First Steps brings to the love to the Fantastic Four

 I am old enough to remember when the Fantastic Four was more important than the Avengers. (Although I am not old enough to remember when the Fantastic Four was more important than the X-Men lol) 

So, when I finally sat down to watch Fantastic Four: First Steps, I did have some emotional investment in the team, even though I haven’t read a Fantastic Four comic book in years.

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First of all, let me say that I have seen neither the 1994 or the 2015 films. And, while I have seen the 2005 and 2007 films, the only thing I liked about them was Michael Chiklis. 

Second, personally, I think a movie needs to be able to stand by itself and that it shouldn’t require familiarity with the material. I have enjoyed plenty of exceptions to that rule, but I still think it’s a good rule.

All of that said, I felt that First Steps was the most fun I had had in an MCU movie in a long time. I’m not saying it’s the best or the most emotionally moving or the most important. Just the most fun. I also felt that it stood on its own and you didn’t have to have seen any of the other 30 odd movies to understand it.

(Okay, Deadpool & Logan was more fun but the Deadpool films are their own weird beasts)

In particular, I liked how they made each of the four a rounded character, particularly taking into account that they are supposed to be the best of the best. The Fantastic Four was cape punk decades before the term existed, subverting so many superhero tropes.

Johnny wasn’t an idiot, for a change. Reed was given humanity. As opposed to leaning into the cranky side of the Thing, this Ben showed the caring side of the character. (It’s worth remembering that the Thing in the comic books is beloved in the wider superhero community) And Sue is shown to truly be the strongest member of the team on every level. 

And focusing on making the Fantastic Four as realized characters emphasizes the family part of the first family. A family has to come together to save their kid. Oh, and the world.

And this vision of Galactus makes him the stuff of nightmares. A purple giant who eats planets sounds pretty silly, but this one is clearly an eldritch abomination. When he rampages through Manhattan, the city literally crumbles around him. This Galactus is one octopus head away from being Cthulhu.

It’s a very back to basics approach. A family who loves each other has to save the world. Maybe that’s why it works.

Trains, dice snd contests

 I’ve been meaning to try out Rolling Boxcars from the 13th Roll and Write Design Contest since, well, the contest from 2022.

It’s honestly amazing how many Roll and Write design contests there were as a reaction to the COVID lockdown, when there as a real need for home printed games. It produced a lot of interesting designs. 

And train themes have long been an interesting one for me. While Ticket to Ride was a big part of my introduction to board games, it was really Mayfair Games presence at GenCon that did the trick.

The late Mayfair had a ribbon event where you played games to earn ribbons. And train games were a major part of their line, since the company was originally formed to publish Empire Builder. (But, let’s be honest, getting the US license for Catan was their biggest move)

I’m rambling because, after trying Rolling Boxcars, I don’t have much to say about it. I didn’t get any sense of theme or innovation from it. Mechanically, nothing wrong. However, I found the game ultimately  forgettable. And I’m pretty generous for finding the bright spots in games.

In fact, Rolling Boxcars made me go back to Fast Train to Miyajima, which was from the fourth R&W design contest from 2020. It is also a simple dice game about loading  trains.

In addition to the fact that I can actually feel the theme, I like it’s mechanic of having to combine primary colored dice in order to load a secondary color train. Simple but also cute and memorable. I still hold that, with a little bit of polish, it could be professionally published and find an audience.

Neither game has an actual entry on BGG. And, while I found Rolling Boxcars didn’t click for me, Fast Train to Miyajima is a very hidden gem. 

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2958172/wip-boxcars-13th-roll-and-write-contest-contest-re

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2442024/wip-fast-train-to-miyajima-r-and-w-contest-compone

A one die Yahtzee can work

 After I wrote a less than glowing commentary about Boat, a three-dice Yahtzee variant, BGG user d x@UanarchyK

asked me to check on their game Raft, a ONE die Yahtzee variant.

The bad news for d x@UanarchyK is that I thought Raft was simply okay. The good news is that I consider it to be a _much_ better game than Boat. 

In Raft, you are filling out six different scoring categories. (1&6s, 2&5s, 3&4s, full house, straight and five of a kind) However, you are not filling it out one category at a time. Instead, you are filling out a five by six grid.

And here’s what made me laminate a copy of the game. Each roll must be placed in the same row or column as the last roll. 

That creates a lot more decisions than Boat gave me while the restrictions make those decisions cruel. I feel like I have enough control to make failure have meaning.

In the minis column: Raft is abstract and dry. Rolling one die thirty times could get tedious, although it wasn’t as bad as I feared. And rolling one die as opposed to even two increases the random factor. (Can’t Stop wouldn’t be a good game if was numbered one to six with you rolling two dice. Honest, that sentence does make sense)

In the positive column: It’s currently free and low ink so the opportunity cost is next to nothing. It could work as a simultaneous multiplayer Solitaire like Take It Easy with any number of players. It’s easy to teach with actually meaningful decisions.

One of the first Roll and Write game I played that only used one die was Not Another One, which soured me to the idea. It took games like Waypoints to make me reassess the idea. And Raft is another good example of one die working.

Boat was a copy of Yahtzee only less. Raft uses Yahtzee ideas but is its own thing. 

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon remains relevant

 Sometimes, books have completely different meanings depending on where you are when you read them. (Every time I read Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, I swear it’s a completely different book. Which is why I try to read it every few years) Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon was published in 1977, I first read it in the late 80s and when I reread it last month, it felt like a new book.

Okay, that’s a bit strong. But I took different things away from it.

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Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson is the first book in a series that is currently nine books over twenty-five years. It’s about a bar (honestly, a series of bars) where fantasy and science fiction things happen.

It’s more than that but that’s enough to give you the gist. I’d describe Robinson as a post New Wave author, with a strong focus on human nature but a profound sense of optimism that I sometimes feel New Wave authors weren’t allowed to have. I don’t agree with all his conclusions but I am willing to listen to his arguments.

(I learned while research this blog entry that he has effectively retired due to having a lot of personal tragedy. Which feels particularly tragic for a someone who championed optimism in the face of adversity)

The first Callahan book is a fascinating uneven read to me now. The Centipede’s Dilemma and Just Deserts are weak fluff. Unnatural Causes, which as about (I kid you not) how Adolph Hitler was a space alien whose race had been cultivating the human race for meat for two thousand years isn’t a bad story but doesn’t fit with the Callahan feel. In fact, later stories seem to effectively contradict it or at least ignore it.

Other stories are quite strong. The Guy With the Eyes and A Voice is Heard in Raman… in particular hold up. And The Time Traveler is Spider Robinson’s strongest and most important early work. The story of Reverend Tom Hauptmann who traveled from 1963 to 1973 the hard way. One day at a time in an isolated third world prison cell. He emerges to a world he doesn’t recognize and struggles to understand.

It was a powerful work at the time. And maybe it would be a powerful work at any given time. Any block of ten years has some weight. But I think the last ten years have been an impressively wild ride and a modern day Tom Hauptmann would have a lot to say.

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon is very much a product of its time, warts and all. But at its best, it is timeless.

 

For once, Shen bores me

 After the first time I tried Alexander Shen’s Lunch Box Lair, I asked ‘Did I miss something?’ and then ‘Is that it?’ Sadly, I fear that the answers are ‘No’ and ‘Yes’

Many of my blogs about Shen’s work are to describe hidden gems. Some describe what I feel are failures. And Lunch Box Lair is just a weird little experience that I’m not even sure if I can describe as an experiment.

Okay. Lunch Box Lair is a dungeon/maze that you build out of cards with items that you find along of the way. That’s not that weird a formula.

But here’s where it does get weird. There are no random elements. The maze cards all fit together in a specific way and and the item cards are all keyed to specific locations. I don’t even think I can call it a puzzle since there’s nothing for you to really figure out. It’s more like an unusual form of narrative. You put the pieces together and it all works out.

Shen has a collection of puzzles called Tiny Maze Things which is probably the simplest thing I’ve seen from them. In comparison, Tiny Maze Things has actual choices for you to make, which makes it far more engaging to me.

What it really reminded me of was one of those crude interactive fictions you’d program in Basic in the early 1980s that would really have only one path. Only you don’t have to fight with the syntax. It also reminds me of the Choose Your Own Adventure board games that Z-Man makes but those have a lot of choices for you. 

In some ways, I don’t know if I’d call it a failure. It does what it clearly set out to do. However, that doesn’t make it interesting.

Is there any reward to simplifying Yahtzee?

 It has become a definite part of my gaming hobby to hunt down odd little truffles. Short games that you can easily knock together yourself. The world of PnP micro games is a surprisingly engaging and diverse one.

But when I came across Boat, I honestly had to ask myself ‘Is this really necessary?’ At the same time, Boat was too convenient for me not to try.

It’s Yahtzee with three dice. 

Boat has two fewer categories and it has a couple different ones. You can’t have a full house with only three dice after all. But it’s still two rerolls and mark a scoring line every time.

Yahtzee is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. I like fidgeting on my phone by playing it solitaire. And I do think it can be a good core mechanic for better, more complicated games. However, it’s not a game I’d played with physical dice. If I’m getting out dice, I’m going to play a better game. And I think it’s a appalling multiplayer game. I honestly believe games that are literally multiplayer solitaires should have simultaneous play.

The selling point of Boats is that is simplifies Yahtzee by having two less dice and two less turns. I will argue that, when you scale down a game, you should either meaningfully reduce its footprint or playing time (or ideally both) and I don’t think Boat does either. Two fewer dice is not going to be the deciding factor on picking Boat over Yahtzee.

(Playing devil’s advocate, I do appreciate Euphrates & Tigris: Contest of Kings, which has a larger footprint on the table than Tigris & Euphrates. However, its storage footprint is minuscule which is how it survives purge after purge in my collection)

I also think that Boats is weaker than Yahtzee which isn’t the strongest game in the first place. Playing Yahtzee as a fidget exercise, my personal victory condition is to get the bonus. If I did the math right, it’s statistically harder to get the bonus in Boats. (Admittedly, I think the odds are less then 10% different but it’s still harder)

In fact, the odds of getting a pair in the first roll and trying to build something off of it is much higher in Yahtzee. The ability to plan and play with the odds, which is basically Yahtzee’s biggest virtue, isn’t there in Boat.

For me, a game that filled the role of ‘Yahtzee but simpler’ was Cinq-O. It’s not a Yahtzee as Boat but it is meaningfully simpler and more dynamic while still being fun. I’m sure there are a lot of little dice games that fit that same description.

I do appreciate the mechanical choices that were made to modify Yahtzee to three dice. I do find it an interesting as an intellectual experiment. However, that doesn’t make Boat a game I want to play.

Asimov’s Black Widowers are cozier than Agatha Christie

 I first stumbled across Isaac Asimov’s Black Widowers stories when I was in middle school or high school so it’s safe to say that I’ve been reading them off and on for a long time.

They are a series of straight up just straight up mystery stories. While Asimov is synonymous with science fiction, he wrote a lot more than that. (In fact, he wrote far more non-fiction than anything else.)

The Black Widowers are social club based on one that Asimov actually belonged to. (He denied the real life one ever solved mysteries though) And the stories are formulaic enough that even the characters seem to be aware of it. The Black Widowers meet once a month, there is almost always a guest who has some sort of problem and their waiter Henry solves it at the end of the story.

That being said, Asimov got more than fifteen years worth of writing out of the Black Widowers, up to the end of his life. And I like the justification that Henry was able to solve so many mysteries because all the arguing about the problem at hand helped him analyze it. That helps justify the formula.

I recently realized that, while I have read quite a bit of the series, I have never read the second collection, More Tales of the Black Widowers. Either I missed it because it has almost the same title as the first book, (only adding the word more to it) or I had completely forgotten about it.

So I decided to correct that.

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Ironically, this collection includes the story that introduced me to the Black Widowers, The Ultimate Crime, which was reprinted in Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space. Further ironically, that story wasn’t about any crime or puzzle but the club helping someone come up with a topic for a Sherlock Holmes paper. I honestly don’t consider it one of the stronger stories.

However, the collection also contains what I now consider to be the weakest Black Widowers story, Nothing Like Murder. A Russian guest believes he heard two college students planning a murder. Henry is about to figure out that they were really just talking about Tolkien. Murder and Mordor just sound alike.

I don’t know if the conceit might have been cuter back in the 1970s, when fantasy and science fiction were a lot more niche, or if it would have seemed obnoxious. I did think Henry figuring it out was a lot more of a magical deduction than usual with his reasoning coming down to ‘college students talk about Tolkien’

(I am now sure that I hadn’t read this collection before because I’d have remembered Nothing Like Murder lol)

It’s ironic to harp on those two stories because one of the strengths of the series is its consistency. The formulaic nature feels comforting. Seven friends solving problems that usually don’t involve them in a luxurious restaurant is probably the height of cozy mystery.

The actual mysteries themselves, while theoretically fair play, are sometimes built on very obscure bits of trivia. Asimov actually softens this by having Henry’s solutions not being definitive but simply the most likely. 

However, the Black Widowers aren’t really puzzle for the readers to solve. They are a very pleasant and entertaining form of escapism :)