Sail.

Sail was one of the most unusual new games I played in 2023: a cooperative trick-taking game where you’re trying to jointly steer a ship around obstacles and sea monsters to reach the end of the path before you run out of turns or your ship takes too much damage. It’s a retheme of a Japanese game called Hameln Cave, published in a tiny box by the folks at Allplay, who specialize in publishing ‘big’ games in small boxes, including Pollen (a retheme of Reiner Knizia’s Samurai: the Card Game) and the underrated little dice-rolling game Sequioa.

Sail has a deck of cards in three suits where each number has a specific symbol on it, and the combination of symbols on the two cards played in each trick determines what happens on the map. You and your partner will each get a hand of cards, exchanging some before the first turn, and then you’ll play a series of tricks – without communicating with your partner – where you must follow suit if possible, which of course means trying to get rid of a suit and/or find a way to indicate what you have to your partner.

The map varies by game, and you can pick a scenario to suit your desired difficulty level, play through them in sequence as a campaign, or even design your own. Every map has obstacles in rocks and Kraken monsters, plus lines you must cross by the end of the Nth turn to stay in the game. You have a set number of turns to reach the finish line, the distance to which also varies by scenario. One major catch is that the spaces on the map are diamonds, so moving to an adjacent space isn’t the same as moving in a straight line, and you’ll have to try to tack back and forth to keep moving while also trying to avoid the islands and monsters. One great card combination lets you move straight to the diamond that only touches your current space at one point, but as you might imagine it’s hard to pull that off. If moving the ship would put the ship on an island or off the map, it doesn’t move at all, which results in a wasted turn.

The remaining combinations can run from the ‘not too bad’ to the ‘very bad,’ with many of them dealing damage to your ship. Cards numbered 1-3 have a Kraken symbol and when played with other cards numbered 1-3 or cards that just move your ship to an adjacent space, they damage your ship. The game begins with all cards numbered 1 or 2 in a separate Kraken deck, but those will enter the player deck any time you take damage from the Kraken. You might even take two damage if you both play a card numbered 1-3 in the same trick. You can deal damage to the Kraken, which allows you to take the lower card in the trick and discard it to the Kraken deck, improving your deck for the next round and also giving you more time, as you can lose the game when the Kraken deck is exhausted. If you both play cards with cannon symbols, you flip the next card in the deck and get something positive – moving the ship either to an adjacent space or forward, or discarding a low-numbered card to the Kraken deck.

Each round ends when one player wins their fourth trick, so you can extend rounds by trying to balance the number of tricks each player wins. When a round ends, you take damage based on where the Kraken meeple is on its board; this meeple moves up any time you take damage but the top card in the Kraken deck isn’t a numbered card but the Kraken card itself, after which you move that to the bottom of its deck and bump up the Kraken meeple so you take more damage after each round. If you ever take damage from the Kraken but there’s nothing else in its deck, you lose.

If you steer the ship on to the End Token on the map, you win immediately. As in most coop games, there are more ways to lose than to win: If you haven’t reached the End Token after 5 rounds, haven’t passed the checkpoints after rounds 2/4, exhaust the Kraken deck, or move the Kraken meeple to the final space, kindly labeled as “Dead.”

What really, really works about Sail is that it’s extremely tight – I don’t think this is a game you can ever win easily. I played this with my father, an experienced bridge player, and once we got the rhythm going, we did quite well … yet whenever we won a scenario, it was by the skin of our teeth. It made for an intense but fun gaming experience: there’s such satisfaction in pulling off the series of moves you need to win without being able to communicate. After a few rounds, we started to ‘read’ each other a bit more as well, so we could strategize without communicating, which I think is also key to this sort of game (The Mind would be the best-known example, I think).

You can buy it directly from Allplay for $1 cheaper than you’d pay on Amazon, including shipping, and you could check out Sequoia as well. I also just learned that they’re reprinting the Reiner Knizia classic Through the Desert, a top 100 game for me since I started making those lists, but which has gone out of print twice in the last decade or so. I own a copy of a prior printing but I’m excited that folks will be able to buy it later this year.

North Woods.

Daniel Mason’s North Woods is the story of a house. I mean, it’s the story of the people who live in it, and some who just pass through, but the only constant in this peculiar but beguiling book is the house, located on what becomes an apple orchard in western Massachusetts. The house becomes the site of a number of tragedies – there’s a lot of death in the book, some comic but others just sad – and some truly eccentric characters who remind us of the transience of life and the things we leave behind.

The house, described as lemon-yellow and assembled piecemeal over many years, first goes up in the 1760s and sees everyone from young lovers to Revolutionary soldiers to a woman kidnapped by Native Americans to an escaped slave and the slave-hunter trying to abduct her and more, although none leaves more of a mark than the Osgood family. Their patriarch discovers an apple there he calls the Wonder, becoming an evangelist of the strain and developing the giant orchard that envelops the property and that his spinster daughters will eventually make their livelihood – at least, until one of them finds a beau. Much of the action in the book is botanical, as apple seeds, acorns, beetles, and fungal spores also leave their mark on the house, its environs, and thus the people who inhabit it. Eventually, we enter the 20th century, with a woman whose son believes he can hear the voices of the dead people who previously lived in the house – which leads to his diagnosis with schizophrenia – and the house’s decline into ruin.

Mason challenges the reader twice over, once with the unusual structure and once with his use of the supernatural in a subtle but central way. The book’s many sections vary in length and style, with interstitials that come in the form of letters, pamphlets, a real estate listing, poems, and more digressions from the prose format. Some work – the real estate listing is one of the funnier bits, and it’s just a single page – but there’s a sense of Mason trying harder than he needs to in a book that is in and of itself a creative marvel. The poems especially do not work, not because they’re bad poems – I am not in a position to judge their merits – but because they add nothing to the novel as a whole. They take up space without advancing story or character, and unless I’m missing some great Parnassian achievement here, I’d have preferred he omit them entirely.

The supernatural elements are harder to understand, but also more essential to the novel. Without spoiling what those elements are, they appear slowly, without much in the way of warning or foreshadowing, building as the novel progresses until they are woven thoroughly into the fabric of each story. By the time we reach the final character to visit the house, it’s easy to see where that chapter will end, because each successive tale has leaned a little more on the supernatural elements to complete its narrative. North Woods could exist, and excel, without the interstitial bits and style variations, but it could not exist without the spirits. (As an aside, I did not catch that the twelve chapters were supposed to represent the twelve months of the year, later reading that in the NPR review of the book. It’s another clever trick that, in hindsight, was also quite effective because of its subtlety.)

That last character refers to the world as either “a tale of loss” or “a tale of change,” and North Woods does not seem to take sides in this debate. The characters themselves experience loss, sometimes plural, often unexpected and unfathomable. The house and the land persist, but their denizens change, as do the ways in which the humans use the building and the trees. And all of the death begets new life, even, in its way, the eventual death of the house by fire, which we know can regenerate the land (e.g., certain morel mushrooms fruit well after forest fires). Death is not final in Mason’s novel, which is obviously a spiritual view that readers may or may not endorse, but he uses this as a device to connect the dozen stories and characters, as one death often sparks the series of events that lead to the next character or chapter in the house itself. It’s an unusual novel, and a slow one to start, but Mason’s lithe prose and gift for characterization ultimately wins out, even with some distractions in his literary flourishes.

Next up: Bryan Stephenson’s Just Mercy, which my daughter had to read for school last year. (He’s a Delaware native.)

Nautilus Island.

Nautilus Island is a simple family-friendly game that first appeared at Gen Con this past August, combining set collection with a tiny bit of press-your-luck that’s great for younger gamers but that I found too simple for my own tastes.

In Nautilus Island, players will try to collect sets of treasure cards from the board, which represents a shipwreck and has stacks of cards aligned in rows, with some stacks face-up and others face-down. On your turn, you’ll move your Castaway meeple to the other side of the board, next to any row except the one you just left. Once there, you may either take the top card from every stack in that row, or play a number of cards from your hand, all of one color, equal to the number of stacks in your row (one to three). If there’s an active bonus token available for that card color, you can claim it. You then have the choice to ‘close’ your set, which precludes you from playing any more cards of that color for the rest of the game (although you may take them), at which point you take the most valuable Porthole token left for the number of cards in that set. For example, if you have four blue cards in your set, and you close it before anyone else has closed a four-card set, you’ll get the Porthole token worth 8 points. Those tokens decline in value as more players claim them. There are six different colors of cards, five of which you can collect in sets plus the yellow treasure cards that are just worth straight victory points. Once players have exhausted the stacks in any row of the board, the game ends, and players add up the points from their bonus tokens, Porthole tokens, and any treasure cards to determine the winner.

There isn’t that much strategy in Nautilus Island other than the turn order aspect of where you place your meeples. The number of stacks varies by player count, but the board always has at least one stack alone in a row at the front of the boat, and at least one row of three stacks at the back. After a round, when all players have placed their meeples on one side of the boat, the new turn order is determined by who’s closest to the front of the boat – so if you moved to the one-stack row at the very front, you had a less powerful move (take or play just one card), but you go first in the next round, which might line you up to get cards you really wanted. Beyond that, however, you’re just collecting cards, and eventually have to decide how much to push your luck around closing sets, because you only score for sets you’ve closed and for which you’ve claimed a Porthole token – once all tokens for a set size are claimed, future sets of that size are worthless.

The game was co-designed by Théo Rivière and Johannes Goupy, who also co-designed last year’s Rauha and have contributed to the designs of Sea Salt & Paper, Orichalcum (still on my Shelf of Shame), and Draftosaurus, so they’ve got some pretty strong designs under their belts. This feels a bit like a throwaway design, though; my seven-year-old nephew loves it, and that’s worth something, but I’ve played this with adults and we all thought it was too light. Your best option on each turn is pretty obvious, and when to close a set isn’t that hard a decision if you’re old enough to figure out how many cards of each color might still be left in the stacks. You can play a complete game inside of 20 minutes with two or three players – I haven’t played with four but I can’t imagine it would run longer than about 25 with that player count. I’d recommend this if you have younger kids who want to join the big people at the game table but are between games strictly for kids and those for older or more experienced players, but that’s a narrow window.

Babel.

R.F. Kuang won the most recent Nebula Award for Best Novel with her first novel for adults, Babel, a long and intense fantasy story that upends many of the conventions of the ‘youth goes to magic school’ subgenre while also attacking serious questions of colonialism and privilege. It’s dark and riveting, and perhaps its best feature is how unsentimental it is about its subject and characters.

The book’s full title is the unwieldy Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, which I think makes the book sound boring when it’s actually a thriller for the majority of its 500-odd pages. Set in the 1830s, it follows a Chinese orphan who is adopted by a strange English academic and brought to Oxford to study at its translation school, which is the most powerful institution in the country and perhaps the world. In this alternate history, translators can create powerful objects from silver by taking advantage of the meaning gaps between words in different languages that might have the same denotations but that have cultural or other contextual differences not captured by a word-four-word translation. These silver bars power much of the world at the time, but Oxford is their only producer, making England the world’s most powerful nation and allowing them to dictate the terms of trade with their partners … and to leave much of the non-European world in a state of underdevelopment because they refuse to share the technology. The orphan, who takes the English name Robin Swift, finds himself torn between the comfortable world of his academic setting and his own values, including his ties to China, which drive him to fight the ivory tower and try to bring silver-making to the broader world.

Kuang begins her novel with a familiar trope – the orphan is plucked from poverty by a mysterious (white) person who brings them to a school that reveals hitherto unknown talents and opens up a world of power and possibility to them. Robin is fluent in Mandarin and becomes so in English, while his professor-benefactor, who takes him in as a ward until he’s old enough for Oxford’s Linguistics Department, drills him in other languages to better prepare him for academe. Once there, Robin becomes fast friends with a few classmates and acclimates quickly to a life of privilege and sudden respect, as the linguistics tower is the jewel in the Oxonian crown, and those ticketed for its top floors – where the silver-making is done – are the Big Linguists On Campus. (I’m not making that other joke, sorry.) The plot begins to diverge from the archetype shortly after Robin matriculates, as an outsider attempts to recruit him to a shadowy, decentralized activist group that wants to pilfer silver bars from Oxford to share them with the developing world. Robin doesn’t choose his fate immediately, although he ultimately chooses – or is forced to – side with the rebels, opening up the second portion of the book, where Kuang continues to explore the same themes of exploitation and social justice, but shifts the style from Magic School Wunderkind to a spy thriller with tons of action and many, many surprising twists.

As a straight read, Babel is a smart and clever thrill ride up to the very last page. The gimmick around languages, using what gets lost in translation as the proxy for magic, is incredibly clever and a credit to Kuang’s intellect and her own linguistic prowess; it feels like the sort of idea you’d have if you’re fluent in several languages without much or any relationship and have tried to translate something but found the words lacking. That alone won’t power a book, but Robin is a superb protagonist, principled but cautious, anxious yet willing to make bold decisions, flawed but ultimately heroic in his own way. His friends are fun side characters, perhaps not as fleshed out as they could be other than the Indian-born Ramy, but this book is already long and giving any of them more time would probably just pad the length.  

This particular subgenre has many smart and entertaining books in it, but I can’t think of an other example that is this serious at its core. At heart, Babel is an angry book, based loosely on the leadup to the Opium Wars and the English crown’s exploitation of both its colonial empire and of China after it subjugated the latter by use of superior weaponry. It’s also a metaphor for the two centuries since then, where the West has seen enormous economic advancement, leading to longer life expectancies and better health outcomes, that it has not shared with the developing world. Some Asian countries – the so-called “Tigers” – have caught up, but did so by selling to the west and undercutting labor costs, while a few western financiers played God with their currencies and nearly killed their economies in the process. The same imperialist-capitalist philosophy that leads fictional England to keep silver-making to itself drives nations and drug manufacturers to charge market rents for treatments or cures for diseases that are devastating sub-Saharan Africa. Over 90% of the children with HIV and over 90% of the pregnant women with HIV in the world live in that region. People with HIV make up over 2% of the population of Africa as a whole. The virus is driving a co-epidemic with tuberculosis. The developed world has not stepped up with sufficient funds to stem the spread of the virus and reduce the death rate through antiretroviral drugs. Even ignoring the potential economic benefits of helping a continent with over a billion people fight an epidemic, isn’t there a moral imperative to help people not die of a disease that is 1) mostly preventable and 2) mostly treatable, just because they don’t have the money or even a way to get it?

Robin’s answer, ultimately, is yes. How he gets there, and what he and his friends end up doing to try to topple the tower, literally and figuratively, makes Babel one of the smartest and most thought-provoking page-turners I’ve read in years. I can even see why readers who’d read this first might have been disappointed by her next novel, Yellowface, which feels insubstantial by comparison. Its ideas are also important, but Babel creates a universe to call out universal ills, and forces you to reckon with its themes by plunging you into a story you won’t want to put down.

Next up: Currently reading Daniel Mason’s North Woods.

The Boy and the Heron.

I’m an avowed Hayao Miyazaki fan, having seen every film he’s directed or written other than his first, 1978’s The Castle of Cagliostro, some of them multiple times. My Neighbor Totoro is a favorite of all of my kids, and my daughter has a modest collection of Totoro-themed trinkets, while I’d rank Spirited Away among the best animated films I’ve ever seen for the complexity of its story and the way it blends fantasy and a very specific form of psychological horror. After 2013’s The Wind Rises, Miyazaki announced his retirement (not for the first time), and it seemed right as that was one of his weaker films. Maybe he’d just lost his fastball in his 70s.

He unretired at some point in the interim, spending seven years making his latest and likely final film, The Boy and the Heron. It certainly feels like a swan song, with a story that’s inspired by his own childhood and is told through his typical lens of fantasy, nature, and food, and ending on a beautiful note that seems to say goodbye to all that. It’s very Miyazaki, enough to satisfy his longtime fans, but takes a darker tone for much of the story than anything else he’s done in the last twenty years.

The Boy is Mahito Maki, a young child in Japan in World War II whose mother dies when the Tokyo hospital where she works burns down. Soon after, Mahito’s father marries his late wife’s sister, Notsuko, and they move to her estate in the countryside to escape the bombing. While there, Mahito encounters a talking, taunting heron, and wanders into an abandoned tower on the property with a haunted history. You can probably guess that we’re going in that tower, with the heron, and very strange things are going to happen there, which would be correct, as Notsuko – by then very pregnant – wanders into the forest as if in a trance, and Mahito goes on a quest to find her that takes him into another world, one populated by angry parakeets, starving pelicans, little white sprites called wara-wara, and the solution to more than just the mystery of Notsuko’s disappearance.

The Boy and the Heron is chock full of Miyazaki staples, starting with the unbelievable landscapes, lush with greens and vibrant floral tones – a reminder that hand-drawn animation is still capable of blowing us away by evoking the same sort of sensations we get from the ultra-realism of modern CGI. There are adorable tiny creatures made for merchandising in the adorable wara-wara, just like the soot sprites of Totoro. There’s food, a lot of it, which somehow looks delicious even when it doesn’t look very real. And there’s magic of the Miyazaki variety, like fire witches and talking herons (well, just one) and a hallway of doors that lead to different worlds. It’s not fan service, but it’s comfort food for fans all the same.

Where The Boy and the Heron succeeds is the way it layers a metaphorical version of Miyazaki’s life and career on top of the actual story of Mahito. Mothers in hospitals and cities under attack are common motifs in his films, both drawn from his own childhood, as is the distant relationship Mahito has with his own father – a pattern Miyazaki has said he’s repeated with his older son Goro, who has directed several Studio Ghibli films himself. A large portion of the plot concerns the ideas of world-building and the responsibilities of a creator (or, by extension, an artist), and when the movie ends by closing a literal door on one of those worlds, it feels like Miyazaki himself saying he’s done as a filmmaker. Mahito’s entire story arc from the moment he meets the heron – voiced in the English dub by an unrecognizable Robert Pattinson – seems to serve as a loosely figurative interpretation of Miyazaki’s career in animation, from his first encounters with the form through the fifteen years he worked before writing and directing his first feature to his reluctant decision(s) to walk away.

There’s a long period where Mahito is in the other world where the story loses some momentum, between his encounter with the wara-wara and his entry into the tower, and the film probably could have benefited from some editing here – not that anyone was likely to tell Miyazaki what to do with his own film. Some of this comes together in the ending, including the meaning of the tower, although Miyazaki also leaves some things unexplained, as is his wont; the conclusion turns out to be incredibly moving, especially through that lens of him using the hall of doors and Mahito’s choice to pass through one as his own way of saying to audiences that he’s done. It’s in the upper half of his films, and if it doesn’t quite reach the heights of Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke or the sheer joy of Totoro or Kiki’s Delivery Service, it’s a wonderful and moving way to end a Hall of Fame career.

The Boy and the Heron just won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature, which has gone to the eventual winner of the Oscar in that category in 75% of the years since the Globes introduced their category, including the last three winners. The Oscar race feels like it’s coming down to this film, a hand-drawn marvel that’s the Academy’s final chance to honor a legend in the field, against Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, one of the most innovative animated films ever and the sequel to a past winner. I think the Spider-Verse movie is the more worthy winner, but The Boy and the Heron is more likely to win, and my sentimental side hopes it does. Miyazaki has only won this honor once, for Spirited Away, and only been nominated two other times, as the Academy passed over Ponyo and two films he wrote but didn’t direct, Arrietty and From Up on Poppy Hill. Giving The Boy and the Heron this award would be the sort of lifetime achievement honor the Academy seems to love, and the film itself would be the easy choice in most years anyway.

May December.

If you’re at least in your mid-30s, you probably remember the tabloid saga of Mary Kay LeTourneau, a sixth-grade teacher who committed statutory rape by sleeping with one of her students, 12-year-old Vili Fualaau. She served about six years in prison, but had two children by Fualaau and they eventually married, staying together for fourteen years until they separated, shortly after which she died of cancer. It was played for laughs, but it was a very real tragedy, with Fualaau a victim of her grooming and abuse, while she herself had a history of private tragedies from alleged abuse in her first marriage to having her three-year-old brother drown in a pool while she was playing in it at the other end.

The new film May December, streaming exclusively on Netflix,takes this story and very, very thinly veils it with some new names and modest details, envisioning the couple as still married twenty-plus years later with one kid in college and two more about to graduate from high school. Within this movie, there’s a film in production about their story at the time of the actual abuse, and an actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), arrives at the family’s house to spend time with them as she prepares for her role as the younger Gracie (Julianne Moore). Elizabeth at least thinks of herself as an extremely serious actress and embeds herself in the family’s daily routines, following Gracie to things like a flower arranging class and helping her with her home baking business, but also clearly flirting with Gracie’s husband, Joe (Charles Melton), who is now just about the same age as Elizabeth. She also meets Gracie’s ex-husband and one of her children from that marriage as well as some neighbors who offer their own interpretations of events that may be unreliable but at least tend to upset the standard narrative about the couple, both the original crimes and their marriage today.

The tone and atmosphere of May December seem like those of a serious drama, but the script is far more that of a dark comedy. Elizabeth and Gracie are utterly ridiculous people, ridiculous in different ways but similar enough that they clash many times throughout their partnership here. Elizabeth’s preparation for the role borders on parody, such as when she visits the pet store where Gracie and Joe worked when she groomed him – and asks to see the stockroom where they first had sex (or, where Gracie first raped Joe). She seems reasonable at first, just affected, but as the film goes on she comes across as either unhinged or perhaps just not that smart, as if she’s going through the steps she believes a good actor takes but doesn’t understand how to translate the checklist into practice.

Gracie, meanwhile, appears to be arrested development in senior citizen form, crying and throwing tantrums like a small child, with a slight lisp or impediment that comes and goes depending on what impression she’s trying to make. She has, or at least has had, the power in her relationship, but as they get older and the kids that bound them together are about to leave them with an empty nest, she might see the odds of Joe leaving her as higher than ever – and perhaps she sees this new film as a way to prevent Joe from leaving their history behind him.

It all leaves Joe, oddly enough, as the film’s most nuanced and interesting character, giving Melton, previously best known for the C.W. drama Riverdale, a great chance to prove himself as a serious actor. Joe insists that he wasn’t a victim, and that the way the world sees him isn’t at all how he sees himself. He’s not happy in the marriage, or at least not happy enough, but it’s less overt than it might be – he hasn’t woken up one day to realize he was groomed, or suddenly decided he doesn’t want to be married to an old lady when he’s still in his 30s. He’s also perplexed by Elizabeth, who comes from another world that he never got to experience, which leaves him vulnerable to her charms.

Joe also raises monarch caterpillars as a hobby, and Haynes is not the least bit shy about beating the viewer over the head with the metaphor here. I’m all for metaphor and symqbolism in films, but the script here lays it on so thick that you have no room for thought or interpretation, and it ends up a distraction from the tripartite character study that’s at the heart of the film. The script’s ambiguous conclusion forces Elizabeth to rethink much of what she believes she saw and learned while visiting Gracie and Joe, and opens the whole film up to more interpretations, enough so that the caterpillar stuff just wasn’t necessary.

All three leads are excellent, unsurprising for the two who’ve already won Oscars themselves, although the current odds seem to show Moore and Melton on the bubbles for the two supporting categories. It’s possible that May December will only get a nod for original screenplay, which might be merited as it’s looking like the 2023 movie crop ended up a very strong one, but this feels like a film that should earn more acclaim for its actors, without all three of whom it just can’t work. After Haynes’ distracting Velvet Underground documentary, which was sunk by the split-screen gimmick and didn’t give enough story about the band’s incredible influence, it’s good to see him return with a film this complex and challenging.

Stick to baseball, 1/13/24.

I had two posts this week for subscribers to The Athletic – a breakdown of the Michael Busch trade for prospects and another of the Cubs signing Shota Imanaga. Somehow, this brought the Matt Mervis stans back out off hiding.

At Paste, I published a full review of the game The White Castle, my top new game of 2023. Fries are extra.

I also sent out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter earlier in the week. You should sign up, as I’m posting less to Twitter these days, although you can also find me on Threads, Bluesky, and Spoutible.

A light week for links, probably because I was on the phone so much working on prospect stuff that I was offline more than usual (at least twice because my eyes hurt from so much screen time)…

  • Nigerian megachurch leader TB Joshua, who was not a drag queen, tortured, raped, and abused many of his worshippers until his death in 2021. A BBC investigation found cases of all of the above as well as forced abortions and cult-like control spanning twenty years.
  • Are fast-food prices really going up, and if so, is it because of rising wages? It’s not that simple, according to this story on Vox. Input prices have gone up substantially in the last few years as well. Also, the $18 Big Mac story that went viral was about a McDonald’s at a rest stop with a captive audience.
  • Paste profiled SPRINTS as the Irish punk band released their first full-length album Letter to Self.

Rye Lane.

Most meet-cute films are little more than cute, and often they’re just cutesy to the point of being saccharine. They’re date movies, or “date movies,” assuming you care more about the mood you’re setting than the caliber of the movie itself. It’s just not a genre associated with quality, which is why Rye Lane, streaming now on Hulu, was such an incredible surprise: It’s a genuinely great movie on its own merits, even though you know from the start that the protagonists are going to get together, in part because they’re both so realistically drawn and well acted. (Thanks to Chris Crawford, who ranked this among his top 5 films of 2023, for telling me about it.)

As the film opens, we see Dom (David Jonsson) crying in a stall in the all-genders bathroom at an art exhibition, when Yas (Vivian Oparah) comes in to use the neighboring stall, leading to an awkward conversation where Dom reveals that his long-term girlfriend left him for his best mate. The two reconnect outside of the loo and end up walking through Rye Lane Market for a few hours, bonding over their recent breakups, eating at a taco stand for the film’s best cameo, encountering both of their exes, and engaging in more hijinks. The love connection hits a few snags, eventually breaking when it becomes clear that one of them lied to the other about something significant, setting up the finish where, of course, they get together for real.

The actual plot of Rye Lane follows the typical story arc of the meet-cute or any rom-com, naturally limiting its upside. For a formula movie to avoid being just formulaic, the characters have to be credible and the actors in the two lead roles have to excel. Jonsson and Oparah are both superb and have clear chemistry, with Oparah especially strong playing the harder-edged and slightly more complex character, as Yas has the longer back story and her character starts with the blank canvas. The script, by first-time film writers Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia, keeps the two characters believable mostly by avoiding unnecessary details – they’re not idealized, they’re not living high on the hog, they don’t have ridiculous lives or impossibly perfect traits. If anything, they’re both appropriately screwed up given what’s come before.

And on top of that, Rye Lane is very, very funny. It’s a screwball comedy wrapped up in a date movie, calling back to classic comedies of the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, throwing its two protagonists into a series of misadventures, some of which push the edges of credibility but all of which lead to hilarious results. The visit to Yas’s ex’s mums’ house, where the two women are having a cookout, is especially ridiculous and had me cringing in a good way from start to finish. The connecting thread is that one of them has a bad idea, and the other goes along with it (or is roped into it unwittingly), and then hijinks ensue. It’s hard to pull this off without turning the movie into a joke or just ending up with a bunch of unfunny situations. The script pushes the envelope without breaking it, and the two actors are so credible in their characters that the film never once goes off the rails.

A superb feature debut by director Raine Allen-Miller, Rye Lane really does the meet-cute as well as any recent movie I can remember. It’s a wonderful ride, even though you know the shape of the story arc, and where it ends is exactly right for its story and its characters. And in a year where best-of lists are dominated by some heavy dramas, Rye Lane is the perfect palate cleanser before your next three-hour watch.

Stick to baseball, 1/6/24.

I took a few weeks off from these posts around the holidays, but I did write one piece for subscribers to The Athletic over the break, looking at the Chris Sale trade and Lucas Giolito signing.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the games Daybreak, a cooperative game about fighting climate change; and Wandering Towers, the best new family game of last year. Both games were on my ranking of the ten best new board games of 2023.

My free email newsletter will return today (most likely). Several of you have pledged to support me if the newsletter were to go paid; I have no immediate plans to do so, but if that happens 1) I’ll give everyone a ton of notice and 2) I’ll move it off Substack.

And now, the links…

  • Writer Tom Scocca’s piece in New York about his sudden, unsolved medical mystery is the best thing you’ll read all week. It’s well-written, of course, and combines the deeply personal with an inherent attack on our broken health-care system.
  • The New Yorker looks at board games with serious themes, profiling Amabel Holland, a trans woman who co-owns the publisher Hollandspiele and designed the Iron Rails series of games.
  • Stuart Thompson of the New York Times looks at how anti-vaxx ghouls latched on to the death of a 24-year-old man, who showed no symptoms of myocarditis after his COVID-19 vaccination but whose parents think the vaccine gave him myocarditis anyway. George Watts, Jr., had an enlarged spleen – over six times the normal size for that organ – which is a sign of long-term heart failure, chronic inflammation in his brain, and signs of late-stage pneumonia in his lungs.
  • Why do pundits like Jonathan Chait and Nate Silver say outrageous things? Because it’s effective, at least when you consider that attention is their goal.
  • Overtime pay for NYPD officers working the city’s subway stations went from $4 million to $155 million between 2022 and 2023, reducing “major crimes” by 2% but primarily leading to more arrests and fines for fare-jumping. That’s a lot of money to fight a handful of skipped $2.90 charges.
  • Amanda Todd was 15 when she killed herself in 2012 after three years of cyberstalking by a Dutch man who blackmailed her with threats to send nude images of her to her friends and family. He was sentenced to 13 years by a Canadian court, but a Dutch court cut the sentence in half to match that country’s legal standards.

Match of the Century.

The World Chess Championship between Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky, the defending champion at the time, and American Bobby Fischer in 1972 was dubbed the “match of the century,” with Fischer winning after 21 games over 50 days to become the first American-born world champion in the honor’s history. Now you can relive this matchup – sort of – in the two-player board game Match of the Century, published in the U.S. by Capstone. It’s played with two decks of cards over a series of games to determine the champion. It’s a clever, tightly designed game, but unfortunately it’s very dry, and relies on a mechanic that both my opponent and I found very confusing. (My opponent was my father, who holds two master’s degrees, spent forty-plus years as an electrical engineer, and is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.)

Each player has a small deck of cards that have two values, one for when the player is white and the other for when the player is black. Your hand size can vary from 5 to 7, and you also start each game by taking one to three pawns from the general supply. The board has four spaces for cards on each side, with a number from 1 to 4 in the middle row. The white player starts each game by playing one card to any of the four spaces on their side, and the black player must respond with a card. The cards’ values are compared – the white player’s card value for white against the black player’s card value for black – with each side adding up to two pawns to boost their strength. The winner gains those 1 to 4 points shown in between the cards, while the loser gets to execute the action or power on their card. A game ends when all spaces are filled, or when one player has gained enough points that the other can’t catch up. The winning player gains one match point; in case of a draw, each player gains one. The first player to six match points wins.

While the game isn’t from the same designer as the amazing two-player game Watergate, it has a similar look and feel, with asymmetrical decks and cards that can be played in several different ways. Watergate remains one of the most thematic games I’ve ever played – the effects of the cards tie so well to the characters and events from the actual scandal that I have always found it impossible not to get swept up in the story while playing, even though the actual third-rate burglary happened a year or so before I was born. Here, the theme doesn’t quite work as well, in part because chess is a game itself, and the game we’re playing here doesn’t look like chess at all – cards are labeled as knights, rooks, and so on, but it has no bearing on how those cards work. I thought far more of Battle Line or Air, Land, & Sea, two fantastic capture-the-flag games, than of chess, and I thought Match of the Century suffered a little in that comparison as well.

The confusion came about because you keep any unplayed cards from one game to the next (and unplayed pawns as well), so you have to flip your hand over when a new game begins, so your white cards become black or vice versa. I can’t tell you how often this screwed one of us up. Even if we both reoriented our cards, one of us would either play a card upside down (for the wrong color/action), or we’d play it correctly and then read the wrong side because of how they’re oriented on the board. I understand the intent, and I don’t see a better way to implement it, but in practice it was frustrating and detracted from the fun of the game.

The general reaction to this game has been very positive, and I think I’m in the minority here. My dad and I both enjoy games and puzzles, but we actually called this one after seven games (he won, 4 to 3, with a pretty masterful parry to my last move on the fourth ‘flag’ of the last game) because it was dragging and neither of us was having enough fun to justify playing it to the end. I’d much rather play Watergate, or even Riftforce, another capture-the-flag game, both of which are published in the U.S. by Capstone.