Good bye, angry man

I used to say that Harlan Ellison’s fans and haters said the same things about him, that he was a powder keg of a human being, ready to explode at anything that offended him. As I have grown older, the many anecdotes about his life have gradually been supplanted by his writing.

Not counting the City On The Edge of Forever (which I first remember seeing via a film projector on a big screen at an elementary school carnival), my earliest exposure to Harlan Ellison was finding Dangerous Visions sometime in middle school. 

That book was like an explosion in my brain. The first time I sat down with it at the library, I didn’t even read the actual stories. I just went from introduction to introduction, reading Ellison’s colorful commentary about the different authors. I was so struck by his voice, by how crass and warm and just so full of life those introductions were.

Dangerous Visions was a landmark work. I feel safe saying it changed science fiction and that speculative fiction in books and TV and movies and video games would not be the same without it. We all live in a post Dangerous Visions world.

The other Ellison work I cannot get out of my head after learning about his death is All The Lies That Are My Life, a novella which is in Shatterday but I read in college as a slender chapbook. It’s biography of a fictional idealized version and/or caricature of Ellison from the viewpoint of what I still believe is a fictional version of Robert Silverberg. So it’s a fictional autobiography disguised as a fictional biography. It says a lot about friendship and fame and the walls and personas we build.

He also kills himself in that story. Now that he is actually dead, it kind of makes my head spin.

Some people feel Harlan Ellison was a big jerk and a creep and I’m sure there is some truth to that. I am sure he was a hypocrite (since we all are) However, he also wrote so well and deeply about pain and loss and sorrow and bitterness and love. He railed against an unfair and unjust world. I think he wanted the world to learn how to be a better place.

The man could write and that writing had impact. I’m glad he was and is a part of my reading and I’m sad he’s gone.

It took an app for me to play Land 6

It annoys me when it takes an app to get me to play a game I already own. I don’t mind learning a game on a site like Yucata (particularly if it’s not one I own or would get to play otherwise) or buying an app for either a game I am not going to get to play otherwise or have played.

But that’s what it took for me to play Land 6, even after I went through the easy motions of crafting a copy months ago. Six tiles, some dice and some cubes. Not hard work.

But playing it on my phone where I don’t have to fight over cubes and dice with the preschooler or cats does make it a lot easier to play.

Land 6 is a solitaire game where you move your dice across a landscape made up of six tiles (with four areas per tile) to your enemy’s city while your ‘robot’ enemy pounds away at you by adding cubes to the tiles. The different spaces have different powers and the dice that are your pawns/workers drop to lower pip numbers as you use them.

At some point, probably after twenty or so plays, I think I’ll have enough of a feel for the game to actually write a review of it. It definitely has some interesting mechanics, with the different special powers of the areas and the way you have to desperately manage your resources. A lot of different ideas going on in a tiny little design space. On the other hand, the random robot can really pound you into the ground, possibly beyond the point where you can cope.

The two questions I really have are: 1) Is the game too random for me to have meaningful control and 2) Is it still fun even if it is random? Because, really, if the process is fun, I can handle a lot of randomness.

While I know I will get those twenty or so plays in, I also know it will be because I’ll play them on the phone. Annoying but better than not playing Land 6.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/161849/land-6

I dip my toe in the treacherous wading pool of Burke’s Gambit

I’ve only played Burke’s Gambit once but, since I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to play it again, I figured I’d do a write up of it while it’s still fresh in my brain. Watch me somehow end up in a group that plays it once a month :P

Burke’s Gambit is Alien: The Social Deduction Game with the serial numbers filed off. You are all crew members on the Nostromo, ahem, I mean the Burke’s Gambit. One of you (but you don’t know who!) is infected with an alien parasite. At the end of the game, you get to vote on who goes out the airlock to hopefully kill the parasite or at least make sure it doesn’t make it back to Earth. Ah, but some of you are corrupt plants of the corporation and want to make sure the parasite makes to back home!

Incidentally, until I looked up the name to make sure I spelled it right for this blog, I didn’t realize that the Nostromo was named after a Joseph Conrad book. Man, that’s embarrassing since I like Conrad.

At the start of the game, everyone gets a public role card that gives you one special power, a hidden loyalty card to determine whose side you’re on and a completely hidden infection card (not even you get to look at it)

The game comes with a bag of specialty dice. I didn’t go through the dice but there are ten different symbols so there’s clearly some variety to the dice. On your turn, you draw a die and roll it. You get one reroll and then you use the die or hold it to use on a later turn rather than draw a die. You can only reserve one die at a time. The actions let you look at other folks cards or hurt people or reshuffle cards or such.

However, every die has an engine power-up face. Those lock and go into the center of the table. Get enough of them (how many depends on the number of players) and the game ends and you have to vote someone into the airlock.

First off, I haven’t played The Resistance or One Night Werewolf or Secret Hitler so I’m not up to speed on social deduction games. So I don’t know how Burke’s Gambit stacks up against those or other well beloved social deduction games.

Second, as I was writing this, I realized that I like a lot of crunch to my social deduction games. When it first came out, I played a ton of Bang and Shadows Over Camelot and Coup are both games I really like. However, I don’t normally think of them as social deduction games because so much else is going on! 

I did have a lot of fun playing Burke’s Gambit. I liked the dice and the game did a good job pushing the tension. More than anything else, I liked the extra layer of hidden information with the infection cards and the fact that you could never look at your own. I would play it again.

The guy that who taught it to me said he was looking for a Battlestar Galactica experience that took under a half hour and I think that’s not a bad description of Burke’s Gambit. It is weird having a game obviously based on Alien that never reaches the chest burster scene but it does keep the tension high.

My June RinCon experience

Over last weekend, I went to the first RinCon fundraiser of the year. RinCon is Tuscon’s friendly little gaming convention, small but well-run. And the fund raisers are effectively micro cons. I may not be able to make it Origins or GenCon at the moment but I still have a surprisingly rich convention life.

I got there right as it started and, apart from when the board game cleared out for supper, I had no problems finding games and moving from table to table to play with a wide variety of folks.

Highlights:

I played Reiner Knizia’s Money twice back in 2009, back to back games on the same night. At the time, I was really impressed with it but we just had too many games to try and it never made it back on the table. So I took it along because I had an itch to try and see if it was as good as I remembered.

Money is actually better than I remembered. Simple rules with complex decisions and a tight economy. It’s not quite an auction game or a drafting game but it has elements of both. And you definitely do your best to track the cards as they go from person to person. We had a second game immediately after the first.

I got to try a game I’d never heard of called Island of Eldorado, where you build a map, gather resources, build infrastructure and occasionally get in a fight. The end goal is to build four shrines and find a chalice. I won by the sheer luck of finding the chalice as soon as I entered the separate cave map. Very well produced. I’d play it again.

And I finally got to play Alien Frontiers, even if it wasn’t my own copy which is still gathering dust. That was a lot of fun. At least in the base game, the economy of points was much tighter than I had expected. I can see why Alien Frontiers has gotten all the the love it has. Definitely want to play more.

And I was able to sit in for someone who had to leave in a game of Clank, which was enough for me to learn how to play. While I am never going to stop thinking that the game’s name means it should be about robots, I did think it did a really good job blending dungeon crawling with deck building.

I also got in plays of Burke’s Gambit, Jorvik, my first two-player game of Circle the Wagons and HUE, which seems like a filler I will play at every event. It was really good as a tiny little con experience.

Gen Can’t is coming back and with a new PnP contest

Last year, I discovered Gen Can’t, the Unconvention for everyone who can’t attend GenCon. It was fun to be a part of the event and the best part was the library of games that their PnP contest created.

I played a decent chunk of the games and there are some I still want to get around to trying. I would recommend the winner, Welcome to Dino World, and the finalists to anyone. 

So I checked in on the Gen Can’t website, where has been in hibernation for ten months, to find that they have announced a new PnP design contest. This time, the good folks who organize Gen Can’t (who no doubt would make an interesting subject for a documentary on Netflix) are teaming up with Jason Tagmire and Buttonshy Games to have an 18-card PnP contest.

I kind of adore Button Shy. They were a big step for me to get into print and play and I feel that they’ve done a good job pushing the concept of micro games into full-sized games that just have a few components. Cunning Folk, Avignon, Circle the Wagons, all games worth looking into and I have very high expectations for Sprawlopolis. 

So, I am pretty stoked about this contest. While I have been having a surprising amount of fun with nine card PnP games lately, eighteen cards seems to be a really good point for micro games having enough parts to really do stuff. And still easy to make.

At the same time, I’m a little sad to see the Roll and Write contest be left the annals of history. After all, with zero construction requirements, those PnP games were accessible to anyone with access to a printer and some dice. That allowed for maximum participation.

Still, Gen Can’t did that last year. Doing it again would be a little tired. Besides, everyone can still and download over forty games from last year. 

Gen Can’t has had a Mega Karuba event, which I’m sure it will have again, where all the draws from a game of a Karuba are played out and everyone who wants to can play at home. Maybe this year, someone will do the same with Welcome to Dino World.

Down - it’s like a casual game app in nine cards

Down is an odd little game of following a line through eight cards. It’s designed to played with all the cards in one hand, even if you were standing on a moving train. (Which brings back memories of Chicago’s L for me and leaves me really wondering if I could play this game standing on a crowded train)

Okay. Standard boilerplate. Down is a solitaire, print and play game which means you have to make it yourself (which isn’t hard since it’s nine cards, not much ink and no other components) and can’t play it with anyone else. 

The cards are double-sided, which doubles the possible combinations. (Actually, quickly doing the math, it increases by a lot more than that. Math!) Each maze card has five vertical lines. Horizontal lines periodically connect two lines and the lines sporadically have coins, stars, diamonds and hexagons on them. You also have a score card that lets you keep track of your coins and stars.

Here’s how you play. Shuffle up the maze cards, flipping some over to add to the mix, and place the score card sideways at the back of the deck at zero coins and three stars. Start at the top of one of the lines and follow it down with your finger and never stop moving. Every time you come to a horizontal line, you must follow it. Get to the bottom and move to the next card. Diamonds let you change directions. Coins add to your score. Stars add to your stars. Hexagons mean you automatically lose. Get through all eight cards, the game ends and you judge how well you did by your coins 

Stars are your real decision point. Spending a star lets you change direction, moving to grab more coins or dodge a hexagon.

The most interesting part of the game is really the hand manipulation. You move the score card back and forth to track coins and up-and-down to track stars (the star track in printed on the side of the maze cards) If you have room, you could discard maze cards when you pass through but you can also put them at the back of the deck, behind the score card. (Which works well for playing while standing)

Honestly, the only tricky part of the game for me was manipulating the cards. But having played a bunch of I Am Lynx helped a lot. (And I am going to pick up Palm Island at some point)

Let’s talk about what Down isn’t. Down isn’t Catan or Terraforming Mars. Down isn’t Friday or Onirim. Down isn’t even Elevenses for One or Micro Rome. There’s no deep choices. It is a very, very light game that is designed to be played anywhere with no space and in almost no time.

With all that in mind, Down does succeed at its very specific goals. A speed solitaire game that can be played with no table is a really, really specific genre. If there are others, I’d like to see them. And, while I suspect it can be improved on, Down works.

I’ve enjoyed playing Down. There’s not much to it but it works as an amusing distraction. It will definitely become a part of my fidget box of solitaire games I keep with me. Sometimes, you don’t have the time or space so it’s nice to still have a game that works.

It’s a nine card PnP game that’s free to download. If it seems vaguely interesting, making a copy to try it out isn’t hard. That’s what’s nice about these tiny PnP games. They’re a tiny investment of time and materials. If it sounds interesting, give it a spin.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/205763/down

Boy, am I splitting hairs

I have spent a lot of time lately playing a lot of very, very short and very simple solitaire games. I’ve spent some time writing about them as well, my parent break or fidget games.

On occasion, when I have had more time to work with, I’ve been playing slightly longer games. And it can be amazing the difference between a game that takes less than five minutes to play and a game that takes five to ten minutes to play. Well, at least when that’s what you’re working with.

I’ve been pulling out Micro Rome and Circle the Wagons (Lone Cowboy solitaire variant) and Orchard (winner of this year’s Nine Card PnP contest) lately when I have a little more time and brain space and they feel significantly deeper (not deep, just deeper) than the many games of Down or Murderer’s Row or such I’ve been playing while keeping the other eye on our four-year-old. The first time I played Micro Rome in a while, I thought ‘Ah, this is a real game’

And I know if I had a regular game group, even if it was just a couple hours twice a month, I wouldn’t feel this way. There wouldn’t be an apparent difference in these little solitaire games. It’s only when they are what I mostly play that it feels this way.

I have a feeling that I’ll look back in a couple years and wonder how I could have this point of view.