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.
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.
Heather’s birthday was on a Tuesday this year–a Tuesday on which her orchestra planned an all-evening event plus concert. Since her day was going to be nonstop from wake up to bedtime with only a brief break after school we celebrated on the prior Saturday.
Her birthday adventure was, echoing the game show in the movie, a KPop Demon Hunters game show!
To start, and in between each event, she needed to answer trivia questions. She got 13 out of 14 correct.
Her first set of questions:
1. What is the name of the magical barrier maintained by HUNTR/X? The Honmoon
2. What are the names of the HUNTR/X singers? Rumi, Mira, and Zoey
3. What is the name of HUNTR/X’s manager? Bobby
4. Where do Mira and Zoey regularly go that Rumi refuses to join them? The bathhouse
My Little Soda Pop
After the warm-up trivia questions she had her first event. The Saja Boys debut single is Soda Pop. In this game she was presented with 10 jars of soda pop and she needed to identify the 5 pairs of matching flavors.
The 5 flavors were: Coke, Vanilla Coke, Orange-cream Coke, Cherry Coke, and Root Beer (other flavors would have been more fun, but colors would kind of give it away). Corinne helped by taking notes.
She got 3 of the 5 pairs correct on her first try. With careful consideration she found the mismatch.
With the sodas identified we moved on to the next round of trivia.
5. What is the demon ruler’s name? Gwi-Ma
6. What are the names of the Saja Boys? Jinu, Romance, Mystery, Abby, and Baby
7. Who trained HUNTR/X? Celine
8. How many eyes does the bird have? Six
Takedown
When the Saja Boys debuted, HUNTR/X realized they’re demons and decided to write a dis track called Takedown. Heather’s next event was to take down various foods hanging from the ceiling without using her hands.
She had to eat two Ritz crackers, a mini chocolate donut, and a full-size glazed donut. She needed to try to complete this before Derpy (played by Corinne) could eat two mini chocolate donuts.
Corinne understood the proper tactic immediately by getting the whole donut in her mouth and pulling it off the string. Heather, instead, attempted to nibble the Ritz crackers from the edges. Derpy won.
And another round of trivia, getting harder.
9. Who does HUNTR/X get the healing tonic from? Healing Han
10. What was the name of Celine’s musical group? Sunlight Sisters
11. Which of Rumi’s arms gets exposed to Jinu during their battle in the bathhouse? Right
Golden
HUNTR/X plans to seal the Honmoon with their new single, Golden. But, oh no, the Saja Boys have interfered and corrupted the gold. Heather needed to identify which nugget was the real gold based on density (rather obviously not real gold, just various things wrapped in a gold-colored wrapper).
She immediately set to work measuring the weights and volumes then calculating the densities. Was successfully identified the correct nugget.
The nuggets were: a ball of aluminum foil, a ping pong ball (so mainly air), steel washers, pennies (mainly zinc), and a lead weight.
The final round of trivia:
12. What is the bird’s name? Sussie
13. What is the cat’s name? Derpy
14. What does “Saja” mean in English? Lion
Face it and Fix it
Her final game was inspired by the lyrics of Free and What it Sounds Like. In Free, Rumi sings, “we can’t fix it if we never face it” and in What it Sounds Like, she sings, “I broke into a million pieces.” In this event Heather needed to face something broken and fix it. The broken thing was pictures of her face and to fix it she needed to use…only her face!
She was a lot faster at it than I expected. I probably would have made them a little harder had I known how effective she’d be.
That completed our game show and our contestant won fabulous prizes in the form of wrapped presents!
This year Heather joined the ranks of the cell phone owners. One of the very few kids in her grade left to do so.
For dinner we went to the Cheesecake Factory and then back home for cake. Heather asked for a cheesecake with brownie crust which I made. I’m pretty happy with out it turned out.
Spooky Strings Concert
On her actual birthday her orchestra put on a Spooky Strings concert with Mendenhall Middle School.
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.
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.
