Clans - this simplicity couldn’t have been easy

 Leo Colovini has been a mixed bag for me. Alexandros spent a long time in one of my groups as the standard for a terrible game. I may never life down bringing it to the table. And Cartagena never clicked for me no matter how hard I tried it. However, Clans still stands out for me as a really solid game. 

Oh and it was also my introduction to Colovini.

Here’s the review I wrote 14 years ago: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/123543/prehistoric-migration-over-epochs My opinion of Leo Colovini has gone down since I wrote this but my opinion of Clans hasn’t changed.

The concept of the game is so simple. Everyone can move about collections of huts and create isolated villages that score points for their participating colors BUT everyone’s color is secret. Very easy to grok hidden information and bluffing. 

But, as I get older and more exposed to more and more games, I have to say that the simplicity of Clans had to have had a LOT of work out into it. The board alone is designed to create both balanced set-up and play. There’s a lot of little touches in the game that look obvious but couldn’t have been simple to develop.

With a younger audience, I might actually try Quicksand before Clans. (Back when our son was into Paw Patrol, I pondered making a Paw Patrol retheme) It’s a quick and easy introduction to the concepts and easy to teach in a loud room. But I think Clans has greater depth and I would use it to secretly introduce negative space.

Back before Covid put a hold on in-person conventions, I had gotten into the habit of taking older games to little cons. I’ve done this with TransAmerica, Money, For Sale and Through the Desert. And they’ve held up for new (okay, younger) players. Clans would fit in to that group and do at least as well.

Lifeguard is not bad but that might not be enough

 I’ll be honest. While I look at every entry in PnP contests and download them, the low ink, low construction games are the ones that get made right off the bat. (Larger games require consideration) Which is why I’ve already tried out Lifeguard: Surf and Rescue. It’s a Roll and Write that consists of one page of play sheet and one page of rules. I duplexed it and laminated and was done in one sheet of paper.

Lifeguard is all about rescuing drownings surfers. In addition to the play sheet, you will need something to write with and a couple of dice. Yes, this game has a really low buy-in requirements. 

The actual board is a grid. You set up the game by rolling the dice and then spending the pips on resources (which consist of three different ways to manipulate dice, ranging from +/- 1 to refills) After that you roll the dice and place drowning surfers on those coordinates. You can adjust the difficulty by adding or subtracting and drowning people.

Okay, here’s how you play. Roll two dice. Choose one of them and draw a line straight up from the X axis until you hit the other number on the Y axis. Then drawn a straight line to the left. If you touch any drowning surfers, you save them. If you can’t, use resources to adjust the dice until you can. Save all the surfers and you win. Use up all your resources and you lose. Scores are based on how efficiently you rescue drowning surfers.

I have to admit that I read the rules wrong the first time I tried to play. Based purely on my own preconceptions, I assumed you were drawing a diagonal line, not a right angle. And that made the game literally impossible. Getting the rules right made quite a difference.

Honestly, the game was better than I expected but I went in with very low expectations and a misunderstanding that broke the game. My favorite part of the game is the dice manipulation, which is clear and cleanly laid out.

But the big problem the game has is that it’s too easy. After a decent handful of games, the only time I lost was when I rolled a four to buy resources. I feel pretty sure that rolling a six or better (and you do get a mulligan) will give you enough resources to win the game. And a d6 is small enough that a little dice manipulation can go a long way.

Too easy isn’t an absolute deathknell for a game. I still periodically play Solitaire Spellbook Swapping from last year’s solitaire contest still comes out. It’s easy to solve but it’s an amusing  puzzle. But it’s the exception to the rule.

Being easy to pull together can be an underrated virtue in PnP games and one I keep in mind when recommending games to folks who don’t normally PnP. However when it’s a game’s strongest point, it’s not the best.

So Kim Newman really does write fan fiction with his own characters?

 I hadn’t planned on blogging about Kim Newman and his Diogenes Club stories again or at least not for a while. And then I read Cold Snap.

Now, I’m not going to go into the plot, beyond the fact that I did enjoy the story and I was happy to see Richard Jeperson again. But the novella has loads and loads of characters, many of which have basically just cameos for all intents and purposes. Honestly, you could have stripped most of them out and the story would have both been the same and strong.

A lot of the characters I recognized from other Diogenes stories. Then, I found myself thinking ‘Isn’t that the vampire lady from those Warhammer Fantasy books?’ Yes, it was and Newman wrote those stories. And doesn’t this concept seem a lot like something I read in a Doctor Who book during the hiatus? Newman wrote that too?!

As I started digging, it rapidly became clear that Cold Snap was a massive cross-continuity crossover of Kim Newman’s writing with many of the characters alternate versions so they could be crammed into the Diogenes Club setting. Kim Newman totally beat fanfic writers to the punch. 

This led to some interesting further revelations. One, a lot of books and stories referenced in Cold Snap are out of print. And some of them were written in different genres so the versions of the characters that twigged my interest wouldn’t be what I’d find in their original works. Actually finding the books might not be that rewarding. 

Really, in one story, Kim Newman out Michael Moorecocked Michael Moorecock and really did write his own fan fiction. 

Sadly, uncovering the meta elements of Cold Snap has probably decreased my enjoyment of the work.

Osmo tricks our son into measuring stuff

 Like just about everyone else in the quarantine world who has a child under 18, we have been inundated with ads for educational stuff for kids. I remember thinking back in the spring that the problem wasn’t finding stuff but figuring out what would actually help.

My personal theory is that consistency is the most important thing. Find something and stick to it. (EMPHASIS: I AM NOT A CHILDHOOD EDUCATION EXPERT) But the most striking thing we found (thanks to one of my sister-in-laws) is Osmo.

The idea behind Osmo is you tilt a tablet upright and put a mirror down on the camera so the tablet can watch the kid (or anyone else) draw or do stuff with different paraphernalia. Letter tiles, number tiles, tanagram pieces.

Part of me wonders if actually having the kids do stuff as opppsed to tapping on a screen or typing makes it more educational. Of course, I have absolutely no idea if that’s correct and there’s enough school-assigned stuff going on that I have no way to measure Oslo’s effect.

The latest one that we have tried out is Math Wizard and the Secets of the Dragons. It has kids measure pictures of dragons and then feed them with different length tiles of food.

So in other words, it tricks kids into learning how to eyeball measurements? That’s actually pretty cool, although I have Habitat for Humanity horror stories about measuring once and cutting twice. And that’s something I really haven’t seen taught in edutainment.

It’s actually caught our child’s interests, at least a little. And it teaches a skill that’s actually quite practical. After months of exploring educational tools, it’s nice to know there are still surprises.

Sometimes, a little bit of random is what makes the difference

 For a while, Leo Colovini’s Alexandros was considered the epitome of a bad (or at least disappointing game) While it wasn’t really the worst game any if had ever played, it was a very frustrating and disappointing experience and our opinion of Leo Colovini never really recovered.

The problem was that you could basically either set off a scoring round (where everyone had a chance to score points) or build up your hand of cards to take advantage of a scoring round. Simply put, we always for it disadvantageous to set off a scoring round. It had all the disadvantages of crafting in Puerto Rico with none of the possible benefits.

(And, yes, I’m sure that if we had taken the time to play a lot more, we would have found out how the game is supposed to played. However, the experience was so not fun we never wanted to go back)

Colovini has another, similar game, Masons. Likewise, you divide a board up into closed areas and set off scoring rounds where everyone has a chance to score points. However, unlike Alexandros, scoring happens automatically after a closed region is formed and everyone has secret scoring conditions. There is a random factor that makes scoring a risk worth taking.

A friend who is more of a gaming purist considers Alexandros to be the more elegant, better designed game. However, he will also admit that Masons is more fun and more playable. And while Alexandros was banished, Masons has seen some decent play for me.

Alexandros is a more precise, calculating game. You can have a pretty decent idea what people will get out of a scoring round. Masons is looser, more random. But that random factor makes the game more playable, more enjoyable.

I had a similar experience with Sid Sackson’s Bazaar and Monad. Well, except that I think Monad is a good game, other than being really hard to play when you’re as colorblind as I am. But that random factor of the die roll in Bazaar made the game looser but more fun and easier for me to get folks to play the game.

Bleed in RPGs needs purpose

 Every once in a while, I go back to the Indie Megamix Mixtape. It’s a rather large collection of tiny indie RPGs inspired by songs and created to raise money for creators in need. I have intentionally treated every game as a single entity and taken my time to look at them. In fact, I think this is the first time I’ve looked at the collection this year.

The Sound of Silence is a game for two-players.

You define a relationship between the two characters and a fight. Then you privately decide how you feel about the fight. Then you sit back to back and try to resolve things.

There’s a fine line in a lot of indie games between RPG/Storytelling and therapy techniques, particularly in short forms like game poems. The Sound of Silence might actually completely cross that line. And I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

A concept I have spent too much time thinking about is bleed. That’s when real feelings bleed over into game play.

When I first came across the idea (which was in a discussion about Wraith: the Oblivion, by the way), I didn’t like it. It struck me as both emotionally dangerous and getting in the way of the whole escapist point of RPGs.

Since then, I have quite changed my tune. Bleed can be not just powerful but useful. Games like Polaris and My Life With Master are two good examples of that. Although I say that with the caveat of Emily Care Boss’s guideline that everyone needs to be safe and protected.

But I can’t help but feel that The Sound of Silence is bleed for the sake of bleed and that just seems unnecessary.

Kim Newman is a strange flavor of brilliant

 I decided that I needed to read more of Kim Newman’s Diogenes Club stories. I’m not going to try and read them all since I’m not sure what books and stories by Newman count and which don’t  :D (I also have to note that only Moriarty and Irene Adler get pinched from the Holmes cannon more often than the Diogenes Club)

Kim Newman’s version of the Diogenes Club has them be the semi-official paranormal investigators of the British government in a slightly quirky alternative history. The first stories I read long ago were about Richard Jeperson, a mod psychic in the 70s with a wardrobe that cannot be believed. However, my interest was renewed when I learned that Newman lovingly deconstructed other eras.

And that’s what makes these stories so fascinating. Newman either clearly loves the genres he’s exploring and skewering or fakes loving them very well. At the same time, he’s deconstructing them, peeling back the edges to show some of the dark implications.

Spoilers

Spoilers

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And, man, the most extreme example that I’ve read so far is ‘Richard Riddle, Boy Detective in “The Case of the French Spy” ‘. It’s a sendup of Enid Blyton’s works, only the free range kid adventurers stumble across a deep one straight out of Lovecraft.

I have a morbid fascination with Blyton. Her work is beloved in England but it’s also mindless dribble that is xenophobic, sexist, classist and obsessed with food. Between Richard Riddle and Five Go Mad in Dorset (thank you, Dawn French), I sometimes think the best side effect of her work is the parodies. (To be fair, I think Chuck Jones’ Dover Boys cartoon is the best thing that came out of of the Rover Boys books)

Admittedly, what makes the Richard Riddle story work (and, as far I know, Newman only wrote this one story in this style, although Richard appears in other works) is that it’s just on the edge of absurdity. That said, the kids are seriously dedicated to being genre savy about the wrong genre, still acting like they’re in a jolly romp while the deep one they freed tears some admittedly naughty men apart.

Although Violet calmly deciding to burn the priory down to prevent any unfortunate questions about the dead people also indicates that these are some pretty cold-blooded kids.

Newman’s use of genre and tropes is fascinating. He doesn’t fully deconstructs them. The rules still apply. But we see enough of the backstage to turn those tropes disturbing. I may be wrong but I am left thinking that he is both a brilliant fan and a brilliant writer.