Carnival games transformed into dice and pencil

 I backed Coin Pusher: Galactic Surge more due to theme than any other reason. Being designed by Jason Greeno and Jason Tagmire probably would have pushed me over any way but the theme was still a big draw.

I am fascinated, for whatever reason, by board games based on pinball. Coin pusher machines are adjacent, although they don’t have the culture cache or history of pinball machines.

Galactic Surge is a Print-and-Play Roll-and-Write solitaire. Along with one of the four different play sheets, you’ll need three dice and something to write with.

The main play area consists of three areas. Alien attacks, which make life more difficult for you. Level one, where you make most of your decisions. Level two, where you can earn points. Thematically, level one is where your coins land and level two is what falls down.

Without flat out repeating the rules, you are writing numbers in either ascending or descending order on twelve columns. Fill up a column and you get to fill in the columns the second level where you can earn points.

Oh and the aliens are bad guys and can eliminate columns. Which isn’t a feature I’ve seen in a physical game but definitely makes the game more interesting. And you can also get items that will get you points or special abilities.

There is more to the game that that. Still, the core is roll three dice. Assign one to further the aliens’ plans, and two to determine what value you put in what column.

Jason Nemo’s designs always seem to be about pushing the limits about what you can do with the Roll and Write or micro game medium. Coin Pusher is, in all honesty, one of his most accessible designs, which may be why I’ve take to it.

Coin Pusher does a very solid job reflecting its theme. The mechanics definitely reflect pushing something along. And the actual game itself is fun. It has good decisions and a good tempo.

I am glad that it has multiple sheets (and you can mix and match the levels) but I hope the two Jasons make more.

I finally find out who Maigret is

 Humble Bundle recently offered a bundle of select Maigret novels, a series I had never heard of. And that ended up being a fascinating rabbit hole for me to go down.

George Simenon wrote 75 novels and 28 short stories about Detective Chief Superintendent Jules Maigret between 1931 and 1972. The series is considered to be one of the first, if not the first, police procedurals. The series has been the subject of theater, movies and more tv shows in more languages than I can easily figure out.

Basically, Maigret is a big deal. And I had somehow never heard of the series. 

Honestly, it’s because it wasn’t originally written in English. (It is popular in the UK, though) It’s like The Invention of Morel all over again for me. I find literature that is important and worth reading that my American provincialism kept me ignorant of. 

Anyhow, I found several volumes at the library so Humble Bundle didn’t get my money this time.

I decided to test the waters by reading Maigret and His Dead Man, which I read was a good way to try the series.

Published in 1948, Maigret and His Dead Man is around the middle of the series (All the mysteries are standalone so no big deal) and is supposed to be a strong example of the procedural element of the story.

I am not going to bother with spoilers because you already know someone commits a murder and Maigret figures out what’s going on.

Short version: it’s good stuff.

Maigret is not a genius who basically serves as a one man police department. Instead, he is a dedicated professional, an important cog in the overall machinery of the police department. He actively works with his colleagues, and they are an important part of the investigations.

Someone once told me that, in one of the Colombo Taco movies, someone asks Colombo if he isn’t at a disadvantage if he is dealing with a murderer who is a genius. Colombo response, no, because the genius is still an amateur and Colombo is a professional who’s been dealing with murders for years. That quote came back to me as I read this book.

Maigret is not a genius like Sherlock Holmes or a wise guy like Sam Spade. He’s empathic, thoughtful and values his colleagues. He is profoundly human and engaging.

At some point, I want to read some of the earlier books. The book I read felt very developed and completely apart from genres like the hard boiled detective or the cozy mystery. I am very curious to see how the series started out.

And, while I am not planning on doing an exhaustive read of the series, I do want to keep on reading.

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.