The Tinfoil Dosiers is a beautiful cosmic scream

 The Tinfoil Dossier series by Caitlin R. Kiernan is about government agents dealing with the Cthulhu mythos. (Which is well trod ground with works like Delta Green and the Laundry but there’s always room for more.) However, that description doesn’t do the series justice.

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers

The series consists of Agents of Dreamland, Black Helicopters and The Tindalos Asset. I understand that a shorter version of Black Helicopters predates Agents of Dreamland but every book is standalone. The Tindalos Asset makes references to the other books but works on its own.

The books are on the far end of the cosmic horror bell curve. They are bleak with each book including at least one chapter of a nightmarish future that has come to pass after the stars were right. Bad things happen. In Delta Green, humanity is trying to put off the end for just one more day. In the Tinfoil Dossier, humanity is hoping to mitigate the damage.

Each book is also written in nonlinear fashion, like Pulp Fiction. And, like Pulp Fiction, it’s not like the chapters are randomly shuffled. The stories build. I had to go back and check the dates at the start of each chapter.

And the books are very ensemble works. The Tindalos Asset is the one that has the closest thing to a protagonist. Each book is more about terrible events than following someone going through them.

The through line in the books (particularly because the awful futures don’t seem to be compatible) is an agent called the Signal Man who appears in every book. He is a broken old warhorse whose a barely functional alcoholic and completely burnt out. He is the very human element in an inhuman world

There are some nice touches. Agents of Dreamland connected the zombie-ant fungi with the fungi from Yuggoth, which I haven’t seen before. The omens that Cthulhu is waking in the Tindalos Asset are downright Biblical. And the climax of The Tindalos Asset was a surprising tonal shift while still feeling true to the work. 

I don’t know if Kiernan will write any more books for the Tinfoil Dossier series. There is always room for more ways to hideously end the world. However, the Tindalos Asset does mark a major change for the agency and could work as an end. And I am glad we got three of these books.

Just Desserts is no Fluxx

 My journey with Just Desserts is more interesting than It has any right to be.

You see, at some point, Looney Labs was selling or giving away beta copies of the game. I want to say 2008 but I’m honestly not sure about that. It came as uncut sheets of cards.

Now, if I were to get something like that today. I would get out a paper cutter, cut everything out and laminate the lot. But when I got those sheets, that was completely outside my wheelhouse. So I just hung onto the sheets. I might even still have them somewhere. 

So it’s a game that I’ve been aware of and been interested in for a while. But it took the solitary option on Board Game Arena for me to actually try the game out.

The game consists of two decks of cards. One deck is deserts that each have one to four symbols. There are ten different symbols and are things like chocolate and nuts and spices and so on. The other deck is customers who each have specific symbol requirements, including sometimes having restrictions. Some folks are allergic to peanuts after all.

It’s a game about delivering orders. While every customer has a favorite desert that fills all their requirements, you’re usually going to have to use multiple cards to serve one customer.

I’m not bothering to go into much details it’s honestly a game that you can figure out how it works just by looking at the cards. 

I’m honestly of two minds about Just Desserts.

On the one hand, I think it has some legitimate mechanical issues. Ten symbols are a lot to juggle, particularly in a game this light. Ten symbols makes hand management mostly guess work. Being able to serve a customer becomes very luck based.

Comparing Just Desserts to Looney Labs’ flagship game Fluxx, a game famously random, I feel Just Desserts is more random with meaningfully less strategy. (Admittedly, one of the major strategies of Fluxx is churn through the deck but that’s still a strategy)

On the other hand, I do enjoy the process of the game and I like how intuitive the game play is. And I also like the card art. The game just has a good feel.

I will go back to it on BGA but if I were buying a Looney Labs card game, I’d pick a flavor of Fluxx I don’t have. That would have more success at the table.

Ring Around the Sun is basically the X-Men versus the 1%

 A little over a year ago, I decided that I should really try Clifford D. Simak again, after not being able to get through his books back in middle school or high school. And, while I don’t agree with all his conclusions, I now found him to be a really solid read.

I had meant to keep reading his work and realized that it had been a year so I picked up Ring Around the Sun.

Spoilers

Spoilers 

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers 

Spoilers 

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers

Set what was then the near future (and is now before a lot of folks reading this were born lol), the world is teetering on the edge of the Cold War becoming a hot war. Into this, a mysterious group is introducing major social changes with inexpensive food and  household items that never wear out, up to and including actual houses.

The mysterious group turns out to be mutants, the next step in evolution. And their long term plan is to break the human race out of a self-destructive death spiral and create healthier cultures. This includes having folks emigrate to alternate time lines where the human race doesn’t exist so there’s a fresh Earth for them.

However, the 1% will do anything, up to and including nuclear war to keep the mutants from upsetting their world of money and power and privilege. In my limited reading, Simak leans on the idealism so it’s not a surprise that things work out okay.

While there are elements that are quite dated (a world changing innovation are razor blades that never wear out), the idea of the 1% willing to destroy the world to prevent a post scarcity society still seems pretty believe.

One thing that I did find interesting was Simak’s approach to pastoralism in Ring Around the Sun. He clearly disliked urban life and idealized rural living. And yet, he clearly and intentionally undercuts that in this book. Vickers, the protagonist, wants the rural Midwest to be innocent and harmless but it is clearly shown to not be. The other world has the transplanted folk living a rugged frontier life but it is clearly supported by industrial centers run by robots far enough away to be out of sight.

I felt like Simak was telling me that the fantasy of the pastoral life was important but only as a fantasy.

Every time I’ve gone to Simak, I’ve have found really strong writing and him presenting his case as an argument, not as a done deal. And good grief, his work is chock full of ideas. I read somewhere that John Campbell wanted authors to have their stories center around one idea but Simak not only has everything and the kitchen sink, he’s trying to find room for a second sink.

Somehow, Simak managed to write science fiction that is escapist and asks tough questions at the same time.

So Walt Kelly wrote high adventure to advertise bread?

 The Adventures of Peter Wheat was a sword and sorcery comic book about a tiny prince living among talking animals, created by Walt Kelly of Pogo fame as a promotion for a bakery.

Wow. That sentence has so much to unpack. In fact, while I didn’t find it a bad read at all, the story of The Adventures of Peter Wheat is more interesting than the comic itself.

Peter Wheat was a home-delivery bakery service, like the milk man only for baked goods. From what I can tell, the comics were a free giveaway item for services that sold Peter Wheat products.

Possibly because it wasn’t published by a regular comic book publisher, details about the series seem all over the place. It seems there was also Peter Wheat News, which included mini stories about Peter and his world. Some sources say that the series lasted 35 issues. Others say 66 but that Walt Kelly only wrote and drew the first 35.

I found out about the series because the first sixteen issues were part of Humble Bundle I picked up. Looking into it, the entire series has been reprinted by Hermes Press. What is impressive about that is older articles that I read felt that some issues were lost media and gone forever.

When I actually sat down to read the volumes, it did not feel like the Walt Kelly of Pogo Possum. What I often forget is that Kelly got his start at Walt Disney, both as an animator and working on Disney comic books. I think Peter Wheat reflects his Disney work more than his Pogo work.

While it has twee elements that feel like they escaped from Dot and Tot of Merryland (a book that scarred me so badly it is my default for twee), the Adventures of Peter Wheat is very much an adventure comic. Peter is the inch-tall prince of a kingdom of talking animals by a wheat field and must fend off various threats, particularly the Hornet Kingdom. (Dragonel, queen of the hornets and daughter of the Grand Wizard would totally be Peter’s love interest if he wasn’t a little kid)

For me, no character defined the dichotomy better than Sammy Sweet. He lives in the land of Sugar Bun, uses the wheat from the wheat field to make treats, and leads his bakers into battle with a sword.

Two things that really struck me were that there is a lot of continuity in the stories, including multi-issues stories and that there is no reference to the actual Peter Wheat bakery. You know, this business the whole thing is an ad for. When Spider-Man was promoting Hostess, he was throwing twinkies at Doctor Octopus. Not Peter Wheat. Just swords and talking animals.

Honestly, if I didn’t already know and if there wasn’t an ad at the end, I’d never have realized it was a promotional comic. 

The Adventures of Peter Wheat is well written but not earth shaking. But the fact that it exists at all is kind of cool.

Legit Civ-lite in eighteen cards

 The Rise of a Jarl has been described as the most complex game that Button Shy has published. Which, to be fair, isn’t that strong a statement, seeing as how Button Shy is a haven for casual gamers.

While my own introduction to Jarl was through Button Shy’s play testing forum, it was attracting interest even before then. 

Jarl is a solitaire Civ-lite game (If Roll Through the Ages counts as Civ-lite, Jarl definitely does) where you are building up a Viking kingdom. You’ve got resource management, warfare, tech, geographic expansion and infrastructure. Honestly, the biggest absence for the Civ-lite label is a lack of epic time scope.

That’s pretty hefty for an eighteen-card game. One card serves as your play mat while the other cards wear many hats as actions, resources, coins, population, countries and technology. 

The game lasts four rounds. Each round ends with an increasingly strong raider attacks. If you can’t fight off the last one, you lose. Otherwise, you figure out how many points your Viking empire is worth. (There is already an expansion which changes victory conditions but I’ll get to that later)

Back in the day, one of my old gaming groups used to play Glory to Rome a lot. And Jarl uses the same basic structure as Glory to Rome. If you know it or one of its descendants like Mottainaj, you are three quarters of the way to learning Jarl.

By giving me a solitaire, more compact Glory to Rome experience, Jarl turned out to be a game that I didn’t know I was looking for.

There are, of course, meaningful differences. Having so few cards makes resources for everything incredibly tight. Choices in technology are key, to the point where there are clear strategies based around specific tech.

If you do reach the point where play becomes too formulaic (which I think will take some time. I’m certainly not even close to it), the first (or only?) expansion adds point goals which will adjust depending on your choices. I don’t like expansions that ‘fix’ games but I do like ones that breath new life to games.

The Rise of a Jarl punches above its weight. It does its theme justice and is well worth the play.

My March Gaming

 March was a month where time wasn’t on my side for gaming, let alone learning new games. Despite that, I managed to cram in some decent faming.

I learned:

Zoning Out

Weeds (TravelSoft)

Unstable Potions (Alexander Shen)

Rolling Slimes

The Cursed Cat (playtest)

On top of that, I also was part of the playtests for most recent prototypes of Jarl and Reawakening. Both are on the heavier side for Button Shy. I hope Jarl in particular finds its audience.

I also have to say that I enjoyed The Cursed Cat enough that I may very well keep playing the beta version even though the play test is over. The fact that we just got two black cats is a total coincidence.

I always try and learn at least one Roll and Write a month. This time, the only one I learned was Rolling Slimes. Which I did not enjoy. But I’ve already written about that.

Actually, the only game I learned last month that I don’t plan on playing again is Rolling Slime. That’s pretty good.

So, you want to play Sprawlopolis with pyramids

 Zoning Out is a Looney Pyramid adaptation of Sprawlopolis. That’s the elevator pitch and also pretty much everything you need to know if you’re going to be interested in it.

Personally, I have been a longtime fan of the pyramid games. I started following Button Shy when they kickstarted Cunning Folk and the Sprawlopolis line is one of their high points. I’m about as target demographic as you’re going to get.

You are building a city out of pyramids. All the pyramids go in a bag so the only thing you can decide when pulling one out is the size. And that’s key because the big placement restriction is that a pyramid can’t be next to a pyramid of the same size. 

The rules don’t quite out and out say this but is very clear that the city is a grid and a little pyramid and a big pyramid functionally occupy the same amount of space. Diagonals don't matter so you’re only worrying about orthogonals. 

Where Zoning Out really shows it’s Sprawlopolis roots is that there are eighteen special scoring conditions. I made cards for them but you could just use scraps of paper. In addition to new ways to get points or rule changes, they all have a number. You use three to a game and the sum of their numbers are your goal for the game.

Just like roads give you headaches in Spawlopolis, black pyramids are there to make life difficult. They are worth negative points. Each one costs its size multiplied by the number of pyramids around it. Which doesn’t sound that bad but the bad stuff piles up fast.

You score the largest group of each color, the special scoring conditions and subtract the black pyramids and hope you win.

There are two questions that Zoning Out has to answer: Is it any good and of itself? Would I rather play it than Sprawlopolis? From where I’m standing, Zoning Out is a good game but Sprawlopolis is better.

You ultimately have more control in Zoning Out. Each move is only dealing with one square while Sprawlopolis has you juggling four at a time. You decide what size pyramid you’re pulling. And you know that all forty-five pyramids are going to be in your city. 

Sprawlopolis was a game changer. Zoning Out reflects that. Sprawlopolis has inspired expansions and spinoffs. Zoning Out doesn’t have the breadth to do that. It is a solid tribute though.