Tiny Maze Things - when I’m too tired to think

Tiny Maze Things was the last Alexander Shen creation I learned in 2024. Shen’s little puzzles and games are such delightful guilty pleasures. And Tiny Maze Things may be one of the simplest of their works I’ve tried.

Simply put, it is a collection of 200 mazes with multiple starting and finishing spots. In the maze are different symbols. Coins and stars get you points. Skeletons and ghosts cost you points. Swords negate ghosts and shields negate skeletons. And you can never backtrack.

Tiny Maze Things isn’t a game. There are no random elements. You determine everything. So it’s a collection of puzzles. And fairly simple ones, really. Not that that is a detriment, unless you want it to be. 

You can clearly play the game optimally, carefully planning out the route on each maze that will get the most points. However, I have found it more enjoyable to intentionally avoid doing that. Instead, I have been exploring each maze by going through each starting flag, and figuring out the best route that way.

I think Tiny Maze Things works better as a decompression activity than as a brain teaser. I have written about brain fog activities, games for when you’re too tired to think straight. I feel Tiny Maze Things is perfect for that.

This is not my favorite Shen creation. Circuit Board Squares is a genuinely clever set of puzzles. Spooky Forest makes brilliant use of its cramped space. And Quests Over Coffee has hidden depths. However, I’m printing out some pages for those times when I’m mentally exhausted.

Protector- Larry Niven’s dark revision of Known Space

 Larry Niven is a fun author. One of the things that has always struck me is how determined he is to make aliens really alien, at least biologically. And in Protector, he takes that in a direction I don’t think he had before. (Other than the short story Protector was expanded from)

Rereading Protector, I also took a look at when it was published. Considering how much it defines a lot of his Known Space setting, I was surprised to see that it was published relatively late, after Ringworld.

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Okay, the core conceit of Protector is that the human race is descended from extraterrestrials. But, man, Niven goes about it in one of the weirdest ways. Which he kind of had to since, even in 1973, that was a dead horse.

The idea is that humanity is a mutated/evolved initial state of a multi-state organism. The next stage, which requires a virus-laced plant, turns several effects of old age into superpowers. Hair loss because the brain gets bigger, arthritis because the joints get more leverage, heart failure because a second heart develops, loss of teeth to develop bills. 

Obviously, Niven was working backwards (growing bills?) but it makes the Pak Protectors really stick in your head.

And their psychology is even stranger. The second stage, the Protector stage, is so hard wired to protect their biological descendants that it overrides everything else, including long term planning. They are intensely violent and xenophobic. They don’t become super smart super heroes. They become super smart super villains.

The original species only becomes sentient when they become protectors. When humans get infected and become protectors, they become ridiculously smart. While still being genetically hardwired to be xenophobic.

Protector is ultimately a remarkably dark book. The Pak contact with humanity, long before the crazy galaxy spanning stories of the later Known Universe, creates one human protector and the knowledge that future contact will result in a genocidal war. So we have one super brilliant super villain who will do anything to save the human race. And some of the things he does are indeed monstrous. But Niven forces us to ask if they were still reasonable.

In Protector, Niven gives us a hidden history of the Known Universe, one full of messy secrets. But it also adds several fascinating layers to the setting.

Xmas Sweaters for Christmas

 Xmas Sweaters was my Christmas game this year. It’s a free Print-and-Play Roll-and-Write themed around decorating a holiday sweater. Of course, it’s abstract to the point where you could replace the holiday symbols with anything from geometric shapes to Doctor Who logos and you wouldn’t notice the difference.

The play sheet consists of five rows of twelve symbols. They are colored green, red, white, green, red. Most of the symbols are hearts but scattered amongst them are six different holiday shapes like Santa Hats and Stockings.

Each turn, a red 12-sided die, a green 12-sided die, a white 12-sided die and a black six-sided die get rolled. You pick one 12-sider to write a number in that particular color . The black die is a modifier, letting you add or subtract it from your chosen die.

Some restrictions apply. Cards in rows have to go in ascending order. The same numbers can’t appear twice in the same column. 

The game ends when someone either fills in four rows or they check off all the penalty boxes you have to check off when you can’t make a move. Full rows are worth more than incomplete ones. Complete sets of symbols are worth their summed value. Marking down the number ten five times is a bonus too.

Okay, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Xmas Sweaters is a pretty obvious riff on Qwinto. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you make reinventing the wheel requirement for quality, you are setting up an impossible requirement. Still, Xmas Sweaters has to be, at the very least, meaningfully different.

While there are more rows in Xmas Sweaters and the scoring is a little different, the key difference for me is the changes in dice and dice manipulation. D12s compared to D6s. Qwinto lets you make dice pools while Xmas Sweaters has the black die as a modifier.

All things considered, I personally like Qwinto more. I like its blunt simplicity and D6s have less variance, letting you make more educated guesses. But Xmas Sweaters holds together mechanically and is fun.

As cynical as it is to say, one major advantage Xmas Sweaters has is that it is ‘free’ and available. Access to a printer and some dice and you’re good to go. From what I can tell, Qwinto is out of print. 

Xmas Sweaters doesn’t have an actual holiday feel. However, it is a solid R&W experience. If you don’t want to make a homemade, pirated copy of Qwinto, it’s a good call.

Gaming taught me about Jose Garcia

In 1812, the French forces who had been occupying the Alhambra placed bombs in order to destroy the palace before abandoning it. Jose Garcia, an injured member of the Corps of the Invalids, managed to defuse enough of the bombs to save most of the Alhambra. (Napoleon’s forced did blow up eight of the towers) 

According to Wikipedia, the Alhambra complex is 35 acres so José Garcia’s actions had to have been the track and field event from Hell.

Jose Garcia Saves the Alhambra is a Print and Play, Roll and Move game that originated from the Postcards from the Front design contest. You use a six-sided die to determine the movement of a Jose Garcia pawn over a simplified map of the Alhambra. You automatically defuse a bomb by moving onto its space but that ends your turn.

You use a limited deck of playing cards as timers for the bombs. Each turn, you deal a card to each bomb still functional. If a bomb’s total is eight or more, it goes off. You can use Jacks to reset the counts.

I had initially thought that any bomb going off ended the game but it just reduces your score. That said, it’s very easy for bombs go off. To the point that the game is pretty much entirely a luck fest.

Honestly, I didn’t think much of Jose Garcia Saves the Alhambra as a game. However, I had never heard of Jose Garcia and his architectural heroics before the game and that was a fun little history lesson. 

So, well worth my time.

A charming game about tea

 Since I have been a tea drinker most of my life (don’t worry, I drink plenty of coffee too) and a fan of Scott Almes’ Simply Solo series, you would think that A Nice Cuppa would be a slam dunk for me. And you’d be right.

A Nice Cuppa would is about going through the motions of making a cup of tea. Selecting a tea, picking out a favorite mug, steeping, actually drinking the tea, things like that. However, you also have to deal with worries, things like work, politics or finances.

The core idea of the game is getting the seven tea cards in order. One of the most basic soliatire ideas out there. Which is okay. Lost Cities taught me long ago that fundamental mechanics are a powerful building block.

The interesting part comes from the worry cards. There are ten of them but you will only use seven of them in each game. You randomly lay out the seven tea cards and then put seven facedown worry cards beneath them. Each turn, you flip one over. So you have seven turns to get your tea in order.

Worry cards do two things. First, they cause the card above them to flip. Focused cards become distracted, distracted cards become focused. Second and more importantly, each has instructions to rearrange to tea cards. They must be followed AND you have to do them in order.

That said, if a worry card is under a focused tea card at the end of the turn, it goes away. And they are worth negative points at the end so it’s good to get rid of them.

I’ll also say that not all worry cards are made alike. Commute allows you to swap two tea cards not next to each other. Finances lets you move a pair anywhere in the line. Those are very useful for rearranging the cards. Politics, on the other hand, has you pick a pair and put them on opposite ends of the line. That can mess up your plans so badly that I understand some play testers had a house rule consisting of removing Politics.

Worry cards are a double-edged sword. They penalize you at the end of the game and they can completely throw a monkey wrench in your plan. However, they are also your best tool for actually getting tea cards in order.

A Nice Cuppa reminds me a lot of the earlier Simply Solo game Fishing Lessons. Both games involve flipping cards and have elements of programmed movement. (A Nice Cuppa admittedly limits your control over the programming) However, Fishing Lessons is, at least for me, more complicated. A Nice Cuppa feels more intuitive and relaxing.

I also have to admit that the Simply Solo game that came before A Nice Cuppa, The Last Lighthouse, wasn’t enjoyable for me. A Nice Cuppa being fun and relaxing for me was a nice return to form.

I feel the theme works well with the mechanics. I appreciate the helpful nature of tea and how life can get in the way. A Nice Cuppa is not just a good game, it’s a charming one.

Trying out weird little dice games on Board Game Arena

 I went back to Board Game Arena for the first time in a long while in order to get in some different games for Dicember. Mind you, what it really meant was that I binged Jump Drive but I noticed some quick and dirty fife games has been added since I was last on the sites

Here’s my thoughts on the first few I tried.

Road to 300 looks and feels like a game that was designed on a spreadsheet. Which isn’t a knock or necessarily a bad thing. However, it does lead to very dry and abstract games.

You use three dice to move around a grid and to block off squares. It’s very simple and most of the decisions are obvious. The best thing I can say for it is that it’s inoffensive. Which sounds pretty weak but does put it above the other two games I initially tried.

Pentaquest is a deck of cards with monster artwork that looks like it’s from a 1970s Dungeons and Dragons supplement (Which I do like) and each one has a Yahtzee scoring goal. Roll five dice, get one reroll and collect a card that qualifies.

Here’s the problem. In the first couple turns, it’s pretty easy to not be able to get a card and automatically lose. But you can discard cards you win for various dice manipulation powers. If you get a few turns in, the game gets dramatically easier. To the point where it’s boring.

Inverse Dice is a simplified Yahtzee scoresheet where you are scoring the die faces you DON’T roll.  For instance, rolling 2-2-4-5-6 would let you score the four box since you didn’t roll a 1 and 3.

Inverse Dice is aggressively, perhaps even offensively, counter intuitive. Counting the numbers that aren’t there just isn’t how human brains work. The game felt frustrating but without the numbers that weren’t there, it would be nothing but a dumbed down Yahtzee.

I think Inverse Dice does do something interesting but I don’t feel rewarded gojng through with the experience.

Honestly, this reminded me of one of the things that makes Board Game Arena so useful. It gives you a chance to try out games you gave no idea about.

Echoes of Wisdom turns Zelda into a Swiss Army knife

 The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom may be my favorite Zelda title. It is also almost assuredly the easiest one I've played. Those two things are definitely linked. Echoes of Wisdom isn't fun because its easy but because of the way that they made it easy.

Echoes is also the first mainline Zelda game that has a Zelda, not a Link, as the protagonist. (The games take place in many eras and the fantasy land of Hyrule apparently has very little imagination when it comes to naming kids) There were a couple of third party games that had you play Zelda but those were so legendarily bad that Nintendo denies that they existed.

And this is why that matters from a gameplay standpoint. (Representation is important too)  This Zelda does not play like a Link with a different graphics. Instead, she has her own, very different, play style.

Zelda's main power is summoning echoes, which are either objects like rocks or monsters that are on her side. She can also telekinetically move things around in a limited fashion. Oh and she can actually turn into Link for very short periods. Which is actually the only way Zelda can engage in combat.

As the game progresses, you of course level up. You can summon more powerful stuff or more of the little stuff. You can become Link for a longer time with more powerful weapons.

This Zelda is a different archetype than Link, who fits the dashing swordsman paradyme. She is a squishy wizard. Certainly nothing new in the greater world of video games and RPGs but it is new to the Legend of Zelda.

And, like virtually every Legend of Zelda game since at least Link to the Past, Echoes of Wisdom has lots of puzzles. But with all her powers, Zelda is like a Swiss army knife. Like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom before it, there are multiple solutions to every problem. 

And the echo summons alone offer so much flexibility that the game is less about finding a solution that works and more like picking which solution you like the most. At a certain point, Zelda can summon up her own army of monsters and stacking beds ends up being a technique you can exploit until the end of the game.

Everyone in our household has ended up playing through Echoes of Wisdom except the cat. And, with a few exceptions, we rarely felt like using the the Link transformation. The toolbox of echoes just gave us so many other ways of solving problems.

Echoes of Wisdom is a 2D game, one that looks like it would have been released on the DS if that was still an option. It is definitely much smaller in scope than Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom. We were afraid that it would be too small and too simple and too limited.

Instead, Echoes of Wisdom offers endless choices. It isn't as challenging as earlier games but it gives you new ways to explore.