→ February 22, 2011
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Scorecasting.

I apologize for the long delay between posts; we moved into our house last week and are finally settled, although far from unpacked.

I tweeted earlier today that I’ll be joining ESPN’s Baseball Today podcast as a co-host three days a week starting in mid-March. And, if you missed it, my preseason ranking of the top 50 prospects for this year’s Rule 4 draft went up last Thursday.

—

Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim’s Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won aims to be the Freakonomics of sports, a marketing angle made quite clear from the cover quote from Steven Levitt that calls Scorecasting the best book of its kind since Freakonomics, which is funny, since Levitt co-wrote that book. (And one wonders if the authors share an agent or an editor or something else.) My cynicism over the quotes aside, Scorecasting is a fun read, one that does a better job of challenging conventional wisdom than providing hard answers to hard questions, the sort of book that could make an old-school sports fan rethink some of his positions without requiring a background in behavioral economics. If you’re here, however, the odds are good that your mind is already open, in which case Scorecasting is more of an enjoyable lark but might leave you looking for more serious analysis than what the authors offer in a book aimed at the mainstream audience.

Wertheim and Moskowitz attack a number of questions over the course of the book, with the only unifying theme that these are questions that can be examined (if not actually answered) through some very rudimentary statistical analysis. For example, they examine the potential causes of home-field advantage, which is fairly persistent within sports but doesn’t seem to tie to attendance; whether icing the kicker is an effective strategy (I won’t reveal their answer, but have always found the practice unsportsmanlike); or whether momentum exists. The template for each essay – some just two or three pages, others thirty or forty – is standard: Explain the question and the conventional wisdom on the subject, discuss how they operationalized the variables, then present the results in text and graphical format, usually just showing some evidence telling us whether there’s a correlation between the independent and dependent variable. For example, in the momentum chapter (“The Myth of the Hot Hand”), they look at basketball, defining what a “hot” period of time constitutes (one, two, five, and ten-minute samples), then look at point differentials over the one, two, five, and ten minute periods immediately following a “hot” period. It’s not rigorous, but it will likely sway some of your opinions even if it doesn’t convince you.

The best essays in the book combine the Freakonomics-style analysis with interesting stories, like the chapter on the history of trades in the NFL draft (“Off the Chart”), which discusses the famous Mike McCoy chart on how to value draft picks in trade talks. The authors describe the chart’s genesis, early successes, propagation, and loss of usefulness once everyone had it, along with some potential explanations for the psychology behind incorrect valuations of draft picks. (Yet another reason why I’d like to see MLB allow teams to trade draft picks: It’s another way for smart front offices to create value.) Another essay (“Rounding First”) asks why we see more round numbers in seasonal statistics than you’d expect if the results were normally distributed, pointing to psychological and perhaps financial incentives that drive behavior in situations where the leverage (to the player, not the team) is increased.

Scorecasting is a text for the mass market, which means fewer numbers and more broad brush strokes in the book. I’m not the first to raise this objection, but the way the authors treat results that are merely indicative as if they’re conclusive is offputting if you realize what they’re doing and misleading if you don’t. For one thing, their analytical methods, while valid, are on the superficial side. For another, they often confuse correlation with causation, and even though I often agreed with their arguments on the causes of the effects they discovered, they meld those opinions with statements of statistical facts in a way that just isn’t warranted. It’s a marketing issue – the book wouldn’t sell if they just presented data paired with a lot of “draw your own conclusions” quotes – but it takes what could have been a serious work and makes it a popular one.

And some of their conclusions just aren’t supported by the analysis, at least when it comes to baseball. They offer throwaway comments on how a salary cap would increase parity in baseball without an ounce of evidence to justify the statements. They claim that PEDs improve baseball performance by showing that players who had been suspended for PED usage were more likely to be promoted to the next level, a lousy proxy for multiple reasons and one that makes their conclusion, “In addition to the science, the data support the claim that steroids work,” ignorant on both sides of its comma. I imagine that the authors glossed over similar controversies in other sports, enough that no matter your game of choice you’ll find something in the book to annoy you.

You should read Scorecasting, though, in spite of its shortcomings. Moneyball was equally flawed, perhaps more so, and yet it launched a quiet revolution not just within the industry but within the fan base, an inflection point that I believe saw a major increase in the number of students of the game who began pursuing and publishing their own analyses, with some even finding themselves entering the industry as a result. I could see Scorecasting as a similar spur to innovation in the analysis of sports, and in the way sports are covered. One thing that Scorecasting does confront, without ever explicitly saying so, is ignorance. If you say “X causes Y,” others will look for a way to verify it, so don’t make the statement without trying to verify it yourself.

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→ February 5, 2011
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Vikings & Ascension board games.

I purchased Vikings on a whim, since I had a Barnes & Noble gift card and wanted to add one board game to the pile of books I ordered through their site: Vikings was one of the only German-style games they offered that I didn’t already own. It turned out to be a great purchase and a new favorite for us, and a rare game that plays well with two players and with more than two.

Vikings’ concept is that each player represents a tribe of Vikings sailing west to settle new islands, but rather than a game of exploration it’s a game of placement and resource management. Players must construct islands using left, middle, and right island tiles; place boats worth points or coins; and gather and place six kinds of viking meeples, each serving a different purpose in the game. Some viking types earn you points, some prevent you from losing points, and one kind (boatmen) allow you to ferry meeples from your main island to your tiles.

The game comprises six rounds, and on each rounds, eleven random tiles are placed around the game board’s wheel on spaces numbered 0 through 10, each tile paired with a viking drawn at random from the supply. Ship tiles go to the highest numbered spaces, while island tiles start at 0. The vikings are also placed in a specific order – first fisherman (used to feed your people at game end), then goldsmiths, scouts (score points for goldsmiths and fishermen in the same column), nobles (two points apiece), and warriors. Goldsmiths are worth 3 gold coins at the end of every round. Warriors allow you to score points for ships placed directly above them, and an “unprotected” ship prevents you from scoring for some tiles in its column. Unprotected ships will also cost you points or gold at game end. Warriors are important, if you didn’t catch on.

The number of the space a tile/viking pair occupies represents its cost, but the 0-cost tile is unavailable unless its viking is the only one left of its color, or the player whose turn it is to choose has no coins remaining. When a player takes the 0-cost tile, the wheel turns until the 0 is next to the lowest remaining tile/viking combination, so tiles become cheaper as each round goes on. But players can always choose to spend big to acquire a choice tile or a needed viking (e.g., a warrior to protect a five-point ship), so there’s no guarantee the tile will still be there when the wheel turns.

I generally don’t like games with a lot of random elements, but Vikings’ randomness is much more controlled: All 72 island tiles are used, and with only a few types, you rarely have to wait long or spend too much for a tile type you might need. There are 78 meeples, so only a few are left out of any single game, and again you’re rarely left up a creek. It’s variation without huge swings in luck, and you can build a coherent strategy around it once you have a sense of how the game flows.

We’ve played Vikings with two players and with three (it plays up to four) and found no significant difference in game play. Your strategy shifts slightly with three players from two to consider where you’ll make a sacrifice; the competition for warriors, boatsmen, and fishermen becomes more intense, and you’ll probably have to accept a point loss somewhere. Minimizing those and/or maximizing point gains elsewhere is key.

It’s the wheel that sets Vikings apart in my mind; it’s an elegant compromise between the egalitarian but time-consuming auction method (think Power Grid) and the straight assignment method where players can be helped or hurt by fortunate tile draws. Since the start player rotates from round to round, every player will have his or her chance to get the tile or Viking s/he needs, given the willingness to pay for it.

Typical game time was under an hour for us once we got the hang of it, and the rules are well-written. There’s a more complex variation/expansion included that we haven’t tried yet, in part because we like the simplicity of the core game so much. I’m certainly puzzled to see it ranked outside the top 100 on Boardgamegeek; it’s worth checking out, especially if you’re a fan of not-too-complex strategy games as I am.

–

I received a review copy of a new deck-building game called Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer, which seems like a cross between Dominion and the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering, based on what I know of the latter game (I’ve never played it). Ascension takes the core Dominion mechanic – shuffle your deck, deal yourself five cards, acquire new cards, place them all in the discard pile, shuffle again when your deck runs out – and marries it to the fantasy elements of Magic, with one substantial twist: You can use your cards to defeat monster cards and earn “honor” points. You also earn points for certain cards in your deck, and when the game ends, the player with the most such points wins.

The mechanics do vary from Dominion’s in a few ways. The most significant is that you can only purchase cards or fight monsters currently in the center row of five cards, as opposed to Dominion, where all ten Kingdom cards in use in the game are available until their supplies run out. Ascension also adds three cards – a basic money card, a basic warrior card, and a weak monster – that you can purchase/fight when you can’t do anything with the five cards in the center, thus largely eliminating the chance of a turn where you can’t do anything at all.

The limited choice in cards to buy or monsters to fight means that the game has a much higher randomness element and less strategic planning than Dominion; it’s hard to build a cohesive deck when you’re at the mercy of the cards in the market when your turn arrives. But we also found that the game ended so quickly that there was barely time for strategic deck-building. (By that, I mean acquiring cards that work well together, so that when you draw two or more into your hand you can increase your buying or fighting power.) We tested Ascension with three players and I was the only player who managed to pull off this trick (once!) before the game ended.

Other concerns not affecting gameplay are a very badly written rulebook, spawning several threads on Boardgamegeek that address these questions, such as whether the Cultist is available throughout the game for players to defeat (it is); and some horrible artwork on cards that looks like what you might find in the social studies notebook of a teenaged boy obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons.

I’ve never been a huge fan of fantasy literature or a player of Magic or D&D and can see why this might appeal more to those audiences. However, my wife and I agreed that we preferred Dominion and I can’t see us reaching for Ascension over that game.

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→ January 31, 2011
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The Gun Seller.

I’m off duty this week, since we close on our house today, but hope to post here a few times. As it turns out, today’s my wife’s birthday, so I tried to convince her that the house was her birthday gift from me, but so far it’s not working.

–

There are plenty of reasons to be jealous of Hugh Laurie. He plays the title character in one of the best television shows I’ve ever seen, and playing it well. Before that he played one of the leading characters in the definitive adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories (the full series is now $25.75, almost 60% off, on amazon, less than half what I paid for it years ago). And he started with a classic sketch comedy series with the inimitable Stephen Fry, many clips of which can be found online, such as this man on the street bit about wine.

Judging by his one published novel, the madcap spy novel The Gun Seller, he’s a damn good writer, too.

The Gun Seller almost reads like Wodehouse doing John Le Carré, although there’s a more modern feel to the prose than you’ll find in Wodehouse’s cheerfully patrician writing. But the wry observations, absurd analogies, and quick shifts of focus are present, as in the title character’s statement (after he’s been shot under his arm) that “I ordered a tonic water for myself and a large vodka for the pain in my armpit.” The plot is over-the-top, borderline farcical, but holds together surprisingly well and has plenty of tension and narrative greed to keep you turning pages.

The narrator and main character is Thomas Lang, a mercenary with an aversion to doing actual violence, who is approached by a man with a request to kill someone, only to find himself (at the book’s open) nearly killed by the target’s bodyguard, and then by his daughter. That one inquiry opens the door to a giant covert operation involving a next-generation attack helicopter and a disgustingly underhanded scheme to sell them to governments around the world, a scheme in which Lang plays a central role.

The book has two parts, the first of which leans more toward humor, the last (the book’s final third) works on resolving the intricate plot Laurie has assembled. That first part includes plenty of dry English wit to savor, much of it laugh-out-loud funny, some more smirk-inducing:

To follow somebody, without them knowing that you’re doing it, is not the doddle they makei t seem in films. I’ve had some experience of professional following, and a lot more experience of professional going back to the office and saying ‘we lost him.’ Unless your quarry is deaf, tunnel-sighted and lame, you need at least a dozen people and fifteen thousand quids-worth of short-wave radio to make a decent go of it.

The action picks up substantially in the second half as Lang finds himself inserted into a terrorist sleeper cell with plans that unfortunately foreshadowed later events in Lima, Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam. There’s a bit less time for the humor of the first half, but Laurie manages to keep the tone light even when bodies are dropping.

When he got there, he sat down very slowly. Either because he was haemorrhoidal, or because there was a chance that I might do something dangerous. I smiled, to show him that he was haemorrhoidal.

Laurie also manages to strike just the right note of cynicism in the book, avoiding the out-and-out misanthropy that can infect any book that looks into the dark recesses of the human soul and finds a cash register there. There is a point, one that resonates more strongly today than it might have when the book was published in 1996, that seemingly “democratic” governments fall under the sway of money, particularly corporate money, and will do things that we would consider abominable if we knew they were up to them in the first place. Rather than beating you over the head with rhetoric, however, Laurie just incorporates it into the book and channels Lang’s anger into action rather than tedious monologues on the nature of republican government or the need for transparency or whatnot. Those would sink a book that, at heart, was written to be fun to read. And fun to read it is, a spy novel for people who like to laugh, or a comic novel for people who like a spot of bother in their books.

Next up: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

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→ January 28, 2011
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Breakfast at Tiffany’s & Fludd.

My list of sleeper prospects for all 30 teams went up this morning for Insiders.

—

Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a novella-length character study of the iconic Holly Golightly, the chameleonic protagonist whose ability to reinvent herself and manipulate people to her own benefit charms the milquetoast narrator.

Holly is a very young, independent-minded woman who takes a flat in a Manhattan brownstone where the unnamed narrator, dubbed “Fred” by Holly, also lives. She fascinates him through her force of will, her expectation that people will jump to meet her every whim (they often do), and through how men just fall hopelessly for her like dominoes in a line. (Fred’s affection for Holly always seems to be of the arm’s-length variety, and I thought the character, like Capote, was gay.) Her anchorless life hits a snag when a piece of her old life shows up out of the blue to try to drag her out of her high-society ways to a backwoods existence she never wanted in the first place.

Capote was a prose master, with Norman Mailer issuing the oft-repeated statement that he “would not have changed two words in” this story, but the line that caught my eye was because it reminded me of a television program:

…I noticed a taxi stop across the street to let out a girl who ran up the steps of the Forty-second Street Public Library. She was through the doors before I recognized her, which was pardonable, for Holly and libraries were not an easy association to make. I let curiosity guide me between the lions…

I’ve tried to find out of the makers of the children’s show Between the Lions took their name from the book, but have had no success. Naming a show about literacy after a phrase from an American literary giant seems fitting, though.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is usually sold along with three Capote short stories: “House of Flowers,” “A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory.” The first two are ordinary, the first about a prostitute in Haiti who finds an escape to what might be a better life, the latter about two unlikely friends at a southern prison camp (one of whom is named Tico Feo, which means “ugly Costa Rican.”) The third story is a marvel, a peer to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s canon of short stories, a sweet but wholly unsentimental tale about the friendship between a young boy and an cousin in her 60s, and how the two would make and sell fruitcakes every Christmas season. We often praise players who recognize their skill sets and their limitations by saying that they “don’t try to do too much.” In “A Christmas Story,” Capote didn’t try to do too much. He lets the story do it for him.

–

Hilary Mantel’s Fludd is a strange piece of fiction, a short novel about a curate assigned to a small, backwards English town where Catholicism is practiced by means of superstition rather than faith and the priest has lost his own belief and probably his marbles as well. The curate, however, isn’t what he at first seems to be, and as the novel goes along one of the nuns emerges as the real central character despite being little more than a stock extra for the first half of the book. That character, Philomena, turns out to be the only character with any depth of anyone who populates these pages – even Fludd, the possibly-supernatural being named after a long-dead alchemist and mystic, is barely revealed, with nothing on his motives or actual thoughts – and her decision between life in the convent (which was chosen for her by her deranged mother) and the fearful world outside of it is the only major event in the entire book. There’s an anti-Catholic undertone to the book, which may bother some readers, and a subplot around idolatry and statues that went right over my head.

—

Next up: Hugh Laurie – yes, that one, House, Wooster, Jools, and so on – wrote a comic novel in 1996 called The Gun Seller. I have incredibly high expectations for this one.

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→ January 26, 2011
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Alphabet Juice.

The 2011 organizational rankings are up on ESPN.com for Insiders. The two most upset fan bases are Cleveland, because I ranked them 17th; and the Yankees, because I didn’t rank the Red Sox 30th.

—

> special
“It’s good that they don’t make many players like Albert Pujols, because if there were more, he wouldn’t be so special, and Albert Pujols is very special.” – Murray Chass, The New York Times. See special.

Roy Blount, Jr., humorist, former sportswriter, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me… panelist, and word-lover, takes aim at etymology and bad writing alike in Alphabet Juice, a book organized like a dictionary and aiming both high and low with its targets. If you like words and get equal joy from a malapropism and an explanation of how livid (which means furious, with a connotation of red-faced) comes from the Latin word meaning “to be bluish,” this is a book for you.

In Alphabet Juice, Blount chooses words with interesting stories or for which he can offer a brief quote (like the one above) or quip or (regrettably) some light verse. The anecdote that constitutes the entry for “TV, on being on” runs from William Ginsburg to Saul Bellow to Designing Women to Kathleen Sullivan to Claude Monet, all inside of four pages. Blount sneaks in some memoir-ish material as well, such as an entry for “Wilt: A Tall Tale,” that starts out with musings on whether Wilt Chamberlain could really have slept with 20,000 women (Wilt: “Well, there was this one birthday party…”) but ends with Blount mediating between an angry Wilt and Blount’s drunken editor.

Some of the entries reveal Blount as a Lynne Truss-ian grammar stickler, a bent of which I approve:

> unique
I have to be firm on this: unique is not to be modified. Adding very or absolutely is like putting a propeller on a rabbit to make him hop better. It won’t work, and he won’t be a rabbit any more.

I’ve always been partial to the analogy that something can be “almost unique” in the way that you can be “almost pregnant.” There is a word for the idea expressed by “almost unique” – unusual. Use it. Please.

Blount’s love of words (aside from a love of language – these are two different afflictions) even brings this fun entry that should appeal to the anagrammists and Scrabblers in the audience:

> transposition game
Rearranging the letters in one word of an existing title or well-known phrase. Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception becomes The Odors of Perception. The Continental Army becomes the continental Mary. I’m told that Burt Bernstein, then a writer at The New Yorker, learned of this game and found himself to be good at it. He hastened to his brother Leonard, who had always been better at everything than Burt, but now, finally, maybe … Burt explained the game. Leonard looked up from whatever major thing he was doing and said: “Icy fingers up and down my penis.”

If there’s a flaw in Alphabet Juice, it’s that it’s a book to be perused rather than read. There’s no narrative, and the themes and jokes to which Blount returns again and again are scattered throughout the book. You could follow his suggestions to see other entries, but would risk never reading everything in the book, a risk I was unwilling to take. I could also have done without the meditations on each individual letter – Blount is supporting an argument he makes that the relation between a word (its sound, that is) and its meaning is not, as some scholars would have it, arbitrary. That’s an interesting debate, but not one Blount is going to solve in 300-word essays on each of the 26 letters of our alphabet.

At heart, though, Alphabet Juice is a vehicle for Blount’s ruminations not just on language but on culture and cultural literacy, on politics (he was apparently not a fan of the most recent President Bush), on music, on food, and so on. If you like his smart-folksy style, you’ll love the book.

P.S. Tender is the Thing.

Next up: Hilary Mantel’s Fludd, which I’m reading at the rate of roughly 15 pages a day because of all the writing.

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→ January 25, 2011
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Race for the Galaxy.

Race for the Galaxy is a card game for two to four players that uses the same basic engine as San Juan while borrowing more heavily from San Juan’s parent game, Puerto Rico. Race junks the colonization theme in favor of a space-exploration one, where players settle worlds and build developments to create the top-scoring civilization. It’s a rich game, different every time, but ultimately has two drawbacks that prevent me from giving it a full recommendation.

Each player starts with a home world that has one or two powers, and then lays other cards representing worlds or developments along side it. Players acquire points for the cards they lay and for producing and consuming any of the four types of goods, represented by cards laid face-down on production worlds, then removed during the consumption phase in exchange for more cards or for points. The game ends when the supply of victory point chips is exhausted or when any player lays his 12th card.

In a turn, each player simultaneously chooses a role from the seven options: Two “explore” roles that allow for card draws; a “develop” role that allows a player to place a development card by discarding a certain number of cards from his hand; a “settle” role for placing a world card in the same way; “consume-trade,” where the player trades in one good in exchange for more cards, then consumes the rest (if he has cards with consume powers on the table) for victory points; “consume-x2,” where the player consumes goods for double points; and “produce,” where each empty card with a production ability produces exactly one good. All players use all selected roles in that round, but receive some extra ability or bonus for the roles they chose themselves – for example, the developer can develop at a cost of one fewer card than the regular price.

Nearly all cards bring some special ability to the table. Some cards allow the player to consume a good for a specific gain – usually a victory point, a new card, or one of each, with a handful of cards offering higher bonuses. Others take a point off the cost of developing or settling a world, or give the player a card draw when he does so. There are “windfall” worlds that only produce goods when the player chooses to be the producer or if the player has another settled world or development that has a windfall production power. So when players have 10-12 cards down, there’s a lot to track, and I’ve found it’s easy to overlook a bonus you might have on one of your cards.

If all players have some experience with the game, it’s going to move fairly quickly. But the first drawback to the game is that it takes many plays to learn the game’s strategy, because you can’t map out a strategy if you don’t know the cards well, and you have to play several times to get to know the deck. I downloaded a free version with strong AIs and played at least 20 games (they take a few minutes), after which I knew the key cards for the two main strategies I use. That’s a lot to ask a newbie to do, especially one who’s playing for fun rather than with the goal of reviewing it. And without those games on the computer, I doubt I would have grasped some of the badly-written rules as quickly as I did. (It’s also extremely helpful to have the computer handle the scoring and keep track of Consume powers for that phase.) The cards also express their abilities in icons unique to this game, which seems to be a frequent criticism in online reviews, although I thought they were pretty straightforward once I learned them (and it’s fair to say that learning them is a time commitment not everyone will want to make).

The second is that there’s one strategy that will win the majority of the time, pointed out to me by Tim K. – the produce/consume-x2 strategy. Beating it requires a fair amount of luck in card draws; I’ve won with a military strategy twice, but needed to nail a couple of key cards to pull it off. There are many more production and consumption cards in the deck, meaning a produce/consume-x2 strategy is more flexible and more likely to work, especially if no other player tries it. (Your strategy choice is somewhat set by your start world; if you get the military world New Sparta up front, you’re at a disadvantage if you want to try the produce/consume-x2 strategy.) I’ve read descriptions of Trade and Develop strategies, but I think the extent of luck in card draws required to pull those off must be very high. And if another player shoots for produce/consume-x2 using low-cost blue good cards, he’ll probably finish before the Develop strategy can lay its first big-bonus development.

With some of your recommendations for Race for the Galaxy and its very high rating on Boardgamegeek (#13 as I write this), I was predisposed to like the game, but the combination of high randomness in card draws and high complexity in resolving consume phases doesn’t validate the high ranking. San Juan is simple when compared to this, and I understand that it’s too simple for some people, but the simplicity means that the randomness of card draws has a much lesser effect. Everyone has the same fundamental strategy because San Juan doesn’t allow for as much variation. Race for the Galaxy gives you the variation and thus the multiple strategies, but one strategy can rule them all, and keeping track of all those abilities and bonuses starts to feel a little like work. It’s good, better than most games out there, but I have high standards and Race doesn’t quite meet them.

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→ January 24, 2011
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Hot chocolate.

Quick break from boardgame reviews – I think I have six or seven in the queue to write up – and from prospect writing (the top 100 goes up on Thursday) to talk about one of my favorite beverages: Hot chocolate.

Now you might be thinking about hot cocoa, which is often incorrectly labelled “hot chocolate” by … well, by morons, because hot cocoa doesn’t contain chocolate, and cocoa and and chocolate are not the same thing. If you’ve had good chocolate – I don’t mean Hershey’s, which is to chocolate as gas stations are to coffee – then you know what I mean.

And that’s not to say that hot cocoa has no place in the beverage pantheon – hot cocoa is more of a quick warm-you-up, while hot chocolate is dessert in a cup. Hot cocoa does have the advantage of being easier to make, even without resorting to packets of sugar, guar gum, and “natural flavor.” Here’s how I do it:

1 Tbsp Dutch-processed cocoa (or 2 tsp cocoa and 2 tsp shaved bittersweet chocolate)
1 tsp sugar, or to taste
8 oz milk

Put the dry goods in your mug. Heat the milk to a bare simmer – in a microwave, try a minute on high, stir to prevent a skin from forming, then another minute – and pour just enough into the mug to moisten the cocoa. Stir or whisk until you have a smooth paste, then gradually stir in the remainder of the milk. If you find yourself with lumps of cocoa powder in the finished product, try sifting it after measuring. Add a shot of espresso for a mocha where both the coffee and chocolate stand in front, with the sweetener playing rhythm as it should be.

Hot chocolate, in a general sense, is what it sounds like: Chocolate, heated until it’s pourable, mixed with milk or cream or a combination thereof, and perhaps with accent flavors layered on top of it. If you’ve seen Chocolat – which, by the way, was much better than the book – you know what this looks like. It’s the best chocolate delivery system known to man, viscous and smooth and full of antioxidants, but who the hell cares about that because it’s chocolate!

I’ve tried a number of recipes for hot chocolate (also called “drinking chocolate” in some sources), and all were good because, again, we’re talking about chocolate. If the chocolate you put in is good, the finished product will be good. Callebaut is my favorite major brand, but these days I use the Pound Plus 72% bar of Belgian chocolate from Trader Joes, which is a lot more affordable when you go through the stuff as quickly as we do. (Valhrona is fine, but what they charge is in no way justified by some superior quality or smoothness. Callebaut is usually 60% of the price and as good if not better in texture and flavor.)

For my birthday last year, my wife bought me a small book called, appropriately enough, Hot Chocolate, by restaurateur and food writer Michael Turback. I find most little food books to be more novelty item than useful resource, but Turback approached this like a researcher, talking to dozens of pastry chefs around the globe and reproducing 60 of their recipes for hot chocolate, some of which incorporate unusual ingredients like chili pepper, ginger, key lime, cardamom, chestnut paste, matcha, or sake. Most work on the same general principle, however: Begin with a ganache (roughly equal parts cream and bittersweet or semi-sweet chocolate), then use that as the base for a beverage by adding milk and other flavors.

My favorite recipe so far is from Top Chef judge Tom Colicchio’s ‘wichcraft chain, which Turback says is known for the hot chocolate served in 12-ounce paper cups, a quantity I find hard to fathom because it’s so filling. Its key ingredient is fresh bay leaf, although I have made it several times with dried crushed bay leaves and can report excellent results. The recipe in the book makes six servings, but here is my adaptation for one:

Sisha Ortuzar’s Bay Leaf-Infused Hot Chocolate

1.5 ounces (40-45 grams) bittersweet chocolate, 60-72% cacao, finely chopped
2.5 fluid ounces (5 Tbsp) heavy cream
1 cup milk
1 dried bay leaf, crumbled
Pinch salt (optional)

Bring the milk and bay leaf to a simmer and let steep for at least five minutes, until the leaf is fragrant. Keep it warm as you make the ganache, but don’t let it boil or reduce.

Place the chocolate in a heat-proof bowl or directly into a mug. Heat the cream to a bare boil – be careful, as cream boils over fast, and fat burns easily – and pour over the chocolate. Let stand for two minutes, then stir to make a smooth paste.

Strain the milk into the ganache and stir until the mixture is smooth and homogeneous. Add a tiny pinch of salt if desired and serve.

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I find salt intensifies the chocolatey flavor of chocolate, but the drink is still rich, deep, and satisfying without it. You can also boost it with coffee or rum or a liqueur like Amaretto or Chambourd, but I prefer it au naturel because it’s like mainlining cacao. Much credit is due to Ortuzar, chef and co-founder of ‘wichcraft with Colicchio, for the bay leaf/chocolate pairing, a less-than-obvious combination that works even better than chocolate and chili pepper.

Turback’s book is about hot chocolate, not hot cocoa, so all of the drinks included are rich and probably high in calories, not that there’s anything wrong with that. He includes a section on alcoholic hot chocolates, as well as a few white chocolate beverages that are just a waste of space. (Really, Michael, a book with 57 or 58 recipes wouldn’t have been enough?) Towards the back of the book are pairings, recipes for a chocolate drink and for a pastry to go with it, like a cinnamon-almond hot chocolate and cinnamon-dusted churros from David Guas, a former pastry chef turned consultant and author of DamGoodSweet, a book of New Orleans-inspired desserts.

Hot Chocolate isn’t an essential cookbook but it’s the sort of cookbook to which I’m gravitating these days, books that can inspire me with new ideas for flavor combinations rather than instruct me on the mechanics of a recipe. However, making hot chocolate is about making ganache, and anyone with a stove and a whisk can do that, so a non-cook can get some value from the book as well.

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→ January 18, 2011
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Catan app.

My latest column for mental_floss, a conversation with prolific board game designer Reiner Knizia (the man behind my favorite two-player game, Lost Cities), went up today.

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Settlers of Catan remains the top board game on my rankings, even though it requires at least three players; it’s a great game that has simple mechanics, requires players to plan and have a strategy, includes mechanisms to reduce the odds of one player routing the others, and has helped forge a new segment in the U.S. board game market. You can’t overstate its value.

The Catan iOS app costs a reasonable $4.99, with colorful and slightly goofy graphics and an AI good enough to help you learn the game or pass the time, but no AI player strong enough to challenge an experienced player on a consistent basis. The app allows you to play two or three AI players, or to play another person who’s sitting with you, but lacks an online play option. The developers just released the first in-game expansion, Seafarers, today, and I purchased it but have yet to download it.

The Catan app itself works well if you fine tune the options to speed up the graphics and reduce the fake chatter from AI players. The app provides statistics on dice rolls and resource gains for all players, so you see for yourself that the computer wasn’t cheating when it made you roll a 7 when you had 13 resources and were about to build two cities and win the game. The map itself is extremely clear even with the colors and textures on the various tiles, and you can zoom as needed.

On your turn, once the die roll occurs, you click a somewhat-hidden menu buton on the right side of the screen to pull up your options: Build something, buy or use a card, initiate a trade, go to settings, or pass the dice. Building is straightforward, and only items you can build are highlighted, although it would be simpler if it snapped right to the first thing you can buy. Buying a card is simple, but using one requires scrolling to the right until you find the card you already have, at which point the question mark (for a description) changes to a check mark.

The trading engine is simpler to use, and AI players do make frequent trade offers. There’s also an option to decline all trade offers until your next turn, which can be useful when you’re receiving a slew of offers for a resource you know you won’t trade at any likely price. The trade engine screen presents all five resources in a row in the center, and you slide up or down depending on whether you want to give or receive a certain resource in the trade.

The game comes with a half-dozen or so AI players that vary in overall skill and in style of play, some aggressive, some focused more on building internally. But no AI player does much in the way of blocking the human player’s strategy, and they all have a tendency to hold resources too long – I’ve won a few times when the AI players each had 9-13 resources, and there had to be something they could have built with those resources to gain some points.

The Seafarers app doesn’t seem to have added any new AI players, and the game requires that you play a few of the basic scenarios before unlocking the Seafarer ones, even though I’ve played the First Island numerous times before buying the expansion. I’ll report back on that once I’ve had a chance to play it a few times.

I’d recommend the Catan app to anyone who’s been listening to me rave about the board game for years but hasn’t had a chance to try it, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking to improve his play. For me – and I am far from an expert at Settlers – it’s more of a fun diversion, not as challenging as some other apps I’ve tried but still fun, probably because I enjoy the underlying game so much. The fact that they’ve issued a major expansion also gives some hope that they’ll continue to develop for it, adding new features and maybe other expansions or AI players along the way.

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→ January 17, 2011
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Forbidden Island.

Forbidden Island is another cooperative board game by Matt Leacock, designer of the fantastic cooperative game Pandemic (reviewed earlier this month), with similar mechanics and a similar goal. It’s more visually appealing than Pandemic, coming in a tin box rather than cardboard with nicer artwork on the island tiles, but is a little simpler to play and definitely simpler to win, making it a better family game than Pandemic but perhaps a little less challenging for a group of 3 or 4 adults.

In Forbidden Island, two to four players take on adventurer roles to capture four relics on the titular island and attempt to escape as a group before the island sinks. As the game goes on, the water level rises, making certain tiles flood and, if they flood again while already flooded, sink permanently, after which they’re removed from the game; players must therefore choose between capturing relics and running around the island restoring flooded tiles.

The island itself varies in each game, similarly to Settlers of Catan – the set of tiles is drawn randomly to build a 3-4-5-5-4-3 island, and no fixed position for any of the nine critical tiles, the tile required for departure and the eight tiles for the four relics. To capture a relic, one player must possess four cards showing that relic (within the hand limit of five cards) and then move to either of the two tiles with that relic on their corners, using one action to take the relic. When the team has captured all four relics, the players must all go to the departure tile and play a special Helicopter Lift card to lift all four players off the board and into victory.

On each turn, a player has four actions to use, including moving to an adjacent tile, restoring (“shoring up”) a flooded tile adjacent (horizontally or vertically) to where he’s standing, giving a card to another player on the same tile, or playing four cards to capture a relic. Diagonal moves are prohibited, so most of your actions will go to moving around the island, with a fair amount of thought going to positioning yourself for future moves. But because the board is fairly simple to navigate, it doesn’t have the same critical-path modeling feel as Pandemic, which may be good or bad depending on your point of view. I prefer Pandemic’s operational complexity; your mileage may vary.

Each player plays one of six roles giving him special abillities. The Engineer can shore up two tiles for a single action. The Pilot can use one action each turn flying to any tile anywhere on the island, regardless of its distance from his starting point. The Explorer can move or shore up a tile diagonally. The Messenger can give a card to another player even if they’re not on the same tile. The Diver can move through multiple flooded tiles or even the empty spaces where removed tiles sat for a single action. And the Navigator can move another player up to two adjacent tiles for a single action to set him up for his next turn. The key to winning is, of course, figuring out how best to use the special abilities of all players, using them as often as possible; most roles are helpful although the Diver isn’t as useful as the others in a two-player game.

A few island tiles are flooded at the start of the game, and each player completes his turn by drawing two to five cards from the Flood deck. Each Flood card shows an island tile; when a player draws an island’s card, he flips the tile over to show that it’s flooded or, if it’s already flooded, removes it from the game permanently. As in Pandemic, several times during the game, the stack of used (played) Flood cards is shuffled and placed back on top of the Flood deck, so an island that has already been flooded is going to be flooded repeatedly as long as the game goes on. The timing of those shuffles depends on when the Waters Rise! cards are drawn from the master Treasure deck that includes relic cards and five special ability cards: three Helicopter Lifts (move one player anywhere on the island, with no action required) and two Sandbags (shore up one tile immediately, also for no action). A player draws two Treasure cards at the end of her turn, discarding if she’s over five cards in her hand.

There are several ways to lose Forbidden Island, although we only lost via one method. You lose if both island tiles that show a particular relic sink before you capture it, thus leaving you unable to do so. You lose if the departure tile sinks. You lose if an island tile sinks with a player on it and he’s unable to swim to an adjacent tile because those have already sunk. And you lose if the water level rises a certain number of times – nine times if you play the Novice level or just six times if you play at Legendary level. We lost when the departure tile sank too quickly for us to shore it up because we drew Waters Rise! cards on consecutive turns; other than that, we played up to the Elite level (one below Legendary) and finished the game with plenty of time left on the theoretical clock.

The relative ease of winning with two players didn’t make the game less fun to play, but it wasn’t as challenging or frustrating as Pandemic. I prefer the higher level of difficulty, even though I can still say “Bogota” to my sister and her husband they’ll remember exactly which session of Pandemic I mean and how aggravating that loss was. If you’ve played neither game and want to try the cooperative concept, Forbidden Island is under $13 on amazon, or about half the cost of Pandemic, making it a great introduction to this style of game and this designer’s mechanics.

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Thanks to a reader recommendation, I’ve set up an amazon.com aStore that includes all board games I’ve recommended and that will eventually include the entire Klaw 100 (I think I’ve added 30-35 titles so far). It’s also linked permanently on the Amazon link above.

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→ January 12, 2011
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The Billionaire’s Vinegar.

Benjamin Wallace’s The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine is the best nonfiction book I’ve read in almost two years, since reading The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber in February of 2009. Vinegar is a bit of literary pinot noir, starting with the auction of a bottle of wine allegedly owned by Thomas Jefferson and left in Paris when he fled the Revolution, a sale that smashed the previous record for a single bottle and helped accelerate the trend of high sale prices for ultra-rare wines. Of course, we wouldn’t have a book about it if there wasn’t an underlying controversy. Was the wine legitimate, or was Hardy Rodenstock, the German who purportedly discovered the cache of wines, a fraud and a forger of the highest order?

The ability to make money through doctored wines wouldn’t exist with a market willing to pay top dollar for what those wines purported to be, and Wallace documents the role of auction houses, particularly Christie’s, in marketing and selling rare wines and troves to a changing market, one that saw collectors bidding up bottles as investments or trophies rather than as libations. The man who built Christie’s wine-selling business over a period of four decades, Michael Broadbent, is a central character in the book for his role in selling the Rodenstock/Jefferson wines and impact on the rare-wine industry. (Michael’s son, Bartholomew, makes a few cameos, and has become a successful importer of fine wines.) The rich men who chase these wines also become significant characters in the book, including millionaire scion and America’s Cup winner Bill Koch, fellow scion Kip Forbes, and wine merchant Bill Sokolin, who bought one of the Jefferson bottles only to damage it and have most of the wine leak out on a restauarant floor as he carried the bottle to show off during a tasting.

The is-it-real storyline is paramount in Billionaire’s Vinegar, but, as an oeneophyte, I found the lay descriptions of wine chemistry fascinating, particularly explanations of how wine’s character changes over time, which also ties into how someone might alter a wine to make it seem older than it is – and how difficult it was until very recently to test a wine to determine, even within a narrow range, its age. The book also dabbles in the politics of wine manufacturing, culture, marketing, and the culture of wine connoisseurs, including massive tastings like “verticals” (many different vintages of a single wine) or “horizontals” (many wines, one year).

But at heart, the book is a mystery, starring Rodenstock and Broadbent, both eccentrics given to showmanship and bravado, one a dealer, the other an auctioneer, one a German of unknown background, the other a Brit of impeccable credentials. (Other eminent authorities on wine also gave their imprimatur to Rodenstock’s Jefferson wines, including Robert Parker, the most influential American wine critic of the past three decades and creator of the now-ubiquitous 100-point scale for rating wines.) The answer to the question of the wines’ provenance isn’t that hard to figure out, but Wallace plays it straight, only gradually revealing more information as the people involved the story themselves would have learned it, giving the book that mystery/detective feel – not to mention a surfeit of narrative greed – that sets it apart from most nonfiction books I read. I needed to put this book down so I could do other things, but found myself picking it back up repeatedly, finishing it inside of 72 hours.

Of note: the book is actually not available for sale in the U.K. because Michael Broadbent sued and wrangled a settlement from Random House, although he didn’t name Wallace in the suit and, having read the book, I’m hard-pressed to understand Broadbent’s complaint from a my non-lawyerly perspective. Wallace himself stated that U.K. libel laws are “notoriously plaintiff-friendly,” and I have to say that Broadbent might only have brought more bad publicity for himself by drawing attention to the book. He hardly comes off worst of the many shady characters populating the book’s pages.

Next up: Humorist and erstwhile sportswriter Roy Blount Jr.’s Alphabet Juice, a compendium of mini-essays on various words and their etymologies.

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