→ November 28, 2023
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The Wolves.

The Wolves came out at the tail end (pun intended) of 2022, and I didn’t get to play it until after I’d filed my best-of-the-year list, but I have to say that’s a whiff on my part. This game is really good, and one of the better pure area control games I’ve tried in a while. It scratches the RISK itch, with very simple rules and surprisingly fast play times.

In the Wolves, players will control a small pack of wolves on a variable board with five terrain types, and compete to grow their pack by converting lone wolves and other players’ wolves, building dens and lairs, and hunting other animals. Each region scores once during the game, with points going to the player with the most tokens on the region.

The big twist in the Wolves is how you choose your actions. Each player has a set of six two-sided terrain tiles, and must flip one to three tiles of a matching type to take an action. Moving wolves requires flipping one tile; building or upgrading dens and “howling” to convert lone wolves requires two; “dominating” an opponent’s wolf or den requires three. Each player has one terrain tile that shows the same type on both sides, which is unique to them and is the only terrain they can show on three tiles at once. You get two actions per turn, so you need to consider the second action when choosing your first, because your options are limited to what’s showing on your tiles. There are bonus tokens available to make some of this easier, however – bonus action tokens and wild terrain tokens – which you can gain by completing certain actions enough times to gain a token.

Each player starts the game with two alpha wolves and four regular (beta?) wolves. Alpha wolves can build dens and upgrade them to lairs; they can also howl. Regular wolves are just sort of around. You can dominate another player’s wolf, but not an alpha wolf; the only way to protect a regular wolf is to put it together with another wolf of either type or on a space with a den/lair. At the beginning of the game, each board piece has a pair of “lone wolves” on it that are up for grabs – any player can “howl” to replace that lone wolf token with a wolf of their own.

The player boards start out with eight additional wolves, two of which are alphas; eight additional dens; and four lairs on them. When you howl, build, upgrade, or dominate, you take the appropriate piece from your board, and in many cases reveal points, a bonus token, or both. The more you take a specific action, the greater the benefits. Hunting is a little different, as it’s a passive action – if you get any three wolves into three spaces adjacent to an animal token, you take it and place it on your board, gaining a wild terrain token as a bonus.

Regions have crescent, half, or full moon tokens on them (or none at all), indicating when they’ll score and their point values, which are 4, 6, and 8 for the players with the most control, respectively. Every token is worth 1 for calculating control, except lairs, which are worth 3. The player in second place in any region gets half the points of the first-place player. The crescents score first, after which they have no area control value; the full moons score last, which triggers the end of the game.

The Wolves really sings with three to five players. There’s a ton of player interaction, a great amount of strategizing involved in manipulating your terrain tiles, and no luck or randomness aside from the initial setup. I especially love the aspect of getting the points from a crescent or half moon region, then trying to move your wolves en masse somewhere else where they’ll matter for scoring. It’s a slow rush, as the saying goes. The designers, one of whom previously designed Merchants of Magick and Chomp, didn’t load the game up with too many pieces or too many actions; the rulebook isn’t that short, but you could probably write all the rules up on one regular-sized piece of paper. It’s just complex enough to be interesting, but it’s a quick teach, and play times are about an hour. There is a two-player variant, with neutral wolves taking up space on the board, and different scoring for hunts, but I don’t love it. I think the game needs the additional players to create more interaction and chaos, while the neutral player is just sitting there, not taking actions like an automa player might. If you can regularly get 3 or more players, though, and you like this sort of push-pull map game, I highly recommend it.

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→ November 25, 2023
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Wish.

Wish, the newest film from Disney Animation, would have been much better if they’d just made a fresh video for the Nine Inch Nails song and called it a day. Instead, it’s a self-congratulatory movie with an adequate story, forgettable music, and almost no humor for anyone over four years old.

The movie takes place on the island of Rosas in the Mediterranean, which seems to draw on Spanish, Italian, and Maltese cultures and architecture, where the population is ruled by a benevolent king named Magnifico. Before creating the kingdom, Magnifico lost his family to an invading tribe and chose to become sorcerer, and in so doing learned how to grant wishes. When Rosas residents turn 18 or emigrants become citizens, they give their greatest wish to Magnifico, who stores it in his castle for safe keeping. Once a month, he grants one wish of his choosing. Enter Asha, whose grandfather Sabino turns 100 the day of one of these wish ceremonies, and who wishes to become Magnifico’s apprentice, only to discover that he’s not the benevolent king he appears to be. Since it’s a Disney movie and you know things will work out in the end, it’s not much of a spoiler to say that Asha will lead the people of Rosas as they work to overthrow the tyrant Magnifico and free their wishes.

The story here has potential, and the ending is one of the better ones among Disney movies, at least incorporating the film’s themes of hope and community into a resolution that’s internally consistent. Getting there, though, is a real drag. Asha (Ariana Dubose) is a mostly one-note character, driven by good intentions without much depth or complexity, and she experiences zero growth or development over the course of the film. She wins by being good, and by being smart, but that’s it. She doesn’t have an arc so much as she has a straight line. Magnifico (Chris Pine) at least changes as the film progresses, and while it’s for the worse, hey, at least it’s an ethos. There’s something to be said for a villain who starts out as just a little bit evil and becomes all the way evil by the film’s conclusion, and who gets there for an entirely mundane reason – he’s corrupted by power. He wants something Asha has, but his story is ultimately one of absolute power corrupting absolutely. There’s more depth to his character than there is to Asha’s, and that’s one of the film’s main flaws.

It has more flaws, though, believe you me. It’s just not funny at all – there are a few decent sight gags, maybe, but the Comic Relief Goat (Alan Tudyk) is just painful because you know he’s supposed to get laughs and he doesn’t. I can’t fathom how this script got through the number of people at Disney who are involved in making movies without anyone pointing out just how devoid of humor it is. The music is also wildly disappointing; I would argue there are two decent songs of the seven originals in the movie, the rousing “Knowing What I Know Now” (which feels like a big Broadway number that might take you into intermission) and “This Wish,” which has some clumsy lyrics but solid music, and plays a key role in the story. Magnifico’s main song is dreadful, and “I’m a Star” feels like a deleted track from a Kidz Bop record.

Then there’s the fact that this movie is a 90-minute celebration of the studio that released it. Rosa’s seven friends map one-to-one to the seven dwarfs, without much embellishment or expansion. (Grumpy/Gabo is probably the best of the bunch.) There are direct and indirect allusions to past Disney films, many of which are just too obvious to be enjoyable – part of the fun of references and Easter eggs is finding them, but most of the allusions here might as well have pop-up bubbles pointing them out. Even the attempt to nod back to the classic Disney films with CG animation that evokes the hand-drawn style fails, because the characters look extremely flat and cartoonish.

Wish seems on pace to be the studio’s third financial flop in its last four, after last year’s Strange World (which I haven’t bothered with) and Raya and the Last Dragon (which opened in March 2021, so the pandemic hurt its box office). I don’t think commercial performance has any bearing on a film’s worth, but Wish seems to serve no purpose beyond making money. It’s a movie about how great Disney movies are, except it’s not great and it isn’t doing well at the box office. With a slew of great animated films this year, including the second Spider-verse movie, Nimona, and the upcoming The Boy and the Heron, Wish probably won’t even land an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature, which would mark the first time in sixteen years that two straight Disney Animation films missed the cut. Perhaps that’s as indicative as anything of how far the studio seems to have fallen.

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→ November 22, 2023
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Forbidden Jungle.

Forbidden Jungle is the fourth cooperative game in its series from the master of the genre, Matt Leacock, who also designed Pandemic and the just-delivered Daybreak, and his first Forbidden game since 2018’s Forbidden Sky, which I thought was the worst of his games to date. It looked great on the table, but the play was a little fiddly with extra rules that didn’t make the game more fun; the fact that to win the game you complete a circuit that made rocket noises was its best selling point.

Forbidden Jungle is an improvement, and I think it’s the hardest game of the series, which I would have previously awarded to Forbidden Desert (even over the original Pandemic). It’s pretty thematically tight, as the preceding game was, and introduces a new spatial awareness aspect that gives it something fresh compared to all three other Forbidden titles. (The first is Forbidden Island, which is a great intro to cooperative games, although if you have players under 7 I’d suggest his kids’ game Mole Rats in Space.)

In Forbidden Jungle, two to four players take on unique roles as explorers who’ve crash-landed on a rather nasty jungle (jungular?) planet and are trying to find and power a portal so they can escape. Of course, there are baddies, giant Cthulhu-ish creates that sting, and that lay eggs to make more of themselves as the game progresses. When play begins, all player tokens are at one end of the board, while all of the aliens, hatchlings, and eggs are at the other end, with all tiles but the start one face-down. On your turn, you get four actions, as in his prior games, and may move your meeple to another tile, explore a tile by flipping it, remove one bad anything token from your tile, use the power of certain tiles, or move a tile into an open space. The threat deck will make the bad things move around, lay more eggs, cast webs that prevent movement between tiles, and even destroy tiles starting from the lowest numbered tile that’s been explored.

The basic gist here is the same as his other games – you must balance your quest for the solution against the need to contain whatever is trying to kill you. The latter part here is straightforward, and if you run out of pieces for any of the four bad things (egg, hatchling, adult, web), you lose. You can also lose if your player gets bitten too many times. The former part is what’s been very difficult in our plays: You have to find the four working crystal tiles (some are defunct), then arrange them in the four orthogonal spaces around any of the portal tiles. When the game begins, you only know where all of the crystal tiles are, regardless of their status, and none of the portals. There’s also just a single open space in the tile grid, so you can only move one of the four tiles adjacent to that space. As tiles get destroyed – and you can destroy some tiles too, which also eradicates anything on those tiles – you do have more space to move around, but that only makes the challenge marginally easier.

Forbidden Jungle might have more luck/randomness in the game play, as it’s really easy for the cards to fall the wrong way and take you out early in the game. I’d also add that deciphering the cards required a little more rulebook reading than in any of his previous games. The flip side to that is that you will probably do a ton of talking at the table, regardless of player count, because the optimal move is generally not that obvious. In Forbidden Island, one person could easily take over and direct all of the action, and Pandemic has some of that as well. I’m not sure that’s as easy or desirable in Forbidden Jungle because the possibilities, with tiles disappearing and the enemy moving in unpredictable ways, are more numerous. That’s not better or worse than the preceding Forbidden Games, just a different experience to bring something new to your table. I haven’t cracked into Daybreak yet, and I’d still rank this below Pandemic and Forbidden Desert, but it’s ahead of Forbidden Sky and I recommend it if you liked any of his other games and want something similar with more twists.

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→ November 21, 2023
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The Killer.

David Fincher’s Mank was a passion project for the director, but despite its critical acclaim and awards, it wasn’t a particularly enjoyable film, or even that interesting. His follow-up is both of those things, a neo-noir thrilled called The Killer that follows a hit man on his quest for revenge after a botched hit leads to an attack on his home and his girlfriend. (It’s exclusively on Netflix and in select theaters.)

Michael Fassbender plays the title character, whose real name we never learn; he uses a series of aliases that provide one of the movie’s best gags. The film opens with a long monologue from our antihero about the nature of his life and his work, all of it as he waits for his target to appear in Paris. The hit goes awry, and he’s forced to flee, but when he returns home he finds out that two people ransacked his (very nice) house in the Dominican Republic and violently assaulted his girlfriend. He works backwards from there to find out who the assailants were and who ordered the attack, and you can probably imagine what he does with each person he finds as he moves up the chain.

The Killer is all style and vibe, without trifles like character development or story arcs. You have to be on the wavelength of a genre film like this, just like you might with a mystery, and be comfortable with rooting for a ruthless, violent protagonist because he’s persuaded you that his cause is just. The opening scene is slow and meditative, but it’s probably three-fourths of the insight we’re going to get into the main character, because once he fires that single shot that sets the remainder of the story in motion, the plot never lets up.

One of the plot’s more curious aspects is that Fassbender’s character doesn’t kill everyone. He spares at least two people he encounters who he might have killed, one of whom wasn’t involved in the crime but could potentially identify him. He also doesn’t kill the dog, which is an interesting contrast to some of the people he does kill in what seems like … overkill is a poor word choice, I admit, but there’s one in particular that just didn’t seem necessary. Fassbender provides a voice-over through much of the film that makes us privy to his inner monologue, and thus to his personal ethos, and explains some of these choices, but there’s still some mystery left over to give you something to ponder after the film ends.

Fassbender, who had just one film credit between 2017 and this film, is superb in this role, entirely credible and chilling as someone with little to no moral compass and that ideal level of confidence that allows him to act like he belongs in every setting. The screenplay, by Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, gives that character nearly all of the air time, threading the needle between exploring the character and keeping him at arm’s length. Most of the other supporting performances are solid but minor, other than Tilda Swinton, who plays another contract killer, where I can’t decide if the role is ridiculous, or if she’s just playing it that way, or if I’m just reacting like this because she’s Tilda Swinton and I expect this from her.

Only one of the many confrontations the Killer has with his various targets turns into a fight scene – the rest involve a lot of talking, and then a gun happens – and it might be a tremendous one. I have no idea, because that scene is so unbelievably dark that I could barely tell anything that was happening, including whether Fassbender was hitting or getting hit. (Both, obviously, but I mean more specifically.) It’s part of a well-documented trend in movies and TV towards making everything too dark to see, but in this case it may have ruined one of the film’s best scenes. I can’t say for sure.

I’ve commented before that I can tolerate violence in film if it furthers the plot, but not suffering as entertainment, which is generally the idea in “torture porn” and slasher films. There is some extreme violence in The Killer and a couple of the kills are stomach-churning, so while I won’t defend its use of violence, I will say that the camera isn’t playing it for entertainment or laughs. Fassbender’s character kills in service of the plot, and it’s up to us to decide if we’re comfortable with some of them.

This isn’t as serious a work as some Fincher’s other films, but it’s a detour into a genre I particularly like (neo-noir, not murder and mayhem), and the lead performance really anchors the film. There’s enough moral ambiguity that it’s not strictly a revenge thriller, but it offers plenty of revenge and plenty of thrills, along with the slightly inscrutable antihero that neo-noir demands.

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→ November 20, 2023
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Tokaido Duo.

I love the 2012 game Tokaido, from 7 Wonders designer Antoine Bauza, both for its gameplay and its art by the French illustrator known as Naïade, which echoes the Edo period of Japanese culture in which the game is set. (More on that in a moment.) It plays two to five players but is definitely better with more, and worst with two, because the game board sends players on a walk along the Tokaido Road, one of the Five Routes of that time period in Japan, and if you’re on a space, I can’t go there – I have to pass you. More players thus means more spaces each player has to skip, and harder choices of where to land. Tokaido even has a sequel, Namiji, which borrows the core movement mechanic from the first game but changes all of the actions available.

Now we have a two-player version of the game, Tokaido Duo, that is almost completely different beyond the theme. Here the two players each have three different meeples – a pilgrim, a merchant, and an artist – who move in different ways around the smaller board, with only the pilgrim’s movement restricted by direction. The scoring is also greatly simplified from the original, and changes what you might be trying to collect or otherwise do. It’s excellent, but it’s pretty different, at least as different as 7 Wonders Duel is from 7 Wonders, if not more so.

The Tokaido Duo board has a track around the outer edge of the island for the pilgrims, tracks connecting four mountain towns in the center to eight coastal towns around the perimeter for the merchants, and sectors formed by the outer pilgrim track and interior pilgrim tracks. The artists can move from sector to sector, with each one showing one of four types of paintings that can be ‘gifted’ there. On each turn, the first player rolls the three dice – one per meeple type – and chooses one, after which the other player chooses one, and the first player gets the last one. The dice show movement values from 1-3 or 1-4, and when a player chooses a die they must use the entire movement value.

The merchants collect goods at the mountain towns and sell them at the coastal towns. You grab 2-4 from the bag of wares when you go to a mountain town, and each coastal town has a token showing one of the four goods and a sale price. You can only hold five wares at a time, so you have to plan out your moves for maximum efficiency, but in a coastal town you can sell all of your goods of that type at once. You get points based on how many 10-coin gold bars you gain in the game. The artist paints paintings and gifts them to the gods; when your artist moves to a new sector, you flip over a number of painting tokens from your board equal to the number of other meeples (yours and your opponent’s) in/around that sector. You can only gift one at a time, however. Your points here are based on how many painting tiles you flipped and gifted, increasing in value as you go.

The pilgrim track has at least five different types of spaces, but I’ll just focus on the two that score. Your pilgrim board has three tracks, temple and garden. You move up a track when your pilgrim lands on a matching space. At game end, your points from the pilgrim equal the product of your places on the two tracks. The pilgrim is also blocked from stopping at any space occupied by the other pilgrim or either merchant, which does recall the original game.

When either player reaches the end of one pilgrim track, gains their sixth gold bar, or gifts their final painting, the game ends. Each player adds up their scores from the three boards. It takes maybe 30 minutes, probably less with more experience.

I haven’t quite figured out if it’s better to push hard to finish the game with one of the three types, which also implies a high score from that one board, or strive for balance; the original Tokaido did a great job of forcing you to find a middle ground between the two, with some specialization required to win … but not too much. I think it’s better here to finish a little sooner than I like to, but I also just like playing the game and doing things even if it’s not great strategy.

It’s a very satisfying game, because almost every turn gets you something, and you’re always left wishing you could just do one more thing before your next turn. There isn’t much direct player interaction here, just some tokens that can get passed back and forth with no real take-that mechanic, with public scores that at least make it easy to see if you’re in the lead. This is, however, a huge example of cultural appropriation in gaming. Neither Bauza nor Naïade is even a little bit Japanese, and they’ve dropped this game into perhaps the most significant period in Japanese history, the time when Japan was largely united under a stable government and experienced economic and cultural growth for over 250 years. If you know much about Japanese culture prior to the last half of the 20th century, you know about the Edo period, its shoguns and its art (The Great Wave off Kanagawa) and theater (kabuki) and more. I personally love the artwork here, and if it’s disrespectful to its theme, I am unaware of it. I’m just increasingly uncomfortable with how easily designers grab themes from well beyond their cultures without at least acknowledging it, or better still incorporating ideas or feedback from people from those cultures.

That won’t bother most folks; if anything, I think the majority of players will love the look of the game. The illustrations are fun and distinctive, while there’s a lot of white space to keep everything easy to see and understand. We’ve had a slew of new two-player games this year, and Tokaido Duo is one of the better ones.

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→ November 18, 2023
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Stick to baseball, 11/18/23.

I offered my opinions of the Aaron Bummer and Cal Quantrill trades for subscribers to the Athletic. That Jake Bauers trade really didn’t move the needle, but I’ll probably include a thought or two on the Vidal Bruján trade when we get another one so I can include it in a longer column.

On my podcast this week, I spoke with film critic Matt Singer about his new book Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I appeared on Seattle’s 710 AM to discuss the Mariners’ possible offseason moves and the challenge of competing in the AL West in 2024.

My free email newsletter has returned, as I sent out a fresh edition last night, my second one this month.

And now, the links…

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→ November 17, 2023
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Junk Drawer.

Junk Drawer is another entry in the world of polyomino (think Tetris) tile-laying games, this one with a relatable theme – you’re trying to organize your junk drawer, which has 21 uniquely-shaped items in it, across four sections, each of which has a different requirement for scoring. The scoring changes each game and the order in which you place those items is random, so the challenge is new each time. I thought the way the game ended was completely backwards, however, and a lot of the scoring cards are needlessly arcane.

The concept here is pretty simple: Each player has those 21 tiles, each with its own shape and size, and each depicting a different item you might find in a junk drawer. (Guilty as charged.) Each player also has a board of four 5×5 sectors, and at the start of the game, the players draw scoring cards for each sector – so every player’s top left sector will score in the same way as every other’s, but their top right sectors will have their own scoring rubric, and so on. To play one round, the players draw the top four cards from the shuffled deck of 21, and then flip those four over one at a time. As you might have guessed, each card shows one of those items. Each player must place that tile somewhere on their board. The next three cards are flipped, and players must place those as well, but can’t place any item in a sector they’ve already used in this round, meaning that for the fourth item of a round, the players have only one choice.

That’s the whole game, and it is very simple to learn and quick to play, while suitable for kids under 10 as well (my 7-year-old had no problem grasping it). The game ends when one player can’t place a tile, which is fine – Planet Unknown, another tile-laying game, ends the same way – but here there is no penalty or drawback for being the first player to bust. It ends up rewarding players who aren’t very efficient at laying their tiles, and it’s counterintuitive to play that way, which is where I think younger and less experienced players will be at a disadvantage. I’ve seen comments from the designer that this is intentional and means that the optimal strategy is to try to “go out” when you think you have a high enough score. I understand this, but it feels very wrong to me.

The scoring cards come in easy, medium, and hard levels. The easy ones are straightforward – one point for every space you’ve covered in a sector, one point for every space you haven’t covered, three points if each if you cover the center space and each corner, and so on. They get more convoluted, and ridiculous, as they increase in difficulty, such as scoring for every row and column with exactly two spaces filled. Again, I understand the design here, but to me those sorts of scoring rules turn the game into work rather than play, and it feels like the designers were trying to make more of the game than is actually there.

Anyone can house-rule a game, and you can do that with Junk Drawer to play it as a light family title. The rules even suggest a variant where players continue playing until each can no longer legally place a tile, which I think is at least fairer than the standard rules. I’d probably stick to the easy and medium cards, and be judicious about which ones I use depending on who’s playing. I have to admit that Junk Drawer just didn’t do it for me, though – there are too many better games in this genre, like Patchwork, Isle of Cats, or New York Zoo.

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→ November 13, 2023
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Asteroid City.

I’m not a huge Wes Anderson fan, which I think is a key disclaimer if you’re going to talk about any of his films. I loved both his animated features and felt pretty close to that about Grand Budapest Hotel, but Bottle Rocket annoyed me throughout, and I turned off Rushmore after 20 minutes because I wanted to punch the television. He’s got a style, and clearly actors will go well out of their way to work with him, but you have to get on his wavelength and stay there for the length of a film, which doesn’t always work for me given his stilted dialogue and idiosyncratic ways of framing shots.

Asteroid City might have his most impressive cast ever, with at least three Oscar winners and twice that many more nominees, almost to the point where the value of a star cameo is diminished because you stop being tickled by the time Hong Chau (nominated last year for The Whale) shows up for five minutes. At the same time, the film requires so much of its actors because most of them get relatively little time on screen – and everyone talks so quickly, par for the Anderson course – and because, unfortunately, the story here kind of stinks. (It’s streaming on Peacock or available to rent on Amazon.)

The conceit behind Asteroid City is that we are watching a televised play within the movie, although the play itself shows up on our screens as a movie (rather than taking place on a stage, where we get some interstitial moments instead). The playwright (Ed Norton) and the host of the television series (Bryan Cranston) introduce the setting and, very briefly, some of the main characters, after which we are thrust into Asteroid City, population 78, a desert town in the American Southwest whose only claim to anything is that a very small meteorite hit the town and left a “crater” maybe slightly larger than a divot left by John Daly. In this town, there’s a convention for the Junior Stargazers science competition, and we meet several families, most of whom arrive with one parent and anywhere from one to four children in tow. The convention is hosted by Dr. Hickenlooper (a surprisingly normal Tilda Swinton) and General Griff Gibson (Jeffrey Wright), and after they give out the awards for the best projects, there’s a viewing using pinhole cameras, during which an alien shows up and takes the meteorite. Hilarity ensues. There’s also a group of grade schoolers led by teacher June (Maya Hawke), a weird country band led by Montana (Rupert Friend), and the hotel proprietor and the only resident of Asteroid City we meet (Steve Carell). Outside of the play, we get black-and-white shots of the playwright, the play’s director (Adrien Brody, so underutilized here), an acting teacher (Willem Dafoe), and an actress whose part in the play was cut (Margot Robbie).

Almost all of those folks do the best they can in very limited roles, with Wright and Hawke the real standouts, but the core of the movie is the relationship that forms between Augie (Jason Schwartzman) and the actress Midge (Scarlett Johanssen, made up to look a lot like Annette Bening), and the one that develops between Augie’s son (Jake Ryan) and Midge’s daughter (Grace Edwards). Schwartzman is one of Anderson’s most frequent partners in crime, but he has dialed it way back here in the most likeable performance I’ve ever seen him give, even though Augie himself isn’t all that likeable – it’s Schwartzman giving depth to a father who’s, well, out of his depth on multiple levels. He’s also able to provide a strong foil for Johanssen’s performance as a troubled film star, one that could have overwhelmed a lesser actor in the opposite role. Schwartzman also appears as the actor playing Augie in the play in several black-and-white segments showing us the actor and Norton’s playwright or the actor discussing the play with Robbie’s character.

The script requires a lot of tolerance for Anderson’s stilted dialogue, and he pushes that too far at many points, including most of the interactions among the various prize-winning teens – other than the memory game they play while they’re all quarantined in Asteroid City by the military, which is one of the best scenes in the movie – and some of the dialogue from the side characters. It’s also just overstuffed with ideas, so that quirky bits like Hawke’s nervous, I-didn’t-sign-up-for-this teacher trying to teach astronomy to a bunch of elementary schoolers who just saw an alien, wash over the audience too quickly. It is coherent, but it is not cohesive, and by the time the last tourists pack up and leave Asteroid City, the lack of a real through-line to connect most, let alone all, of the characters overshadowed the many funny or clever bits scattered through the film.

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→ November 11, 2023
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Stick to baseball, 11/11/23.

Nothing new from me at the Athletic as I wait for some real news, a trade or signing, that I can break down. I’ve also begun the offseason prospect work, although those rankings won’t run until late January or early February.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the wonderful game Fit to Print, which has a real-time aspect like Galaxy Trucker where players grab various tiles, then some tile-laying like Patchwork, as players try to fill out their woodland newspapers – with some hilarious text and art on the tiles – with articles, photos, and ads, playing over three rounds to represent three days of issues.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road and The Lost Girls, primarily about the first book, which deals with a family where six of their twelve children developed schizophrenia, although we touched on his update to the latter since the case may have been solved. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I also appeared on NPR’s Marketplace, talking about Moneyball and the data revolution in baseball in the last twenty years. You can catch it on iTunes on the Marketplace Tech podcast.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last Saturday and will do another this weekend as I try to make this a weekly thing, although I might shift to Monday since that tends to be the slowest day of my week (in more ways than one).

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The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.

Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is one of the biggest successes in self-publishing in the last decade or so, as she ran a successful Kickstarter to give her the time to finish the book, which sold well enough that Hachette’s Hodder & Stoughton picked it up and published their edition a year later. The book now has three sequels, winning the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2019, and all of the sequels earned nominations for the Hugo for Best Novel. This book, at least, has “first effort” all over it, though, and it’s kind of clunky and overdone in so many parts, especially the world-building, which detracted somewhat from a fun if very light story about a group of misfits becoming an ersatz family aboard a spaceship.

The Wayfarer is that ship, and as the series opens, Rosemary is heading for the Wayfarer to serve as its clerk, handling all of the paperwork the ship needs to move through space, across civilizations and, often, punching holes in the fabric of space to create shortcuts across great distances. These artificial wormholes are the Wayfarer’s main source of income, and they do it with a truly motley crew of specialists drawn from multiple species. Each crew member gets their own moment in the spotlight here, so rather than a single plot we get a series of episodes that allow the focus to move across everyone on the ship, from Corbin, the stubborn, meticulous biologist who grows the algae that helps power the ship; to Dr. Chef, the mechanic and, yes, chef, from a dying species who also serves as the ship’s counselor; to Jenks, the engineer who is – slight spoiler – in love with the ship’s AI. Really. (Needless to say I found that one a bit hard to take.)

I think the real problem I had with Long Way was the extensive exposition as Chambers builds out her universe, with giant civilizations of many species, endless rules, fictional technologies, and at least seven characters who need some sort of back stories. It’s a trap many first-time writers seem unable to avoid, and I at least attribute it to the benign desire to get all of these thoughts – the whole universe they’ve built up in their heads – out on to the page, as well as to prevent too much confusion on the part of readers. It also drives me up the wall, because 1) we can learn about this stuff as the story goes along and 2) if I really, really need to understand the technical details of how interstellar travel works in your books, or get a full description of every species’ cultural norms, that’s a bigger problem than just giving us a few pages of extrapolation can solve. Since Long Way visits a lot of planets and has such a diverse crew, we get a lot of that cultural stuff, and the book ends up spinning its wheels for pages and pages while Chambers describes trivial points about handshakes or mating customs.

The book does tackle some larger social themes, although it does so in a cursory way because there are so many smaller stories in the novel’s 438 pages. There’s a bit about cloning, a part about LGBT relationships, some stuff about war and the ethics of supplying one side (pretty timely right about now) when you’re not involved, and more, but none of tit gets more than superficial treatment.

The Long Way has to stand on the strength of its characters, since the plot is modest and the prose more akin to YA fiction, and there Chambers has some more success, although it’s a mixed bag. Rosemary is fine as the closest character we have to a protagonist, as her wide-eyed views and relative inexperience outside of her home planet make her a sensible lens for the reader to view most of the action. Some of the non-human characters are a little overdrawn, notably the navigator, Ohan, so again we get bogged down in details rather than seeing the characters develop. The more I write, the more I realize I just didn’t care for this book at all, other than that it was light and easy to read. It’s not The Calculating Stars bad, but I hope the remainder of the series spends more time developing the characters than explaining its fictional universe.

Next up: I’m about 2/3 done with Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go.

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