A pleasant little mashup of Scooby Doo and Agatha Christie

 One of my go-tos for casual, decompressing reads is the Three Investigators books, a juvenile detective series from 1964 to 1987. I actually find them more engaging than the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, although the Three Investigators are not as fluid or as chameleon as those books. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew have been able to endlessly reinvent themselves while the Three Investigators are more grounded in their era and geography. 

And I normally don't feel the need to write about any particular book in the series. They’re fun, escapist fluff but few books in the series really stand out. And some of the ones that do stand out for the wrong reasons lol However, when I read the The Mystery of the Sinister Scarecrow, I was left thinking that it managed to be a fun mashup of Scooby Doo and Agatha Christie.

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While the Three investigators was using the trope of the Scooby Doo Hoax before the TV show came out (Indeed, the whole fake haunting plotline is an old one and there have even been some real life examples), iI can't help but imagine that, by 1979, Scooby Doo may have had a little influence on the series. But if you are going to steal from a children's cartoon, Scooby Doo is a good choice. Obviously the scarecrow of the title is someone dressed up to scare the emotionally unstable heiress (and the boys clearly never think its supernatural) but its still the trope in action. The book gets points for not insulting the readers intelligence.

However, where the book actually won me over was in the resolution. In a household of six different people, two thirds of them were in on three different crimes, all interlocking with art theft. I had to go back and make sure one guy was actually innocent. Honestly, it was one murder short of being able to pass for an Agatha Christie work. That was some nice mystery structuring.

Even by 1979, it wasn't too much to ask for a children's book to be well written. The Hobbit is considered by some to be a children's book and it's a masterpiece and was decades old by the time The Mystery of the Sinister Scarecrow rolled around. It’s still nice to get a work that doesn't talk down to its intended audience and has some good writing.

Lovecraft through the lens of Bloch

I always forget that Robert Bloch was part of the Lovecraft circle. He seems too young to have been one of Lovecraft’s pen pals and he also seems like he’s at least one generation further in the development of horror.

Well, to be fair, he was the youngest member of the circle, still a teenager when he was a part of it. And, while he started out writing Lovecraftian tales, he moved on to develop his own style and voice.

Reading the Mysteries of the Worm, a collection of some (but I don’t think all) of his Mythos works, a number of things struck me. 

First of all, a lot of stories are meh. Which isn’t unreasonable, seeing as how young he was when he wrote most of them. However, they don’t show the promise of how good he was going to become. His afterward pretty much agrees with that assessment lol

But I can’t ignore that some of the stories, The Shambler from the Stars in particular, were influential and important to the Mythos. Not only did Shambler give us the memorable star vampire, it inspired Lovecraft to write the Haunter of the Dark. (Bloch and Lovecraft killed each other in their respective stories because that’s how they had fun)

The other thing was how hard Lovecraft’s death affected Bloch. I hadn’t realized how important a mentor, as well as a friend, Lovecraft was to him. Lovecraft did a lot to push Bloch into becoming a writer. And Bloch was also well aware how unknown Lovecraft was to the world at large when he died. Lovecraft’s passing was devastating for Bloch.

(I get why some people are August Derleth haters. But we wouldn’t have the world of the Mythos without him)

The best story in the book is, unsurprisingly, one of the last ones written. Terror in Cut-Throat Cove, despite having one of the most hackneyed titles _ever_, is a rich and unnerving work. I was reminded of Ramsey Campbell’s The Faces of Pine Dunes in a very positive way. It is Bloch approaching Lovecraft is a very Bloch way.

For me, Mysteries of the Worm was an archeological dig into both the history of the Mythos and Bloch.

Gaming with scrap paper

Recently, when I didn’t have access to my phone but was bored, I sketched out a five by five grid on the scrap paper and used my watch’s die roller to play Knizia’s Criss Cross using numbers as the six symbols. Board games are the best fidget toys.

But it made me think about what kind of games you could improvise like that.

Specifically solitaire games. Two player pencil-and-paper games are a time honored genre. Tic Tac Toe, Dots and Squares and whole books of them.

First of all, any game you can scribble down from memory has to be fairly simple. Maybe you can draw the tables from 30Rails from memory but I can’t. Second of all, while I think it’s kind of necessary to use dice, it becomes awkward to use too many.

Actually, more than Criss Cross, Wurfel Bingo and its sequel Knaster are really obvious choices.  They also only require a 5 x 5 grid and a couple of dice. And have rules you can easily carry around in your head. Criss Cross just happens to my go to in general for a super quick roll and write.

If you had more dice, you can go with something like Can’t Stop Express. Back in the olden days, scrap paper was pretty much how I normally played it. There’s also Yahtzee but I’d rather play Can’t Stop Express. Mind you, if we’re to the point where we’re talking about five or more dice, are we still in the world of scrap paper, pick up improv gaming?

While it can’t be played solitaire, I think the ultimate pick up with random stuff game is Zendo. Yes, it’s traditional to play it with plastic pyramids and other shapes, you can make koens with anything at hand.

At the end of the day, this isn’t something I’m going to get into the habit of. And I’ll probably just fall back in Criss Cross. But I still think it’s interesting to think about.

Dreams of Urbicand

I recently had a restless night where I kept dreaming of a black and white comic that I had I once read where a lattice kept growing in and around a city. When I woken up, I figured that I wouldn’t be able to figure out that distant and vague memory was about.

Nope. Two google searches later and I figured out that I had been dreaming of Fever in Urbicand by Francois Schuiten and Benoit Peters. (It’s also been published as The Fever in Urbicande)

Way back in high school, I had read it piecemeal in back issues of Cheval Noir, a Dark Horse comics anthology that reprinted European comics. It was printed in six chapters and I ended up not reading all of them in order since I read them when I could find a back issue.

I learned at that time that it was part of a larger series called Les Cites obscures, stories where architecture and geography and urbanization are used as key components to convey the story. The series is actually larger than I had realized and also includes a movie and at least one art installation. However, from what I can tell, a lot of it has never been released in English. (In fact, I relied on scans and memory to revisit Fever in Urbicand)

Of course, so much media ends up in English, it feels petty to complain lol

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Urbicand is a literally divided city where the elite live on one side of the river and the poors all live on the other side with only two bridges connecting them. And Urbicand is a mashup up of Jules Verne aesthetic and the 1927 Metroplis movie. A mysterious lattice made of an indestructible material that can grow through solid objects without damaging them engulfs the city, connecting everyone and transforming the city.

To be brutally honest, as a concept and a pretty obvious social metaphor, Fever in Urbicand wouldn’t be unusual if it were a written work. And it would fit in with the science fiction anthologies that Marvel and DC published before devoting themselves to superheroes.

However, the comic story would be ten pages long. Fever in Urbicand is much bigger than that in length. It explores the changes the network makes to the city, particularly the political ones. And while the work ends on a mysterious note, with the network growing again until it is presumably bigger than the planet but out of Urbicand, that ambiguity has weight. 

The story does have a point-of-view character, the master architect Robick. Who takes being a passive observer to such an extent that his friends Thomas the political opportunist and Sophie the madame-turned-political-radical comment on it. (Indeed, by the end, instead of Robick being the middle ground between them, they represent one side and Robick the other) However, Robick anchors the reader and even he is changed by the newtwork by the end.

However, the two most important characters are Urbicand and the network. Visually, they dominate the story. Two dueling (?) structures and their interactions drive the plot. And, damned if the art work isn’t beautiful and would look at home in a museum. Urbicand is a vision of precision and control while the network is a power outside of that control.

Fever in Urbicand left enough of an impression that I dreamed about it decades after I last read it. The story itself is an ultimately simple social parable but the artwork is magnificent. It’s not perfect but it has impact.

Nanga Parbat: Alone on the Wilderness - a tiny game about a HUGE mountain

Nanga Parbat: Alone in the Wilderness is the last game in the Kickstarter for Dr. Finn’s Book of Solo Strategy and Word Games I’m looking at. I saved it for last because it’s not actually in the book but a bonus for backers. Steve Finn has said that he plans on releasing it in some format in the future.

And, truth to tell, it doesn’t feel like it would belong in the book. The eight games in the book use elements from games like Scrabble and Carcassonne and Yahtzee that make them feel intuitive and familiar. They are carefully crafted for a wide, casual gaming audience. Nanga Parbat, on the other hand, is its own thing.

Nanga Parbat sounds to me like either a cryptic or a spare identity for Bruce Wayne but it is actually the ninth highest mountain in the world and is part of the Himalayas. It’s known as the killer mountain, one of the hardest mountains to climb in the world. It is also known for its diverse wildlife and that part is the theme of the game. You are exploring the mountain, documenting the animals you see.

The game sheet has six areas, one for each die pip. Each area has six spaces, also for each die pip. Each space has one of four different animals. (Yak, Red Panda, Snow Leopard and Musk Deer, by the way) At the bottom of the sheet, each animal has six different scoring icons.

Oh, there’s are also some trails between areas but those are only for the musk deer scoring. 

0kay. At the start of the game, you roll a die. Put it on the marching mountain area. Choose one animal to circle in that area. Circle one of the matching animal’s scoring icons on the bottom of the page. Then, move to the die to the mountain area that matches that animal’s number. Roll the dice and cross out the animal that matches the roll in the new area. Then you move the die to the area that matches the new number.

At that point, you start over again but you don’t need to roll the die. You start over in the new area. Do that twelve times and figure out your score.

If you roll a number to cross out an animal that’s already taken, cross out the next highest number. If an entire area is filled, the roll becomes a wild number.

That might sound all cluttered but after one game, it all clicks. Nanga Parbat may not use ‘familiar game language’ but it is still a simple game.

Yaks score specific spaces in each area. Musk deer score specific completed paths. Red pandas score three or more connected circled spaces in an area. Snow leopards score for varieties of animals circled in an area. The rules include a scale for judging your score and I have yet to do well lol

Okay. Here’s the thing. I enjoy playing Nanga Parbat: Alone in the Wilderness. But I’m not sure it’s a ‘good’ game.

The way that the random elements kick into the game, in particular the fact that the areas you get to add a circle to are random, makes me wonder how much my choices matter. Am I playing the game or is the game playing me?

Mind you, I also half expect to have something click and how to play well suddenly make perfect sense. Heck, if someone told me that I was wrong and the game was actually solved, I would give them a listen.

At the end of the day, it is an interesting experience and takes very little time to play. That is enough for it to have some real value for me.

Where I realize the Long Halloween is a foundational story

Rereading Batman: The Long Halloween, I realize I had forgotten both how good it is and how long ago it was written. Almost thirty years ago but it doesn’t feel that way.

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Of course, part of why The Long Halloween feels timeless is because it is so firmly entrenched in film noire. Which I suppose means it is kind of timely but that time is the 1940s lol

It is also set in that mythic early period of Batman’s history before Robin. Which, in real life was eleven months of comic books but apparently lasted at least ten years of Bruce Wayne’s life in some continuities.

The Long Halloween is a murder mystery, one that never entirely gets resolved (at least to some readers’ satisfaction. And that’s just fine because that’s part of film noire) It also explores the fall of Gotham’s conventional organized crime with the rise of costumed lunatics taking over the criminal world.

The Long Halloween is not the only story that explores Gotham becoming a superhero setting with the likes of the Joker pushing out mobsters who haven’t escaped from Dick Tracy but it does a very good job of it. (It might be one of the earliest stories about that but Batman is too vast a subject for me to the sure)

The Long Halloween also gives us another origin story for Two Face. I’m honestly not sure how many of those we’ve gotten over the years. Two Face is such a hot mess that he can’t help but be fascinating. Again, it does a very good job of it. Having thirteen issues, eleven of them before the disfigurement, helps. It gives us time to get to know Harvey Dent before everything comes crashing down.

Researching the story for this blog, I found that it influenced the Nolan movies and 2022 movie. Which I hadn’t realized but I can see. The fact that I hadn’t realized it speaks to how well The Long Halloween has sunk into the DNA of Batman.

Because while it is a solid mystery with a fascinating serial killer and an engaging origin story for both Two Face and Gotham’s identity as a fever dream, it is, above all else, a cracking good story.

My August Gaming

August is a month where life kicks back into high gear for us. There wasn’t the time or space for much gaming, let alone learning new games. Still, I got some in.

I learned:

Paper Pinball - Cretaceous Skate Park

A Dragon’s Gift (playtest)

Roll and Reanimate

Earlier this year, I realized that I have been sitting on games in the Paper Pinball series, saving them for a rainy day. I decided I should stop that. And then, in August, it looked like playing one for the first time might be the only new game I’d get in lol

I do try and learn a Roll and Write each month. I wasn’t sure if I could count Cretaceous Skate Park since I am already familiar with the system. Roll and Reanimate does count. Unfortunately, it was also disappointing.

I was very lucky to be able to participate in one of Button Shy’s playtests. Lucky in both being part of that community and finding the time. That was a lot of fun.

My August PnP

August was a month in which adulting really kicked in so working on Print and Play projects fell on the wayside. However, this wasn’t any kind of surprise. It’s part of the natural cycle of the year.

I made:

Casinopolis (published version)

Paper Pinball - Cretaceous Skate Park

Paper Pinball - Mall Bats

Paper Pinball - Boss Battle

Paper Pinball - Miasma

Words (Creative Kids)

My Farm (Creative Kids)

A Dragon’s Gift (playtest)

Rome Must Fall

My big project for August was Casinopolis. I got in on the playtesting for it but I realized I hadn’t actually made a copy of the final version of it. And, possibly because it is the most standalone version of the family, it is currently my favorite. 

Earlier this year, I realized that I was saving Paper Pinball games for when I don’t have time or mental energy to learn anything more complicated. But then I realized that meant I was never learning new boards. So I decided to just play them. And then August was busy enough that learning one Paper Pinball board was a chunk of my new-to-me gaming lol

I also laminated some other Roll and Writes. I want to revisit some of the Creative Kida games and Rome Must Fall feels like a good way to try Solo Wargame’s designs.

What if you held a convention for no one to come?

I enthusiastically follow ButtonShy and I was surprised when I saw a BGG listing for a game series called ShyCon that I’d never heard of. I wondered if it was designed to be a convention you could hold in your living room or by yourself.

Spoiler: it’s none of those things. It’s the goodie bag for ShyCon, Button Shy’s convention. That, despite paying so much attention to the company, I didn’t know existed lol

My intitial impressions have still stuck with me. Including wondering how they would even work as a concept.

I mean, how would a convention in your living room be any different than a regular game night? Have a computer set up in the corner to simulate the dealer hall by people shopping online in between games?

Now, a solitaire convention. That’s actually something I’ve participated in. Gen Can’t was essentially that. 

I first found out about GenCan’t from its 2017 Roll and Write contest where every game had to have a solitaire option or even just be a solitaire. I also participated one year in the mass Karuba game. And I’m sure there have been plenty of online conventions I’ve never heard of.

Honestly, when I first discovered BSW many years ago, it felt like I had discovered an online convention.

So, what would a physical product look like that was designed to be some kind of solitaire convention? 

First of all, it would need some kind of online connection. A way for everyone to be able to plug-in, albeit possibly not at the same time. It would need solitaire games that have scores, so people could compare how well they did with other people. And I think it would be also good to have a Take It Easy style-game so the developers could post a series of moves and attendance could have an experience like the Karuba one mentioned earlier.

Honest, I think a collection of three to five games would be a good number to keep it manageable. I don’t want to actually organize anything but it would be an interesting thought experiment.

And I’m sure it’s already been done.

Terry Pratchett and the value of Small Gods

The ending of the video game The Last Campfire reminded me of Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods. Which made me decide that it was time for me to reread Small Gods.

Which was significant for me because I haven’t been able to bring myself to read Pratchett since he passed away in 2015.

Terry Pratchett has been my favorite author for my adult life. (Daniel Pinkwater was my childhood favorite author) I’ve been reading him long enough that, starting with the third Discworld book, I was reading the books as they came out. (And, no, I have not yet read The Shepherd’s Crown, the last book and published posthumously)

Small Gods was the thirteenth books in the series and, by that point, Pratchett had definitely his stride. (There are plenty of arguments about what book was the watershed point of Pratchett becoming an insightful and compassionate satirist) When I was in college, Small Gods was the book to hand people to get them hooked on Pratchett. Which may say more about who I hung out with in college than the book.

Small Gods is Pratchett’s treatise on religion. Which honestly breaks down to people should be nice and considerate to each other. However, Pratchett also discusses how complex and difficult actually doing that really is. 

(I’m not going to go into the actual plot because I want everyone to go out and read Small Gods for themselves)

Small Gods is a good example of how Pratchett didn’t write escapist fantasy or comedy but critically considered discussions about humanity.

Cosmic Run: Mission One feels bigger than a piece of paper

At its heart, Cosmic Run: Mission One is a Roll and Move, along with being a Roll and Write. While Roll and Move is often derided as a mechanic by those who have forgotten Backgammon, Cosmic Run uses multiple pawns and dice manipulation to make sure there’s actual gameplay.

Cosmic Run: Mission One is a Roll and Write solitaire from Dr. Finn’s Book of Solitaire Strategy and Word Games. It’s also the only game in the book that Steve Finn writes cannot work as a multiplayer solitaire.

You are trying to reach four different planets before your AI opponent reach them. The play sheet consists of four planet tracks and a column of special powers that you have to earn before you can use.

Each track actually has the planet in the middle with you coming from one side and the AI enemy coming from the other. Each track on your side has a specific requirement, like three of kind needed to move/mark off a space. There are six special powers in the column, one for each pip. They range from reroll a die to change a die to any pip.

Each turn, you roll four dice. You always have to assign a die but you can reroll the rest so you get up to four rolls without using special powers. Dice can be assigned to planet tracks or special powers to earn said powers.

After you’ve assigned and resolved your dice (which can end up doing nothing if you couldn’t fulfill a track’s requirement), you roll one die for the AI. The AI spaces have numbers on them, sometimes two. If your die roll matches one (or more!) of the number at the next space of an AI track, cross it off. If it doesn’t match, you choose which track to cross off a space on.

If the AI reaches a planet first, you either lose points depending on how far along you are for that planet or lose outright if you aren’t far enough. When all four planets are claimed, the game ends. You gain points for claimed planets and unused powers and lose them for AI-claimed planets.

I haven’t played any of Dr. Finn’s other Cosmic Run games but Cosmic Run: Mission Run definitely feels like a game that started out as not-a-Roll-and-Write. And I do like it when R&Ws stretch the medium, although it’s long past the point where anyone should be surprised when R&Ws aren’t just Yahtzee clones.

The game is remarkably accessible, in large part because it uses so many concepts and mechanics that are part of the building blocks of board games. At the same time, it manages to also be its own thing. And easy to understand doesn’t mean easy to win.

Cosmic Run: Mission One does a bang up job at both being a Roll and Move game without actually having any physical pawns and while giving you choices. It’s short and ultimately simple but feels bigger than a piece of paper and some dice.

Roll and Reanimate does not make me feel lively

I’m just going to start out by saying that I did not enjoy Roll and Reanimate. 

And a good chunk of that lack of enjoyment had to do with rules ambiguities. Even worse, I was able to figure out quite a bit of what I think the designer wanted to tell me because I have played a lot of roll and write games. I think that it would have been an even worse experience for someone who wasn’t familiar with these kinds of mechanics.

The idea behind the game is that you are trying to create your own Frankenstein monster. Or, as the rules, describe your potential creation.  Franken-dice monster. I’m a dad. I dig dad jokes. Works for me.

The core of the game is dice drafting. Each player has their own pool of six dice and there is one Franken-die for the whole group. You can roll your own pool of dice multiple times, but you have to set aside at least one die in your laboratory each roll. And the first player to scream ‘Eureka’ gets to draft the Franken-die but they can’t draft any more dice.

There are three main parts of the play sheet: a mob track, the monster and the coil. Each body part on the monster has six boxes, each part with a specific die pip. 

You can spend three or more of the same pip to work on a body part. A run of three dice lets you improve the power coil. You can also discard dice to adjust other dice, reduce decomposition (which I’m not going to go into but makes sense as a mechanic) or erase check marks on the mob track.

If you complete the monster, you get a chance each turn to bring it to life. Roll all six dice and get at least the number of sixes on the coil to win.

The mob track basically makes your life difficult. Every unused die you have and every turn you don’t adds to the coil checks off boxes in the track. As the track fills up, you lose dice when you try to bring your monster to life. And when the track completely fills, you lose.

At least, I am very sure that’s how the game plays. I found the rules a bit murky and I have a lot of practice reading rules. And I also often read prototype rules that aren’t the final version for publication and they are usually better than this.

I also played the game solitaire and that’s where the real confusion kicked in. When playing solitaire, you are to mark off the mob space on the number of the Franken-die. Does that mean you mark off spaces irregularly and how does that affect the penalty? 

You also take a two mob box penalty if you use the Frankenstein-die but that makes sense. After all, there’s no competition for it. That rule also applies to large group play (but large group play doesn’t have the other penalty)

Not only is the first penalty confusing, it also doesn’t seem balanced. It’s not like playing solitaire makes the game any easier, other than no competition for the Franken-die and the other penalty accounts for that.

Honestly, Roll and Reanimate has the bones of a good game. However, it desperately needs at least a good copy editor to straighten out the rules and make them clear.

To add to my displeasure, it was a Kickstarter project, meaning I did pay for it. Not much but I am a _lot_ more forgiving of a free download or a contest entry. The moment you ask me to treat a download as a piece of merchandise, I expect the standards of a piece of merchandise.

I do think there’s a decent game hidden in Roll and Reanimate. However, I have a big backlog of games that I haven’t tried yet and a bunch of games I enjoy and want to replay. I don’t think I’ll be going back to Roll and Reanimate.

K-Pop Demon Hunters made me cry like it was a Pixar film

After enough people recommended it to us, we watched K-Pop Demon Hunters as a family. I mean, a work called K-Pop Demon Hunters would have to be pretty bad for _me_ not to like it.

But I’m going to argue it’s pretty good.

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I went in expecting fun songs and the movie had them. I was expecting stylized but strong animation. Yup. Solid and emotional voice acting? Had that too.

In other words, I went in expecting high production quality and I got it.

But that’s not what I want to talk about.

The actual plot structure was pretty boilerplate. You knew the girls were going to fall apart and get back together stronger. You knew the handsome demon boy would redeem himself. You knew the heroes would win and save the world.

But the individual beats were very strong. The way K-Pop Demon Hunters kept raising the stakes and convincing you to buy into the stakes? That’s good stuff.

At the start of the film, I was more invested in Mira and Zoey than I was in the protagonist Rumi. The other two hunters felt like they had more interesting quirks and personalities.

However, as Rumi was steadily developed as not just a workaholic but a half-demon whose demonic heritage was becoming more prominent, the film got me behind her as a protagonist. As the film explored the issues and traumas and flaws that her heritage brought her, it just kept making her a better character.

In Pocahontas and Moana, right before the finale, the protagonists meet with their maternal teachers who support them. In contrast, Rumi meets with her teacher and surrogate mother Celine before the final battle and their relationship completely falls apart. It’s a powerful scene and sets up Rumi having to go face the king of demons all alone. 

We all knew that she was going to turn it around but they really brought her low before she could start winning.

Two works ran through my head while we watched the movie. Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks (which makes sense since magic and music) and the web comic Sleepless Domain. A love letter and deconstruction to the magic girl genre, Sleepless Domain becomes much darker than it seems while remaining sweet, similar to K-Pop Demon Hunters.

Yeah, we all agreed we understood why people love K-Pop Demon Hunters.

My Perfect City uses familiar ideas to challenge us

My Perfect City from Dr. Finn’s Book of Solitaire Strategy and Word Games is an example of drawing a map on a grid. Between published Roll and Writes and design contests, I feel like I have seen dozens of games that could be described that way.

However, I also remember when I first saw Welcome to Dino World back in 2017, I felt like someone had handed me Carcassonne on a sheet of paper. That was when I really realized that the medium of Roll and Write could be so much more than different flavors of Yahtzee.

So, what does My Perfect City do to make it stand out and make it worth playing?

You are filling in a six by six grid with five different symbols/city areas (which are government buildings, banks, parks, houses and apartments, by the way) They each have their own scoring conditions and any empty spaces at the end of the game are negative points.

Okay, that’s all pretty boilerplate. So what did Steve Finn do to make My Perfect City interesting?

What I have normally seen is a symbol assigned to a die pip. In My Perfect City, each pip has three sets of symbols in specific shapes, made of one to four squares, each unit called a tile. (If that sounds confusing, it automatically makes sense when you see it)

The first placement has to touch the edge of the grid. Every placement after that has to touch a previously placed tile. And you are not allowed to flip or rotate the tiles, except through one-shot powers. There are three one-shot powers, letting you flip a tile horizontally, vertically or remove a square.

You cross off a tile when you use it. If you have crossed off every shape in a pip, you can pick any remaining tile when you roll that number. When no more tiles will fit, the game ends and you figure out your score.

So. What makes My Perfect City stand out, what makes it work? I’m going to say the variety of different tiles. 

It’s definitely an example of limitations and restrictions creating tough choices and tension. The board becomes claustrophobic. While there are eighteen tiles, the total number of squares in those eighteen is greater than the board. You can’t use every one.

That makes My Perfect City less granular. You don’t slowly fill up the board, square by square. Each move dynamically changes the board. You don’t have as many moves as you would if every tile was only one square but that means the decisions are bigger.

And that does make My Perfect City enjoyable and worth playing. The elements may be familiar but they are crafted into a thoughtful, engaging experience.

Shut the Box has a place in pubs and toy boxes

 I was surprised to see I’d never written about Shut the Box, even though it’s one of these games that I’ve played every once in a blue moon for years. 

Shut the Box is one of those pub games that can be played when you are blind drunk and the components can survive having drinks spilled all over them. There are different versions of the game but they all break down to rolling dice and flipping over numbered levers equal to the sum of the dice.

The classic version of the game has the levers in an actual box that you can close if you flip over all the levers. However, I have also seen instructions to just write the numbers on a sheet of paper and cover them with buttons. (That was in a book of kids games) 

I first came across it as a heritage edition-style game that was bigger than a Ticket to Ride box. The back, which also included the rules, said that the game originated on fishing boats where it could be played despite waves. Which is a delightful story but I haven’t actually found any evidence to back to up. It was a charming and pretty object but that couldn’t hide that there’s really not much to Shut the Box and it didn’t stay in my collection for long.

When you get past the novelty of flipping the levers, Shut the Box doesn’t offer very much. When you compare it to other pub-style dice games, like Farkle, it barely has a decision tree. The game makes more sense when you figure that its origins are in gambling. Money on the line always makes things more interesting. 

Despite that, I have gotten in the odd play, be it online or a simpler homemade copy since that heritage edition took up too much space on the game shelf. There is an odd fascination to Shut the Box for me, particularly as a historical item.

Recently, I made a set of Shut the Box cards because it amused me. More than anything else, it reminded why I don’t play it much. Yes, I play  brain fog games that I can play in a daze but Shut the Box is really too slight for even that. But a tiny handful of cards is something I can keep around.

Shut the Box is a game that will probably never be in my wheelhouse but it seems to have kept it’s home as a pub game and found one as a children’s game.

My July Gaming

July was a solid month for learning games for me. I finished going through Dr. Finn’s Book of Solo Strategy and Word Games. I got in some play testing, which always feels like a privilege. And I learned some other games.

I learned:

My Perfect City (Dr. Finn)

Paper App Galaxy

Cosmic Run: Mission Run (Dr. Finn)

Aqua ROVE

ROVE JR

Aqua ROVE - Dangerous Depths expansion (playtest)

Monster Dinner Party 

Around the World in 10-15 Minutes (USA and Europe maps)

I’ve really enjoyed Dr. Finn’s book. The games are really strong for casual play. They don’t last longer than ten, fifteen minutes and they’re easy to learn. At the same time, they deliver a definite game. I’ve been going back to them and I think I will keep doing that.

However, exploring the ROVE family was my big July experience. As I’ve said, I appreciated the design of the original ROVE, I didn’t actually enjoy playing it. Since I decided to play test an Aqua ROVE expansion, I had to learn Aqua ROVE and I decided to learn JR as well.

Both Aqua and JR meaningfully shift the movement rules in a way that are easier for my brain to handle. Aqua ROVE is arguably harder than the original game but being able to process it makes it more fun. JR is simpler, enough that it’s now on my casual play list.

Although it’s not on the list, I also tried out the dice-free variant of Paper App Golf. I appreciate that it exists but, unsurprisingly, it removes everything that’s interesting about what is already a very simple game. Paper App Galaxy, on the other hand, promises to be an interesting campaign game.

With some games, after I’ve learned them, I figure out what I’ve learned from them and I’m done. Which isn’t that unreasonable with PnP and prototypes. But last month, just about everything I learned, I plan to go back to.

My July PnP

 Huh, August snuck up on me. Well, time to write about what Print and Play Projects I made in July.

I made:

Dungeon Post

Concealed (zen mode board)

Par Out Golf demo

Rollway Station (basic map)

Aqua ROVE

Aqua ROVE - Dreadful Depths (playtest)

Battle Crest - Fell Woods

Battle Crest -Imperator 

Monster Dinner Party

One Card Maze

My original ‘big’ project for the month was Dungeon Post. I haven’t actually learned it yet but I know that I won’t play it if I don’t have it made lol

However, playtesting for Button Shy was what actually ended up being my crafting focus. I realized that I hadn’t actually ever made a copy of Aqua ROVE so I had to make a copy to playtest an expansion. And while I didn’t think I would playtest the new Battle Crest module, I made a copy of the base game and the solo module/AI so I could learn the system if I felt like it. (So far, I haven’t but having a copy makes it much more likely)

I can already see with the school year kicking in, my crafting time will be limited. But July let me make stuff that will be seeing some play.