The Third Bear is a book that rewards us with mysteries

The Third Bear by Jeff Vandermeer reads like what would happen if the ghost of Franz Kafka possessed Neil Gaiman. 

Published in 2010, the book is a collection of stories that could be described as magic realism or could be described as just plain unsettling. His works have a dreamy sensibility but those dreams often veer into the nightmare.

I really enjoyed this book. The story that really hooked me in the was the second one, The Quickening, about a girl being given something that looks like a rabbit but speaks. 

(Spoilers)

I thought I had the story all figured out, that the possibly magical creature would drive the aunt insane who would then kill it, making it a symbol of lost innocence and lost childhood. Instead, the girl kills her aunt, giving me a sense of relief that that rabbit lives and then asking myself why I’m relieved a little girl became a murderer. And then Vandermeer gives us one last disturbing flashback of the speaking creature eating rabbit stew, bones and all, making us really question what it is and how benevolent is it really?

(End of spoilers)

The Quickening is not the best story in the collection. Stories like the Situation or Errata fight for that title. But it let me know I was looking at a collection that didn’t give easy explanations or interpretations. It let me know that I was in for mysteries without solutions.

In the afterward of The Third Bear, Vandermeer wrote that he intentionally didn’t write forwards or afterwards for the stories because he didn’t want the readers to know his interpretations but to discover their own.

I have read some reviews that felt like the stories were incomplete and flawed because there is so much that isn’t filled in. And if the stories were even a little less well written, I’d agree with that. However, I am going to say that Vandermeer writes well enough that he pulls it off.

The Third Bear isn’t a happy book. It isn’t an easy book. But it is a rewarding book.

Vague but happy memories of the Big Cheese

When I spend time ruminating on the start of me becoming a dedicated board gamer, two companies tend to feature heavily in my memories: Looney Labs and Cheapass Games.

And they are companies I continue to like. However, I got to say that the earlier games from Cheapass Games are a lot more uneven. 

The Big Cheese was one of my earliest acquisitions, mostly because it was so very cheap, even by Cheapass standards. It was also very small, a tiny deck of cards and my game collection at the time consisted of a tiny deck of cards, not counting dice that didn’t come with the game, bidding tokens and a way to keep score.

In fact, I don’t even really remember what it was like to play the game. My strongest memory of the game is playing it in a coffee shop across from the Music Box Theatre in Chicago. I can’t even remember the name of the coffee shop and I’m pretty sure it’s gone. It’s kind of a fun memory.

The game itself, while the edition I own has some fun artwork of rats doing business work (the rat race :D), is really an auction game. Here are the twists. Your bid serves as a timer for any card you win. You’ll place your bid tokens on a project card and take one off at the start of each turn. Definitely makes resource management interesting. And you roll dice to determine how many points a project is worth so there’s some definite swinginess. Although you could argue that makes it a more realistic business model :P

I should really revisit The Big Cheese sometime. I have a feeling I would like it more now. For one thing, I’ve played a lot more auction games since then and have a better appreciation and understanding of them. I also think I would appreciate tokens being tied up in a project and used as timers better.

Of course, now it’s available as a print and play so even if I didn’t still have my old copy, I could make a new one.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/506/big-cheese

Playing Dante’s Inferno felt like being there

Take a simple dungeon crawl. Now, set it in Dante’s version of Hell. Finally, add the Catan economic system. That might sound cool but what we got was a complete, horrible mess.

Climbing into the Wayback Machine, I rediscovered Twilight Creation’s Dante’s Inferno, a game I apparently did my best to block out. A friend of mine got it around when it first came out. We were already familiar with Catan and we thought it was promising but we were done by our second play.

I have a weird opinion of Twilight Creations. I sincerely believe that they love what they do and are trying to give the world cool games. And I think they are willing to take chances. But so many of their games that I’ve tried seem like they need two more rounds of development.

And Dante’s Inferno is near the bottom of the heap for me. But not as bad ZombieTown. That was literally unplayable, although a horrible rulebook had a lot to do with that.

You steadily build a square spiral to the center of Hell where you try and defeat Lucifer. Each space has a number and resource and if one of your pawns is on a space, they can earn that resource Catan style and spend it on different effects.

Back in the olden days, the game just ended up being a tedious slog. Now, older and more jaded- I mean wiser, I can see why Dante’s Inferno has so many problems.

The combat, which consisted of trying to rolling high on two dice, was simplistic and weighted against the players. (Which is thematic, seeing as how damned souls shouldn’t have much chance against demons, but still not fun) Fighting demons is something of a last resort but it should be more interesting.

And the Catan economic system doesn’t mesh well with the rest of the system. You don’t really set up an infrastructure, particularly since other players can force your pawns to move. Everyone’s resources are public knowledge and there are ways to directly attack the other players, so trading isn’t as desirable.

And the rulebook was so bad that we weren’t at first sure how you fought Lucifer (turns out the same as any other combat). And you had to collect and then spend resources to build the inner layers of Hell, turning just progressing into a slog. And- THERE WAS JUST SO MUCH THAT DIDN’T WORK!

If we had come across Dante’s Inferno a couple years later with a lot more games under our belt, we wouldn’t come near it. At the same time, I have a feeling if the game had been developed a couple years later, it wouldn’t have so many issues. Welding a Euro game structure to an adventure game theme was pretty experimental and daring for the time. I have to give credit where credit is due. But the experiment failed.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6201/dantes-inferno

The Mysterious Benedict Society solves its mysteries

The Mysterious Benedict Society is a series of books about four extraordinary kids who are recruited by an eccentric but benevolent genius to help save the world. Their adventures are filled with riddles and puzzles set in an off kilter world, giving me some idea of what a crossover between A Series of Unfortunate Events and Professor Layton would be like.

The first book, The Mysterious Benedict Society, describes how the kids are brought together and uncover a conspiracy to take over the world. In the Perilous Journey, they go on a madcap journey to rescue their kidnapped benefactor. And in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, they have their final confrontation with the bad guy.

Yeah, I’m trying to avoid spoilers.

The four kids make me think of comic book superheroes. They each have a special ability and a quirk/flaw. Reynie is practically Sherlock Holmes but struggles to have faith in humanity. (As opposed to Holmes who sometimes doesn’t bother :D) Sticky is a walking encyclopedia but has crippling self doubt. Kate has all the physical skills of Batman but very poor impulse control. And Constance is a mutant and a brat. They’re fun but flat characters.

By the end of the series, my favorite character was Constance because she ended up the most developed. The books explore and explain why she is such a brat without absolving her of being a brat.

It was really hard not to notice the clear influence of A Series of Unfortunate Events and the author noted that people compared how books to that series and The Secret Series by Pseudononimous Bosch.

And, I’m not going to lie, as an adult, I liked both of the other series more. The Mysterious Benedict Society is fun but it isn’t as deep and interesting, particularly compared to A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Part of what made the Lemony Snicket books so strong was how dedicated they were to their Kafkaesque sensibilities. Both for the characters and the readers. The Baudelaire orphans live in a world that is openly malicious and the best they can hope for from an adult is that they will be useless and ineffective. And we the readers never truly get to find out what’s going on. We are just as lost as the Baudelaires.

In comparison, everything gets neatly explained and wrapped up in the Mysterious Benedict Society. And as opposed to useless or malicious grownups, the kids have loving family support networks. And Mr Benedict and his associates are basically adult versions of the kids, super heroes in their own right :D

In fact, because it was a more conventional story, the kooky setting of the Mysterious Benedict Society actually strained my suspension of disbelief. Weaponized office supplies are a neat symbol but I kept wondering why the bad guys never use guns.

While I prefer A Series of Unfortunate Events, I would give the Mysterious Benedict Society to a younger child first. I think it would be easier for a seven-year-old to handle. An eight year old, I might change my mind.

My ongoing adventures with micro games - Slicer

Slicer is 1) a free PnP game 2) a solitaire 3) just nine cards with some dice and tokens 4) an incredibly abstract interpretation of computer hacking. Yup, that about covers it.

In the spirit of William Gibson devotees everywhere, you are a hacker who is hacking their way through a series of servers in order to reach and open up a corporate database. So, each card represents a server and you roll dice in order to successfully hack it. (Am I even using that verb right?)

Slicer has different modes of play. Each mode has you lay out the cards in a different pattern and easy mode makes it easier to successfully hack servers. In fact, you might even win on your first turn on easy mode since the database is shuffled in. On the other hand, the layers of cards you need to go through on hard might require loaded dice.

To add to the fun, you have to complete the game in six turns and messing up a roll can cost you two turns. You do get two to three tokens that let you bend the rules a bit.

Proverbially cards on the table. Slicer is not a good game. It really boils down to flip a card and roll three dice and hope you roll high. The dice and card manipulation that your help tokens give you isn’t enough to really give you choices or control. When I’m complaining about the lack of control in a nine-card, six-round game, it’s pretty bad.

That said, there are some things I like about Slicer. It’s a super easy build. I like the variable set-ups. And it works well as a parent break game, taking up little space, time or brain power.

What Slicer really reminds me of is Muses, another nine-card and some dice game. Muses, which I’ve bashed, is better though, because it allows more dice manipulation. I ended up playing Muses than I ever expected because it works so well as a parent break and I suspect that I’ll do the same with Slicer.

I do think Slicer missed a trick by not giving any of the cards special powers. For instance, being allowed to flip a card after successfully hacking a midrange server would add decisions to the game.

I wouldn’t recommend Slicer for anyone to make. Still, I don’t regret making it and it will see some play from me.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/217273/slicer

The guilty pleasure of Prince of Tennis

It has been said that the only genre of sports movies is the scrappy underdogs overcoming the odds. I really want to know who said that but it really seems to be true from The Bad News Bears to Sea Biscuit to The Mighty Ducks to Rocky (well, he did go the distance) to Major Leagues to etc.

To be fair, it’s one of the easiest ways of creating drama and tension. I mean, watching a movie about Michael Jordon being awesome would be fun but we wouldn’t be wondering how it would end.

But that’s a lot of why I really liked the manga Prince of Tennis enough to read a couple dozen volumes of it back when it was first getting published in the U.S. Because it completely subverts that theme.

Ryoma and all of the other players at Seigaku aren’t introduced as newbies to tennis who turn out to be prodigies or who have to learn that hard work and practice can make champions out of them. No, these middle schoolers start out as physical gods who laugh at the laws of physics and just get more ridiculous from there.

In fact, Ryoma is kind of an immature brat :D Although he is a twelve-year-old who has gone Batman levels of training in tennis by his crazy monk dad so he kind of has an excuse for being both arrogant and immature. He’s young and not a prodigy but someone who worked hard to be insanely good.

But I’m getting off track. Prince of Tennis entertained me so much because it wasn’t about plucky underdogs. It’s about the Dragon Ball Z of tennis matches. It’s not about the heroes overcoming the odds. It’s about the heroes overcoming the laws of physics, common sense and reality.

Maybe if I’d seen more subversions of the underdog theme, I wouldn’t have been so charmed by Prince of Tennis. Then again, it jumps into its madness feet first and no apologies. Maybe it’d have been fun no matter what.

But Ryoma and his friends are no Bad News Bears. They’re Greek gods with tennis rackets.

What will we pay for free?

One of the selling points of Print and Play is that it’s a way to get ‘free’ games. Which is, of course, patently untrue. You always have material costs, even if the download is free.

That said, as long as you have a reliable printer, some games are virtually free and there are other ways to moderate the cost. Having a tool box of assorted dice, tokens, dry erase markers and pawns is an investment that goes a long ways. 

Having said that (and there’s a lot to say about budget PnP), you also have to ask yourself what you’re willing to settle for for ‘free’. To quote my dad, if you wouldn’t pay a dime for it, why are you bothering getting it for free?

Now, I freely admit that I personally give more leeway for PnP games than I would for a published game that I would have to pay quite a bit more for. Particularly if it is not from an established publisher but from a hobby designer. (If I have paid for the files, my standards go up) But there is a definite line.

Shortly after I first discovered Boardgame Geek, I tried out Malta Convoy. All it takes to make it is printing out a page and adding dice. However, it’s a game where you barely have any choices. It’s mostly rolling the dice and recording what they tell you to record.

I’d still probably pull out Malta Convoy and play it out of nostalgia value but there are literally dozens of games I’d recommend over it that are also print and add dice. Being free just isn’t enough. Even a free PnP game has to have some value.

There’s definitely a tipping point for me. What got me thinking about the value of ‘free’ games was Outlaw. Outlaw is basically a poor cousin to Pikomino, tossing dice in order to claim spots to earn points. It’s another game that doesn’t require any more construction than print the board and add dice and tokens.

Outlaw is, honestly, a so-so game. It’s too easy to have a null round or even accidentally knock one of your own tokens off the board. The game can become a grind. It doesn’t have the legs to be a game I’d want to play a lot of.

But, I have seen dice games that publishers were asking money for that were worse. In fact, I’d say that Outlaw is actually pretty middle of the road for light dice games, which is a genre I think it pretty fun and easy to get folks into.

So Outlaw is a game that I made a laminated board for and it’s a game I’ve recommended to people. It’s not brilliant but it is a good return for ‘free’. It passed the threshold.

All that said, what I’ll settle in the name of ‘free’ hasn’t been as big a deal recently. Over the last few years, I really think a lot of solid PnP games have come out. PnP contests and prototypes with Kickstarter in mind probably has a lot to do with that. I will happily listen to any argument to the contrary but I think you have to settle for ‘free’ a lot less than when I started.