MONKEY-SHAKESPEARE INTERACTIONS

Many thanks to good friend Tom, who sent me this link. It's a simulator of monkeys typing randomly. Each 2000-character "page" is meticulously compared to the complete works of Shakespeare--and looks for matches. More cleverness lurks within; check out the text beneath the generator. So far, my record is seventeen characters:

After 5.49342e+33 pages in this session, a monkey typed:

PROLOGUE

In TroyDNGK5amS!.4swJ![5D[1gpSXB wdI...

the first 17 letters of which match "Troilus and Cressida":

_________________________________________________________________________________
PROLOGUE

In Troy, there lies the scene. From isles of Greece
The princes orgillous, their high blood chaf'd,

Not bad, I daresay. The overall record (of all observers) is twenty characters (as of this writing). My only gripe is that it seems to only look at the beginnings of the monkey-output and the actual plays--which makes sense from a processing-speed point of view, but is slightly lacking in elegance.

UPDATE: As thrashed out in the comments section, looking deeper into the site one learns that this is a distributed computing project, kind of like SETI@home and other sorts of projects. Most of them are more serious than trying to randomly generate Shakespeare, and yet it's the only one I take part in, although I was in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search at one point.

This is more fun. Especially since the monkeys are damn near finishing Hamlet, as we can tell from their latest opus:

Barnardo. Who's tSKfq0oH3P0cvhea

Keep plugging away, guys!

HANDICAPPING ESSEN

I was looking over the great Essen Preview over at Gamefest. Some thoughts:

There's a russian roulette game, Ra rethemed to be about the mafia, and two (two!) games about trying to escape Pompeii during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. The theme of this year's games seems to be "Optimism."

Three Carcassonne expansions/new games! Goodness...a while back, I made a joke somewhere on Boardgamegeek that an upcoming expansion was going to be about the conflict between commune and contada in northern Italy, based on the presumption that there just weren't that many more things to do. Evidence: Carcassonne, the Cathars. This expansion adds four tiles to the game, and provides heretics who...bore holes in city walls? Huh? I wasn't aware that was in their job description. Particularly since they built the Carcassonne city walls.

Carcassonne: The City looks pretty cool, though.

"Friedrich" from histogame looks promising. I like it when eurogames take on more history, and wargames take on more "euro" elements.

What an odd bunch of games coming out from JKLM. An 18xx game set on the Isle of Wight? I'm going to have to start working on my Easter Island Rails project. I'll probably get City and Guilds to work on my collection of games on, well, medieval cities and merchant activity. Finally, I'd like to point out that "Scottish Highland Whiskey Race" is one of the better titles I've seen in a while.

Settlers now has a prequel--Candamir, based on one of the Catan novels that's come out. (Novels! Has anyone out there actually read one of these things?) Could be interesting, but seems to be pretty unlike Settlers--which may be for the best.

Phalanx has a heck of a lineup coming out. Actually, Ted Raicer's WWI game is fairly unappealing to me--too few notes, to paraphrase the Emperor in Amadeus. Heart of Africa and Revolution should be pretty good, though. Naval Battles should also be good--Dan Verssen does good stuff in this format.

Reading about Splotter's Antiquity game makes me all weak and drooly. I love Roads and Boats, I love medieval city growth and development, and I love the mechanic of having different victory conditions. And the components! Miles ahead of Roads and Boats. This is about the only Must Have out here.

Gotta love Terra Authentica:

The print run of this game will be 250 copies. The price of this game is going to be approximately 1800 Euro, plus tax.

...for a game about canal digging in seventeenth-century Oman. That's over two grand (US). Think about that. Take your favorite game, and ask yourself: Would you pay two grand for it? What if it meant you could not play it otherwise? Tough questions, but I can imagine scraping together two grand for the right to play Go, for example. (It helps that I don't have to actually do that. Easy to agree to stuff you don't have to do...) Then ask yourself: What are the odds that this game is that good?

I want one of everything Warfrog is coming out with. Age of Steam expansions, and a cool looking game in Struggle of Empires. Martin Wallace missed with Runebound, though; I'll wait and see on that last one, certainly. The AoS expansions seem to disappear in a twinkling, though...

Meisterdiebe looks cool--how many games double as furniture?--but does it work? And how much must this thing cost? (And how much would it cost if Terra Authentica got ahold of it?)

A German ice hockey simulation! That could be interesting. Hockey hasn't translated well to the boardgame format, but it's good to see people still trying. I wonder if the solution isn't to "tone it down" like in StreetSoccer.

So, if I were shopping at Essen, and had no serious money worries, I'd be getting:

• Carcassonne: the City
• Antiquity
• City and Guilds
• Revolution
• Every Age of Steam and Railroad Dice expansion I could find

...but as it is, it's going to take significantly longer to get all of that (assuming I ever do)! Fun window-shopping, though...

ANOTHER NOTE ABOUT FIRST-AB HOMERS

Of the 82 twentieth-century players who hit a homer in their first at-bat, sixteen never hit another one.

WARNING! BASEBALL CONTENT

One of the neat things one can do as a ballplayer is to hit a home run in one's first at-bat. Since 1900, 82 men have done so.

Looking over that list, the first thing you see is that these are mostly not names to conjure with. I'm sure all you Astros fans remember the Dave Matranga era, just as I (and all Cardinals fans) look back fondly on Keith McDonald's career.

The other thing I noticed was...there are a lot of pitchers on this list. One of the two Hall of Famers on this list is Hoyt Wilhelm, for example. I sat down and calculated what position these folks played...and discovered that pitchers are vastly overrepresented here:

1. Outfield: 27 (33%)
2. Pitcher: 14 (17%)
3. Catcher: 11 (13%)
4. First Base: 10 (12%)
5. Shortstop: 9 (11%)
6. Second Base: 7 (8%)
7. Third Base: 4 (4%)

(With some underfudge in the percentages for rounding.)

The "Outfield" position, of course, is really three positions, and if we assume for the moment that these are distributed equally, that's nine for each of right, left, and center fields. Which leaves the pitcher as the most likely slot to see a first-AB homer (and this includes substantial time in the AL where pitchers never hit).

This would seem to be counterintuitive. Pitchers hit vastly fewer homers than any other position. One possible solution may be that there are more first AB for pitchers than any other position--vastly more--and thus even with a far lower incidence of HR hitting there will be, in absolute numbers, more pitchers with 1st AB HRs than any other position. In 2003, for example, 182 players had their debut, 101 of whom were pitchers. Of coruse, of those debuts 55 players didn't have an at-bat--52 of whom were pitchers (the other three, presumably, were just used as pinch-runners or late-inning defensive substitutes). That leaves us with 127 debut players who had an at-bat, 49 pitchers and 78 non-pitchers. Now, a few folks--mostly pitchers--who had debuts earlier would have their first at-bats this year--just for sake of easy numbers, let's say sixty pitchers and eighty non-pitchers have their first AB in a typical year. Before the DH, it'd probably be, instead of three pitchers for every four non-pitchers, say it's about even (since fewer pitchers tended to be used). Over the course of the past 103 years, it'd be a shade under 50-50.

(Ish. I'm treating this like a Fermi problem.)

So, if it's a fifty-fifty split over the course of the "study," then position players have had more success hitting HR in their first AB, 4.85 times as often as pitchers. The thing is, this may still be too high, since I'm guessing that even rookies have a far higher HR/AB rate than that for position players vs pitchers.

This is one of those times I wish I had a far better way to analyze this stuff, than manually transcribing it all into Excel...

NEW IDEAS FOR HEROSCAPE

Adam recently bought HeroScape (a "present," as I understand it, for "someone else") and has, as I confidently predicted for all, found it most amusing. He also has a new unit concept to try out: Warg Riders.

I've come up with some Warg Riders which I think require some playtesting. It'd be a two or three orc squad with Move 8, Height 3, Attack 3, Defense 2, Range 1. They'd also have the ensnare ability, range of 4. Ensnare attempts to trap an enemy unit in a net. Roll four attack dice, while your opponent rolls a number of dice equal to their height. If you score any hits (it doesn't matter how many) the unit is ensnared and can not move, attack, or use special abilities the next time it is activated. You may not attempt to ensnare an opponent who is on higher ground than you.

I think those guys would play pretty well, they have some strengths and some weaknesses. But I'm not sure how many points they're worth or how many units should be in the squad. Thoughts?

I like the netting idea, but also have no clue how to dream up a fair point cost for these guys.

We also wondered why there weren't any rules for pushing people off of cliffs. To that end, I put a playtestable rule together for the purpose:

An activated unit, instead of attacking normally, can attempt to push an adjacent unit off a cliff (an edge hexside which is adjacent to the target unit).

A unit may only try to push a unit which is the attacker's height or smaller. To conduct this brand of hand-to-hand (or -claw, or -other-appendage-as-appropriate) combat, each player rolls the D20 and adds their figure's height to the roll, and subtracts any wound markers the unit has accrued. If the Activated unit rolls a higher modified number than the target unit, then the target unit falls off an adjacent cliff hexside (attacker's choice), following the rules for normal and major falls as appropriate.

If the defender wins, then the attacking unit is pushed away one hex (defender's choice) any legal direction from his current location. This may well be over a cliff as well. The defending unit MAY (at the defending player's discretion) occupy the hex just vacated by the attacking piece.

If there's a tie, then the two units Holmes-and-Moriarty themselves BOTH over the cliff, applying the Fall rules as appropriate. The defending unit falls first (if there are choices, at a hex of the attacker's choosing), and then the attacker next to him (at a hex of the defender's choosing).

I might need a picture illustrating that one...

HeroScape would seem to be a good game for making up house rules and new units--the game's simple enough that bolting on new items doesn't unduly complicate matters. (With any luck, though, this will avoid turning into Supremacy...)

VARIA

A commenter below asked if I've heard anything about Heroscape expansions...the last thing I've heard is that they'll be out sometime like December or January. However, we do get to look at them earlier. Will I be buying the Romans? Yes. Yes I will. Why? To find out how many legionaries it takes to kill a giant dinosaur, that's why.

I've not been idle with HeroScape, by the way. This game is...well, it's not serious fun, as I like to say, but it's terrific unserious fun. I want to play on one of those super-duper setups. I have a grandiose web-project in store for it; like most of my grandiose projects I fully expect this to die by the wayside. But we'll see...

Reading-wise, I just picked up Henry Petroski's latest book, Pushing the Limits. This one's a collection of his articles for American Scientist magazine, and thus sometimes seem a bit disjointed. Still, neat articles all the same. I was particularly interested in his take on the Bonfire tragedy, a good example of how years of small accumulated errors and organizational misjudgements can lead to an out-of-control situation and tragedy.

Most of the book is substantially more upbeat. Half the articles are about one of Petroski's favorite subjects--bridges great and small (mostly great). The whole book is about engineering, and how it operates with the political and more purely artistic spheres to create magnificent pieces like the Golden Gate and Brooklyn Bridges. I'm not an engineer myself, but was raised in an engineering/techie environment and this sort of thing is in my blood, I suppose. Petroski does amazing work; anyone interested in the history of invention, technology and engineering should seek out his books and articles.

YIKES!

Been a long time since the last post. Most of the past week has been spent holed up in a library, or at work, but some quick notes to keep the brand alive until a more substantial post (this weekend, one hopes):

On the Nightstand is Molvania: a Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry, which is one of the funniest books I've read in a long, long time. It's a sendup of those travel guides to...less touristed destinations, which labor long and hard to make, say, Syria sound like a hot tourist destination. Lonely Planet is probably the best-known of these. The look of this parody is perfect--two of the less geographically-aware folks at the store could not tell, just looking through it, that it was a parody. It starts you off with a capsule look at the history, government, and language of Molvania--put forth as a landlocked Balkan nation, with all the wars, coups, and tricky consonants that this implies. It then leads you through the various parts of the country--Lutenblag, the capital city starts us off. Each city in the guide has a map (each with a Platka dj Busjbusj, a square named after the "Father of Modern Movania," who granted each Molvanian the constitutional right to bear a grudge), a look at its history, its major sites, and a look at the budget, mid-range, and budget hotels and restaurants.

Molvania is a complete dump--swamps, rocky desolate plains, rude inhabitants, sleaze, and the world's oldest operating nuclear reactor. It has lousy jazz clubs (the "Bje Bjop"), hotels squeezed between a highway and a steel mill, and pigeons with teeth. Its ("politically incorrect") national anthem is sung to the tune of "Oh What a Feeling" from "Flashdance." This country is a mess, but this travel guide always tries to put the best face on things. Many of these attempts come from Philippe Misèrée, a "veteran traveller" who looks down on us philistines who like clean sheets, safe streets, and air-conditioning in our hotels. Philippe does things the hard way--in the search for "an authentic travel experience." Boy does he find them--sleeping homeless in a grimy industrial wasteland in eastern Molvania, getting robbed in Lutenblag, being taken out to the middle of the uninhabited steppes to starve, the works. And, he reminds us, he is our definite travel superior.

I liked laughing at both the travel guide writers and the Molvanians. This is one of the better parodies to come down the road in quite some time.

Game-wise, it looks as though there will be a new Columbia block game coming out soon--Hellas, as of this writing with 442 pre-orders out of 500 needed to publish. Place your order now! This looks like another possible small gem from Columbia--only 56 blocks, and the cards look like an interesting variant on the ones in Hammer of the Scots. The Peloponnesian War is an interesting situation; this has a lot of potential.

I just discovered these, the "room puzzles" of Toshimitsu Takagi. Fun stuff! Fans of, say, the Myst series and the like should definitely check these out...

All for now. Will return later...

VIKING FURY, CONTINUED

I decided to set up the game with all five "players" in play. I always forget what Fun Names I give player colors, so I'm giving up and just using Blue, White, Green, Red, and Yellow--which is the turn order. (In real life, the first player is "he of the hairiest head.") Going first seems to confer some kind of slight advantage--if you start first, you start with 1 VP; second gets 2 VP, and so on.

Each player also starts with a Rune card:

BLUE got a card that allows him to ignore the clear sailing limits for one turn.
WHITE got "Disputed Settlement," which allows him to attack another player's settlement and try to convert it to his own.
GREEN got the "Change in Demand" card. One of the three trade goods is in "extra demand" at any one time, which gives a player two extra VP for using it in a Trade action. This card allows Green to change which trade good gets the bonus.
RED got a card that allows him to load two crewmen or trade goods for free (i.e., no cost in "days").
YELLOW is the "Siege" card. If the Yellow player begins a turn in an orange, raidable port, he can play this card and gets to add one to his raid dice.

There are also three Saga cards in play. When I note a Saga card, I'll put an (N) if it's a Norse Saga, a (D) if it's a Danish Saga, and an (S) if it's a Swedish Saga. The three starting Sagas are:

Raid Lindisfarne (N)
Raid Paris and Bordeaux (D), with a five point bonus
Settle the Faeroes, the Orkneys, and the Shetlands (N)

All the players' longboats start in the Wintering box.

Blue begins the first round. It's hard to do anything with an empty longboat, so this round will see most players busy loading their ships and collecting Rune cards rather than doing anything too fun. Until the first Second Era Saga card comes out, players only have five spaces in their longboats--thus, they can only have up to five (crew + trade goods) on board. Blue loads his ship with two crew, two skins, and a set of tusks, taking five days to do so. He heads out to the Norway home port, and spends his last two days collecting Rune cards. (You can collect Rune cards in a home port, but you can't play them in a home port.) He gets "Change in Demand," described earlier, and "Call Upon Odin," which when played lets the player fill his Rune card hand back up to three for free.

That's seven days, so it's White's turn. White wants to get that settlement Saga card, so he puts five crewmen in his boat and goes to Denmark. He also draws two Runes: "Storms," which makes players at sea lose some of their crew/loads; and "Not Welcome Here," which makes another player in a port be attacked by the natives. Ahh, the glories of "screw your neighbor" cards. Most of the Rune cards help you, I think, but a fair number are used on offense, as it were.

Green loads two crewmen and one each of the trade goods, and goes to Sweden. (There's no limit to how many longships can be in a home port--although only one can be in a non-home port--and in retrospect I'm not sure why I had Green go to Sweden.) Follwing a trend, he draws two Runes. One allows him to attack another player's settlement, and another incurs a rebellion against another player's settlement.

Red, on the other hand, gets off to a fast start. He plays his Rune card and gets two free crewmen. He loads a further two crew and some skins and goes to the Norway port. He then sails to Lindisfarne, and raids the good monks.

He rolls a die, and needs to roll a four or better. He rolls a five on the first roll, and thus succeeds. He turns over the treasure chit: Three points, pretty small change. He gets a Saga card, though, and keeps that in front of him. A new Saga card gets turned over to replace that one on the board: "Trade with York, Lincoln, and Norwich" (D)--the hexagonal ports on the east coast of England on the map. (If this Saga had already been "completed" when the card was drawn--a trade good in each port--then the card would have been discarded and a new one drawn.)

That's only six days, but Red can't think of anything else to do so he passes on his last day.

Yellow looks at his "Siege" card and decides to try for the Raid Paris and Bordeaux Saga. (And what a Saga it would be!) He loads his ship with four crewmen and a Skins trade counter, and moves to Denmark. He draws two more Rune cards before he goes: A "Change in Demand" card (there seem to be lots of these), and "Trade with the Natives," which lets you, if you stop in a port with a trade counter, take another chit of that commodity. Normally you can only load a trade good when you're wintering, so this could be a big help if you don't want to start over in Scandinavia.

So that's the first round--mostly preparing for the adventures ahead, which will be detailed later...

ON THE TABLE: EXTENDED VIKING FURY EDITION (PT. 1)

I've played through the first "era" in Viking Fury, and I thought I'd give a report. I'll start with an exhaustive description of the game:

The game covers Viking and Norse activity from about the years 750 to 1020. It is divided into "eras," and after the third era the game ends (reasonably enough).

The map shows most of the areas of Viking activity, on the seas and major rivers of Europe (note the Volga and Don over in Russia, and the Seine in France--both enlarged for ease of play) and parts just inland.

Cities on the map are either part of regions or are independent. Regions consist of three cities in a row on the map with the same symbol--like the three hexagons there on the east coast of England. Independent cities are the starburst symbols. The cities in orange are "treasure cities," and can be raided for, well, treasure. Rome, Constantinople and Paris have especially large payouts, denoted by their larger size on the map.

Each sea area has a letter in it--N, S, E and W as befits where they're located. There's a big diamond on the left side there that shows how many clear days of sailing each sea area allows--the south allows six, the north three, and so on. These are base numbers and may be modified during the game.

Each player's turn is divided into seven "days," which are hardly literal. It takes a day to move a sea area (or into or out of port), to load a crew member or trade good into your ship, or to draw a "Rune" card. Rune cards give you various special abilities; you can have up to three. You can sail up to seven days, but if you exceed the number of "clear" days for a sea zone, you lose men or goods to storms.

Some things don't take up days. There's a "Wintering" box (pentagon, really) stuck in the middle of Scandinavia there, and three triangular "Home Ports" corresponding to Sweden, Denmark and Norway. You can move from anywhere on the map to the wintering box for free, but that ends your turn and you lose anything that was in your ship except for one man. You can also move from the wintering box to a home port for free. Playing rune cards is free (but you can't do it in a home port), and the three Major Things You Do are also free:

First, there's trading. When you enter a port (that does not already have a trade marker in it), you can place a trade marker from your ship to the port, and score that port's value (the number inside the symbol). Each region can only have one of each kind of trade good in it--so if two of the ports in a three-port region have a skins counter and a fur counter, the third can only take a tusks counter.

You can also raid an "orange" treasure port. To do so, you roll dice and try to exceed the port's value. You can roll up to three dice (one for each crewman--if you have a fourth crewman, he's "extra") one at a time. If you roll lower or equal to the port's value, that crewman dies. Thus if you roll a failure die and then a success die, you lose one guy (and there is no third die roll). If you lose on all three...well, if you have anyone left, you can try again next turn. (If you don't have anyone left, you immediately go to the wintering box.) If you successfully raid, you flip over the heretofore hidden treasure marker and get that many points. There's a bonus for whichever viking has the most successful raids at the end of the game.

You can also try to establish a settlement at a port. Again, you're trying to exceed the port value, but here you roll (up to) three dice at once. If any die is over the port value, the settlement is placed (by moving a guy from your boat to the port), but for every die equal or less than the port value you lose one of your men. There can only be one settlement in any one port. Settlements score you points only at the end of the game.

Notably, you can only perform one of these actions in a port per turn.

Central to the game are the Saga cards. There are eighteen of them per game, six for each era. There are always three "open" Sagas on the board. A Saga card gives some task--such as "Settle the Faeroes, the Orkneys, and the Shetland Islands"--and is labeled as being a Norse, Swedish, or Danish Saga. If you complete a Saga card's task, you get that card. (You want to have the most cards of a given nationality at the end of the game.) Note that if one guy settled the Faeroes and the Orkneys, and you swoop in and settle the Shetlands, you get the card and the other guy can only bemoan the fates. Certain Saga cards give you bonus points; otherwise, Sagas only turn into victory points at game end.

Probably a few turn descriptions will help explain all this...

OUT OF THE WRAPPER

I'm about a third of the way through a solo play-through of Viking Fury, and I must say that this one has been Big Fun so far. There's been raiding and trading and pillage and men lost to rough seas and...everything. A lot of flavor to this, and some strategy, too. I've been taking notes, so I'll do a full write-up when it's done. (There's a new HeroScape scenario set up right next to it, too, but that may have to wait. Or not. Ahh, multitasking...)

For the moment, though, I'd like to touch on a couple of other games that just came in. These may be just about my last (significant--more than $5) game purchases for a while; I have a vacation/possibly moving (to Waco?) to worry about, so it's time to retrench. But, in the meantime, two new games came in the mail.

The first is Sword of Rome from GMT. This is the latest in the "Card-Driven Strategy Games," a series that could use a better title. This is the wargame line that began with We the People, and now ten years later SoR is, by my calculations, the 723rd game using the same basic idea: You hold a hand of cards, with which one does basically everything--order units to move, bring in new units, and incur special events. There have been a few evolutionary advances to the system, some more punctuated than others. Paths of Glory brought a major change, giving each player their own deck of cards (rather than players drawing from the same deck). Thirty Years War showed that, after a long string of great games, it was, in fact, possible for a game using this system to be not very good. (I, at least, am still waiting for the definitive 30YW game.)

Sword of Rome, based on a fairly brief look, seems to bring the complexity level back down around the We the People level, which is fairly low. That said, it does have some neat features to it. First of all, it's multiplayer--the first real multiplayer game in the series (I don't count Successors). Second, each player is pretty different. Each has their own deck, and each player has special abilities and ways to score (the Gauls look like fun to play--no VP's for conquest, but plenty for pillage!)

I'll report more on this one later, but initial reactions are positive. Except for the cover art, which is kind of bland.

The other game is Shakespeare: the Bard Game. This game has gotten kind of weird press. On BGG, it's suggested as the latest evidence of Uberplay "not getting the job done". It may be just me, but I'm actually pretty excited about it just reading the material inside.

It could be that I tend to look on the bright side of games, assuming they're not unduly pretentious or complete wrecks. I can see a niche for just about any game (which explains the size of the ol' collection) that isn't broken. The niche for S:tBG is...Shakespeare nuts.

This game is certainly not the next Puerto Rico or St. Petersburg, a nice meaty Game for Gamers to inspire one to rapture about the mechanics. The mechanics are pretty simple--roll-and-move with extras. The extras, though, is what make this game.

The idea is that the players are Elizabethan play producers, trying to get a venue, actors, props, patrons, a script, and money to all coincide--thus producing plays to increase your eminence in the theater world. Which is, honestly, a great premise. The plays you're producing are Shakespeare's. You have to buy your scripts from him, and when you do you see how many leading actors it requires, how many props it requires, and how many patrons you need to pull it off. You get props at the central marketplace (with money), and you hire actors at the taverns (with--wait for it--money), and you put on the plays at one of the four theaters on the board (which all charge rent).

So you're going to need money. How do you get it?

There are a few ways. First, you can busk. You can do this anywhere, and you get five shillings (the unit of currency in the game) but have to draw a Fate card, which does something to you randomly good or bad. Another way: When you land on a space occupied by a fellow player, you can try to mug him (!). This might backfire. (Don't worry, it's done with dice. No LARPing here. Yet.) The usual way, though, is to go to a theater and show off either your Shakespeare geekdom or your thespian abilities.

If you take the first way, another player draws a card off a big ol' stack of question cards and asks you a question. You can ask for an easy, medium, or hard question. If you get it right, you get money (more money for more difficult questions, of course). If you get it wrong you are jeered by your fellow players, but suffer no other penalties. If you don't trust your trivia knowledge, you can instead take a card off the top of another deck and recite--dramatically--a famous(ish) passage from the plays or sonnets. The other players then are to sit down and decide how much money to give you based on nothing but pure whim (informed, presumably, by their appreciation of your performance). (This money comes from the bank.)

When you put on a play, how well you do depends on the quality of actors you've attracted into your company, how good a script you have, and a random bunch of dierolls--each theater gives you a certain number of dice (one to five), and you get the sum of those added to your score. The Globe gives the most dice, of course, but you can only put on one play there--so make it good!

So you roll-and-move, answer trivia questions, and sometimes ham it up for a minute or two...it sounds like a party game, all right. It's a party game for Shakespeare freaks, who may or may not be gamers. (One of the codesigners is Mike Siggins, editor of the late, lamented Sumo games magazine and Game Cabinet website of a few years back.)

It seems to me--just reading the rules and thinking about it--that one should play with either the trivia questions or the passages, but not both. I'd think that having some people do one thing and other people do another wouldn't be as much fun. Personally, I'd prefer to play on the trivia deck (mostly from preternatural shyness), but that'd require a group of players with roughly equal (and substantial) knowledge of the Shakespearean canon. On the other hand, if you had a bunch of extroverted types willing and able to ham it up, going nuts over the monologues would be a great time for all.

The game has a lot of social qualities going for it, and it drips with its Shakespearian theme, but isn't much of a game system. A mixed group of gamers and non-gamers, with a love of Shakespeare and/or overacting, though, should have a blast with this one.

(I keep saying "overacting," "ham it up," and so on. Sure, one could try to emulate Laurence Olivier for this stuff...but surely I'm not the only one who finds it more fun to parody Laurence Olivier in such situations. I'm reminded of the Monty Python sketch, the Royal Hospital for Over-Acting. One of my favorites...)

Thus far, though, the pick of today's litter is Viking Fury. More comments later...

BRIEF HOCKEY NOTE

Gosh darn it, again. Fun game, though...a great scoring play with Gomez to Weight, an eleventh-hour (OK, ninth- or tenth-hour) comeback, a flurry of US chances at the end...

With possibly no other chance to see these guys play for a year, it's good to soak up this stuff. (Unless ESPN starts showing Finnish league games. Or Korean league games--which I didn't know existed, until I learned that Esa Tikkanen was hired to play for and coach one of the teams.)

QUICK FOOTBALL NOTE

Gosh darn it.

That is all.

OUT OF THE WRAPPER

After many misadventures--lost PayPal payments, inconveniently-timed vacations, etc--I finally got Viking Fury in the mail, having pre-ordered it some time back.

This is my first Ragnar Brothers game, and I must say I'm impressed with the physical quality. I had somehow come to expect a more...primitive product, as it were. I was very mistaken. It all looks very professionally done, except for the cumbersome "double-sided" knorr counters, which require somewhat more cutting and pasting than I'd have preferred. I have done more to put games together, to be sure, and this was no undue strain.

I've only gotten a chance to glance at the rules, but it seems straightforward enough. Ragnar Brothers is probably best known for two things: maps on tea-towels (check), and inventing History of the World. There's a lot of flavor in the rules, cards, and map, and if the mechanics hold up this should be a winner. I'll probably give this one a solo whirl sometime soon.

ON THE TABLE (AND ANOTHER ACQUIRE NOTE)

So, I tried out that battle I described earlier for HeroScape--the DeathBot, the 82nd Airborne, and the Vikings aganst the Kirye, the aliens, the Samurai, and the Elf.

Lesson Learned: You want the DeathBot. Really bad. On turn one, he jumped on top of the doohickey that gave all the guys on his side one more attacking die--each die has a 1/3 chance of a "hit," a defensive die has a 1/3 chance of a "save"--and then used his special "High Explosive" attack to wipe out the aliens. The Samurai don't have ranged attacks--which reminds me--

Lesson two: You want guys with ranged attacks

so they did what they could to scurry out of the way, but before they could do that, the DeathBot lobbed another megabomb in the vicinity and wiped 2/3 of them out. On turn three, the 82nd paradropped onto the board and, again with the ranged attacks, picked off the last Samurai (a ronin by this point) and the Elf. The Kirye gave up, having not even managed to fargin' attack the DeathBot, the Screaming Eagles, or the Vikings.

The Vikings had a grand time of it, marching merrily along behind the DeathBot as he spread carnage across the battlefield. They neither attacked nor were attacked, which is a pretty good deal if you ask me.

Some of the dierolls blew. The Samurai shouldn't have died so easy--the 'Bot's special attack gave him four dice to the Samurai's seven, and the Samurai never rolled more than one save (and they die after just one hit). Same with the Aliens. That said, clearly I gave the Kirye and Co. some crap men. Not much in the way of ranged attack strength here, and bunching up the aliens was a poor play (the DeathBot special attack is aimed at one figure, and any neighboring figure also gets caught up in the conflagration and must roll to save--and the DeathBot got the alien in the middle).

The DeathBot only has one hit point, but gets to roll nine "save" dice, which is way more dice than the attackers get to roll, most of the time, plus there's that whole lobbing-huge-bombs-at-long-range thing. Close-combat troops--like the Samurai--seem trickier to use, particularly for a low-subtlety tactician like me. The Samurai are cool--they roll five dice normally (they got two extra for being near the Kyrie, her special power), and any extra saves they get in close combat are hits on the attacker. Which is nice, but getting them in close combat would seem to take some tactical acumen, such as avoiding two-story tall robots with heavy weapons.

Which is really a life lesson for us all.

Army composition seems more crucial than I first thought. I kind of idiotically figured that, you know, a 100-point unit is about as good as any other 100-point unit. Not so! With the special powers, and needing long-range firepower to cover your close-combat troops, some serious care needs to be taken here.

The game itself is simple enough. You roll for initiative, you decide what order you want to move your units in, you move that unit, you fire that unit, and then the next player goes.

Initial response: The game is simple, but richly rewards--in no particular order--army drafting ability, tactical maneuvering, and luck. (Too early to tell which of those is paramount.) The mechanics are nothing special, but provide plenty of opportunity to go Boom!! and Ker-POWW!!, which is always welcome. You won't be looking in the rulebook much once the game starts. This is another game that reminds me of the ersatz games I played with my toy soldiers years ago--particularly the line-of-sight rule.

See, each figure has a little diagram on their statistics card (that shows movement allowance, attack strength, etc) that shows a silhouette of the figure with part/most of the figure in red, with a bit of green around the head. The green dot represents the thing's eyes, and the red the "target area" of the figure. If your figure can see, from the green dot, any part of the red area of the opposing figure, then a line-of-sight is established. If the target figure is turned so that the relevant bits are hidden behind...whatever, then there is no line of sight. So you have to be careful when you move your figure that you're facing him in the right direction to see, or not be seen by, another figure.

Let the rules lawyers chew on that.

Speaking of rules lawyers, I was looking at the rules in my old/new Acquire game. The rules are printed on the inside cover of the game box--you don't see that on many new games, anymore--and under "ending the game," it gives this:

The game ends when one player, after playing a tile, announces that either all chains on the board are safe or that one chain contains 41 or more hotels. (A player does not have to announce that the game is over if it is to his advantage to continue playing.) After announcing that the game is over, the player finishes his turn, buying stock if he wishes. (Emphasis added.)

Here's my question. Did anyone ever announce--say on an early turn when he or she just took the lead--"All the chains on the board are safe," and claim an end the game? Clearly the announcement isn't true, but the rules don't say that the announcer has to be right. Sure it's implied, and doubtless such a player (if a scoundrel like that deserves the name) would never be invited to play again, but still. In one of those high-stakes mid-sixties Acquire megatournaments that Wide World of Sports televised, I can see how it might have been tempting.

I suppose those might have been simpler, more innocent gaming times, without such nefarious gamesmanship (and people making up stuff like televising Acquire games).

Back to HeroScape. I want to try it again, and I'm beginning to angle for a multi-player game of it. That said, with the delicate nature of army building I can see how having multiple sets or expansions would be a major plus. I'm going to try to better-balance the next scenario, though...maybe swap out the Elf for the T-Rex...

YAY THRIFT STORES

I'm always jealous when I read those gloatathon thrift store finds GeekLists, and so I always feel good when I, too, find something nice and cheap at the Value Village. It's not too often, but today I got lucky and picked up Acquire. I felt a little silly standing there and counting out the pieces, but hey: For $2.02 I gotta make sure I'm doing it right.

(Not too sure what the point is behind the "extra" two cents in the price.)

If I'm worse at a game than I am at Acquire, I've presumably blocked it out of my memory. I have just no idea what's going on in the game. It's one of those games that I know is great, but when I look at my situation, all I know is that I'm in Big Trouble.

(Not the wooden pieces, sadly. A nice 1966 3M model, though.)

OUT OF THE BOX

Sometimes living in a relatively gamer-free zone has its little advantages. For instance, take HeroScape, the latest Big Hit on Boardgamegeek. The "articles" mostly consist of people frantic to find the game, or sending out frenzied calls to the herd, alerting them to new flocks to pillage. Then there's this guy, who I hope is making it up.

I read about the game, it got good reviews from people I trust, sounded pretty neat, and wandered into my local Big Box of Stuff store, and lo and behold there was a full display of it. I could well have been the first customer. My strong suspicion is that most area stores are full up with this one.

It's good to see Hasbro putting some more effort into its boardgame line. Between snazzed-up rereleases and new games like Battleball--not to mention the "new" Avalon Hill, which has done reasonably OK--they're doing a better job of putting out quality games for gamers than they have in a long time. It's neat to see boardgames getting the high-profile treatment.

And HeroScape, no matter what else it is, has a heck of a physical treatment. It comes with 30 figurines, which are nicely-sculpted and well-painted (although I may touch up one or two, but probably not). The best part, though, is the "board," which consists of umpteen hex plates of various sizes--from one hex to twenty-four--which can be combined to form any number of 3-D terrain maps. You can have wide flat plains with rivers, high mountains, caves...you name it. It looks awesome set up, and it doesn't take as enormously long as you might expect.

I must say, though, that this is an extremely silly game. I don't mean it's a bad game, or a trivial one, but it has the silliest premise I've seen since Devil Bunny appeared on the scene. I've picked up most of the "idea" from websites and the manuals; let me see if I can do it justice:

OK. The game's set in Valhalla. So, before there were Valkiryes, there were mere Kiryes (how you pronounce that, I don't know--like "curries"?) and Archkiryes. Then one of them discovered this well/spring/wellspring, which kept him from aging, gave him superstrength, and allowed him to have hallucinations of the great warriors throughout history. Then other people found these wellsprings, had their own visions, which eventually became real, and now the Kiryes became Valkiryes and have these warriors fight battles over these wellsprings.

(The Nibelungenlied this ain't.)

And so, there are these epic battles consisting of upwards of ten or twelve warriors a side. In one battle I'm throwing together to try out the mechanics, I have an army consisting of four members of the 81st Airborne, four vikings, a mecha, and a dragon facing off against a Kirye, three samurai, five aliens, and two smaller mecha. I neglected to include the Orc riding a Tyrannosaurus and the folks who look like extras from a Men in Black/Matrix crossover TV pilot. (How do giant robots get into Valhalla, anyway? Do they have souls?)

Basically, then, the premise is a super-flimsy excuse to have the 81st Airborne take on some samurai, and to include an Orc-controlled dinosaur in a game for the first (?) time. And, honestly, haven't we all wondered how this would work out? I'm reminded of one military history course I had in college, where the professor went on a rant about how "silly" wargamers were, for wanting to "give Alexander the Great a Sherman tank." (First of all, it's Darius who would have needed the Sherman tank.) After class I gently upbraided him, but honestly: The 81st Airborne vs. Samurai vs. Giant Killer Robots vs. Dragons vs. a T-Rex. What's not to love here? Somewhere deep in the heart of a historical gamer, like me, lurks a nine-year-old imp who wants to throw all plausibility out the window.

This is a game for your inner imp. You will in no way be enlightened by this game. It's about eye candy and the pure joy of tossing together anachronistic battles.

As far as the game mechanics go, I don't think this is something that would come out of the Sid Sackson or Reiner Knizia workshops, but there's some real thought going on here. Each player has three rounds, and in each round you give orders to one of your units (either a squad--like my vikings and Airborne--or a single hero, like the dragon and the Giant Robot). At the beginning of a turn, you get four order markers: Round 1, 2, 3, and X. The "X" is a dummy. The other player can see what units are being ordered (and you can order a unit multiple times), but not when they're going, and they can't tell which is the dummy marker. So there's planning ahead to be done, certainly, and coordinating your units (and the individuals within a unit) is a challenge in almost any environment.

Expansions are promised. There are a lot of features in the game that don't really come up. The Orc on the dinosaur, for example, can give benefits to other Orcs--which are not present in the basic set. Each unit has a "temperment," which as near as I can tell has no effect in the current rules. There could also stand to be a little more variety in the units, and again expansion sets would cure that. My guess is that, if this game really takes off, we can expect to see new kinds of terrain, optional rules, and a bunch of new units coming down the line. I just hope it avoids the dreaded "random booster pack" trick.

I hope to have a battle report sometime this weekend, what with the extra day off for US Labor Day. (About that: I fully support a labor day holiday in September rather than May, speaking as a guy whose busiest week of the year is right before Labor Day...)

MORE ON EBAY

As it turns out, the auction sniper who got me earlier did, in fact, save me money--although possibly not the way Russ intended in his comment...I just picked up the same item for $15 less in a subsequent auction!

Thanks, too, to Iain for the Auctionsniper link...it's an interesting idea, which I'll have to try for something.

NEW TO THE BLOGROLL

Everybody welcome that well-loved bokki saell ("good chap," kind of), Thothhrod, taking time off from a life of pillage and plunder to share his thoughts with the blogosphere. Thothhrod Hugframr (Thothhrod the Valiant of Heart) provides welcome commentary on all the aspects of life, nordic or not.

(I knew a semester of Old Norse would come in handy sometime. Those of you interested in learning ON, or in Viking/Norse studies generally, would be well-advised to join the Viking Society in England. They do good work, and their Old Norse textbooks cannot be beat.)