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.

Barely coherent ramblings about Poker Squares

 When I was writing up Solatro, I figured there had to already be ways to play Poker solitaire. And the first thing that popped up when I started poking around was Poker Squares. Also known as Poker Solitaire and Poker Patience. I am willing to bet that there are other games that use those names as well.

Basic idea: deal out cards in a 5 x 5 grid. Try to make the best hand possible you can with each column and row.

The game dates back to at least 1949. I understand that there have been many computer versions of it, including one by Sega. In other words, the game isn’t that obscure. It’s just obscure in the circles I run in.

Other tidbits that I find interesting. I have also seen that it can be played on a smaller grid with people just writing in notation, which definitely saves space. And I have read that it can be played as a multiplayer solitaire.

And that last bit really interests me. Before looking at Poker Squares, the earliest multiplayer solitaire I was familiar with was Take It Easy from 1983. It certainly has done a lot to popularize the mechanic. And, obviously, Poker Squares can be played that way.

What I wonder, and reading those 1949 rules might answer it, did people play Poker Squares as a multiplayer solitaire before 1983? Wouldn’t surprise me if they did. And if you were just writing down card names in a grid, you’d only need one deck of cards.

Now, it goes without saying, Poker Squares really reminded me of Wurfel Bingo. Now it’s from 2007 but I learned it in 2011 so a long time before I discovered Poker Squares existed. In fact, a friend of mine at the time came up with the Poker Squares as a card variant with none of knowing he’d reinvented the wheel :D

And, honestly, I prefer Wurfel Bingo. With just two dice and the bell shaped curve of the odds, it feels cleaner to me. But that’s me. Cards gave their own odds and appeal and I can see how that would work better for some folks.

I also learned that Cribbage Squares exist. I haven’t actually played cribbage and I don’t think playing Cribbage Squares would teach me how to play. Still curious about it.

Someone had to make a version of Balatro with regular cards

 Solatro is what you get when someone decides to adapt Balatro for physical cards and does a pretty good job of it.

With that said, a key element to making Solatro functional is to simplification. Balatro has 150 Jokers alone, let alone different planet and tarot and spectral cards and different decks. It has many ways of modifying game play. 

Solatro has six. Not nearly as impressive but very manageable.

If you know how to play Balatro, learning Solatro is like falling of a log.

You get a hand of eight cards. In the first round, you are trying to earn at least 25 points. That goal goes up by 25 points every round. You earn points by playing poker hands. Each round, you get to play three of those poker hands and you get three discards to work with each round. 

A major difference between Solatro and Bolatro is that in Solatra, each poker hand is worth a set amount points. What cards you use don’t matter. While in Balatro, higher cards get you more points. Not as interesting but damn if it doesn’t simplify things.

At the end of every round, you can use any excess points to buy one-use powers. An extra card, discard or hand, bonus points, double score or survive a round where you’d lose. You can only have one of each power at a time and you can’t carry any excess points to the next round.

Okay. I feel you have to ask two questions. Is Solatra a replacement for Balatro? No. Not even close. Is Solatra a decent game on its own? Yeah. I think it is.

Between the simpler scoring and the fact that Solatro doesn’t have over a hundred modifiers, the decision tree in Solatro is a lot simpler. However, it still has a solid decision tree.

When I was researching poker solitaire, I found out there is a solitaire variant called Poker Square that goes back to at least 1908. Which was a rabbit hole all by itself. However, Solatro feels more like poker, discarding to build your hands.

Solatro is fun and only requires a deck of cards you almost assuredly already have. It deserves to be out there and it’s worth trying.

… they made multiple video game franchises out of this book?

I don’t know really anything about the Persona video games but I know some folks really like them. Doing a bit of reading, I found out Persona is a spinoff of another video game series, Megami Tensai. Which I learned was based on a book series, Digital Devil Story by Ayla Nishanti. The first couple books have had fan translations. So I read the first book.

I have read that Megami Tensai and Persona are philosophical, deep works. Man, the apple must have flat out run from the tree.

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After high schooler Akemi Nakajima gets badly beaten by bullies, he uses his insane computer skills to summon up the demon Loki to brutally murder his abusers. (Wow, what a sentence.) However, this releases Loki into the human world and opened the human world to the demon world.

While the term edgelord wasn’t a term back in 1985, the behavior certainly existed. And, boy, this is a clear cut example. There are definitely scenes that are extreme just for the sake of shocking and grossing the reader. On top of that, Loki’s almost exclusive targeting of women definitely smacks of misogyny. Some parts are just ick.

And Nakajima is a hot mess of a protagonist in a way that doesn’t feel intentional. If he had been horrified by what he’d done, he’d be sympathetic. Instead, he aides and abets Loki, sacrificing students and teachers to him _until_ it’s a girl he likes. Up until then, he is not even an anti-hero. He’s a flatout villain archetype.

And Yumiko, his love interest and co-protagonist, also has issues. She basically  falls in love with him at first sight and is sympathetic to him even seeing him sacrifice a teacher to Loki. And her moment of strength quickly falls into becoming a damsel in distress (and dead) that Nakajima has to rescue (and resurrect)

There are some excuses. They are supposed to be the reincarnation of lovers. At the end, Nakajima owns up to the fact that he’s done some terrible things and has to do something about that. However, we’re basically just told that he is our protagonist and we’re supposed to like him. It’s worse than an Adam Sandler movie.

With that said, there are some interesting elements to the book. It’s a very 1985 vision of using computers to summon demons. The heroic side, becoming embodiments of deities in order to be able to fight demons was interesting. In all honesty, the best  bits of the book actually probably worked better as a video game than as a book.

From what I can tell, out of the nine books in the series, only the first two have been translated into English. And, after reading the first one, I really don’t know if I’m going to bother hunting down the second one. Ultimately, Digital Devil Story is an intellectual curiosity at best.

My Taskmaster Birthday

 Every year, since before we were even married, my wife bakes me a themed birthday cake. This year, she made a Taskmaster-themed cake.

Taskmaster is a TV show from the UK that was developed by sadistic lunatic Alex

Horne. In theory, it’s a game show where five contestants have to complete challenges, most of which are filmed before the show.

In practice, it’s more of a panel show. The contestants are almost always comedians. A couple have flat out stated that they try to be entertaining, not competitive. Everyone zings each other constantly.

The UK, New Zealand, Australian and Danish versions of the show are all on YouTube and we’ve watched them all. If we need to chill and laugh, Taskmaster does the job.

My wife and son didn’t just make me a Taskmaster-themed cake. They presented me with a sealed task. I had to find my hidden presents. They could answer yes-no questions but only with animal names and they could not repeat animals. I had twenty minutes and my time starts NOW.

The code was that warm-blooded meant yes and cold-blooded meant no. For a bit, I tried to figure out if members of the felidae family meant something specific or if there was difference between reptiles and amphibians. 

While I could have just looked without asking questions, where’s the fun in that? And it was a voucher that let me know she had ordered this year’s Taskmaster Advent Calendar. Because this was a Taskmaster birthday!

My family has set a high bar for my birthday cakes but this was a new high water mark.

Packing Party is too colorful for me but I like its interaction

 I have slightly mixed feelings about Packing Party. On the down side, it feels weak to me compared to what I’ve come to expect Shiny Pigeon Games. Two of their games, Around the World in 10-15 Minutes and Beards and Booty, feel like games out of a box, not a printer. They are games I regularly recommend. Packing Party, on the urged hand, feels like a PnP R&W. 

On the other hand, Packing Party is a pretty solid PnP R&W.

My actual biggest beef with it is that it requires six different colors. Not only am I colorblind, I normally only keep four different colors of dry erase markers around. (I ended up using patterns as well as colors)

The game is about packing up boxes. In Moving Day, the one I’ve been playing, you are packing boxes for a move. In Santa’s Helpers, you’re packing gifts for foster kids.

The actual mechanics are drawing shapes in grids. It’s a good thing I like doing that since I honestly think I’ve literally played over a hundred games with that mechanic. So, what does Packing Party do to make it not just be another tree in the vast forest?

In Packing Party, you are filling three different-sized grids. And you are filling them out with six different colors. 

The core mechanic is actually drafting. You lay out the colored writing utensils in a specific order. You roll the dice one at a time, assigning them in order to the pens. Then, you draft them. The pip determines the shape so you are drafting for color and shape.

In Moving Day, there are two ways to score points. Boxes score points for the number of different colors. You also have to pick a color for each box (in game terms, label what room the box is for) and you will score points based on that specific color. You can label the boxes at the end of the game but you can earn bonus points doing it earlier.

The game ends when either someone labels their third box or everyone passes in a row. Most points wins.

Other nice touches: There are one-shot special powers. There are six and three are available per game. There are advanced sheets where you randomly determine the pip shapes. There’s a solo mode that simulates the draft. You have some control over what the dice get taken away but not total control.

In short, while Packing Party doesn’t break any new ground and, if you’re used to gaming, the mechanics will be comfortably familiar. However, it does more than just have you fill in a grid. How you fill it in matters. It is simple but there are layers to the decisions. 

More than that, by having a draft as a core mechanic, it has legitimate player interaction. So many R&W are solitaires you play next to other people. Or with no one. In Packing Party, your choices affect other people. That’s it’s real standout quality.

As I said before, my honest problem with the game is that I have very limited color vision. I laminate sheets and use dry erase markers for games I plan on using more than once. With the standard colors that are easy to get, the black and the blue look alike to me, as do the red and green. Playing Packing Party gives me eye strain.

Which isn’t a real knock against the game. I can find dry erase markers with enough contrast if I wanted to. It’s not as big a problem for me as the original five-to-six player expansion for Catan, which added brown and green. With the original red, half the options were identical to me!

Ultimately, while it’s a game I physically struggle with and I don’t think is as strong as other Shiny Pigeon games, I do think that does its job well, particularly because it has that solid player interaction.

Which means I will be trying out the other version, Santa’s Helpers, before Christmas.

Weetzie Bat - searching for love in a dream of Los Angeles

 Weetzie Bat is Tales of the City on peyote.

It is the first book in a series by Francesca Lia Block. I had heard that it was a pioneering work of urban fantasy, like War for the Oaks by Emma Bull. Now that I’ve read of, I really can’t see it.

That said, boy is it its own thing.

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Plot wise, Weetzie Bat is about how Weetzie Bat and her gay best friend find their soul mates and form a family with some bumps along the way. 

The only overtly magical event is Weetzie using a genie’s wishes to form said family. Although not even she is sure that it happened. I get the impression that the later books might have more overt fantasy elements but it felt more like Tom Robbins than Charles de Lint. 

The book takes place in what feels like a mythic Los Angeles, a place of Hollywood legends and local restaurants. However, the book also describes these things getting torn down and replaced. I felt like the characters want to live in a dream world but the real world keeps creeping in.

In fact, I would go so far as to describe Weetzie Bat as prose poem disguised as a short novel. The book plays with names and lists and imagery.

I am not the main demographic for Weetzie Bat, although online commentary makes it clear this was an important book for many people. It is technically a young adult book but it is one of those young adult books where you have to be told that it is one.

However, the chapter about the death of Weetzie Bat’s dad, Charlie Bat, that was powerful. His overdose makes it clear something precious but broken was lost. That chapter ended up being where the book clicked for me and the reason that I might read more of the books.

I don’t think Weetzie Bat is a part of the same literary evolution at Charles de Lint. However, it does its own thing and stands by it.