Obligatory year end blog - warning - it’s boring

 In 2021, I started included monthly updates on my blog so the thought of a year-end update isn’t as interesting this year. But, you know you got to do it.

I will say that 2021 was a better year than 2020 but 2020 was a profoundly bad year. The Pandemic is a (hopefully) once-in-generation event whose effects will still be felt years after it’s finally over. 

My only face-to-face gaming was with my immediate family. If there were any local conventions, I didn’t hear about them and I’m pretty sure there weren’t any. 

Print and Play and solitaire gaming continued to be the primary focus of my gaming and I continued to curate that. Less crafting a game because it was there and more and more focus on making games I want to and would play. And online play continued to be there for me.

Honestly, a lot of 2021 was spent focusing on getting life outside of lockdown going again so gaming wasn’t a priority. Under those circumstances, Print and Play Roll and Write games are so awesome. They let me keep on exploring games with limited time, space (mental and physical) and resources.

2021 was a busy, honestly productive year for us. Gaming just wasn’t a focus but it did help keep us sane.

Kids Creative looks promising for the classroom

 Earlier in 2021, I broke my two and a half year hiatus from Kickstarter to back Radoslaw Ignatow’s Lots of Games Roll and Write collection. (Which has given me lots of fun) Well, he got me to do it again for his Creative Kids Collection.

After stretch goals, it ended up being a collection of fourteen Print and Play games. So, it’s given me a new set of games to go over. I’m slowly going through at least the Roll and Write games from the collection.

As the name of the collection makes abundantly clear, the games are aimed at kids. Some of the games are aimed at kids as young as five. His earlier games weren’t super complex but they were still discernibly more complex than the Creative Kids Games.

Now, being simple or aimed at a younger audience does mean poorer quality. But, honestly, so far, I’d say that Ignatow’s games aimed at an older audience are honestly better. (But, to be fair, I still have some games to go and some of them look promising. The more I play, the better it gets)

BUT… Part of the mission statement for this collection was games that you could use in a classroom or similar setting. And I think that the collection has a lot of promise there.

An hour might sound like a lot of time for a little Roll and Write game. But when you have to teach the game as well as run and manage it, that time can get eaten up fast. Some of the students/participants may have been taught Catan in the cradle but you can only go as fast as the slowest participant.

When I tried out My Farm from the the Creative Kids Collection, it reminded me of Ignatow’s earlier Alpakaland. If I was playing for my own enjoyment, I’d pick Alpakaland. However, I can see myself being able to teach a room of fifth or fourth graders My Farm in a class period and I don’t see that happening with Alpakaland.

The Creative Kids Collection may not be for the dedicated gamer but that’s not the audience. 

I don’t have a Star Trek joke for Deep Space D6

 I’ve been vaguely aware of Deep Space D6 pretty much since it first showed up. I even downloaded the app. But it took trying to play a different dice games for Dicember 2021 for me to actually try it.

So, I decided to look at the tutorial… and then played the game five  times in a row.

While the title implies that the game is themed around Star Trek Deep Space 9, it’s really one of the space ship wandering around the universe versions of Star Trek with the serial numbers filed off. And, as a Doctor Who fan who hasn’t watched a lot of Star Trek and thus isn’t the best guy to judge, I feel like it really nails that feel.

The game consists of a spaceship playmat, a stack of encounter cards and some dice. Well, you also have to have some tokens to track hull and shields. Honestly, the spaceship, with its separate hull and shields and  stasis beam, is what makes the game a spaceship game and not a dungeon crawl with a different skin.

The dice are the crew and you assign them to different tasks each turn. Each pip is a different kind of crew member. Each one does something different and I think it succeeds in being immersive and thematic.

One thing that makes the game both great and nightmarish is that encounters don’t go away until they are resolved. (Most of them are enemy ships and you resolve them by blowing them away) If the dice don’t let you manage them, you end up fighting an armada while terrible things go wrong on board.

And, yes, the lack of control the dice can give you is the biggest issue with Deep Space D6. You have to manage your hull, your shields, your dice pool and the encounters. If you don’t roll what you need to do at least part of that, you will get buried. I’ve had games last six turns.

There is some dice manipulation… through the commander pip. So you have to roll a specific pip in order to manipulate the dice :D

That said, after you get an idea how the game works, it seems like you tend to win or lose by the skin of your teeth as opposed to massive swings one way or the other.

In short, I can see why some folks don’t like Deep Space D6 but I’ve been having a barrel of Klingons worth of fun with it. At some point, I want to make the fan expansions and maybe even look into the published version.

A couple of free Holiday R&Ws

 I decided to celebrate Christmas by playing some Christmas-themed Roll and Writes. The two that I rolled with were The Cuboid’s Proud Christmas and Giftbringer.

(I had planned on also trying out Pohutukawa Christmas but its rules are literally missing step four. I suspect it’s a formatting error but it f you want me to learn a game, there needs to be a basic level of clarity in the roles)

The Cuboid’s Proud Christmas is themed around decorating a Christmas tree. Mechanically, it’s actually all about creating sets of dice. Two twos, three threes, etc., a set for each ornament on the tree. 

I like dice manipulation and this game is _nothing_ but dice manipulation. Rerolls, flipping dice, adding or subtracting, etc. Every turn is a puzzle.

I don’t know how well it would do with more than two or three players and I’ll have to play it more to see if it’s balanced. However, I like the moving parts.

When I first looked at Giftbringer, I felt that it looked like a Radoslaw Ignatow design. Then I looked at the designer and felt very observant.

Giftbringer is set in an alternate dimension where the Vikings have gifts instead of pillaging. It uses the Take It Easy paradigm of everyone using the same die rolls on their own board.

Over the course of ten turns, you use a pool of four dice to recruit Vikings (who supply gifts to give and can carry milk and cookies away) and pay for moving across the map to deliver gifts.

Giftbringer is all about managing resources, both the die rolls and your Vikings. There may be an optimal path across the map but the random factor of the dice keeps the game from being solved.

Giftbringer _might_ be simpler than Proud Christmas. It is definitely more intuitive. It’s a game that you can plonk down in front of folks and get the game going in two minutes. And, as a family holiday game, that’s a big plus.

I have heard folks say that free PnP games are a gift to the community and I agree with that. Both Proud Christmas and Giftbringer are definitely gifts and I appreciate both of them. 

That said, I will say that I do think that Giftbringer is the stronger, more polished game. I have already started recommending it to folks as a way to celebrate Christmas.

Yeah, I finally read Mona Lisa Overdrive

 Early in 2021, I decided that this would be the year I’d finally finish the Sprawl Trilogy. I’d already read Neuromancer and Count Zero more than once but this was the first time I read Mona Lisa Overdrive.

You know, I try not to spoil works but I can’t really discuss Mona Lisa Overdrive without spoilers. So…

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers

Like Count Zero before it, MLO follows multiple characters. We have Kumiko, a Yakuza princess who is mourning her dead mother. Her father sends her to England to get her away from one gang war, only to land her in another. There is Mona, a drug addict and prostitute, who is pulled into a scheme and a world bigger than she’s ever known. We also have Slick Henry, a damaged artist and ex-con in the middle of nowhere whose nowhere turns into the epicenter of a world changing event. And finally, Angie Mitchell from Count Zero. She is at the center of the two conflicts: a plot to kidnap her and the next evolutionary step of cyberspace.

And the supporting character who runs through all of the plots is Molly Millions, the original street samurai. Except she is older and wiser and not so street. But, while she doesn’t pull any Wolverine fight scenes, she is clearly a lot more in control and a lot deadlier than she was in Neuromancer.

One of my observations (not criticisms) of Count Zero was that it was almost a standalone work from its predecessor, Neuromancer. Mona Lisa Overdrive, the third and concluding volume of the Sprawl Trilogy, ties those two books together.  It makes the three books a series.

A definite part of the overall arc of the Sprawl trilogy is that the ‘human’ level conflict gets smaller while the ‘internet’ level gets bigger. While the human conflict in MLO involved lots of death and money and power, it feels petty compared to the gestalt mind of the internet making its next big step.

Count Zero is still my favorite work in the trilogy. It is tighter and the danger of the stakes getting lost is stronger. And Neuromancer informed an entire genre. Mona Lisa Overdrive is honestly the weakest of the trilogy but only because it stands next to such giants. 

Unsurmountable: it’s you versus that mountain

 Unsurmountable is the third game in Scott Alme’s/Buttonshy’s Simply Solo series. For me, a work really earns its series label when it hits three works so good on them.

The game, like all of the games, is very simple. You are trying to build a mountain out of the cards with a path that runs from the bottom to the top. (For the sake of clarity, I should mention it’s a two-dimensional mountain)

You have eighteen cards and nothing else. No dice or tokens or such. Seventeen of the cards are mountain cards that show paths and a special action. The other card is the rescue helicopter with a one-time ability to put one card from camp/your hand at the bottom of the deck.

Shuffle the mountains cards and deal out four or five in a row. (The number depends on the difficulty level) You can either add the first card to the mountain, which will be a step-pyramid, or use the special power on any of the other cards. Draw back up and repeat. If you form a path to the top of the mountain before you run out of cards, you win!

Unsurmountable has five levels of difficulty, which is a very good design choice. After you get to know the deck, the game becomes dramatically easier. So the game needs the extra challenges to keep it interesting. I view the second level (four cards in your hand) as the base game with level one as a tutorial.

The worst thing I can say about Unsurmountable is that I still like Food Chain Island better. Scott Almes and Buttonshy started out the series with a very strong game in Food Chain Island. 

Unsurmountable is a micro game that is designed to be played in ten minutes or so. It is not going to be Gloomhaven or Agricola. However, within the framework of its design expectations, it does very well. Mechanically, it is intuitive and easy to understand but the choices are legit. Sometimes you get the mountain. Sometimes the mountain gets you.

Not everyone is looking for a solitaire micro game. But, if you are, Unsurmountable is worth looking at.

Halfway through Dicember

 We are about half way through Dicember. 

Let’s go through the ground rules: there are three levels of challenges. Play fifteen different dice games, play thirty-one different dice games and play a different dice game each day in December. (Which would still be 31 games but with a time structure)

Oh and online play or app play count BUT only if it duplicates the analog version of the game. (And if it doesn’t, why would I want to play it?)

I went in, aiming for the regular challenge level. I was pretty sure I could do the second level. I wasn’t too sure about the third level but I am tracking the dates of plays just in case.

Well, I am almost at thirty-one plays. Which honestly isn’t a surprise. I’ve really gotten into PnP Roll and Writes. I have a decent library of dice games to tap. 

So, that leaves the third level of the Dicember challenge. A different dice game each day of the month. And there are four hurdles to to doing it.

Pacing - making sure I don’t play too many different games when I have free time 

Life - And some days, I really don’t have free time and Dicember isn’t a priority. As the holidays kick in, that will get more so.

Fun - Feeling obliged to play a game can be a grind, which defeats the purpose of playing a game

Asynchronous Play -

Okay, that last one requires a little explanation. I play a lot of turn-based games online with long distance friends. It’s great. But I can’t control when the game will end which was how I had five dice games end on one day. Which was great for reaching thirty-one plays but not great for a game a day. On the other hand, we might not finish any of our games of Castles of Burgundy this month :P

Eh, I’ll at least reach the second challenge before January. It adds a new element to my month. And if it stops being fun, it’s okay to stop.