Simak’s Time and Time fails as science fiction but is brilliant as an allegory

 Time and Time Again (a title that I know has been used many times) by Clifford D. Simak is one of his earlier works. It managed to be a sweeping epic that spans galaxies and millennia and a tiny cosy parable.

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The book begins six thousand years in the future. Ashtyn Sutton is an astronaut who has come back to Earth as a game changing figure of destiny. He has literally died and will eventually write a book that will explain how all life has an equal stake in the universe.

And of course, that’s going to start a war between human supremacists and basically everyone else, particularly human made androids and robots. And thanks to the power of time travel, Sutton ends up in the thick of it. 

Simak does a good job making Sutton a down-to-Earth Joe and an enlightened prophet. He was a normal guy before he died, got resurrected and enlightened. Much of the book is about him coming to terms with both those things.

But here’s where my suspension of disbelief struggled. Simak did a good job conveying the vastness of space but not time. It’s very common for science fiction protagonists to really be contemporary people in future settings but even the future setting of Time and Time Again seems to be the 1950s. (A particularly jarring moment was when someone 6,500 years in the future’s desk has paper clips and an ink well)

The detail I struggled the hardest to swallow is that a key plot point is Sutton finding a letter from an ancestor that had just been lying around an attic… for six thousand years. While they make a point that the glue has dried up, it’s hard for me to buy the paper isn’t dust.

None of these elements hurt the theme or really the plot of the story, which just makes me feel like a pedantic nitpicker to be bothered by them.

And, if you view the book as a parable with Simak discussing issues of the 1950s behind a veil of science fiction, these incongruities actually make a lot of sense. Sutton’s world and issues aren’t in 8000 AD. They’re really the 1950s in disguise. And ink wells in the distant future are really his way of telling the reader to pay attention.

Time and Time Again isn’t about time travel paradox. It is a very thinly veiled commentary about civil rights. Sutton isn’t becoming a prophet but someone in a privileged position learning to understand others. 

I feel like much of Clifford D. Simak’s work seems escapist but is actually focused on discussing hard truths.

Okay, how travel gaming go?

 Okay, one more time. This one should be it, though.

Went on a non-gaming trip. Packed a few small solitaire games, knowing that I wouldn’t have much time or space. Wrote all about that already.

So what happened?

Well, it turned out I underestimated how much gaming time I’d have. More than that, underestimated how much space I’d have to work with.

One of my standby’s for limited time and space is Criss Cross which is smaller than a post card and twelve rounds. Almost entirely due to space, I only got a couple game of Criss Cross in.

(If I had brought a clip board along, it would have been a different story. Of course, I was trying to minimize how much non-essentials I packed lol)

Palm Island ended up being what actually saw serious play. It benefited from the combination of not needing a table (or any other kind of surface) and having a bit meat to it. I do enjoy The Starspeaker or Labyrinth Runner for fidgeting but they don’t feel like ‘full’ game.

I actually improved my Palm Island game during the trip. I hadn’t played Palm Island seriously in a while and found there was some more depth to be found. (And, yes, the Tool Maker really is the MVP of the deck)

My travel set is just the demo black-and-white deck. Revisiting the full game and the feats definitely feels like something to consider.

Couple of thoughts for the future:

If I’m just playing In Hand games on non-gaming travels, I’ll need to look for heavier games. Palm Laboratory is an obvious choice. I’ve had good experiences with the Zed Deck and Foothold Enterprises. I’ve also been meaning to look into Gloomholdin’ and Dragons of Etchinstone, among others. There’s stuff to look into.

The other thought, particularly if I am trying to be as minimal as possible, are In Hand games that use a traditional deck of cards. I’ve had Loot the Loop and Road Trip Solitaire recommended to me and enjoyed The Shooting Party more than I should. That’s also worth looking into.

Yup, still like Ukiyo

 Some years ago, I tried out Ukiyo and I thought it was a really solid game. However, it fell under the never-ending issue of ‘so many games, so little time’ and got buried under other games to learn and non-game life.

Last year, I decided that I needed to give Ukiyo another try. And it has ended up being a game I now get in the table all the time.

(I should note that I have only played it as a solitaire. That being said, I suspect that that is where it really shines.)

Ukiyo is a tile-laying micro game that uses Japanese symbols. (I have the first edition but the second edition looks very pretty) Each card is two-by-three symbol grid and the play area is going to be a six-by-six symbol grid. Cards have to overlap because it wouldn’t work otherwise.

Every card also has a goal on it. And that that is the heart of the game, multiplayer or solitaire. In the solitaire game, you set aside three to four cards and you try to achieve all of those goals in order to win.

One of the things that makes the game so very playable as a solitaire is that there are 20 different challenges, ranked in four levels of difficulty. 20 challenges might not sound like a lot, but there are many solitaire games that are basically just one challenge. 20 is a lot of replay value.

And the fact that you can choose your difficulty rating is also a big deal. I can handle the easy challenges basically on auto pilot. That’s great for when I’m not up for heavy thinking. And the toughest challenges? Haven’t actually won one of those yet which makes them a reliable challenge.

When I first played the game, I definitely thought there was good stuff there. When I went back to the game earlier this year, I was impressed all over. I was happy to find that it offered different flavors of mental exercise/escape in an 18-card package.

Now, mind you, there are a lot of options like this out there. Enough that there are some that are very, very good. Sprawlopolis and its many children are a strong example of this.

And, while Ukiyo can be played on a airplane tray, where Sprawlopolis might spill off the side, it isn’t the small footprint that makes the difference. It is my ability to choose the level of challenge and to choose it in a very fine degree that has made me add Ukiyo to regular play. 

It is a very good game. But, possibly more importantly, it is a very flexible game.

Ignition- an insightful and snarky history of early rocket fuel

 Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John Drury Clark and published in 1972 is an interesting bit of history.

The only reason I know who Clark is because of his association with Isaac Asimov. The two of them worked together during WW II. Later on, Clark was directly responsible for the formation of the Trapdoor Spider Club, which inspired Asimov's Black Widower stories. In fact, the Trapdoor Spiders formed because Pratt Fletcher couldn't get along with Clark's wife so he formed a social club so he could still hang out with Clark. (To make matters even more like a soap opera, Clark divorced and married the woman Pratt had been married to when the club formed) Clark is specifically the inspiration for James Drake.

While Clark did write a couple of science fiction stories, his most famous work of writing for non-scientists is Ignition. When I started looking at the Trapdoor Spider members I hadn't heard of, that rabbit hole took me to Ignition and it was too fascinating a work to not read.

Clark does lightly touch on the chemistry that is the point of the book, the book is really as collection of anecdotes about the research. It is pretty much an oral history of the development of rocket fuel up through the 1960s. Clark was in the thick of it so he got to hear a lot of what happened. (There are some things he specifically mentions were classified and he couldn't discuss) The chemistry pretty much went over my head but the stories kept me going.

Above all else, the book is entertaining. Clark clearly was a story teller and he also had a snarky, black sense of humor. He is discussing the development of extremely volatile chemicals during the Cold War. Explosions, massive property damage and death were a part of that and he addresses them with a lot of gallows humor. A particularly dark comment that stuck with me was that they only had to make a limited amount of ICBM fuel because everyone would be dead if they ever got used so they didn't have to make enough for a second round. (The real point was they could be picky with how they developed ICBM fuel but the argument definitely sticks with you)

Ignition also made me think about how much technological development I take for granted. Ignition isn't about the engineering involved in rocket development, which is what you usually hear about if you look at the history of rockets. It's about the chemistry involved. It's about a very specific part of the rocket development, albeit an absolutely essential part. It describes decades of research that I'm sure is still going on, as well as vast amounts of effort and money. You couldn't just pump diesel into a rocket and watch it go. (I was embarrassed at realizing I never thought about how oxidation would have to be part of the chemical reaction to make rocket fuel work when it's so obvious that that would be essential. A big chunk of the book in fact discusses oxidizers)

The book is more than fifty years old. As I've said, much of the development that is described must have been superseded by now. However, it's good to know what we had to do in order to get to where we've gotten. It is also a good look at technological development that was driven by the Cold War. (Or was it the first Cold War?) Clark wrote an book that is pretty darn entertaining but it is insightful as well.

The Great American Fox Hunt… isn’t that great

 A major point of Board Game Arena is getting to try games without going out and buying them. (_The_ major point is to play games with people who aren’t in the same room as you) Sometimes, you find an actual gem. And sometimes you find a train wreck.

The Great American Fox Hunt turned out to be a train wreck. 

It is themed around an international hunting competition. I got curious if it was named for a real event I just had never heard of. And apparently… it’s a nickname for a motocross event at Firebird Raceway in Idaho. (Not to be confused with a nigh identically named track in Arizona) So, no, it’s apparently not named for a real event.

You’ve got a 96-card deck of prey animals. Each player gets a five-card deck of hunters, which are really bid cards. And there’s a deck of hound cards you can buy to add to your hunter deck throughout the game. And they all have numbers on them.

The Great American Fox Hunt is basically a variant on blind bidding. On your turn, you lay down one or more hunter cards. Then you flip a prey card. If your total is equal or more than the prey number, you get it.

If you don’t equal or beat the prey number, you are tracking the animal and the cards stay in front of you. Another player, on their turn, can poach the animal rather than hunting an unknown. They can add hunter cards to your hunter cards to claim the animal. Yes, they get to use your cards to win a card.

You win by collecting a set number of one given animal. You have to get six squirrels compared three bears but there are thirty squirrels compared to thirteen bears.

My biggest beef with the game is the degree that there is how much luck determines the game. Bidding a lot so you are very likely to get a card feels like the best choice but that also burns resources for potentially little reward.

And poaching, the one time you can bid with precision for a sure thing, feels surprisingly mean spirited. Not only is there no way to defend against it, your opponent is literally using your bad luck against you. I love me some direct confrontation in games but this just feels like kicking someone when they are down.

The blind bidding against the game itself, mechanic brought back memories of a handheld solitaire game called Foothold Enterprises. But that game had a much more narrow range of odds, no mechanic like the poaching, and ways to earn special powers. The Great American Fox Hunt doesn’t have any of the elements that made me like Foothold Enterprises.

What it really brought back memories of the times I would buy some random game at a convention, have it hit the table, and be really disappointed. I am glad that PGA let me have that experience without wasting money or storage space.

Pyramid Solitaire combined with Yahtzee is perfectly pleasant

 Realizing that June was looking to be a crazy month, I decided to start looking at Board Game Arena for a quick game to learn, just to get that off the checklist. (I have found that if I don’t feel pressure, I’m more likely to try and learn a heavier game later on in a month) BGA has a big enough library that it feels like there’s always something new or I’ve missed.

Heck, I keep a running list of BGA games I’m interested in.

I stumbled across Dice Pyramid, which has probably been there for a while, and my first reaction was ‘Huh. Surprised I haven’t seen this idea before.’

The perfectly accurate elevator pitch is that it’s Pyramid Solitaire mixed with Yahtzee. You have a ten cards in a pyramid formation. You capture cards with specific Yahtzee combinations. You can only capture ‘open’ cards. Your goal is to get the top card, which means you have to get all the other cards to open it.

Every captured card gives you a one-shot dice manipulator. You can also use them to get another turn since you lose if you can’t capture a card.

To Court the King is one my touchstone games so the special powers in Pyramid Dice is something I appreciate. And I do think combining two fundamental gaming paradigms feels so natural I wouldn’t be surprised if it has been done before.

I am basically of two minds about Dice Pyramid. On the one hand, there’s not a lot in it. Luck can play such a big role that you could lose the game on the first turn. I don’t think that’s a good game design. The special powers you get from the cards aren’t very strong. They are just enough to keep the game from being functionally impossible to win.

On the other hand, it’s a perfectly pleasant, quite initiative little game that doesn’t overstay its welcome. A couple years ago, I learned another Yahtzee-card hunted called Pentaquest that just dragged. Dice Pyramid, on the other hand, moves along at a good tempo. Ten turns is the longest a game can be.

It’s not a game I’ll play over and over but I will keep it open as an option. More than that, it’s also offered as a free Print and Play download and I’m honestly tempted to make it.

I only learned Dice Pyramid to check a box off of an imaginary list. However, it’s a game I’ll play some more. It’s not brilliant but it exceeded my expectations.

Maigret Sets A Trap is pure gold

 Maigret Sets A Trap is probably my favorite Maigret work that I’ve read so far. There are over sixty books I haven’t read yet and I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read up to this point so that isn’t too strong a statement. 

Georges Simenon’s Maigret stories was a long running and internationally famous mystery series. Except, apparently, in the US. Or I’m just an idiot. Regardless, they’re good reading.

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Maigret Sets A Trap begins in media res. The book starts five months after a serial killer has been terrorizing the streets of Paris, killing seemingly random women. The book itself takes place over four or five days during which Maigret sets in motion a plan to draw the killer out.

(While the Maigret books do have a darker, gritty take on the world, they aren’t _that_ dark and Maigret does catch the killer. Just in case you were wondering)

Maigret Sets A Trap may be the most plot-centric book in the series I’ve read so far.  There is still plenty of psychological focus. However, since Maigret spends a good chunk of the book finding the suspect before he can get into their mind.

And when Maigret does get his suspect? Then Simenon takes a deep dive into the psychological aspect of the story. The killer is a petty, nasty little piece of work. The serial killer is in no way a larger than life figure. They are terribly, perhaps even pathetically, human.

I also like how, as has been the case in every book I’ve read except arguable Yellow Dog, Maigret is not a one-man police force. We see him working with and depending on the rest of the force. In this book, as he orchestrates an elaborate trap and dragnet, more than ever.

I’ve become a fan of Maigrat over the past few months. And, if you wanted to start reading the series, Maigret Sets A Trap would be a great place to start.