Dice Spray doesn’t do anything special but it does it well

 I originally came across Dice Spray as part of the 12th Roll and Write Design Contest in 2022. Since then, it’s gotten its own BGG entry and some revised rules so I figure it’s okay to write about it as its own thing.

Dice Spray is a Roll and Write where you’re filling in a six-by-six grid. In multiplayer, you roll dice equal to the number of players plus one. Draft die and everyone shares the last die. In solitaire or a whole bunch of people, two dice get rolled. 

You pick one die to be the column or row. The other die will be the shape, which is the pip formation. So a four is four squares in the sale of a square and a five is five squares in the shape of an X.

You can get three rerolls but each one costs you a point. All six pips are scattered on the spaces (there are six different patterned boards and blank ones to make your own) and they have to be covered by that number’s shape. The revised rules include expansion where players get special powers.

Ten turns. Each filled square is a point. Most points wins.

Dice Spray has seen some regular play from me since 2022 and it’s really for one reason. I keep a 4.7x7.3 clipboard around so I can play Roll and Writes on the couch, using a dice roller on the phone. Each individual Dice Spray sheet is small enough to easily fit enough on that. So it’s quick and convenient to play solitaire that way.

Because, really, Dice Spray is an incredibly generic Roll and Writes. Filling in a grid with shapes. I honestly wonder if I’ve seen over a hundred of them at this point. Having restricted spaces is the only interesting element of Dice Spray. And I think that some of the other games that live on that clipboard are meaningfully better (Criss Cross, 13 Sheep or Palatial)

With that said, between the random special powers of the expansion and the dice drafting, I suspect Dice Spray is better as a multiplayer game. 

Honestly, two of Dice Spray’s strongest selling points is that the PDFs are free to download and easy to make. The PnP Outlaw from 2014 is another example of those virtues that I have referenced in the past. And I think that Dice Spray is the better game.

On the one hand, Dice Spray does absolutely nothing special or new. On the other hand, it is intuitive and balanced. If the mission statement was a simple game that anyone can play, it does just that. 

It’s a good option for the budget gamer.

When We Were Very Young truly speaks to the very young

Over the past several years, I have come to appreciate media that allows you to decompress, some of which could even qualify as escapist. Games, movies, books, music, etc. And while you can't survive on a diet of that, I also think that they are important and part of a balanced mental health. However, sometimes I wonder if some escapism is going too far lol

I recently reread A. A. Milne's collection of poetry When We Were Very Young, which was his first work for children. And, yes, we are talking about the same guy who gave the world Winnie the Pooh. However, there is a fascinating difference in maturity (but not artistry) between When We Were Very Young and the Winnie the Pooh stories or even his later volume of children's poetry, Now We Are Six.

In When We Were Very Young, Milne actually seems to be writing to, not down to, three-or-four-year-olds. He doesn't capture their vocabulary but he does capture their worldview. I quite enjoyed how E. Nesbit managed to do that with older children (and felt that Kenneth Grahame completely failed in the Golden Age) but Milne manages to capture the voice of the truly young. With the very important note that he speaks in the voice of a child who is from a family of affluence.

And that sense of privilege and social isolation may be why I found rereading the book not clicking for me. Most of the poems in When We Were Very Young were just too far away for me. Does that mean Milne did his job too well?

That sense of disconnect isn't something that I had a problem with his other works for children. The two collections of Winnie the Pooh stories are charming and delightful and I can easily see how they launched the merchandising juggernaut that Disney helms. (And I do think that at least the first movie holds up to Milne's work very well) Even Now We are Six has more wry humor that I can buy into.

I did find myself thinking that the simple rhyming schemes and meter felt like the quintessential children's poetry. Then it occurred to me that if Milne hadn't invented the form (and I'm sure he didn't), he refined it and helped carry on its popularity. Lewis Caroll, Edward Lear and Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote memorable children's poetry but Milne really nailed it.

And When We Were Very Young has what is one of Milne's most important poems, Halfway Down. I think I have heard or read in in enough other places that I forgot that it was originally Milne's. The sense of disconnection that the poem defines, of being in the middle of staircase and thus not being 'anywhere', is where my sense of disconnection really works in the poem's favor. Which is the actual point. It is a child's first liminal space.

My parents read the book to me when I was about that age and the fact that I still remember that speaks volumes. I may no longer be the target demographic but I think there is brilliance there.

My February PnP

I didn’t plan on February being a month where I made almost exclusively Alexander Shen designs but that’s how it ended up going. If it wasn’t for a playtest design coming up at the very end of the month, it would have been nothing but Alexander Shen.

I made:

Dice Flow (Alexander Shen)

Goblin Golfin (Alexander Shen, page 1)

Dungeon Run Pocket (Alexander Shen)

Star Dust (Alexander Shen)

Shaper (playtest)

Dungeon Run: Pocket was my big project fo the month and it would have qualified as a big project for me on almost any month. (I am in no danger of making an PnP only 18XX game) However, two smallish decks of cards adds up to more than my usual micro game.

I don’t always make Shen games but I don’t think a month goes by without me playing some. Alexander Shen doesn’t make the best games but they make games that are good for my mental health.

March, between future playtests and some other projects I’ve been meaning to get to, looks like it will be busier. But I am glad I had light games to make and play during February.

Alexander Shen gives us just enough golf to be fun

 Ah, Alexander Shen. They make such tiny little games and puzzles that take half a cup of coffee’s worth of time to play. And Goblin Golfin’ skates the racer’s edge to have just enough going on to make make it interesting.

It’s a solitaire R&W PnP where you are, well, playing golf. You can also collect gems along the way, which is only part of it which has any goblin theming.

Each map has a golf hole on a grid with inconveniently placed rocks and tempting gems. You roll three dice and pick one to be the power die and another to be the deviation. You move the number of spaces of the power die in a straight orthogonal line. Then, you move at a right angle a number of spaces that’s the difference between the two dice.

If the dice are the same value (so the difference is zero), you get bonus points. There are rules for bouncing off walls and rocks. If you land on gems, you get bonus points. And you can skip the die rolls and putt one space. 

Oh and you automatically lose if you go over six strokes.

This is not the simplest golf board game I’ve played. That’d be Par Out Golf. It’s not even the second simplest. That’s Paper App Golf. But Goblin Golfin’ is still pretty simple.

Like so many Alexander Shen experiences, Goblin Golfin’ skates the edge of just barely being enough to be interesting. Collecting gems and the deviation rules gave me some fun for the three or four minutes it took to complete a sheet.

I can’t help but compare Goblin Golfin’ to Paper App Golf. It’s honestly a better game. Three dice and pick two compared to roll one die and that’s what you get alone makes it better. However, the fact that Paper App is, be design, a minimalist design to be shoved in your pocket it will still get some play from me.

If you like Alexander Shen’s games, you will have fun with Goblin Golfin’. If you don’t, you won’t.

Huh, LitRPG is a genre

 A friend of mine recommended Dungeon Crawler Carl to me (which I quite enjoyed and will keep reading, thank you) but when I did a bit of research, I found it was part of the genre of LitRPG.

And I went ‘Oh, there’s a name for it.’

LitRPG is media, usually literature or comic strip, where the setting follows the mechanics of a computer RPG. (Sometimes a tabletop RPG but computer RPGs are by far the most common.)

A book of Dragons of Autumn Twilight wouldn’t count because, while the world of Krynn is a literal Dungeons and Dragons setting, the characters don’t look at their stats or discuss actual leveling. They just live there.

In a ‘proper’ LitRPG, the characters are fully aware of the mechanics that run their world. In many of them, characters can pull status and inventory screens. All the nuts and bolts that run the worlds they’re in are clearly visible.

Within that range, definitions can still get kind of fuzzy. For instance, Bofuri (another series I want to read more of) follows the rules a computer RPG because it’s about Kaede flat out playing a video game and driving the developers nuts. And it’s considered LitRPG.

Most of the examples I’ve read, though, have the characters actually living in the setting. Many of them have someone from ‘our’ world entering the new world, usually getting some kind of special power or insight in the process. I feel like a huge chunk of the Isekai works I’ve looked at are also LitRPG.

Because the concept of LitRPG is intrinsically meta, it tends to lend itself to comedy. The idea of characters pulling up a status screen is absurd. When you can measure your health by discrete hit points, things are unreal.

With that being said, there is room for more serious elements.The aforementioned Dungeon Crawler Carl in underpinned by the seriousness of the overall situation and also has some scathing social commentary. LitRPG has some intrinsically escapist elements pretty much baked in but there is clearly room for depth.

According to Wikipedia (a place I discourage students from ever using as a primary source), one of the earliest examples of the genre is Quag Keep by Andre Norton. A story where a player is pulled into a D&D game, it is also the first Dungeons and Dragons novel, even set in Gary Gygax’s Grayhawk.

… Why have I never heard of Quag Keep?

Back to Wikipedia, it says it wasn’t critically well received. And looking at other reviews, it looks like it wasn’t one of Norton’s better books and is more viewed as a historical curiosity than anything else. At some point, I should try and hunt it down and find out what my opinion is. Still wild that I’d never heard of it.

While LitRPG seems to have grown in popularity, it’s been around for decades. I’m also think that line defining it is fuzzy. (Does Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame count?) And it may be one of the most extreme examples of write-what-you-know I have seen. 

I also have no idea where it falls in the spectrum of ‘serious’ literature. I am sure there are academics who are studying it. Regardless, as a genre, LitRPG is entertaining and I think it has as much potential to be meaningful as any other.

Egyptian Solitaire and other pyramid thoughts

 The first activity I used the Pyramid Arcade for was playing Egyptian Solitaire. Honestly, I thought it would be Treehouse since I have a long, happy history with that game but there you have it.

Egyptian Solitaire is a Looney Pyramids variant of the classic peg solitaire. The twists are that the pyramid doing the jumping can land on another pyramid the same size or an empty space and the fact that each space has three pyramids to clear.

By the way, I am profoundly terrible at it. I do enjoy it and I can’t help but hope someday that something will click in my head and I will solve it. And it’s a perfect information puzzle so it is solvable.

The base version is a three by four grid but you can expand it it make it more difficult/interesting.

So, you use some stackable pyramids to recreate a puzzle that goes back to the 1600s, if Wikipedia is to be believed. (Since anyone can edit it, you should always have approach Wikipedia with a grain of salt) So the question is: does it do something unique that you’d need the pyramids for and is it any fun?

And I think the answer to that is yup.

Now, I wouldn’t buy a pyramid set just to play Egyptian Solitaire (I did buy both colors of Treehouse when they came out, just to make a comparison) It is a nice little something to do with pyramids you bought for other games though. (I will say that Food Chain Island is a vastly superior reinvention of the peg solitaire puzzle)

Egyptian Solitaire does highlight two elements of the Loony Pyramids and gaming systems in general. Does it let you play a game and do you need the game system to play it?

On one extreme, Ricochet Pyramids lets me play a game almost exactly like Ricochet Robots without the trouble of having that oversized box in my closet. However, I could use that rule set to play Ricochet Pyramids with some other bits. (I don’t but I could) On the other hand, I think it would be really hard to cobble together a Volcano set without anything other than the pyramids and I think that’s an absolute banger of a game.  

Egyptian Solitaire in no way reinvents any wheels but I do like an excuse to play with little plastic pyramids.

Horror can be a fragile genre

 I was about two thirds of the way through Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand when I asked myself ‘Am I reading an M. R. James homage with hippy folk rockers?

Which is a crazy question to ask since any given ghost story written in the past century or so has a good chance of being influenced by James. Still, that was when I decided to write about it.

Wylding Hall is a story about a folk rock band that spends a summer at a decaying country manor to work on an album and the bad things that happen to them.

And there are a lot of elements that make me think of James. The book is told as a series of interviews taken long after the events of that summer. There are strong hints that the library in the manor contain forbidden secrets. The manor clearly has plenty of dark history. And we never get a clear explanation of what happened. 

All good stuff.

However, I ended up feeling like the parts were better than the sum. In fact, the very last scene, literally the last two pages, managed to make the entire book fall flat for me. I won’t spoil it beyond that but, yeah.

Having said that, there are many individual scenes that succeeded in creeping me out. The reoccurring motif of dead song birds was very effective. The culmination of inexplicable photographs that form the climax of the book uses minimal details to maximum effect.

And the scenes that work wouldn’t work in isolation. They need the slow burn leading up to them to work. There was a lot in the book that was very promising. Unfortunately, a lot of those promises never got fulfilled.

Ultimately, I wish that Wyldness Hall hadn’t missed being an honestly great book by just a few missteps.