I like ROVE’s children better than I like ROVE

 I tried out ROVE (Results-Oriented Versatile Explorer) when it first came out because, quite frankly, Button Shy has had a very good track record for me when it comes to solitaire games. 

And I was left with two impressions. First, it was a terribly clever design. Second, I did not grok it. A game can be good and I cannot enjoy it and both those statements can be true.

In ROVE, you are trying to rearrange six module cards into different patterns and each card has its own kind of movement. (It was pointed out to me that Chess clearly influenced ROVE’s design, which turned out to be obvious when someone else pointed it out) You pay for action points by playing move cards and you try and complete seven patterns (the move and pattern cards do double duty), as well as have access to one-shot special powers on each of the module cards.

And don’t get me wrong, I think it is a good game but I am profoundly bad at it. I am so very bad at parsing it. 

I did back the Kickstarter for Rove’s two sister games, ROVE JR and Aqua ROVE, but I was in no hurry to try them out since ROVE hadn’t been engaging for me. However, when I finally did, I found both of them clicked for me much better.

Both games remove the chess-like element of each module having its own kind of movement. In JR, every module moves the same and in Aqua, the movement cards dictate how the modules will move. For whatever reason, that is much easier for me to understand. 

There are other differences. JR uses only four modules. Aqua’s patterns include requiring specific modules in specific positions. Every flavor of ROVE is distinct. I can see the value in owning all of them (of course, since I just buy the PnP files, the cost is minimal)

I can’t say that JR and Aqua have fired the original ROVE for me… because I wasn’t playing it. If anything, my enjoyment of them makes it more likely for me to revisit ROVE. 

Still, Aqua ROVE and, if I’m to be honest, ROVE JR in particular are games I want to keep playing.

The time Don Rosa explored publishing

I sometimes wonder where Don Rosa would rank worldwide in popularity as a cartoonist. Particularly if you took the United States out of the equation lol

Don Rosa is justifiably considered to be one of the best creators of Disney Duck comic books. And it is hard to discuss his work without also discussing Carl Barks (who _defined_ Disney Duck comic books) or without discussing Duck Tales or without describing his magnum opus, the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck.  

But earlier drafts ended up being bloated and, even by my standards, rambling and incoherent. And I probably got lots of details wrong. So I am just going to touch on his Uncle Scrooge story Guardians of the Lost Library.

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The Guardians of the Lost Library features Uncle Scrooge and grandnephews Huey, Dewey and Louie going on a globe trotting adventure to rediscover the Library of Alexandria. In regular history, it was destroyed but there are hints that it survived in the Duck version of the universe.

What unfolds is actually a history of the development of written information. Uncle Scrooge and his nephews discover that each version of the library was condensed and added to by developments in publishing. We go from papyrus scrolls to published books. Each set they find has been destroyed by time but hints are left to guide them further.

The ultimate reveal is that the most recent version of the Library of Alexandria is the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook, the closest thing Disney has to the Necronomicon. It had already been well established as a repository of all knowledge and a Deus ex Mechina that let the nephews get the ducks out of any crisis.

Before I read the story, I already knew about that and I thought that was the point of Guardians of the Lost Library. Instead, Don Rosa explores both how we wrote stuff down and how that affected history. The bit about the guide is just the cherry on top.

Despite being a globe-spanning adventure, Guardians of the Lost Library is a thoughtful work without a lot of blatant conflict. No villains like the Beagle Boys or Magica De Spell. Instead Scrooge and the boys have to deal with forces of time that decayed the various forms of the library and ignorance, embodied by Donald spending the entire story watching TV.

Wikipedia states that the Comic Buyer’s Guide allegedly mentions it as ‘possibly the greatest comic book story of all time’ but with a note stating citation needed. Yeah, that’s a bit much. I wouldn’t describe it as even Don Rosa’s best work. (The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck easily hold that title but it’s also twelve stories, not counting later companion stories, so you can accuse it of cheating lol)

With that said, the Guardians of the Lost Library is fun and charming. It’s a lesson both in history and why people love Don Rosa.

The Little Flower Shop: Open for Business is a charming little package

The Little Flower Shop: Open For Business from Dr. Finn’s Book of Solo Strategy and Word Games is a such a mouthful that I’m just going to call it Little Flower Shop for the rest of this blog entry. It’s a cute little game about managing a cute little flower shop while dealing with market fluctuations. It’s also a Roll and Write (the whole book is nothing but) 

You’ve got six different types of merchandise (half flowers and half tchotchkes), one for each pip of the die. You have a column of ten pieces of stock for each but you don’t have any of them until you start rolling the dice. Off to the side is a row of ten boxes where you’ll be writing down each day’s profits. They also serve as the game’s timer. And on the bottom is the market prices for each item, which will fluctuate throughout the game.

Each turn has three steps. First of all, get inventory. Roll four dice and choose three of them to circle the corresponding merchandise. And, yes, you could theoretically get three of the same item. Second, market fluctuation. Roll two dice and cross off the current price of the corresponding merchandise so the next price in the row is the active one. Prices will end up going all over the place. Third, sell all of one item of merchandise at its current price. Write down the profits and start the next round.

Twice during the game, rounds four and seven, you have to choose a special order that you will try and fill at the end of the game. These are things like five different items or two of the same items. And they are all worth a set price. You also get three rerolls during the game.

After ten rounds, figure out how much money you’ve made. The contents page of the book has a scale for each game to figure out how well you’ve done and so far, I’ve done terribly :P

I quite like Little Flower Shop. I haven’t played any of Dr. Finn’s other Little Flower Shop games so I don’t know how this one compares. But it does feel like a larger game translated into one sheet of paper. (He has made another Roll and Write game for it so I’m planning on looking at that sometime)

Some R&Ws manage to feel bigger than a sheet of paper and, in all honesty, Little Flower Shop doesn’t manage to do that. Six items of merchandise and ten days of sales doesn’t give the game enough scope to be big. But they are enough to give a bite-sized chunk resource management experience. More than that, the game is very clean and accessible. There are no fiddly bits. The game visually just makes sense.

I have played a _lot_ of R&Ws that are filling in grids or filling out boxes. (And had a lot of fun along the way) Little Flower Shop isn’t like that and doesn’t have a ‘traditional’ R&W feel. It’s a R&W for folks who aren’t into R&Ws.

The Little Flower Shop: Open for Business is a cozy little game that doesn’t take a lot of time to play but does give you a charming experience.

Entering Dr. Finn’s world of word games

Dr. Finn’s Book of Solo Strategy and Word Games Contains three different word games: Word Wrap, Leftover Letters and Spell It Out.

To be honest, I don’t feel like I have enough to say about each one specifically for a blog each. Which isn’t to say that I think they are bad or dislike them. Quite on the contrary, as someone who generally isn’t into word games, I think they’re downright brilliant.

All of them are Roll and Writes. While they are all designed to be played as solitaires, there is no reason that you can’t play the multiplayer Take It Easy Style. They also all show a strong Scrabble influence. Letters are worth specific amounts of points and there are rules for multiplying letter and word scores.

Leftover Letters is the most complex game by virtue of having three steps. You start out with a seven by seven grid that already has some letters in it. Step one: You roll dice to fill in the fourteen empty spots. Step two: Keep rolling dice to scratch out letters, using the dice to determine the coordinates for points where four boxes come together. (So you have four letters to pick from) Step three: make words out of each column and row with the letters you have left. You don’t have to use all the letters in a group but the more letters, the more points.

Spell It Out, on the other hand, is the simplest game of the three. Possibly the simplest game in the entire book. You have a blank crossword-style layout that has space for six 2-letter words, four 4-letter words, and two 5-letter words. Every turn, roll two dice and pick a letter a group for each pip. After you fill in all the empty spaces, score all the words that are actually words.

Word Wrap changes things up by having you drawing Tetris–style shapes on a grid of letters. After you draw each shape, you write the letters you just encircled in the spaces for two 3-letter words, two 4-letter words, one 5-letter word, one six-letter word, and one 7-letter word. After you’ve filled every space in, score all the words that are actual words.

Frankly, if I put a playsheet in front of you, you’d have an idea how to play before I even started going over the rules. More than that, you’d be playing in less than five minutes. All these games are very accessible. Even more than that, use of the Scrabble’s visual language helps make the games accessible.

On top of that, I found that the games offered choices, particularly at the start. Near the end, they become more push your luck as you hope to get the letters you need to finish the words you want to make. They are all quick games, none of them lasting long enough to get tedious.

While FlipWord remains my go-to word game, I enjoyed all three of these more than my previous favorite Roll and Write word game, which was Lingo Land by Dark Imp. (Sorry, Ellie Dix) In fact, my reaction to playing Spell It Out was to play it again.

Word games aren’t my go-to for gaming, although I seem to have played plenty of them by this point. With that said, word games are clearly a large and successful niche of the gaming world. And I think all three of these games are ones that Word gamers would really enjoy. I think making them a part of the book was a very wise choice on Steve Finn’s part.

The Singles Club uses pop culture to make high art

I had read that Phonogram vol 2 The Singles Club was the right place to actually start the series, the best of the three volumes. 

Well, I read the first volume first anyway. And quite enjoyed it. I found the complaints that you have to be familiar with the indie music scene for it to make any sense to be heavily exaggerated. You just have to understand fandom in general. 

Then I picked up The Singles Club. And couldn’t put it down lol

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The Singles Club describes the same night at a club seven different times. Wikipedia claims it’s based on a real event but I couldn’t find any other reference to that. More than that, there isn’t any dramatic moment in this evening. It’s eight different people having a night out.

I also want to note that this isn’t a Rashomon story, at least as I understand the term. None of the stories contradict each other. They are just different points of view.

(Rashomon is a movie that has really stuck with me. I know Kurosawa didn’t invent the concept but, man, he created such a definitive example. The dead husband testifying through a medium was so wild to me. And I also appreciate that every single person, even the woodcutter, turns out to be lying)

But that formula wouldn’t be enough to make for a good read. No, the reason the Singles Club is good is because the art and the writing come together to give memorable, believable, flawed, sympathetic characters. 

And the characters are everything. All of the action is internal. There isn’t a dramatic plot structure. Instead, we watch pretty much every character end a touch wiser than they started. 

And then they stick the landing with Kid-With-Knife. Who isn’t a serial killer and whose name I _think_ is a reference to the band Knife. A band I have only heard of through Phonogram. He’s a big, loveable goof. He was the Chas Chandler to David’s John Constantine in the first volume. And he’s convinced David to teach him about Phonomancy.

And KWK works so well as an endnote because he is such a contrast to every other character. He may be a loveable idiot but he knows who he is and he is comfortable in his own skin. His reaction to phonomancy instructions being listen to the music until it fills you is ‘Hell, everybody does that’

Truth to tell, as an old duffer, I related to Rue Britannia better. However, as a work of art, the Singles Club is better. The journey seems to go nowhere but takes you so far.

Paper App Golf makes minimalism a virtue

My interest in Gladden Design’s Paper app series was rekindled when I heard about Paper App Golf. Golf seemed like a good fit for the Paper App mission statement of a minimalist game you could carry in your pocket and play anywhere.

Oddly enough, I find golf an interesting subject for board games, particularly solitaire games, while I’m not very interested in the actual sport itself. I think part of that is that golf can be functionally a solitaire athletic sport. 

In a nutshell, each hole is a grid of dots and you roll a six-sided die to see how many spaces you draw the line per turn/stroke. You also always have the option of putting just one space. Amazingly, this is not the simplest golf board game I’ve played! (I’d say that goes to Par Out Golf)

The grit of the game comes from the terrains. Fairways give you a plus one to distance and let you draw a line through trees. Sandtraps, on the other hand, give a minus one. You can’t stop in water but you can draw over it. Near some holes are slopes, automatically moving the line. And you just draw the line normally in the rough.

There is also a speed variant if you can’t be bothered with dice. The ball can move six spaces if it starts on the fairway, three everywhere else and you can still putt one space.

Look, if you’re looking for a deep, involved golf game, you are looking at the wrong game. If you’re are looking for a game you can play while waiting in line at the bank, then you’ve come to the right place. And you probably don’t care about the weird looks you get at the bank.

I have to compare Paper App Golf to Paper App Dungeon, the game that made me aware that the series existed. While Golf is somehow even simpler than the minimalist Dungeon, I enjoy it more. The mechanics are cleaner and fit the theme much better.

Paper App Golf is very niche. It’s a game to play when you have basically no time, no space and no concentration. And there are times like that when I need a game break so I know I am going to keep playing it. I think the dice-less variant just turns it into a meh puzzle but I appreciate that the option exists. 

Paper App Golf isn’t that good a game but it does a very good job at what it’s meant to do.

Jim Shooter leaves behind such a messy legacy

On Monday, June 30, 2025, comic book editor, writer and publisher Jim Shooter died.

And when I read that, I was struck by two thoughts. First, as the editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics from 1978 to 1987, he had a huge impact on my childhood. Second, man, he left a complicated legacy.

Because, history has judged him as, to put it politely, quite the jerk. And, from what I can tell, not unfairly.

(I also can’t get over how he started writing comics professionally when he was fourteen.)

Trying to summarize his career, even just the Marvel part, is more than I think I can do without getting too much wrong.

However, during his time as Marvel’s editor-in-chief, he restructured it to be, well, more professional. I think it’s safe to say that allowed Marvel to thrive in the 1980s and his influence on both Marvel and the comic book industry can be felt to this day. From what I have understand, Marvel Comics was close to shutting down when he took over and he turned things around dramatically, making it the market leader.

It’s also safe to say that he could be a tyrant and a jerk, particularly near the end of his time as editor-in-chief. He instituted what were then viewed as homophobic editorial policies (which has to be saying something since it’s not like other media were very embracing) And some of the stories that were made under his watch or even under his pen are terrible. (Avengers #200 is one of the crowning examples. And, no, I don’t feel comfortable describing it)

I’m not very familiar with his work after Marvel so I can’t comment on it.

Jim Shooter leaves behind a complex, divisive legacy. He was profoundly hated by many. And I was only on board for a relatively small part of the journey, albeit what might have been the most important part. And I don’t know if I would have become a comic book fan without his work.