Tag: Kyle

Games October 2025

October 30, 2025 8:34 pm

Storyfold: Wildwoods is one of the last games I’ve crowdfunded that I was waiting to be delivered. A solo (or loosely co-op) game built around a narrative. It sounded intriguing. To my dismay, however, the gameplay is built around an arbitrary restriction on how many turns you can take before you lose each scenario. I typically dislike that mechanic. It makes the game into an optimization puzzle–which can be fine if actions are fully under your control, but when success or failure is probabilistic you create a game system where perfect play can still mean you lose. Which is stupid. And a couple turns of poor dice rolls means you can end up in a situation from which it is impossible to recover. Which is stupid.

I played through the prologue twice (which guides your turn and dictates your successful dice rolls) and then played chapter 1 twice. The first time I was defeated and the second time I fudged the rules a little to accommodate a couple turns of bad dice rolls to make it more fun and less annoying.

Played a round of Hardback at the meetup and won. Played another round at home and Jess won by a point.

Played Ruins again at the meetup. I lost.

Books October 2025

6:15 pm

Pandora’s Star by Peter F. Hamilton

This is the first book in the Commonwealth Saga. It has a lot going on. A murder-mystery storyline. A spy story. A first-contact story. And some action-adventure happening too.

Hamilton creates an interesting universe and spends many, many pages filling it in. Long, but I enjoyed it.

Polostan by Neal Stephenson

I’m not sure what to say about this one. It’s historical fiction set during the cold war following a woman born in the US, taken by her parents to the USSR, returned to the US as an older child, then back to the USSR as an adult. Her life is not smooth.

It’s the first in a series so hopefully more happens later–making this all foundational, but otherwise it never seems like much happens.

Games September 2025

September 30, 2025 10:58 pm

Started the month off with another adventure in Vantage. We completed our mission for a victory ending. Looking forward to playing again.

At the board-game meetup I played a couple rounds of Ruins. It’s a trick-taking game which usually isn’t my thing, but it has some interesting tweaks which I liked. It uses card sleeves and overlays so the cards get more powerful each round. I usually find trick-taking games to be repetitive and not interesting after a few rounds, but with this mechanic the game has a very different feel each time and we discovered very different strategies that could be used. The second game ended in a one-on-one tie-breaker round which I lost without even taking a turn when Robert made the ultimate play using every card in his hand on his first turn. It was brutal and epic. I also lost the first game too.

At the next meetup I played the classic Carcassonne for the first time. I can see how many games since have borrowed or built on the concepts introduced in Carcassonne. I lost.

After Carcassonne we played a couple rounds of a Hanabi. The cover art would have you believe this has something to do with fireworks. That’s a very loose theme–so loose I didn’t know that was the concept until looking up the image. It’s a card game where the only cards you can’t see are your own and you have to work together to play the correct cards in the correct order.

Like most games which do cooperation within restricted communications you end up with game-impacting issues. For example, if someone asks for clarification about a rule, just asking the question might give away a piece of knowledge that they’re not supposed to. Also, once a group has played a few times you end up with a significant amount of implied communication which maybe is intended in the design, but maybe not.

Rather than win/loss the goal is to get the most points. In our two games we ended up with 14 and then 20 out of 25 points.

During Jess’ birthday weekend we played Garden Variety which is another trick-taking game. It kind of highlights the things I don’t much like about many trick-taking games. In particular, many of your turns are spent just throwing away a card for no purpose because you have to play a card and your cards aren’t currently relevant which is both annoying and boring. I lost.

We also played several rounds of Cat Fluxx that weekend and in the following days. The base game, Fluxx, has dozens of themed variations and Cat Fluxx was just released in September. I thought Jess might enjoy the general concept themed around cats since the general concept has a lot of arbitrariness and is not to be taken seriously–like cats. I lost 3 and won 3.

Back to yet a third meetup for the month I got in a game of Heat. I still really enjoy playing. I was pushed to play much more aggressively than I usually play games and I just barely squeaked out a victory in what is probably the tightest and closest race I’ve played yet. It was lots of fun.

Books September 2025

September 28, 2025 10:50 pm

The Telescope in the Ice by Mark Bowen

After having been disappointed in the last few non-fiction books I read for being shallower than I was looking for, The Telescope in the Ice made up the difference.

A deep dive into the history of modern particle physics and what we now call the “standard model” with a focus on the neutrino. The book follows the global efforts to detect neutrino interactions culminating in the IceCube neutrino observatory at the South Pole.

I found it really interesting. The author gives the history, science, and engineering of the topic with first-person accounts providing details along the way.

And that was the only book I got finished in September. It was lengthy and not exactly light reading. Then I started another massive sci-fi tome which took up the rest of the month. I’m almost done with it.

Cider Making

September 14, 2025 2:54 pm

I like apple cider, but it’s hard to find good (or even real) cider around here without driving way out to the orchards in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.

So I bought a grinder and a press and built a cider station!

Building the bench took up a good chunk of Saturday–longer than I expected since it’s not exactly complicated, but I plugged along until it was done.

That made Sunday, Cider Sunday!

I bought 9.5 pounds of apples from Safeway: 50% Granny Smith, 25% Fuji, 25% Envy. I sliced them up, Corinne put them in the grinder, Heather ran the grinder. Then we loaded them into the press and out came beautiful, rich cider.

The 9.5 pounds of apples turned into 4.5 cups of cider. Less than I was expecting, but it tastes really good.

Also….not cost effective. I’ll have to pay attention to sale prices on apples. My delicious cider, ignoring equipment costs and labor, came at a cost of $6 a cup, yikes.