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.

Brain fog gaming

I’ve decided that I need another category of gaming, brain fog gaming. 

You know, when you play the games that you play when you are too physically or emotionally exhausted to think. As opposed to the games other people play with you when you are too physically or emotionally exhausted to think.

 

I suppose I could also use the term fidget gaming but I feel that implies either anxiety or boredom. That probably involves playing some of the same games but the motivation isn’t the same.

We are definitely talking about short games, games that fall under the filler label. Either simple rule sets or rule sets that you know like the back of your hand. And you should have fun. 

And brain fog doesn’t mean brainless. There still has to be something to engage you. Years ago, I read about a betting game called Pig which was just rolling one die until you quit or roll a one. Without betting, there’s no engagement. But Pass the Pig with its cute pig dice, that’s engaging.

Even in brain fog, I need some spark. Be it theme or chrome or some quirk of the mechanics, it needs to not just not tax my brain but also entertain me. So, if you want to get through my brain fog, it does take some kind of hook. 

Brain fog gaming definitely has elements of guilty pleasure. Because a huge chunk of the games that I reach for are not good games from a mechanical standpoint. In fact, when my brain is clear, I find myself wondering what was I thinking playing some of these games lol And yet, these help me relax and have fun.

I don’t think I can cross the line to saying that brain fog gaming is part of mental health. I think that’s giving them too much weight. However, I do think they help.

Nine Perils: Mysticana’s first steps

 It only makes sense that my first foray into Mysticana was Nine Perils, the solitaire option of the core games. I mean, I only have to find myself in order to try out the game.

For me, Mysticana is going to live or die by the solitaire games. If I’m not enjoying it, then at least I’m not spreading the misery around. Solitaire games are how you test drive game systems.

 

And I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am alone on focusing in on the solitaire options. It seems like more and more games have solo modes. There is a definite demand for it. Out of the first nine planned expansions, if I’ve counted right, six of them are solo or have solo options. (Holy cow, that’s a lot)

Mysticana is an eighteen card deck that has three suites ranked A to 6. The suites are elemental themed with a rock-paper-scissors hierarchy. Water beats fire. Fire beats earth. Earth beats water. If I keep looking at these games, I feel like I should copy and paste the paragraph.

Nine Perils is pretty darn simple. Shuffle the deck and make a line of nine facedown cards. The other nine cards are your draw pile. Draw a hand of one to three cards (the bigger your hand, the easier the game) Flip over the middle card in the line and you’re ready to go.

Turns are simple. Turn over a line card. Draw a card from the draw pile. Play a card under one of the line cards. Game ends and figuring out if you’ve won or not when you’ve got a line of your own nine cards under the original line.

If every card in your line is greater than the card above it, you win. Which would mean you have to be lucky and good at card counting. But there’s a twist. If there’s a tie, that card and the next card down the line are determined by third card.

Basically, if you can set up a cascade of ties ending with your card beating the last card in the line, you win. Ideally, four cards will get skipped over and it doesn’t matter what you played on those spots.

So, Nine Perils really comes down to trying to do this one clever thing. You could also hope to being really lucky but the cascade move is really the goal. And that one clever thing is a very obvious strategy.

But… I found myself playing three times in a row until I got that cascade. The game play and the goal are simple and obvious but it was still satisfying. I’ll keep playing it and probably at a higher difficulty.

Nine Perils isn’t revolutionary or brilliant. It is a solid little solitaire though. I don’t think it’s a killer game that will make Mysticana famous. It does make me think that the deck does have potential.

My June gaming

 June was a different kind of month for me because a lot of what I learned were design contest entries or play test prototypes. Which, in many ways, are very similar. 

Miseries of the Night

Mysticana - Nine Perils

Casinopolis (prototype)

Dice Fishing D6

Guards & Goblins (2024 9-Card Contest)

The Star Speaker (2024 9-Card Contest)

Simply Solo #8 (prototype)

My Evil Lab

Design contest entries were one of my entry points into PnP so that was a return to form. On the other hand, being more serious about being in play test groups is new. I’m hoping to keep doing that but I will have to see what life holds. I momentarily have a little more free time but that won’t last. 

I have also noticed that I am getting into the habit of starting each month by learning a really quick, simple game just to make sure that I actually learn something. This month, it was Miseries

of the Night. Shockingly not Dice Fishing D6, which is easily the simplest and lightest game I’ve played all year.

But really, the real value of my game learning this June was playing games that were still in progress, still experimental in some ways. And giving my feedback in some cases. It’s a different side of gaming, one that I didn’t discover for quite a while.

I don’t know what July will be like. For one thing, I don’t know how often Button Shy asks for play testers lol

But June was rewarding.

My June PnP

 June ended up being a busy Print and Play month for me. Heck, there’s a chance it will be my heaviest PnP month of the year.

Some of it was because of summer break giving me more time. Some of it was because I was looking at contests and play testing. And if I’m am already doing a lot of printing and laminating, laminating some Roll and Write sheets was just natural.

Beards and Booty

Mysticana (demo version)

Murderers’ Row (Bluey Retheme)

Casinopolis (playtest prototype)

Guards & Goblins (2024 9-Card Contest)

The Star Speaker (2024 9-Card Contest)

Wayfarer’s Tale: The Lonely Isle

Dice Fishing D6

Around the World in 10-15 Minutes + expansions

Everest 1924

Bake and Sale

Space Alone - B&W basic boards 

Malta Convoy

Logicards (2024 9-Card Contest)

Nintle (2024 9-Card Contest)

Tanuki Matsuri

Habits (2024 9-Card Contest)

Spore (2024 9-Card Contest)

Simply Solo #8 (play test version)

My ‘big’ project was originally Beards and Booty, which was a surprisingly fun game. However, I’d also count the Mysticana demo deck as a big project as well. The play test prototypes also edge into that territory.

But I did a bunch of smaller, often quirkier projects. Which was quite fun. I used to add an asterisk to laminating a R&W sheet because there wasn’t any real construction involved. I no longer do that because the quality of a game doesn’t depend on the amount of work you put in.

Beards and Booty, for example, just required me to laminate a variety of play sheets for the different characters and beasts. But the actual game play is jolly fun. I will get plenty of play out of it.

I also did a lot of prep work for projects that I didn’t finish. When life is busier and crazier, I will be glad to have PnP games where most of the work is already done.

Button Shy and playtesting

 Perhaps the biggest highlight of my June gaming was being part of the play testing group for Casinopolis.

As I understand it, I am allowed to discuss the game. I am just not allowed to give out the files. However, in order to be safe and courteous, all I will say is that it is definitely part of the greater Sprawlopolis family but is mechanically distinct as well. And jolly god fun.

(I do plan on posting a proper review when the game gets kickstarted)

This was not my first rodeo play testing a game but it was my first time play testing with Button Shy. And I am definitely planning on continuing to participate in their program.

Part of that is because I’m going to be buying these games anyways so it’s fun to both get a preview and contribute. A way to give back. The community is also quite nice, but I have had good luck with nice board gaming communities, on and off line. (When I first began my transition from only RPGs to board games too, I was amazed at how much friendlier I found board gamers to be)

But, frankly, the biggest reason is how accessible Button Shy has made the process. The hardest part was joining their discord server. Button Shy made it easy to find and sign up for the projects.

My gaming life has changed a lot over the years. For a variety of reasons, mostly moving to different cities, I don’t have a regular group. However, gaming finds a way. And this has been a fun way.

Tolkien’s vision of Faery

 If it wasn’t for the Lord of the Rings, I doubt I would have ever heard of J. R. Tolkien’s Smith of Wootton Major. That said, the novella is an interesting, thoughtful read.

According to Wikipedia, a source that can and should be questioned, the novella started life as a preface for George McDonald’s The Golden Key. I might be a coward but an entire novella for a preface feels like a lot to me. Also, I’m pretty sure the finished Smith is longer than the Golden Key.

Set in the not-too-far past, it is the story of how the titular Smith is given a magic star that lets him explore the world of Faery. Tolkien wrote it to describe Faery as a concept and a setting but there’s a character arc in there as well.

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As a child, Smith is gifted with a Faery star that ends up affixed to his forehead. It gives him the ability to travel far from the fields he knows and into Faery. But Smith doesn’t have any grand quest or goal. Really, for all intents and purposes, he is a tourist in Faery. Which makes perfect sense if the story is more about world building than plot. 

In fact, when Smith is given a task by the Queen of Faery, it’s simply to find his successor in wearing the star and traveling through the Faery lands. While it is never said, rereading the story makes me wonder if the real purpose of the star bearer is to keep humanity’s wonder and connection to Faery alive.

Which would tie in to one of the reoccurring motifs of Smith of Wootton Major, the contrast between the Victorian cute fairies and the older, more dangerous beliefs. Nokes, a shallow and arrogant villager in Wootton Major, who gets a hefty chunk of the entire dialogue, is there to represent the Victorian side of the equation. 

And the vision of Faery in Smith of Wootton Major is one of mystery and wonder and danger. It is the most Lord Dunsany of anything I’ve read by Tolkien and Tolkien’s letters make it clear Dunsany was an influence on his overall work. The fantastic but unexplained world of Faery is definitely one of the stories strengths.

Still, Smith is not a static character. We see him grow wiser as the story goes on. At the end, when he has given up the star for the next generation, Smith is clearly prepared to bring the insight he has gained from his wanderings into the mortal world.

The Lord of the Rings was possibly the biggest event in the fantasy genre. It changed the genre forever. Smith of Wootton Major is an itty bitty blip compared to it. However, it also shows Tolkien’s love of world building and history.

Why I keep playing Murderers’ Row

Looking at my records, it’s been a few years since I’ve written about Murderers’ Row. I have played a lot of Print and Play games over the last several years. I’m always curious about finding new things. So it’s hard for a game to stay in rotation. But Murderers’ Row has. It just keeps holding up.

It’s an eighteen-card tableau destroying game. You randomly create a row of ten cards and then use the cards’ special powers to eliminate all but one card. If you can’t make a move and you have either more than one card or no cards, you lose.

 

The cards all have thematic names like Swordsman or Assassin and have powers that are somehow at thematically linked to that name. When a card gets used, it gets flipped over to mark it as inactive and you can’t use that power again. 

A major factor in the game’s replay value is that you only play with some of the cards and placement matters. Most cards have very specific ranges. So you end up with a ton of possible layouts and they are all functionally different. 

Not only does Murderers’ Row not take up much space, it’s pretty easy to play it as an In Hand game so you don’t even need a table. I will admit that, sometimes, when playing it as an In Hand game, I’ll drop the number of cards, particularly if I’m tired. However, the fewer the cards in the initial setup, the more luck plays a major part in making a layout solvable. With ten cards, you have enough abilities that decisions make the real difference.

And that is also why I keep playing Murderers’ Row and recommend it. It is a tiny game and doesn’t take long to play. However, it isn’t just luck and the game doesn’t play itself. You have to figure out how to solve it.

In many ways, Murderers Row reminds me of Scott Almes Food Chain Island. Similar idea and mechanics only you are just working with a line instead of a grid. And frankly, Food Chain Island is better but Murderers Row is still a damn good little game. It’s been part of my travel box for years and I don’t see it leaving.

Dipping a toe back into contests

 Sometimes, it feels like every design contest has some easy-entry-point entry. A game that doesn’t have a ton of rules or a ton of construction or components. As a rule, they usually aren’t the ‘best’ games but they let you get your foot in the door, let you participate.

In the 2024 9-Card contest, at least one of those games is Guards & Goblins. It’s a solitaire so I don’t have to find anyone else. All it takes is the nine cards, no other components. Heck, it’s even low ink.

And it’s a tile-laying game, which is a blessing and a curse for it. On the blessing side, that means it was easy to learn. On the curse side, there are a lot of micro tile-laying games out there. And when you’re competing against the Orchard family or the Sprawlopolis family, you are up against some top tier competition.

And, no, Guards & Goblins doesn’t measure up to those games. 

Every card has one guard, one goblin or hobgoblin, and two houses. You get a hand of three cards. You need to connect each enemy with a group of two to four guards.  You can cover or tuck parts of cards but you can’t cover enemies or both houses.

(My first glance at the rules led me to think that you placed a card and then slid a card. A mechanic I do think would be interesting)

What Guards & Goblins really reminds me of is Micro Rome, an ‘older’ tile-laying micro game. Micro Rome is also about the interaction of symbols. However, it has a lot more symbols and twice as many cards not counting an expansion. So, a lot more going on.

All of that said, Guards & Goblins is still a pleasant little nine-card experience. I am pretty sure it can be reliably won by creating a conga line of guards touching all the goblins and hobgoblins and I’ll probably play it off and on until it feels ‘solved’

But it’s real value to me is playing a contest entry that isn’t just printing out a R&W sheet (which I do like doing) I really haven’t done that in over a year and it’s nice to do that again.

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3227901/wip-guards-and-goblins-2024-9-card-pnp-design-cont

Chi’s Sweet escape from reality

You would think that I’d been meaning to read Chi’s Sweet Home because I am a life long cat lover. But no, I decided to pick up Chi’s Sweet Home because I saw so many students reading it, including students who I really didn’t expect to read anything at all.

Spoiler: I quickly realized that there isn’t much actual reading involved in Chi’s Sweet Home. And that’s the last mean thing I will say about it.

Chi’s Sweet Home is a slice-of-life manga about a kitten who gets adopted by a family after she gets lost. It is so soft and gentle that it makes Ai Yori Aoshi look like Berserk. (Or if video game analogies are more your thing, it makes Animal Crossing look like Dark Souls)

The last cat-centric manga I read was A Man and His Cat, the story of a widower who adopts an unwanted cat and how they ease each other’s loneliness. I haven’t finished the first volume of that because it’s hard to read when you’re crying that hard. It’s beautiful but has serious feels.

I was worried that Chi’s Sweet Home would also be emotionally rough. However, at least in the first volume, it wasn’t nearly so traumatic. Yes, Chi gets lost from her mother and still dreams of her. However, the stories are more focused on sweet life moments.

Amusingly, Chi’s Sweet Home is Seinen, the young adult men genre. (Not porn but the next step up from Shonen) Because it is published in a Seinen magazine. While it is as child friendly as Bluey. Which is just further proof that genre categories are garbage.

That said, part of its strength is that it can be quite frank about daily life. Chi’s struggles getting litter box trained (she is a very young kitten) and her stress visiting the vet are clearly conveyed. As a pet owner and a parent, Chi’s Sweet Home rings true.

But the reason to read Chi’s Sweet Home is how it celebrates the quiet joys and tiny victories. It is a refuge from the big, scary world. And it’s a series I know I won’t binge but I will keep going back to.

Beards and Booty is a beer and pretzels joy

I went into Beards and Booty with meh expectations but I was pleasantly surprised by how it played out. Nothing in Beards and Booty is original or innovative but it all came together in a way that really worked for me.

Beards and Booty is a game about pirates fighting other pirates or sea monsters. It’s a Print and Play game where all you print out are play mats. No other construction necessary. Just add dice and a few tokens.

The game comes in a few different modes. The original multiplayer mode just has everyone grab their own pirate and beat each other up. You add in the sea monsters for solitaire, semi-cooperative and fully cooperative mode. 

Each pirate and sea monster has their own play mat. Pirates have tracks for reputation/health and gold, a menu of dice driven actions, spaces for tracking rolls and special gold driven powers. Sea monsters just have a health track and a menu of dice powers.

Yes, our old friend Yahtzee is back to be the driving force behind the game. Which I am completely fine with. Yahtzee, as a standalone game, only works in my opinion as a solitaire. It is too dry and turns take too long to work as a multiplayer game. Multiplayer solitaire games work best with simultaneous turns. However, when you add theme and additional mechanics to Yahtzee, then the limited dice control that you get becomes interesting.

Beards and Booty makes one twist in the Yahtzee formula. While you roll all five dice at the start of your turn, each dice can be rolled up to three times. There are spots on the mat to help you keep track of how many times you’ve rolled each dice. So you can roll more than three times. This usually hasn’t been the case for my plays but this does give you a chance for Hail Mary plays.

I recently learned another game that uses Yahtzee as its base, Roll Crawl. However, Roll Crawl uses a smaller dice pool and a very limited number of actions per character. Beards and Booty uses the full range of Yahtzee combinations, although the more powerful actions require specific pips which vary depending on each pirate.

You can do damage, heal up damage and get gold. Gold is used to pay for special actions. Every pirate has a different set and that’s the only real difference between pirates.

Sea Monsters work differently. Whatever dice you don’t use for a dice combination becomes their dice pool which gets rolled once. Each monster has a different menu of attacks so each one has its own feel. They also each have three levels of difficulty and the higher levels are legitimately harder.

So why do I like Beards and Booty? Chuck dice and do damage. That’s pretty much standard operating procedure for what have to be hundreds, if not thousands, of games.

It’s because it has such a rich Beer and Pretzels vibe to it. Between the big, goofy pictures of the pirates and monsters, the big menu of options and the special powers which, at the right time, seem too good, Beards and Booty just has a strong sense of fun. It’s not a game for serious play but it definitely clicks for silly, casual, trash talking play.

More than that, Beards and Booty does it with very few moving parts. In my experience, Beer and Pretzel games have a big stack of cards and/or chunky plastic pieces. Which awesome because experience is a big part of Beer and Pretzels. But cramming that into a few sheets of paper, plus some dice, that’s cool and convenient.

I would be lying if I said that Beards and Booty was the game I didn’t know I was looking for. Because I have been looking for a casual, take that, Beer and Pretzels, print and play game. All of the likely candidates that I have found he involved making thick decks of cards. Finding one with minimalist components that I think really works, that’s just ideal. I bought it with solitary play in mind, but I can really picture getting all the play sheets printed in color and laminating them so that I have a game I can put into a folder and take anywhere.

Beards and Booty is a niche game. There are a lot of people I wouldn’t play it with and there are a lot of times I wouldn’t pull it out for the folks I would play it with. However, it is a game I’m glad to have found.

The Last Lighthouse - Tower Defense and Nameless Horror

 The Last Lighthouse is the sixth game in Scott Almes’ Simply Solo series. As someone who has stumbled into Print and Play, solitaire, and Button Shy, the Simply Solo series is one that I eagerly look forward to every new entry.

The game consists of eighteen cards (which I have been told is how many cards fit on one professional printer’s sheet) Two of them are your light house and a way to keep track of its health. The rest are duo-purpose monster/trap cards. Monsters are trying to destroy your lighthouses and traps are how you destroy monsters. 

The game consists of a queue leading to the light house. Monsters get added from the deck and you add traps from your hand. Monsters attack your lighthouse and your traps. Traps attack monsters.

Here are the two really clever bits. Both traps and monsters have special abilities that either go off when placed or when defeated. And managing special powers are a big part of the game. And, after your initial hand, you don’t draw any more cards. The only way you get more traps in your hand is by defeating monsters and getting those cards.

I hadn’t thought of The Last Lighthouse as a tower defense game until I saw other folks use that description. Trying to protect a lighthouse against a column of monsters? By Jove, it is totally a tower defense game!

My first two plays of the Last Ligjthouse were terrible experiences. That was because I got a rule seriously wrong. I had assumed that traps were one use and got discarded after taking out a monster. Even at easy level, that made winning neigh impossible. Then I realized that traps stick around until destroyed by monsters or the tide.

After I got that straightened out, the game got a lot better. In fact, I think that the mechanics are a treat. Games get tight quickly and there’s room for clever moves.

Most of my issues with the game are actually about the theming. In particular, with the term traps. Because traps implies a one-shot item and the traps are functionally work just like monsters, only on your side. A term like drone or automaton would have made a lot more sense.

I also wish traps had more theming.  The monsters don’t have names but they get creepy imagery. And being nameless may make them more dreadful. Traps don’t get a name or a picture, just numbers. It’s a level of abstraction that pulls away from the theming. 

That said, the mechanics carry the game and mechanics are the real deciding factor.

After a really bad first impression, The Last Ligjthouse is really growing on me. After I got the rules straight, it fits the Simply Solo mission statement. Easy to set up, doesn’t take too long to play while still having some meat on its bones. It went from ‘why am I playing this’ to ‘this is coming out on the regular’