and some of the details were amazing (this, I accounted for by noting that black and white art is always easier than colour).
But then I noticed the teeth.
The movement of the characters was suspicious, but it was the teeth that made me think, Waitaminnut! As it turns out, the film used mocapped* 3D models and was entirely computer generated. Which is fine. I just had to drop the comparison with A Scanner Darkly out of my head. Just so you know, 3D models never move naturally and their teeth are always funny-looking.
In any case: Renaissance.
A French film from last year, it echoes the industrial German expressionism of Fritz Lang (Metropolis, M), the cameraplay of Orson Welles (Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil), and the stark visual contrast- lighting of the American noir cinema. Visually, it's like a black and white Dark City. And it's futuristic.
The creators describe it not as sci-fi, but as an anticipation film. It's Paris in 2054 and the city has grown and evolved almost naturally (given technologies that don't exist). And it's actually a pretty interesting vision. Like much of the genre of near-future fables, the urban center has become dichotomous in its expression of utopia and dystopia. Like Metropolis and hundreds of stories from the last eighty years, uptown and downtown are heaven and hell, respectively. The closer one gets to the sky, the brighter and shinier his world becomes; while those near the earth dwell in darkness and rut and moan even as you would expect of the merely human.
Of course, as is common with the genre. Not all is good in utopia and the underworld has its honourable moments. On its surface, Renaissance is the story of a successful, untouchable cop named Karas who is on the hunt for a missing woman, kidnapped from the darkness outside a downtown club. And of course, Karas is his own law; he doesn't break rules so much as just pretend that there are none. He's a noir hero for the new age. The story plays out as a typical manhunt with 21st century toys.
And while the story on the back of the box will talk about the kidnapping, the manhunt, and all the foul play along the way, the subtext is what the story is all about. And by subtext, I mean that which sits immediately below the surface with dorsal fins jutting out hear and there at odd and defiant angles. The film is not by any means deep. Its black and white heart sits perched with gravitas on its sleeve.
Renaissance is about a moral dilemma. If immortality can be had, can it be entrusted to a private corporation? Already in the business of rejuvenation, turning old women into twenty-six-year-old hotties, Avalon is now hot on the trail of a treatment that will keep those treated eternally young. There really isn't much question as to where the sympathies of the audience ought to lie. After all, this is a black and white movie. The corporation is the soul of evil, quietly murdering those who stand in their way, while it is upon to renegade Karas and his misfit accomplices to kill there way into a world where immortality remains elusive.
The visual aspect of the film is stunning, even if occasionally the black is so overwhelming that it can be hard to see what's what. The plot is engaging if not brilliant. The characters are two-dimensional at best. And the story is, well, typical.
*note: mocap stands for "motion capture," the process of using a computer to plot the movements of a live person and transfer those movements to a 3D computer rendering - used extensively in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings.
Rating:
Board game.
3-5 players.
A few weeks ago, I put together that list of my Top Howevermany games. A few of you may have taken note of my Number Two choice, placing immediately after the Cities and Knights expansion to Settlers of Catan. That game is Puerto Rico and is, by any standard, a reason to get back into playing boardgames after whatever time/space distance has irrupted between your childhood and your present state.
Myself, I loved boardgames as a child. From Candyland to chutes and Ladders to Uncle Wiggly to Sorry to Trouble to Monopoly to Life to Oh! What a Mountain to Bargain Hunter and beyond. Then I hit the ripe ol' age of perhaps eleven years old. Board games immediately lost their allure and were recognized for what they were: games of chance modified by nothing save the occasional dash of whimsy (as in property-buying logic in Monopoly) and in which the investment of time was only a gamble insofar as a victory would allow the winner to imagine that he had not just wasted the prior hour and a half. Hungry Hungry Hippos was a greater determinant of a victor's skill than any of those board games.
And so, board games were put away for nearly twenty years (with occasional detours into the realm of over-complicated war-strategy games like Axis & Allies).
With my skeptical introduction to Settlers of Catan a few years ago, a whole world of engaging entertainment was revealed to me. And within months, I was led to a game that was quick to place among favourites. Puerto Rico is a thinking Dane's game. While there is enough unpredictability to rescue the game from the dire tediousness that makes its abode in the impoverished recesses of the game mechanics of old clunkers like chess, checkers, and tic-tac-toe, there are definite strategies upon which to adhere and unwise play will seldom result in a victory.
In Puerto Rico, three-to-five would-be rulers try their hand at governing the colonial island while interacting tangentially with the Old World. Primarily, players are concerned with four things: producing salable crops, building upon the islands slim infrastructure, distributing manpower to the island's best function, and supplying Europe with the goods your citizens have reaped.
Puerto Rico's two conceits are the facts that there are no dice and that all three-to-five players are constantly involved with the game (there is little downtime, waiting while paralyzed players consider their far-too-many options). In the course of the game, players choose various roles related to island operation—and when a role is chosen, each player follows through on the opportunities that role presents. If Player 1 chooses the role of the Mayor, she greets newly arrived citizens and puts them to work as she chooses; and then, Players 2, 3, 4, and 5 each do likewise. If Player 2 thinks it's high time those plantations produced a worthy crop of indigo, tobacco, coffee, or whathaveyou, he might choose the role of the Craftsman, reaping the benefits of his manned crops and production facilities; and then, Players 3, 4, 5, and 1 would take their turns to do the same.
The trick is to balance your coin-purse, your storehouse, and your choices in such a way that moves will benefit you more than they will benefit your competition. And that is a heady trick to master. As mentioned last week before I got sick, I had recently been party to a game in which the order of play coupled with very occasional poor choices to leave me a shell of a man. Strategies undone, hopes dismayed, dreams dashed. And oh what fun we had playing. Three of our party of five had never played the game before that night and each one of them (wholly different personalities all) maintained that the game was strong fun and well worth revisitation.
They'd be fools to say otherwise.
Rating:
Novel: Thriller.
508 pages.
I loved the movie and heard that I the book was comparatively awesome. And it was.
The thing is: I haven't the faintest idea how the movie came out of the book. Beyond the premise of a man fished from the sea with no memory but incredible ingrained abilities and talents that make it look like he's really probably and assassin with no amnesia, and the fact that the first act after the prologue occurs in Zürich and deals with a Swiss bank, nothing is the same.
Sure, there's a girl named Marie, but she's an entirely different character. Sure, there are people trying to kill the man named Jason Bourne, but they're entirely different men. Sure, there's an American government-run company called Treadstone Seventy-One that is looking for Bourne, but for entirely different reasons. But are all these differences a bad thing?
No. They are not.
I really think the first Bourne movie is among the best action films ever created. That said, for most of its running time, Ludlum's 1980 novel is better than the movie. The premise is so much more intriguing and Bourne's turmoil better perceived. Instead of an enemy as doughy and effeminate as cloak and dagger U.S. senators and secret servicemen, the novel pits Bourne against the unbeatable assassin, Carlos the Jackal (though Ludlum refrains from the colourful animamorphism), and his vast array of human resources. The book is action-packed, one of those thrillaminnut rides that refuse, for the most part, to let up. I don't read cheap thrillers often, but The Bourne Identity was well worth my time.
And I like to think that my time is valuable.
This is not to say that Ludlum's thriller is not without fault. The books requisite romance is rushed and artificial. We know that Bourne and his interest are in love solely because Ludlum tells us that this is the case, not because we see any evidence that this should be the case. And, actually, there is a far greater problem. The climax is poorly wrought and much more difficult to follow than anything previous encountered in the book. The ending is not satisfying in that by the time it comes, emotional resonance has long-since evaporated.
But still. I was in love with the book until the last forty pages or so.
Just 'cause I'm like that, I thought I'd leave you the weekend to ponder 16 Games. Drink these games responsibly.
My Top 10 Favourite Table-Top Games
1 - Settlers of Catan: Cities & Knights
I really need to do a full review of this sometime. Settlers of Catan is an awesomely fun game and pretty much perfectly paced (those with xBox 360s should check it out on that platform), but the Cities and Knights expansion set turns an awesome game into an incredible game. There is so much to do and so many strategies to do it with. Most of our games end up pretty close and so we never quite know who's in the lead. My one piece of advice: endeavor to complete your turn quickly, as those who make lingering moves can drag the game out for quite longer than needed (the game should finish in one-and-a-half to two hours, but there are certain friends of ours who can stretch a game to nearbout four hours... ugh). My other one piece of advice is that if you have the five to six player expansions to the game as well, play even your three to four player games on the larger map. It gives everyone more room for growth and contributes to what may be a funner gaming atmosphere. My last only piece of advice is that you start with regular Settlers of Catan before graduating to Hot City Knights.
2 - Puerto Rico
Players each act as the governor of colonial Puerto Rico, competing to see who would make the best governor. Managing the arrival of new colonists, the growth of new plantations and maintenance of old ones, the building of essential building, the trading of crops for money to build with, and the shipping of crops back to the Old World, Puerto Rico is a thinking game that keeps everyone active throughout the whole game. Even more so than Settlers, this one keeps the leader shrouded in ambiguity even up 'til the very last move. Great stuff!
3 - Settlers of Catan
As you may have gathered from above, I think pretty highly of Settlers of Catan. It's broadly considered a gateway game - a means of introducing people to the recent European style of gaming, of drawing out those who "don't like games" because they're only familiar with boring, tedious crap like Monopoly and other Chutes and Ladders-style fare. Unlike those games of your youth, Settlers is honestly fun and combines strategy and fortune in a fun, easy-to-learn way. In the game, you play on a island (different every time you play) covered with a variety of resources. Your goal is to settle the island, building settlements and cities, connected by roads. You accomplish this through harvesting the land of its natural resources (and making trades as necessary). It's an awesome game and there are numerous sets with which you can expand the game (Cities and Knights, Seafarers of Catan, etc.), even expanding the game to fit up to six players from its original four (by adding more pieces and enlarging the island). Get it, play it, love it.
4 - Tigris & Euphrates
I will admit that the placement of Tigris & Euphrates on the list here may be a little premature. I've only played the game once. And it was a test game with The Monk. The game supports 3 to 4 players so we each played as two players to make four - and I'll freely point out that this is not the ideal way to experience a game. That said, it was a lot of fun and you can expect a full review after we get some real play time on the board. It's a pretty high strategy game somewhere between Settlers and chess. Which is fine, 'cause I love Settlers and hate chess. I'd say it feels pretty similar to Puerto Rico so far as the chance/strategy ratio goes.
5 - Scotland Yard
This one's rad. It's the only game I played as a ten-year-old that is still on my list of Fun Games to Play. One player is Mister X and the others attempt to uncover his secret movements through simple deduction to corner the poor chaps and clap him in irons. While playing, Mister X should probably wear sunglasses and a ballcap to hide his eyes.
6 - Power Grid
Power companies competing for control over the nation's power grid doesn't sound like fun. But... Surprise! It is. Budding capitalist pigs should soundly enjoy themselves. Read the review if you like.
7 - Bang!
A fun game. And I don't ever really like cards. But this is so much more than cards. It's like Fistful of Dollars in your fist. You can read my review if you want to know more. I recommend playing with six players.
8 - Dutch Blitz
I'm not very good at all at speed games. I played Pit about a year ago and kinda just stood there with trades in my hand wondering how everyone was going so fast. Even so, Dutch Blitz, as advertised, is a vonderful goot game. It's like playing multiplayer solitaire very quickly (we like to play with eight players for the pure ferocity of it). I tend to place moderately, but if you're a fan of speed games, I haven't played a better one.
9 - Wise and Otherwise
As related in my NAQ review, I'm not a big fan of party games, but as far as they go, Wise and Otherwise is far and away my favourite. I think it might be due to its catering to my taste for the absurd. For those familiar with the Balderdash series of games, the mechanic is the same. The difference is that rather than everyone crafting phony definitions for words and guessing which is the real definition, players craft phony proverbs and guess the real one. The player who's turn it is provides the first part of the proverb, such as "There is an old Nepalese proverb: A cooked dog..." and everyone writes down inventive endings to the proverb such as, "is better than eight" or "won't complain of the cold" or "is a happy dog." These are shuffled in with the real one and everybody guesses what is the truth. A fun game and the real proverbs are generally as loony as anything you'd make up yourself.
10 - Carcasonne
A tile-laying game of strategy, Carcasonne is pretty easy to pick up. And fun. Though not as fun as the games I mention above, so I probably won't play it much until I get tired of the above games.
Two-Player Strategy Games
Go & Khet
I am famously bad at games like chess, checkers, Connect Four, Othello, Stratego, etc. So I don't play them often. The Monk got me a cool laser-based game called Khet last Xmas and promptly beat me five games straight. Within minutes. It's a fun game. You should try it. Go is another game I will occasionally play. I like it for a couple reasons. For one, it makes even people who are good at chess sweat. It's too much for their computation skills. For another, it's pretty elegant. I might not be that good at it, but I still like it!
Word Games
Scattergories & Boggle
I find word games to be moderately fun. The inherent problem with most of these games is that they cater to a particular kind of person - a person with a problematic affinity for vocabulary. Simply stated: the dorkiest of the dorks in your group will win every time. Scattergories largely defeats this by allowing the use of words and terms that wouldn't be allowed in typical word games and further complicates the issue for word dorks by basing your entries not so much on letters but on categories. Boggle is fun because the rounds are short and egalitarian. Everyone's working with the same letters and the spatial element of the game may just be enough to adequately handicap a dork in order that someone less dorky might win. Still jocks will always lose, so Boggle could never make a Top 10 list.
Game I Like to Play but Not as Intended
Trivial Pursuit
I love Trivial Pursuit, but playing the game as intended is rather boring. People land on subjects and only one person gets a chance to answer a question and half the time, when people do get a question right its something aberrational and dumb like "Literature: Was Frodo Baggins the hero of The Chronicles of Narnia?" That's why I vastly prefer to do away with the board and just sit around with a roomful of people and ask whatever looks interesting on a card. That way everyone's involved and there's nothing so distracting as a bored to compel boredom to creep in. And the game ends when people get tired of not knowing what movie Paul Perkins produced for $17,000 in 1923.
Game I Like but Will Probably Never Play Again
Axis & Allies
The set-up time is two or three times what it is for Settlers (and Settlers isn't brief on set-up time) and explaining the rules to a newcomer would probably take an hour (the instruction booklet is forty-some pages long). And then the game itself, if expedience is not demanded, can last for hours and hours. And hours. And, well, hours. I've played eight hour games in my more youthful days that were only about a third of the way done. That said, it's one of the coolest war strategy games I've ever played. A good can be one of the best games ever. You just need ridiculously patient friends with a lot of time to kill (and as I get old, time is becoming more and more difficult to find).
When asked which biography/memoir I best prefer, I am unable to hold back my admiration of David Niven's work here in Bring on the Empty Horses. I understand that he previously wrote something of an autobiography but I cannot vouch for that work. It is Empty Horses that has earned my love and adoration.
Niven, above all things, is a storyteller; and his recountment of the Hollywood heyday (essentially the '30s through the '50s) is magical exploration of an era that was at once special and something impossible to mimic. Never again will a particular zeitgeist carry the particular bouquet that lilted through the rarified air of the Tinseltown of those glamour years. It's an era impossible to imagine. Yet Niven was there.
And because he was there, we are there as well.
Niven's recollection bounces from larger-than-life personality to other of the like. Errol Flynn. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. Cary Grant. Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. Bogart and Bacall. Marlene Dietrich. Selznick and Mayer. Judy Garland. And some guy who went by Mike Romanoff, opened a popular restaurant, and pretended to be a nephew-prince of Tsar Nicholas II. Niven really does collect a panoply of stories and, in effect, writes a biography of Hollywood itself.
I cannot recommend Bring on the Empty Horses highly enough. Check your used bookstore or Friends of the Library (where I got my hardback copy for a dollar), as it's out of print.
Rating:
Board Game/Party Game.
∞ minutes.
I've been spoiled. Spoiled by playing above-average game after above-average game. It was a good run. An unbroken streak of maybe eight just plain great games.
Well, those of you who have long envied the fun I have been having playing boardgames with friends and family alike, can all rest very assured. I have played NAQ and there is no going back. No matter how blissfully ignorant of what the rest of game-playing humanity might have had to endure, I have now stared into the eye of the demon, seen through it's crystalline gaze, and witnessed first-hand the blood-slick walls of the antechamber to his altar to gaming depravity. I have played NAQ. And the greatest wonder is that my soul has not been entirely drained of its tenacious will to play games.
Seriously. If you want to ruin games for someone. Make them play this. No, better yet, trick them into playing it by raving about how good the game is, thereby making all the more devastating their experience as they peel off their own flesh in an attempt to purify their being.
Now I know what you're asking yourself as you try to pick through what you assume must be thick hyperbole. Could it possibly be as bad as all that? My truthful answer to you? Probably. Maybe. Well, yes.
Yes, NAQ is a horrible awful game. Granted, I'm not any kind of great evangelist for party games. They aren't my favourite activity by a long shot. But still, I have been known to enjoy myself while playing Beyond Balderdash, Taboo, Pictionary, Outburst, etc. Certainly there are games I'd prefer, but sometimes a party game is the only game that will do. And in cases when only a party game will do and all you have available is NAQ, you have officially received confirmation that it is time to send everyone home and end your party. Because really, that's what NAQ will do as it sucks all joy from the room, causing your guests to wander aimlessly about the room quoting bits of Sarte's Nausea in an effort to properly equip themselves for the dreadful ennui that must verily follow.
Now, to the mechanic. When it is your turn, you think up a trivia question to ask everyone else. Your goal is to think up a question that exactly half of your opponents will answer correctly, while the others sit stumped and pained by their ignorance. You get points for an even split of answers and less points the more extreme the divide. It essentially comes down to Know Your Room.
If I'm playing with Tom, Reginald, Vicky, Julie, Michael, and their teenage daughter, little Auschwitz, I can think to myself, well I know that Julie, Michael, and little Auschwitz just moved from Kentucky, so I'll ask, "What county is Pikeville, Kentucky situated in?" knowing all the while that they had lived in Pikeville until two months ago. My gamble is slight - that Tom, Reginald, and Vicky would have the good sense not to know that Pikeville is located in Pike County. The thing is, once I find a divisor in the group, I can hone in on questions that will benefit from the division. Only half the group are familiar with Italian directors? Great! All my questions will favour Italian directors. I'm in a group in which half the members didn't read Harry Potter because they thought it was the Great Satan? Bingo. I'm a sure win. Or, as it happened with me, a group that was half kids half adults: Naruto trivia for the win.
The game wasn't fun. Not even by a stretch. I could imagine it being remotely less tedious in a group of friends who are all exactly the same age and grew up in similar households and no one is able to determine the divisor. But no, nevermind, then its just random guessing and where is the fun in that.
p.s. the NAQ website says "NAQ is Patent Pending." I imagine that they're having a hard time patenting "the players make up the game themselves and we just supply dice." Seriously, this thing lists for $39.95 and doesn't even come with trivia questions since you make it all up on your own. I have to pay $40 to create my own game? The Chicago Tribune rated NAQ as one of the Top 10 Cool Games of the Year. Either there were only four games released in 2006 or I'd rather have a zebra in a blender than have a Chi-Tri sitting on my doorstep Sunday morning.
My thumb seems to be healing at last. It's still early to tell, but I carved a pumpkin for the Labour Day party we threw a couple days back and it didn't hurt at all. So hooray for that. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to take a picture of the carved rind until the day after, by which time the carving had begun to collapse in upon itself as the pumpkin* rotted. Still, you can make out most of the details and if you click on the image, you can see a comparison between the pumpkin and the BANG! card I modeled it after: Tequila Joe (Tequila Joe and Slab the Killer are my two favourites).**
*note: no matter the fruit, once carved, it is a pumpkin.
**note: the party was a day-long game day, hence the theme-appropriate carving.
I was sick over the weekend and I suspect that Paulo didn't aid me in my recovery at all by introducing me to Gimme Friction Baby, an addictive little game of angles, friction, and momentum. In fact, I may go so far as to say that our Brownish Pau actually introduced a new kind of sickness into my system. So, needless to say, I saw the words GAME OVER quite often over the last couple days:
I was also the happy recipient of a big box full of fun. RightStuf recently had a big bulky sale, of which I was certain to avail myself. Essentially, I got twenty-three dvds and two cds for a hundred bucks. All cartoons :) I was able to fill out a couple series to which I had the first disc but wasn't willing to pay the sixty-to-ninety bucks it would take to get the two and three more dvds I'd need in order to get the whole series. I also got three complete series, one of which I had been wanting for some time and another of which I selected based on trust in the show's creator (he had directed two prior favourites, Seriel Experiments: Lain and Haibane Renmei).
The great American dream, in some fearsome circles (circles usually preceded by a numeral and a th and finding deep association with an certain Italian named Alighieri), is comprised of power creation, management, and disbursement—in ways far less subtle than those proposed by a certain Chomsky. This dream consists, quite plainly, in the ownership and management of a power company in the most vernacular sense of the term. This dream is not my dream.
And so, I find it somewhat surprising that I could find myself lauding a board game whose whole conceit lies in telling the story of such a dream.
And yet, here we are. Power Grid is such a board game, a game in which each player takes the role of a power magnate, building power stations, divining the resources necessary to power said stations, and then delivering wrought energies to an increasingly webbed network of cities. And of course, there is the requisite reaping of monetary gain, the soul of any capitalist gain. And here I find myself, strangely compelled by a game whose description leaves me wholly unappetized.
Really, it doesn't sound that fun to me.
So in the end, my vast enjoyment of the game must come down to the game itself, not pale descriptions resembling the barren wasteland of the American business wilderness. Any game that actually sounds like work shouldn't be fun—and yet it is, because what Power Grid does more than anything is that it keeps you actively pursuing simple goals through a consistent-though-evolving set of strategies, and rewards your continued perseverance with coloured pieces and neat little cards signifying the industrial decay that marks our world. And yes, that too is way better than I make it sound.
Maybe I should describe what one might—nay, will—do in a given turn. The gaming mechanic! Therein lays the joy!
So first the order of play is determined. Each round, the order of player alters in order to somewhat handicap the game that no player is necessarily left in the dust. That keeps things lively for sure. Then players (i.e., power companies) bid on available and increasingly powerful power plants, diversifying by type just enough to keep one from being ruined via a lack of available fuel sources. Power plants convert coal, oil, garbage, and uranium into precious energies. There are even environmentally friendly plants that require no natural resource save for the very wind that nature herself provides. After purchasing the resources necessary for power conversion, players extend their network, their power grid, to comprise ever more cities, all the while trying to be careful not to connect to too many more cities than one has the capacity or ability to power.
And at the end of a game, the map on which you play (Germany or America, unless you purchase an expansion map) incarnates as a multi-coloured nightmare, a galaxy of rainbow-hued wood and cardboard. It is an unexpected, unheralded joy to behold.
Admittedly, even that description fails justice, where evaluation of the games worth and value are concerned. At the last, I suppose, one must simply trust the word of another (and in this case, your humble reviewer) that Power Grid is worth the time or, indeed, the money. Those who do trust will be rewarded with, I believe, an amusing experience and a time well-spent. They will be met with an engaging game that, while not espying that grail-like stature of Cities and Knights, will nonetheless please gamers with a fine mix of strategy, a little bit of luck, and more than a handful of that plumbing type of psychology by which one works to gauge and predict the mode and direction of opposition players.
Rating:
My experience of Neil Gaiman and his estimable oeuvre is, in large part, a recent acquirement, having come into being over the last year and a bit. If you don't count an earlier, regrettable experience with Sandman—an experience than by no means offered justice either to Gaiman or his grainy little fellow. Or indeed to myself as a reader. I feel fortunate that Anansi Boys came along and changed everything.
Because otherwise, I might not have given The Eternals its due shot. And that would have been sad.
When I was a wee Danish (jelly-filled), I had the good fortune to inherit a veritable mess of comics that included some real finds among which were the entire original series of Silver Surfer, several giant-sized Hulk books, and ancient and collected reprints of some of the greatest Kirby-era Fantastic Four. And an entire run of another Kirby invention, The Eternals.
I'll be honest here. Either I was not a very discriminating fifth grader or the Great Jack Kirby wasn't exactly on his game when he came up with this super group, based, I hear, on ruminations inspired by Chariot of the Gods. I suppose that the truth of the matter lies in all likelihood betwixt these two precarious compass points. In any case, I didn't really catch the fire for the series and abandoned it both to my crappy-comic box and to that sector of my memory that is now and likely forever unreachable.
And so, I am approaching the work, for all intents and porpoises, as a reader entirely unaware of the personalities and history intimate to the characters going by the nomenclature, Eternals. In essence, as you yourself would approach the work—presuming that you were intimately familiar with the visual vocabulary upon which works of comic storytelling are founded. I will assume this knowledge and allow you to debate my assumption wholly within the realm of your internal monologue in which you engage your mind, your heart, and your moral self.
So then, Gaiman crafts a tale in which no prior knowledge of the Eternals is necessary for events have conspired to leave the Eternals themselves with no knowledge of either their longevity or their grand destiny. Gaiman allows the reader to be introduced to their fantastic world with all the shock, surprise, and inevitable confusion that the Eternals themselves experience. It is an indubitably strange experience. The story is wild and inventive and all those fantastic adjectives that book reviewers indiscriminately slather all over the backs of a a thousand books that grace the new release tables at Borders and Barnes & Noble across the span of any given year.
I cannot be certain that Gaiman's story will be memorable (at least I still remember now, but it's only been a week and a half...), but I'm sure I wouldn't mind reading it again some day. And that's worth something. I do remember thinking both Woah and Huh on several occasions as Gaiman proceeded to blow my mind. That also must be worth something in whatever currency you call native.
I was not initially certain that John Romita Jr.'s artwork would work for the story that Gaiman was telling. I love JRJR's work on other, more mundane projects, but was concerned how it would serve this particular yarn. I needn't have worried. While there are probably artists who might better capture both the grandiose and the pedestrian more capably, it did not mind their exclusion from this particular work.
At the last, I will give The Eternals my recommendation. Understand that this is not an unqualified recommendation—as there are a vast number of books that are more worthy. Still, there are a much vaster number of worse books out there and while this is no Anansi Boys, I can certainly claim to have enjoyed myself.
As far as tabletop gaming goes, there are winners (Dutch Blitz) and there are losers (Monopoly). And there are excruciatingly painful losers (Sorry!) and jaw-droppingly awesomely awesome winners (Settlers of Catan:Cities and Knights). Bang! happens to fall somewhere in the no-man's land between winners and jaw-droppingly awesomely awesome winners. It's a good game. It may even be better than a good game. But it's not a great game. Still, I've yet to play a card game that was.
And yes, for you skeptics out there, I have too played Pok-é-Mon.
So you guys remember that group game you may have played as some form of youthful individual (I played it in high school) called "Mafia," right? Well, imagine that Mafia was a three-to-eight player card game. Also imagine that it was fun instead of a great big ball of suck (like Mafia inevitably is). That game you're imagining might be something like Bang!
Bang! is a card game set in the world of Spaghetti Westerns. Players take on the typical roles: a sheriff, his deputies, outlaws, and the diabolical renegade. The identities of all players (save for the sheriff) are kept secret and players' roles are made known by their actions (by their fruit you shall know them!). The outlaws are trying to kill the sheriff, the deputy is trying to kill the outlaws and the renegade, the sheriff tries to outlive both the outlaws and the renegade, and the renegade must kill the outlaws, the sheriff, and the deputies. It's a tangled web of life, death, Indian attacks, and life-giving beer.
Building on the unique flavour of the game, each player, in addition to his general role (e.g. sheriff or outlaw), takes on the identity of one of a fistful of colourful western characters. Each character has his own particular strengths. For example: Slab the Killer fires a six-shooter that is very difficult to avoid; Tequila Joe heals better than anyone when alcohol touches his lips; and Willy the Kid is so quick he might as well be firing a semi-automatic.
The playing cards themselves are fun and feature simple icons that make it easy (in an ideal world) to understand how each card operates. There are barrels to hide behind, jails to throw people into, horses to ride, guns to collect, duels to be had, and dynamite to throw. And for added flavour, everything is in Italian (with helpful English subtitles).
The only real problem I've found with the game is what to do with players who have been eliminated (as the game can meander on without them for some time, it can become particularly boring for those who get killed off early in the game). As a partial means of salvation, fans of the game have developed a variety of "ghost's rules"—ways in which ex-players can continue to affect the game even as the dearly departed (albeit with less direct influence than the living players). I'm tempted to give this game 3 stars out of 4, but will bump it up as it's my favourite card game.
After having come to appreciate Neil Gaiman's voice as expression in the delectable Anansi Boys and other treats (MirrorMask and select episodes from The Absolute Sandman), I thought I'd give American Gods another shot. Years ago, after it had first been released, I purchased it on the strength of rave reviews. I got about two-fifths through and just lost steam. The book is not exciting. Still, maybe it was worth it, so I began anew a couple months ago and read the thing through over the course of a week and a half.
In some ways, American Gods is a bit of a prequel to Anansi Boys (a fact I found encouraging). The real world, it seems is populated by a number of the lords and deities of myths long dead. Anansi lives and breaths and wears a funny suit. Odin wanders this mortal plain - with a taste for young Nordic girls. Czernobog, Loki, Kali, Baldur. They all play their parts. Fighting a war against forces of pop expression in an unforgiving, godless land.
Gaiman approaches the work in an understated manner with an eye for detail that amazes in its scope. Things that you hope and beg to see wrap up really do wrap up. And in the end, everything is mostly satisfying. It was well-crafted and is a quality piece of fiction. Still, it's a rather sleepy work and despite its technical grandeur, I just couldn't really say that I loved it. It just didn't have the heart.
Plus, if I never read another scene in which a woman swallows a man whole into her vagina, I will be able to say I led a charmed life.
Rating:
Thinking it was about time to read some teen fiction marketed to/at girls, I picked up Aimee Friedman and Christine Norrie's Breaking Up (the cover lists it as "A Fashion High graphic novel", so I assumed that Fashion High was an established brand in the teen-fiction arena, but a quick Googling has turned up nothing that would suggest the series is actually a series).
The read, naturally, was light and breezy. It's an understandably inconsequential book, but one that's enjoyable in its excess of both drama and melodrama. Breaking Up charts the well-balanced cacophony that crops up in the lives of four girls who, until their tumultuous junior year of high school, have been best friends since time began. Now, growing into their own personalities and dreams and goals and tastes, they find that nothing lasts forever.
It doesn't even last very long when everyone is petty, self-absorbed, and governed entirely by the convictions of others. Ah, high school.
After all is said, the book was enjoyable. It would function perfectly as poolside reading as you sip margaritas out of mugs shaped like palm trees in Cancun. It never gets too heavy or depressing. The characters are cliched enough to keep you from too much mental heavy lifting (you know the geeky boy is a geek, despite dressing nonchalantly and looking halfway handsome, because he has a Star Trek t-shirt "not worn in an ironic/hipster way" and he mentions a friend wanting to have a Star Wars marathon). And Norrie's art is, as always, fluid and tells the story well (I'm a fan!).
Item! Local boy makes good on test of trivia!
Intrigued when I saw Paulo's link to the smartorstupid trivia quiz, I sallied forth to test my mettle. I got 28 out of 30 correct and shewed myself smarter than 56.something% of the at-that-time current population who had taken the test. On a lark, I took the test again, and corrected the two I got wrong: a question about who performed a rap song and the year a particular celebrity died. I really think that tests like this and that Place the State game from awhile back are really just a way for geeks to pat themselves on the back. *pat pat pat*
Item! Local addict struggles with ready market!
Last August, I cut myself off from World of Warcraft again. I really enjoyed the game but I stopped in order to play Oblivion. I finished Oblivion in December - just in time to enjoy the burning leads of Guitar Hero I & II. Currently, I'm not playing anything (I'm taking a break from guitaring so that my left hand can get some rest - two of my knuckles are hurty from my furious fretwork).
And yet, I feel Azeroth calling to me. I was always a casual player of World of Warcraft. At most, I'd play five hours in a given week. I was never able to get any of my characters up to level 60 (the top tier at the time), settling for a 55 druid, a 47 rogue, and a 38 mage (it was the mage I was working on and having such fun with when I finally killed my subscription). It was a fun diversion. I don't think I'll return to it. But I want to. Can someone be addicted to doing something occasionally?
And now that WoW: The Burning Crusade has been released, there's all kinds of news filling my inbox and field of vision. It's ever so tempting. It looks ridiculously cool. I don't think I'll return to it - but if I do, it'll be after I finish my script at the least. At the least. I guess that's the testament to a really well-done game: many months after quitting (last time was over a year ago), I get the desperate itch.
Item! Local funny bone is devoured by ninja whales and turned to stone... twice!
If any of you are missing out on the raw and unadulterated humour readily available in the following, then I am sad for you. Simultaneously, I am happy for the new joy that will sashay forth into your waking hours. I am confident you will soon believe the postmillennial millennium is upon us (until you remember padded toilet seats).
#1. White Ninja Comics are the best reason I can think of for getting up in the morning. The ninja is a philosophical joy to behold as he cuts to the heart of the matter and leaves you astonished that something so simple could have gone so long without being made known. As such.
#2. Dinosaur Comics will surely open a whole new dimension somewhere. Until then, we must content ourselves with throwing hands into the airs and wavings like there is anybody but cares.
The last few weeks have been incredibly busy. Pretty much immediately after work, I've been heading down to the local Stabbuck's to work on my graphic novel's script. It's a lot of work and slower going than I had originally presumed. If it was just writing, it'd be a piece of cake, but since I have to remain conscious of page layout and per-page-turn pacing, it involves far more planning than a mere novel. But even though my progress is going slower than I'd like, I still feel - at the end of each night's work - that I've really done pretty well. When I had written the prior post last Wednesday, I had scripted up to page 45. On my lunch break today, I had put myself up to midway through page 74.
The other thing keeping my busy is Guitar Heroing. I don't know who said that Wii was the party game that gets non-gamers into games, but I was instantly drawn into the GH-mania. Monk, my roommate, got me the first Guitar Hero for Christmas and a couple days later, I picked up its sequel so we'd have a second guitar.
We had a big game-playing festival at the house on New Year's Day. It was mostly board games (Puerto Rico and Scotland Yard), card games (Dutch Blitz and Bang), and one or two party games (Trivial Pursuit: Genus Edition and Wise and Otherwise). The rad thing was that Guitar Hero was infectious. As soon as anyone got out in whichever game they were playing, they'd head back to the TV room to indulge in a little Boston, Franz Ferdinand, or Sabbath. The game is simply glorious.
We also found that those practiced in guitar or piano were better equipped to play the game. My left forearm has been burning pretty steadily since Christmas (burning guitar leads hurt so sweetly). Both Monk and Johnny T (piano and guitar, respectively), however, were largely immune - having developed both reach and muscles in their regular musical habits.
Okay. I've come to the end of the road on the Funny Farm game (my progress on which I've been chronicling below). It was fun and frustrating and in the end, as many as I found, I still didn't break the 50% correct mark. I got discovered 191 answers out of a grand total of 417. That's 46%. Not to great, huh?
But from another perspective, I did pretty fair. By the time I got to the point at which I quit, I was only able to hazard guesses on 264 of the boxes (191 of which I correctly guessed). From that perspective, I correctly guessed 72% of the available puzzle. Not stellar, but not shabby either.
Now that I've seen the answers, I'm pretty satisfied that I wouldn't have been able to go much further. There are some that I totally should have gotten. Which would have lead to other "sure things." But in the end, I don't see my final score possibly raising more than 40 or so points (and even that, through a lot of hard thinking). So I think I can describe my level of play here as: Better than most, not as good as some. Really, I did a lot better at the M&M game.
And for those who are interested, I present three images of the game: 1) My final game board displayed without any answers, so you can see how to beat me without giving it away for yourself; 2) My final game board including my answers, so those of you who want to show me up can stand on my shoulders and get a few more to push yourself over my edge; and 3) for those of you who are completely fed up with it but want to see exactly the kind of madness we're dealing with, the entire game board revealed.
So, great. Paul introduced me to a new and addictive puzzler. It's a blind, word association game. And it's rad. The successes, when they come are exhilarating - especially when they lead to two or three more immediate successes, but the slow points can destroy me. So if you want to see my progress, click on this post's masthead (don't worry, you won't be able to see my answers if you're trying to win yourself).Oh, and please, nobody give away answers in the comments section (and this means You Alex!).
UPDATE: I'll post links to my progress via the images below. And don't worry, I don't spoil the answers.
UPDATE#2: Things are definitely going more slowly and gradual now. Last night's effort consisted entirely of work in two squares on the bottom row (with no new squares revealed) save for my completion of the two remaining ones that sprung off Cow in the original square. I may be reaching my limit. Still, except for using Google on the Poker Stars part and getting one of the clues in the baseball section, I've been pretty good about sticking to my own devices.
So I've been playing the Dark M&M game, in which you look at a painting and try to figure out all the "dark" movies* they're trying to represent by their pictures. I aquitted myself nicely, I think, guessing 39 out of 50 without aid before turning to Google for assistance. With Google's help, I nabbed another couple and with further assistance from Wendy (we ended up consolidating), I bumped myself up to 46. Which means I'm still 4 shy of an assisted victory.
For those playing at home, the four I'm missing are 1) the Mountains in the background, 2) the reaper in the circular fence, 3) the lady carrying the two youngins, and 4) the Wile E. Coyote tunnel in the brick wall. Have fun. And tom? You should especially enjoy this.
[*note: not all the movies are necessarily scary/horror films. some are sci-fi or mystery/thrillers]
Update: if you don't want to spoil it don't read the comments within.
I really need to do a full review of this sometime. Settlers of Catan is an awesomely fun game and pretty much perfectly paced (those with xBox 360s should check it out on that platform), but the Cities and Knights expansion set turns an awesome game into an incredible game. There is so much to do and so many strategies to do it with. Most of our games end up pretty close and so we never quite know who's in the lead. My one piece of advice: endeavor to complete your turn quickly, as those who make lingering moves can drag the game out for quite longer than needed (the game should finish in one-and-a-half to two hours, but there are certain friends of ours who can stretch a game to nearbout four hours... ugh). My other one piece of advice is that if you have the five to six player expansions to the game as well, play even your three to four player games on the larger map. It gives everyone more room for growth and contributes to what may be a funner gaming atmosphere. My last only piece of advice is that you start with regular Settlers of Catan before graduating to Hot City Knights.
Players each act as the governor of colonial Puerto Rico, competing to see who would make the best governor. Managing the arrival of new colonists, the growth of new plantations and maintenance of old ones, the building of essential building, the trading of crops for money to build with, and the shipping of crops back to the Old World, Puerto Rico is a thinking game that keeps everyone active throughout the whole game. Even more so than Settlers, this one keeps the leader shrouded in ambiguity even up 'til the very last move. Great stuff!
As you may have gathered from above, I think pretty highly of Settlers of Catan. It's broadly considered a gateway game - a means of introducing people to the recent European style of gaming, of drawing out those who "don't like games" because they're only familiar with boring, tedious crap like Monopoly and other Chutes and Ladders-style fare. Unlike those games of your youth, Settlers is honestly fun and combines strategy and fortune in a fun, easy-to-learn way. In the game, you play on a island (different every time you play) covered with a variety of resources. Your goal is to settle the island, building settlements and cities, connected by roads. You accomplish this through harvesting the land of its natural resources (and making trades as necessary). It's an awesome game and there are numerous sets with which you can expand the game (Cities and Knights, Seafarers of Catan, etc.), even expanding the game to fit up to six players from its original four (by adding more pieces and enlarging the island). Get it, play it, love it.
I will admit that the placement of Tigris & Euphrates on the list here may be a little premature. I've only played the game once. And it was a test game with The Monk. The game supports 3 to 4 players so we each played as two players to make four - and I'll freely point out that this is not the ideal way to experience a game. That said, it was a lot of fun and you can expect a full review after we get some real play time on the board. It's a pretty high strategy game somewhere between Settlers and chess. Which is fine, 'cause I love Settlers and hate chess. I'd say it feels pretty similar to Puerto Rico so far as the chance/strategy ratio goes.
This one's rad. It's the only game I played as a ten-year-old that is still on my list of Fun Games to Play. One player is Mister X and the others attempt to uncover his secret movements through simple deduction to corner the poor chaps and clap him in irons. While playing, Mister X should probably wear sunglasses and a ballcap to hide his eyes.
Power companies competing for control over the nation's power grid doesn't sound like fun. But... Surprise! It is. Budding capitalist pigs should soundly enjoy themselves. Read 
A fun game. And I don't ever really like cards. But this is so much more than cards. It's like Fistful of Dollars in your fist. You can read 
I'm not very good at all at speed games. I played Pit about a year ago and kinda just stood there with trades in my hand wondering how everyone was going so fast. Even so, Dutch Blitz, as advertised, is a vonderful goot game. It's like playing multiplayer solitaire very quickly (we like to play with eight players for the pure ferocity of it). I tend to place moderately, but if you're a fan of speed games, I haven't played a better one.
As related in my NAQ review, I'm not a big fan of party games, but as far as they go, Wise and Otherwise is far and away my favourite. I think it might be due to its catering to my taste for the absurd. For those familiar with the Balderdash series of games, the mechanic is the same. The difference is that rather than everyone crafting phony definitions for words and guessing which is the real definition, players craft phony proverbs and guess the real one. The player who's turn it is provides the first part of the proverb, such as "There is an old Nepalese proverb: A cooked dog..." and everyone writes down inventive endings to the proverb such as, "is better than eight" or "won't complain of the cold" or "is a happy dog." These are shuffled in with the real one and everybody guesses what is the truth. A fun game and the real proverbs are generally as loony as anything you'd make up yourself.
A tile-laying game of strategy, Carcasonne is pretty easy to pick up. And fun. Though not as fun as the games I mention above, so I probably won't play it much until I get tired of the above games.
I am famously bad at games like chess, checkers, Connect Four, Othello, Stratego, etc. So I don't play them often. The Monk got me a cool laser-based game called Khet last Xmas and promptly beat me five games straight. Within minutes. It's a fun game. You should try it. Go is another game I will occasionally play. I like it for a couple reasons. For one, it makes even people who are good at chess sweat. It's too much for their computation skills. For another, it's pretty elegant. I might not be that good at it, but I still like it!
I find word games to be moderately fun. The inherent problem with most of these games is that they cater to a particular kind of person - a person with a problematic affinity for vocabulary. Simply stated: the dorkiest of the dorks in your group will win every time. Scattergories largely defeats this by allowing the use of words and terms that wouldn't be allowed in typical word games and further complicates the issue for word dorks by basing your entries not so much on letters but on categories. Boggle is fun because the rounds are short and egalitarian. Everyone's working with the same letters and the spatial element of the game may just be enough to adequately handicap a dork in order that someone less dorky might win. Still jocks will always lose, so Boggle could never make a Top 10 list.
I love Trivial Pursuit, but playing the game as intended is rather boring. People land on subjects and only one person gets a chance to answer a question and half the time, when people do get a question right its something aberrational and dumb like "Literature: Was Frodo Baggins the hero of The Chronicles of Narnia?" That's why I vastly prefer to do away with the board and just sit around with a roomful of people and ask whatever looks interesting on a card. That way everyone's involved and there's nothing so distracting as a bored to compel boredom to creep in. And the game ends when people get tired of not knowing what movie Paul Perkins produced for $17,000 in 1923.
The set-up time is two or three times what it is for Settlers (and Settlers isn't brief on set-up time) and explaining the rules to a newcomer would probably take an hour (the instruction booklet is forty-some pages long). And then the game itself, if expedience is not demanded, can last for hours and hours. And hours. And, well, hours. I've played eight hour games in my more youthful days that were only about a third of the way done. That said, it's one of the coolest war strategy games I've ever played. A good can be one of the best games ever. You just need ridiculously patient friends with a lot of time to kill (and as I get old, time is becoming more and more difficult to find).
trivia!
market!
twice!
