October 23, 2026  ·  2 comments

Murder in the Crooked House.

Soji Shimada’s Murder in the Crooked House earned a recommendation from the great Anthony Horowitz as a successful, modern locked-room mystery. I could not possibly have been less impressed: The resolution of the mystery is absurd, and the detective character – the only interesting person in the book – doesn’t show up until the novel is almost three-fourths done.

A locked-room mystery involves a murder that takes place in a room that is locked from the inside, so it appears to be an impossible crime; the killer would have to still be in the room, in theory. Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is the first known example, while there are two Sherlock Holmes locked-room stories, and “Golden Age” author John Dickson Carr wrote several. Horowitz’ reference came up in Close to Death, and the recent film Wake Up Dead Man had a similar mechanic. The resolutions usually involve some clever way to kill the victim(s) that don’t require the killer to actually be in the room.

Shimada’s novel is quite long for a straight mystery, about 350 pages, and that would be fine if the mystery and/or the characters were interesting enough to sustain it. The murders take place in the eccentric mansion of a Japanese industrialist who has invited some subordinates for a holiday party, also attended by his daughter and son-in-law and a few others. The mansion is oddly designed, with slanted floors and weird paths so that you can’t easily get between rooms on the same floors. The chauffeur of one of the guests is the first victim, in a locked room, and no one can figure out how he was killed or see any possible motive, not even the local police officers who arrive and end up staying at the house because of bad weather and, eventually, to try to prevent the killer from striking again.

His detective character is the voluble Kiyoshi Mitarai, who claims to be a psychic or a fortune-teller, and who says ridiculous things so that people will underestimate him and potentially fall into traps he’s set for them. He’s reasonably funny on the page, but more than that, he provides some actual life to the story, keeping things moving, engaging in realistic dialogues that shine compared to the boring-as-hell conversations taking place in the house before his arrival. It’s not quite as bad as the Netflix “you have to explain the plot to people every half hour” before Mitarai shows up, but it’s close, with lots of long-winded explanations of things that don’t matter at all to the story.

Worse than that, however, is the resolution, which comes after a page that taunts the reader by saying that you have all the information you need to solve the case. I won’t spoil the answer beyond saying that it required more of a leap than any mystery I’ve read before, and I’ve read north of 100 of them. It’s not a case of deduction, and you can’t go off motive, because the ultimate motive involves information the reader doesn’t have before the killer confesses.

Horowitz recommended a few books in that passage of Close to Death, including The Honjin Murders, which was a better read but which had a similarly unsatisfying answer, in that case relying on the reader to properly visualize the room as the author wrote it. Both of these novels ultimately used the physical spaces of their settings as key parts of the mystery, rather than using motive, psychology, or ze leetle grey cells to let the reader reason through the suspects and find the solution. There may very well be readers who enjoy this sort of engineering puzzle – Shimada is a best-selling author in Japan – but I’m not among them.

Next up: Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie.

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October 21, 2026  ·  No comments yet

Wingspan Pocket.

Wingspan Pocket is the fourth standalone Wingspan game, following the original, Wyrmspan, and Finspan, each bringing its own level of difficulty and rules tweaks. The Pocket version is the simplest, smallest, and cheapest of the line, as you might expect, and serves as a great introduction to the core concepts of the Wingspan games, especially for teaching people who want to know about “the bird game” but haven’t played any modern board games. (It’s available now for $16 on Miniature Market.)

In Wingspan, players play bird cards to three habitats, represented by rows on their player boards, spending food tokens in five varieties and eggs to do so. On other turns, they invoke the bird cards in one habitat, moving right to left and using the powers printed on some or all of those cards; or spend a turn drawing new bird cards. The game lasts four rounds, with each player getting 26 turns, and by the end of the game most players will have at least ten bird cards on their boards.

The Pocket version streamlines this game in several ways. You’re creating just one line of bird cards, and the game ends when any player plays their sixth. There are different food types, but they aren’t represented by separate tokens; the backs of bird cards show one or two food types, and if you take a ‘draw cards’ action, you take two cards – two birds, two food cards, or one of each, after which you can’t flip them to the other side (so food stays food and birds stay birds). There are only two public objectives in the Pocket game, rather than four, and no private ones.

Other than the size of the game, the biggest difference here is that you activate all of your bird cards on every turn. You can draw cards, or play a card, or lay 3 eggs total on your birds, and whichever you choose, you then run through the powers (printed in brown) on your bird cards, left to right. Drawing cards I described above; playing bird cards requires discarding the correct food cards from your hand, and possibly an egg as well. Placing eggs is straightforward, with one difference from the original: you must place the three eggs on three different birds.

Those ‘brown’ powers will be familiar to players of the original Wingspan. You may get to lay an egg, or ‘tuck’ a card from your hand beneath a bird you’ve played; each of those is worth 1 point at game end. You may also get to draw any card, a bird, a specific food type, or any food card of your choice. Some powers you’ll activate also give some benefit to other players. A majority of bird cards have these brown powers you activate on each turn, while some others have ongoing powers, printed in green, that are always active, such as giving you a permanent discount for birds that require a particular food type, or let you treat one particular food type as wild.

The objective cards give you one point per egg on a matching bird, so you’re looking for birds that meet a card’s criterion and that can hold more eggs. You also have space for up to three eggs on your starter nest card, and many birds require an egg to play them along with their food costs. The position in your row doesn’t matter for the bird’s cost; it only affects when it’s activated.

The end-game scoring is simple. You add up the points shown on each of your played bird cards, take 1 point for every egg and tucked card in your row, and then take 1 point for every egg you have on birds that match the two public objectives.

Wingspan Pocket plays 1-5 players; the solo mode is extremely easy to use, as is true for pretty much all Stonemaier titles. If you like Wingspan, or even Finspan, I don’t think you need Wingspan Pocket, unless you want a simpler version of these games to play with kids or to teach friends who are boardgame-curious. It distills Wingspan into a smaller box and much shorter play time – about a half an hour – and can give new/younger players a sense of the mechanics so that they might be able to play one of the full-length games, and might be more interested in playing them, since I have had plenty of adults and kids say they’ve seen Wingspan but found it intimidating. I wouldn’t choose to play this over any of the Fullspans, though, because I find the simpler game less satisfying now that I know what the whole experience is like. I’m giving it an A- because it is Wingspan, simplified, even though it’s probably not going to see a lot of table time in my house.

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October 20, 2026  ·  2 comments

A Time of Changes.

The 1960s and early 1970s saw a movement within science fiction to incorporate ideas from psychology, philosophy, and other soft sciences into the genre, which produced some sci-fi classics like Samuel Delany’s Babel-17 (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from linguistics and philosophy), Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (gender as a social construct), and several of Philip K. Dick’s more serious novels. In A Time of Changes, the winner of the 1971 Nebula Award for Best Novel, Robert Silverberg takes another epistemological concept as his launching point for a novel: what would a society look like if it proscribed the use of the first person singular?

Humanity has spread out from Earth in this novel, which probably takes place a few thousand years into the future, and we meet our narrator, Kinnall Darival, who lives in the autocracy of Velada Borthan. As the novel opens, he’s a refugee, living in exile in an isolated forest, although we won’t learn why until well past the midpoint of the novel. His father, the king, dies quite early in the story, after which his brother takes the crown and Kinnall heads abroad to start his own life and avoid any question of rivalry to the throne.

In Velada Borthan, all life is governed by The Covenant, which makes the use of the first person singular an obscenity, while also creating relationships of Bond Brothers and Sisters that prove relevant to Kinnall’s story. He will eventually meet a traveler from Earth named Schweiz who describes his old society, and who will also give Kinnall a consciousness-expanding drug that allows for the communion of minds between people who use it together, a dangerous idea that turns Kinnall into a revolutionary and a wanted man.

The adventure within A Time of Changes and the way it changes Kinnall’s character end up more interesting than the philosophical question Silverberg appears to be asking. The society under the Covenant seems like a garden-variety autocracy, and Silverberg doesn’t give us much evidence that the diktat against individualism has somehow led to negative results for the people within it, or for the society as a whole. There’s a general lack of civil rights, and the monarch seems to be absolute, but those conditions can exist without the anti-individualist statutes.

Instead of asking deeper questions, Silverberg instead gives us Kinnall’s inner monologues, where he feels differently, but doesn’t give any explicit explanation. It’s very namby-pamby, we’re all one, don’t take the brown acid feel-good stuff, and doesn’t play out on the page in a way that materially changes Kinnall’s life or his interactions with others. Only the drugs do that, in that some people buy into the telepathic mind-melds, some find it overwhelming, and some are repulsed. The monarchy, of course, views this as a threat, and that gives the novel its narrative greed, and puts Kinnall on the run towards the conclusion, which is very fun and satisfying. I don’t think the book achieves what Silverberg set out to do with its concept, however, and that left me disappointed at the end even though I enjoyed the read until that point.

One note on the book: The idea of a society that bans the use of “I” wasn’t new – Silverberg discovered later than Ayn Rand used it in Anthem, but he hadn’t read that book, probably because he had some taste and self-respect.

Next up: I’m reading Dr. Kate Bowler’s Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved), which I mentioned in my latest newsletter.

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October 19, 2026  ·  3 comments

Arizona eats, fall 2026 edition.

The best new spot I tried was the daytime Latin café Malegria, located on Grand Ave in Phoenix two blocks from Bacanora. The menu incorporates Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan culinary influences, although the standard food menu seems to be mostly Mexican, with the other countries showing up in specials (like pupusas). The Central sandwich comes with scrambled eggs with peppers and onions, queso fresco, avocado, maduros (fried sweet plantains), and crema verde served on bolsillo bread, with a spicy Guatemalan salsa called chirmol on the side. I wasn’t sure about the maduros on a savory sandwich, but the sweetness was subtle because there was so much else on the sandwich, including the fat from the avocado and cheese, along with plenty of salt and acid. I had considered the Mexi Torta, which is similar but replaces the plantains with chorizo, going with the Central because I eat so little red meat, and I didn’t miss it at all. I’ve been locked into a breakfast rotation on these trips for almost 15 years now, hitting Hillside Spot, Crepe Bar, and Matt’s Big Breakfast, but Malegria is going into the mix.

I think the biggest new restaurant opening this year in Phoenix is Roman God of Fire in Tempe, tucked into a mixed-use development off Rio Salado, with a menu driven by the regional cuisine of Rome and the campagna around the city. I got there early enough to order something from the happy hour menu, getting two of the Italian croquettes called supplì, one with mushrooms and fontina and one with nduja and scamorza, for $4 each. The mushroom one was better, both were good, and despite being fried till deep golden brown, neither was the least bit greasy. The gnudi alla gricia, a gnocchi-like pasta made with ricotta rather than potatoes, with a sauce that is a carbonara without the eggs. It runs the risk of being very heavy between the fat in the cheese and a sauce that is mostly pecorino romano and guanciale (and pasta water), but this wasn’t, particularly the sauce, which was smooth and almost translucent, letting the saltiness of the cheese and the guanciale come through. My only note on the menu would be that it might be tough for vegetarians; every pasta dish but one has some sort of meat or fish in it.

As for the restaurant itself, my god, it is pretentious. The women at the host stand were all wearing dresses that evoked the idea of a toga, although none was wearing an actual toga, fortunately. There’s also a speakeasy called Mea Culpa inside the restaurant that you enter by going into a “confessional” booth and confessing your sins, which I didn’t do because I was going to a game and also I grew up Catholic and am definitely done with confession forever. I would absolutely go back to the restaurant and would like to go some time when I can try one of their cocktails, but I could do with more bread and less circus.

Il Forno Bello is a Neapolitan-ish pizzeria out in east Mesa founded by a chef who worked under Chris Bianco. Il Forno Bello’s dough style is different, somewhere between Naples and New York, without the big puff and airiness of Neapolitan pizza. Their ingredients are outstanding, though, as you’d expect of a Bianco discipline; I got the Finocchio, a fennel sausage and caramelized onion white pizza,

Babo Jumak showed up on Eater’s list of the 38 ‘essential’ restaurants in Phoenix – the word choice is odd, but I do think it’s better than saying ‘best’ because that is an impossible task – for its authentic Korean food in a bright, appealing strip-mall space. The menu was not ideal for me; it’s extremely red meat-centric, with almost no poultry at all and not that much seafood. I went with the bibimbap with spicy pork, figuring bibimbap is mostly rice and vegetables, but Babo Jumak’s version came in a bowl that’s about 10 inches wide and had at least a half a pound of pork in it. (I actually left so much meat that the server asked if it was too spicy for me, which is funny because it was about as spicy as a barbecue potato chip.) It was well-cooked, but everything was a little light in flavor and seasoning. I actually prefer another Korean place, Hodori, which is nearby and a little less fancy but I think has better food, and also has more options that don’t include red meat.

Ponderosa House is a new place in Old Town Scottsdale that pitches its cuisine as “Arizona Born Food,” although I’d call the menu a fusion of American and Mexican (Sonoran, specifically, according to reviews from writers with better knowledge of regional cuisine). It’s a broad menu, with sandwiches, tacos, two pasta dishes, a braised cabbage entrée, and several entrée salads. I ordered the shrimp tacos, which use shrimp from a local family purveyor (Chula Seafood), along with avocado and avocado-lime crema, pickled onions, cabbage, and cotija cheese. It was actually … kind of outstanding? There’s so much acidity in the dish that it gives you the flavor profile of a ceviche, but with the added flavor of the grill. I went back to Tacos Chiwas on the trip, which is still the best taqueria I know in Phoenix, and I love Gallo Blanco and Otro and Taco Chelo, so I wouldn’t say go to Ponderosa just for the tacos, but the fact that their tacos are this good tells me the rest of the food’s probably pretty good too.

I got all of my coffee for the week at Cartel Coffee or Crepe bar, except for the morning I was in Tuscon, where I tried Exo Coffee, which talked up their light roasts and single origins on their site. They don’t do pour-overs, so it’s drip or espresso, and I went with the drip to get to try a single origin option. The drip that day was a Mexican option – I think it’s these beans – and it was a little milder than I like, lacking a lot of body or strong flavor notes, although it also had zero bitterness. I’d probably try a different shop if I end up in Tucson early enough for coffee.

I barely had time to eat between the games in Tucson, and ate at Raising Cane’s for the first time, which … why are people obsessed with this place? It’s a very ordinary chicken tender with bad fries. I didn’t expect anything but fast food, but given how much people seem to love it and how fast they’re expanding, I thought it would be better. There is no scenario where I’d go there over Popeye’s for fast-food chicken.

I also hit a bunch of my usual spots, places I’ve written about before: the aforementioned breakfast rotation, Ollie Vaughn’s, Pane Bianco (the Wednesday special, a reimagined eggplant parmigiana sandwich is outstanding), and Andreoli Italian Grocer. Also, Eric Longenhagen passed along the sad news that two great spots, the Ethiopian place Café Lalibela and the sushi-and-cocktails spot Hai Noon, both closed recently.

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October 17, 2026  ·  11 comments

Stick to baseball, 10/17/26.

The first of three posts from my trip to the Arizona Fall League is now up, examining and excoriating the ridiculous outfield-positioning experiment happening in games at Salt River Fields. My notes on players I saw will run Sunday and Monday in two posts, split up by league. I’ll also work up a post on the five new restaurants I tried on this trip.

I have a newsletter written but have been holding it until the AFL posts were up, so I’ll probably send it on Monday. In the meantime, you can sign up for the newsletter (it’s free) or follow me on Bluesky, Instagram, TikTok, or Threads.

And now, the links…

  • The Times looks at the upheaval in mathematics after the release of hundreds of new proofs and findings generated by OpenAI, including a proof of the quasi-Riemann hypothesis, which may get mathematicians (or AI) closer to solving maybe the most famous currently unsolved problem in math.
  • Singer/guitarist Geordie Greep, formerly lead singer of black midi, was accused of sexual assault by a woman after a show earlier this month in Vancouver. The accusation was followed by a flyer, not written by the accuser, that claimed he’d raped her, a claim she flatly denies.
  • A 20-year-old woman in Milwaukee called the police to ask for protection from her 39-year-old boyfriend; he killed her hours later.
  • Bestselling author Sally Rooney (Normal People) has supported the group Palestine Action, which the UK has branded as a terrorist organization, meaning under UK law her publisher could not pay her royalties for her books sold in the country. As a result, Faber will no longer supply her books to stores in Britain, a move she supports. We aren’t the only western country rolling back civil rights.
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October 13, 2026  ·  2 comments

Space Lab.

Johannes Goupy is one of the best and most prolific new game designers to pop up in the last few years, making a name for himself with a number of small-box/big-thinking games like his hit game Faraway (which just got its third expansion), Rauha, and the lighter Pixies, as well as the heavy game From the Moon, the last of which is on my shelf of shame at the moment. Space Lab is in that former category, with a decent amount of tension and strategy in a smaller box, although it is definitely more luck-driven than Faraway and might frustrate players looking for something that gives you more control over card draws.

In Space Lab, players will draw and draft cards to fill out the ten spaces in their personal tableaux, working around three space stations that each have unique scoring objectives, similar to Forest Shuffle’s tableau format but much simpler with only one card going into each slot. At the end of the game, you score for the cards you played, the objectives you completed, and project cards you picked up, mostly through the cards you played above your space stations (three spots).

On your turn, you can draw three cards from the deck, keeping all cards of any single color and placing the rest in the ‘recruitment center.’ You can also take all cards of one color from that recruitment center area. As long as you start your turn with fewer than five cards in your hand, those two actions are available. You can also play any card from your hand, paying its cost (in the upper left corner, from 0 to 3) by discarding that many cards from your hand. Those cards go to the discard pile, not the recruitment center, so they’re out of play until the deck is exhausted and you have to reshuffle.

There are four colors in the game, representing different space agencies, and four roles on the player cards, both of which matter for scoring. Objective cards in your three space stations show three colors, anything from three different ones to three identical, and you score those if you place those colors in the four spots around the station. (You have ten card slots because there are two shared ones, between the left and middle stations and middle and right ones.) The roles matter mostly for end-game scoring, although there are some in-game options on objective cards where you gain something if you play that symbol below the station you gain a project or regular card. Finishing an objective card allows you to take the top point token from the stack for that location, with the points declining and the top left and right tokens giving you a one-time bonus as well.

The project cards are a bit of a lottery ticket, and from what I see on BGG, they’re the part of the game that engenders the most disagreement. When you play a card to one of the three slots above your three stations, you draw project cards equal to the number/cost of the card you played. You then keep just one of the project cards, all of which score more if you collect more of the set. Thus, playing expensive cards to those slots in your tableau means cycling through more of the project deck and increasing your odds of getting the card(s) you need. It is random, mostly, but you have some say in the matter here, enough that, for a medium-light game, I’m good with the balance.

The game progresses until one player fills all ten spots in their tableau or fulfills all three objective cards, at which point, you score. Many cards have variable scoring based on what’s in your entire tableau (e.g., 1-3 points per astronaut card) or just that card’s row, while others have fixed point values from 1-7. There’s a scoring pad here, but it’s not very difficult to score in your head.

I’m definitely higher than the consensus on Space Lab, which is about to get its first U.S. release from Pandasaurus (who sent me a review copy). It’s a fun filler that has a tiny bit of player interaction through the shared card space of the recruitment center, but where mostly you’re trying to cycle through the decks to get stuff you need. I wouldn’t put it over Faraway, but I’d probably take it over Rauha, just among Goupy’s games I’ve played. The solo mode is pretty tight as well, because it keeps all of the game’s rules but ends when the deck is exhausted and has a single automatic step that discards quite a few cards on each turn. It’s a B+ for me, and you can pre-order it from Pandasaurus now.

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October 12, 2026  ·  1 comment

Whistler.

Ann Patchett might be the greatest living American novelist. Her Bel Canto, which reimagines The Magic Mountain in a setting inspired by the Tupac Amaru takeover of the Japanese embassy in Lima, is one of the best novels of the century, and of all of her novels, only one, Run, failed to hit its mark, with unusually trite characters and a somewhat silly story.

Her last three novels have all been somewhat narrower in scope, focusing on family dynamics, often across several generations, in mostly white, middle-class settings that removed some variables (like money) to allow for greater focus on the interpersonal relationships within. Whistler, her tenth and most recent novel, is even tighter and smaller than the three preceding works, exploring family trauma and second chances, this time almost entirely among older adults, with children relegated mostly to flashbacks and a bit of comic relief.

Our protagonist and guide through Whistler is Daphne Fuller, who is now right about my age (53), married with adult stepchildren – blended families figure heavily into this book – and a husband around 70 who is now retired. While visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they run into a man, Eddie Triplett, who was briefly Daphne’s stepfather over 40 years prior, until a car accident ripped him out of their lives. Daphne had adored Eddie and always felt his loss after he disappeared, the truth of which she only gets now in adulthood, while her slightly younger sister, Leda, has far less memory of him and views his return more clinically – she’s a psychologist – than Daphne does. Eddie’s return leads him and Daphne to pick up almost where they left off, spending time together and confiding in each other now as they couldn’t when he was the adult and she the child, which allows Daphne to learn many truths about her childhood, including that accident, that have long formed lacunae in her life.

Whistler is unusual among Patchett’s novels in many ways, but most strongly in that nothing really bad happens in the present day. One older side character dies, but it’s hardly surprising, and he’s annoying enough that it passes with little emotion from anyone except his widow. Patchett gives us the stories of the past, which include the accident and the death of Daphne’s birth father, with her usual empathy towards everyone involved, but these interstitials take place so long ago, with the remaining characters so much older, that they provide answers without seeming as tragic as they would had she told them as stories in the novel’s present.

That leaves the book feeling less substantial than any Patchett novel since Run, maybe since Taft, which was her least successful novel prior to Bel Canto. Patchett’s prose is so lovely and evocative that all of her works are quick to read; here, there’s so little real action that the novel absolutely flies by, with characters talking about the past in clear and somewhat removed tones that don’t require the reader to slow down and absorb the import of what’s happening.

Patchett may be trying to explore how gaps in our lives and our memories affect us decades later, especially when those things come in childhood and involve adults coming in and out of our lives. Daphne is more than fine, but she missed Eddie more than she realized, and comes to discover that not knowing what happened, as well as the difficulty she had later when her mother remarried and had two more sons with her third husband, has altered the course of her life in subtle ways.

More than that, however, it seems like Whistler is about how most of us never really know our parents, exploring that question by giving Daphne a chance to get to know the stepparent she knew the least, so that by the end of the book, she knows Eddie better than she knows her own biological parents – and he helps her know them better too. Daphne adored Eddie, but she was so young she didn’t see many things that in hindsight become quite obvious, and without that context she couldn’t possibly understand him, his marriage to her mother, or how their divorce affected her mother for decades afterwards.

In the pantheon of Ann Patchett books, Whistler is unusual in its small scope; Patchett seems to be narrowing her focus as she gets older, in almost linear fashion post-Bel Canto. The throughline that connects all of her novels, except perhaps Run, is her ability to craft compelling, realistic characters who have compelling, realistic relationships. The Daphne-Eddie one would be enough for a novel, but here it’s just one among a web of relationships, including Daphne’s husband, her sister, her mother, even her late father, that show that Patchett has lost nothing off her fastball, and that make Whistler feel like a longer, richer novel than it is.

Next up: I’m most of the way through Robert Silverberg’s A Time of Changes.

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October 10, 2026  ·  5 comments

Stick to baseball, 10/10/26.

Nothing new from me this week on the Athletic, and just a pair of posts from me here, actually, reviewing the board game Forage and the abysmal novel Verity. So let’s get right to the links…

  • Longreads first: This New York Times investigation of the three people orchestrating smear campaigns against certain women in Hollywood, doing so at the behest of Justin Baldoni, Rebel Wilson, and others, is appalling – and very well-sourced. They uncovered messages between Wilson and one of the ringleaders, saying that for $110,000 they could put up a website that accused her target, writer Amanda Ghost, of sex trafficking.
  • The Atlantic spoke to the trucker who hit Pierre Damas Bel, the Haitian man who killed himself by jumping in front of the truck after Trump revoked the Temporary Protected Status of Haitian refugees earlier this year. The driver, Jack Burhing, was absolutely not at fault, and writer Stephanie McCrummen shows tremendous empathy for Buhring, Bel’s family, and others in the community in Springfield, Ohio.
  • Bernadette Greene-Placentia, a Democratic candidate for Congress in Arizona’s 8th district, revealed this week that she was raped while fixing one of her campaign signs. She’s running against election denier and incumbent Abraham Hamadeh, who has received $60,000 from AIPAC and other pro-Israel PACS this cycle.
  • A pastor and his wife who are Christian influencers and wrote a relationship book have been arrested for physically and sexually abusing their daughter. Seth Day is a professor at a Southwestern Adventist University – that religion was founded by a nutcase who claimed Jesus was coming back in 1843 or 1844, and, well, he’s a bit late – and he was charged with the abuse, while his wife Heather was charged with knowing of the abuse and failing to protect her daughter or report it. There were no trans people or drag queens arrested or involved in this story.
  • Of course the MAGA right, notably Christian nationalist Matt Walsh, have jumped into the Cornell 7 discourse by defending the rapists. It’s inherent to that fringe worldview.
  • A cop in North Carolina shot and killed a woman’s two dogs during a break-in in 2024. A court told her she can’t release the camera footage of the incident, but she’s doing it anyway. The court claimed releasing any of the body or dashcam video would endanger the police officer; that says to me that the officer must really be in the wrong here.
  • Writing for The New Republic, Michael Tomasky praises Sen. Jon Ossoff’s highly effective quips and one-liners against his opponent, Rep. Mike Collins (R), and says Ossoff is the 2028 Democratic front-runner until proven otherwise. I would broaden the statement to point out that candidates who are taking this aggressive approach, including Ossoff, El-Sayed, and to some extent Adam Hamilton, seem to be faring better than those who are playing defense (like engaging with transphobes).
  • Wisconsin Congressman Derrick Van Orden (R) has been posting deepfake videos of his Democratic opponent Rebecca Cooke, who has hit Van Orden with a cease-and-desist order over this AI slop. He isn’t even labeling the fake ads as AI, which is generally required by the sites where they’re posted.
  • New research found that James Watson’s claim that he first found the helix in a famous photo of human DNA is bogus; Rosalind Franklin, who died in 1958 and still is not properly honored for her role in the discovery, spotted it first.
  • Board game Kickstarters: Cole Wehrle’s Buried Giant Studios has one for a second edition of An Infamous Traffic, a fairly heavy game about the opium trade in China in the 1800s. I haven’t played this game but have been looking for a copy in trade for a while because the theme is so good.
  • This Way! Games has a Gamefound page for Arctica, an engine-building game about creating an ecosystem in the Arctic, with intriguing gear-driven player boards. I will say those cards look a lot like Wingspan’s, though.
  • Tycoon Games has one up for Fable Quest, a cooperative game set in the world of 2014’s Arcadia Quest.

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October 5, 2026  ·  2 comments

Forage.

Forage is a new roll-and-write from Flatout Games’ internal design crew, the same folks who brought you Verdant, Point Salad (and sequels), and TEN, where players fill out three types of cards by selecting from a huge set of dice rolled on each of the game’s thirteen turns. As in most good roll-and-writes, you’re trying to chain bonuses and get extra plays, which exist in Forage but aren’t that easy to come by.

In Forage, players try to gain victory points by completing goal cards, spending time to use journey cards, and from bonuses on the cards they’re filling out from the dice rolls. Players will fill out Pantry, Gift, and Exploration cards, gaining bonuses for finishing the cards, and in the case of Pantry and Exploration cards for finishing parts of the cards – sometimes giving a victory point or two. Players also gain and spend time, using it for extra dice actions, extra icons, or to invoke a journey tile that gives a bonus action and/or points.

Each round starts with the roll of eight dice, seven normal ones and one special one that is special because the wood is dark like chocolate, and chocolate is special, especially when it’s dark. Whoever rolls the dice separates them by the symbols showing; if there are any groups of dice with the same symbol, they go to the left of the central foraging basket card, while unique dice go on the right, and the special one goes on the basket card itself. This grouping matters tremendously in how you play the game.

Dice on the left, in groups, can be used for the Pantry cards, which show rows of jars of three different colors, which I believe is always 16 jars per card to complete. Dice on the right can be used as an entire group – including the special die – for the Exploration cards, which show paths between these symbols and bonuses between the paths that you get when you mark off all the surrounding symbols. For the Gift cards, you can use any one group on the left, or use all the dice on the right, again adding the special die if you wish.

Time is the main currency within Forage, and, as in life, there is never enough of it. You start with two time units on your dry-erase card, and you gain a time from completing any card. You can fritter and waste your time in many offhand ways, such as spending two to take an additional dice action as described above, or spending one to add any icon you wish to the dice you selected. The big use of time here is on those journey tiles, which mark the passage of time through the game – you start with three revealed, then reveal one per round. The first ten of those will allow any player to pay a fixed amount of time, three to nine units, for an immediate benefit that may include victory points (9 time yields 12 VP, which I think is the most) and/or the ability to mark off various things on your cards. The last three give you some kind of instant benefit instead as you approach end game. There are also knowledge and experience symbols on your scoring crd that score 1 point apiece, or 5 for each pair (one of each, that is).

If it sounds a little point salady … I think that’s fair, as even after a few plays I still had to put the knowledge/experience part out of my mind to focus just on the cards in front of me. I love the way the dice work, so that you aren’t facing three equivalent choices among the cards, a mechanic that spills over into extra dice actions as well. Completing these cards is pretty hard, though, and that’s where I struggle with Forage: It is not an inherently complicated game, and you will always have something you can do, but either I’m really bad at this or chaining bonuses is quite difficult here, so my plays have been equal parts fun and frustrating.

I do think Forage is a good game, and I would probably like it more if I kept playing it and learned some better strategies to use early in the game. Right now, I feel like I haven’t fully grasped how to play it well, which isn’t usually how roll-and-writes go for me, for whatever that’s worth. It’s a grade B for me, but I admit I could be too low because my brain refuses to cooperate when playing.

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October 4, 2026  ·  16 comments

Verity.

Verity might be the worst novel I’ve ever read. If it’s not, I am unable to remember one that was worse.

It’s not just that it’s the book I disliked the most, although that’s probably also true. I hated Moby Dick and Naked Lunch. Those books were unpleasant to read, the latter because it seemed to be pointlessly provocative and the former because I don’t care about whales, but they still have literary merit beyond their stories or the authors’ language choices. Verity, which is by Colleen Hoover, is completely devoid of literary merit. It is barely a novel. It is a novel-like substance. It is novel-shaped. It’s about 300 pages of absolute dreck, and the only good thing I can say about it is that it was over fast.

The plot, such as it is, might have made for a good potboiler in the hands of a better writer. Lowen is a struggling writer who’s about to be evicted from her apartment when her literary agent (who was briefly her lover as well) calls her in for a secretive meeting. En route to that meeting – and here’s where the book opens – she witnesses a pedestrian walk into the path of an oncoming bus and get his head smashed like a watermelon on stage with Gallagher, covering her with blood and, one would presume, some of ze little grey cells. A handsome stranger helps steer her into a coffee-shop bathroom and even gives her the shirt off his back.

Naturally, the handsome stranger, Jeremy, is also going to that meeting. His wife, Verity, was a successful novelist, but she’s unable to continue writing after an accident has left her catatonic. He wants Lowen to finish the series Verity had begun. Oh, did I mention that Jeremy and Verity lost both of their twin daughters, about six months apart, to strange accidents? Verity needs the cash, so she accepts the offer and heads to Jeremy and Verity’s house in Vermont to go through Verity’s papers, looking for notes and outlines. She instead finds a manuscript that seems to be Verity’s autobiography, in which she reveals herself to be something akin to Mommie Dearest.

It gets dumber from there, right down to the cowardly resolution, where Hoover essentially refuses to pick any side at all. Besides the thin plot – which, again, could have been something – these three main characters all suck. Jeremy is about as three-dimensional as the parchment paper I use to bake cookies. He’s handsome and considerate and grief-stricken in that brooding way, and also, he really doesn’t seem to have much compunction about flirting with Lowen while his non-responsive but definitely alive wife is upstairs. Lowen makes the wrong choice at nearly every turn, for no apparent reason other than plot convenience, as she is definitely not stupid, and she’s not that naïve, either. Like any author of a mediocre horror story, Hoover needs her characters to do dumb things, so they do.

The writing is the real icing on the dumpster, though. The prose is choppy and the vocabulary is limited, with a slew of sentence fragments, one-sentence paragraphs, and sentences in desperate need of an editor. “To the right are boxes of things accumulated over the years they’ve been together. Some with lids, some without.” An even clumsier example: “I learned very early on that a human is not merely comprised of only one thing.” (Wrong. The whole comprises its parts.) “We have our conscience, which includes our mind, our soul, and all the intangible parts. And we have our physical being, which is the machine that our conscience relies on for survival. If you fuck with the machine, you will die.” That’s four separate paragraphs, along with one of the worst explanations of dualism you’ll ever see. Most of the book reads like a middle-schooler might have written it … except for the sex scenes, which are among the worst I’ve ever read – and I read a lot of science fiction by male authors. “He fed me, and then he fucked me,” introduces one of the first such scenes, which reminds me of the excerpts from Fifty Shades of Grey people would post to show how bad the writing in that series was.

I know this book is very popular, as is most of Hoover’s work, and the movie is already off to a good start at the box office. I say don’t waste your time. This is twaddle. It’s pablum for the masses, but it isn’t even entertaining enough to make up for how low-quality the prose and characters are.

Next up: Ann Patchett’s latest novel Whistler.

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