Asimov’s Black Widowers are cozier than Agatha Christie

 I first stumbled across Isaac Asimov’s Black Widowers stories when I was in middle school or high school so it’s safe to say that I’ve been reading them off and on for a long time.

They are a series of straight up just straight up mystery stories. While Asimov is synonymous with science fiction, he wrote a lot more than that. (In fact, he wrote far more non-fiction than anything else.)

The Black Widowers are social club based on one that Asimov actually belonged to. (He denied the real life one ever solved mysteries though) And the stories are formulaic enough that even the characters seem to be aware of it. The Black Widowers meet once a month, there is almost always a guest who has some sort of problem and their waiter Henry solves it at the end of the story.

That being said, Asimov got more than fifteen years worth of writing out of the Black Widowers, up to the end of his life. And I like the justification that Henry was able to solve so many mysteries because all the arguing about the problem at hand helped him analyze it. That helps justify the formula.

I recently realized that, while I have read quite a bit of the series, I have never read the second collection, More Tales of the Black Widowers. Either I missed it because it has almost the same title as the first book, (only adding the word more to it) or I had completely forgotten about it.

So I decided to correct that.

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Ironically, this collection includes the story that introduced me to the Black Widowers, The Ultimate Crime, which was reprinted in Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space. Further ironically, that story wasn’t about any crime or puzzle but the club helping someone come up with a topic for a Sherlock Holmes paper. I honestly don’t consider it one of the stronger stories.

However, the collection also contains what I now consider to be the weakest Black Widowers story, Nothing Like Murder. A Russian guest believes he heard two college students planning a murder. Henry is about to figure out that they were really just talking about Tolkien. Murder and Mordor just sound alike.

I don’t know if the conceit might have been cuter back in the 1970s, when fantasy and science fiction were a lot more niche, or if it would have seemed obnoxious. I did think Henry figuring it out was a lot more of a magical deduction than usual with his reasoning coming down to ‘college students talk about Tolkien’

(I am now sure that I hadn’t read this collection before because I’d have remembered Nothing Like Murder lol)

It’s ironic to harp on those two stories because one of the strengths of the series is its consistency. The formulaic nature feels comforting. Seven friends solving problems that usually don’t involve them in a luxurious restaurant is probably the height of cozy mystery.

The actual mysteries themselves, while theoretically fair play, are sometimes built on very obscure bits of trivia. Asimov actually softens this by having Henry’s solutions not being definitive but simply the most likely. 

However, the Black Widowers aren’t really puzzle for the readers to solve. They are a very pleasant and entertaining form of escapism :)

Flip Freighters is exactly what it says it is, no less and no more

 I’ve been looking at Flip Freighters really since it came out. More than anything else, having to put together a deck from two decks of traditional playing cards got it sidelined compared to games that just required grabbing dice.

However, Flip Freighters promised me something that I’ve been wanting, a Roll and Write Pick Up and Deliver experience. And, yes, Flip and Write is close enough.

(And I have played some games that featured the mechanic. Voyages, Recycling Route and Gryphon Delivery Service are the ones that immediately come to mind. However, none of them quite hit the mark for me as a Pick Up and Deliver game, a miniature Empire Builder on paper. I would play them all again, though, particularly Voyages. Voyages is awesome)

During one of my periodic binges of BGA, I noticed that Flip Freighters was in their library. That took away the biggest hurdle that I had, being too lazy to put the deck together.

Honestly, Flip Freighters turned out to be pretty much what I thought it would be. And it does give me the Pick Up and Delivery experience that I thought it would. But, in some ways, it might be too much on the nose. 

Take two decks of cards and make a deck out of only aces through sixes, plus all the jokers. Shuffle and make three decks of fifteen and set the rest aside. Everyone get a play sheet with nine trucks and a distance track for each truck.

The game takes place over three five-day work weeks. Each stack of fifteen is one week and you reveal three cards each turn to represent a day.

You can use cards to either load a truck or move a truck. The trucks hold four or six cards with different rank or suit requirements. All that matters for moving is the rank, moving that many spaces on the truck’s track. You can move a truck that isn’t fully loaded but you can’t add anything to it once it’s moving. And the more stuff on a truck, the more points it’s worth when you make the delivery.

You score your finished deliveries at the end of each week. So, if you make a delivery by the end of week one, you’ll score it again on weeks two and three. There are also overtime boxes that you can use to modify cards but are worth points if you don’t use them.

At the end of three weeks, high score wins.

Flip Freighters is a game that you can figure out most of the game play by looking at the play sheet. It may be the most bare bones, basic, what-you-see-is-what-you-get Pick Up and Deliver I’ve seen. 

Which is a con and a pro. 

Against it, there is nothing surprising going on here. There isn’t any clever twists or novel mechanics. The theme is just what it says on the tin. Flip Freighters is so straightforward that it’s kind of dry.

I can’t help but think that if Flip Freighters had come out twenty years ago, when Qwirkle was making the industry reevaluate Roll and Writes as a medium, it would have been revolutionary. But Roll and Writes and Flip and Writes have seen a lot of development.

On the other hand, Flip Freighters does deliver exactly what it says that it does. It gives you a distilled Pick Up and Delivery experience. If that’s what you want, you’ll get it from Flip Freighters. It’s also very accessible, both from a mechanical standpoint and from the Cheapass philosophy of using cards people already own. (James Ernst would have given it a wackier backstory, though)

Ultimately, from a mechanical standpoint, Flip Freighters doesn’t do anything special. If you have a closet full of train games, it will do absolutely nothing for you. On the other hand, from a budget gamer standpoint, it’s very solid. From the standpoint of doing what it says it will, Flip Freighters does a great job.

Sadly, Road Trip Solitaire made my hand hurt

Road Trip Solitaire didn’t work for me because my hand kept cramping up.

Honestly, if you just read the first sentence, you’re good. I think that Robin Gibson came up with a mechanically clever game for a regular deck of cards. My only issue was that I found it physically difficult to play.

As the name implies, it’s a game that you could play whole sitting in the car, as long as you’re not the driver. It’s an In Hand game using a traditional deck of cards. Play anywhere with the most common game component known to humanity. (Okay, dice can fight for that position)

You are rearranging the top seven cards, trying to get them in a row. You can discard (move to the bottom of the deck) a card to move another card that many spaces back and forth. (At the start, you out a joker at the bottom of the deck so you know when you run out of cards.)

Conceptually, I really like the idea. There are a lot of good touches. Scored sets of seven cards get flipped around so you can tell them apart when you discard them. The decision tree is wide but easy to understand. 

However, splaying seven cards with the rest of the deck under them was physically difficult for me. My hand got cramped, I kept dropping cards and I’d be constantly double checking to make sure I was at seven.

The solution would be to play it with a table. However, that defeats the purpose of it being an In Hand game and, frankly, I got too frustrated to try that. 

Road Trip Solitaire is a good idea and I appreciate where it’s coming from. I just couldn’t get it to physically work.

Contrasting Maigret on screen and on page

 My exploration of Maigret expanded into watching one of the adaptations. Over the last few weeks, I watched the first ‘episode’ of ITV’s 2016 adaptation, as well as reading The Night in the Crossroads. 

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Okay. Let’s be real. I watched that version because it had Rowan Atkinson as Maigret and I had to see that. Beyond only being known for his comedic work (in fact, I read this was his first serious role in a career that started in 1978. I have no idea if that’s true), he is the physical opposite of Maigret. 

I also use the word episode with quotes because each of the four episodes was movie length.

My reactions were mixed. I actually felt Atkinson did a strong job as Maigret. However, I felt that it took what was already one of the more melodramatic books I’ve read in the series (don’t get me wrong, I loved Maigret Sets A Trap) and made it much more melodramatic.

I feel that Simenon had a lowkey approach, that he undersold drama to make it more powerful. There is a grounded element to the books that I felt was lost in the TV show. Maybe that’s an inevitable difference between mediums.

As for The Night at the Crossroads, I think it’s one of the shortest of the series I’ve read. I tore through it in a couple of sittings. I had felt a little off Maigret after the the TV show but this book got me back in track.

A man is found murdered in a car that belongs to someone else and that car is in the garage of another somebody else. And it all takes place in a rural crossroads where there are only three houses.

Remember how I talked about melodrama? There are elements of that going on but Maigret himself notes them and he knows something is off.

And when the reveal is pulled off, it turns out that the melodrama was all just an act. More than that, just about every suspect turns out to have been in on the murder, as well as other crimes. Simenon grounds us and makes it satisfying, not feel like a cheat.

Maybe I should just stick to the books or maybe I just tried the wrong TV version. But, at the moment, I feel like sticking to just reading the books.

61 feullies d’automne, a game designed for charity, a game designed for everyone

61 feullies d’automne or 61 Autumn Leaves is a Roll and Write that was created as a charity game for the French non-for-profit Accessijeux which promotes assessable gaming. It is part of four games made for Accessijeux, each themed around one of the seasons. 

The artwork has since been released into the wild. Since it’s a one-sheet R&W, that means the game is now a free download and there’s even a low-ink version. For those of us who speak French very badly, there are fan translations of the rules. A special shoutout to Benjamin Cronshaw who provided translations for all the games.

61 Autumn Leaves is a multi-player Roll and Write solitaire, meaning that, technically, the number of player sheets you have on hand is the player limit. You do get a bonus for completing a section first so playing with a 100 people might be tricky.

I will also note that the artwork is lovely and thematic. Which is good because the artwork is the only thematic element. Nice warm colors and fall images. The artwork definitely sells you on playing the game.

The play sheet consists of the six mini games, one for each pip of the die, and a leaf track. Each turn, three dice get rolled. You use one to pick a mini game, one to use in that game and one to add to the leaf track.

Each of the mini games is pretty simple, with almost all of them being either filling in numbers that are either all identical or all different. You earn points by completing steps in the mini games and the first person to complete each mini game gets by bonus points.

I find the leaf track to be the most Interesting part of the game. It is cumulative, meaning each turn you add to the total. And if you get exactly 11, 21, 31, 41, 51 or 61, you either get a wild number to add to a mini game or bonus points.

The game ends when either someone hits or exceeds 61 on the leaf track or there have been twenty turns (which is also the end of the leaf track) Most points wins.

The structure of 61 Autumn Leaves is one that I’ve seen before. For instance, the Dark Imp’s Beach Life and Restaurantrepreneur immediately came to my mind. (And I feel Restaurantrepreneur is still the strongest game of this type O’ve played) Compared to the Dark Imp designs, 61 Autumn Leaves is simpler, streamlined.

What sold me on 61 Autumn Leaves is the leaf track. Trying to get those bonuses, particularly the wild numbers, is big. It adds a lot of tension to the game and makes the leaf die not a throw away choice. Compared to some (not all) games made up of mini games, 61 Autumn Leaves is shorter and simpler (shout out to Rolling Realms!) but the track keeps me coming back.

As of me writing this, I’ve only also played the winter game in the series but I’ve also looked over the rules for summer and spring. That said, I feel safe to say that autumn is the simplest, I’d even go so far as to say most basic. I’d also say that you need to prioritize certain mini games to maximize your points.

 With those critiques said, I do think that 61 Autumn Leaves is very engaging and accessible. This is a game you can get small children and great-grandparents on board with. Between the appealing artwork and easy-to-learn mechanics, this is a game for anyone.

While I honestly expect to enjoy every other game in the series more, I also expect that Autumn Leaves will see a lot of play from me.

My June Gaming

 June ended up seeing me learning more games than I really expected. Some of that was from me looking at Board Game Arena for new games. A lot of that was because Button Shy had a wave of play tests that I was able to participate in.

I learned:

Dice Pyramid

The Great American Fox Hunt

Flip Freighters

Forest Rivals (playtest)

61 Leaves of Autumn 

Road Trip Solitaire

Villainopolis 2.0 (playtest)

Astronotl (playtest)

So, on a whole, it was good month.

Like April, I went to Board Game Arena early in the month to make sure I learned something, particularly because I wasn’t sure what the month would be like. Dice Pyramid is pleasant enough that I’ll probably make a hard copy and I was happy to finally play Flip Freighter, which I’ve been meaning to learn since it first came out.

I hadn’t expected Button Shy to be so generous with the playtests. I don’t feel comfortable on going into any details but Villainopolis (renamed Crime Sprawl) and Astronotl are particularly strong. I had jolly good fun.

I had vaguely heard of the season games made for Accessijeux charity but then I learned that they are available as free PnP games. The first one I tried was 61 feuilles d’automne or 61 Autumn Leaves. It was a streamlined, nifty little experience. And now I have learned that Accessijeux exists.

Good month.