→ October 12, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 10/11/24.

Nothing from me this week at the Athletic, although I should have at least two pieces going up in the next seven days.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Little Alchemists, a streamlined version of the heavy game Alchemists that also works as a light legacy game, building you up over seven modules to a full midweight deduction game that you could play with the family.

I’ve been much more regular with my free email newsletter since taking some PTO in August, which I don’t think is a coincidence as it gave me some mental downtime after the crush of the draft and the trade deadline.

And now, the links…

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→ October 9, 2024
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Applejack.

Applejack comes from Uwe Rosenberg, known for his heavy worker placement games and his light tile-laying games, although I think it’s been a few years since he had a real ‘hit’ – probably 2020’s tile-layer New York Zoo. Applejack came out in 2023 and it’s a perfectly fine game that suffers from an overwrought final scoring mechanic, so while I think it’s good enough to recommend, it’s not one I’ll come back to very often.

In Applejack, players will draft hexagonal tiles to fill out their meadow to attract the most bees and grow the most apples of seven different varieties. Each tile has up to four apples on it, possibly some flowers, and honey pots with numbers from 2 to 10 on at least one of the six edges. There’s a central board with a spiral track, and as the round-marker die moves, it will offer you your choices of the tiles in the bucket ahead of it and the bucket behind it (located around the outside of the board). You can place the tile anywhere on your personal board; if you line up an edge with a honey pot next to another edge with a honey pot, either on another tile or on the outer frame of your board, you get coins (honey) equal to the lower of those two values. That matters because you have to pay coins for the tile you draft, with the cost equal to the value of its honey pot(s). If you can’t pay, you must flip the tile over and place it face-down, with no apples, flowers, or honey pots showing.

The general goal is to place tiles to create chains of apple varieties; as the round marker moves, it will score the different varieties one or two at a time, giving each player coins equal to the number of tiles in the longest chain of that variety minus the current round number. Flowers score one coin apiece at the end of the first round, two apiece at the end of the second.

About halfway through round three, all players will have filled their boards and the game ends. You then score each apple variety again, subtracting three for the current round number, and double that number – effectively scoring them twice. Then there’s a bonus for the number of apple varieties you scored in that last harvest, starting with 4 coins for 4 varieties up to 35 points if you scored all 7. And flowers score again, but this time it’s back to just one coin per flower. Whoever has the most coins wins.

The actual game play, meaning the tile selection and placement, is good. I’d even argue that it’s all good until the final scoring, and then it gets annoying. It’s a lot of arithmetic, and it takes a while, but that also means that it’s hard to do the mental math during the game to fully anticipate how it’ll play out. Building the chains is fun, as is the challenge near the end of the game when you only have a couple of spaces left for tiles and have to choose which varieties’ chains to sacrifice and which to expand. I understand the philosophical decision to double the chains’ scoring at the end, because otherwise you’d end with players potentially gaining fewer points in the end game than they did in the second scoring, but it makes the process clunkier than it needs to be. Maybe Rosenberg tried it without subtracting the round number and it didn’t work; that seems like a more obvious way to score, at least. And I think the flowers are just kind of there – the points are nice but they’re so small in relation to the rest of the scoring that you’re not likely to pay much attention to them.

That’s a lot of words on what’s wrong with Applejack, but I’m being a little harsh – it’s really a solid game other than the scoring, and it’s possible that 1) the scoring won’t bug you like it did me or 2) you’ll just house-rule it and score it differently. I will say that among Rosenberg’s tile-laying games, though, this is below Patchwork, Sagani (also known as Nova Luna and Framework), and New York Zoo for me, so if you’re interested in this mechanic you might want to check those out first.

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→ October 8, 2024
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To End All Wars.

I read Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost back in January of 2013. In hindsight, I’d have to say now it’s one of the most influential books I’ve read in my life, which I think is saying something. It is an incredible, detailed, horrifying work of historical writing, telling the story of how Belgium’s King Leopold destroyed the region of Africa that is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, exploiting its people and resources for personal gain while setting the stage for what has been sixty-plus years of bloody civil wars. It’s the most damning work I’ve read on colonialism. It provides a new and somehow even more excoriating view of western racism towards Africans. It changed how I think about the world.

For some reason, I had never sought out Hochschild’s other books until last year, when my daughter had to read his To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. His approach here is to provide a history of World War I through a modest number of individual Britons, many of whom were connected by family, marriage/liaison, class, or cause, while telling the larger story of this bloody, pointless war through brief descriptions of military maneuvers and deadly battles. The result is a book that is quite readable despite the grim subject matter and that also sheds light on a number of historical figures, some famous and some who probably should be, while also delving into the war’s effects on women’s suffrage, the labor movement, and the Russian Revolution.

The choice to focus on British subjects allows Hochschild, who is American, to make many of the stories far more personal. Many of the people he follows, including Rudyard Kipling, end up losing a son on the battlefields, yet only in some cases does it change their perception of the war – Kipling was an ardent hawk whose racism on the page translated well into similar sentiments against the Germans. The women of the Pankhurst family were all ardent suffragettes, but they split when the war began, in part due to a disagreement over whether becoming war supporters might win them more support in Parliament, but primarily due to a fundamental disagreement over human rights. The cast also includes military leaders John French and Douglas Haig, Prime Minister Lloyd George, pacifist Charlotte Despard, Labour Party founder Keir Hardie, and philosopher Bertrand Russell, most of whose lives would intersect in myriad ways through their positions on the war, both official and unofficial.

Hochschild’s decision to follow all of these people also spares us some of the grisliest aspects of the war, although he doesn’t eschew them entirely, particularly in describing trench warfare and the various new ways in which it allowed soldiers to die. That makes for a book that’s just far more readable, and also means that when someone connected to one of his main characters does die, it sits larger on the page – one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic, just in literary form.

In an ironic contrast to the callous way in which its various leaders and commanders sent millions of young men to their deaths or to life-altering wounds, World War I also brought out the largest antiwar effort we had seen, itself an outgrowth of a movement that began during the Boer War against Dutch colonizers in what is now South Africa. (In that war, white fought white, and the losers, as always, were the natives.) Hochschild steps back to tell that war’s history, both how it began and how antiwar sentiment crystallized and grew before and during its progression, tying it into the voices who spoke out against war in Europe even before it began, and to the conscientious objectors who rose in number during World War I and often faced harsh prison terms or even forced conscription.

What To End All Wars is not, and does not try to be, is a comprehensive history of the war. A few battles get the full treatment, while others receive little to no mention. Hochschild’s digressions on the Boer War, the pacifist movement, the fall of the Tsar and the Russian Revolution, British politics, and more mean that the look at the Great War itself is selective, albeit not superficial. He also doesn’t dedicate much time to exploring the causes of the war, a welcome decision given how much literature there is on that subject (I feel like that is all I ever learned about WWI in school, even if the whole topic remains open to debate). This is very much a story of one country’s role in the war viewed through maybe eight to ten people, with tendrils reaching out to cover some related topics – but only as they connect back to Britain.

Instead, we get some small character studies, several of them around people who aren’t well remembered (at least not in the U.S.) but have extremely interesting back stories. I was less caught up in the stories of the various military men, including French and Haig, who were terrible people happy to condemn thousands of soldiers to certain death and somehow even worse than that at military strategy; the civilians Hochschild discusses are all more compelling and three-dimensional on the page. The royalist Viscountess Violet Cecil saw the brutality of the Boer War, then lost her only son, George, in the first year of the Great War, yet remained a vocal hawk until its end, only to become an advocate of appeasement when she became the editor of her family’s conservative periodical The National Review (unrelated to the American publication). Emmeline Pankhurst cut off two of her own daughters over their political disagreements, as she became a jingoistic supporter of Britain’s war efforts, while daughters Sylvia and Adela remained true to their cause and became socialists and labor agitators, although Adela eventually flipped and became a right-wing nationalist during World War II. Charlotte Despard was also a suffragist and went to prison four times for her cause, later also fighting for Irish independence, yet also spent a large part of her time advocating for the poor and even lived in a small flat above one of her ‘shops’ to provide services for poor residents of one disadvantaged area of London. Bertrand Russell, quite a famous figure for his non-fiction writings in philosophy and math, is more human on the pages here too, with only mentions of his written opposition to the war but not his other work.

To End All Wars didn’t radicalize me the way that King Leopold’s Ghost did, but it is also an infuriating work in many ways because there is such broad, blind disregard for the value of human life, and in this case it comes from so many people. It’s a deeply humanist work at its core, even with all its depictions of callousness and suffering, and also a highly accessible work with a strong narrative that had me hooked despite my previously low degree of interest in its subject.

Next up: Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley.

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→ October 7, 2024
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Seers Catalog.

Seers Catalog is yet another trick-taking game, this time a game where you’re trying to get rid of most of your cards, but not all of them. It has a lot in common with SCOUT until you get to the scoring, where it has a novel way of awarding points – or taking them away – that makes this game so fun and so very hard to play well.

A remake of a self-published game called Of What’s Left, Seers Catalog has a deck of cards numbered 2 through 13 in five suits, although you’ll cut that down based on player count so that each player will start with a hand of twelve of those cards plus one wild and two ‘artifact’ cards. Those artifact cards have various special powers but nearly all of them have values of 0 for scoring at the end of the round, so you want to use them rather than holding on to them. Some work in tandem with another card you play, such as changing its suit or adding or subtracting 1 (or ½!) to its value, while others you play on their own, like a card that automatically is the highest one on the table, or the Go First card that, as you might infer, means that player goes first (but doesn’t have to play that card immediately).

The player who starts a trick must play a ‘meld’ from their hand: a set of cards of the same value with different suits, a run of cards of the same suit with consecutive values, or a single card. All players may follow by playing the same type and size of meld – so if I play a run of 3-4-5, you must play a run of exactly three cards – but must have a higher card value than the last trick played, so in that example, you would have to play at least a 4-5-6. Players may pass; whoever wins the trick opens the next one. When any player has fewer than six cards in their hand, they go in the Bonus, flipping the indicator token in front of them. From that point on, they may not pass: if they have a legal play, they must make it.

A round ends when any player is out of cards. They will score zero points for the round, as will any players not yet in the Bonus. All other players in the Bonus score as follows: Take a number of points equal to the value of the lowest card in your hand, then subtract the number of cards in your hand. So if you have two cards remaining, a 6 and an 8, you would get 4 points (6 for the card minus 2 for your two cards in hand). Wild and artifact cards are (mostly) value 0, so if you have one, you get 0 points minus the number of cards in your hand.

It should be obvious that the goal is to end up with one high-value card at the end of a round, or at worst just a couple of high-value cards. Because you’re required to play once you’re in the bonus, however, that’s really hard to do. Later in the round, players are more likely to make smaller plays – a single card or a run/set of two – and it’s similarly likely that you’ll have a legal play. And if you have the misfortune to win a late trick like that, you may end up having to lead the next trick and end up playing your last card.

I haven’t mentioned the theme here, because beyond the wonderful title – which, I’ve discovered, you probably have to be at least 45 or so to get – the theme is irrelevant. There’s flavor text on the cards, but I never read them; I played this once without my glasses, so I couldn’t have read it if I’d wanted to, and it didn’t affect my ability to play the game at all. I can say that the game plays well with two players, which is unusual for a trick-taking game. It’s different, since it’s easier to guess what the other player might or might not have, but it still works really well. I prefer SCOUT, but if you love SCOUT and want something in a similar vein that’s offers a few new twists, you should put Seers Catalog on your order form.

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→ October 5, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 10/5/24.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top rookies on postseason rosters, based on their likely impact; my top pick looks pretty good so far. I also held a Q&A on the Athletic’s site on Friday, which was almost entirely baseball questions (unlike the typical Klawchat over here).

We’ve got two family birthdays this weekend, so it’s birthdaypalooza around here, but I’m hoping to do another issue of my free email newsletter once we get through Sunday.

And now, the links…

  • The Washington Post covered a rambling, incoherent Trump speech accurately, without “sanewashing” it. There have been a lot of clips this week of Trump appearing to forget where he was or what he was talking about. Too many media outlets continue to dance around this.
  • A new study of Scottish women found that those who received the HPV vaccine before age 14 had zero cases of cervical cancer. Yes, there is a vaccine your kids can get that may completely prevent several types of cancer, including cervical and anal cancers. There is so much misinformation about this vaccine online, and the cost of this will be human lives.
  • Board game news: To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the release of the first Dungeons & Dragons set, NPR asked readers to contribute their memories of playing the game. Here are five of their stories.
  • Rock Manor Games has a Gamefound campaign up for StarDriven: Gateway, a pickup-and-delivery game on a modular board. I’m friends with the publisher and got to try a prototype last week; we played the shortest version, and I think it needs the extra rounds, but I like the fact that there’s no conflict and that the economic aspects are easy to keep straight in your head.
  • Shem Phillips’s Garphill Games has a Kickstarter up for two new titles, Skara Brae and The Anarchy. Phillips is best known for his series of worker-placement games that started with Raiders of the North Sea. I don’t think Skara Brae has anything to do with The Bard’s Tale, though.
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→ October 3, 2024
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Happier Hour.

I heard Dr. Cassie Holmes talk about her book Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most and her approach to time management, making sure we get the most out of the limited free time most of us have, on the Hidden Brain podcast a month or so ago. She was an excellent guest, telling some great anecdotes and offering a superficial look at her recommendations for people to reorganize their time around the activities that give them the most joy or pleasure. The book, however, goes no deeper than that, and really could have been a pamphlet for all the insight it offers.

Happier Hour’s main advice is simple to understand and plan, albeit perhaps not to implement. Holmes asks readers to spend about two weeks tracking their time in small increments, writing down what they’re doing and how they felt while doing it. The goal is to identify the activities that give you the most happiness, however you may define that. That’s often social activities with family, friends, etc., but it will vary by person – you might enjoy solving a puzzle by yourself more than playing a game with friends, and if so, then you should enter that in your little journal.

Once you’ve gathered that information, you should then create a schedule of your week, filling in the activities that you must do before you get to anything else. Holmes distinguishes between types of required activities, however; for many people, there will be aspects of work that you enjoy, and aspects that you don’t enjoy but have to do anyway. (One recurring problem with Happier Hour, though, is that this is very much a book for privileged people. Here, you have to have a job that gives you some flexibility in when you perform required tasks, at the very least.) Her advice is to isolate the best parts of work – the ones that give you some positive feeling, however you wish to define that – and dedicate time to them at the time(s) of day when you feel best. She’s a morning person, and she likes the deep work parts of her job, so she sets aside a few hours each morning for it, delaying the lesser parts of the job, like answering emails, to the afternoon when she’s not at her best anyway.

She counsels the same approach to your leisure hours – some of which will, again, involve required tasks, like making dinner, chauffeuring children or other family members, or performing certain chores. As I write this, I just emptied the garbage and recycling bins in the kitchen, dealt with the cats’ litter, and took the trash bins to the curb, a required task I perform every Wednesday. That would be on my calendar, each Wednesday night, taking up maybe 15 minutes at most. Once those fixed tasks are in place, I would then fill I the remaining time with activities that give me the most joy and with required tasks that can be performed at any time, again prioritizing the good stuff for times when I feel my best. (This also would require that I know when I feel my best. It depends on the day.)

That’s all there is to the Happier Hour system, aside from some minor details. Beyond that, the book is fluff – a little research here and there on how social activities tend to make us happiest, how experiences beat acquisitions (no kidding), or how social media sucks, plus some mostly cute stories from Holmes’ own life (along with one pretty lousy one). I don’t mind hearing about the author’s experiences when they relate to the book; her decision to leave a prestigious but intense job that was cutting into her time with her young children is understandable, and there’s a straight line from that to the research she does now at UCLA. However, they also underscore how this book is only for a small sliver of the population: It is way, way easier to execute the program in Happier Hour if you’re either rich, or in a flexible job (like mine, come to think of it), or both. So many of her stories just scream wealth and privilege: oh, you have a weekly coffee-and-hot-cocoa date on Thursday mornings with your preschool-aged daughter? How nice for you, but most of your readers with kids that young will take them to day care or similar arrangements so they can go to their not flexible jobs.

I say this with full awareness that my job is flexible – I’m a writer, and as long as I hit my deadlines, I could write at any time of the day I wanted. I could do it from 2 to 4 in the morning if I wanted to. (I do not.) And I could write from anywhere; in the offseason, I don’t even need to be in this hemisphere, as long as I have a phone and an internet connection. I am in the target audience for this book. I just didn’t feel very moved by it, and by the time I was about 2/3 of the way through, I was just annoyed by how much extra verbiage there was around something that could be described in under ten pages. This book could have been a podcast, and in fact, it was.

Next up: Still reading Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars.

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→ October 2, 2024
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Music update, September 2024.

Another month where I thought things started slow but by the turning of the calendar I found myself with 30+ songs saved and had to cut down to the ones I considered the best or most interesting. We also had a few albums come out on the final Friday that I’m still working through, so some tracks may bleed into October’s playlist. As always, if you can’t see the widget below you can access the playlist here.

Michael Kiwanuka – Lowdown (part i). Kiwanuka’s follow-up to his Mercury Prize-winning album KIWANUKA, called Small Changes, comes out on November 15th. This single, his second this year, is a lo-fi, bluesy track that recalls Jimi Hendrix’s version of “Hey Joe.”

clipping. – Run It. The first true new track from Daveed Diggs & company this year, not counting their wide release of 2020’s “Tipsy,” “Run It” has Diggs’s rapping front and center again, as in the best tracks from their last full-length album, Visions of Bodies Being Burned. The noise-rap trio are working on a new LP, possibly for next year.

Ezra Collective feat. Olivia Dean – No One’s Watching Me. Ezra Collective won the Mercury Prize last year for their 2022 album Where I’m Meant to Be, an album I hadn’t heard before but didn’t find that catchy. This spring, they started releasing singles from their new album, Dance, No One’s Watching, which just came out on Friday, and they’ve pretty much all been bangers. There’s definitely more emphasis here on melody, and they go well beyond modern jazz into 1970s soul, funk, Afrobeat, and more. It’s almost a full hour of music across 19 tracks.

flowerovlove – erase u. This 18-year-old bedroom pop artist had one of my top 20 songs of last year with her song “Next Best Exit,” and this song is another sunny pop gem in a similar vein. Her latest EP, ache in my tooth, comes out October 11th.

FKA Twigs – Eusexua. FKA Twigs’ third album, also called Eusexua, is due out on January 24th, which will be her first full-length LP since 2019’s Magdalene. In interviews, she’s promised a greater techno influence, and that’s certainly evident here in the backing music, but it’s not a techno song, or even much of a dance track, and her feathery vocals are by far the most prominent part.

Divorce – All My Freaks. This Nottingham quartet are suddenly everywhere, with this track getting quite a bit of media coverage for a band that won’t release its first album until March. It’s undeniably catchy, though, in a sort of alt-pop way. Also, the bassist/singer is a former actress named Tiger Cohen-Towell, which might be the most English name I’ve ever heard in my life. P.G. Wodehouse would have rejected it as too much.

Sløtface – Leading Man. Sløtface’s first album as a solo project for singer Haley Shea, called Film Buff, came out on Friday, but their sound is pretty similar to what it was before the other three band members departed: it’s witty punk-pop with strong hooks and a ton of cultural references. I’m glad she didn’t retool their sound.

Japandroids – All Bets Are Off. I just could not get into Celebration Rock, Japandroids’ big breakthrough album, but liked their 2017 follow-up Near to the Wild Heart of Life, and now I’m enjoying all of the singles from their upcoming album, Fate & Alcohol, except that they’ve announced this is their swan song. Good stuff.

Sunflower Bean – Lucky Number. Sunflower Bean’s new EP, Shake, has five songs that are mostly heavier guitar-driven stuff than what they’d been releasing, although I think if you go back to their first album and songs like “Wall Watcher” you can hear the seeds of this sound in there. “Moment in the Sun” is a great pop single, but I don’t think it’s representative of the band’s typical output.

High Vis – Drop Me Out. This British punk band’s third album Guided Tour will come out on October 18th, and this is the third single from the record, but this was actually the first track of theirs I’ve heard. There’s at least some melody lurking here beneath the shouted vocals, which at least superficially nod to singer Graham Sayle’s working-class roots.

Lambrini Girls – Company Culture. Then there’s Lambrini Girls, a straight-up punk duo from Brighton with very progressive politics and a great ear for melody even within the strict confines of the genre. They’re coming to the U.S. for just three dates, all in NYC, in early December.

Oceanator – Lullaby. I wasn’t familiar with Elise Okusami, who released her newest album Everything is Love and Death on August 30th, until hearing this and “Get Out” over the past month. This track opens like a melodic death metal song, but then veers back into more accessible hard rock territory, and you can hear metal influences throughout the album even though at no point would I call her music ‘metal.’

Pale Waves – Glasgow. I’ve never been a big fan of Pale Waves, who seemed to have better publicists than tracks, but this one from the Manchester pop/rock quartet has one of their best hooks.

Franz Ferdinand – Audacious. Franz Ferdinand peaked with their first three albums, but in the last fifteen years they’ve released just two albums – neither particularly good – and a couple of singles from a greatest-hits record, so when I say this is the best song they’ve released since 2009, that’s sort of damning with faint praise. It’s still clearly an FF song but with a song structure and tonal shifts drawn more from 1990s Britpop than their 1970s/early 1980s-influenced early work.

Blossoms – I Like Your Look. Blossoms’ last album was very Lord Huron/Head and the Heart/Ryan Adams, but this new album, Gary, is a big leap for them, a more ambitious medley of sounds that draws on new wave, notably the New York scene (I can’t hear anything but Blondie on this song);  and 1970s soul (“What Can I Say After I’m Sorry”), without totally abandoning their previous sound (“Perfect Me,” the title track). I liked a couple of songs off Ribbon Around the Bomb, but this is a welcome swing for the fences, even if they don’t all connect.

Atlas Genius – End of the Tunnel. My daughter alerted me to this new album from the Australian quartet, whose last full-length came out in 2015. The best track on the LP is “Elegant Strangers,” which they released as a single in 2021, and it also includes the one-off tracks from the late 2010s “63 Days” and “Can’t Be Alone Tonight”; this is the second-best song on the album after “Elegant Strangers.”

Temples – Day of Conquest. This track didn’t make the cut for 2014’s Sun Structures, so it’s on their upcoming EP of B-sides Other Structures, due out October 4th.

Foxing – Barking. Foxing’s new self-titled album was also self-produced and self-released, and it is the sound of a band being completely liberated from any label expectations. Opener “Secret History” starts out so quietly you might be tempted to turn up the volume, which would be a mistake around the two-minute mark when the death metal screaming starts up (is this Deafheaven?). “Hell 99” has guitarist Eric Hudson screaming “Fuck!” repeatedly in the heaviest track on the record. It feels like a window into someone cracking up, an album full of existential dread, angst, repressed anger finding any outlet to release the pressure. It’s a marvel and it’s also, at times, very hard to listen to. I included “Barking” here because it’s one of the most accessible tracks on the record, and in some way the most recognizable to fans of Nearer My God or Draw Down the Moon. Foxing’s interview with Stereogum is worthwhile reading if you’re a fan of the band.

Razorlight – Zombie Love. Razorlight were one of the original “landfill indie” bands, as Andrew Harrison coined the term in 2008 right before the release of their third album, which underperformed and put them into a decade-long hiatus.

Hinds – Mala Vist. Hinds’ fourth album, Viva Hinds, came out last month, their first new music since half the band quit in 2023, and it’s their best album yet.

Katie Gavin – Inconsolable. I couldn’t believe this was Gavin (also of MUNA), as it’s a straight-up country song and features Sara and Sean Watkins of bluegrass icons Nickel Creek. Gavin’s solo debut What a Relief comes out October 25th and all three singles to date have been outstanding.

The Aces – The Magic. The Aces return with a slightly funky pop track ahead of their upcoming, fourth album. This 2023 BBC profile of the Utah-born members’ journey, with three coming out as queer and all four leaving the Mormon church, explains a lot of the opening up of their sound since their second album came out right as the pandemic hit.

The Cure – Alone. The Guardian called this song “majestically wreathed in misery and despair,” and if I just told you that phrase and asked you to name the band, The Cure would probably be in your first three guesses, right? “Alone” is a clear attempt to bring the band back to its Disintegration peak, and is the first single from their first album since 2008, Songs from a Lost World, due out November 1st.

Wolfgang Press – Take It Backwards. Wolfgang Press were part of the latter wave of the post-punk movement in the 1980s, but really peaked with their 1991 album Queer, when they ditched most of their funereal goth vibes and went for a dance/funk sound that was unlike almost anything else of that moment because they still ultimately sounded like Wolfgang Press. Their cover of “Mama Told Me (Not to Come)” was a modest hit in the U.S., and was followed by the one-off single “A Girl Like You,” which was their biggest hit, but after their next album flopped in 1995 they appeared to be done. They’re back now with their first new album in 29 years, A 2nd Shape, which came out on Friday; the members are probably about 65 years old at this point, so I’m fascinated to give it a spin.

Flotsam & Jetsam – The Head of the Snake. I Am the Weapon, the fifteenth album from these thrash stalwarts, is more of the same, and I mean that in the best possible way. They still have two members from their 1980s peak, singer Eric Knutson and guitarist Michael Gilbert, so the core sound hasn’t changed much, and I admit I’m just happy to hear anyone still producing that particular strain of thrash.

Opeth – §3. Opeth’s new album The Last Will and Testament will come out on November 22nd, and is the first Opeth record to include death-metal elements since 2008’s Watershed … but this song is straight prog-metal in line with their last four albums, so it’s clear the death growls and such won’t be present everywhere on the album. I love all Opeth, notably Blackwater Park, which is a progressive death metal album through and through, but sometimes their musicianship can get clouded out by the growled vocals. Blackwater Park is especially strong for its long instrumental passages, often comprising several movements, so that when the vocals return there’s a real tonal shift and a clear demarcation between sections. I’m hopeful based on the first two tracks that The Last Will and Testament will be the same.

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→ October 1, 2024
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Red Side Story.

Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey came out in 2009, his first novel separate from his various Thursday Next/Nursery Crime books, and ended on a cliffhanger. The resolution had to wait for fifteen years, until the release earlier this year of Red Side Story, which picks up right after the end of the previous novel and thrusts our two heroes directly into jeopardy. It’s Fforde’s longest novel to date, and his darkest, as he finally reveals the story behind the alternate universe of both books.

The novels take place in the future, at a date unknown (but revealed within the second book), in a place called Chromatacia, which exists on the island of Britain. Our civilization appears to be long gone, as residents of Chromatacia refer to the Something That Happened before they existed. Their civilization revolves around color: Most humans can see just a single color, and their status in society depends on what color that is and how much they can see it. Purples have the highest status; Greys have the lowest. Our hero, Eddie Russett, is a Red, while he falls in love with the pugnacious Jane Grey, who has a habit of punching people in the nose when they displease her. In Shades of Grey, they discover that all is not right in Chromatacia or with the authorities that run it, National Colour, who profess to abide by the rules of a prophet named Munsell, who wrote the rules that govern the nation. The events that close the first book put Eddie and Jane in immediate danger of a death sentence, giving the sequel a real-time feel, as they must both solve the greater mystery of what exactly Chromatacia is and finagle a way out of execution via the Green Room.

Fforde has always at least dabbled in dystopias. The Thursday Next series takes place in an alternate universe as well, and while it’s mostly a comic and satirical world, he colors it (no pun intended) with numerous negative or simply unpleasant twists. Both of his standalone novels, Early Riser and The Constant Rabbit, depict worlds distinctly worse than ours, the former full of great suffering, the latter a not-thinly-veiled analogue for our own racism and xenophobia, just with bunnies. The truth of Chromatacia does not emerge until near the end of Red Side Story, but once it begins to come out over the last hundred pages or so, it is monstrous at both a micro level and a macro one.

That long, detailed conclusion and the sheer number of characters we met in Shades of Grey make Red Side Story the first Fforde book I’ve ever read that I found slow to start. It didn’t help that I read the first book fifteen years ago, so I didn’t exactly hit the ground running, but there is a lot of exposition here, and a ton of plot for Fforde to set up for his usual denouement to work. He’s a master of this particular form, laying hints and details early that will come back to matter later in a way that makes you laugh or simply slap your forehead for your failure to see it coming, but here he’s also busy building out more color (pun intended) to the world even as he’s placing stones for the conclusion. It’s not a mark against the book that he does so – this universe has so many details and quirks that it requires more work to set it up and keep it running. It does mean that some of the character development that boosted Shades of Grey doesn’t appear until you’re maybe a fourth of the way into Red Side Story.

That development goes far more to Eddie than to Jane, as she becomes more of a supporting player here, with Eddie clearly the star and far more in control of the action (to the extent that anyone is in control in Chromatacia). Jane was the more interesting and fun character in the first book, not least because she would punch anyone who commented on her rather retroussé nose (Eddie describes people’s noses any time he meets someone), but here she has somewhat less to do and ends up off screen more. Some of that is plot-driven, as Eddie is betrothed to the officious climber Violet deMauve, who is also carrying his baby, so she ends up a more significant character this time around, while Fforde also delves into the underworld of Chromatacia more than in the first book, much of which is necessary for the big finish.

Fforde had a long stretch of writers’ block when he was working on Early Riser, but since that book came out in 2018-19, he’s been on something of a roll, not just in productivity but in creativity, as his last few novels before the hiatus began had started to lose a little something, especially the Thursday Next ones. He’s promised the eighth and perhaps final book in that series next, and in February of this year he announced that there will be a third book in this series as well, which is especially interesting given how Red Side Story concludes. I’m already in the tank for Fforde anyway, but Red Side Story is even more ambitious than his typical novel, and seeing him succeed when stretching himself makes me even more eager to read whatever he publishes next.

Next up: Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918.

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→ September 28, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 9/28/24.

I had three new posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic – my hypothetical ballots for the six major postseason awards, my annual look at some players I was wrong about, and a look at the future of the White Sox based on what’s in their system and their recent development successes and failures.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Let’s Go to Japan, a fantastic game that is about … exactly what it sounds like: planning a trip to Japan, based on the designer’s own yearslong plans to visit the country only to have it postponed for several years by the pandemic.

I sent another issue of my free email newsletter out on Monday. That’s two weeks in a row, so clearly I have the hot hand.

And now, the links…

  • The French cement company Lafarge paid millions to ISIS to keep its plant operating in Syrian territory held by the terror group. The Guardian has the full story, including the $778 million judgment against Lafarge in the U.S., lawsuits from people victimized by ISIS, and now a criminal trial in French accusing Lafarge executives of abetting crimes against humanity.
  • Josh Kraushaar is the editor-in-chief of Jewish Insider, and this past week, he started a false rumor that Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D) accused Michigan AG Dana Nessel of filing charges against pro-Palestinian campus protestors because Nessel is Jewish. Steve Neavling, the Metro Times writer whose interview with Rep. Tlaib was the supposed source of the quote, says the claim is false and she never referred to Nessel’s religion. Kraushaar’s tweet and story are still up, and it’s been picked up by Nessel, by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, and others. The New Republic weighed in as well.
  • Seeing a lot of AI spam on Facebook? It’s the “zombie internet,” says 404 Media’s Jason Koebler, with bots interacting with bots in a facsimile of the old web.
  • The Delaware Drug Overdose Fatality Review Commission released a new report with suggested policies to try to reduce drug overdoses in the state, especially among those recently released from prison.
  • Kurt Vonnegut designed a board game in the 1950s, before his literary career took off. It’s about to get its first commercial release, and the board game blog Space-Biff got to play a pre-release copy.
  • North Star Games, publishers of Evolution, has a Kickstarter live for Nature, a new, standalone, modular game in the Evolution series that streamlines a lot of the rules of the original.
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→ September 27, 2024
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Undergrove.

Elizabeth Hargrave has already cemented her place in board game history thanks to her design of Wingspan and her choice to devote much of her time and energy to promoting diverse voices in the space, notably women designers. She followed it up with The Fox Experiment, a completely different sort of game other than the two games’ shared basis in real science, and now is back with another science-themed game, Undergrove.

Hargrave’s name on any game box is going to get reactions, pro and con; the board gaming space has its share of incels and other misogynists who seem to rush to savage her games on Boardgamegeek and elsewhere, while I think she also has the benefit of being one of the few designers who even some casual gamers might know by name. I know I’m predisposed to like anything Hargrave does, certainly, because of her past designs and because I’ve had many positive interactions with her over the last five years.

So when it comes to her newest game, Undergrove, I have had a very hard time deciding what I really think of the design. There’s no question the game itself works well – it looks great, feels thoroughly playtested, isn’t too hard to learn, and seems balanced. If someone breaks it out, I’m going to be happy to play it. I’m just not sold that it’s fun enough for me to want to play it regularly.

Undergrove is built around the symbiotic relationship between trees and the fungi that live in the ground around them. Players have a collection of tokens to represent seedlings, trees, and roots, and will play them to the vertices on the shared board they’ll build, where the tiles are fungi that belong to the forest as a whole. You’re managing five basic resources in water, carbon, nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, with the last four represented by their atomic symbols on the board, and will use the carbon cycle to continually trade up through those resources to allow you to take the game’s main actions – placing mushroom tiles, planting seedlings, growing roots, and soaking up carbon through those roots to grow your trees.

There are five primary actions in the game, one of which you can always take while the others tend to require you to have something first. There are also four major mushroom types, represented by tokens on each player board; when you take the first action, Activate, you pick a mushroom tile where you have at least one root, then flip the matching token to its used side, which means you can’t activate a mushroom of that type again until you do something to refresh the token. To Activate a mushroom, you pay the carbon cost shown on the tile, then pay whatever other resources are shown to activate its ability. These can include getting different resources in exchange, soaking carbon up into your trees (as in the Absorb action), or copying the ability of another mushroom. Some mushrooms can’t be activated but give you ongoing powers for the rest of the game once you have a single root on them. All mushrooms have victory points you get at game-end for each root you have on them, with a few mushrooms showing a variable victory point value that’s tied to how often it was activated.

The Absorb action lets you bring carbon from connected mushrooms into your seedlings, which is how they grow; once a seedling has taken in 3 carbon, it becomes a tree, and then can’t grow any more. A tree scores for all four of its roots at game end, whereas a seedling only scores for one root per carbon token. The Reproduce action lets you place a seedling and one root at any unoccupied vertex, and optionally to place a mushroom tile. The Partner action lets you place two roots from your supply from one or two of your seedlings/trees on to adjacent mushrooms; you may also choose to play a mushroom tile from your hand to the table. The fifth action, Photosynthesize, allows you to refresh all of your mushroom tokens, and to take two carbon cubes, plus optionally to trade nitrogen for carbon.

If all this sounds a bit … well, educational, it feels that way too. The problem I keep facing with Undergrove is that the actions feel pretty rote, and as a result, the game is lacking the joy of a really great design – never mind Wingspan, since that’s a totally different sort of game to me, but even to other resource management games where you’re gathering resources and trading them up either to build things or to get more of other resource types. I suspect that there was a tradeoff between lighter or freer gameplay and authenticity to the underlying science, which is something I’ve noticed in games explicitly designed to teach a science topic, like Cytosis and Cellulose (both very solid games, but a bit dry to play).

You can definitely get a little engine going in Undergrove, as the game rewards you for cycling through the various actions as efficiently as possible. There are some end-game objectives, and there’s a carbon track that you move up every time you absorb carbon through any means, giving you rewards while also serving as the game’s internal clock. Once any player reaches the top, they get to choose a bonus (probably the two point token) and the game enters its final round. That gives you more things to shoot for as you play so there’s something a bit more than just, well, breathe in (nitrogen), breathe out (carbon).

I’m afraid this game just missed the mark for me on some hard to define criterion. I think in the end I felt too constrained in my choices, though; the next turn’s action was always obvious, and often it was the only viable option. Maybe that was ultimately what made Undergrove fall a little short, despite the tight design, the balance, the fantastic artwork, and clever flourishes like the little boxes to hold your seedlings and roots and trees: I’d rather have more latitude in my actions, even if it means I might take some bad ones, than to have fewer options, or even just one.

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