Played through days 2 and 3 of Earthborne Rangers with my game group. It’s a slow-paced game. On day 2 we delivered biscuits to the people of White Sky and took a boat to Golden Shore. On day 3 we hitched a ride on a glider out to the Fractured Wall which turned out to be an ancient, failed, mega dam. There we were harassed by birds and a giant, automated, demolition machine. We managed to store up some prey for our quest to lure out a dangerous predator harassing the Valley. Then we climbed over the dam and headed for the Philosopher’s Garden on our way to the Spire.
It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway by David Satter
Satter takes a hard look at modern Russia to try and make sense of its trajectory back into authoritarianism under Putin. He argues, in my interpretation, that the people of Russia have failed to come to terms with the horrific actions of the Communist-era government and this failure, in part, drove them into the waiting arms of Putin and renewed repression.
Nature Wars by Jim Sterba
To me, the most interesting aspect of this work isn’t about backyard battlegrounds with nature, but the astounding effectiveness of the conservation movement at saving ecosystems and inhabitants, particularly in the Eastern part of the country which had been devastated by unrestrained, colonial exploitation.
I watch the grocery store flyers in the Fall for apple prices so I can make cider. This year, Safeway had Envy and Gala apples for $1.50 a pound in mid September. So I asked Jess to buy 5 pounds of each and stuck them in the freezer. Finally, at the end of the October, Nob Hill had Granny Smith apples for $1.50 a pound and I bought 10 pounds. I rotated the earlier apples to the fridge to begin thawing and froze the Granny Smith for a couple of days before moving them to the fridge to thaw as well. Then Sunday was Cider Day!
Sadly, I woke up sick on Saturday and had to power through Cider Day because the apples needed to be turned into cider before they deteriorated too far after having been frozen. So I didn’t get to enjoy it so much as I had to just get it done so as to not waste all the apples. The weather was good though. Crisp, sunny Autumn day.
I got the cider bench set up and Corinne helped me grind the apples. Didn’t take much for the Envy and Gala–they were barely being held together by their skins.
Approximately 20 pounds of apples turned into about 23 cups of cider at a cost of about ~$1.30 per cup. The flavor is pretty good with a nice rich cider color.
There already exist many 3D-printable box organizers for Earthborne Rangers, but they all talk about being designed to hold all the expansions, add-ons, etc. And I since I have only the base game it wasn’t clear if I would benefit from those features or if they just made things more complicated. By the time I finished my own design I realized it’s pretty much all the same. But this one is mine and I enjoyed designing it.
The colors match really well to the game. I’m happy with the movable dividers and covers for the tokens so they don’t go everywhere if the box is flipped upside down. The token trays have curved bottoms to make scooping easier. The card trays have cutouts in the bottoms to reduce filament usage and reduce vacuum grabbing. I did all the design work in Dune3D.
The 3MF file has the correct settings for the colors and the hexagonal pattern on the token tray covers. Working from the original Dune3D files or the Step files you’ll probably want to do something with the covers to not get a solid surface.
You’ll need 2 long trays, 1 short tray, 2 token trays, 2 token-tray covers, and ~15 dividers. I also printed a “Leader” token, which may not actually be very important, but the game rules says to designate a lead ranger, but provide no method to indicate it persistently.
First game of the month was Star Squadron. It’s a 2-player, space-combat, dog-fighting game. I played it at a board game meetup. It launched on Kickstarter this month and the designer is one of the meetup regulars. So I got to do a late-stage play test. While the 2-player, direct-combat style is not my personal preference, the combat mechanics were very well designed. The feel of the dog fight–twisting and turning to line up a shot on passing spacecraft while utilizing asteroids for cover–was spot on. I lost by a hair (against the game designer, so that felt pretty good to me).
Played Bomb Busters during our “decide on next campaign game to play” session with the campaign game group. It’s a cooperative logic game in which you’re, nominally, trying to defuse a bomb based on correctly identifying pairs of numbers across the players tile sets. We did 6 rounds, victory on 3 and defeat on 3. Played it again with another group later in the month for another victory and another defeat.
We completed character creation and the first day in our Earthborne Rangers campaign. It’s a highly-narrative game, so I can’t really say we were victorious or defeated. The day ended peacefully in camp though (rather than anyone getting injured). It was a slow going start as we all tried to figure out the flow, strategies, and tactics that make it work. Hopefully we pick up the pace in future sessions. All we managed to accomplish narratively was to collect biscuits from Hy Pimpot in Lone Tree Station and then leave for White Sky. Doesn’t sound like much, and it wasn’t, but it still took us a few hours to get through.
Fall is the time to swap in my Halloween-adjacent games. Played a session of Mysterium with some friends. I did some on-the-fly adjustments to the rules and flow to keep things moving–it has a fair bit of fiddliness if you’re not fluent in running it. We were victorious in identifying the murderer.
Final game of the month was Through the Desert played at a meetup. Nominally you’re organizing caravans through the desert, but in effect you’re building walls out of camels to claim territory. A competitive game. I felt it suffers from a classic issue of multiplayer, adversarial games: You can either react to someone else’s moves and counter their aims or do your own thing. If you react, it probably harms the other player, but it also harms yourself and leaves other players open to doing whatever they want. But I guess that’s the game. I placed 2nd of 3.
