Quests Over Coffee is worth a second cup of coffee

Alexander Shen really got on my radar with Quests Over Coffee. Certainly, it’s the game that has gotten the most exposure at PnP Arcade, thanks to all the expansions. I’d made a copy earlier this year and I’ve finally tried it out.

Short version, Quests Over Coffee is the best game that I’ve played by Alexander Shen.

Longer version: Quests Over Coffee consists of a deck of quest and a deck of item cards. You have to add dice and some way of tracing health, money and luck. The game structure is resolve five quest cards, get a chance to buy items and then resolve another five quest cards.

Quest cards are obviously where all the real game play happens. Each one has a cartoon that gives you some narrative, a failure condition, a success condition and a special condition. Essentially, how high you have to roll to succeed and a combination of dice you need to roll to get a bonus. 

I went in expecting a total luck fest. But you actually have a number of choices. You can buy more dice for a quest with money. You can use luck for rerolls. Items, which you can buy at the shop or earn through quests, give you special abilities (almost always one-shot) And, perhaps most importantly, you deal out five quests at a time and you decide what order to tackle them.

I was expecting roll the dice and hope for the best and found instead a surprising number of options. Quests Over Coffee has proven amusing, fun and interesting. That’s a good combination.

When I made a copy, I also made the first expansion. I was very glad that I did that because that meant I wasn’t playing with the exact same cards over and over again. When I have the time (which might not be until next year), I’d like to make all the expansions. Because Quest Over Coffee is clearly at its best when you have a stack of cards at add more of variety.

I have tried at least seven or eight of Alexander Shen’a puzzles and games. I found them enjoyable but unpolished. Quests Over Coffee, with its charming art and interesting decision tree, I can see succeeding with wider publication. 

Why isn’t there a Song of the Lioness movie?

Last year, I discovered Tamora Pierce and read her Protector of the Small quartet, the third of her series set in Tortall. I really enjoyed it so I made it a lot t to read Song of the Lioness, the first series in that setting.

Not only is Song of the Lioness is the first Tortall series, it is also the first young adult work by Pierce. It was originally written as a single volume for adult readers and ended up being revised into four books for young adults. It is also considered a milestone for young adult fantasy and feminist fantasy. 

And, yeah, I liked Protector of the Small better. Which I think is a good thing. An author should get better as they go along. The pacing and the character development were better in the Protector of the Small, although character development in the Song of the Lioness is a strong point.

The Song of the Lioness is about Alanna, a girl who disguises herself as a boy to become a knight. Along the way, she also becomes a sorceress, a shaman and an all around hero. It’s also so high fantasy that having a room that basically a benign eldritch abomination in the capital castle is considered normal.

I don’t want to spoil the plot of the stories but I went in expecting a coming-of-age story and got much more of straight adventure stories. Three of the four books lead up to her fighting some kind of big bad.

My favorite book was the third one, The Woman Who Rides Like A Man. It’s the Taran Wanderer of the series.

Okay. Some spoilers.

Having earned her knighthood (and had her gender revealed) at the end of the second book, as well as resolved a major ongoing conflict, Alanna now has to figure out what to do with herself after achieving her life’s goal.  Honestly, it’s the only book where I didn’t see the plot coming.

Which comes back to my comments about character development. While I don’t think the Song of the Lioness is a coming of age story, it is about Alanna figuring out how she relates to a world that doesn’t have a place for her. She is flawed but determined. 

While they aren’t perfect, the books in the Song of Lioness are strong. I can see how they had an impact on young adult fantasy (and a reminder that that existed before Harry Potter) and feminist fantasy. I am sad that, to the best of my knowledge, there hasn’t been any plan to adapt them to other media and a wider audience.

After packing most of my remaining games…

I have three or four weeks between packing up my game collection and unpacking it. So, I have put together a tiny s library for that time. More than that, it has to take up minimal space the car is gojng to be packed.

Number one item for the library. A deck of playing cards. Honestly, if i had to drop it down to one item, it would have to be a deck of cards. You have a vast library of games at your fingertips with just a deck of cards. Not only are there are tons of classic games, folks have made games with more ‘modern’ aesthetics for playing cards. 

https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/264858/modern-solitairesolo-games-using-only-52-card-stan

https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/301657/my-big-book-solo-traditional-deck-card-games

Seriously, a deck of cards is amazing.

I have also rearranged my fidget box of In Hand games. (In case you’re curious, it’s one of those plastic Extra gum cases. They are great for micro card games) It now has Palm Island, Labyrinth Runner, Flip Word, Elevens for One and Murderers Row. 

I have dozens of plays under my belt for each of these games and they can all be played without a surface. For some of them, that’s the only way to play them. They are prefect for travel or when all your tables are packed up.

Frankly, I usually have a deck of cards or my fidget box with me if I leave the house, particularly if it’s some kind of overnight trip. However, for this length of time, I’m adding a clip board and a folder of laminated Roll and Write games. I double-sided the one-page games, which I thought was just me being silly but laminated sheets actually bulk up a folder fast.

I have some old standbys, 30 Rails and Yard Builder, as well as 13 Sheep and Criss Cross to make sure there’s some extra ligjt fare. I think 30 Rails helped define what a PnP R&W could really be. It was a great PnP R&W before it was cool.

I decided to include all four games in Dark Imp’s playmat line (Beach Life, Opeing Night, Castaway and Restaurantrepreneur) , even though they’re two pages each. (Hadn’t thought of using double-siding so I’d have two games on two sheets until I had packed up everything) I think they are solid casual weight games that would get a lot more attention if PnP was more mainstream. 

Radoslaw Ignatow is heavily represented in the folder. I honestly feel he has a real knack for pushing the boundaries for what you can do with Roll and Write format. From his Lot of Games collection, I have Pointree, Alpakaland, Time Machine, Mixture, Roll Pirates and Jurassic Hunt. Some of those games are in the folder as an excuse to explore than more. I also have the basic solitaire map and the first four scenario cards for Island Alone. I’ve been wanting to try it out and this might be that time.

Honestly, in the kind of space that takes up no room in a backpack, I feel like I’ve packed a lot of experiences.

I’ve purged about 80% of my game collection

I have written that I need to do a heavy purge of my game collection because we will be moving across the country. At this point, I have done most (but not all) of my purging.

There is a definite value to mental house cleaning, getting rid of stuff I am not using and don’t realistically see myself really using in the future. But the real goal here is space. Shipping a household has gotten more expensive and space is precious.  

Now, going from a bachelor to a family with a kid, I have already heavily purged my collection over the last ten years. I used to be a game hoarder and picked up tons of random games just because I could. And I have already gotten rid of the vast majority of what I once owned. I’d honestly say I was down to just good stuff. It was time to go scorched earth.

My goal was to get rid of at least 80% of the physical space. And I’m pretty sure I have done that.

Which means I have had to really ask myself if I needed a game. I bought Settlers of the Stone Age in 2004 ... and I’ve played it once. I love Reef Encounter… and my copy is still in shrink wrap. Games I’d said I won’t get rid of, I asked ‘will I really ever play it?’

And, this time, even though they don’t take up space individually, I have started really looking at cards games. And donated or sold close to two bins worth.

If I find a gaming group on the other side of the country, other people will have collections too. I have, in the past, been groups’ collection. That doesn’t have to always be the case.

As I was doing this, I kept thing of a Martin Wallace game called Toledo that I picked up near the end of my game binging. Allegedly about making swords, you fill in the spaces of a track with cards to give spaces effects. And I remember thinking both that it was a decent game and that it wouldn’t get played again. Toledo was a milestone for me realizing that collection has ceased to be functional.

I don’t know how many games I’ve owned I’ve gotten real use out of. And I’m at a point where that is the highest priority.

Rediscovering the pure silliness of Rave Master

When I saw that Humble Bundle was offering a Hiro Mashima bundle, my first thought was that it would be a way to get the rest of Fairy Tail (a manga I quite like, in no small part because of the ways it gently subverts some of the tropes of Shonen) Then I saw it also had the complete Rave Master. Which whole heartedly embraces all of those tropes lol 

Many years ago, I picked up the first few volumes of Rave Master at a flea market. My first reactions: One, that it was fun. And, two, it felt like it was Hiro Mashima was trying to distill the essence of what was going on in Shonen manga at the time into one cliche storm.

Haru is a spiky-haired badass with a heart as big as the world and whose brain is slightly less rational than Pinkie Pie. He’s prone to finding or coming up with new techniques and powers and his determination has no limits. He’s also much nicer than Son Goku. (Seriously, Goku is a sociopath) 

The fact that the manga begins with Haru fishing  as snowman/dog hybrid out of the ocean on his home of Garage Island announces that we don’t have to take things too serious. Yes, there will be life-and-death battles and the fate of the world will be at stake and angsty revelations will happen.  But Rave Master assured us it will be goofier than One Piece.

Rave Master isn’t the best Shonen manga I’ve ever read. Nor is it my favorite. However, it has the joy of a ten-year-old who gets to create their own manga but with the art and writing skills of a twenty one-year old. It’s clear that Mashima had a blast making it.

Castaway: dice and desert islands

For the last couple years, I’ve tried to learn at least one Roll and Write game a month. And we are moving across the country this summer so both my game playing time and my game thinking power has been limited.

Enter Dark Imp’s playmat line.

I had already tried out Beach Life last year and found it better than I expected. Beneath artwork that looked like it had been designed for High Lights and the simple rules were some tight choices. I blocked out the rest of the line for May, June and July.

June was Castaway.

The title tells you everything you need to know to know about the theme. You are stranded on a desert island and trying to escape and survive.

The actual gameplay is roll two dice and then everyone gets to do something with the roll. The two basic actions are gather resources and use those resources to build stuff.

Let’s get a little more detailed. The play area is a five by five grid. Each square has four squares in it. The little squares either have a shipwreck, empty water, a tree or empty land in each little square.  You use the two dice to determine which set of four squares you’re working with that round.

Two details: when you harvest materials, you immediately assign it to a specific building project. To be fair, that does simplify the book keeping. Second, another action you can take is planting trees. Since wood is the most heavily used resource, that’s an interesting way of resource management.

The game ends when someone build the right combination of stuff for either self sufficiency or rescue or someone has three turns where they can’t do anything. There’s a variety of ways of getting points that all come down to how well you’ve developed your island.

Okay. I’ve been playing Castaway solitaire and I’ve been enjoying it. The game offers simple mechanics that let you build up your island in different ways.

Two mechanics I like in particular: the subdivision of the squares into four smaller squares and replanting trees. The first one gives you more choices and the second one gives you a way to manage resources.

I also think that playing it solitaire, I am missing out on the potential of Castaway. Playing alone, you can control when the game ends. Losing that would add a lot to the experience.

Ultimately, Castaway is a lowkey, enjoyable game that I think works well with a casual audience. It’s not innovative but it is accessible. It’s aimed at a family audience and I think it works for that. 

(I haven’t played Island Alone, another PnP R&W about being stranded on a desert island but it is high on my list to try. I think I will find it more engaging and fun. However, I think Castaway will do better for times when my brain is worn out :) )

River Wild: Build valleys for fantastic beasts

When I first looked at River Wild, the first game I thought of Dos Rios. Which is completely silly because, apart from being themed around rivers, the two games have nothing in common. That said, I think Dos Rios is a lost gem so good for River Wild for making me think of it.

The game that it should remind me of is an earlier Button Shy game, Insurmountable. Both are 18-card tile-laying game that don’t use any other components. However, one is about building a mountain up with special powers while the other is building down a river with special scoring. 

As I already mentioned, River Wild is a tile-laying game. Cards are placed landscape-style. While you have to respect orientation, the flip side of each card is a mirror so it’s not that big a restriction. You have a hand of thre cards and you are building a river system that is flowing downstream from the source. The river can (and must if you want to form valleys) fork but it can never flow upstream.

The goal of the game is to form valleys, which are also the only thing that gives you any points. I honestly think they look more like islands but the rules call them valleys.  Valley cards have ore of two different things on them: either mythical animals or scoring conditions. Scoring conditions are sets of mythical animals that have to be in that valley to count. More than that, you will get fewer points if it’s your biggest valley so building a giant valley isn’t an automatic strategy.

Okay. Because it’s an 18-card solitaire game with no other components from Button Shy, I can’t help but compare te River Wild to both Scott Almes Simply Solo series and Aramini’s own Sprawlopolis series. (Yes, Sprawlopolis and it’s many kin can be played multi-player but they work solitaire very well as well)  And honestly, I’d say it isn’t as strong as most of those games. (Sorry Ugly Gryphon Inn)

But that’s comparing it to what I feel is the cream of the crop. Sprawlopolis is largely considered one of the best micro games and the reason most people have even heard of Button Shy. It’s like saying someone isn’t LeBron James. It still leaves room for a game to be excellent.

One of River Wild’s greatest strengths is how tight the margins are. Aramini helpfully supplies a scoring chart and it takes some careful planning to do well by its standards. It is mechanically simple but still requires some real thinking.

If you want to only have one game by Steven Aramini, you got to go with Sprawlopolis (which is really three games and a bunch of expansions lol) But if you’re willing to have more than one, River Wild is a good game to get.