TKO - a light boxing game that still delivers

TKO was one of the surprises for me in the pack of games. I was interested in trying it out but I had very low expectations for the game. After all, it is basically rock paper scissors with a boxing theme slapped over it.

You get a stable of eight boxers in the game, each one built out of six cards. Every boxer has four meters, for high and low punches and high and low blocks. Every time they successfully pull off a move, they get a point in that meter. Five points in any given meter, you win that round.

Both players get a card that shows the four moves. You secretly pinch one of them and then reveal. Unblock punches earn points and successfully blocking punches earns points.

I have to admit that I'm used to fighting games keeping track of damage, not keeping track of technical points. However, it does work with TKO and it makes successfully blocking just as valid a strategy as punching away.

Each of the fighters starts with one or two points in the meters, giving them an edge up in that particular move. Of course, that also means that you can watch your opponents thinking that you will be going for that move. Makes the bluffing more interesting.

Let's be honest, TKO is a very light, very simple game. Most of the games in the Pack O Game games push the limits of what you can do with the medium. Even FLY, which is even simpler than TKO has an interesting scoring system, particularly for a game about dropping cards. 

Bluffing and rock-paper-scissors? That's been done before. Pico 2, R, Love Letter, Coup, they've all covered this ground and done it very well. Heck, Cosmic Coasters literally uses rock-paper-scissors for science fiction combat back in 2001. TKO isn't breaking any new ground.

But here's the thing. We've had a lot of fun playing TKO. When we've gotten the little one to bed and we are exhausted and half brain dead, TKO is a nice way to blow off some steam and decompress. 

TKO isn't a great game. It's a very light and fluffy game with all the decisions being built around mind games. And I will admit that it suits our circumstances right now. But when we keep on having fun playing a game, that's a big thumb's up for it.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/158917/tko

Shut the Box as a piece of history

I have read that Shut the Box started out as a game that fisherman would play when they were out on the ocean, back in the 1700s. There is even some evidence, if you can believe Wikipedia, that the game has its origins in 12th century northern France.

Beyond any doubt, Shut the Box has spent some centuries being a standard pub game. Still, I really like the image of grizzled fisherman playing it on a swaying boat out on the Atlantic.

While you can easily make the game out of a piece of paper and a pencil, and I have read instructions on how to do just that in books about gaming with children, or using numbered chips, the classic Shut the Box is played with an actual box. Inside the box are wooden flippers marked 1 to 9 or 1 to 12, depending on what version of the game you get. Heck, I'm sure there are other combinations.

Play the game, you grab a couple of regular old dice and roll them. If you are using the box version of the game, use that box is your dice tray. You then flip over some of those numbered flippers. The total of the flippers you flip has to equal the total of the dice you rolled. You keep on going until you can't make a legal rule or you have flipped over all the flippers, in which case you shut the box.

In some versions of the rules, if you're down to only the lower numbered flippers, you can choose to just  roll one die.

There are a lot of different ways to keep track of the score. Sometimes, you add up all the flippers you flipped. Other times, you read them like a number, leading to some pretty crazy scores. In yet other versions of the rules, you win by shutting the box.

It has to be abundantly obvious by now that there are a lot of variations of Shut the Box. But, ultimately, they are all fairly mindless exercises of dice rolling.

Yeah, you do get some decisions in what numbers you flip but you don't get any control, like getting rerolls in Yahtzee. The dice control the game. I can't even really call it a push your luck game since you can't even control when you stop.

Despite that, I do have a certain fondness for the game. I like the history behind it, the idea that it was played in pubs and taverns and fishing ships. There's a sense of romance and past to Shut the Box for me.

I no longer have a copy but I got rid of my old copy knowing it would be an easy game to get again.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shut_the_Box

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9851/shut-box

Yahtzee as a system

Yahtzee is one of those games that is both so easy to scorn and to appreciate. Everyone has heard of it, including folks who have never heard of Catan or Tera Mystica and game designers keep on mining it for inspiration. 

The obvious reason to scorn Yahtzee is because it's a successful mass market game. The gamer subculture can certainly have some elitist tendencies, although I swear that is dwindling as destined games become more mainstream.

However, Yahtzee also is luck-dependent, involves no interaction with the other players and has zero theme. Any one of those things can be a turn-off for some folks and they are all legitimate gripes.

Despite that, I have come to enjoy Yahtzee and have lost any scorn I might have had for it. It's an easy game to cobble together and teach. More than that, it does help teach odds and dice evaluation. It isn't as random as it looks at first.

I even went through a spell of regularly playing Yahtzee online. If I woke up early and wanted to get in a life game without getting out of bed, Yahtzee was a game I knew I could find an opponent and finish a game before I had to get up.

Still, Yahtzee is never going to break into my top 100 games. It's not a game I would actively seek out or suggest to play. Yeah, if someone really wanted to play, I would play Yahtzee and I would have a decent time. However, what I have come to truly love about Yahtzee is how it has been a stepping off point for so many other games.

Simply put, getting two re-rolls and trying for specific combinations of dice faces is a fundamental mechanic for game design. It is one of those bed rock concepts. 

I know that Yahtzee didn't invent those mechanics from scratch. Dice games have been around for thousands of years. But Yahtzee helped codify the formula and helped spread it around, particularly for the non-gambling audience.

There are literally hundreds of games that are built off of the Yahtzee mechanic. I am not even going to pretend to try and list them all. While some are frankly garbage, others are genuinely good. 

And the ones that are fun address the issues that I brought up before. Games like To Court the King add special powers that five players a measure of control. King of Tokyo not only adds interaction by having folks beat each other up, it embraces the rich theme of giant monsters. And that's not even the tip of the iceberg.

Yahtzee has given us a way of understanding and using dice that has created a lot of fun experiences.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahtzee

We end up liking Shimmer and Shine, despite ourselves

Last August, Nick Jr. gave us Shimmer and Shine, a cartoon about two genies in training and the hijinks they got into. When we first watched it, neither my wife or I cared for it. However, sporadically watching it, the show grew on us.

The show is as formulaic as an algebra class. Leah and her goofy friend Zack try to do something and fail. She summons up Shimmer and Shine, her genii friends who grant her three wishes a day, to solve the problem. Shimmer and Shine, misunderstanding her wishes, make things worse while hiding from Zack. Finally, out of the wreckage of the wishes, they work things out.

Part of our issues with the show are the characters Leah and Zack. Not only are they two children who seem to live alone in their own homes, Zack is a space cadet only loosely connected to reality and Leah fails to show any realistic reaction to Shimmer and Shine messing up. 

The moral of the show is not that it's okay to make mistakes or everyone makes mistakes but that you can your mistakes work out for the best. That does beat teaching kids about giving up and quitting as a moral but I don't think it's the best lesson.

In actuality, it's the genies that we have to enjoy about the show. They are more developed and realistic characters. Their relationship as sisters and pet owners with a mischievous monkey and tiger cub creates an actual dynamic, as opposed to Leah and Zack's flat and empty lives.

As a gamer and fantasy reader, I also enjoy the vague but fairly consistent laws that define their magic. The genies have vast reality warping powers that are limited more by their understanding than anything else. (Which is why two thirds of their mistakes come from culture shock) They are only allowed to do three things per day for Leah who holds their bottle but they are able to do just about anything they want of their own volition.

Okay, they seem to basically have the same restrictions as the a Robin Williams genii.

According to Wikipedia, Shimmer and Shine has had very high ratings, so apparently other folks took to it faster than we did and watch it a lot more regularly. A new season has been announced that looks to be shaking just about everything  up.

For one thing, the new season will be in CGI, completely changing the look. It also appears we will have Leah and Zack ending up in the genies' dimension, having adventures there. New characters will be added, including the princess of the genies and an antagonist. In other words, it looks to be nothing like the first season.

I'm quite curious to see how this goes. On the one hand, it definitely livens everything up. On the other hand, wow, doesn't it break every series was built around.

If nothing else, I got to give the creators credit for being so brave.

Outlaw - a super easy game to make yourself

Outlaw is a tiny little dice game that feels like a simplified version of Knizia's Pickomino with a bit of Sackson's Can't Stop and its bell-shaped curve thrown in.

While it is themed around capturing outlaws and bandits in the Wild West, it's really about dice and odds. The board consists of two rows of wanted posters. One is numbered four to nine and the other one is numbered nineteen to twenty-four. Each poster has a reward, ranging from $1000 on the nine and nineteen to $10,000 on the four and twenty-four.

On your turn, you roll four dice with two rerolls. As long as you rolled one of the numbers on a poster, you get to place one of your tokens on that poster. If your opponent had a token on the poster, you replace it. BUT if you already had a token on that poster, you take it back.

When you have three posters claimed, you collect the reward for all three posters and take your tokens back. The first person to get to $50,000 or $40,000 in a three-player game, wins.

I've already compared Outlaw to other games, like Pickomino. And, quite frankly, Outlaw isn't as strong. While there is interaction between the players when you poach claimed posters, it's pretty mild. More importantly, it's too easy to have a turn where nothing happens. 

However, Outlaw does have one very strong thing going for it. It's a free print-and-play that requires virtually no work to make. No cutting and no gluing and no folding. Print out the board and add four dice and three tokens per player. Done and ready to play.

Seriously, for the deep budget gamer, Outlaw is a pretty good deal. It may not be the end all, be all of light dice games but it's still a decent little game. If you are watching your gaming budget, Outlaw is a good choice.

Personally, I am planning on taking the time to mount the board, the rules and the purely optional score board and laminating them as a travel game. Even that will probably cost me less than fifty cents in material costs. I'm also planning on recommending it to family and friends.

Outlaw is a light dice filler. It's not a perfect game. However, for a free, print-and-play game that requires minimal effort to make, Outlaw is well worth the effort.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/169309/outlaw

Dot and Tot of Merryland - too sweet for words

Dot and Tot of Merryland is easily my least favorite fantasy novel by L. Frank Baum. Let me get that out of the way at the start. I don't dislike it as much as The Queer Visitors From Oz and the Woggle-Bug Book, which were written to drum up interest in the second Oz musical. With the extreme racial stereotypes, those works were downright offensive. Dot and a Tot of Merryland was just cloyingly twee

Webster tell us that twee means affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint. That pretty much sums up this novel perfectly.

Let me summarize the book for you. Spoilers ahead. In a nutshell, two small children float through seven fantastic valleys and then float home.

Dot, who is a wealthy girl of privilege although never actually described as such, is taken to the countryside for her health. There she meets and befriends the gardener's son, Tot, who is the youngest protagonist in all of Baum's books.

One day, they wander onto a boat and float down the river. After passing through a stone arch over the river, Dot and Tot find themselves in Merryland, which consists of seven valleys, each one with its own special inhabitants.

Ready for this? They are the valley of clowns, the valley of candy people, the valley of babies and storks, the valley of living dolls, the valley of pussycats, the valley of windup animals and the valley of lost things.

Honestly, for almost all intents and purposes, this is a tour guide of Merryland. Everyone is nice to Dot and Tot, they're never in any danger and there's virtually no conflict. In fact, the queen of Merryland, who is a living wax doll in the middle valley, makes them a princess and prince of Merryland.

There are some low notes in the book. The chocolate people in the valley of candy are straight out of a minstrel show. There are some high notes, like the genuinely neat Mr. Split who can divide himself in half to wind the clock work animals twice as fast and each half only speaks in half words. But, on a whole, the novel just strolls along in extreme sweetness.

I have asked myself how I could like the earlier Magical Monarch of Mo so much more than Dot and Tot of Merryland. It's also super light and silly beyond words. However, silly is not the same as twee and every chapter in the Magical Monarch of Mo is full of conflict. Nothing really happens in Dot and Tot.

All the same, I might try reading it to my son in a year or so. Maybe a child the age of Tot might get more out of the book than me.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37976

Taking flight with Lady Blackbird

Lady Blackbird is the story of a noble woman searching for true love in an endless blue sky of shattered worlds. It's also a role playing game system built around a single scenario with a strong narrative focus.

  

On top of all that, it is also an example of a role playing game designed so that everyone, including the game master, can sit down and play with minimal preparation. 

Lady Blackbird pulls off a pretty amazing trick. It uses pregenerated characters and a synopsis of the general storyline BUT manages to be opened-ended enough that the players have immense freedom to make their choices and develop the story. That's a pretty amazing balance.

Lady Blackbird is set in a world that in one part steam punk and one part swashbuckling adventure and one part fairy tale. Sky pirates and sorcerers fly spaceships through the breathable aether. The players portray Lady Blackbird, her bodyguard and the scruffy but good-hearted band of rogues helping her escape her arranged marriage and reach her secret lover, the pirate king Uriah Flint.

Each player character sheet also includes the rules, which should give you an idea how simple the rules are. Every time you try to do something tough, you build a dice pool and roll, 4,5 and 6 being successes. Characters break down into traits to add dice to rolls, keys to get experience points and secrets that are really special abilities.

I particularly like keys. When you hit a key, you either get an experience point or a die in your personal dice pool. And you can buy them out for extra experience or dice by acting against the key and getting rid of it. Keys help guide roleplaying but also gives you so much freedom that you can subvert them.

The game master section is really what makes Lady Blackbird work. The game master is encouraged, above all else, to ask questions. They then use the answers to build the situations and story. That's collaborative story telling!

While I sadly have not played Lady Blackbird, I have a number of friends who have and who really loved it. And, because it is so open in its structure, it has a lot of replay value. The same group of players can play it again and come up with a completely different story.

Lady Blackbird pulls off the very difficult trick of being mechanically very simple and accessible but allowing for some very involved character development and story telling. If you're looking for a game that'll last two to four sessions that requires minimal prep time, Lady Blackbird is a strong choice.

http://www.onesevendesign.com/ladyblackbird/