Lord Dunsany disappoints me

I first read Lord Dunsany’s Two Jars of Relish back when I was in high school. I think I hunted it down because Isaac Asimov (or Harlan Ellison?) wrote that it was a mystery story critics couldn’t ignore, even if they wanted to.

And I have to give it this, the story has stuck with me.

I am not going to spoil the story but I will say that the actual solution to the mystery is not remotely surprising. The strength of the story is the solution isn’t spelled out. It’s implied and the reader has to put the pieces together themselves.

Honestly, the last line, which is referenced every single time I read anything about the story, is the entire selling point of Two Jars of Relish.

Many years after I read the story, I found out that it was the first in a series of mystery stories. The Little Tales of Smethers and Other Stories contains nine Smethers stories (Smethers is the Relish narrator) and seventeen other mystery/crime stories.

And Two Jars of Relish is easily the best story in the book.

Lord Dunsany can be an incredible writer. His fantasy works didn’t just help create the fantasy genre. They also hold up and are some good reading. His later Jorkens stories are also jolly good fun.

So when I say this was the weakest Lord Dunsany book I’ve read, there’s still room for greatness. But no, the Little Tales of Smethers is mediocre.

They read like they were written in a world where Trent’s Last Case was never written, let alone the whole hard boiled revolution. Which still leaves room for great stuff but that isn’t there. The puzzles and solutions aren’t good and I didn’t find the characters interesting.

A number of the stories felt like someone was trying to imitate G. K. Chesterton but without the charm or whimsy. When you consider the number of people who have tried to write like Lord Dunsany, reading him seem to trying to write like someone else is weird.

And, from what I can gather, he was writing the Jorkens stories around the same time. So I am not going to accept that ‘Oh, his later stuff wasn’t as good as his older writings’ I have read that Dunsany only wrote a first draft and never revised and this collection shows that doesn’t always work.

There is so much profoundly good stuff to read by Lord Dunsany. The Little Tales of Smethers just isn’t one of them.

The Starspeaker: challenge versus engagement

 The Starspeaker from 2024’s 9-Card contest is about finding a new home in the far flung future after the eleventh earth is dying. The cards are decorated with mystic symbols and aspirational quotes.

And the game play consists of sorting the cards lol

Honestly, I got over the disconnect of theme and mechanics when I first played Lost Cities. ‘Wait, that’s what I’m doing with all this cool imagery? Sorting cards like Klondike? Oh, wait, this is really good’ But the world building in The Starspeaker compared to the mechanics has a striking disconnect for me. Ultimately in a good way, since I was happy about how accessible the game is.

The Starspeaker is an In-Hand solitaire game, a niche I love. Each card has a different goal. Pick one out for your game and go for it. The core mechanic is that you fan the first three cards in the deck, pick one to flip backwards into the back of the deck, and then rotate the other two cards like they are airplane propellers, changing their values. The game ends when all the cards have been flipped and the you see if you’ve achieved goals like all positive cards or no ones.

I’m not actually sure if I’ve seen this done before. Sure, Palm Island does all kind of interesting things rotating and flipping cards but Starspeaker’s card sorting is its own kind of thing.

Most of the cards also have a special power, either rotating the card or exchanging it for a card further back. Simple stuff but we are talking about just nine cards. And it adds some real agency to the game.

The cards are really solidly designed because everything you actually need to look at to play the game are on the corner so you can see it when you fan the cards. And it might seem weird to praise a design element that has been around for generations but sadly that is not the case.

So the game has cards that are both visually neat and very functional. The mechanics are easy to understand but offer choices and there are special powers to mitigate bad shuffles. But is it challenging or engaging?

Well, no and yes.

The goals do range in difficulty. The easiest one is to get a +/- 6 in a suite. The most difficult is to have each suite have the exact same ranks. The easiest goals are painfully easy even as tutorials while the tough goals actually take some concentration but are very doable.

I can see someone being done after playing each goal once or twice. But as an In Hand game, Starspeaker is also a puzzle you can noodle around with anywhere. And being able to scale the difficulty adds some nice flexibility. 

I normally think that asking how challenging a game is isn’t a bad yard stick to measure it by, particularly for a solitaire game. After all, in a solitaire game, you are playing against the game itself and too easy shouldn’t be interesting, right? 

However, I still enjoy the process of playing some games that aren’t that challenging. Starspeaker is one of those games. It is very portable and playing through a few rounds is relaxing. The challenge isn’t high but the engagement is solid enough that I’ve added it to my travel kit.

The Starspeaker is a visual treat that doesn’t offer a tough challenge but it is decompressing. I do wonder how the design elements could be taken further.

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3237752/wip-the-starspeaker-2024-9-card-nanogame-pnp-desig/page/1

Not every hundred plays weighs the same

 Playing a game a hundred times is a big thing. Maybe a big, silly thing but it is still a thing. There are a lot of games I haven’t played ten times after all. (Not counting the vast, perhaps unfathomable, number of games I have never ever played)

Of course, some games to are easier to rack up plays of. Getting in ten plays of Advanced Civilization requires not just a lot of time but organizing that time with a bunch of other folks. On the other hand, the short solitaire games that make up a lot of my current play are easier to play over and over. Playing Onirim daily over breakfast lets the plays add up lol

Anyway, the reason why getting centuries for individual games has been on my mind is that I noticed there were two games that I was creeping close to a hundred plays. And while they have some things in common (short, simple solitaire games that my copies are PnP), it’s the differences that made me feel like writing.

Tanuki Matsuri is one of the free games that were released during the Covid lockdown to help folks cope with life. It’s a Roll and Write where you are checking off boxes, so it works well even when you have smudgy dry erase markers. 

The appeal of the game is that virtually every space in the game (all but three) have you make some additional move. Part of the joy of playing it is setting up cascades of actions.

However, it’s not that hard to figure out what you need to do to get a high score. (Optimizing strawberries and flowers, by the way) It’s the fact that there are multiple paths to doing that keeps Tanuki Matsuri entertaining.

The other game is Food Chain Island and it’s a whole other kettle of fish. The first game in Scott Almes’ Simply Solo series (which means it probably needs no introduction), it honestly breaks down to being a solitaire peg puzzle with special powers. 

And it’s brilliant.

Admittedly, I am playing it more consistently lately but I feel like I’m still figuring things, still improving my game. The random layout means that the relative value of a card changes every game. And I still haven’t broken out the expansions or used one of the alternate layouts. There’s a lot of game left for me to discover.

Tanuki Matsuri is fun but the fact that I can play it on a clipboard and don’t need a table has helped it get so many plays. (It is far from the only game like that so getting this many plays is still a feather in its cap) Food Chain Island, on the other hand, is just plain solid. And it’s the one more likely to get two hundred plays.

When Cinq-O was my hero

Cinq-O is a game that I picked up very early in my board gaming life. Like before I ever made an online board game order. Before I hauled a ton of games home from a convention. Back when my collection consisted of a bag that held a couple of Looney Lab card games and some Cheapass Hip Pocket games. I’m not ever sure I’d picked up the travel version of Settlers of Catan, which may have been my first ‘big’ purchase. 

I was going to say before I’d heard of Ticket to Ride but that was just because Ticket to Ride hadn’t been published yet lol

Cinq-O is a dice game where you are trying to get to a hundred points. It consists of five regular dice and one special Hi-Lo die, along with a cute little carrying case that also doubles as a playmat.

The elevator pitch is that, each turn, you are either trying to roll low or high. The key is the Hi-Lo die. The side that you lock in will determine both whether you going low or high AND what the multiplier will be. You can get up to ten points for either five ones or sixes and that can get multiplied up to three times.

A few more key points. You have to lock at least one die every roll but you can also bank dice. Put them to one side and lock them in for a later turn and keep rolling the rest of the dice. And a straight is also worth ten points, giving you another option other than low or high.

Back in the day, I played a lot of Cinq-O. And revisiting it now, I find that mechanically it holds up better than I expected too. With the generous amount of rerolling that you can do, the option of banking dice, and the option of going for a straight, I found that I had a lot more control than I expected. Yes, the decision tree was pretty obvious, but there was more than just roll dice and hope for the best.

Cinq-O has been out of print for at least fifteen years. And while I found that it was still fun, I don’t know if it will get reprinted.

Simply, the number of alternatives for this niche have really grown and there are just better little dice games to play. With options like Qwixx or the Rolling Japan family or the Pretty Clever family, there are just options in this game space that offer more engaging gameplay and more complex decision trees. Heck, I’ve seen Qwixx sold at gas stations so it’s hitting the same mass market audience Cinq-O was.

While it’s not mindless and I had fun playing it again, Cinq-0 feels simple and bland compared to games that either came later or I just found out about later.

Still, for a mass market game from 2003, Cinq-O was a solid gaming experience. And if you wanted to try it out now, making a homemade copy would be a few minutes work.

This Sprawlopolis is really good

I have to confess that I have largely admired the Sprawlopolis family from afar. I have always thought the games were downright brilliant but, until quite recently, I played their parent game Circle the Wagons more than the entire family put together.

That’s really because I have a black and white printer and I’m colorblind on top of that. The textures in the original game aren’t super distinct and even when I printed out the game in color, the colors were diffuse enough that it was hard for me to tell some of them apart.

Both Agropolis and Naturopolis do a much better job at both texture and color contrast but I was already derailed by the original game. Which is a shame because the family is very good.

Micro tile-laying games were already a well established concept, including ones with overlapping cards. Variable scoring conditions were also established. Sprawlopolis also has a variable winning score depending on the scoring conditions, which I hadn’t seen before but I would be surprised if it wasn’t already out there.

What Steve Aramini has done, though, is a really good job of packaging all of these elements together into a tight, well balanced, challenging game. 

Revisiting Sprawlopolis, what I am really struck by is how many tough and annoying decisions there are in the game. I look at a lot of 18 card games because, well, they’re really easy to print out and play. And from my experience, Sprawlopolis has a lot of weight for a micro game.

I feel micro games and more minimalist games have become more a part of the gaming culture. This started a ways back since both Love Letter and Qwixx helped get that ball rolling in their own ways. (Feel free to tell me how I’m wrong)

And I feel that a design goal that some micro games pursue is for the game experienced to feel like a “big“ game. It doesn’t always work and sometimes the results feel cluttered and fiddly. And it isn’t always the goal of a particular game. In the first set of Pack O Game, HUE is solid but feels intended to be small. On the other hand, TAJ feels ambitious but fiddly and GEM actually feels like a bigger game.

Sprawlopolis feels bigger than eighteen cards. More than that, the gameplay is intuitive, not fiddly. Scrabble and Carcassonne and other games have made tile laying second nature to so many of us. You don’t have to concentrate on how to play but on the actual choices you need to make.

I revisted Sprawlopolis because I signed up to playtest Casinopolis. Now, I want to re-examine the entire family.

A completely unfair review of Paper App Dungeon

First of all, confession and disclosure. I played Paper App Dungeon via the play sheet provided by Semi Co-Op. So I have in no way shape or form played the game as it was designed to be played. That said, that is also probably the only way that I would have tried out the game.

Paper App Dungeon is a Roll and Write dungeon crawl. One of the simplest ones I have seen, to be honest. The core mechanic is that you rule one D6. If you rolled even, you have to move orthogonally. If you roll odd, you have to move diagonally. And you move that many spaces. Hit a wall, bounce off that wall (Hi, Ricochet Robots!)

There are encounters spaces. Stop or run into them and they happen. From what I can tell, there isn’t a combat mechanic. Monsters just cost you X number of hit points. (Again, I could be wrong)

One rules discrepancy that I wasn’t sure about was if you had to choose a path that didn’t run into a wall over one that did. Quite frankly, I think, forcing you to choose the path that doesn’t let you ricochet removes a lot of the decision making in the game and then we are back in the first module of Outdoor Survival. And if you don’t know what that means, it isn’t good!

Also from what I can tell, the complete game is an actual campaign with the ability to level up and equip the line you are drawing. So there’s a lot that I haven’t been exposed to.

The interesting quirk in the game is that every sheet is procedurally generated. Which means random but within specific parameters. It’s published as a spiral notebook and every one will be different. And you can also buy a pencil from the publisher that has been marked so you can use it a knuckle bone die, dropping the components down to two.

In some ways, I am the ideal and absolute worst demographic for Paper App Dungeon. I play a lot of Roll and Write games and I have no idea how many of them have been dungeon crawls. I also like portable games I can play anywhere.

At the same time, a big reason I play so many Roll and Writes is because I love Print and Play. And Paper App Dungeon is clearly designed to not be a PnP.

I also have to say that a procedurally generated dungeon really gives me pause. I have played some procedurally generated PnP games and the boards become incredibly swingy. It’s amusing if I’m not being asked to pay for the experience. Under those circumstances, I don’t care if balance is lost. But when every board is effectively a one-shot experience? Then the loss of balance becomes a loss of overall gameplay, particularly if it’s a campaign.

Even setting that to one side, the game seems to come down to drawing a semi random line through a dungeon grid. There isn’t even combat, just lose hit points. I realize that I have not had the full experience of the game, but I feel pretty confident saying that I have played several Roll and Write dungeons that were, better than that and some of them were free. 

I think it is a perfectly valid argument that I have not given Paper App Dungeon a fair shake since I didn’t play the official version. But if you accept that the Semi Co-Op UKGE Dungeon can be viewed a demo, than the demo sank.

Even by Roald Dahl standards, the Witches is disconcerting

Since my son was reading Roald Dahl’s The Witches, I decided to read it too. While I have read a lot of his books for children, some of them when I was a kid, and his stories for older audiences, that was a book that I had never read.

That was a weird read.

 

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First of all, let’s be honest. Roald Dahl’s work has always had elements of the grotesque and the macabre and the really bizarre. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator reads like it was written during a severe fever where opiates were part of the treatment plan. But his other kids books balance out that with happy endings.

(No, I haven’t seen any of the movie adaptations of the Witches but I did l know they were out there)

An orphaned boy learns from his grandmother that witches are real and among us. They look like humans, other than their hands, feet, and their saliva. Oh, and they’re bald but being bald as a qualifier as being inhuman feels kind of extreme. And their whole deal is killing children.

When the unnamed boy and his grandmother end up at a resort where all the witches of England just happen to be meeting, they manage to wipe the witches out by using the witch’s’ own transformation potion against them. But the boy also gets hit by the potion and will be a mouse for the rest of his life.

While the topic of The Witches is probably the darkest of any Dahl book I’ve read, the tone isn’t. The witches are serial killers with genocidal plans, which puts the people-eating giants in the BFG to shame. However, their behavior is incredibly childish with the Grand High Witch in particular coming across as a petulant brat.

Even by Dahl standards, the contrasts are jarring.

Then there’s the boy’s final fate. Permanently transformed into a mouse with a significantly reduced lifespan. And he plans on dying with his grandmother since they now have about the same life expectancy. The boy views this as a happy ending but I’m not sure how many readers will agree with him.

Really, what the Witches lacks that so many of his works have is whimsy.

And I was unsurprised to learn that the book has been accused of being misogynistic. In fact, the first draft of this blog entry was twice as long discussing that. And that was just too distracting. What I will say is, regardless of authorial intent, the book is very easy to give a misogynistic reading of. Which is definitely not to say don’t read it. Just keep that in consideration, particularly when discussing it with children.