The Space Merchants still feels timely

 I’ve been aware of The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth pretty much since I started looking seriously at science fiction. I remember seeing copies of it at used bookstores when I was in high school and I knew it was supposed to be one of the great classics of the genre. 

But I only got around to reading it last month.

It’s one part thriller, two parts social commentary and three parts satire with a hefty focus on character development.

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In this world of the future, industry rules the world to the point where governments are not even figureheads. And advertising firms runs industry. The world is on the edge of ecologic ruin but advertising campaigns mask and hide that fact.

Michael Courtenay is a high level advertising executive in one of the leading firms. To give an idea of the scope, the company incorporated the entire subcontinent of India. They are now in the process of colonizing and owning the planet Venus.

So, of course, Mitch ends up getting shanghaied into a position at the bottom of the barrel, skimming algae and locked into a contract designed to bury him in forever debt so he gets to see life on the other side.

Mitch is a really well designed character. He starts off an an anti-hero. And not a Wolverine anti-hero but a Willy Loman anti-hero. More than that, he isn’t a Bertie Wooster child of privilege. He is fiercely intelligent and aggressive. When he hits rock bottom, he immediately starts digging up.

And it takes most of the book for Mitch to hit his redemption point. I remember hearing DiMartino and Konietzko, the creators of Avatar the Last Airbender, say that Zuko had to regain his privilege to give him to sacrifice for his heel face turn to mean anything. Mitch has taken over the company that owns India before he become a conservationist and a good guy.

While the thriller aspect of the book is the least important one, at least in my opinion, Pohl and Kornbluth do deliver on it. The plot keeps on making unexpected swerves and they keep on ratcheting up the tension.

I found the satire to be milder compared to works by, say, Kurt Vonnegut. However, I also wonder if it would have felt more extreme in 1952 compared to a far more social media saturated world.

The Space Merchants felt like a piece of classical literature disguised as pulp science fiction. I’m glad that I read it but I’m also glad I waited to read it.

I don’t know how big a legacy Warpspawn Games has

 It had been a number of years since I had last tried looking at Warp Spawn Games. Even then, it had been a bit dodgy. Unfortunately, it looks like it is gone for good.

This is because, even more unfortunately, the designer behind Warp Spawn Games, Lloyd Krassner, passed away in 2020. He was younger than I had always pictured him. And, eventually, the no-longer-maintained site faded away.

I am not the right person to write about Krassner or Warp Spawn. They weren’t my kind of games and I’ve only played very few of them. However, as someone who loves PnP, they are a major historical landmark in that part of the hobby.

Warp Spawn got started in 1997, still the early years of regular people using the internet. For more than twenty years, it offered free print-and-play rule sets.

Almost all of the games were designed by Krassner. Who designed literally hundreds of games. Mostly war games, which are outside of my wheelhouse but I believe he was well regarded as a designer, not just for being prolific. 

I may be mistaken but I believe it was just rule sets and you had to come up with the components yourself, although online users created resources for a number of the games. 

Mind you, we are talking about dial-up modems that _allegedly_ could get up to 56 kilobytes per second. By modern standards, that is non-existent bandwidth. Getting enough to be able to make anything was amazing.

While the site is gone, the games are not. The files have been saved. I personally found them at https://www.rockini.name/warpspawn/ and I am sure that’s not the only place. 

Lloyd Kissner created resources, free games and a gaming space in the Internet when folks were figuring out just what kind of environment the Internet would become. I honestly wonder what the hobby alone, let alone PnP, would look like without him.

Rome Must Fall explores the logistics of war in one page

 I have really been meaning to look at Martin Melbardis and their company Solo Wargame. Specifically the Roll and Write war games. I’ve actually backed a few on Kickstarter and just needed to find the time/headspace to try them. Looking through the ones I have, Rome Must Fall seemed like the most newbie friendly so that’s what I started with.

I have to say that Print and Play war games have been around for a while. I think they might have been one of the earliest genres to get adopted. You can find Chit-and-Hex PnP games that are decades old. Heck, Malta Convoy is a roll and write war game from 2001. 

However, Solo Wargame’s mission statement seems to be to create PnP games that have the convenience of Roll and Write but have some heavier meat to them. I like Postmark Game’s Battle Card series but they are very light exercises.

Despite the name, you are actually trying to hold the Roman empire together in Rome Must Fall. The game is set in 425 AD and you are dealing with threats on… well, just about every side. 

You are dealing with six different fronts in the game, four barbarian forces and two raiders. Every loss to the barbarians makes you lose territory while losing to the raiders will cost you some form of resources.

The core mechanic is dice allocation. You roll six dice. You assigned them to each front. Then, the invading forces get to roll against you. 

You have a limited number of reserve tokens that you can use to increase your die, as well as limited access to some special abilities. Not only do you have to roll sixes to be able to use the special abilities each one is tied to a city on the map. If that city gets sacked, you lose that ability.

And, just to make sure it hurts, your six sided dice can get reduced to three-sided dice by certain losses.

If you lose too many key cities, you lose the game. If you can survive 12 turns, you win the game.

Simply put, you can’t win every fight. You have to pick your battles carefully and figure out what you can afford to lose. Your resources are going to get more and more scarce as the game goes on. Years ago, a friend told me that Advanced Civilization was about managing calamities over six hours. Rome Must Fall gives you that experience on one page in fifteen minutes.

To be honest, I haven’t played enough to figure out how much luck determines if you’re going to survive. I haven’t survived yet.

That being said, and I mean this as a compliment, Rome Must Fall feels like an older brother to the Battle Card series. It serves as both a small war game and a history lesson. However, while I feel that there is an optimal path in those games, there is too much going on in Rome Must Fall to have a single, scripted strategy. 

Rome Must Fall is a budget friendly, accessible experience. It is fraught with tension as you do your best to slow down the death spiral that is baked into the game. I’m glad I looked into Solo Wargame.

Rock Candy Mountain - tale of mythic hobos

 Rock Candy Mountain is a mythic hobo tale. I can only assume it’s not named The Big Rock Candy Mountain due to copywrite reasons. It is the story of how far a man will go to be with his family. (Oh, it’s also a two volume graphic novel. Did I mention it’s a comic?)

I don’t know if mythic hobo is actually a real term but you know what I mean. The story of men (it almost always seems to be men) who may be homeless but still have pride and integrity and independence. It’s not exclusive to the United States but it does seem to click here.

While Brother Where Art Thou is one of the quintessential mythic hobo movies (despite not actually being about hobos) and uses the song The Big Rock Candy Mountain, the work that immediately sprang to my mind was Emperor of the North Pole. A movie that it sometimes feels like only three other people have seen lol

In it, Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine play a hobo and a conductor who basically try to murder the Hell out of each other. It’s not perfect but it left an impression on me.

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Rock Candy Mountain is the story of a hobo named Jackson who sold his soul to the devil to make sure he would make it back to his family when he gets drafted into WWII. A family that dies on their way to meet him when he gets back to the states. 

Now, he is searching for Rock Candy Mountain, a heaven for sinners, hoping there he can be reunited with his wife and daughter.

The gift that the devil gave him was the power to defeat any man in combat. A power with a lot of loopholes (more than one man or a woman negates it, for instance) but one that the book has a lot of fun playing with. (He was able to use it to kill Hitler and take the spear of destiny. Which is why the book isn’t set in the 1930s and isn’t very hobo but is pretty mythic)

By the time the story starts, Jackson has the FBI and the Hobo Mafia after him but they pale compared to the devil. The devil looks like a pantomime devil with horns and goatee but literally rips people apart. The book is a comedy horror and the devil is the horror part.

And our point of view character is the perpetually unlucky Pomona Slim, who wasn’t looking to be a hobo or caught up in a fight with the devil. However, he turns out to be one of the most decent characters in the book, to the point that the devil tells him he has no claim on his soul. (He is willing to make a deal with Pomona though)

Rock Candy Mountain is a fun story with undertones of tragedy and redemption. I didn’t know I needed a mythic hobo but I guess I did.

66 fleurs de printemp just doesn’t fit for me

I want to start off with thanking Accessijeux for letting games published for their charity out into the wild and Benjamin Cronshaw for translating the rules into English.

66 fleurs de printemps, 66 Flowers of Spring, is the third game in a series of season-themed Roll and Write games that were originally published for charity. 

It follows the general formula of all the games in the series. Each turn, you roll three dice and assign them in different ways. 

The first die is assigned to one of the five different mini games, all of which are season-themed. The second die causes a weather event to go off, which gives you some kind of bonus. The last die goes to the flower tracks, which is cumulative. The game ends either when someone’s track reaches 66 or either twenty turns, whatever comes first. Most points wins.

By this point, I’ve played all four of the games In the series, including the summer game. And Spring Flowers is currently my least favorite game in the series and I don’t see that changing soon.

Part of that is because I found it the most confusing. In particular, the plant mini game where you use a weather event to grow the plants. I wasn’t sure if you automatically got points and had to grow plants just for admittedly strong bonuses or if you had to grow them for the points as well. Does every plant you’ve started grow when it rains or do you do have to pick just one. I think I’ve figured it out but I won’t be surprised if I’m wrong. 

However, beyond learning pains, I found that the weather events were only about getting bonus points. Some of them were almost like separate mini games. Admittedly, some of them increase multiplayer competition, which is good. In 16 Lights and 62 Suns, the bonus elements, which include forms of dice manipulation, are part of the main gameplay. In 66 Flowers, they feel like an add on.

(61 Leaves doesn’t really have extra elements but its simplicity is part of its charms)

Don’t get me wrong. 66 Flowers is a solid design. And I very much appreciate how each game in the series isn’t the exact same game with different artwork. In fact, 66 Flowers with the weather events may be the most unique game in the series. However, I still don’t enjoy it as much as the others.

My August Gaming

With school starting on the second week of August, life got crazy for all of us. So, not much time or mental space for learning new games.

I learned:

62 soleils d’ete

Solatro

Poker Squares

With 62 soleils d’ete, I now have played all the Accessijeux season games that I’m aware exist. I’d be happy to find out there are more. I’d expected to enjoy the Summer game more than the Spring game and I turned out to be right. I need to play it more but August was just too crazy.

The other two games I learned were both solitaire flavors of Poker. One is at least 77 years old and the other was designed last year. (I thought I saw a reference that said Poker Squares dated back to 1908 but I never found it again so I guess I was mistaken)

Solatro _feels_ more like actual poker, which I appreciate. Poker Squares only uses poker hands while Solatra had more poker mechanics. Although there’s nothing with just using poker hands. Lamarckian Poker is a dandy game.

September will probably be busy too but I’ll get in enough gaming to keep me sane.

My August PnP

 August was a busy month, which I honestly think will be the pattern until at least the holidays. I got some small projects in. In fact my big project was a whole bunch of little things.

I made:

Rolling Thunder 

Paper App: Dungeon (maps 1-7)

Flipuzzles (2021 & 2024 sets)

One Page Mazes (Season 4 exclusives plus  a few odds and ends)

Master of Coin (eras I & II)

Poker Squares

Voyages (Maps 1&2)

Aquamarine (2 copies of Map 1)

My big project for August was making a bunch of puzzles that are each one card. I made pretty much all the Flipuzzles that I have access to and several pages of One Card Mazes. Both series are mazes that you follow with your mind’s eye.

And they have already proven to be a good build. They are perfect for when I am stuck waiting in the car, particularly when it’s so hot that I’m worried that my phone will overheat (which has happened) I prefer One Card Mazes because it’s easier to keep my place in them but variety is good when you fidgeting to stay sane.

Beyond that, it was one-page Roll and Writes, including making slightly larger versions of some of the maps of Voyages and Aquamarine. (I made two copies of the Aquamarine for multiplayer play)

I haven’t tried Master of Coin yet but I think I’ll enjoy it more than the 52 Realms games. 

I make and play games for fun and for intellectual engagement but I also do it for decompression. This month’s builds? Very decompression oriented.