Not every hundred plays weighs the same

 Playing a game a hundred times is a big thing. Maybe a big, silly thing but it is still a thing. There are a lot of games I haven’t played ten times after all. (Not counting the vast, perhaps unfathomable, number of games I have never ever played)

Of course, some games to are easier to rack up plays of. Getting in ten plays of Advanced Civilization requires not just a lot of time but organizing that time with a bunch of other folks. On the other hand, the short solitaire games that make up a lot of my current play are easier to play over and over. Playing Onirim daily over breakfast lets the plays add up lol

Anyway, the reason why getting centuries for individual games has been on my mind is that I noticed there were two games that I was creeping close to a hundred plays. And while they have some things in common (short, simple solitaire games that my copies are PnP), it’s the differences that made me feel like writing.

Tanuki Matsuri is one of the free games that were released during the Covid lockdown to help folks cope with life. It’s a Roll and Write where you are checking off boxes, so it works well even when you have smudgy dry erase markers. 

The appeal of the game is that virtually every space in the game (all but three) have you make some additional move. Part of the joy of playing it is setting up cascades of actions.

However, it’s not that hard to figure out what you need to do to get a high score. (Optimizing strawberries and flowers, by the way) It’s the fact that there are multiple paths to doing that keeps Tanuki Matsuri entertaining.

The other game is Food Chain Island and it’s a whole other kettle of fish. The first game in Scott Almes’ Simply Solo series (which means it probably needs no introduction), it honestly breaks down to being a solitaire peg puzzle with special powers. 

And it’s brilliant.

Admittedly, I am playing it more consistently lately but I feel like I’m still figuring things, still improving my game. The random layout means that the relative value of a card changes every game. And I still haven’t broken out the expansions or used one of the alternate layouts. There’s a lot of game left for me to discover.

Tanuki Matsuri is fun but the fact that I can play it on a clipboard and don’t need a table has helped it get so many plays. (It is far from the only game like that so getting this many plays is still a feather in its cap) Food Chain Island, on the other hand, is just plain solid. And it’s the one more likely to get two hundred plays.

When Cinq-O was my hero

Cinq-O is a game that I picked up very early in my board gaming life. Like before I ever made an online board game order. Before I hauled a ton of games home from a convention. Back when my collection consisted of a bag that held a couple of Looney Lab card games and some Cheapass Hip Pocket games. I’m not ever sure I’d picked up the travel version of Settlers of Catan, which may have been my first ‘big’ purchase. 

I was going to say before I’d heard of Ticket to Ride but that was just because Ticket to Ride hadn’t been published yet lol

Cinq-O is a dice game where you are trying to get to a hundred points. It consists of five regular dice and one special Hi-Lo die, along with a cute little carrying case that also doubles as a playmat.

The elevator pitch is that, each turn, you are either trying to roll low or high. The key is the Hi-Lo die. The side that you lock in will determine both whether you going low or high AND what the multiplier will be. You can get up to ten points for either five ones or sixes and that can get multiplied up to three times.

A few more key points. You have to lock at least one die every roll but you can also bank dice. Put them to one side and lock them in for a later turn and keep rolling the rest of the dice. And a straight is also worth ten points, giving you another option other than low or high.

Back in the day, I played a lot of Cinq-O. And revisiting it now, I find that mechanically it holds up better than I expected too. With the generous amount of rerolling that you can do, the option of banking dice, and the option of going for a straight, I found that I had a lot more control than I expected. Yes, the decision tree was pretty obvious, but there was more than just roll dice and hope for the best.

Cinq-O has been out of print for at least fifteen years. And while I found that it was still fun, I don’t know if it will get reprinted.

Simply, the number of alternatives for this niche have really grown and there are just better little dice games to play. With options like Qwixx or the Rolling Japan family or the Pretty Clever family, there are just options in this game space that offer more engaging gameplay and more complex decision trees. Heck, I’ve seen Qwixx sold at gas stations so it’s hitting the same mass market audience Cinq-O was.

While it’s not mindless and I had fun playing it again, Cinq-0 feels simple and bland compared to games that either came later or I just found out about later.

Still, for a mass market game from 2003, Cinq-O was a solid gaming experience. And if you wanted to try it out now, making a homemade copy would be a few minutes work.

This Sprawlopolis is really good

I have to confess that I have largely admired the Sprawlopolis family from afar. I have always thought the games were downright brilliant but, until quite recently, I played their parent game Circle the Wagons more than the entire family put together.

That’s really because I have a black and white printer and I’m colorblind on top of that. The textures in the original game aren’t super distinct and even when I printed out the game in color, the colors were diffuse enough that it was hard for me to tell some of them apart.

Both Agropolis and Naturopolis do a much better job at both texture and color contrast but I was already derailed by the original game. Which is a shame because the family is very good.

Micro tile-laying games were already a well established concept, including ones with overlapping cards. Variable scoring conditions were also established. Sprawlopolis also has a variable winning score depending on the scoring conditions, which I hadn’t seen before but I would be surprised if it wasn’t already out there.

What Steve Aramini has done, though, is a really good job of packaging all of these elements together into a tight, well balanced, challenging game. 

Revisiting Sprawlopolis, what I am really struck by is how many tough and annoying decisions there are in the game. I look at a lot of 18 card games because, well, they’re really easy to print out and play. And from my experience, Sprawlopolis has a lot of weight for a micro game.

I feel micro games and more minimalist games have become more a part of the gaming culture. This started a ways back since both Love Letter and Qwixx helped get that ball rolling in their own ways. (Feel free to tell me how I’m wrong)

And I feel that a design goal that some micro games pursue is for the game experienced to feel like a “big“ game. It doesn’t always work and sometimes the results feel cluttered and fiddly. And it isn’t always the goal of a particular game. In the first set of Pack O Game, HUE is solid but feels intended to be small. On the other hand, TAJ feels ambitious but fiddly and GEM actually feels like a bigger game.

Sprawlopolis feels bigger than eighteen cards. More than that, the gameplay is intuitive, not fiddly. Scrabble and Carcassonne and other games have made tile laying second nature to so many of us. You don’t have to concentrate on how to play but on the actual choices you need to make.

I revisted Sprawlopolis because I signed up to playtest Casinopolis. Now, I want to re-examine the entire family.

A completely unfair review of Paper App Dungeon

First of all, confession and disclosure. I played Paper App Dungeon via the play sheet provided by Semi Co-Op. So I have in no way shape or form played the game as it was designed to be played. That said, that is also probably the only way that I would have tried out the game.

Paper App Dungeon is a Roll and Write dungeon crawl. One of the simplest ones I have seen, to be honest. The core mechanic is that you rule one D6. If you rolled even, you have to move orthogonally. If you roll odd, you have to move diagonally. And you move that many spaces. Hit a wall, bounce off that wall (Hi, Ricochet Robots!)

There are encounters spaces. Stop or run into them and they happen. From what I can tell, there isn’t a combat mechanic. Monsters just cost you X number of hit points. (Again, I could be wrong)

One rules discrepancy that I wasn’t sure about was if you had to choose a path that didn’t run into a wall over one that did. Quite frankly, I think, forcing you to choose the path that doesn’t let you ricochet removes a lot of the decision making in the game and then we are back in the first module of Outdoor Survival. And if you don’t know what that means, it isn’t good!

Also from what I can tell, the complete game is an actual campaign with the ability to level up and equip the line you are drawing. So there’s a lot that I haven’t been exposed to.

The interesting quirk in the game is that every sheet is procedurally generated. Which means random but within specific parameters. It’s published as a spiral notebook and every one will be different. And you can also buy a pencil from the publisher that has been marked so you can use it a knuckle bone die, dropping the components down to two.

In some ways, I am the ideal and absolute worst demographic for Paper App Dungeon. I play a lot of Roll and Write games and I have no idea how many of them have been dungeon crawls. I also like portable games I can play anywhere.

At the same time, a big reason I play so many Roll and Writes is because I love Print and Play. And Paper App Dungeon is clearly designed to not be a PnP.

I also have to say that a procedurally generated dungeon really gives me pause. I have played some procedurally generated PnP games and the boards become incredibly swingy. It’s amusing if I’m not being asked to pay for the experience. Under those circumstances, I don’t care if balance is lost. But when every board is effectively a one-shot experience? Then the loss of balance becomes a loss of overall gameplay, particularly if it’s a campaign.

Even setting that to one side, the game seems to come down to drawing a semi random line through a dungeon grid. There isn’t even combat, just lose hit points. I realize that I have not had the full experience of the game, but I feel pretty confident saying that I have played several Roll and Write dungeons that were, better than that and some of them were free. 

I think it is a perfectly valid argument that I have not given Paper App Dungeon a fair shake since I didn’t play the official version. But if you accept that the Semi Co-Op UKGE Dungeon can be viewed a demo, than the demo sank.

Even by Roald Dahl standards, the Witches is disconcerting

Since my son was reading Roald Dahl’s The Witches, I decided to read it too. While I have read a lot of his books for children, some of them when I was a kid, and his stories for older audiences, that was a book that I had never read.

That was a weird read.

 

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First of all, let’s be honest. Roald Dahl’s work has always had elements of the grotesque and the macabre and the really bizarre. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator reads like it was written during a severe fever where opiates were part of the treatment plan. But his other kids books balance out that with happy endings.

(No, I haven’t seen any of the movie adaptations of the Witches but I did l know they were out there)

An orphaned boy learns from his grandmother that witches are real and among us. They look like humans, other than their hands, feet, and their saliva. Oh, and they’re bald but being bald as a qualifier as being inhuman feels kind of extreme. And their whole deal is killing children.

When the unnamed boy and his grandmother end up at a resort where all the witches of England just happen to be meeting, they manage to wipe the witches out by using the witch’s’ own transformation potion against them. But the boy also gets hit by the potion and will be a mouse for the rest of his life.

While the topic of The Witches is probably the darkest of any Dahl book I’ve read, the tone isn’t. The witches are serial killers with genocidal plans, which puts the people-eating giants in the BFG to shame. However, their behavior is incredibly childish with the Grand High Witch in particular coming across as a petulant brat.

Even by Dahl standards, the contrasts are jarring.

Then there’s the boy’s final fate. Permanently transformed into a mouse with a significantly reduced lifespan. And he plans on dying with his grandmother since they now have about the same life expectancy. The boy views this as a happy ending but I’m not sure how many readers will agree with him.

Really, what the Witches lacks that so many of his works have is whimsy.

And I was unsurprised to learn that the book has been accused of being misogynistic. In fact, the first draft of this blog entry was twice as long discussing that. And that was just too distracting. What I will say is, regardless of authorial intent, the book is very easy to give a misogynistic reading of. Which is definitely not to say don’t read it. Just keep that in consideration, particularly when discussing it with children.

Dice and colors and evil labs

 I’ve been meaning to look Polterdice games for a while. I’ve backed a couple of their Kickstarters so I’ve picked up a decent amount of their library and their designs do look interesting.

Many (not all) of their Roll and Write designs involve using color, markers or pencils or crayons or whatever of different colors. They certainly aren’t the first to do so. And, as a medium, Roll and Write games have fewer components to work with. Something that allows an additional layer in the game design and game play is a good thing.

Yahtzee just involves writing down numbers. The write element of Qwixx is checking off boxes. They are both very important games in the development of the Roll and Write medium (and Qwixx rocks) But, as a medium, Roll and Writes can do more than that. Color can be a powerful tool to adding new elements into turning a piece of paper into a fully fleshed out game.

But here’s the thing. I’m quite colorblind. It’s been a bane for my gaming from the start and it’s takes some decent contrast for me work with colors. So that makes some of Polterdice’s designs a real challenge for me.

And some of their designs really interest me. Dice of Steam looks like it might be able to capture rail stock in a couple pages. (I know, that’s been tried a _lot_) The engine building of Iron Made might actually give me the Pick-Up-and-Deliver Roll and Writes I’m looking for.

All that said, I started with My Little Evil Lab, the family/Junior version of Evil Lab. Evil Lab might be their simplest and most accessible game and I’m starting with the simplified version lol

Stripping away the made science theme, you’re putting symbols on a grid. Pretty familiar territory for me. The columns act like Connect 4 columns, that a symbol has to go down to the bottom or on top of another symbol. Again, we’ve seen this before.

So… what makes My Little Evil Lab different?

You use two dice to determine the color and shape of the symbol you draw each turn. A very important touch is that each pip gives you more than one choice of color or shape. In fact, the difference between the junior version of My Little Evil Lab and regular Evil Lab is that the Junior version gives you four shapes as opposed to the regular version’s three shapes. That makes gameplay easier because two identical shapes cannot be next to each other. Diagonal is fine, thank goodness. If placement is impossible, you put a big X in a space.

In order to score points, you have to create patterns of colors. A box of four squares, a line of three squares, that sort of thing. And the patterns must be isolated. If you have a line of five squares, not one of the scoring patterns, you get nothing. It doesn’t count a line of four with a buddy.

You also get bonus points for making every pattern in one color or making one pattern in every color. Trust me, if that sounds confusing, looking at the scoring sheet will make it all makes sense.

(The low ink version substitute’s patterns for colors. I went one step further and used numbers)

From what I can tell reading through rule sets, the Evil Lab family is the simplest of Polterdice’s

catalog. And I have to admit that the various elements are familiar. However, the various restrictions on both placement and scoring make for some interesting game play.

The Evil Lab family is simple but so many of the games that they share qualities with are even simpler.  Even sitting down to My Little Evil Lab requires making some plans and some decisions. There is enough going on to keep me interested and coming back.

The more forgiving ruleset of My Little Evil Lab has actually made it relatively easy to get good scores. I am definitely planning on trying the regular version soon. More than that, there are alternate boards with different scoring conditions or special symbols that change the gameplay. I feel like the Evil Lab family has a lot of gaming for me.

My Little Evil Lab was me poking at Polterdice and it’s been encouraging.

Young Adult literature and the upside of necromancy

Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m the Queen of the Dead by Richard Robert’s wasn’t on my immediate reading list. I mean, I planned on eventually reading it but I had other stuff higher on the list. But it ended up sneaking to the front of the line.

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It is the eighth book in a cape punk series about teenagers whose struggles to figure themselves out are complicated by super powers. The initial protagonist of Please Don’t Tell et al is Penny whose uncontrollable mad science and knack for super villainy makes her dreams of  being a super hero tricky. After her story is resolved in Please Don’t Tell My Parents You Believe Her, Roberts began bringing in new protagonists.

While I liked Goodnight and Magenta, Avery Special, most powerful living necromancer in the world (on account of being the only living one), is  my favorite new protagonist. In no small part because she’s not interested in heroics or villainy. She just wants to get better at necromancy. Not that she won’t save the world if it needs saving.

The world of Please Don’t Tell et al has a very silver age feel where both heroes and villains follow a code of conduct that keeps things safe for civilians. But one of the underlying themes of the series is how much work it takes to keep that code of conduct up. In fact , outside of Los Angeles, it’s pretty much stated the rest of world is a lot scarier. In fact, one of the supporting characters in PDTMP I Work for a Supervillain gets, for all intents and purposes, mutilated by a world-scope villain.

One of the major conflicts in the series is the teenagers chafing under the restrictions of the code of conduct. In fact, a major part of the first book is getting grown-ups to take them seriously. Part of what makes Avery an interesting contrast is that she much more acknowledges the need for a social structure that keeps everyone safe. Part of her story arc is realizing that she does need a mentor and that magic can become a dangerous addiction.

One character, who only appears as a one scene wonder, helps hammer the danger of magic addiction home. The Godchild of Despair, who gained her powers and lost her name by failed magical suicide. I am certain that White Wolf has a splat book built around this concept. While only appearing for one scene and being a likeable character, she helps both Avery and the reader realize the stakes of dark magic.

After I Did NOT Give That Spider Superhuman Intelligence (which I think was published in the middle of the Penny books) and Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Work For a Supervillain, I didn’t think the non-Penny books would be as strong. Queen of the Dead felt like a return to form and I’m glad Avery apparently becomes the narrator again for the tenth book.