Sometimes, James Ernst’s throwaway ideas should be thrown away

 I try and pay attention to whatever James Ernst is up to but I managed to miss his abstract game The Fractured Flat for a couple years. Sadly, after trying it out, I could see why it went under my radar.

It’s a two-player, perfect information abstract. The board resembles a broken piece of glass with some areas having dots on them. Players take turns placing pawns or moving them but only to spaces wirh more sides than the one they left. You get a point if the space has a dot and for every enemy pawn adjacent to it.

The score track is a tug of war and one of the ways to end the game is getting to your end of the track. The game can also end by running out of pawns and, if the score track is at zero, whoever made the last move wins.

As far as I can tell, there’s nothing _wrong_ with The Fractured Flat. At least to me, it’s not immediately solvable and I haven’t figured out if there is a first or second player bias. But I just don’t find it interesting.

I can’t put my finger on why. I do like abstracts. It may be that it doesn’t feel dynamic but but feels plodding. As a comparison, the only game in the GIPF project I haven’t enjoyed is GIPF. 

The game that I found myself comparing it to was Mapple, as earlier abstract series that Mr Ernst made. It’s also simple and about territory control. It’s not flawless or brilliant but it keeps me engaged. There’s a momentum to Mapple that keeps the play going.

(My favorite pure abstract by James Ernst is Tak, which is a very dynamic game. In fact, I’d even call it brilliant. But the only way that The Fractured Flat and Tak actually resemble each other is they have the same designer)

The Fractured Flat feels like a throwback to the early days of Cheapass Games where Ernst has admitted he was throwing things against the wall to see what stuck. It doesn’t feel polished.

While Mapple is a slight little game, it’s stuck with me. On the other hand, a year from now, I wouldn’t be surprised if I have no idea what The Fractured Flat is when I look at my notes.

Chesterton is full of cynicism and hope

 I recently reread Tremendous Trifles, a collection of essays by Gilbert K. Chesterton from the early part of the last century. And when I say recently, what I actually mean is that I would read an essay when I wanted to take a break from something else I was reading. So, all in all, it took me about five months to read the whole thing and I only stopped because I ran out of essays.

Tremendous Trifles wouldn't make my top ten books by Chesterton. Which doesn't mean it isn't worth reading. It just means that I would recommend you read some of his other works and only pick up Tremendous Trifles if you decided that you wanted to become a Chesterton fan.

I also realized that reading the book stretched out the way I did this time was actually a better way to do it. Because if I had read the whole thing in a day or two, it all would have blurred together and I'd have only really remembered or been struck by one or two things. However, treating each essay as its own little standalone bit. (Although I can accept the argument that reading it all at once and only taking a couple gems away means you singled out the best of it)

Two aspects of Chesterton (who is a complex literary figure and if you hate him, I think there are valid reasons for doing that) that really struck me over my months of casually reading this collection. One is his charming, almost twee way of presenting the world as a more simple, more innocent place than I have any reason to think that it is. Showing the world as a literal fairy tale.

And then there are the single sentences that hit me right between the eyes with their brutal and accurate cynicism. Something that makes me think "That's true. That's still so true' 

Just picking one essay, the Riddle of the Ivy had 'And the American has become so idealistic that he even idealises money' and 'In a cold, scientific sense, of course, Mr. Balfour knows that nearly all the Lords who are not Lords by accident are Lords by bribery'

Lord knows I don't agree with everything that Chesterton wrote (Don't even get me started on The Flying Inn) However, he sometimes writes something that I feel cuts right to the bone of a topic and I didn't even know he was holding the knife. A thought that seems so relevant that I feel like it ought to have been written last week, not over a hundred years ago.

I have many friends who despair over the state of the world and the sky is falling. Chesterton, I suspect, would say that the sky has always been falling. At the same time, I think he would also say that doesn't mean we should be complacent. That the fact that we are still here doesn't mean we will always be here but that we need to always be struggling.

My December Gaming

 December ended up being a busy month for me in non-gaming ways. Apart from some play testing (thanks again, Butron Shy!), I didn’t really learn many new games and the ones I did learn were very light. 

I learned:

Paper Pinball - Little Ghost

Reawaken (play test)

Villainopolis (play test)

Coin Pusher: Galactic Surge

Orphan Source Detected!

The highlights were the playtests but that’s largely because of how slight the rest were. I try and learn at least one Roll and Write a month and they kept rolling this month.

Of them, the best was easily Coin Pusher: Galactic Surge. It is still a very light game but it has solid theming and the mechanics have enough to give you interesting choices.

Looking at the January calendar, I don’t see a lot of free time so I’ll be digging back into my R&W backlog.

My December PnP

On the one hand, I got a decent amount of PnP crafting done in December. On the other hand, I didn’t end up using as much of it as I hoped to.

I made:

iina

Paper Pinball: Little Ghost

Paper Pinball: Comb Clash

Paper Pinball: Escape the Vent

Coin Pusher: Galactic Surge

Villainopolis (play test)

Launchtime

Packing Party (basic version)

Astro ROVE - Hyperdrive Hops (play test)

Everything Machine (play test)

A Dragon’s Gift (demo)

Arcane Bakery Clash + expansions

Criss Cross

Dinks and Donkeys

Orphan Source Detected!

The Button Shy playtest forum had a busy month and I did my best to keep up. And I was able to do that from the printing and crafting side. However, I just didn’t have the time to play all of it. 

I had planned on the demo for A Dragon’s Gift to be my ‘big’ project for December. And I do quite like it. 

However, somehow, Arcane Bakery Clash ended up taking over a weekend of crafting. I had been interested in its use of timing but getting two-player PnP games played can be hard. Other people want quality components lol 

When I learned that it had not one but three expansions for solitaire play, three different AI opponents. And another expansion besides. I ended making all of them, even though all I needed one was solitaire module and the base set. Now I have to actually play the thing.

(Note the earlier comment about finding gaming time lol)

I also, among other things, decided to finish laminating all of the Paper Pinball games. I want to finish trying all of them so I can play any of them when I feel like it.

Not my strongest month for playing games for a good one for making them.

The required look back at 2025

 As is pretty much always the case, 2025 had positives and negatives for me as far as gaming experiences go. I think that’s pretty much just the human condition.

Easily the best gaming experience I had in 2025 was going to the first convention since 2019. (I think we still have no idea of the long term social and economic effects of the pandemic) I got to see old friends and play a lot of different games.

And the low point of the year was simply that the gaming time just wasn’t there. That’s just how life works. I usually like to play some journaling games for NaNoWriMo and it was December before I thought of doing that. I literally remembered Dicember on December 30. My time and my mental energy have have just had other focuses.

Buttonshy’s Playtesting continued to deliver for me. It has given me a community to interact with and a way to give back to the broader community. I’m really thankful and glad that I get to be a part of it.

Another highlight was Dr. Finn’s Book of Solo Strategy and Word Games. None of the eight games (plus the bonus game since I backed the Kickstarter) are perfect. However, collectively they are fun and accessible. They offer wide variety of accessible gaming experiences in a convenient way for both time and physicsl space.

And, oddly enough, my guilty pleasure of Metal Snail’s Paper Pinball series picked up. Any given game in the series is, honestly, a so so Roll and Write. But I found grabbing a few and playing them back-to-back really engaging. The whole is greater that the parts.

2025 wasn’t a bad gaming year for me. But I did have to focus on what really gave me joy.

The Judas Contract disturbed me. Which was almost assuredly the point

 I recently read The New Teen Titans - The Judas Contract for the first time. I went in knowing that it was a very important story in the run that defined the Teen Titans, even though the team had been around since 1964. I also I knew it was controversial. And I also knew the basic plot lol

It was like watching The Usual Suspects or Fight Club in 2025. The twists are well known, even if you haven’t seen them.

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The Teen Titans have brought the very young and very powerful (and very unstable) Terra onto the team. Unfortunately, she is the partner and lover of their nemesis Deathstroke the Terminator. She helps get them captured by an evil organization. When they inevitably break free, she completely loses it and accidentally kills herself in her meltdown.

Oh, where to start.

The storyline is where Dick Grayson, the original Robin transitions to Nightwing, which is a huge deal. It introduces Jericho, a mainstay of the Titans for a while.

But the real point is Terra.

I read the 2017 edition and Marv Wolfman wrote in the introduction that their goal was to make Terra the anti-Kitty Pryde, which is wild to me. That seems incredibly specific and potentially petty.

And the character is either clearly designed to be disturbing or Wolfman and Perez have some serious issues. Or both.

Terra has many child-like design elements. A page girl haircut, a slight overbite, a small frame. At the same time, she many troubling unchildlike behaviors. She smokes, which in 1984 meant you were either a bad guy or Wolverine. She’s a minor in a physical relationship with Deathstroke who is old enough to be her dad. And she’s really eager to kill people.

In fact, you can read Deathstroke as the victim in the relationship. Which is really problematic. Beast Boy/Changljng is also depicted as the victim in their interactions, even though he treats her terribly. (This is easily the nastiest version of Beast Boy I’ve read)

Most striking of all, in a series that had a lot of focus on character development, both Raven the empath and the literal narrator explicitly state there is no reason for her to be a bad guy. She’s just evil. Wow.

It’s easy to invoke misogyny but I think it’s appropriate In this case.

The Judas Contract is striking. If I’d have read it in 1984 when it came out, it would have knocked me off my feet. I can see why is still remembered forty years later. However, I cannot get over how… problematic it is. And how intentional that choice was. 

Games don’t have to be good to be educational

 When I looked at Orphan Source Detected!, it reminded me of the kind of Print and Plays I saw when I first started looking at PnPa back in the early 00s. Minimal graphics, basic mechanics but very grounded theme.

The idea is that you are a scientist with a Geiger counter trying to find six orphan sources in a rural area. An orphan source is a self-contained radioactive source that isn’t under proper control. Real thing, real problem. Historically, it looks like they have been caused by a combination of carelessness and stupidity.

The game itself consists of a seven-by-seven grid. You add a die and something to write with. Each turn, you pick an empty square, roll a die and write the number in. One through four gets you nothing. Five and six gives you out plus one and plus 2 in adjacent squares. Seven or more, you’ve found one of the orphans sources. After you’ve found a source, roll for casualties but you get to subtract the number of sources you’ve already found from that roll.

There is nothing in the rules about having to make a trail of spaces, that each one has to be adjacent. I also figure that the bonuses only get added to empty spaces. I mean, to already searched spaces that have a number in them.

So, the obvious strategy is trying to chain bonuses. My boards look like I’m making a checkerboard of numbers. You can’t find an orphan source without getting bonuses since you can’t roll a seven on a six-sided die without a sharpie.

There are variations but they are all different radioactive materials with slightly different modifiers.

Okay, there’s not much here, mechanically. The basic strategy is really obvious and the random number generating powers-that-be can wipe out your plans. A series of ones left one of my plays with missing sources and a decimated rural landscape. I found it amusing when my plan came together but there’s a lot of other light Roll and Writes that do that better.

The real value of Orphan Source Detected! for me was the rabbit hole it took me down researching real life orphan sources. And the game actually includes helpful links!

While the Goiania Incident that required over a 100,000 people to be screened for radiation contamination is mentioned in the rules, the Ciudad Juárez cobalt-60 contamination incident is the one that really blew my mind. An accident ended up contaminating 6000 tons of rebar, requiring the demolition of hundreds of buildings.

Orphan Source Detected isn’t a good game but it led to some good history lessons.

https://ellie-valkyrie.itch.io/orphan-source-detected-osd-solo-roll-and-write