I finally discover the Giver

The Giver came out in 1993, which meant that it came out at the perfect time for me to miss it. I was in college and, while I was reading a lot of stuff and discovering a lot of books and authors, young adult literature was not on my radar.

In fact, I only learned about the Giver by Lois Lowry when I was reading about dystopias and learned that it is considered a major work and one that helped develop dystopias as a young adult genre. I also learned it's considered a classic and is taught in many schools.

Two days after I learned it existed, I finished reading it. To be fair, it's a really short read.

In order to talk about my impressions of it, I'm going to have to spoil some major events in the book. So, I suggest going off and reading the book before going any further. Seriously, it won't take long.

Seriously, spoilers ahead....

The Giver appears to be set in a bland, happy little utopia where everyone is well fed, happy and kept in their place. Of course, it's pretty obvious that things are so strict that there is no freedom of choice whatsoever. Plus, undesirables of every stripe get 'released to elsewhere', which is so blatant a euphemism for death that I wondered how Lowry was going to get any mileage out of that revelation at all.

The protagonist, Jonas, gets tagged to be the community's next receiver. Somehow, all of the knowledge of the past, every memory, gets syphoned into one person and contained. Everyone else gets to float around in a dull, brainwashed bliss, unable to even understand the past or what it meant.

Lowry is probably wise not worry about the mechanics of how this works. For Jonas and the readers, all that matters is that it does. One interesting point is this brainwashing causes everyone to be completely color blind. Well, interesting for me since I am colorblind.

So the whole system is built on one person being a scapegoat, holding onto all of the pain of history and memory so everyone else can be oblivious. Congratulations, this is a novel-length examination of Ursula K. LeGuin's Those Who Walk Away From Omelas, which was inspired by Dostoyevsky.

Massive spoiler ahead... You have been warned....

The book is clearly building up to a climactic revelation of Jonas figuring out that 'released to elsewhere' means killing folks. Like I said, that was pretty obvious from the first chapter so I wasn't sure how that  would have any emotional impact.

Lowry does it by having Jonas watch his dad euthanize an infant for the sin of being a twin which would disrupt the status quo. While cooing and babbling to the child in baby talk. That last part took a clinical description and made it an emotional gut shot.

Reading it as a dad probably made it even more horrible. Hurting and killing kids can seem like a cheap shot and an easy way to get a reaction. But I see it in the news every night and that's not fiction.

And the Giver is trying to say something about the value  freedom and the power of choice and the weight of memory. It is a book designed to upset a classroom full of kids and make them argue about morality. (A line I stole from LeGuin, to give credit where it's due)

In the end, Jonas flees the community, taking with him their protection from memories. They will come back to them, although we don't get to see it. Instead, we follow Jonas and an infant/toddler he saves from being euthanized as they flee to the wilderness, either to find other people or die of hypothermia thinking they found people.

Apparently later books assure us that they did survive but, boy, did it read like hallucinations while freezing to death to me.

The Giver shows us a setting that seems safe and pleasant to live in. But it's a setting that puts no value on individual life, in particular, the lives of children. And the safety is a lie. Step out of the bounds of society and you will die and quickly.

Considering that the dystopia genre tends to be an action-filled one, the Giver is a very quiet, calm book. The big moments are Jonas watching a video of his dad and him sneaking out with a toddler to quietly bike out of town. However, these scenes hammer home the very simple and important points of the book:

Choices matter. Children matter.

What's with dystopias for kids?

I recently finished reading the first book in the Divergent Trilogy, Divergent. I enjoyed it well enough, although I felt the ending removed any moral ambiguity from the plot and made things clearly good and evil.

And it got me to thinking about young adult literature and dystopias. It seems like there has been a real boom in them ever since the Hunger Games, although I've been told that the real culprit is The Giver by Lois Lowry, which I guess I now have to read.

But dystopias for kids have been around for a while. The earliest one I've been able to figure out that was meant for a young adult audience is the Tripod Trilogy by John Christopher. Civilization has been regressed to a pre-industrial level of technology, adults are all brain-washed and humanity has been subjugated by extraterrestrials.

Actually, for a series with such a clearcut enemy (I mean, we are talking about aliens invading!), it manages that moral ambiguity I look for in dystopias. While the books are about the value and importance of freedom, they also have the cynical message that humanity needs to be taken over by lobotomizing aliens to unify. Get rid of them and we're back to distrust, nationalism and war.

When you think about it, dystopias are a logical subject for young adult literature. Teenagers are crossing from being kids to adults, which is a confusing place. The world can turn out to be bigger, scarier and more serious than it has been. I'm not sure if folks ever feel in control but being a teenager creates whole new levels of not being in control. Dystopias can be a perfect metaphor for that. 

That pretty much describes the Uglies series perfectly, come to think of it.

I am sure I'll read the rest of the Divergent series and apparently The Giver as well. In them, I hope to find not just imperfect societies but examinations of humanity's imperfections.

Meeples set sail for the south seas

Thanks to the power of Yucata, I have had a chance to try out Carcassonne: South Seas.

Like a lot of folks, I have a long history with Carcassonne. It was one of the first designer games I discovered when I first found out there was a wider world of board games out there. I distinctly remember seeing a game of Hunters and Gatherers for the first time and having no idea what was going on with the fish and tiny people.

However, I have to admit that I burned out of the expansions and spin offs a while go. I still play Carcassonne with the first couple expansions and get in regular plays of Hunters and Gatherers. There’s not too many games that I can say I still keep on playing after more than ten years.

The basic Carcassonne formula is that it’s a tile laying game where the players are building a map. You can use your tiny little wooden men to claim landscape features that will score points at the end of the game.

South Seas adds some genuine twists that changes things up. You are building islands and bridges and fishing areas. But, when a feature is scored, you don’t get victory points. You get trade goods. Bridges earn shells while islands get you bananas. Fishing waters will get you fish, which isn’t a surprise.

There’s a stack of trade ships, which is where the points come in. Four of them are revealed at a time, each with a specific set of goods that you need to fork over in order to get those points.

There’s more to the game than that, like trading posts and the ability to take a meeple back from the board. However, that’s the gist of it. You’re not trying to make giant cities and take control of the fields with farmers. You are trying to get the right price to buy them ships.

So, three years late to the party, Carcassonne: South Seas strikes me as a game that is distinct from other Carcassonne games on a fundamental level. However, it does this without sacrificing the relative simplicity and accessibility and depth that makes Carcassonne such a good game.

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/147303/carcassonne-south-seas

Why I keep Euphrates and Tigris

As I am shuffling through my game closet again, working on another purge, I know that storage space is a driving force in my decisions. After all, one of the reasons we need to keep purging is so our toddler can get his closet back :D

So smaller games get an easier time than big ones. Which is why Verrator, only the size of a deck of cards, is probably never going to get purged, even though it hasn't seen play in close to ten years :P

This has led me to comparing Tigris and Euphrates with Euphrates and Tigris:Contest of Kings, otherwise known as Tigris and Euphrates the Card Game. 

Tigris and Euphrates is widely considered to be Reiner Knizia's masterpiece. It's the game that officially pushed him from the guy who did auction games to the guy who made heavier games with lots of interesting math. It's a genuinely brilliant game where you juggle your hand of tiles, your scoring cubes, your board position and your conflict with your opponents.

But, the truth of the matter is that I've never gotten a lot of play out of it. While a couple of my friends owned copies of it, those copies almost never came out. Honestly, most of our plays were at convention board game rooms.

Frankly, we never played the game enough for anyone to really get the nuances of it. If we had, it probably would have become a regular game in the rotation. We never got far enough long the learning curve. In other words, we would have needed to play the game more in order to want to play the game more :D

In comparison, Euphrates and Tigris: Contest of Kings does away with the board, just using columns of cards to define the areas. This creates a vaster simpler spatial component. Even more importantly, the cards double and scoring cubes as well as tiles, so hand management and luck of the draw are both more important.

I don't think anyone would argue that Contest of Kings is a weaker game then the original Tigris and Euphrates. A bunch of columns doesn't create the tactical and strategic play of the board. Needing to be able to both place and score from your hand seriously increases the power of luck of the draw. And, quite frankly, it ends up taking even more space than the board game in play.

However, particularly after I stored it in a photo case that's close to a quarter the size of the original box, Contest of Kings takes up a fraction of the storage space that Tigris and Euphrates would take up. And it is still a good game that gives me that T&E flavor. It doesn't just stand up well to its profoundly good big brother.

So, while I know it is heresy to some gamers, Contest of Kings really fulfills all my T&E needs and can justify its storage space. I don't foresee getting the board game anytime and I don't see myself getting rid of the card game.  

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/42/tigris-euphrates

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/19419/euphrates-tigris-contest-kings

Hitting play on the Indie Mixtape Megamix

I picked up the Indie Mixtape Megamix last year from Bundle of Holding. It is a project to help raise money for members of the Indie RPG community with medical issues or other serious issues.

What is it actually? It's an anthology of little RPGs, each one inspired by a song. Hence the whole mixtape thing. And when I say little, I mean it. Most of them are only a couple of pages long.

As someone who loves looking at quirky, little RPGs, this could have been called the Indie Treasure Trove Megamix :D

Don't get me wrong. If you really want to find RPGs that are only a couple pages long and have a very tight focus, they aren't that hard to find. And there are some gems out there. Lover of Jet and Gold comes to mind as one I want to really try out sometime.

However, with the Indie Mixtape Megamix, I didn't just get a whole bunch of them in one place. I got more than thirty games that have been vetted and quite probably edited. No offense to the brave souls who put their heartfelt designs on the Internet for me to find but I've read some pretty bad games. The quality of the Indie Mixtape Megamix is above average.

At the same time, none of these games are for everyone and none of them are going to replace Dungeons and Dragons or Call of Cthulhu as a go to game to play all the time. These are tightly focused games that are designed to tell specific stories, games you might only play once.

And, being so short, they do require some improvising and house rules when it comes to some of the details. Having some idea how Indie games work is definitely helpful.

Still, even if it isn't the ultimate RPG experience, it's pretty neat.

I am in no hurry to rush through the collection. I'm planning on slowly reading it, looking at every game as its own special snowflake. It'll be fun.

Elevenses-For-One, surprisingly fun for organizing a tea cart

My recent kick of making Print-and-Play solitaire games got started with Elevenses-For-One, the thematic sequel to Elevenses, which I've never actually played.

11s-4-1 (an abbreviation that makes the game sound like its about filling out tax forms) was well regarded as a Print-and-Play, nominated for a Golden Geek in 2014. So I made sure to download the files for my records. However, when it got Kickstarted, I decided it was time to take a closer look.

Thirteen cards, including the two timer cards. Cut out the cards and laminate them, boom, done. Low ink images, five minutes of crafting and probably not even a quarter's worth of materials. And there not even any extra parts like dice or tokens.

In 11a-4-1, you play the role of an Edwardian maid who has to get a tea cart ready in fifteen minutes. Which reminds me that I still haven't made good on my promise to my mom to watch Dowton Abbey.

Two of the cards serve as a timer and the number 1 card, the tea trolley, acts as a place holder for stacking the cards. The actual gameplay is made up of the other ten cards, makes 2 to 11. You're trying to put them in numeric order after shuffling them into a row. They all have special powers, some of which will hurt you. You rearrange the cards by doing things like discarding them or flipping them over to use their powers or actually adding them to the stack. Most actions will tick the clock down a notch.

The game will end with either the clock running out or getting all the cards down, with your score based on how many cards you stacked up and how much time you have left.

It amuses me that, when you strip away the hoighty toighty theme and the special powers of the cards, you have the perfectly standard solitaire framework of putting cards in order. Not that that is a bad thing. A solid foundation is important.

And, while solitaire games aren't really my thing, I found 11s-4-1 to be an interesting little five-minute puzzle. Fun and easy to craft and amusing to play.

I don't see myself buying the game when it comes out in punished form but I figure I will keep playing it occasionally.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/158882/elevenses-one

Thoughts on winnowing my game collection

For maybe have of my time being into designer board games, I was a compulsive game buyer, borderline game hoarder. For the second half, I've been winnowing and purging my collection.

A huge reason I needed to purge my collection was just for the room. Getting a family meant just having enough for the cats to squeeze by was not nearly enough room :D

Before our son was born, I remembering hearing a coworker's husband complain about his basement den. It had been a shrine to his favorite baseball team and, after the kids, it had shrunk to one pennant on the wall. He kept asking when he would get his sports den back. The answer was never.

At the time and still now, I don't view that as a cautionary tale as much as I view it as a realistic way of viewing the world. Your home has to reflect your priorities.

But game purging is about more than just square feet. Back in the day, a game would be lucky to get one play before it got shoved back into the closet so I cold try out a new one. 

Some of my friends did say they got the most amazing crash course in game mechanics imaginable but you definitely don't get your money's worth out of a game that way. You also don't get to really to explore or understand a game very well. 

And I'm pretty sure that hoarding is never a healthy mindset unless it's after the apocalypse.

Game purging has been a fascinating journey in and of itself. Plus, it definitely feels healthier than the hoarding phase. 

I'm getting ready to do another push because we want to give our som more closet space. (Yes, I annexed the closet in my son's room. I'm a terrible person :P) Every time, it's an interesting process.