→ March 28, 2020
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Stick to baseball, 3/28/20.

One new article this week for subscribers to The Athletic, looking at what the agreement between MLB and the players’ union might mean for this year’s draft. It’s not very good for the draft prospects themselves, unfortunately. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday and a Periscope (where my voice gave out!) on Tuesday.

On the gaming front, I had four new pieces this week. For Paste, I reviewed ClipCut Parks, a new “flip-and-cut” game that is great for younger kids who love using scissors but not much of a game for older players. For Vulture, I updated my ranking of the top 25 board game apps available on mobile platforms. For Ars Technica, I reviewed the new app version of the legacy game Charterstone.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.

And now, the links…

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→ March 26, 2020
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Klawchat 3/26/20.

I’ve updated my ranking of the top 25 board game apps for Vulture. My review of the digital adapation of Charterstone is up at Ars Technica.

Keith Law: So let it be written. Klawchat.

Trav: What the hell is going on?
Keith Law: Well, the United States has the world’s worst response to the coronavirus pandemic, thanks to the current Administration, and as a result several thousand Americans will die when they would have survived had someone else been in charge.

Todd Boss: Since the 2020 baseball season is delayed, is Bryce Harper still overrated?  🙂
Keith Law: I’m sure someone on sports talk radio blames him for the Phillies being winless so far in 2020.

Aaron C.: Favorite Opening Day memory from BEFORE you started hatin’ everyone’s favorite team?
Keith Law: Weirdly enough, I don’t think of many memories specifically as Opening Day, despite going to quite a few of them. I think the Pedro-Carpenter matchup where we (Toronto) knocked Pedro around and ended up winning a slugfest was Opening Day, but I’m really not even sure.

WhiteSoxAndy: (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?
Keith Law: I do need a little time to wake up, thank you.

Deke: Best guess — what does the world look like in, say, July?
Keith Law: Pandemic still raging in developing nations, with worldwide deaths in the six figures.

Jordan: Why do the Astros seem unwilling to give Kyle Tucker consistent PT? Does still have the same long term upside as he once did?
Keith Law: I think some of it is his perceived lack of energy or effort, and some just the presence of other players. Upside is unchanged.

Aaron C.: What’s your favorite recipe from Ruhlman’s Twenty? I have the cookbook and…some time on my hands.
Keith Law: The braised duck legs. Never tried a recipe from that book that was less than good, though. His mayonnaise is my go-to as well.

OC Joe: Your thoughts on the MLB Draft proposal reported by Kiley? (July date, 5-10 rounds, 10% of bonus money up front, 45% deferred to 2021, 45% deferred to 2022)
Keith Law: Not what I’ve heard from industry sources.

Chris: Have you tried the Charterstone app? Any word on if it’s any good?
Keith Law: Yes, and I filed a long review to Ars Technica that should run any day now. I played a full 12-game campaign on Steam and thought it was good.

Todd Boss: Is it just me, or does an abbreviated “sprint” of a season kinda sound cool as hell?  Imagine a 60-game season where every game counts and has post-season tension, then leading to a post-season not riddled with fatigue and injuries?
Keith Law: It would be fun, but I also think an abbreviated season will mean games every day, and thus games where all the regulars are in the lineup will be infrequent.

JG: One day the current occupant of the White House will be gone.  But isn’t the REAL problem, the MILLIONS of American voters who are saying they approve of the job he’s doing with the pandemic, economy, etc?  They’re not going anywhere.
Keith Law: Nope. The hope is that there are enough rational people out there to outnumber the cultists, and that the rational people vote, because we know the cultists will.

Zach D: With the pause for MLB, starting pitchers are obviously impacted more. Can you see the league saying: we’re giving you 2 weeks to get ready then game time, and teams just using starters for 60-70 pitches for the first month of the season?
Keith Law: My guess is ~3 weeks of ramp-up, expanded rosters, and then pitchers used more gently maybe all season.

Dark Johnny Rises: Chris Rodriguez’s ceiling?  Make the rotation by 2021?
Keith Law: Call me when he’s healthy. He’s missed two years now.

Jaylen: Why is Nick Lodolo’s upside maybe not as high as someone like Spencer Howard? How would you compare Josiah Gray to those guys in terms of long term upside as well?
Keith Law: Stuff, delivery, FB quality. I did compare all three on my top 100 and would refer you there.

Krontz: When you play Dominion, do you roll your cards out on table before your turn?  My normal buddies and I do, to speed stuff up.  It’s not an issue at all.  I played with other friends recently and they were shocked I did that, saying it was a huge advantage strategy-wise I was giving them.  I told ’em to look as much as they wanted at my cards, not a big deal to me.  Am I missing a critical element?
Keith Law: Doesn’t everyone kind of know what’s in your deck anyway? They see every purchase you make.

Dark Johnny Rises: What do you think about Drew Rasmussen?
Keith Law: Promising reliever.

Chris: Thoughts on the proposed player service time situation?
Keith Law: Still working on a column on this subject. I do think any solution has to give players who play an entire, abbreviated season a full year of service. Anything less creates a systemic problem for years to come (problem for players … owners would win big).

Mike: Keith, what would YOU do re: the MLB Draft?
Keith Law: Still thinking about that one too, but it has to be somewhat shorter, both for practical reasons (less time to scout lower-round players) and needs (more top picks will play in short season, so there’s less need for filler guys).

Andres: Not baseball related, or hobby related, but how do we even begin to recover from this? As in, great, we survive, now how do we undo all the financial damage? Does Trump get re-elected despite the poor response?
Keith Law: We don’t, not really. Some significant number of Americans will lose their lives, and they won’t just be old people sacrificing themselves to save the stock market. (Holy shit, the people advocating that are *terrifying*.) A huge portion of our population will be affected by the losses of loved ones. The economy will be harmed for years. (Note: The stock market is not the economy. It’s not even a good proxy any more.) The labor force will be adversely affected. Many small businesses won’t survive this. I doubt we could ever have mustered a response like South Korea’s, but we could have saved so many more lives had the government been more prepared and responded sooner. Instead we had Kudlow on TV a month ago saying the virus was well contained, a bald-faced lie that only slowed the national response.

Dark Johnny Rises: Bryan Abreu looks like he can be a hader type?  What do you think?
Keith Law: I think Abreu is right-handed, so no, he can’t.

Darren: IF it was a normal year where would you probably be and what would you be doing?
Keith Law: Flying back from Arizona, most likely.

Darren: I personally do not believe we will have baseball this season, and if we do it will be without fans in attendance. Do you think there will be any part of an MLB season this year?
Keith Law: Yes. Half a season. Maybe some games with fans, some without. If we don’t get any games, it’s a sign of a larger problem with the pandemic.

Darren: Have you played Pandemic in the past month or two? I keep playing with my boys for hope the world can be saved.
Keith Law: Yep, played on Saturday. Got smoked once, won the second time.

Guest: Considering it looks like the prep and college seasons are going to be wiped out, is it too early to start linking teams with draft prospects or do we need “combines” or “pro-days” to get that kind of buzz?
Keith Law: No teams had any real meetings to discuss their plans, but I would imagine if they were candid with us most GMs/directors could tell you who they’d probably take in round one.

Erik: Pancakes or waffles?
Keith Law: Waffles.

Don: Would teams be incentivized to keep elite prospects in the minors during an abbreviated 2020 season in order to easily manipulate service time?
Keith Law: I thought the opposite – in a shorter season, there’s more variance, and bringing up a top prospect could have more direct impact on your playoff odds.

Aaron C.: Without getting too deep into your business, how’s your daughter dealing with all this? I have a 16 y/o son who alternates from loud false bravado to quiet concern/worry.
Keith Law: Still doing really well. I’m very proud of her for how she’s taking the possible loss of all the fun parts of eighth grade – she’s upset, of course, but keeping perspective too. I do think she’s a bit bored though.

Zach D: PSA to the Media: Stop broadcasting Trumps daily covid briefing. He’s using it as a campaign rally act since he can’t do those at the moment. It’s like after lie.
Keith Law: They should have stopped airing his briefings three years ago. Better late than never I guess.

John: Isn’t the fact the stock market has climbed because of the bailout package proof that the stimulus is only really good for the rich?
Keith Law: They bailed out corporations, which is what the market wanted, but in no way helps the average American; I think only about 50-55% of Americans own any stock at all.

Danny: Moncada’s defensive numbers were terrible at 2B but quite good at 3B.  Do you see him as an above average defender at third or was that just noise?
Keith Law: I wrote before he was traded that I thought he was better suited to 3b, after seeing him there in the AFL. It looks like that’s been true – his first-step quickness plays up there, and his upright style is less of an obstacle.

Adam: I read your top 100 in the Athletic.  Great stuff!  Do you happen to have a good former/current pro comp for kelenic?
Keith Law: I really don’t do player comps, sorry. I think they’re more likely to misinform than inform.

Erik: Has Greg Jones improved much at SS? I saw him play a handful of times in college and thought he was destined for CF at the next level. Are the Rays really bought in on him as a SS?
Keith Law: He hasn’t. I don’t know what they truly believe.

Joe: With all the other great candidates, how did Joe Biden end up as the nominee?  Do people think that because he is a white, middle of the road guy that he will appeal to the biggest subset of people?
Keith Law: Because he had name recognition. I think that’s 90% of it.

Alex: Just finished Trust Exercise and found it incredibly thought provoking and absorbing.  Just curious, do you have a theory of who the main villain was (SPOILERS): one person represented by separate characters or perhaps multiple people?  I would favor the latter, but it seems like many people favor the former.
Keith Law: Yeah, I don’t know that I have come to an answer to that one. The fact that someone may have ‘stolen’ another character’s tragedy (?) throws it all into disarray in my mind.

Mike: Confession: got 7 Wonders for Christmas, have read the instructions 3 times and still not played.
Trav: I don’t know how MLB could manage allowing fans toward the fall. Reading multiple medical officials suggesting it’s possible, if not likely, that a successful flattening of the curve means another round of this come autumn/winter.
Keith Law: We just don’t know yet.

Dave G.: I’d say that Trump didn’t create this Republican part; it (and Fox News) created him. His skill was reading the room and knowing how to put on the racist, misogynist, xenophobic, pseudo-Christian show the audience wanted. It might not be as bad when he leaves, but the problem isn’t going away.
Keith Law: No, not quickly enough, but I do think the long-term trends on bigotry and on religiosity are both pointing down. Eventually, those people will be sufficiently outnumbered that we won’t get a bunch of budding theocrats in office every time the Republicans win.

Guido L: What is a good recipe to make that’ll last awhile but doesn’t use super expensive ingredients?
Keith Law: I’m a big fan of making extra grains (rice especially) so that I can repurpose them as leftovers (fried rice, although that trick works with many grains).

addoeh: “Increasing the amount on unemployment checks will decrease people’s willingness to work” said someone who has never had to be unemployed.
Keith Law: Or someone who has simply never made that little money and doesn’t grasp that unemployment checks don’t go very far.

Matt: Venn Diagram of people that want old folks to sacrifice their lives to save the economy and those that are pro-life is a circle right?
Keith Law: No question.

Sam: Not that I think the bailout was good or have super in depth economics knowledge, but couldn’t you make the argument that while relatively few Americans own stock, most Americans work for companies that have stock and stabilizing the market may have preserved those jobs at least a little longer?
Keith Law: You couldn’t because it’s not true. 48% of Americans work for small businesses. That doesn’t include the self-employed, or people who work for closely held businesses.

Trevor: Bill Ripken’s book State of Play synopsis: “Advanced statistics and new terminology have taken hold of baseball today, but do they accurately reflect the reality of the game?” Yes. Yes, they do. That is the answer.
Keith Law: I was offered a review copy of that book multiple times. I did not accept the offer.

Matt: I know you too busy to write about it, but did you watch start of Top Chef last week?
Keith Law: No. I haven’t watched Top Chef in several years now.

Arnold: Whenever it is held, how does MLB conduct a draft when there was little or no high school or college seasons to scout?  Do they go by the 2019 season?
Keith Law: Scouts went out and saw players last summer and fall, and then briefly this spring. It won’t be the same draft that it would have been with a full season this year, but they have enough looks and data to have a draft.

Nick V: If you were the GM of an average team/market/payroll with an average roster but a poor farm system and were given 10 years of job security, what would your strategy be to bring that team in contention?
Keith Law: In the current environment? I’d strip the major-league roster to build up the farm system. Being average is a poor strategy under the current system.

Gregory: How much impact will this shortened season have on the development of minor league players? Much impact on ETA? Increased injuries?
Keith Law: It will slow some guys who needed reps – players who might be more physically gifted but were/are still working on baseball skills.

tnj629@gmail.com: A coworker says this virus was engineered by the Chinese government in retaliation for Trump’s policies.  How should I reply to him?
Keith Law: You can’t, really. He’s delusional. Maybe just hand him a tin foil hat.

addoeh: What prospect that you ever scouted most impressed you the first time you saw them?
Keith Law: Harper.

Bryan: Do you think the Dodgers will use Gonsolin in a “flex” role as mainly a long reliever but one of their 12 starters when needed throughout the year?
Keith Law: I assume most teams will try to have a Gonsolin or two on their roster – someone who can start, but isn’t officially in the rotation, so he can be a long reliever or make spot starts as needed. Pitching stats this year, if we get a half-season or so, might be the weirdest ever.

Aaron C.: For some reason, my wife bought a shit-ton of potatoes. Any go-to recipes in the Law household? (I mean, I *could* eat homefries for the next four days, but…)
Keith Law: I parboil them, toss them with olive oil that I’ve used to brown some garlic (strained out), salt, pepper, and chopped herbs, then roast for an hour at 425, turning to brown on several sides.

Drew: As a practicing Christian, I find the platforms of Warren, Sanders, (and now by proxy, Biden) to be way more in line with the teachings of Christ. I even think there’s room for pro-life voters on the left, since their policies reduce the need for abortion. Do you hold out any hope for religiosity to be less cultish and better balanced between the two parties or am I an outlier?
Keith Law: I would like to see real demographic survey data on this; my impression is that the moderately religious are becoming less common, so that we have more polarization – the nonreligious are clearly growing at the fastest rate, but the extremely religious are at least not shrinking, and they vote as reliably as any group. They have every right to believe and practice what they want, but I don’t want them making policy decisions (or choosing judges) for the country.

Jeries: Would a trade for Arenado require more or less than the Red Sox got for Betts?
Keith Law: More if there’s no Price-like contract attached.

Jeremy: Props to all of the leagues, universities, businesses, etc. that are still finding ways to pay employees who are being force to stay home. Those who aren’t, especially the ones who have the resources to do so, and the people that support their actions, can all go to hell.
Keith Law: Including my alma mater, with the largest endowment in the nation, which is kicking the low-wage dining workers to the curb.
Keith Law: I can’t wait till the next fundraising call!

Pat D: Should we be surprised that a place like Liberty University is already planning to bring students back to campus?
Keith Law: I’m surprised on one level. I’m not surprised that their dear leader is pushing false narratives and anti-science viewpoints. I’m surprised he’s acting on those. Maybe he actually believes his own bullshit.

Todd Boss: One fun point about the GOP/Lindsay Graham argument that “we’re giving unemployed people too much money so they won’t want to work.”

Its almost precisely the argument that the minimum wage needs to be increased!  “Hey, why should I work when I can get nearly as much in welfare/disability as I would working 40hrs/week at $7.25.”  

Hypocrite much?
Keith Law: They view it as an argument to reduce welfare/disability checks, to keep them below the minimum wage, and then they can argue to reduce the minimum wage.

Stu: A friend of mine and I were discussing how long COVID can live on surfaces.  It’s pretty scary that some could for instance touch your leg with their hand and the virus can live in that surface for a while.
Keith Law: The virus can, but that isn’t the same as enough viral particles to make you sick – especially since the virus is respiratory. If you lick your leg (ew?) you still probably wouldn’t get sick from that.

Dan: How does Mitch Keller’s slider addition last season change his projected outcome, if at all? Have to imagine it’s still tough to project a front-line SP without a legitimate changeup. The slider looked pretttty nice though.
Keith Law: It doesn’t change it. He has to find a pitch to get LHB out.

Danny: How many annual pop-up guys will suffer from no prep/college season? Keoni Cavaco is an extreme example but how many guys legitimately pop-up like that from not on the radar to top 4 rounds?
Keith Law: I’d guess a dozen or so a year, mostly HS and JC kids, rarely four-year college guys. Brent Rooker would be one of the latter – if he doesn’t get a full spring as a fourth-year junior, he doesn’t go on day one of the draft.

Sam: Any prospects you are particularly disappointed to not get to see this year?
Keith Law: All of them. Not joking. I miss the actual nuts and bolts of going to watch players and write about them.

Scott: With stores having empty shelves mostly around me, what’s the best way to store vegetables and other aromatics for the long haul?
Keith Law: Aromatics should last weeks; many vegetables freeze well. I don’t have a root cellar or anything similar but those do work. If you have white vinegar, you can pickle onions rather than tossing them.

Leo: What can you tell us about Oscar Marin? Didn’t seem to be a big name coming over to PIT, but pitchers seem to be buying in. Of course, Ray Searage admitted to not being an analytics guy so anything is an improvement. Can you see a big jump for Musgrove or a return to glory for Archer coming?
Keith Law: No, I don’t see a big jump for Musgrove coming, and Archer is just a ‘who knows’ at this point as the Rays couldn’t seem to get more out of him either.

Avery: Have you seen Tanner Houck at all? What pitch type or possible delivery change could help his splits be less dramatic?
Keith Law: I have. His low slot and lack of an average changeup make him a likely reliever. His platoon splits are the symptom.

Josh: Where does Dwight Gooden 1985 season rank for you in terms of all time best single season pitching performances?
Keith Law: By Baseball-Reference’s WAR, it is the best pitching performance in the integrated era. I would probably still give the nod to Pedro in 2000 (5th all time) for the ‘best’ honor, given the better competition and high offensive environment.

mike: 3 million filed for unemployment, and the markets are up. anyone that thinks the economy and the markets are linked is delusional….I can’t believe I fell for this shit when I got my MBA. Capital doesn’t give a damn about labor, other than how it can exploit it. Hell, we are taught that in school….
Keith Law: That is generally true: Capital doesn’t care about labor. They care about public sentiment, sometimes.

tnj629@gmail.com: I told my coworker what you said.  This was his reply – Don’t know who Keith Law is or why he is credible?  China has a connection to this. Media can try to cover for them all they want.
Keith Law: I told you – you can’t reason with people like that. He’s like an anti-vaxxer or a creationist. They believe what they want to believe, and facts won’t change their minds.

Eamon: From what I could read it sounded like MIL traded for Urias to play SS. Is there any chance (aside from current injury) Arcia keeps that from happening and pushes Urias back to 2B?
Keith Law: Doesn’t sound like they’re open to that possibility, but I haven’t asked anyone with Milwaukee about this.

Luke: Former Mets “Big 5” – Matz, Harvey, Syndergaard, deGrom, Wheeler. TJ, TJ, TJ, TJ, TJ. Fun times!
Keith Law: deGrom was before he was even a prospect, though. The others, sure.

Dark Johnny Rises: With recent J2 classes producing 19-20 yr old mlb’ers like Vlad, Tatis, Acuna, Soto, and the next guys like Wander and maybe Luciano.  Has int’l scouting improved to rank these guys early?  Do you think Jasson has a chance to be the next one?
Keith Law: I do think scouting and development have improved for those kids, yes. Teams are identifying players more efficiently than they did ten years ago, and clearly helping the elite kids develop faster as well.

addoeh: If you parents named you Richard, would you go around as Dick Law?
Keith Law: Probably not. You should ask my dad.

Fuzz: Wouldn’t corporations that receive gov’t assistance be disincentivized to run efficiently and profitably as those seeking unemployment? Or is this more likely a way for the GOP to funnel tax dollars to GOP donors (Corp execs, owners, etc.) so they will then, in turn, give some of it back to the GOP in donations?
Keith Law: No, no, corporations that receive government assistance would never do that. They’re too busy funneling money back to politicians to ensure the spigot stays open and no nasty environmental regulations get in their way!

Adam: Luisangel Acuna.  Is this a player to keep an eye on?  Bloodlines and seemed to do well his first year.  What’s the upside?
Keith Law: He’s in the Rangers farm report.

Pat D: Listening to CNN right now with them interviewing Peter Navarro.  He’s once again blaming things on Obama for what they “inherited.”  And people believe this shit.  It’s why I know they’re all just cultists.
Keith Law: The Trump Administration inherited a pandemic response team too.

Dark Johnny Rises: Will Chris Paddack’s 2 pitch mix succeed in the majors?  Or does he really need to develop the CB?
Keith Law: I think you can succeed as a major league starter with a plus CH, above avg FB with command, and fringy breaking ball. I don’t think the same is true if you switch the breaking ball and the CH.

Matt: You should up these chats to 2x a week since there’s nothing for us to do.
Keith Law: Aside from the fact that they’re kind of exhausting to do, there isn’t enough baseball stuff to talk about to support even one a week right now.

Hodgey: You can’t expect the jump back to his MVP-like seasons, but is Matt Carpenter get himself into Comeback POY talks? Or was last season the start of a mighty quick downfall?
Keith Law: He’s 34. He’s almost certainly declining.

Tim (KC): Thanks for the chat Keith… so the Braves, then Padres, White Sox and maybe the Rays; who is the next team on the way to building an elite farm system?
Keith Law: Giants.

Aaron G: I crunched numbers last night and figured that we’d have one million-ish infected by April 8th (standard doubling, 3.5 day rate). Assuming summer beings relief, what do you think the odds are of a fall/winter COVID-19 comeback?
Keith Law: I’m really not qualified to even guess at that one. We don’t know what immunity if any you get if you’ve been infected with COVID-19 and recovered.

Dean: Before Sale had TJ news would it have been easy to dump him off on another team?  Or were teams wise enough to stay away?
Keith Law: Everyone knew he had an underlying injury. Teams see everything you see and more.

Griz: hey Keith, regarding Parks game – I agree the photo part is a little wonky but hey, that seems to be the ticket to victory thus far for me, as the end scores have always been close, and those few points from pictures have made the difference.
Keith Law: I agree that the points end up mattering because it’s all fairly close, but it strikes me as a weird or just not-fun way to get points. It’s kind of perfunctory, like, oh, fine, i’ll take a picture.
Keith Law: OK, that’s all for this week. I won’t promise another chat for next week because who the heck knows what will be going on, other than that we should all still be staying home as much as possible. I will be writing some stuff for the Athletic in the next week on off-field topics, and I have a lot of board game content coming too. Be safe, everyone.

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→ March 25, 2020
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Sabrina & Corina.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina & Corina is her first published volume, a slim collection of eleven stories about women of mixed Latina and indigenous ancestry grappling with identity, sexism, and cultural changes in the rapidly shifting landscape of Denver, the author’s hometown. The book was shortlisted for the National Book Award (won by Trust Exercise) and the Story Prize (won by Everything Inside) and made numerous year-end top ten lists for 2019, due, I assume, to its beautiful prose and the window it opens on to characters and subcultures that do not often appear in contemporary literary fiction.

The title story is told through the eyes of Corina, remembering her cousin Sabrina with whom she shared much of her childhood before they grew apart as Sabrina became more licentious, and who has now been strangled by some unknown man months after the last time Corina saw her, the latest in a long string of women in her family killed or harmed by men. That leads into “Sisters,” which jumps back a few decades to tell how Corina’s aunt was blinded by a violent man – and how little people even seemed to care about what happened to her. “Tomi,” one of the standout stories in the collection, is told by a woman who’s just coming home from prison to live with her brother and his son, the title character, as she tries to rebuild trust with her family even as Tomi is struggling with his mom leaving the family, leading to a confrontation when Tomi tries to go see his mother across town. Every story has some incident of death or another kind of loss, set against the backdrop of a city that marginalizes women of color in multiple ways – economically, geographically, socially – and creates the conditions for these cycles to repeat themselves.

I wouldn’t put this among the top contenders for this year’s literary awards – at this point, the Pulitzer is really the only significant one left – because there just isn’t enough here. The stories are great, without a letdown in the collection, but there is a sameness across the volume that made me want Fajardo-Anstine to stretch out beyond these themes and character archetypes. I assume she will do so as she grows as a writer, whether in more short stories or in longer forms of fiction, but by the time I reached the final story, the plaintive “Ghost Sickness,” I realized how similar the characters and settings had become over the course of the book. There’s a tenuous quality to the stories, especially their main characters, where I felt connected to what was happening but not to the women at the centers of these events, and in nine or ten of the stories the protagonist might as well have been the same person. It is a very promising debut effort, however, a bit like a rookie season by someone you think is going to become a star in another year or two – just not as well-developed a work as you’d expect of someone further in their career.

—

I’d set a goal for myself for 2019 to read ten works of literary fiction, and this marked the tenth such work I’ve read, which means I feel like I have read enough to rank them. This isn’t a Pulitzer prediction in any way, but a matter of personal preference. I wouldn’t be shocked to see something from this list win the award for fiction next month, though.

1. Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken
2. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
3. Feast Your Eyes by Myla Goldberg
4. Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
5. Everything Inside by Edwidge Danticat
6. Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
7. The Topeka School by Ben Lerner
8. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
9. Exhalation by Ted Chiang
10. Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

The one 2019 work of fiction I haven’t read but plan to read when I can is Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House. If something I haven’t read wins the Pulitzer, I’ll read that too.

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→ March 24, 2020
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Uncut Gems.

Uncut Gems was one of the best-reviewed movies of 2019, taking home the Best Director, Best Editing, and Best Actor honors at the Independent Spirit Awards in February, and landing at the top of many critics’ year-end lists, including those of my friends Will Leitch and Tim Grierson. (I count 20 critics who put it on top of their 2019 lists on this Metacritic roundup, which includes Tim’s list but not Will’s.) After finally catching it on demand this week, I can at least add my voice to the chorus – it’s tremendous, maybe not my favorite movie of last year but close to it, and one of the most intense, relentless movie experiences I’ve had in quite a while. (It’s available to rent now on amazon and iTunes.)

Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a jeweler in New York’s Diamond District who has a sliiight gambling problem and, as a result, makes one reckless decision after another, including regularly pawning valuable pieces that other people have loaned to him. As the film opens, we see the discovery of a large black opal in an Ethiopian mine, a stone that Ratner has negotiated to obtain so that he can sell it at auction for what he expects to be over a million dollars. He’s harassed by goons from a loan shark, Arno (Eric Bogosian, looking pained at every moment), who is extremely pissed that Howard keeps betting rather than paying him back. And in another early scene, Howard’s assistant Demany (Lakeith Stanfield) manages to get then-Celtics star Kevin Garnett into the shop, where Garnett becomes obsessed with the uncut black opal stone and asks to borrow it because he seems to think it will bring him good luck on the court. Howard is also busy having an affair with an employee while still living with his estranged wife, and appears to owe several other people money, but can’t stop himself from betting or making other really terrible decisions.

Directed and co-written by the Safdie brothers, Uncut Gems grabs you by the throat from the start and never lets up until the closing sequence (a gimmicky shot that mirrors one from the beginning of the film). Everything about this movie will induce anxiety in the viewer, not least the music, which often feels like the soundtrack to a 1980s arcade game, and the frenetic cinematography, which often puts the viewer uncomfortably close to the action. The story itself never gives you a chance to catch your breath: Any time it appears that Howard might have a way out of trouble, something goes wrong, usually something of his own doing. Meeting Garnett turns out to be the worst-best thing to ever happen to him, not least because he’s a bit starstruck and suddenly decides to bet huge amounts on complicated parlays involving Garnett and the Celtics. This four-dimensional balancing act he’s trying to pull is absurd and you know it’s destined to fail and you shouldn’t even want this guy with no apparent redeeming qualities to succeed, but knowing what the consequences will likely be if it doesn’t work will still put you on the edge of your seat and have you rooting for Ratner in spite of yourself.

Sandler’s performance here is remarkable, and it’s a crime he wasn’t nominated for Best Actor here. Gone is the joking, crude comedian persona, replaced by a nervous, obsequious, crude version of himself, with minuscule changes to his appearance that somehow were enough to make him seem like Not Adam Sandler. He is this character, so that everything he does fits with what we know about him; without the performance there’s no way this film would be watchable, let alone good, because everything depends on him being credible. Garnett is the other real revelation here – sure, he’s playing a version of himself, but, as with Sandler/Howard, you have to believe that Garnett really wants that stone, and you have to believe his interactions with Howard are authentic. There’s a lot of stunt casting here – Mike Francesa appears as a bookie/restaurateur, John Amos has a brief cameo (which makes for a good in-joke about the Safdies’ prior film, Good Time), the Weeknd plays himself, Tilda Swinton and Doc Rivers make voice cameos – but Garnett’s is the one that has to be credible for the film to work, and he does it.

I still have two more movies I want to see before posting a very-late ranking of 2019 movies, but this is clearly in my top 5 for last year. I couldn’t put it over Parasite, which was just as gripping, and also quite funny in parts (as is Uncut Gems), but also has a more serious underpinning than this film does. The Uncut Gems script also has a few moments that don’t quite add up, but the ending works, and some of the flourishes that pop up towards the end of the film (Wayne Diamond’s character doesn’t appear until maybe 80% of the way through, but damn is he effective) pay off in more substantial ways than I expected. I’m not that shocked that an indie thriller starring an actor known for lowbrow comedies was snubbed by the Academy, but Uncut Gems deserved more recognition than it got.

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→ March 21, 2020
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Stick to baseball, 3/21/20.

My one new piece at The Athletic this week looked at the top 30 prospects for this year’s MLB draft, which is itself up in the air, although I am inclined to doubt that the draft would be completely cancelled because I think there’d be a flurry of lawsuits from players (and their advisors).

In response to many reader requests, I posted a ranking of my favorite board games for two players – some are just two-player games, some play more but work quite well for two. I have more board game content in the works for Paste, Vulture, and Ars Technica in the next few weeks as well.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.

And now, the links…

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→ March 20, 2020
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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous made the longlists for this year’s National Book Award (won by Trust Exercise) and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction (won by Lost Children Archive), both in the same year that Vuong earned a Macarthur Foundation grant. A grim, epistolary work of auto-fiction, On Earth is a difficult and unsparing read that’s probably better from a critical eye than it would be in the eyes of most readers (mine included).

Written as a series of letters from the protagonist, Little Dog, to his abusive mother, now that Little Dog is an adult, On Earth goes back to Little Dog’s childhood, to stories his mother and grandmother told him from before they left Vietnam, and to his adolescent years, when he first fell in love with a local boy named Trevor who became addicted to opioids. Little Dog is closer to his grandmother, Lan, who helps take care of him and tries to protect him when his mother becomes violent, and who helps him get to know an American veteran, Paul, who became her husband and Little Dog’s surrogate grandfather. The novel bounces around in time between those three settings – Vietnam, his childhood, and his relationship with Trevor – but hurtles towards multiple deaths that define the end of the novel, and the way it’s constructed, the story unfurls as a tapestry that weaves grief and memory together for a somber and often depressing read.

Entangled with those themes is Little Dog’s three-pronged intersectionality – he’s an immigrant, a person of color, and openly gay, all of which are true of Vuong as well. Little Dog also arrives in this country unable to speak English, and he becomes the first member of his family to learn to read, which makes the entire conceit of the novel as a series of letters to his mother more poignant or a little bit farcial. On Earth is more interesting as a new entry in the long tradition of immigrant fiction, especially given how many variables are different – how extreme the fish-out-of-water aspect is when his family ends up in Hartford, Connecticut; the added challenge of his sexual orientation at a time when society was more bigoted than it is now, and with a mother who doesn’t really understand it; and his mother’s work at a nail salon, a haven for exploitation of women who’ve immigrated here from east and southeast Asia.

There’s plenty to dissect in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, but Little Dog himself is too much of a cipher – even with all of the details we know about him as a person – to make this slight book connect with me. I sympathized with him, but never empathized with him; perhaps it’s the nonlinear narrative, perhaps it’s the dispassionate way in which Vuong writes, which always seemed to keep me at arm’s length. There’s a scene in the novel where Vuong describes something in explicitly physical terms, but never grapples with the emotional impact of it, during or after. That seems to be emblematic of the work as a whole. In the end, Little Dog seems to forgive his mother, to arrive at some sort of understanding, but I still wasn’t sure how he got to that point even with 240 pages leading up to that point.

Next up: I finished Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s short story collection Sabrina & Corina and started Jo Walton’s Lent.

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→ March 19, 2020
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Men at Work.

I generally don’t play many ‘dexterity’ games, meaning games that have some kind of physical component inherent in the play, like Jenga or the 1800s game Crokinole. There are tons of these games on the market but most just aren’t very good, often asking players to do things that are too easy or too difficult, and usually just rewarding the player who had the most fortunate timing rather than rewarding some specific skill or strategy. That made it a surprise that I enjoyed the 2019 game Men at Work, a dexterity game of stacking and especially of balancing, which builds in a way to keep you playing even if you make a mistake and gives players multiple things to do over the course of an entire game.

who can it be now?

Men at Work, designed by Rita Lodl (who appears in the game on one card as ‘Boss Rita’), has players building a construction site of girders and workers, where each player will get a specific instruction on their turn to place one of those two things with some specific additions or restrictions, such as matching a girder to a color already on the site. The initial setup has three girders and one or two workers on grey support blocks so that none of the girders is touching the playing surface. On your turn, you add the girder or worker, sometimes also placing bricks or tiny beams on the arms of the workers as well, while trying to keep the structure balanced so that nothing slips or falls to touch the table beneath. If any parts touch the table, you’ve caused an accident and must remove all such components, and then you lose one of your three safety certificates. If you lose all three, you’re out of the game.

Your moves are determined by a deck of two-sided cards. You flip a card to show two instructions, one for placing a girder and one for placing a worker. The card left on top of the deck will show a girder symbol or a hard-hat, telling you which instruction to follow, and two colors of girders, indicating you must place one of those colors or must place the new worker on a girder of either color. About a quarter of the way through the deck, the Boss Rita card will appear, after which the real scoring begins. If your move adds a new highest point to the construction site, you get an employee of the week token; the first player to get N tokens, where N varies by the number of players from 4 tokens to 6, is the winner. If your move doesn’t add a new highest point, which sometimes isn’t possible, you still must complete the move without causing an accident or risk losing a safety certificate. Play continues until someone reaches the target number of employee of the week tokens, or only one player still has safety certificates remaining.

The one key rule in Men at Work is that you’re supposed to place everything on the structure using just one hand, which is hard enough to remember, let alone to execute. I played this with a seven-year-old who had no problem at all understanding the rules – she only needed help with interpreting card instructions that weren’t all that clear, such as the different cards that say to put the worker on first and then add the bricks/beams, and those that have you put a brick/beam on the worker and then put them all on a girder at once – but I improvised and let her use two hands while I used just one. That was enough to keep the game balanced (pun intended) until eventually the structure got large enough that it was easy for one of us to knock almost the whole thing down with one errant move. It took us about 20 minutes of actual play time (not counting me reading the rules and looking up several cards for more explanation) from start to finish, and there was a lot of laughing in the process too. It’s still not my preferred genre of game but this is high on my list of titles you can play with kids of just about any age.

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→ March 18, 2020
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Wild Rose.

Jessie Buckley’s first film role was in the highly underrated, barely-seen independent thriller Beast back in 2017, a star turn by the young Irish actress just four years who had previously only worked in theater and on British television. She had a minor role in last year’s Judy, which was probably Americans’ first exposure to her work, but once again starred in an independent film, this time the musical comedy-drama Wild Rose, which plays with the standard formula of such smalltown-girl-makes-good movies and shows off Buckley’s impressive vocal and acting range. It’s free on Hulu and available to rent on amazon and iTunes.

Buckley is Rose-Lynn Harlan, who is just getting out of jail as the film opens and heads home to her two children and her mother (Dame Julie Walters), who has been taking care of them for a year while Rose-Lynn served out her sentence for a minor drug charge (revealed a bit later in the film). She’s never without her white cowgirl boots, and her only goal in life is to get to Nashville and become a country-music star, even if it means neglecting her kids or spurning the few people in her life willing to help her, including her mother and the woman whose house Rose-Lynn cleans for work. Susannah (Sophie Okonedo, who does not age) hears Rose-Lynn singing and tries everything to help her get to Nashville, but Rose-Lynn simply can’t get out of her own way.

Wild Rose is half formulaic, but manages to zig and zag enough times to get away from most of the clichés of the genre – notably the way such films generally rely on extraordinary good fortune to push their protagonists along the path to stardom. Rose-Lynn could have that, maybe, but every time she has such an opportunity, reality intercedes, often in the form of her own irresponsibility. She had her two children quite young and still hasn’t accepted the obligations of parenthood, nor does she seem to recognize the burden she places on her mother through her behavior. Yet she’s also spirited and driven and a talented singer and you’ll probably find yourself rooting for her in spite of her actions, even when she has gone past deserving our support. There are some moments that made me cringe, but that is what most helps this script avoid the saccharine elements of typical up-from-nowhere music films.

Nearly all of the songs Rose-Lynn sings in the film, and the majority of the songs on the soundtrack, are covers, many of them well-known country songs (John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” is a particular standout), along with a cover of Primal Scream’s “Country Girl” and a few originals. The closing song “Glasgow (No Place by Home),” co-written by Mary Steenburgen, is one of the two best songs in the film along with “Angel” and deserved one of the five Best Original Song nominations, at least over the Diane Warren song and I’d argue over the Elton John/Bernie Taupin track that won.

Buckley is an absolute star, though – she’s magnetic on screen and, it turns out, quite a singer too. (She finished second on a British reality-TV singing competition show at age 19, which led her to drama school and eventually to this career on screen and stage.) I’m not sure what it’ll take for her to land a  role in a major film that gets the attention of American audiences, but after three films, two in which she was the star, she’s reached the “I’ll watch anything she’s in” status for me. She earned a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress along with four nominees for the Oscar for the same award, taking the nod that Cynthia Erivo received here. She makes this movie work, even when it’s a bit uneven, and carries off the star-is-almost-born role to make every aspect of it credible, even when the plot seems a little farfetched (the Susannah bits). The resolution here is just perfect as well, avoiding the sentimental or the maudlin for a conclusion that’s just atypical enough to be satisfying.

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→ March 17, 2020
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Best two-player games for 2020.

I’ve been getting so many requests for recommendations for two-player games this week that I decided to pull the list I’ve added to the bottom of my annual top 100 rankings and make a separate post, with some updates for things I’ve played more recently and a few games on which I’ve changed my opinions as well.

1. Jaipur: Full review. Jaipur is my favorite two-player game, just as easy to learn but with two shades of additional complexity and a bit less randomness. In Jaipur, the two players compete to acquire collections of goods by building sets of matching cards in their hands, balancing the greater point bonuses from acquiring three to five goods at once against the benefit of taking one or two tokens to prevent the other player from getting the big bonuses. The game moves quickly due to a small number of decisions, like Lost Cities, so you can play two or three full games in an hour. It’s also incredibly portable. The new app is also fantastic, with a campaign mode full of variants. Complexity: Low.

2. 7 Wonders Duel. Full review. Borrowing its theme from one of the greatest boardgames of all time, 7W Duel strips the rules down so that each player is presented with fewer options. Hand cards become cards on the table, revealed a few at a time in a set pattern that limits player choices to one to four cards (roughly) per turn. Familiarity with the original game is helpful but by no means required. There’s a brand-new app version out from Repos this fall. Complexity: Medium-low.

3. Carcassonne: Full review. Carcassonne brings ease of learning, tremendous replayability (I know I use that word a lot here, but it does matter), portability (you can put all the tiles and meeples in a small bag and stuff it in a suitcase), and plenty of different strategies and room for differing styles of play. You build the board as you go: Each player draws a tile at random and must place it adjacent to at least one tile already laid in a way that lines up any roads or cities on the new tile with the edges of the existing ones. You get points for starting cities, completing cities, extending roads, or by claiming farmlands adjacent to completing cities. It’s great with two players, and it’s great with four players. You can play independently, or you can play a little offense and try to stymie an opponent. The theme makes sense. The tiles are well-done in a vaguely amateurish way – appealing for their lack of polish. And there’s a host of expansions if you want to add a twist or two. I own the Traders and Builders expansion, which I like mostly for the Builder, an extra token that allows you to take an extra turn when you add on to whatever the Builder is working on, meaning you never have to waste a turn when you draw a plain road tile if you sit your Builder on a road. I also have Inns and Cathedrals, which I’ve only used a few times; it adds some double-or-nothing tiles to roads and cities, a giant meeple that counts as two when fighting for control of a city/road/farm, as well as the added meeples needed to play with a sixth opponent. Complexity: Low/medium-low for the base game, medium with expansions.

4. Imhotep: The Duel. Full review. A truly great re-imagining of a larger game for two players, one that forces more interaction between the two of you so you don’t feel as much like you’re playing parallel solitaire. Players place their four meeples on the 3×3 grid that allows them to take goods off of the six boats, three on one side of the grid and three on the adjacent side, and place them in the four spaces on their personal boards, each of which scores in its own way. Several of those spaces create competition for specific tiles, and the boards have two sides so you can mix and match between the more or less interactive sides. There are also blue tiles that give you bonus actions and for which you may particularly want to battle your opponent when they appear. Complexity: Medium-low.

5. Patchwork: Full review. A really sharp two-player game that has an element of Tetris – players try to place oddly shaped bits of fabric on his/her main board, minimizing unused space and earning some small bonuses along the way. It’s from Uwe Rosenberg, better known for designing the ultra-complex games Agricola, Le Havre, and Caverna. Go figure. And go get it. Complexity: Low.

6. 7 Ronin: Full review. An asymmetrical two-player game with a Seven Samurai theme – and when I say “theme,” I mean that’s the whole story of the game. One player is the seven ronin of the title, hired to defend a village against the invading ninjas, controlled by the other player. If the ninjas don’t take the village or wipe out the ronin before eight rounds are up, the ronin player wins. But the ninja can gain a decisive advantage in the first four rounds with the right moves. It’s very clever, the art is fantastic, and the theme is completely integrated into the game itself. It also plays in about 30 minutes. Complexity: Medium-low.

7. Wingspan. Full review.The only game to which I’ve given a perfect score of 10 since I started reviewing games for Paste five years ago, Wingspan is one of the best examples I can find of immaculate game design. It is thoroughly and thoughtfully constructed so that it is well-balanced, enjoyable, and playable in a reasonable amount of time. The components are all of very high quality and the art is stupendous. And there’s some real science behind it: designer Elizabeth Hargrave took her love of bird-watching and built a game around the actual characteristics of over 100 species of North American birds, such as their habitats, diets, and breeding habits. The European expansion is now out as well. Wingspan won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2019, which it more than deserved, making Hargrave the first woman to win that honor as a solo designer and just the second solo woman to win any Spiel des Jahres prize. It’s a marvel. Complexity: Medium.

8. Watergate. Full review. It’s a pure two-player game that pits one player as Nixon and the other as “the journalists,” each with a unique deck, where the latter player tries to place evidence tokens connecting at least two witnesses to the President, and Tricky Dick tries to block them. It’s fun, incredibly well-written, and a real thinker. Complexity: Medium.

9. That’s Pretty Clever. Full review. From the mind of the designer of The Mind, Wolfgang Warsch, That’s Pretty Clever (original title: Ganz Schön Clever) is a roll-and-write game where you roll six dice, each its own color, and can choose one die per roll to score on your sheet. The player sheets have five areas matching five of the dice colors, with the white die a wild, and each area scores in a unique way, with the potential for bonuses like the power to check off a box in a separate area for free. It’s also a great solitaire game, where 200+ is a solid score and 300+ is some Hall of Fame type stuff. Complexity: Medium-low.

10. Targi. Full review. Moderately complex two-player game with a clever mechanic for placing meeples on a grid – you don’t place meeples on the grid itself, but on the row/column headers, so you end up blocking out a whole row or column for your opponent. Players gather salt, pepper, dates, and the relatively scarce gold to enable them to buy “tribe cards” that are worth points by themselves and in combinations with other cards. Some tribe cards also confer benefits later in the game. Two-player games often tend to be too simple, or feel like weak variants of games designed for more players. Targi isn’t either of those things – it’s a smart game that feels like it was built for exactly two people. Complexity: Medium.

11. Baseball Highlights: 2045: Full review. I was floored at how much I enjoyed this game; it is baseball-themed, but it’s really a fast-moving deckbuilder where your deck only has 15 cards in it and you get to upgrade it constantly between “games.” The names on the player cards are all combinations of names of famous players from history – the first name from one, the last from another, like “Cy Clemens” – except for the robots. It’s not a baseball simulation game, but that might be why I liked it, because it was easier to just let the theme go and play the game for what it is. It’s down from previous years as I’ve found the replay value is limited, even with the expansions. Complexity: Medium-low.

12. Silver & Gold. Full review. Phil Walker-Harding is some sort of genius, with Imhotep, the Sushi Go! series, Bärenpark, Gizmos, and this all hits under his name, with the Adventure series he co-created with Matthew Dunstan still on my to-play shelf. Silver & Gold is a polyomino flip-and-write game where there are just eight shapes to choose from in each round, with seven of them displayed in random order (the eighth isn’t used), and players fill in those small shapes on the larger ones on their two objective cards, using dry-erase markers. You score for finishing shapes, with three small bonuses available each game that do usually end up mattering in the final score. It’s portable, easy, lightly strategic, and undeniably fun. Complexity: Low.

13. The Mind. Full review. The Mind may drive you crazy; I haven’t beaten it yet, playing with several different people already, but I still find it really enjoyable and something that nearly always ends up with everyone laughing. This Spiel des Jahres-nominated game has just a deck of cards numbered 1 to 100, and in each round, every player gets a set number of cards dealt from the shuffled deck. All players must play their cards to the table in one pile, ascending by card number … but you can’t talk to anyone else, or even gesture. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. Complexity: Low.

14. Stone Age: Full review. Really a tremendous game, with lots of real-time decision-making but simple mechanics and goals that first-time players always seem to pick up quickly. It’s also very hard to hide your strategy, so newbies can learn through mimicry – thus forcing veteran players to change it up on the fly. Each player is trying to build a small stone-age civilization by expanding his population and gathering resources to construct buildings worth varying amounts of points, but must always ensure that he feeds all his people on each turn. I introduced my daughter to the game when she was 10 and she took to it right away, beating us on her second play. Complexity: Medium.

15. Ticket To Ride: Full review. Actually a series of games, all working on the same theme: You receive certain routes across the map on the game board – U.S. or Europe, mostly – and have to collect enough train cards in the correct colors to complete those routes. But other players may have overlapping routes and the tracks can only accommodate so many trains. Like Dominion, it’s very simple to pick up, so while it’s not my favorite game to play, it’s my favorite game to bring or bring out when we’re with people who want to try a new game but either haven’t tried anything in the genre or aren’t up for a late night. I do recommend the 1910 Expansion< to anyone who gets the base Ticket to Ride game, as it has larger, easier-to-shuffle cards and offers more routes for greater replayability. I also own the Swiss and Nordic boards, which only play two to three players and involve more blocking than the U.S. and Europe games do, so I don’t recommend them. The iPad app, developed in-house, is among the best available. The newest expansion, France and The Old West, came out in the winter of 2018, with two new rules tweaks, one for each board. I’ve ranked all 18 Ticket to Ride boards for Ars Technica. There’s also a kids’ version, available exclusively at Target, with a separate app for that as well. Complexity: Low.

16. Splendor: Full review. A Spiel des Jahres nominee in 2014, Splendor has fast become a favorite in our house for its simple rules and balanced gameplay. My daughter, now eight, loves the game and is able to play at a level pretty close to the adults. It’s a simple game where players collect tokens to purchase cards from a 4×3 grid, and where purchased cards decrease the price of other cards. Players have to think long-term without ignoring short-term opportunities, and must compare the value of going for certain in-game bonuses against just plowing ahead with purchases to get the most valuable cards. The Splendor app, made by the team at Days of Wonder, is amazing, and is available for iOS, Android, and Steam. I also like the four-in-one expansion for the base game, Cities of Splendor. Complexity: Low.

17. Agamemnon. Full review. An absolute gem of an abstract two-player game, with very little luck and a lot of balancing between the good move now and holding a tile for a great move later. Players compete to control “threads of fate” – connected lines on a small hub-and-spoke board – by placing their tokens at the hubs, but there are three different types of lines and control of each is determined in its own way. The board has alternate layouts on the other side for infinite replayability, but the main board is elegant enough for many replays, because so much of the game involves outthinking your opponent. Complexity: Low.

18. Dominion: Full review. I’ve condensed two Dominion entries into one, since they all have the same basic mechanics, just new cards. The definitive deck-building game, with no actual board. Dominion’s base set – there are ten expansions now available, so you could spend a few hundred dollars on this – includes money cards, action cards, and victory points cards. Each player begins with seven money cards and three victory cards and, shuffling and drawing five cards from his own deck each turn, must add cards to his deck to allow him to have the most victory points when the last six-point victory card is purchased. I don’t think I have a multi-player game with a smaller learning curve, and the fact that the original set alone comes with 25 action cards but each game you play only includes 10 means it offers unparalleled replayability even before you add an expansion set. I’ll vouch for the Dominion: Intrigue expansion, which includes the base cards so it’s a standalone product, and the Seaside expansion, which is excellent and really changes the way the game plays, plus a standalone expansion further up this list. The base game is appropriate for players as young as six. Complexity: Low.

19. Small World: Full review. I think the D&D-style theme does this game a disservice – that’s all just artwork and titles, but the game itself requires some tough real-time decisions. Each player uses his chosen race to take over as many game spaces as possible, but the board is small and your supply of units runs short quickly, forcing you to consider putting your race into “decline” and choosing a new one. But when you choose a new one is affected by what you stand to lose by doing so, how well-defended your current civilization’s position is, and when your opponents are likely to go into decline. The iPad app is outstanding too. Complexity: Medium.

20. Battle Line: Full review. Reissued a few years ago as Schotten Totten – same game, different theme, better art, half the price right now. Among the best two-player games I’ve found, designed by Reiner Knizia, who is also behind a bunch of other games on this list. Each player tries to build formations on his/her side of the nine flags that stand in a line between him and his opponent; formations include three cards, and the various formation types resemble poker hands, with a straight flush of 10-9-8 in one color as the best formation available. Control three adjacent flags, or any five of the nine, and you win. But ten tactics cards allow you to bend the rules, by stealing a card your opponent has played, raising the bar for a specific flag from three cards to four, or playing one of two wild cards that can stand in for any card you can’t draw. There’s a fair amount of randomness involved, but playing nine formations at once with a seven-card hand allows you to diversify your risk. The iOS app is among the best as well. Complexity: Low.

21. Samurai: Full review. I bought the physical game after a few months of playing the app (which, as of November 2019, is still not updated for the newest iOS version), and it’s a great game – simple to learn, complex to play, works very well with two players, plays very differently with three or four as the board expands. Players compete to place their tiles on a map of Japan, divided into hexes, with the goal of controlling the hexes that contain buddha, farmer, or soldier tokens. Each player has hex tiles in his color, in various strengths, that exert control over the tokens they show; samurai tokens that affect all three token types; boats that sit off the shore and affect all token types; and special tokens that allow the reuse of an already-placed tile or allow the player to switch two tokens on the board. Trying to figure out where your opponent might screw you depending on what move you make is half the fun. Very high replayability too. Fantasy Flight updated the graphics, shrank the box, and reissued it in 2015. Complexity: Medium/low.

22. The Castles Of Burgundy: Full review. Castles of Burgundy is the rare game that works well across its range of player numbers, as it scales well from two to four players by altering the resources available on the board to suit the number of people pursuing them. Players compete to fill out their own boards of hexes with different terrain/building types (it’s like zoning) by competiting for tiles on a central board, some of which are hexes while others are goods to be stored and later shipped for bonuses. Dice determine which resources you can acquire, but you can also alter dice rolls by paying coins or using special buildings to change or ignore them. Setup is a little long, mostly because sorting cardboard tiles is annoying, but gameplay is only moderately complex – a little more than Stone Age, not close to Caylus or Agricola – and players get so many turns that it stays loose even though there’s a lot to do over the course of one game. I’ve played this online about 50 times, using all the different boards, even random setups that dramatically increase the challenge, and I’m not tired of it yet. Complexity: Medium.

23. Morels. Full review for Paste. A 2012 release, Morels is an easy-to-learn two-player card game with plenty of decision-making and a small amount of interaction with your opponent as you try to complete and “cook” sets of various mushroom types to earn points. The artwork is impressive and the game is very balanced, reminiscent of Lost Cities but with an extra tick of difficulty because of the use of an open, rolling display of cards from which players can choose. The app version is also very good. Complexity: Low.

24. Ingenious. Full app review. Ingenious is another Reiner Knizia title, a two- to four-person abstract strategy game that involves tile placement but where the final scoring compares each player’s lowest score across the six tile colors, rather than his/her highest. That alters gameplay substantially, often making the ideal play seem counterintuitive, and also requires each player to keep a more careful eye on what the other guy is doing. The app, which I owned and reviewed, is now gone from all app stores, because of a trademark dispute (and maybe more). Complexity: Low.

25. Azul. Full review. The best new family-strategy game of 2017 and winner of the Spiel des Jahres, Azul comes from the designer of Vikings and Asara, and folds some press-your-luck mechanics into a pattern-matching game where you collect mosaic tiles and try to transfer them from a storage area to your main 5×5 board. You can only put each tile type in each row once, and in each column once, and you lose points for tiles you can’t place at the end of each round. It’s quite addictive and moves fairly quickly, even when everyone starts playing chicken with the pile left in the middle of the table for whoever chooses last in the round. Complexity: Medium.

26. Cacao. Full review. A simpler Carcassonne? I guess every tile-laying game gets compared to the granddaddy of them all, but Cacao certainly looks similar, and you don’t get to see very far ahead in the tile supply in Cacao, although at least here you get a hand of three tiles from which to choose. But the Cacao board ends up very different, a checkerboard pattern of alternating tiles between players’ worker tiles and the game’s neutral tiles, which can give you cacao beans, let you sell beans for 2-4 gold pieces, give you access to water, give you partial control of a temple, or just hand you points. One key mechanic: if you collect any sun tiles, you can play a new tile on top of a tile you played earlier in the game, which is a great way to make a big ten-point play to steal the win. Complexity: Low.

27. New Bedford. Full review. I adore this game, which is about whaling, but somehow manages to sneak worker-placement and town-building into the game too, and figures out how to reward people who do certain things early without making the game a rout. Each player gets to add buildings to the central town of New Bedford (much nicer than the actual town is today), or can use one of the central buildings; you pay to use someone else’s building, and they can be worth victory points to their owners at game-end. The real meat of the game is the whaling though – you get two ships, and the more food you stock them with, the more turns they spend out at sea, which means more turns where you might grab the mighty sperm whale token from the bag. But you have to pay the dockworkers to keep each whale and score points for it. For a game that has this much depth, it plays remarkably fast – never more than 40 minutes for us with three players. Complexity: Medium.

28. Welcome To… Full review. I don’t know if it was the first flip-and-write title, but Welcome To… was the first one I encountered, and I think it’s spawned a few imitators because it’s so good. In each round, there are three cards from which players can choose, each showing a house number and one of six colors; each player chooses one of those three houses to fill in and takes the benefit of that particular color. The goal is to fill out as much of your own ‘neighborhood’ as you can, scoring points for clusters of adjacent houses, for providing green space, for adding pools to certain houses, and more. It’s simple to learn and has huge replay value. Complexity: Low.

29. Everdell. Full review. This was my #1 game of 2018, just edging out the legacy game Charterstone. Everdell takes the worker placement and resource collection mechanic of Stone Age and adds what amounts to a second game on top of that, where the buildings you build with those resources actually do stuff, rather than just giving you points. Players build out their tableaux of cards and gain power as the game progresses. Some cards grant you the right to build subsequent cards for free; some give resources, some give points bonuses, and some do other cool things. The artwork is stunning and the theme, forest creatures, is very kid-friendly. The game also crescendos through its “seasons,” with players going from two meeples in the spring to six by game-end, so that no one can get too big of a lead in the early going and new players get time to learn the rhythm. It’s quite a brilliant design, and consistently plays in under an hour. Complexity: Medium-low.

30. Gizmos. Full review. Phil Walker-Harding’s engine-builder plays very quickly for a game of this depth, and doesn’t skimp on the visual appeal – the ‘energy tokens’ you’ll collect to buy more cards are colored marbles, and they’re dispensed by what looks like a cardboard gumball machine. The engine-building aspect is a real winner, though, as it’s very easy to grasp how you’ll gain things from certain cards and how to daisy-chain them into very powerful engines before the game ends. Complexity: Medium-low.

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Stick to baseball, 3/14/20.

I have one new post for The Athletic subscribers this week, looking at what might happen to the draft when there are no games to scout. I will have a ranking of the top 30 prospects for the draft on Monday; I’m not sure what my draft coverage might look like from here on out, as it depends on whether anyone’s playing and if the draft date moves.

Over at Paste, I reviewed PARKS, one of the most popular new games of 2019, featuring artwork from the Fifty-Nine Parks series.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.

And now, the links…

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