Good times at Mega Moose Con

In the middle of September, I went to the first table top gaming convention I’ve been to since 2019, Mega Moose Con in Richburg, SC.

The Pandemic really did a number on conventions and other table top gatherings. I realized that my only face-to-face gaming since 2020 had been with my immediate family. On the other hand, I really came to appreciate solitaire gaming and the Nintendo switch. 

The con was really a vehicle to have a reunion with old gaming buddies who I had originally met in college. It had been well over a decade since I had seen most of them. Which was my ‘fault’ since I had moved the farthest away by a long shot. 

With that said, Mega Moose was a really solid small convention. The only weak spot was that it didn’t have much in the way of dealers. Which really isn’t the draw of going to a smaller convention, just like the opposite is a true of going to GenCon and spending hours and too much money in a dealer hall the size of a football field. (I actually have no idea how GenCon’s dealer hall compares to a football field)

It had lots of gaming tables, certainly enough for the crowd. You could find a table but there wasn’t a sea of empty tables. The staff was friendly and helpful. The game library was solid. And the auction and flea market was actually one of the best that any of the gang could remember. 

I honestly didn’t know what it would be like to play games face-to-face again after being out of that part of the hobby for so long. (And I used to think of that as the hobby itself!) But it was like falling off a bicycle. It comes back automatically.

High points for me were learning Last Light and Hadara. However, the real star of the convention for us was Medici. We were a six-player table and we kept on going back to Medici. I played more Medici than I had ever played before and came to enjoy more than ever.

Good times.

A pleasant little mashup of Scooby Doo and Agatha Christie

 One of my go-tos for casual, decompressing reads is the Three Investigators books, a juvenile detective series from 1964 to 1987. I actually find them more engaging than the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, although the Three Investigators are not as fluid or as chameleon as those books. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew have been able to endlessly reinvent themselves while the Three Investigators are more grounded in their era and geography. 

And I normally don't feel the need to write about any particular book in the series. They’re fun, escapist fluff but few books in the series really stand out. And some of the ones that do stand out for the wrong reasons lol However, when I read the The Mystery of the Sinister Scarecrow, I was left thinking that it managed to be a fun mashup of Scooby Doo and Agatha Christie.

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While the Three investigators was using the trope of the Scooby Doo Hoax before the TV show came out (Indeed, the whole fake haunting plotline is an old one and there have even been some real life examples), iI can't help but imagine that, by 1979, Scooby Doo may have had a little influence on the series. But if you are going to steal from a children's cartoon, Scooby Doo is a good choice. Obviously the scarecrow of the title is someone dressed up to scare the emotionally unstable heiress (and the boys clearly never think its supernatural) but its still the trope in action. The book gets points for not insulting the readers intelligence.

However, where the book actually won me over was in the resolution. In a household of six different people, two thirds of them were in on three different crimes, all interlocking with art theft. I had to go back and make sure one guy was actually innocent. Honestly, it was one murder short of being able to pass for an Agatha Christie work. That was some nice mystery structuring.

Even by 1979, it wasn't too much to ask for a children's book to be well written. The Hobbit is considered by some to be a children's book and it's a masterpiece and was decades old by the time The Mystery of the Sinister Scarecrow rolled around. It’s still nice to get a work that doesn't talk down to its intended audience and has some good writing.

Lovecraft through the lens of Bloch

I always forget that Robert Bloch was part of the Lovecraft circle. He seems too young to have been one of Lovecraft’s pen pals and he also seems like he’s at least one generation further in the development of horror.

Well, to be fair, he was the youngest member of the circle, still a teenager when he was a part of it. And, while he started out writing Lovecraftian tales, he moved on to develop his own style and voice.

Reading the Mysteries of the Worm, a collection of some (but I don’t think all) of his Mythos works, a number of things struck me. 

First of all, a lot of stories are meh. Which isn’t unreasonable, seeing as how young he was when he wrote most of them. However, they don’t show the promise of how good he was going to become. His afterward pretty much agrees with that assessment lol

But I can’t ignore that some of the stories, The Shambler from the Stars in particular, were influential and important to the Mythos. Not only did Shambler give us the memorable star vampire, it inspired Lovecraft to write the Haunter of the Dark. (Bloch and Lovecraft killed each other in their respective stories because that’s how they had fun)

The other thing was how hard Lovecraft’s death affected Bloch. I hadn’t realized how important a mentor, as well as a friend, Lovecraft was to him. Lovecraft did a lot to push Bloch into becoming a writer. And Bloch was also well aware how unknown Lovecraft was to the world at large when he died. Lovecraft’s passing was devastating for Bloch.

(I get why some people are August Derleth haters. But we wouldn’t have the world of the Mythos without him)

The best story in the book is, unsurprisingly, one of the last ones written. Terror in Cut-Throat Cove, despite having one of the most hackneyed titles _ever_, is a rich and unnerving work. I was reminded of Ramsey Campbell’s The Faces of Pine Dunes in a very positive way. It is Bloch approaching Lovecraft is a very Bloch way.

For me, Mysteries of the Worm was an archeological dig into both the history of the Mythos and Bloch.

Gaming with scrap paper

Recently, when I didn’t have access to my phone but was bored, I sketched out a five by five grid on the scrap paper and used my watch’s die roller to play Knizia’s Criss Cross using numbers as the six symbols. Board games are the best fidget toys.

But it made me think about what kind of games you could improvise like that.

Specifically solitaire games. Two player pencil-and-paper games are a time honored genre. Tic Tac Toe, Dots and Squares and whole books of them.

First of all, any game you can scribble down from memory has to be fairly simple. Maybe you can draw the tables from 30Rails from memory but I can’t. Second of all, while I think it’s kind of necessary to use dice, it becomes awkward to use too many.

Actually, more than Criss Cross, Wurfel Bingo and its sequel Knaster are really obvious choices.  They also only require a 5 x 5 grid and a couple of dice. And have rules you can easily carry around in your head. Criss Cross just happens to my go to in general for a super quick roll and write.

If you had more dice, you can go with something like Can’t Stop Express. Back in the olden days, scrap paper was pretty much how I normally played it. There’s also Yahtzee but I’d rather play Can’t Stop Express. Mind you, if we’re to the point where we’re talking about five or more dice, are we still in the world of scrap paper, pick up improv gaming?

While it can’t be played solitaire, I think the ultimate pick up with random stuff game is Zendo. Yes, it’s traditional to play it with plastic pyramids and other shapes, you can make koens with anything at hand.

At the end of the day, this isn’t something I’m going to get into the habit of. And I’ll probably just fall back in Criss Cross. But I still think it’s interesting to think about.

Dreams of Urbicand

I recently had a restless night where I kept dreaming of a black and white comic that I had I once read where a lattice kept growing in and around a city. When I woken up, I figured that I wouldn’t be able to figure out that distant and vague memory was about.

Nope. Two google searches later and I figured out that I had been dreaming of Fever in Urbicand by Francois Schuiten and Benoit Peters. (It’s also been published as The Fever in Urbicande)

Way back in high school, I had read it piecemeal in back issues of Cheval Noir, a Dark Horse comics anthology that reprinted European comics. It was printed in six chapters and I ended up not reading all of them in order since I read them when I could find a back issue.

I learned at that time that it was part of a larger series called Les Cites obscures, stories where architecture and geography and urbanization are used as key components to convey the story. The series is actually larger than I had realized and also includes a movie and at least one art installation. However, from what I can tell, a lot of it has never been released in English. (In fact, I relied on scans and memory to revisit Fever in Urbicand)

Of course, so much media ends up in English, it feels petty to complain lol

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Urbicand is a literally divided city where the elite live on one side of the river and the poors all live on the other side with only two bridges connecting them. And Urbicand is a mashup up of Jules Verne aesthetic and the 1927 Metroplis movie. A mysterious lattice made of an indestructible material that can grow through solid objects without damaging them engulfs the city, connecting everyone and transforming the city.

To be brutally honest, as a concept and a pretty obvious social metaphor, Fever in Urbicand wouldn’t be unusual if it were a written work. And it would fit in with the science fiction anthologies that Marvel and DC published before devoting themselves to superheroes.

However, the comic story would be ten pages long. Fever in Urbicand is much bigger than that in length. It explores the changes the network makes to the city, particularly the political ones. And while the work ends on a mysterious note, with the network growing again until it is presumably bigger than the planet but out of Urbicand, that ambiguity has weight. 

The story does have a point-of-view character, the master architect Robick. Who takes being a passive observer to such an extent that his friends Thomas the political opportunist and Sophie the madame-turned-political-radical comment on it. (Indeed, by the end, instead of Robick being the middle ground between them, they represent one side and Robick the other) However, Robick anchors the reader and even he is changed by the newtwork by the end.

However, the two most important characters are Urbicand and the network. Visually, they dominate the story. Two dueling (?) structures and their interactions drive the plot. And, damned if the art work isn’t beautiful and would look at home in a museum. Urbicand is a vision of precision and control while the network is a power outside of that control.

Fever in Urbicand left enough of an impression that I dreamed about it decades after I last read it. The story itself is an ultimately simple social parable but the artwork is magnificent. It’s not perfect but it has impact.

Nanga Parbat: Alone on the Wilderness - a tiny game about a HUGE mountain

Nanga Parbat: Alone in the Wilderness is the last game in the Kickstarter for Dr. Finn’s Book of Solo Strategy and Word Games I’m looking at. I saved it for last because it’s not actually in the book but a bonus for backers. Steve Finn has said that he plans on releasing it in some format in the future.

And, truth to tell, it doesn’t feel like it would belong in the book. The eight games in the book use elements from games like Scrabble and Carcassonne and Yahtzee that make them feel intuitive and familiar. They are carefully crafted for a wide, casual gaming audience. Nanga Parbat, on the other hand, is its own thing.

Nanga Parbat sounds to me like either a cryptic or a spare identity for Bruce Wayne but it is actually the ninth highest mountain in the world and is part of the Himalayas. It’s known as the killer mountain, one of the hardest mountains to climb in the world. It is also known for its diverse wildlife and that part is the theme of the game. You are exploring the mountain, documenting the animals you see.

The game sheet has six areas, one for each die pip. Each area has six spaces, also for each die pip. Each space has one of four different animals. (Yak, Red Panda, Snow Leopard and Musk Deer, by the way) At the bottom of the sheet, each animal has six different scoring icons.

Oh, there’s are also some trails between areas but those are only for the musk deer scoring. 

0kay. At the start of the game, you roll a die. Put it on the marching mountain area. Choose one animal to circle in that area. Circle one of the matching animal’s scoring icons on the bottom of the page. Then, move to the die to the mountain area that matches that animal’s number. Roll the dice and cross out the animal that matches the roll in the new area. Then you move the die to the area that matches the new number.

At that point, you start over again but you don’t need to roll the die. You start over in the new area. Do that twelve times and figure out your score.

If you roll a number to cross out an animal that’s already taken, cross out the next highest number. If an entire area is filled, the roll becomes a wild number.

That might sound all cluttered but after one game, it all clicks. Nanga Parbat may not use ‘familiar game language’ but it is still a simple game.

Yaks score specific spaces in each area. Musk deer score specific completed paths. Red pandas score three or more connected circled spaces in an area. Snow leopards score for varieties of animals circled in an area. The rules include a scale for judging your score and I have yet to do well lol

Okay. Here’s the thing. I enjoy playing Nanga Parbat: Alone in the Wilderness. But I’m not sure it’s a ‘good’ game.

The way that the random elements kick into the game, in particular the fact that the areas you get to add a circle to are random, makes me wonder how much my choices matter. Am I playing the game or is the game playing me?

Mind you, I also half expect to have something click and how to play well suddenly make perfect sense. Heck, if someone told me that I was wrong and the game was actually solved, I would give them a listen.

At the end of the day, it is an interesting experience and takes very little time to play. That is enough for it to have some real value for me.

Where I realize the Long Halloween is a foundational story

Rereading Batman: The Long Halloween, I realize I had forgotten both how good it is and how long ago it was written. Almost thirty years ago but it doesn’t feel that way.

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Of course, part of why The Long Halloween feels timeless is because it is so firmly entrenched in film noire. Which I suppose means it is kind of timely but that time is the 1940s lol

It is also set in that mythic early period of Batman’s history before Robin. Which, in real life was eleven months of comic books but apparently lasted at least ten years of Bruce Wayne’s life in some continuities.

The Long Halloween is a murder mystery, one that never entirely gets resolved (at least to some readers’ satisfaction. And that’s just fine because that’s part of film noire) It also explores the fall of Gotham’s conventional organized crime with the rise of costumed lunatics taking over the criminal world.

The Long Halloween is not the only story that explores Gotham becoming a superhero setting with the likes of the Joker pushing out mobsters who haven’t escaped from Dick Tracy but it does a very good job of it. (It might be one of the earliest stories about that but Batman is too vast a subject for me to the sure)

The Long Halloween also gives us another origin story for Two Face. I’m honestly not sure how many of those we’ve gotten over the years. Two Face is such a hot mess that he can’t help but be fascinating. Again, it does a very good job of it. Having thirteen issues, eleven of them before the disfigurement, helps. It gives us time to get to know Harvey Dent before everything comes crashing down.

Researching the story for this blog, I found that it influenced the Nolan movies and 2022 movie. Which I hadn’t realized but I can see. The fact that I hadn’t realized it speaks to how well The Long Halloween has sunk into the DNA of Batman.

Because while it is a solid mystery with a fascinating serial killer and an engaging origin story for both Two Face and Gotham’s identity as a fever dream, it is, above all else, a cracking good story.