New assessment: Ablaze works great for casual gaming

 I have sometimes wondered if I have some kind of weird obsession with Heinrich Grumpler’s Ablaze, which is actually a thematically linked set of three games that use the same components. If you count games I’ve played only once, I have played a lot of different games over the years. And, on multiple occasions, I’ve revisited Ablaze for binge plays, despite thinking there are more deserving games for that honor. 

But after my latest revisit, I’m wondering if I’m being too harsh to Ablaze, that Ablaze is actually quite a good set of games. I just haven’t been using the appropriate criteria.

Okay, here’s a short overview. The box has rules for three different games: Wild Fire, Volcano and On the Run. All three are tile games that are themed around forest fires. More than that, they all are can be played competitively, cooperatively and solitaire. They are pretty abstract but their themes do shine through.

And all the games were too light and too random to really work as serious abstracts or ‘serious’ games so I always felt like they weren’t actually good. 

And if I want a brain burning abstract or a meaty game that will be the centerpiece of a game night, Ablaze isn’t a good choice. But for casual gaming? The Ablaze collection is quick and easy to teach with the right amount of choices to keep everyone engaged. And for solitaire, which I play a lot more of right now, the games are light enough that I can get them in but still feel like I have gamed.

Over the last few years, I have gained or regained an appreciation of casual games. (I have also regained an appreciation for James Earnst and Cheapass Games, which is clearly related) Outside of organized game nights and conventions, this is what gets played. And there’s a broader audience for it.

And Ablaze is a really good example of a casual game system. It’s one step more thematic than a deck of cards (Don’t get me wrong, I think a deck of playing cards is the most amazing tool you can have in your tool box) while being very accessible and versatile. Heck, the original Feurio version came out in 2003 and the Ablaze version is still pretty easy to find.

I was right in my old thinking that Abalze isn’t going to set the world on fire (thank you, folks, I’m here all week, don’t forget to tip your waiters) but I now really it’s a game that would see a lot of play for a lot of different audiences.

This is how the magic school genre got started?!

I have been meaning to read the short story ‘The Wall Around the World’ by Theodore R. Cogswell for years. As I understand it, it was the first work that actually featured a school that taught magic. While Ursula K. LeGuin was the one who really solidified and developed the idea in A Wizard of Earthsea, this story touched on the idea earlier.

I eventually found it in Isaac Asimov presents The Great SF Stories volume 15. That’s the problem with individual short stories. They can be harder to find than full books. That particular anthology focused on stories published in 1953, by the way. 

The academy, incidentally, really comes across as a middle school that just happens to teach magic. It doesn’t have the flair or individual touch of, say, Hogwarts, as an obvious example. However, it does actually do the intended trick of making it clear that magic is an every day thing in the setting.

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The unnamed magical land of the story is surrounded by a ridiculously big wall. Porgie, the 13-year-old protagonist, figures out how to build a glider and fly over the wall. There he learns that there’s a high tech world on the other side that built the wall to create an environment where magic could develop. In fact, his school teacher is an observer to both track magical development and make sure  folks who figure out how to get over the wall end up okay. 

My first reaction to the story was ‘Wow, this is so pre-New Wave’ So many of the social issues that the setting brings up are glossed over, particularly how the high tech civilization that created a giant prison camp as an experiment is depicted as benevolent :D The story is a classic example of science fiction being about how to solve a problem through cleverness. (I blame John Campbell) 

Which isn’t to say ‘The Wall Around the World’ is a bad story. It is a silly romp that was fun to read. I definitely enjoyed reading it. And I don’t mind the ‘it was science fiction all along twist’ which wasn’t exactly new even in 1953. 

Still, I went in looking for a revolutionary story and got a good but standard yarn with a cute detail. Really, Ursula K. LeGuin earned the credit she gets for developing the idea.

 

Why does scary stuff work?

 It’s almost Halloween. Our six-year-old has been obsessing about Halloween since August. So I feel like I should write about ghost and horror stories/movies/authors/board games/RPGs. But man, where to start? I mean, what can I write about Edgar Allen Poe that hasn’t already been written? 

Really, between ghost stories, gorror, zombies, vampires, undisclosed generic horror, werewolves, demon types and all of the fun you can have with Cthulhu, there’s a lot of subcategories in the whole ‘scare you’ genre. 

Clearly, it touches some kind of nerve on the human race. Perhaps fear fascinates us or is so fundamental that we all can relate to it. According to Paul Eckman, fear is one of the six core emotions (the others are joy, anger, disgust, sadness and surprise and, yes, the Pixar movie Inside Out drew heavily on his studies) 

But our love of media that have scary stuff in them is clearly not just related to fear all by itself. Being able to indulge in it safely and in a controlled way lets our minds add joy to the equation which changes everything. I’m not actually worried about a rabid dog attacking me when I read Cujo or zombies when I watch Night of the Living Dead.

(Too much control can remove all the fear, though. I was in a D&D campaign where we mugged a litch. Took a lot of planning and very special circumstances but we did it. And it wasn’t scary at all)

Clearly, while there are lots of specific niches of scary stuff, media that has scary stuff in it is not really a niche. I’d go beyond saying it’s mainstream and go so far as to say that it is universal. And it’s clearly not just for Halloween.

I find out Clock Golf is a thing

 I just discovered that there is a thing called Clock Golf. It was a 19th century lawn game. I found out it existed because George MacDonald Fraser mentioned it in passing but apparently Agatha Christie and Wodehouse mention it as well, if Wikipedia is to be believed.

The basic idea is setting twelve metal numbers in a circle ten to thirty feet in diameter and taking turns putting a golf ball into a hole somewhere in the circle from each of the numbers. The hole doesn’t have to be in middle so there can be some variety. Some rules say it’s okay to have shrubs and other obstacles to make things interesting.

My first thought on finding out that Clock Golf is a thing was that it was like a precursor to miniature golf.  My second thought was that it was kind of the opposite of miniature golf since everything happens in one tiny space. 

I guess if you love golf enough that you still want to play it when you only have ten feet to work with, this is what you come up with. On the other hand, I kind of thought space was kind of the idea when you play golf, even miniature golf.

I can see how Clock Golf is a clever idea and I can also see why I never heard of it.

Yes, I had to make my own Alone Among the Stars hack

 I have been looking through the various hacks of Alone Among the Stars, designed by Takuma Okada. I realized I wanted to play a hack that would let me tell a Tom Hanks in Castaway story but I couldn’t find one that fit what I wanted to play. 

So I decided to make one.

Again, I made this for my own personal enjoyment and all the hard work was done by Takuma Okada. So here it is:

Alone as a Castaway

You are a castaway, the lone survivor of a shipwreck who has washed up on the shore of a tropical island. You need to island and do what you need to to survive. This island may be your home for the rest of your life.

Look, this is a blatant hack of Alone Among the Stars by Takuma Okada. Not going to pretend otherwise. It follows almost the exact same rules except for one. You don’t roll for multiple cards for each scene. A Robinson Crusoe island is small enough in scope that I think one card is enough for each scene. Essentially, the island is treated like one planet in Alone Among the Stars but you can use more than six cards.

Okay. Alone as a Castaway is writing/journaling game. Each scene/journal entry, you will draw a card to determine what discovery the scene/journal entry is about and roll a die to establish how you came across that discovery. The suit of the card will establish the nature of what you have discovered and he rank will establish where the discovery was made.

While I created this with a Tom Hanks in Castaway story in mind, you can bend it however you’d like. It can be modern day or set in the 16th century. It can be extremely realistic or full of magic and fantasy. There is no wrong.

Okay, here go the rules:

Roll a die to determine how you came across the discovery.

1-2: it took a lot of work to find it

3-4: you came upon it suddenly

5-6: you were on break.

Now draw a card to get some details about what you discovered.

Diamonds - Some essential resource you need to survive, be it a natural one to the island or sometuing washed up 

Clubs -  a danger that you need to be wary of

Hearts - wildlife

Spades - a natural, breath taking  beauty

A - in the waters of the natural bay the reefs form

2 - on the beach 

3 - on the cliffs

4 - in a shallow cave 

5 - on the mountains

6 - in the grassy fields

7 - in deep caverns

8 - deep in the jungle

9 - in the swamps 

10 - by a stream

J - at the volcano

Q - in an isolated pool

K - ruins

Have fun!

So Star Trek is Octonauts in space?

 Octonauts is underwater, old school Star Trek with funny anthropomorphic animals but no red shirts or prime directive.

While we tried having our son watch it two, three years ago, he wasn’t really interested in it. Now that we are delving into all the potentially educational kids TV that Netflix has, Octonauts has gotten some viewing.

The show, aimed at the five to seven bracket, is about a group of animals who have undersea adventures with the mission statement of ‘Explore! Rescue! Protect!’ Each segment features a different and very specific form of marine life and includes a few interesting factoids about them.

But man, does it have a Star Trek vibe like no one’s business. 

While Star Trek didn’t create the paradigms that have become synonymous with it(I keep waiting for someone to tell me The Voyage of the Space Beagle ripped off Star Trek), it did run away with them like a house on fire. And, speaking as a dedicated Doctor Who fan, I think Star Trek has done quite well by them. (To be fair, I haven’t seen a single episode of at least half the versions of Star Ttek out there)

What really screams original Star Trek to me about Octonauts is that the main characters form a aid-Ego-SuperEgo trio like McCoy-Kirk-Spock. This time, though, the medical officer is the Spock figure while the Id is a kiddie-friendly version of Wolverine.

I do wonder If the light-hearted action-adventure or the cartoonish anthropomorphism gets in the way of actual scientific facts. Still, I figure our son will at least remember the names of some sea life. And if he ends up liking Star Trek more than Doctor Whi, I’ll blame Octonauts :D

Alone Among the Stars actually works

 I recently stumbled upon Alone Among the Stars and its myriad of hacks completely by accident. I’d been looking into more conventional solitaire card games. In fact, I’m still wading through all the variations and pondering the whole matter. You use a deck of cards and a die to come up with the inspiration to describe planets that you are exploring.

Alone Among the Stars is on the seriously soft end of the solitaire RPG spectrum. On the hard side, you have the tightl structure of game books that strictly restrict your choices. On the soft side, you have basically guidelines to write fiction or a meditation exercise. The solitaire version of De Profundis consists of keeping a diary of Lovecraftian horror that hopefully isn’t actually happening to you.

Alone Among the Stars Has you take the role of a solitaire explorer in outer space. For each planet you choose to explore, you role a die to see how many cards you lie down. You then use the dice and charts to give you some rough inspiration on what you find. And thus you create a journal of exploration.

Okay. The games consists of three tables that you use to create writing guidelines. That’s it. Which is probably why there have been so many hacks of it. That’s a really, really simple framework to work with.

But... Alone Among the Stars gives you just enough structure to work with that you really do have a framework to work with. And it is open enough that the replay value is just limited to your creativity and imagination. 

I honestly wasn’t sure how well it would work. Alone Among the Stars didn’t seem like much of a step beyond just telling you to go write a story, have fun. But when I actually tried it, I found it did give me enough guidance to work as a structured writing game.

I then recommended it to some friends... and they quickly began playing it as well.

I honestly think Alone Among the Stars gives enough guidance AND flexibility that it can work for a lot of people. You can spend pages on one card or just a couple sentences and both are perfectly valid. 

I didn’t think Alone Among the Stars would be good but it is.