THANKS, GMT!

I got my replacement blocks from GMT to fill out my complement of Roman Medium Cavalry (Medium Roman Cavalry? Roman Cavalry Medium?). Glory be, there were also four little gray blocks along with them, so I also got to sticker up some spares for one last Roman Sling unit. It was a shame to have to ask for replacements, but I must say the service was prompt and excellent. Thanks again!

FOUND 'EM

They were on the floor. See, this is why I need to be tidier: I can never find anything.

GREAT. JUST GREAT

Somehow, I managed to lose three medium cavalary Carthaginian blocks for C&C:A. My guess is they got swept up in last night's Cleaning Frenzy that swept over the apartment. This is exactly why I'm not a tidy person; if you don't throw away anything, you'll never throw out something you really wanted to keep.

TRASIMENE

So, I played a solo game of C&C:A tonight, that Lake Trasimene scenario I mentioned earlier. Much like history, the Romans got pounded like a tenpenny nail--six flags to zip. Ten Carthaginian blocks were eliminated to thirty Roman blocks, plus Flamminius was forced to swim across the lake early in the battle as Hannibal's Gauls crashed into the Roman center.

First thoughts...

Easily the most complicated C&C-family game thus far. It could use another player aid card, with a summary of the turn (including the various special actions) and the terrain effects. Every unit's a little different, there are all kinds of special actions (advance after combat, evading, units retreat at different speeds, etc). We've come some distance from Battle Cry, folks. That said, I think I like it. There's a lot of color here, and I don't think the chrome is overwhelming (and, indeed, is what provides the color).

A little too early to compare to Ancients and DBA, except to not some of the obvious. C&C:A isn't as adaptable as Ancients, and is naturally more "historical" than the typical DBA throw-down. That said, it'd be interesting to see some "army lists" devised for some stylized battles. (Ancients had this as well, as I recall.) I'll have to see if I can somehow adapt a scenario from Ancients (or, more reasonably, SPQR) to C&C:A. Something with elephants...

MUST-READ

You may not think you're interested in a many-thousand-words story on the life and personality of Washington, DC's top preschooler-birthday-party entertainer, but trust me: you are. Don't start unless you're willing to go all five pages at a stretch. One of the finest pieces of journalism I've read in a very, very long time. It's both about an amazing person (and personality), a job I never really imagined existed, and the whole milieu that allows both to come together. And the story's crafted so well...wow. Great stuff.

(Found via Dave Barry's blog.)

SO CLOSE TO ACTUALLY PLAYING C&C: ANCIENTS I CAN TASTE IT

I set up the Lake Trasimine scenario just now. I must say, it's an impressive-looking product, at least to my eyes. The color is nice. I'm going to go over the rules--there look to be some new ones--and then go at it.

For dice, I attached the stickers to seven of my umpteen spare dice. I ran each side of each die against some sandpaper to roughen it up just a shade; I'm not sure if that was necessary but it made me feel as though I were doing something useful. Looks pretty good.

There are a lot of complaints out there about stickering, the board, the cards, the dice, and on and on. And here I am, just muddling through everything. I almost feel like I'm doing something wrong. I feel like there was a time, somewhere back in my earlier youth, where I would have gotten good 'n' mad, but those times have passed. (They may come again in my Curmudgeon Years.) I've gotten to where I just deal, where I see the good in games--at least in terms of components--and try to work out an accomodation with the not-so-great.

Sure. I mean, I'd love it if the board were mounted, the cards were "linen," the stickers-on-blocks were really professionally-painted white-metal figures, the game cost $5 $1, the dice were casino-quality with embossed symbols, the whole works were signed by Richard Borg, and so on. But that's not the case, so I play the game I have. I have the utmost faith that Bang/$ is going to be better for this game than many less-expensive, and many "better-produced," games I own.

TOO RELIEVED TO BE MAD

So, I was in the library, checking out a book for another project.

"Looks like a book came in for ya."
"Um...really?"
"Yeah, a day or two back."
"Seriously?"

To the joint questions "Why didn't the hold status page change?" and "Aren't I supposed to get an email when books come in?" apparently these sorts of things don't happen until the book has been "curing" on the hold shelf for a week or so. I mean, we don't want to rush this stuff.

Anybody want a never-opened copy of Archaeology of Mesopotamia when it comes in?

The various emotions--embarassment, anger (variously directed), relief, etc--have all just about cancelled out.

MORE ON THIS STUPID BOOK

Fretting over this book and looking for other options has been practically my whole day. (Other than doing some bread shopping.) Amazon says they finally shipped it, using "UPS Next-Day Air Saver," again with the Monday delivery time. I've gotta figure out if I can get a refund if it actually shows up on Monday like they say now, as opposed to what they said then. And if I still get the refund if I set the book on fire out of frustration.

Meanwhile, it appears that St. Louis Community College: Florissant Valley (where the computer inexplicably decided to get the book from) may finally be springing into action. I now have two possible chances that I'll have a book by close of business tomorrow. (I also put in a recall on the professor's checked-out copy. I do not count that as a possibility.) A third possibility remains: Driving to Columbia, MO, three or four hours from here, and buying an actual copy from an actual store. That'd be, with gas, almost a $90 book. I might just stick with a combination of "Search Inside" and reading reviews if it comes to that...

As Jorge says, clearly I didn't take the Prayer Rug letter seriously enough. Too late to change that. It's still sitting here; it "expired" four and a half hours ago.

UR AWESOME

"Want this book on Friday, January 27? Choose one-day shipping!

(Sigh) Gotta do what you gotta do. No word from any of my other sources. Get to checkout:

"Choose your shipping option....ONE-DAY SHIPPING: Get it tomorrow!"

Mere sixteen bucks for shipping. Cheaper than the two tanks of gas it'd take to drive to a store and get it, though, or even to a library that has it. I'll at least have the whole weekend to read/skim it before class on Monday.

Order confirmation email:

"DELIVERY ESTIMATE: Monday, January 30"

[reaction redacted in deference to our more sensitive readership]

LIFE OF A GRAD STUDENT

On Monday, I was assigned a book to read by this coming week's class, on the history and methods of archaeology in Mesopotamia. Problem: the library's copy was checked out to some professor. Solution: Have it sent from a nearby library. Problem: They've decided to sit in quiet medititation rather than actually locate and send my book.

So, now there are a few possibilities.

First, I'm checking to see if my professor is the one who actually checked the stupid thing out. Failing that, there is a copy in Columbia, MO, four hours away. I could, theoretically, drive up and get it, or (better yet) have it Express Mailed to me.

Or I could keep doing what I've been doing, which is read the book three pages at a time using/abusing Amazon's "Search Inside!" feature.

I suppose I should use this prayer rug I got in the mail today. I really did get one, printed on the finest newsprint and apparently "anointed." Some weird church in Tulsa sent it to me. I'm supposed to stare at the "rug"--which shows a picture of Jesus with his eyes closed--until the eyes open. I'm guessing this is some sort of optical illusion that I just don't "get." After that, I'm supposed to take the rug and touch each of my knees with it. Overnight, I'm supposed to tuck the prayer rug between two particular pages of the Bible, or else stick it under my mattress. Tomorrow, before noon (No later! "God sees all," the letter warns people thinking about waiting a day or two), I'm supposed to fill out this form and return it, with the rug, to Tulsa for, I dunno, processing. Along with the rug and the form (and a postage-paid return envelope), I got a couple of pages of testimonials. One guy got a car. Another guy got a house. One woman got a bunch of money. I kept waiting for them to tell me to make twenty copies and send them to twenty friends.

I'm guessing that this isn't one of the more successful proselytizing methods out there, but if it gives me a shot at finding this book I might just go for it.

C&C (NOT THE MUSIC FACTORY) UPDATE

(Gonna Make you Sticker? Nah. Doesn't scan.)

Anyway. GMT is going to have some more blocks headed my way tomorrow. I should have asked if they could toss in four more little grays, too. I had twelve little grays left over, so that's three more foot units; I have just enough spare stickers left to put together one last unit of light sling.

I must say I'm a fan of all the different units. M44 has this a little, but I think the shields are a bit on the clunky side. I'm curious to see how it works with the command cards--ones that restrict what kind of unit you can move, not just where you can move them from. Could be pretty cool. (The Worthington games have different units, too, which is a plus. I complained earlier that C&C:A doesn't have any two-map scenarios; Clash for a Continent and For Honor and Glory don't, either, but those games are at a vastly smaller scale, so I don't miss them.)

Tomorrow: See if I can find some blank dice. Something with a little more heft.

Another game I like I'm going to be comparing this one to: DBA. And you think putting stickers on blocks takes a while...And trust me--there's no way the rulebook for C&C:A has more ambiguities and "dead zones" than DBA 2.0.

C&C: ANCIENTS

Well, I was going to have a first battle up and running, but I'm short five of the cavalry blocks for the Romans. (I do have twelve extra small blocks, though.) I have email in to GMT; with any luck, this will be straightened out soon enough.

A few comments on comments I've seen...

I don't mind the blocks. I think they look kinda neat, actually. Nor do I mind putting the stickers on. Is it really more obnoxious than de-spruing (sp?) the original Battle Cry figurines? I did that twice, after all. Watch TV, put on stickers, it's a good system.

Nor do I mind the unmounted board. Again, this may be me as a longtime wargamer talking, but I have a few poster frames around for this very purpose. The cost...my suspicion is that, for the rest of our lives, there's going to be a competition between the "games should be cheaper" and "I'm not sure I like the idea of games being made in China" crowds. I'm on record for wishing games were cheaper, but I'm handling the situation as best I can.

I do find odd the decision to squeeze the center by a hex. I don't think that was explained in the rules. If any of the games in the series thus far needed the center-and-wings treatment, it's ancient warfare, but the center was typically where a lot of the action was (exceptions noted). (For other eras, I frankly prefer the command system in the Worthington games. I have half a mind to give it a shot for a Battle Cry game...)

What I do mind are the problems people (like me) have with not getting enough blocks and the spares/not spares problem with the stickers, where you can't just slap on stickers, assuming the sheets are right. I feel like I have a long post about errata welling up within me, but I have to go in a few minutes, so I'll pass for a while.

I don't mind the relative lack of scenarios so much--I suspect that "the market" will produce others soon enough, just like for BC and M44--but I do wish there were some two-map scenarios. C'mon--who wouldn't love to see Cannae in widescreen format? I mean, other than the Roman player. (The Worthington games kinda filled the space with their scenarios, although there are a few left to do. I should whip one up for one of the "missing" Am. Rev. battles.)

For me, what I'll be comparing this game to isn't the rest of the Command and Colors extended family of games, but the old 3W title Ancients. You could throw down almost any battle you could think of on an 8.5 x 11" piece of paper, with a few counters, in about half an hour most of the time. It's not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's fun, by jiminy, and it's like a toy. BC, M44, WfA, etc all evoked that spirit, but the comparison was inexact. Now it's easier.

Now I gotta find a scenario that doesn't have much Roman cavalry and try it out...

ON THE NIGHTSTAND

It's been eons since I had one of these.

Virtually all my reading these days is for school--reading for class, or, more often, for the thesis (happily, they often coincide). I'm very fortunate in that I love what I'm studying--military logistics. I'm weird. Right now, the logistics books I'm reading are what I call "general case" logistics studies--logistics through history, how to study it, and so on. I'm not sure I'd recommend any in particular to the general reader, but I might do so with Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton. (I'm sick of doing up the links to Amazon/Powells. It takes for-freaking-ever.) It's probably one of the first modern, reasonably in-depth treatments of military logistics. The problem is that it misses a lot; that's a bunch of history to cover in 230 pages of text. There's no American Civil War, for example--none of the wars of the New World at all, in fact; it's all cases from European conflicts. Granted, those are of significant interest, but I think that's unduly limited. (I wouldn't call a book on the logistics N. American wars a general study, so I'm not sure why this book often is.) This weakness inspired another book, Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western Warfare from the Middle Ages to the Present, which stretches the study both temporally and spatially. It's a series of essays, which is its own weakness; there's not a lot to bring these together historiographically.

OK! Enough of that. Everyone else can start reading again.

The main non-school book I've discovered lately has been Pyongyang, a graphic...tavel narrative, I guess it'd be called. It's by Guy Delisle, an animator sent to Pyongyang (duh) to supervise work on a cartoon for French TV. Fun Fact: Many French TV cartoons are farmed out to North Korean studios. You learn all sorts of stuff here--I knew most of the North Korea tidbits already, but it's good to get a window into the world of commercial animation.

Delisle ("Mr. Guy" to his government-provided translator and minder) managed to smuggle in western music, a radio, and a copy of 1984 (which he lent out to his guide at one point). Orwell is one of the recurring themes--along with music (western and DPRK), "volunteering," and--of all things--turtles.

I guess what I like about it is that it has a measure of wit to it. Delisle is aware of both the absurdity and gravity of the North Korean atmosphere, and both come across. So many graphic novels (or whatever) these days aren't fun, and this is fun, at least in many parts. I can appreciate Frank Miller, but I can't enjoy Frank Miller. So much out there is grim, and dark, and violent--a reaction, true, against Disney and the other real and perceived enemies of Real Comic Art, but good Lord almighty. I want books to be friends most of the time, not dour and depressing.

Anyway. Pyongyang gets my highest recommendation. EDIT: I should mention, though, that like many things in life it's not for everyone. It has its share of bad words, and one difficult-to-discern-but-still-visible naughty frame. Probably PG-13, when it's all said and done.

FORGOT ABOUT ONE

A while back, in the "Musings On..." about chance in games, I mentioned that I'd like to see a game where the player represented just one level of command, and everything above and below was largely or entirely out of the player's control. I thought such a game would be kinda neat--not many people agreed with me, though--but that such a game was unlikely to exist.

What I forgot, though, was that such a game does exist. Furthermore, I have it--and, yes, I do like it. It's not for everyone, though, by which I mean that in certain gamers--I'm talking to you, Jorge, and other "serious eurogamers"--it could easily cause nausea, shortness of breath, convulsions, and in rare cases green splotches around the neck and shoulder area. Why?

Friends, this is just one of the four technology development flowcharts one uses in Race for Space. True, it is the most complicated. The Level One display only has eight nodes. Along with the four flowcharts, there are thirteen tables where you roll either a 1D10, 2D10, or 1D100, depending. Then there's the two-sided Record Sheet where, among other things, you track each of your 42 (for NASA) various mission systems (launch vehicles, payloads, guidance systems, etc etc etc etc), each of which has three or four associated costs--never mind that most have prerequisites.

I'm not sure what defines an "American-Style Game," but I think if a game has four flowcharts and a multilayered technology tree, it counts.

I thought about this game reading (and commenting on) Brian Morris's Geek of the Week tenure. He mentioned that he'd like to see a "wargame" (sometimes we prefer "historical simulation;" it's kinda like the "German Game" vs. "Designer Game" debate) on the space race. I suggested this one.

My mom was one of the programmers designing, coding, and operating the flight simulators for the Gemini program, so interest in the space race (particularly the relatively early manned missions) was probably predestined. (She has many stories about the astronauts, which probably won't do to be divulged here. Nothing naughty, rest assured--just how the uniquely-formed egos and personalities of the astronauts meant that they had particular itches that needed to be scratched when it came to designing the capsule's interface and training them in its use.)

In RfS, you play the director level of the national space program of either the US or USSR. At the beginning of every turn, you roll 2D10 to determine a random event--some political, economic, or geopolitical issue that effects you in some way. Then you roll for income--which, yet again, you have a very limited role in shaping. You get more moeny if you have more prestige--which means successful launches and being "first" with this, that, or the other. It leads to (all too realistic, sometimes) thoughts like "I really need to have something big on the rèsumé to impress Congress/the Politburo...this isn't a great rocket, but it'll probably get Shepard/Gagarin up there."

After the "forces above" determine your income, you have to pay the "science teams" (contractors like McDonnell-Douglas, etc) you have working on your projects. Then you get to decide whether to hire more teams, where to allocate them (the more you put on a project, the more likely it is to progress in a good direction on the flowchart), whether to start a new project, and so on.

Once you do that, things go out of your hands for a little while again. Now, the scientists and engineers you've just assigned try to do their part. That's when you roll on the flowchart, to see how the project is going. I'm playing a game right now--a solo game, as the US. It's 1955, and we've got the Redstone rocket all designed-up, we have a half-decent guidance system, but the first satellite--the Vanguard--is in development hell, stuck in an eddy. I've thrown all kinds of resources at it but it's not going anywhere. Do I kill it and start over, or what? It's highly frustrating, and listening to my parents (my dad's a mechanical engineer) talk about the ways engineering projects go, it's quite evocative.

After you've rolled for everything under development, you can take your developed systems out to the test site. Once something's "developed" on the flowchart, it has between a 45 and 60% success rate. In my game, I've been working on perfecting the Redstone (which will, hopefully, toss up a few scientific satellites for me and then a Mercury capsule). It breezed through development, got to 60%, and I've been launching it in subsequent turns on test flights to improve it. To test fly a rocket (or anything else, for that matter), you roll 1D100 and if it's lower than or equal to its reliability, it goes up by 5% until it hits 95%, and 1% thereafter to 99%. Again: What the rocket does is up to the rocket. The head of NASA can't do anything about it one way or another except order tests and hope it works.

Basically, in this game you set goals and priorities, buy and assign resources, and hope for the best. You hope that the higher-ups give you enough money and otherwise leave you alone, and that the lower-downs have good luck and work effectively. Essentially you play a government bureaucrat.

And I love it.

It tells a story I'm interested in, puts me squarely in a plausible spot, and gives me plenty of decisions to make, but also a lot of tension, frustration, and unexpected glimpses of joy when something works better than I expected.

The campaign game--ninety turns or so--would take...a really long time. The graphics are primitive. (It's a desktop-published effort that's long out of print. I think it'd be a good candidate for Wargame Downloads, personally. Not many counters, not many rules.) Player interaction, in the two-player game, is virtually nil. (Although the two players do pressure each other indirectly, as in real life.) Again: Umpteen charts. Rob Markham's printer at the time was...not so great, so many of the counters are hard to read.

I forgive it everything, though, since it tells a story I'm interested in, and tells it pretty well.

That's what I look for when it comes to historical simulations. Dug at Gathering of Engineers wrote about wargames from a perspective I never dreamed of. He--and others, judging by the comments--see wargames as optimization exercises. Now, I come from a pretty math-science background, I've done my share of mathy stuff in my day (I have fond memories of convincing an Apple II to draw the Mandelbrot set--using LOGO; you could zoom in and everything) (although I have to work at keeping my skills, and I'm prone to occasional brain lapses, which is why I never considered majoring in math in college), and I swear looking at games like that never occurred to me. Heck, I never dreamed that anyone looked at them that way until I read that post.

Such gamers would be driven absolutely up the wall by this game, I think. You can do everything "right" and still have it fall down around you, far more often than in other historical simulations. There's just so much uncertainty. For the rest of us, though, this may be a game of some interest. It's not my very favoritest game ever, or anything like that, but playing it again the last couple of days has reminded me that I need to do it a little more often.

MYSTERY HUNT

Puzzlers (of a reasonably advanced type) are warmly encouraged to check out the 2006 MIT Mystery Hunt. Game-puzzlers are especially encouraged to check out this one from "Moscow."

(And, no, I don't know the answer.)

I AM THE WORST PoF PLAYER OF ALL TIME

Once again, George and Terttu Hummasti were gracious enough to invite the Susan and Gary Marker and I over to their lovely home for an evening of games. We were only able to get two in, but it was interesting times.

First up was Expedition. I have the English version, the Markers have the German version, and the Hummastis (Hummastit?) have Wildlife Adventure. It's a good system. Anyway, with five players long-range planning is somewhere between difficult and impossible. The expeditions have a way of wandering away from you. Most of my strategy consisted of trying to influence other players' moves via telekinisis. My powers waned at precisely the wrong moment--if Terttu had played a yellow instead of a blue arrow, I'd have won by a point. But nooooooo. She had to play in such a way that she would win. There were some cool moves, and it was fun, but with so many players it's a strange combination of having a lot to keep track of, and not much control over your fate, long-term. I think it might be better with fewer players. It reminds me of Alhambra in that sense.

Next: Princes of Florence. I've played only once before, and I came into the game armed only with the knowledge gleaned from a game nine months ago and a half-remembered reading of Fawkes' strategy guide. Now, before I go on, I'd like to emphasize that reading that guide did not contribute to my horrific downfall. Indeed, by any reasonable standard I should have had a darn'd good game--hence the title of this post. To wit: The first auction, I got a Jester for $400. I, in fact, ended up with four jesters (which may have been excessive, true), and never paid more than $800 for any one of them. I finished dead. Freaking. Last. A good nine points behind second-to-last. I think I might have cracked forty points. Maybe. With fourteen points of prestige cards. I brought nothing but shame and disgrace upon my Jester-playing brethren. I'm, like, the Anti-Scott. If he saw me play, he would be reduced to weeping at seeing such a fine game dragged through the mud.

I'm fairly certain what I did wrong, though--i.e., almost every other aspect of my game--so I can work on that.

Good times, as always. My greatest successes of the evening were my cookies: Chocolate chip and my über-rich chocolate truffles. My theory is that if you lose a lot and bring good snacks, you get invited to more games.

(In other gaming realms, I do not have my mojo working in this Spielbyweb game of Adel Verpflichtet (using the sixth-player variant available in the US under another name). Starting the game essentially a turn behind: Always a good thing. I gotta play a solo game of something tomorrow just to get my winning percentage up.)

PARTAY

So, the original "occupant" of the apartment across the hall (who only lived there five days out of every month) finally moved away, and in her place these two loud! girls moved in. The volume of this evening's soirée was (to paraphrase Nigel Tufnel) recently turned down from 14 to 11. The bass is sufficiently high that it's usually hard to tell what's actually playing, but I just stepped into the hallway: right now, they and some dear friends are gettin' down to some Sk8r Boi from Avril Lavigne, which is just about the lamest thing I can imagine.

That said, if this continues I'm getting some bagpipes off eBay and playing some of these Skinny Puppy arrangements I found. "I have bagpipes, and I'm not afraid to use them" is a sentence I've long dreamed of uttering.

ON THE NIGHT SHIFT

This semester, Wednesday nights mean just one thing: Sitting around the library, waiting for questions that never come. Yep: If any of y'all have reference questions and are in the Springfield area, Alfred is here to help. I've got the Commodores going through my head, I'm ready to roll.

For whatever reason, I find it hard to read "for real" when I'm working here. It's just not a comfortable reading position. Easier to type pointlessly, flip through magazines idly, or surf the internet aimlessly. So I'm doing that.

I'm looking into Ys. Looks kinda interesting. What I noticed on the BGG page, under the "relationships" section, is that to the statement "Ys: Bag of Gems Expansion is an expansion for Ys" one person said he (or she) had no opinion. Who goes through and answers "No Opinion" for these things rather than leave them blank? It's like having a choice on ballots that says "I dunno; I wasn't really paying attention." (NOTE: The following joke is too easy, and should be avoided: "Isn't that the same as voting for ______?" Quite.)

I've wanted Um Reifenbreite for a while now, and Boards and Bits had a copy in their Ding 'n' Dent page. Got it today; the dent was almost unnoticable. I also got The Flit for Blue Moon, which rounds out the collection (except for some promo cards I'm told exist, but whatever). Finally, I got the Fishermen of Catan Spielbox issue. What a neat magazine! Lots of reviews, articles, interviews, colorful ads...and there are wargame and kids' game reviews, too, which are nice to see. The best part of the review--if you ask me--is at the end, where they have several people give numerical ratings. I like knowing that four separate people gave Tooor! a seven, that ratings for Palazzo were all over the place, and while two people built small shrines to Die Dolmengoetter one guy clearly was not impressed. It's kinda like the ratings at the end of Greg Schloesser's game report reviews.

What I found odd about the magazine is that nowhere on the cover was there an indication that an expansion for Settlers--the most popular game in Germany, as we're often reminded--was inside. Wouldn't you lead with that?

Other things discovered: Somebody came out with wine that has a special Alhambra label--reproduces the front of the box. Also, I need to get out to Chemnitz to see this game museum they've got out there.

What else did I find around the interent...

Oo! The English version of Pingvinas has come out! Can I pass up the first "major" Lithuanian-designed board game? I don't think I can. I can't imagine how Lithuania-minded I'd be if I actually, you know, made it out to Panevezys to teach English as I intended coming out of college. (Now that's a long story.)

I love GeekMod for moderating images on the 'Geek. Here's hoping they open up the system to game moderation. (I'm boldly assuming that that's even possible. Who knows?) I've gotten 56 Geek Cents so far. Not exactly sure what I'm going to do with them, but getting to give a thumbs-up or -down on the work of others gives me a sense of power rare to graduate students.

Oh yes: And my third attempt at pecan pie worked much better. I think I'm really starting to dial this one in.

Finally, also in Food News, you can now buy bags of Gardetto's that have just the rye chips. Apologies if you're not familiar with these warped disks of crunchy goodness. This is kind of a big event in my life, which may say more about my life than it does the rye chips, I dunno.

COMMENTS FEED

Bloglines users (like this Bloglines user) might not be getting comments. I'm not 100% certain I feel like wading through the Bloglines helpdesk. In the meantime, I set up a Feedburner feed that seems to work.

ATTENTION!

Mikko mentioned this over at Best of Board Games, but it bears repeating: Check out Mike Doyle's blog. I love the Settlers recast, the monumentally in-depth reviews, and that he's redoing the art design for Modern Art so it looks more contemporary, rather than modernist. Might I suggest a meeple encased in a tank of formaldeyhde?

(More on Damien Hirst here. Some of it's gross. I'm talking about the pig, yes.)

SIGN OF THE TIMES

This is...vaguely troubling. What was wrong with using a Spin-4-It, I ask?

S-O-M

Found via Baseball Musings comes this NYT article about Strat-O-Matic Baseball, the World Championships (!) of which are taking place in Las Vegas.

I loved that game (and its Football counterpart) growing up. I'd play it solo or with my dad, and he got all the teams from all the World Series that involved the Cardinals. Still got it, but (to my shame) haven't played it in years.

What's saved S-O-M over the years? There have been plenty of other baseball board, card, and miniatures games since the sixties. I think S-O-M does a good job of combining realism (producing plausible outcomes, giving each player a reasonable possibility matrix) with playability. Most of the easier games don't look real, and many of the more realistic games are virtually unplayable in a sitting. My other favorite baseball game of recent year--Sportsclix--suffered from not having every player and making it difficult to get every player anyway, what with the rarity aspect. You couldn't pit a whole Astros lineup against a whole Cardinals lineup, which is a breaker for a lot of baseball fans looking for a game. (Substituting their favorite teams, of course.) With S-O-M, you buy whole years at a time.

Back to the article, I was intrigued by how the statistics on the cards have a subjective element--I always assumed they were just computed from the real stats. I also salute their refusal to give Jeter a defensive A+.

I'll have to get some new cards--if only to keep the Cardinals World Series collection up-to-date.

COMPETITION AND EXCLUSIVES

Chris Brooks defends the notion of providing Funagain with exclusive product, mostly via attacking Boulder Games's complaints about it, which are as follows:

Note: If you believe competition is good and going into cahoots with a producer to get an exclusive to thwart competition and fix the price is bad, then buy this game instead of Carcassonne: the Discovery. You not only strike a blow for all game consumers, you save yourself a good bit of money.

Chris points out that, since what he, Rio Grande, and Funagain are doing is trying to compete with the competition, when what they're doing is not "thwarting competition," inasmuch as the abstract concept of "competition" is not being denied. I'd like to deal with this subject briefly. Basically we're talking about, in some sense, a couple different kinds of competition here.

First of all, I'd like to point out that the sun rises in the east, big things are larger than small things, and if you can gain a monopoly on a product or service then that's good for your business. Doing so will, in fact, help you compete. It also helps if you can sell all your product at once.

That said, the point of getting a monopoly is that you can avoid having to price competitively against your competition. That's the whole point, that there's no competition driving the price down. Monopolies do, in fact, still incur risk even though they don't have competitors for selling their product. I wasn't aware anyone was saying that Funagain wasn't necessarily taking on risk by selling Havoc or Carc: Discovery or...for that matter, any other game they carry.

Chris Brooks asks: "What if we had chosen to only sell the product direct (as Columbia Games did for a while)? Is that anti-competitive?" Yep, at least in the pricing sense. At least from my standpoint. And we'll note what's happened to the price of Columbia games on the marketplace. They all sold for retail (unless you preordered) while they held the retail monopoly, and now that they sell through "normal" channels again you can buy them at discount from various places again. Obviously Columbia was "trying to compete" in the marketplace by preventing price competition.

I would have vastly preferred, as a consumer, to have had Havoc in the normal retail channels, since I could have bought my copy cheaper and from a closer retailer. I still haven't bought C:tD since, to get it from Funagain, it'd cost more than I want to pay to ship it. I believe that, from the consumer's standpoint, the lack of price competition that arose from the exclusive agreement is a bad thing.

Now, I should note that I see a difference between the "Havoc Case" and the "C:tD Case." C:tD makes me itch. Havoc only causes me mild discomfort. (Put that on the back of the box for the next printing.) A new company, with a new game, from a new designer has significant challenges that an established company--the largest in its niche, with an established designer producing a product in one of the most profitable franchises in the hobby--doesn't have. I'm not entirely sure what it takes to have Alliance or Esdevium or the other big distributors carry one's product, but it presumably takes more than showing up at the warehouse door with your truck. I can't really fault a new company taking the immediate money and drastically reducing their risk, but I'm not sure what Rio Grande was doing. I can't imagine that this is selling more product for them, while I do imagine that Sunriver is coming out at least slightly ahead (although I have intuitive doubts about the "2x" increase in sales by going through Funagain, granting that it's hard to prove this sort of thing).

I'll also note that if this exclusive was with Boards & Bits, Fairplay, or any other online retailer that had lower prices than Funagain, there wouldn't be nearly as much complaining, but that doesn't mean it would be any less inimical to retail competition. EDIT 1/17: It'd be more popular among the "gaming chattering classes" (as I put it in the comments) at B&B, TimeWellSpent, and the others not because the price of the "exclusive" would necessarily be lower--I doubt it would--but because it'd be easier to "toss in" the exclusive game with another order, as their other games tend to be somewhat less expensive.

Executive summary: I agree with Chris Brooks that the exlcusive deals Funagain has are not "contrary to competition" in the sense that, indeed, gaining a monopoly helps you compete. I would just say that they are contrary to the sort of competition that Boulder Jim is talking about, the retail price competition that makes prices lower for the consumer.

Semantic arguments: Always the best kind.

I put in a bit of clarification to a point a couple of paragraphs up. I've also noticed that Bloglines has a problem with the comments feed for MR&TLU, which is annoying. There have been at least eight (five on this post, as of this writing) since it stopped working. I'll have to poke around on this one.

IF YOU WANT TO TRY IT AT HOME...

The recipe I used for my "pie" the other day is this one. HINT: If you over-bake it, it turns into a round, tasty, chewy, nutty, dentist-enriching candy bar. If you go that route, don't bother refrigerating it, or if you do, have it warm up for an hour or two before trying to hack into it.

So, as hinted above, after another day of "curing," it became less pie-like but no less tasty. I clearly did something wrong, but eating the mistake is paying off this time. I'm going to have to go back to the drawing board. My sense is that there are three potential weak points here:

1. The Recipe. (Or, as we say (less and less) in the south, the "receipt.") I don't really doubt this one; it "looks" like something should result from it that could be called "pie," and it's not excessively complicated and it doesn't have anything too weird in it.
2. Technique and skill. I'm willing to believe that I'm not yet ready for my Food Network premiere, to be sure. That said, I'm pretty OK with desserts as long as they don't involve a preparation surface larger than my kitchen. I've made all kinds of stuff. There may be something specific to pies, or pecan pies, that I'm missing, though.
3. Equipment. This is a fairly cheap apartment designed for students and other semi-transient occupants. This isn't the top-of-the-line here, and I've had the oven act unpredictably before. I'm planning on monitoring its temperature--got an oven thermometer and everything. I hate blaming the tools, though--as a great philosopher once said, "How human it is to blame on one's boots the faults of one's feet."

So, yeah, more experimentation is necessary. Upside: I get pie. Downside: Weight gain. Gotta go back to eating veggie more often and doing umpteen stomach crunches every morning...

EXPERIMENTATION

Pecan pie is one of my very favorite desserts. It's a staple of southern cooking in the US, and variations are found wherever pecans are to be had. Still, however much I like them, most pecan pies I've had have lacked a certain oomph. I blame the light Karo syrup that most recipes use; it's just too bland. I've been working on using darker syrups, and the results have been...spotty.

Today, I made one with sorghum, a common sweetener here in the Ozarks. It tastes kind of like a cross between honey and molasses. It's really thick and I think it dissolves dental enamel on contact, it's so sweet. It's also bold, like good molasses. Anyway, I made up the pie, popped it in the oven, and came back to check on it. Still pretty soupy, so I left it in there for few more minutes. When I came back...

Awwwww, maaaannnn.

Black as night. Firm, though! I took it out of the oven, put it on the cooling rack, and waited to perform the postmortem. Hours later I cut out a test piece to see what was left.

It looked burned. It smelled burned. It tasted like nothing I've ever had before, and I mean in a good way. It's just the strangest thing. I'll never get anybody else to eat it, though.

"Want some pie?"
"What kind--ahh, I'll pass."
"No, seriously, it's good."
"It's charred!
"It's not char. It's...carmelization."
"It's burned."
"It's the best part. Eat the crust--it's covered with crystallized sorghum."
"Is that supposed to be good?"

And so on. I guess it's left to me. Each slice, by my taste test, contains enough calories to power a small town for a day. Might have to start walking to school...

BEST OF BOARD GAMES

The feedburner feed has, on Bloglines, been working fairly reliably. This makes it very, very different from the other feeds. Now that I've mentioned it, though, it'll doubtless stop working.

BLUE MOON BOARDGAME

I'm intrigued by the notion of a Blue Moon boardgame. I'm a big fan of the card game--one expansion left to get!--so this one'll find its way on the shortlist once it gets published. I'm curious to see how this game is themed. I don't think that the Blue Moon card game really has much "theme," per se--each deck is different, the various races feel very unique, but...does anyone really feel like they're doing...whatever it is they're supposed to be accomplishing? I don't. I still like it, but it feels very abstract to me.

I have to admit that my Spidey-Sense for Bad Novels on the Horizon is beeping pretty loud about a possible novelization. Has anyone out there read the Settlers novel(s)? Were they any good at all?

MEMO

TO: My Secret Santa
FROM: Alfred
RE: Swag

You're awesome! I wish I'd thought to giftwrap the game that I sent out.

And I have to point out that it's cool that I, a Civil War scholar-in-training, had a Secret Santa in Richmond.

Thanks again,

Alfred

PS: Thanks again to you, too, Tom.

IT'S A MEME!

I'm generally not a huge fan of internet "virus" blog posts, but the "Thirty Questions" one for gamers is not without interest. It's not really a classic blog meme--there isn't the obligatory "tagging" other bloggers, for one thing--which helps, I suppose.

It started over on Habergamer and has since been seen on AKA Pastor Guy and The Game Shelf. Basically, it pulls back the curtain a little bit about the blogger in question. I had a little "intro" piece a while back, but this should provide other data for those interested. With any luck, I won't contradict myself (I'm not going back to look, thus raising the degree of difficulty).

1. How long have you been gaming? As long as I can remember. In fact, I've been solo gaming for as long as I can remember. Even played Candyland solo. Games were always a way I could escape into a little world, kind of like reading. I guess I like escaping, considering all the books and games I've managed to accumulate over the years.
2. What was your first Euro game? Just like Mark and Doctor J, it's Scotland Yard--although I had no idea what "Euro" meant when my parents got that one for me. Can't play that one solo, of course, so my parents actually had to participate. My dad was always more enthusiastic about playing games than my mom. We didn't play it terribly often, but it's been one of my favorites ever since I first tried it.
3. Which game sucked you in? For wargames, it's Flight Leader. Got that one when I was nine. The first complicated wargame I was obsessed with solo. I had played other wargames--well, wargame-like substances such as Naval War, my Kool-Aid stained copy of which remains one of my treasured gaming mementos--but this was something else. I "sanded off" some of the rules for most of my early playings, but I loved all the scenarios, all the different planes, and making up my early, idiotic scenarios like "How many Mig-15s does it take to bring down an F-15?" Huge fun. Haven't pulled it down in years. What I also loved was the mapboard--it was an absurdly detailed groundplan of some western European landscape. Most air war games just slap up a blue sky map, which if you think about it doesn't make any sense since you're looking at the dogfight from the top down, not from bottom up. Anyway. For euros, what turned on the light was playing Settlers, way back in, I dunno, 1996 or something. I think I played it in Austin at...gosh, what was his name...he was mostly a wargamer but he had my friend Tim and I over to his house to play games, and the only one I remember now is Settlers. Played the tar out of that game for the next several months. Settlers will never get a truly bad word out of me; I just can't be objective about it. Euros, ever since, have been one of my major social outlets, while wargames remain an outlet for my imagination.
4. What is your favorite game? Yikes! Tough question. Let's assume that I have as much time as I want and can pick whatever group I want. In that case, it's probably Taj Mahal. Back in reality, it's a bunch of different games for all kinds of scenarios. Amun-Re, or Go, or Lost Cities, or Zertz...This can be easily over-thought.
5. What is your least favorite game? Ritter ohne Furcht und Tadel. Oh it's bad. That's the only one of the "classic bad games" I've ever actually played (and then only partially, I think). Now, I should mention, in this context, Three Wizards--a bitterly obscure little dice game that isn't in the Geek and, so far as I can tell, has no internet presence other than what I'm creating right now. This game was salvaged by Adam and I going into grandiose histrionics while playing it, which is why RoFuA is worse (that game just made Jeff and I sad and frustrated). Three Wizards is, for lack of a better description, LCR with theme. As I recall, you roll these dice, and hope that you get all three Wizard-side-up. If so, Huzzah! If not, Boo! Rinse, repeat. Truly a glorious product. Now: How about the game "everyone" seems to like except me? Gotta be Ticket to Ride, he says, as he sets fire to whatever tiny chance he ever had of snagging a Gathering invite. (But I love Union Pacific! Really!)
6. Open or closed holdings? Generally open. Closed, among experienced gamers, basically means developing mnemonic devices. For instance, I've gotten pretty good at keeping track of everyone's water hole collections in Through the Desert, which means that in hidden-info games against players who don't keep track, I have an advantage. Of course, I can always choose to not bother to count, but I try to always put in my utmost except when it's really late. So, I say play with rules that do not privilege memory skills. Except, for, like, Memory.
7. To gamble or not to gamble? I have, in my life, gambled exactly once. I bought a lottery ticket, and won my dollar back. I declared victory. I pour perfectly good money down the drain in gaming situations all the time, but at least I get to have the box on my shelf. I'm sufficiently poor at poker to not even want to try playing "for real."
8. How much luck do you like in your games? I've found that the amount of luck in a game rarely influences how much I like it. Sometimes the type of luck, or how it is applied, bothers me--such as if a wargame makes something luck-based that I think shouldn't be--but not the amount, per se. I have three "10" games on the 'Geek: Go has no chance element, Amun-Re has some, and Up Front has a whole bunch. I love 'em all, since they feel so right to me.
9. Last three games played? Do we count online? If we do, it's Amun-Re, Taj Mahal, and Alhambra. If not, leave just Taj Mahal and add Tsuro and Poison. I'm a big fan of all five.
10. Last three games purchased? Here Come the Rebels!...gosh, what came before that; it's been a little while...and then probably Wooly Bully and High Stakes Drifter. Kind of eclectic there...
11. Packrat or trader? A little of both, but doubtless I come down on the "pack rat" end more than "trader." I used to trade a whole lot; my eBay handle is "Madtrader" from that era. Then I stopped when I stopped being active on Consimworld, and have only done a few on BGG and elsewhere.
12. What game are you thinking about right now? I've been thinking about Go lately. I've read The Treasure Chest Enigma about four times since I got it, which is the major impetus. I need to find someone in Springfield to teach Go to; it's something I enjoy. Other than that, I've been thinking about Roads to Gettysburg and Sam Grant--two wargames I have my eyes on acquiring, but not just yet.
13. What's your favorite mechanic? Tile placement.
14. What is your favorite Theme? For wargames, I'm a sucker (especially these days) for operational-level Civil War games. I'm far more interested in campaigns than I am battles. For Euros, I like games where you build something, and at the end of the game you can stand back and look at it. That's what I really like about Carcassonne, train games, Big City, and stuff like that.
15. Who is your favorite Designer? Hmm...for Euros, I gotta go with Knizia, with Martin Wallace (no relation) (I don't think) a close second. And Kramer a very close third. For wargames, I'm predisposed to like anything by Eric Lee Smith and Perry Moore. Perry Moore just picks the oddest things, sometimes, to make games about--which I always appreciate. Eric Smith made my first favorite Civil War game, among other things.
16. Best Gaming experience? I feel like there's not one that stands out--I've had so many great times playing games. Favorite memories include playing Tally Ho with Adam; Zertz with Jeff; my runaway Stephensons Rocket win with Adam, Marty, and Russ; go with the umpteen helpful players vastly better than I at Austin Go Club who gave useful advice; and on and on. I just noticed that I used "with" instead of "against" as the preposition there. I left lots of people and great times out, which is not intentional.
17. Worst Gaming experience? The one I'm the least proud of is when I got really, really mad--for a reason I can't recall now--during a game of some idiot card game like Five Crowns or something. Oh! I was @#$(*ed. Not a good moment. I haven't lost my cool too many times playing games, and I'm always ashamed later. Of gaming experiences where I didn't necessarily embarass myself, but just out-and-out sucked...Yeah, I'm takin' the fifth on this one. Not everybody needs to know what this was, sorry. It's not scandalous, just not a cool story.
18. Favorite game for 2? Of the classics: Go. Of Euros: I'm stickin' with Lost Cities. I think this is the strongest number for games.
19. For 3? This is not such a strong number. I'll go with Alhambra, but I feel like I'm forgetting something.
20. For 5? Amun Re, then depending on the situation either Taj Mahal or Santiago.
21. For 6? Hmm...Union Pacific or Liar's Dice.
22. Favorite party game? Beyond Balderdash. If a game is improved by not keeping score, it's a great party game.
23. Do you value Theme or Mechanics more? For Euros, definitely mechanics. For wargames, they have to fit together. The quality of a wargame is a Cobb-Douglas function, I say, with "theme" as "capital" and "mechanics" as "labor." (Or vice-versa. I'm not sure one way is more pregnant with meaning than the other.)
24. What color do you want to be? I go for black, then red, then blue. I'm not sure there's a reason.
25. What is your favorite movie? Groundhog Day. Yep, I'm one of "them," the legion of quasi-cultists about GD. I'm no more going to defend this choice than I would defend Light against Darkness; it is self-evident except to the Doomed.
26. What is your favorite book? Now that's a good question. This is another area of life where I have things graded within categories, and I have a hard time comparing across them. Then there's the matter of whether my "favorite" books are the same as "the books that have been most important to me." The latter are, in no particular order, Siddhartha, Surprised by Joy, Seven Storey Mountain, and Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries, one of which is substantially unlike the others. Maybe that list gives out more information about me than I usually prefer to divulge on this blog, I dunno. For "favorites," I absolutely inhaled The Lord of the Rings (and various critical approaches to it, of which I especially recommend Tom Shippey's books Road to Middle-Earth and Author of the Century), Master and Margarita, Petrarch's sonnets, The Brothers Karamazov, and Gary Gallagher's The Confederate War. (Again, pick the outlier.)
27. Last 3 books read? The Treasure Chest Enigma, Confederate Industry, and Understanding _The Lord of the Rings_. I recommend all but the middle one. Well, OK, that one's good too--hard to get that information and analysis anywhere else--but it's kind of oddly arranged.
28. Last 3 movies watched? Yikes. Let's go with (in reverse order) The Blues Brothers (DVD), Kung Fu Hustle (theater), and Russian Ark (DVD). I liked 'em.
29. Favorite alcoholic beverage (or non-alcoholic if you don’t drink)? I don't drink, but it's the same sort of way I don't fish. I just...don't. At least not very often at all. I think I had a beer two summers ago. It was OK, I guess. I wouldn't have gotten it myself, but there I was, sitting around, and my hostess plopped an open beer (a Heineken? some green-bottled stuff) in front of me, and so hey: Beer. I usually say that "I don't really drink" rather than "I don't drink." Anyway, back to my favorite beverage. By total yearly consumption, it's gotta be milk. By what I'd love to be drinking right now, it's gotta be ginger beer. (A nice, serious strong one.) By what I wish I could get in Springfield that I could easily get in St. Louis, it's gotta be either doogh or kefir (aka "milk with oomph").
30. Who are the three most important people in your life? My parents, certainly, and then--at least for the next eighteen months--my thesis advisor! Although I could probably say something trite but true-ish like "whoever I'm with at the moment."

That was pretty fun, actually...

QUICK SPORTS NOTE

Prediction: In 2006, "Vincent" will make a resurgence as one of the most popular names for baby boys in the state of Texas.

This will be richly deserved.

Heck, it might be a popular name for baby girls.

(coughs) Now, I don't sing often, but...

The eyes of Texas are up-onnnnn you,
Allll the live-long day,
The eyes of Texas are upon you,
You can-not-get-a-wayyy!
Do-o-o not think you can escape them,
At night, or early in the morn,
The eyes of Texas are upon you,
Till Gab-ri-el blows his horn!

Thank you! I'll be here all week.

BOBG

Is it just me, or is anybody else not getting RSS feeds from Best of Board Games? I've found that, for reasons that totally escape me, the RDF feed works much better.

UPDATE: Seems like this is more of a bloglines problem than a feed problem. The RSS feed should work nicely for the rest of humanity, and for us Bloglines types once...whatever it is gets straightened out. Meantime, I'm sticking with that RDF feed.

GOING TO THE LIBRARY

I spent most of today in Springfield--Illinois, this time, doing thesis research at the Abraham Lincoln Library. Archive research can be frustrating. I can tell from the catalog what the archive has from people in the various regiments I'm looking for, but obviously they don't go into too much detail about exactly what they contain, so you gotta look. One diary, for example, had entries for just about every day from 1862-1864...except for the month where the campaign I'm studying took place which was missing. Awesome. I'm studying supply and logistics, and I found an entire quarter's reports on supplying one particular company in one of "my" regiments. Score!--except that it's for a quarter long before any of "my> campaigns, when they were still in camp. Interesting, but not for this thesis. (For my dissertation, maybe. It's an amazing amount of paperwork.) The most promising source turned out to be a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than I expected, so that'll have to wait for another day (or three).

Since my day ended a little early, I went through the Lincoln Museum next door. It was very popular; there was one school group of what looked like first graders going through, which I'm sure made sense to all of them.

It didn't really have much new information for me, but it was neat just being in the presence of all of this stuff. It was full of life-size mannequins, which get lots of praise for being so lifelike, but personally I was getting the heebie-jeebies from the uncanny valley. I think I feel that phenomenon a little more strongly than most people. (I wonder if that's why, for movies, I tend to like only comedies or very idiosyncratic, stylized dramas? As actors approach being "real," I get increasingly turned off? Who knows.)

Definitely worth a visit for any Lincoln/American history fan (the two should, in my opinion, be cognate).

AAAAUUGHH! DIFFERENT! AAAAUUGHH!!!

So! Do we like the new Geek? I'm sure I'll get used to it, but it'll take a little bit. I had almost gotten to where I didn't need to look at the screen to find the various links--now I need to learn the new layout. Again, I'm sure it'll be fine.

I'm intrigued by the notion of getting to buy out of seeing ads for $25. What will this do for ad revenue? Game-theory-wise, if everyone buys adblocker but me, then presumably nobody will buy ads anyway, so I'll get to free-ride on the people who bought out of the ads.

BGIA UPDATE AND REMINDER

Just a reminder: Check out the Board Game Internet Awards (now with spiffy new logo) and post your nominations!