Who is Sexton Blake anyway?

I was vaguely aware of Sexton Blake but until recently, I didn’t even know if it was the name of a character or an author. As it turns out, it turned out to be a much deeper rabbit hole than I expected.

Sexton Blake was an action hero/detective who was in constant publication from 1893 to 1978. In addition, he has been the subject of stage plays, comic strips, movies, radio shows and television programs. It’s estimated that at least two hundred authors (one of whom was apparently Michael Moorecock) wrote his stories and that there around 4000 Sexton Blake works.

I’m pretty sure there’s more Batman media out there but that’s still a lot of content.

Two things really strike me about Sexton Blake. One: how much the character seems to have faded from the public consciousness. (Of course, that might be different in his native England) Two: Sexton Blake seems like an extremely generic hero.

In Sexton Blake’s defense, with that many creators churning out content, it is going to be hard for him to have too many distinctive traits. I’ve also only read some of the ‘earlier’ works up that are public domain. I am 100% convinced each era of Sexton Blake must be distinguishable. However, his two traits seem to be hyper competence and an impeccable moral compass, which lead to a focus on plot, not character development. 

I do wonder what would have happened if Sexton Blake could have kept on going. I suspect he would have entered serious deconstruction territory, which might have kept the character going for decades.

While I am sure that with so much Sexton Blake mass produced, a lot of it is trash. But what I have read is pulpy, silly, utterly escapist fun. Pretty sure it has been heavily curated. I won’t try to read all (or even most) of Sexton Blake but I will read some more.

Roll and adjust property values

 I picked up Town Constructor Junior (TCJ for the rest of this blog) in order to dabble with the Town Constructor family. It’s the entry level, family/kid friendly version of the game.

It’s a Print-and-Play Roll-and-Write. Hunting those down as become a hobby in and of itself in addition to my overall gaming hobby. It’s one of the ones where you are drawing a map on a grid. And those games are practically their own genre.

So, well trod ground.

Now, to TCJ’s credit, it does some things differently. What I’m used to seeing is having a die pick the map feature and another die for the location. Which can be good. It works for 30 Rails, which I consider an important R&W.

Instead, you use one die to pick out two of the four types of buildings from a table. The other die, you use the same table to adjust the values of those buildings. There are four wheel-shapes tracks with the spaces valued one to three. And they don’t just go up.

Every round after the third (so there’s time to get something on the map), you will pick a row or column to score, using the adjusted values. The game only lasts twelve rounds so you won’t use every space or row/column.

There are also some special buildings that give bonus scoring  and you get points for the largest group of each type of building. Pretty standard stuff but things become fundamentals because they work.

There are definitely some shortcomings. Not only are there only four types of buildings, there’s  nothing thematic about them really. They all do the exact same thing. TCJ is ultimately very abstract and drawing a map has a lot of room for theme.

However, those value wheels, those are good. Not only do I not remember seeing that mechanic before, they add some real value to the gameplay. They make every round more interesting and give some oomph to your decisions.

TCJ isn’t a perfect game. There are similar games out there I like more and a lot of that is because they have richer themes and mechanics that build on those themes. However, TCJ doesn’t blend in with the sea of R&Ws.

Going over all the Evil Lab games

 The Evil Lab family is one I’ve been going through. (I got them as an add-on to a Kickstarter and I’ve spent more time on them so far than the actual Kickstarter) There are seven individual games in the series, although the differences between each one are just little tweaks. 

It’s a collection of print-and-play, Roll-and-Write multiplayer games. I feel like there is a meaningful number of small publishers who specialize in this kind of game. To be fair, it makes sense as a business model. The overhead is less than physically publishing and games that just require printing and adding dice and pencils are accessible.

(I also initially wondered why every variant had its own entry on Boardgame Geek, as opposed to a game like Voyages. The answer, quite obviously, is each one is a separate product. I feel silly for not realizing that)

The core game is filling in different shapes in different colors in a grid. Roll two dice and pick one for the color and one for the shape. You are trying to create patterns of colors, like four in a line.

The two clever bits are that the same shape can not be next to itself and the patterns have to be exact. A line of five doesn’t count as a line of four with a buddy.

At the end of the day, Evil Lab is pretty simple. But those two restrictions are enough to create some hard  but interesting choices. Enough that I have ended up trying out all of the variants. 

My Little Evil Lab

This one is designed to be for younger players and an entry point in the family. The tweak in My Little Evil Lab is that it adds a fourth shape.

Which is enough to possibly make this the most dramatically changed variant. That extra shape makes a huge difference and does make the game substantially more forgiving.

This was my starting point in the family and, unless I’m playing with non-gamers or younger gamers, I wouldn’t pull it out again. It feels like it makes the system too easy.

Biohazard Zone

Biohazard Zone may actually be the simplest modification of the core system. Four of the squares in the grid are blocked off.  

I did find the rules a little vague. The concept of Evil Lab is that you are dropping the shapes down into the grid, a pencil and paper Connect 4. One reading of the rules could be that the blocked areas  keep shapes from falling through them. Which would remove fifteen of the thirty-six squares which is just too much. And the visual examples also indicate that shapes just can’t be in the blocked squares.

With all that said, I am actually pretty indifferent to this variant. It doesn’t feel different enough from the core game for me so I’d rather play the base game.

Bio Split

Okay. Some of the lines on the grid are thicker. Those lines don’t break the ‘the same shape can’t be next to itself’ rules but they do break up the patterns you are forming.

Bio Split actually annoys me. I feel like it is saying you could pull off some clever patterns but luck keeps that from happening. It feels like a premise built on false promises.

Least favorite variant.

Color Rampage

Certain squares are marked with specific colors. BUT you can put different colors on those squares. You just take a point penalty for doing it. So now it becomes a choice.

It’s still not different enough from the base game to make me choose it over the base game. However, I think it’s more interesting and offers more real choices than Biohazard or Bio Split.

Monstrous Monster Mixer

Instead of a square grid, MMM has an asymmetrically shaped grid. That’s it. 

And I like it. That changes things enough to make you change the kind of patterns you’re going to try to make. MMM plays differently enough to justify playing it instead of the core game.

Tetra Terror

Tetra Terror has you using different shaped patterns for scoring. This set is actually the five Tetris shapes.

And like MMM, Tetra Terror changes the way you play the game. It feels different. It arguably makes the game deeper because the scoring shapes are more complicated. It makes the game more interesting.

Good stuff.

CONCLUSION 

There are Roll and Writes that really push the envelope about what you can do with paper and dice. This is not one of them. Evil Lab is a decent but very abstract little game that works with familiar R&w tools. It doesn’t do anything new but it does an effective  job at what it does.

However, I really only see myself going back to the core game, MMM and Tetra Terror. Those are the ones I’d recommend if you’re interested in Evil Lab.

Kensington Gardens is not Peter Pan’s origin story

 

When I was quite a bit younger than I am now, I came across a book called Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. And it was a confusing discovery. It was by J.M. Barrie, the same guy who wrote Peter Pan. And I checked the copy write dates (I didn’t have the internet but I was at a library and Peter Pan was next to it on the shelf) and saw the Kensington Gardens was first published in 1906, five years before the Wendy-Neverland-Hook version. And the two versions are radically different.

I now know that Barrie first wrote about Peter Pan as part of an adult novel called The Little White Bird. He then wrote the stage play, which introduced the familiar version of Peter Pan. Then the chapters that featured Peter Pan from The Little White Bird got published as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. And THEN Barrie wrote the novelization of the stage play.

Whew.

And, seriously, the Kensington Peter is radically different than Peter Pan. He’s an eternally seven-day-old baby. He lives in London. The book reads more like Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies. Seriously, it’s twee to the point of being creepy. (Which, given that the Little White Bird is about parenting, may have been the intent)

I’m not going to spoil the book because, in all honestly, I feel it comes across as more about tone and setting than actual plot. For me at least, Peter Pan at Kensington Gardens is less about what Peter does and more about who he is and what his version of Kensington Gardens is like.

Kensington Peter is definitely not an origin story for Peter Pan. It’s not even a beta version of the character. It is a completely different character in a different genre, despite a few similarities. Yes, there are fairies in Kensington Gardens but they make any version of Tinker Bell look like Dirty Harry.

I do agree with history. The right version of Peter Pan won. Be it an innocent adventurer or a disturbing view of eternal youth or a creepy child kidnapper, the Neverland Peter Pan is a vibrant creation open to a lot of interpretation and storytelling. Kensington Peter has his dark elements but is, at most, a deconstruction of Victorian cherubs.

I also want to note that the first version of the book on Project Gutenberg had a chapter I didn’t remember, a fascinating description of Kensington Gardens. Looking further, I found versions on Project Gutenberg that had fewer chapters than the book I found in the library. Clearly, Peter Pan at Kensington Gardens has an interesting publishing history. 

FantasyForm: where you buy your opponents hit points

 While I have not yet gotten around to trying Spaceshipped, I did decide to give its spiritual sequel FantasyForm a try. Among other things, I figured the system would get an extra layer of refinement.

FantasyForm is an 18-Card micro game about being an alchemist whose ultimate goal is to kill your rival. (Let’s assume your rival is a bad guy, just for the sake of our peace of mind) The game is one part adventure game and two parts economic game.

I’m not going to go into details about the mechanics but the game gets by with eighteen cards by having each card able to be a resource, two different flavors of event, an item/companion and a price index. I’m no stranger to multi-use cards but that’s still a hefty amount of content for one piece of cardboard.

But the graphic design actually makes it easy to make sense of everything. Sid Sackson’s Venture is one of my gold standards for graphic design making a card work and FantasyForm hold up.

More than that, I am impressed by the flow of the game. The explore phase has you follow downward steps on a row of event cards. At the end of each exploration phase, the end card of each row becomes the first card of the next row.

I did have to watch a tutorial video to get over the initial learning curve. However, after two turns, everything clicked and I was rolling.

A goal of a lot of micro games is to fit a ‘big’ gaming experience in a small amount of components. And, as someone whose into PnP, I’ve looked at a lot of those. And it is easy for them to get cluttered and fiddly.

FantasyForm, between clean graphic design and clear flow of action, manages to be fairly intuitive. Once you know what’s going on, it makes sense and doesn’t feel fiddly. Honestly, I am impressed, not by how much game is crammed in, but by how playable it is.

A lot of the game actually comes down to money and market management. Buying magical essences low and selling them high. I find it hilarious that you hurt your rival by paying for the damage with the game’s currency. Mechanically, though, it makes sense and helps the game hold together.

Once I got past the initial learning bump, I found FantasyForm has a very natural rhythm. The game has a tempo that really adds to the experience.

I don’t know if I’ll try Spaceshipped. So many games, so little time. But FantasyForm makes me consider it.

Beer, pretzels and social engagement

 Beer and pretzel games have been a part of the hobby for a long time. (Not to be confused with pub games which have been a part of the culture for a loooooooong time. But Crown and Anchor apparently doesn’t count as beer and pretzel games, even though that’s what you are eating and drinking when you play it) I think beer and pretzel games are party games for folks who want to say they don’t like party games lol  

Wikipedia defines beer and pretzel games as light tabletop games that have light theming and lots of luck. It also says that the term originated for simple war games before breaking out into the broader world. I personally define beer and pretzel games as ones where you can trash talk during the entire game.

It would be easy today ‘I don’t know what a beer and pretzels game but I know one when I see them’ but that’s not true. There are some key elements. It has to have some kind of theme. It has to have a lot of luck. It has to be easy to learn. It has to have social engagement.

I was going to write fun but all games are supposed to be fun. Social engagement is a better fit. Because a beer and pretzel game is what you pull out so you and your mates can sit back and blow off steam together.

Chess. Chess is not beer and pretzels. Munchkin is beer and pretzels. And in my world, Chess is fun but Munchkin is not lol

The Wikipedia article added one additional criteria. A beer and pretzel game has to be replayable. It has to be a game that you want to go back to.  So a good beer and pretzel game has to balance chaos, let you surf the madness but still give you some agency. Your choices matter but you might not know their outcome.

Beer and pretzel games are not going to be strategic masterpieces. Instead, they are the games that become part of the folklore of your gaming group. They are the games you remember because of the time Marcy made a move that made Linus throw the popcorn bucket at her.

Clearly, the social component is the defining attribute of a beer and pretzel game. The Friday night poker game can be a beer and pretzels experiences. The World Series of Poker never will be.

Still, as games like Munchkin and Nuclear War are clearly designed to fit the beer and pretzels mold. You can’t guarantee the result but you can build towards it.

Beer and pretzel games didn’t create a new social experience. I’m sure people have been chewing the fat and teasing each other since the Hunter and gatherer days. But they do give us a safe and consistent environment for the experience.

Why I would teach Pickman’s Model

 While I’m pretty sure I’ll never get the chance to reach Lovecraft in a high school or middle school English class, I have given a lot of thought to how I would do it.

In the past, I’d figured that The Outsider would be a good work to work with. It’s relatively short and the plot is accessible. And, while at least to modern audiences, the twist might be really obvious, I think the bit where the narrator opens the trapdoor on the tallest tower to find it opens onto open ground is really strong.

However, while I don’t agree with all of his Kenneth Hite’s critique of the story, he made a damn good point that the prose is purple enough to be ultra violet. I honestly think that would really challenge students enough that the actual content of the story wouldn’t get through. (I have found Poe is a challenge to many of them)

Now I think that Pickman’s Model is the best story to introduce kids to Lovecraft.

First of all, it has some of the plainest language of Lovecraft’s work. It’s also one of his shorter works. Both of those things are going to make it easier for students to handle.

I also know that both of those elements have also relegated Pickman’s Model to being a lesser Lovecraft work for some authorities. Which I don’t think is correct. What they do is make for a lean, mean piece of writing where every element is tightly aimed at creeping me out.

Pickman’s Model is one of the two Lovecraft works that have given me nightmares. (The other is Dreams in the Witch House. Brown Jenkin is so visceral that it’s pure nightmare fuel) It has some real oomph. And it helped define Lovecraftian ghouls which have become a staple of the Mythos.

No, it’s not Call of Cthulhu but it’s a good place to open the door.