I won another game of Hardback. The “fan fiction” mods make for some interesting tweaks to the game play.
Jess and I played Harvest with friends. Definitely a game you need to play a few times to get a feel for the timing of tasks and nuances of resource management. I lost.
Played Heat at the board game meetup. We played the Tunnel Vision expansion. It adds one track that has a slight nuance to it and a few new cards (as well as parts for another player). I lost.
Vantage was just released and arrived before we left on vacation. I got it to the table for the family before leaving since I was excited about it. It’s a cooperative exploration game where the point is to enjoy the journey. So it’s not really about winning or losing, but we were successful in achieving our mission goal.
The girls had a blast and we did smoothies for dinner to keep playing and then played past their bedtime and they were insistent we play again the next day.
It’s chill. You wander around this planet discovering people and places and secrets. You can pursue a mission goal or just enjoy the journey.
Set during the end of the Scientific Revolution we get a historical-fiction look into the lives of members of the Royal Society and Louis XIV’s court as well as happenings around the world. Court intrigue. Vagabond action and adventure. Scientific discovery. Technical advancement.
Long. Very long. 944 pages in print. But I enjoyed the story. Not sure how much appeal it would have to someone with no existing knowledge of Newton, Hook, Huygens, Leibniz, Louis XIV, etc.
A Burglar’s Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh
Nominally a discussion on urban design and architecture and its impact on criminology, but I was a little disappointed in the depth. Can’t put my finger on exactly what was missing, but I wanted more.
Wedding of the Waters by Peter Bernstein
Our vacation was going to take us across midstate New York so I thought it appropriate to visit the Erie Canal and to learn more about it before the trip.
Interesting exposition of why build the canal where they did as well as the political interest of using a canal to bind the interior of the country to the seaboard via commerce.
Quicksilver took up most of June and after Wedding of the Waters I started the 2nd book in the Baroque Cycle which I haven’t finished by the end of July.
Started the month by dipping back into Mechs vs. Minions. We’re on to mission 5. We lost almost immediately and then restarted for another try. After an extended slog we successfully pushed the bomb onto each of the repair pads.
On my birthday I took the day off of work and we spent the afternoon starting Tales from the Red Dragon Inn (which I got for my birthday last year; too many games to play, too little time; though I was waiting for a 2nd-edition update kit which got released in the interim). We played scenario 1.1 and successfully defended the inn from the out-of-control training automata. It’s a fairly simple dungeon-crawling game with a campy atmosphere. So the emphasis is on fun rather than deep tactical analysis. I appreciate that the characters give a complexity rating to enable effective selection by family members of varying skill levels.
A couple days later we played scenario 1.2 and were victorious in fighting our way through the inn’s cellar to the intrusion site and defeating the giant gelatinous blob.
At the board game meetup I played a couple of ecological games. First was Undergrove in which you manage supplies of nitrogen, potassium, phosphorous, and carbon to grow mushrooms in the shared forest and then grow trees within the forest to enable end-game points.
It’s a clever game inspired by real growth networks of fungi. However, a design issue in which accuracy harms playability is that you manage both potassium and phosphorous and the tokens are denoted by chemical symbol. So potassium, is ‘K’ and phosphorous is ‘P’. Really easy to reach for the ‘P’ when you’re looking for potassium if you’re not already comfortable with potassium being ‘K’ (as occurred regularly by players in my game).
Overall I enjoyed the game, though I did not win. Lots of variety and opportunities for varying strategies, however it did seem like some locations were substantially more beneficial than others. Maybe there are strategies to balance that which I couldn’t see in a single play through.
The second ecological game of the night was Petrichor. It’s a game of clouds, rain, and crops. You add clouds to the grid of crops, move those clouds around, increase the water in them, and try to strategically rain on the crops. Each round you get a hand of cards which determine which actions you can take.
Whenever I learn a new game at an event my focus is on understanding the rules well enough to make valid moves on my turn that are not obviously bad and keep the game moving. Sometimes I “get” a game and can try to apply intentional strategies after a couple of turns. This was not one of those games. My moves were intended only to be shallowly useful to me based on the objectives I was able to easily understand with no grand strategy behind them. But sometimes that’s enough and I won this game. I think it’s much more strategically challenging than the fairly simple table presence would suggest.
A friend hosted a game day which I was able to stop by at for a few hours. Started by playing Explorers of Navoria. Each player has an expedition team on each of 3 continents. Nominally your task is to explore these continents and settle villages, however it turns out you can more or less ignore that aspect entirely and earn plenty of points doing other things. So from that perspective I think the designers missed something. I won, but I also felt like I didn’t play the game the way it was intended. There’s a too-powerful shortcut to points by focusing on a single tribe and grabbing a couple of cards that gives you points for each person in the tribe (which is what I did).
Explorers of Navoria was a little bit longer of a game and most of us were looking for something light and short to play next. That turned out to be Animals Gathering.
In Animals Gathering you are a mage gathering magical stones to restore lost animals from extinction. What that looks like in practice is rolling dice with shapes on the faces, those shapes determine which tangrams you can pick up and use to fill in the tangram-silhouettes of the animals on the cards you collect. But any shapes from your roll that you can’t use your opponents get to use. The dice have different shape distributions and you get to choose which dice you’ll roll. So there’s a little bit of strategy and tactics involved, but overall it’s light and easy to play. I won this but, if I recall correctly, the points were something like 26, 25, 25, 24. So extremely close.
After Animals Gathering we were waiting for another group to finish their game so we played a few rounds of Stool Pigeon. That went: loss, loss, loss, win. At no point did the person who “called” the round end up winning. Which makes sense given the mechanics of the game and makes me wonder about use a reverse psychology approach to the game–“calling” the round with a poor hand on the expectation that people will swap your cards out assuming they’re better than they are. Could be interesting to try.
Jess and I took an overnight trip to the coast for our anniversary and I gave her A Gentle Rain as an anniversary gift. We had both seen it online somewhere and thought she’d like it. It’s a calm, contemplative, solitaire game (you can play in groups by just taking turns). The theme of this game is that the lilies on the lake only bloom in the rain. Today a gentle rain is falling and your task is to lay out the lake tiles to create places where the eight lilies can bloom. There is no winning or losing though you can calculate a score for how well you did if you want. The point of the game is to be relaxing, quiet, and meditative. We played a few times. I don’t remember how many lilies we were able to place in any of the games though. Jess has been able to place all eight a few times playing solo.
At another board game meetup I was able to play a few games starting with Faraway, which I’ve played before. I got trounced in this game. I was unable to realize the main gambit I aimed for to boost my score, so I was quite thoroughly in last place. Still an interesting game in that it’s kind of upside-down engine building. You can only score points on a card based on the cards you play later.
Someone dug up an old kids game from 1988 called Up the River (which was apparently published under several names with the same mechanics and different themes–BoardGameGeek groups them together under the name Race Through Space). It is a deceptively simple game though. You each have three boats and the goal is to sail them to the harbor. The harbor has twelve docks numbered 1 to 12 (which are points) with each boat reaching the harbor claiming the highest available dock. At the end of each round the river flows downstream and if you have a boat at the bottom of the river it’s lost forever. On your turn you roll a die and decide which of your boats to move that amount.
Initially we all tried to save all three of our boats, but by the end we had all lost one. We suspect the better strategy is to strategically abandon one to begin with as gaining docks, say, 12 and 9 will handily win over someone straggling along all 3 boats claiming docks 7, 5, and 3.
Afterwards I was planning to head home, but someone wanted to play Shamans which they said was fairly short. So I let them convince me to join in. It was not particularly short however.
Shamans is a hidden role / defector game, but what I liked about it is that it’s played over several rounds and the defectors are random each round. So getting caught early on doesn’t eliminate you or make it impossible to do anything effective. Bluffing games are not generally my cup of tea–I like to play the games not the people at the table, but this was the most enjoyable one I’ve played because of that resetting that occurs each round removing some of the pressure. I was a defector for 2 of the 3 rounds in the game. I got caught once. The game is a little odd in that you have loyalists and defectors, but it’s still an individual that wins. So you’re operating in an environment of nominal cooperation of all players, but some players are cooperating against the others and everyone is trying to figure out who the teams are each round while also trying to position themselves to earn victory points. I did not win.
Jess and I played a game of Wyrmspan. I won with my strategy of prioritizing the Guild track. Neither of us managed to fill our caves with dragons this time.
And to finish off the month we played Creature Comforts as a family. Jess’ family of squirrels made the coziest home and won.
I guess it’s a credit to Sanderson’s writing ability that I find the main character of this story so annoying. Immature, rash, flippant, lucky. But I suppose the point of the story was the character realizing many of these things by the end and begins to understand she’s going to have to take life more seriously in the future.
Perhaps the next time she shows up I’ll like her more.
Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
The non-fiction, biographical narrative of Dr. Paul Farmer. Farmer came from poverty and dedicated his life to providing medical care for the impoverished–not just individually but at the public-health level too. Though “impoverished” isn’t quite the right word. The poor, the abandoned, the abused–les misérables. Those in the worst imaginable conditions throughout the world.
Fascinating story. Inspiring and humbling to consider how Farmer spent his life compared to what pretty much any the rest of us are doing to help our fellow beings.
Then I got bogged down starting Neal Stephenson’s massive Baroque Cycle. I might finish the first book in the trilogy within another week or two.
“I can tell you,” my colleague went on, “of a man in Leipzig, a judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn’t an anti-Nazi. He was just—a judge. In ’42 or ’43, early ’43, I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an ‘Aryan’ woman. This was ‘race injury,’ something the Party was especially anxious to punish. In the case at bar, however, the judge had the power to convict the man of a ‘nonracial’ offense and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party ‘processing’ which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. But the man was innocent of the ‘nonracial’ charge, in the judge’s opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted him. Of course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the courtroom.”
“And the judge?”
“Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience—a case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how could he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more, and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then to acquaintances. (That’s how I heard about it.) After the ’44 Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don’t know.”
–They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer
A federal judge in Tennessee has ordered a delay in the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia after his legal team raised concerns that the Salvadoran native could be deported upon release.
His attorneys pointed to an emergency hearing Thursday in Maryland — Abrego Garcia’s home state — where the government said it planned to deport him to a third country as soon as he is released from jail.
We are forcing our judges to decide whether to falsely hold innocent people in jail or risk putting them in the hands of the federal government which has made it clear they intend to dump their victims in foreign prisons to be abused and forgotten.
Meanwhile, supporters of this behavior are actively working to open camps where the undesirables can be densely packed. One might even say concentrated.
And the Supreme Court just ruled that executive orders can suspend Constitutional rights indefinitely unless each person affected makes an individual petition to a court to demand their Constitutional rights be upheld which the court then enforces.
Justice Sotomayor warns in response:
No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates. Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship.
This continues the ongoing attack on Constitutional rights, in particular birthright citizenship. Section 1 of the 14th Amendment reads:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
That text is unambiguous. Born in the United States means citizen of the United States. But right now, that’s no longer true. The Supreme Court says Trump can revoke citizenship from whomever he wants until a court gets around to hearing and ruling on each specific case.
